The Economist

Children usually rejoice in a break from school, assuming it will be a chance to slack off. Not Ryu, a nine-year-old in Tokyo. As the new coronavirus spread across Japan, schools throughout the country closed on March 2nd. His parents have enforced a strict schedule every day. It includes Japanese, science an

When Michelle Fisher was a teenager, money was tight, and she had to ration the number of tampons she used. Despite experiencing extremely heavy periods, she would use only one or two a day. Once, she bled through onto a chair at school. “Even to this day when I’m buying products it still feels like I need to ration myself as an after-effect of being so restricted growing up.”

Europe’s largest bank has a new strategy—but no permanent boss

Antoinette, a rough sleeper in the Finsbury Park area of north London, doesn’t feel safe going to the toilet. The one public toilet nearby is often dirty, she says, and people take drugs in there. A pub near the underground station allows non-customers in, but men use it for another kind of relief. She prefers a branch of Costa, a coffee chain, but the door requires a passcode that is handed out only to customers. So she relies on friendly baristas slipping her the code.

The industry tasked with finding bosses is more powerful than ever, even though the value it provides remains hard to measure

The death of Anucha Thasako was supposed to change everything. After several sharp blows to the head during a Thai boxing bout in 2018, the scrawny 13-year-old fell to the floor, unconscious. The referee rushed to his side, to no avail. There was no doctor in attendance. Anucha died soon afterwards from a brain haemorrhage. He had been boxing since the age of eight, and had taken part in around 170 fights.

Airbus wants to help airlines hedge ticket prices. Will that fly?

A romance and two years of dating, Emma and her girlfriend, Han, have tied the knot (see picture). They invited about 100 people to their wedding on January 18th in the south-western city of Kunming. It involved a ceremony, with the two women in matching white wedding dresses, followed by a banquet and an after-party. Emma says she was both excited and nervous. The wedding meant “commitment and responsibility” and “the courage to spend the rest of my life with the one”. She is looking forward to

TAIWAN’S VOTERS go to the polls on January 11th to elect their president and parliament (called the Legislative Yuan). If opinion surveys are any guide, the current president, Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which supports eventual independence, will beat Han Kuo-yu of the Kuomintang (KMT), which advocates closer ties with China. That would rule out any near-term prospect of a thaw in relations across the Taiwan Strait.

A car-hailing firm and a telecoms giant have banking ambitions far beyond Singapore

Wealth managers are promising business-class service for the masses

Rather like horror movies, nativities have reflected Britons’ fears

Created to democratise credit, P2P lenders are going after big money

Biased product design

Created to democratise credit, P2P lenders are going after big money

Virtual reality continues to make people sick

Silicon Valley is bad at making products that suit women. That is a missed opportunity

Can claret survive? Or will the French soon be sipping English wine?

Big Tech takes aim at the low-profit retail-banking industry

Why California can’t quit PG&E

Romania’s health-care system, the EU’s worst, struggles to reform

Almost two-fifths of Turkish cars run on liquefied petroleum gas

How Silicon Valley woos Stanford students

As profits dwindle, HSBC plans a radical overhaul

The world’s oldest and most intricate paper trail is about to be ripped up

Investors hope psychedelics are the new cannabis. Are they high?

Data-labelling startups want to help improve corporate AI

As cars ditch fossil fuels, how can governments tax motorists?

The issuer of a star cryptocurrency is being sued for $1.4trn

From the 1880s to the 1960s, cosmopolitan hangouts helped foster the avant-garde