Oil and gas The cruel sea The government tries to block a Russian investment in the North Sea THE business climate in Britain's oil and gas industry is as daunting as the winter weather in the North Sea. Even before the oil-price fall last year, elde...
Ukraine's front line Longing for silence Diplomacy fails the folk on the edge A subterranean life LYUBA VOEVCHIK lives underground. Her neighbourhood, the Petrovsky district of Donetsk, is close to eastern Ukraine's front line. When shells began land...
The police and austerity Down beat Budget cuts may not affect crimebut they will change politics Good old-fashioned policing POLICING in England and Wales is in crisis and things are about to get nasty. That, at least, is what the coppers would have...
Reforming Leviathan Mandarin lessons Governments need to rethink how they reward and motivate civil servants THE French call them hauts fonctionnaires, the Germans Beamte im h?heren Dienst and the British, somewhat more economically, know them as man...
German politics Gone boy on the right How an anti-foreigner, anti-establishment group is changing German politics Bachmann: only joking, honest THE march on January 19th in Dresden by Pegida, or Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occ...
Display screens Going through a phase A new way to create electronic images Wave of the future? LIQUID-CRYSTAL displays are a familiar and ubiquitous technology. But if Harish Bhaskaran of Oxford University is right, their days may be numbered. The e...
The euro zone That sinking feeling (again) If Germany, France and Italy cannot find a way to refloat Europe's economy, the euro may yet be doomed JUST a few months ago the euro zone's leaders believed that, having weathered the storm, they were set f...
Scottish nationalism Thistles and thorns What the Scottish National Party will try to do in Westminster WITH hardly a glimpse of tartan, Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP), presented her squad of 56 MPs at the House of Commo...
Online entertainment A craze too foreign China tries to restrict foreign entertainment online FOR young professionals in China's cities, watching television online has become a part of daily life. In Shanghai, for example, many office workers watch t...
Cotton, a global history Spinning tales A fine account of 900 years of globalization Still a player, thanks to subsidies Empire of Cotton: A Global History. By Sven Beckert. GOOD economic history tells dramatic stories of ingenuity and aspiration, gr...