Samsung Electronics wants to dominate cutting-edge chipmaking

Oct 17th 2021SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS (SE) is a behemoth. The South Korean tech company is the crown jewel of the mighty Samsung chaebol, as the country’s conglomerates are known. It makes more smartphones than any other company in the world, as well as home-entertainment systems and appliances. It dominates the manufacturing of memory chips, which are used...

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Ukrainians are coping stoically with Russian aggression

Oct 17th 2021PAVLOPILAS AN ICY wind rattles the windows of his office, Sergei Shapkin dips a biscuit in honey and ponders the art of survival. He is the mayor of Pavlopil, a village in eastern Ukraine. When Vladimir Putin started grabbing Ukrainian territory in February 2014, Mr Shapkin knew his village was in danger.On one side were pro-Russian separatists,...

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The murder of Sir David Amess will change the nature of British democracy

Oct 16th 2021SIR DAVID AMESS was the quintessential local MP. When party whips whispered that he might become a minister if he voted the right way, he laughed. When his invitation to the Leigh Duck Race, where the local scout group ceremonially released hundreds of rubber ducks, went missing, his staff turned his office upside down. His relentless campaign...

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A Russian editor says he won the Nobel because his slain colleagues could not

Oct 16th 2021THE DAY before Dmitry Muratov won the Nobel peace prize, the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta stood in remembrance outside the Moscow apartment block where his newspaper’s most famous journalist was murdered exactly 15 years before. Anna Politkovskaya was shot on October 7th 2006—Vladimir Putin’s birthday. Her death, Mr Putin said at the...

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Sabine Weyand on role of trade policy in fighting climate change

Oct 16th 2021by Sabine WeyandWHEN I WAS a visiting student at Cambridge, my way to class led along the banks of the River Cam. Every morning fellow students rowed in eights, fours or pairs. I have never been a rower, yet I have always been fascinated by it. The boats are light but can carry a lot of weight. An eight-person shell can hold more than 1,000kg,...

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The booming business of knitting together the world’s electricity grids

Oct 16th 2021CLV Nexans AuroraIMAGINE A TOY boat that might fit in the palm of your hand. At mid-ship add a squat spool of sewing thread lying on its side. Scale that up about a thousand-fold and the result is the 150-metre-long Nexans Aurora. The thread in question is kilometres of high-voltage power line ready to be deployed from the aft of the ship...

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Femtech firms are at last enjoying an investment boom

Oct 16th 2021A HORMONE CALLED relaxin helps loosen up pregnant women’s hips. Without it, the pain of delivery would be unbearable. Its job done, however, relaxin lingers in female bodies for up to a year, when softer ligaments make new mothers more prone to injury, as Jessica Ennis-Hill, an Olympic champion heptathlete, discovered in training after...

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Germany’s workers are in the strongest position in 30 years

Oct 16th 2021BERLINA HIGHLY SKILLED workforce, harmonious labour relations and restrained wage growth: all have long underpinned Germany’s economic success. But, as the recovery from the ravages of covid-19 continues, the three pillars are looking wobbly. A shortage of skilled workers is becoming more acute. Pay is rising against the backdrop of higher...

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KAL’s cartoon

Oct 16th 2021Dig deeper into the subject of this week’s cartoon:• The first big energy shock of the green era• It is tempting to blame foreigners for Europe’s gas crisis• Russian elections once again had a suspiciously neat resultKAL’s cartoon appears weekly in The Economist. You can see last week’s here.This article appeared in the The world this week...

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The IMF decides to keep its boss

Oct 16th 2021HONG KONGIT TOOK 24 days and seven bureaucratic steps to start a business in Beijing, according to the World Bank’s report on the ease of doing business in 2017. But an investigation released last month concluded that the bank’s leaders, including Kristalina Georgieva, its former second-in-command, had pressed staff into doctoring the report...

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