Industry’s move from the rich to the poor world is confusing the carbon accounts

ON MARCH 4th The Economist ran a story about the challenges facing scientists who are trying to find out which greenhouse gases come from where. On March 8th a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Steve Davis and Ken ...Read More

Some innovations help women more than others

TWO recent innovations have garnered a lot of attention for the way they empower women. One is microcredit, a system of lending to very poor people, the majority of whom are female microentrepreneurs who are thus helped to climb out of poverty. The other is the mobile phone, which among other th...Read More

Few companies are ready to accept cloud computing

THE hype surrounding “cloud computing” has become deafening of late. Your correspondent suspects the evangelists, promoters and others hoping to cash in on the computing-services-in-the-sky movement are getting nervous about the way corporate customers, big and small, have not e...Read More

Eastern Europeans should strive to present a more modern face to visitors

IMAGINE that you are attending a conference (call it Agenda 2010) in the capital city (call it Klow) of a generic ex-communist country (call it Ruritania). The discussion will be mostly about the present and the future. After a night-owl session on “the impact ...Read More

What really happened in 2009

ONE of the common assumptions about the art market in 2009 was that the stunning success of the three-day Yves Saint Laurent/Pierre Berge sale in Paris—the highest grossing single-owner sale ever—would allow France to reclaim its position as the third-biggest art market in the world after America a...Read More

The best way to make hospitals green is to keep people out of them

IN JANUARY the National Health Service (NHS) in England calculated its carbon footprint as the equivalent of 21m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year—just short of the amount emitted by the Drax coal-fired power station in Yorkshire, western Europe’s largest. Unlike ...Read More

Hank Paulson on journalists’ role in the crash

“THOSE people who know me well know I’m pretty direct,” Hank Paulson told a room full of journalists in New York on March 1st, as he analysed the performance of news organisations during the economic crisis. The former treasury secretary, addressing a meeting of the Com...Read More

A lazy man’s guide to cutting energy costs

WITH an apocalyptic sense of humour, Angelinos quip they have four seasons—wildfires, downpours, mudslides and earthquakes. The first three usually occur during autumn and winter; the last whenever the fractured rocks beneath the Los Angeles basin decide it’s time to release some...Read More

The ex-communist states of eastern Europe are leaving their pasts behind

WHERE would they be without their past, the ex-captive nations? (Or "ex-communist countries", "former Soviet satellite states", "the old Eastern block": so much history even in the category). The region between the Baltic and the Black Sea is so shaped by history that...Read More

A sale in Dubai shows off the vision of Egyptian modernists

BETWEEN the first and second world wars, the Egyptian port of Alexandria gained a reputation for being one of the most attractive cities of the Mediterranean. Visitors remembered it for its warmth and cosmopolitanism, gracious living and the scented wind that came off the sea thro...Read More