The Economist

Poland wants a fort with Donald Trump’s name on it (with Shashank Joshi)

Charities try new tactics to be remembered in wills

Architects are adapting to the need for more multisensory design

A as much for its financial crashes as for its juicy steaks and nifty footballers. But even compared with its usual performance, 2018 was a particularly miserable year for the economy. The worst drought in 50 years wrecked the corn and soyabean harvests, knocking 2% off . The peso lost half its value against the dollar, pushing inflation to 46%. That tipped the country into its second recession in three years and led to a crisis that forced it to seek one of the largest credit lines in the ’s hi

In his festive tale, released 175 years ago, Charles Dickens prescribed not Marxist revolution or Victorian beneficence but free trade and commerce

W was a guerrilla army, among its many illegal sources of income was the kidnapping and ransom of tourists. It started disarming in 2016 but is still making money from tourists in a more peaceful way. In Camp Mariana Páez in Meta province, about eight hours’ drive from Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, visitors can “live like a guerrilla” with 260 demobilised members.

The trade war gives agricultural merchants a surprise fillip - but not salvation.

Price guarantees are common at art auctions

Buying nuclear fuel is back in fashion.

Social media makes a joke of Poland's ban on surveys near elections

Poland’s state-owned giants cope with unprecedented turnover

Treaty-shopping is about to get more expensive.

As firms struggle with seasonal hiring, Amazon turns to automation

Support for political parties today closely tracks the frontiers of the old Habsburg Empire

Eighteen years after Zadie Smith’s debut novel was published, its multicultural optimism is a distant memory

Investment platforms vie to capture a share of global remittances.

The benefits gap between high and low earners is widening

Mexico’s incoming president halts an airport project, and pays a price

A new form of cryptocurrency promises to defy financial gravity

The Natural History Museum in London plays host to “The Wider Earth”, a play about its spiritual father

Its members may have lost their official roles, but the royal family is still recognisable to many Romanians

The IMF appoints a new chief economist

FOR a traveller whose flight had been delayed by five hours, Andrés Manuel López Obrador looked surprisingly cheerful. A video published on social media on September 19th shows Mexico’s president-elect preparing to disembark a budget flight from Huatulco to Mexico City. A reporter asked whether the hold-up, caused by rain, had prompted him to reconsider his campaign promise to sell the presidential plane, a Boeing Dreamliner, which cost $219m and was delivered in 2014. Not at all, replied Mr Lóp

THE three-year, $50bn credit line agreed on with the IMF on June 7th was intended to halt Argentina’s currency crisis. The peso had lost a quarter of its value against the dollar since the start of the year as investors fled to safe havens. It kept sliding. On August 29th Mauricio Macri, Argentina’s president, asked the IMF to bulk up the package. On September 26th, after three weeks of negotiations, the fund’s managing director, Christine Lagarde, agreed to increase Argentina’s credit line from

A near-royal wedding in Romania

American creditors say China should honour pre-Communist debts

Are Emirates and Etihad about to merge? (with Charles Read)

IN 1991 Mauricio Macri, son of a wealthy industrialist, was kidnapped. His captors bundled him into a coffin, drove to a hideout and held him for two weeks before his family paid a $6m ransom. Mr Macri, Argentina’s president since 2015, says the ordeal persuaded him to abandon business and contribute to society by taking up politics. His second career has proved hardly less traumatic. Argentina’s plunging currency led Mr Macri to confess on September 3rd that “these were the worst five months of

A $3bn debt dispute between Russia and Ukraine may go to trial

WHEN an emerging market loses favour with its creditors, how should its government respond? The policy prescriptions do not typically include intimidating the central bank, railing against the “interest-rate lobby”, falling out with allies, eschewing the IMF’s help, pouring scorn on the dollar or appointing the president’s son-in-law as finance minister. Turkey has done all of these things, and its currency has duly lost 40% of its value this year. Argentina, by contrast, has stuck much closer