The Economist

Hacker gangs go where the money—and the data—are

Competition in the cryptocurrency world is mushrooming. We ask whether any contender might knock bitcoin off its top slot

Decentralised digital currencies promised a new financial system. The hype may go unrealised

Cryptocoins are proliferating wildly. What are they all for?

As remote working outlasts covid, someone has to foot the bill for empty offices

As bitcoin lurches, Wall Street plots its way into cryptoland

Why foreign banks’ forays on Wall Street have gone wrong—again

The troupe is known for putting its audiences under pressure. How might that work on Zoom?

Has Amundi, Europe’s BlackRock, outgrown its pond?

A digital-payments system that favours consumers, not banks and credit-card firms, is long overdue

SIXTY-TWO years ago today, the Tibet uprising was officially defeated by the Chinese army. It was the end of nearly two weeks of demonstrations in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, during which protesters demanded Tibetan independence. The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, fled into exile. The Chinese Communist Party’s victory laid the groundwork for the establishment of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) in 1965. The TAR was the People’s Republic of China’s fifth and last autonomous region.

America used to be behind on digital payments. Not any more

BEIJINGERS WOKE up on the morning of March 15th to orange skies. In scenes that some compared to “Blade Runner 2049”, a dystopian film set in a hazy, futuristic Los Angeles, a heavy smog had descended on China’s capital. According to a scale used by the World Air Quality Index project, a non-profit group that monitors pollution, Beijing’s concentration of PM2.5, an especially harmful particulate that can enter the bloodstream, peaked at 655 in the early hours of Monday morning.

Stripe got in early providing online-payment software to tech startups. Now it’s the most valuable Silicon Valley darling yet

Things are moving quickly in Qaraqosh, a sleepy Christian town just outside Mosul in northern Iraq. Pope Francis arrives on March 7th, four years after Islamic State ( ) was chased out. So local priests have been hurriedly cleaning up al-Tahira, their cathedral and one of Iraq’s largest churches. They have refurbished its burnt interior and repaired most of the masonry that the jihadists used for target practice. When your correspondent visited, five days before the pope, smashed chandeliers and a golden

A new fintech wave is coming. Can Britain ride it, as it did the last one?

Bitcoin grabs the headlines, but the real action is at central banks

Europe's banks need new chiefs. Where to find them?

IN HIS glowing description of bilateral relations between Norway and America, Kare Aas, Norway’s ambassador in Washington, DC, has only a couple of quibbles. “Americans don’t recognise that a Norwegian discovered America long before Columbus,” says Mr Aas. Indeed, almost 500 years before he left for the New World, a Viking ship steered by Leif Eriksson crossed the Atlantic and reached North America, where the Norsemen remained for one winter. “They should also eat more fish,” adds Mr Aas—whose c

MYRANDA CHANCEY loves being pregnant. So much so, that after having three children of her own, the 26-year-old decided in 2019 to be pregnant for someone else: “I think everyone deserves to experience the joys of being a parent.” She signed up to a surrogacy agency in her home state of California, and on October 5th last year gave birth to “the surrobabe”.

Lessons from an artistic programme set up during the Depression are being applied at a British playhouse

O past week Bangladesh, India and Pakistan have largely lifted nationwide lockdowns intended to curb the spread of covid-19. The freeing of 1.7bn people—more than a fifth of humanity—from varied restrictions will bring relief to the region’s battered economies. Alas, it promises no relief from the pandemic itself. In luckier countries, stay-at-home rules reduced the number of new infections. In South Asia they managed only to moderate the disease’s acceleration, but not to halt it (see chart). T

Governments and investors hope to stoke a new global infrastructure boom, but they are terrible at making projects happen. Can that change?

ARGENTINA HAS become the latest, and most populous, country in Latin America and the Caribbean to legalise abortion. On December 30th its Senate voted to legalise terminations in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy; previously abortions had been permitted only in cases of rape or when the mother’s health was in danger or the fetus malformed. As well as legalising many of the roughly 500,000 abortions that already take place each year in Argentina, according to campaigners, the change will increase the proportion of women in Latin America and the Caribbean with access to legal abortion from 3% to 10%.

“THERE IS ONLY one outlet for truth, which makes all other voices rumours.” So declared Zhang Zhan, a Chinese journalist who, at the height of the country’s coronavirus outbreak, offered first-hand accounts that often contradicted the government's official narrative. In the end, the government agreed with her, and deemed her a rumour-merchant.

Born 150 years ago, Saki was a master of social observation who sided with life’s rebels

Getting into Zhao Dai, an underground nightclub in a fashionable part of Beijing, involves a little more faff than it once did. Party animals must prove that they have not travelled anywhere they might have picked up covid-19, by showing doormen a code generated by a government mobile app. Once inside, however, the smoke-filled basement is just as sweaty as usual. On a recent Saturday a hundred unmasked revellers bopped to techno tunes. No one bothered to maintain social distancing while dancing.

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S&P pays $44bn for IHS Markit as financial-data providers race for scale