Jun 6th 2020

The fire this time: Police violence, race and protest in America

The world this week

Leaders

The fire this time

Police violence, race and protest in America

Will protesters in American cities bring progress, or set back the cause they champion?

Conduit’s end

Can Hong Kong remain a conduit between China and the world?

Its future as a financial centre depends on nothing less

The other three-quarters

The pandemic is still gathering pace in most of the world

But there is lots that countries can do to curb it

Tomorrow’s problem

Don’t worry about inflation—yet

Monetary stimulus is unlikely to spark sustained price rises while labour markets remain depressed

Orbital liberties

SpaceX is making human space travel a routine form of commerce

And a model of public-private partnership

Letters

On public debt, Vitamin D, the BBC, clock dials, lists of three, globalisation

Letters to the editor

Briefing

The paths of destruction

How SARS-CoV-2 causes disease and death in covid-19

There are direct routes and indirect ones

United States

Order above the law

How to fix American policing

Measuring racial progress in America

Segregation and poverty have declined among blacks since 1968

Introducing the G11

Donald Trump is right that the G7 needs updating. But what for?

Alaska welcomes hooligans

In praise of the tiny, oily candlefish

Lexington

Far worse than Nixon

The Americas

Cracked crown

Canada’s Conservative contenders

Medellín’s medical marvel

How Colombia’s second-largest city is controlling the pandemic

Bello

Latin America’s empty skies

Asia

Deadly tide

Covid-19 infections are rising fast in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan

Knot happy

Covid-19 spurs single Japanese to look for love

Voice of treason

The Thai government tries new ways to curb online critics

Haunted by Gwangju

South Korea debates a massacre of 40 years ago

Viral marketing

Indonesia’s president has a new rival

Banyan

Central Asian governments do not know how to talk about China

China

Break time

The pandemic is hurting China’s Belt and Road Initiative

Chaguan

For people in China, adopting Chinese children is getting easier

Middle East & Africa

The invisible outbreak

Covid-19 quietly sweeps across Yemen

Empty empires

Binyamin Netanyahu has bought loyalty with meaningless titles

Streets with no rage

Algeria’s protest movement considers how and when to come back

No rain, slow gains

In the dry season, Nigeria’s army puts Boko Haram on the back foot

“You can’t just say ‘please’”

How Ugandan feminists make themselves heard

A borrowers’ catch-22

African governments face a wall of debt repayments

Europe

Disparate impact

Covid-19 threatens Europe’s success at fighting inequality

Raising the floor

Spain’s embattled government proposes a new anti-poverty scheme

Hitting the poorest hardest

Italy’s informal workers fall back on charity

Time for a reboot

France’s President Emmanuel Macron mulls a reshuffle

Social distancing and prostitution

Germany helps sex workers idled by covid-19

Barbarians at the gates

Slovenia’s prime minister hunts for enemies

Strength in numbers

What Turkey got right about the pandemic

Britain

Ignore the squabbling

Devolution has become less dysfunctional during the pandemic

A warm(ish) welcome

Britain opens its doors to Hong Kongers

Doubly unlucky

British Pakistanis and Bangladeshis have been hit hard by covid-19

A risky reopening

England emerges from lockdown

Your own personal Jesus

Online services swell the Church of England’s congregations

Parliamentary procedure

The British government shows how not to return to work

Making history

How British museums are documenting the pandemic

Bagehot

Why Conservatives have embraced victimhood

International

Return of the paranoid style

Fake news is fooling more conservatives than liberals. Why?

The moderator’s dilemma

Donald Trump has reignited a debate about regulating speech online

Business

What’s mine is yours

The sharing economy will have to change

Floating not drowning

Companies are still raising cash by floating

Command & reconquer

The video-games industry raids its back catalogue

A tale of two social networks

Twitter and Facebook have differing business models

Part of the furniture

The boss of IKEA on dealing with the fallout of the covid crisis

Bartleby

A guide for foreign workers at Chinese firms

Schumpeter

The quest for a vaccine could restore faith in big pharma

Finance & economics

Hong Kong’s uncertain future

Can Hong Kong remain a global financial centre?

Counting the cost

America’s public-pension funding crisis worsens

Prudence in the pandemic

Americans saved a record chunk of their incomes in April

Social climbing

ESG investors get their heads around social risks

Buttonwood

Is there a role for options insurance in equity portfolios?

This time is different

Downturns tend to reduce gender inequality. Not under covid-19

Free exchange

Japan probes the limits of economic policy

Science & technology

The shape of things to come

The Crew Dragon mission is a success for SpaceX and for NASA

Palaeo-musicology

The lost instruments of Teotihuacan will soon be heard again

The fires within the deep

Have Siberian fires been smouldering underground all winter?

Books & arts

A quarantine rhapsody

For Alexander Pushkin, lockdown was liberating

Hearts of gold

Are humans innately good? Rutger Bregman thinks so

The floor lines of beauty

The first big art show of the covid era is a vision of the future

Home Entertainment

For Hayao Miyazaki, flight is a metaphor for freedom

Home Entertainment

Jane Eyre, like many people, is at her best alone

Perspectives

The family unit has shaped people’s experience of covid-19

Economic & financial indicators

Economic data, markets and data

Graphic detail

Out in the open

Democracies contain epidemics most effectively

Obituary

The life pressed out