Those were the days, my friend “OH MY God! We had all of these!” trills Alina Radu, a 43-year-old businesswoman visiting the Romanian Kitsch Museum. She is admiring crochet doilies, a 1980s TV set, decorative glass fish and the scarves and badges of Romania’s Pioneers, a communist-era youth organisation. “I loved looking like a general!” The museum, which opened in May, has proved a hit. You can l
“THIS is the best you can find anywhere, and not just in Sudan,” says Ali Alsheikh, gesturing at the deep-green field behind him. His farm, which exports animal feed, belongs to DAL Group, Sudan’s lar ... Read more
IT IS not as bad in South Sudan as people think, insists Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth, the petroleum minister. The UN may claim that a third of the population have fled their homes, but that is an exaggeratio ... Read more
THE old town of Mosul is a wasteland. So are many other cities and towns that have been mangled by the wars in Iraq and Syria. There is so much broken concrete and twisted metal in Aleppo, the Syrian ... Read more
IN THE evening Adil Jumaili and his daughter stand beside the Tigris river in Mosul and stare at the wreckage on the opposite bank. Two twisted cars lie where their home once stood. It was destroyed, ... Read more
Print section Print Rubric: Technology is reshaping the financing of firms that sell to other firms, and leading banks into new alliances Print Headline: The missing link Print Fly ... Read more
NEARLY as striking as Asia’s dynamism is how unevenly prosperity is spread—in contrast to Africa, Latin America or Europe. First-world Japan (with a GDP per person of $38,900) is in effect part of the ... Read more
A LOT has changed since Jeon Tae-il killed himself. In 1970, when the 22-year-old South Korean set himself alight to protest about poor working conditions, his country received millions of dollars of ... Read more
High spirits, clogged lungs THERE is a buzz in the air of India’s capital, and not just because Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, is barely a week away. Along with a shopping rush and a welcome di ... Read more
IN 2015 Kiddyum, a small company from Manchester that provides frozen ready-meals for children, won a contract from Sainsbury’s, a big British supermarket chain. Jayne Hynes, the founder, was delighte ... Read more
MANY people complain that the finance industry has barely suffered any adverse consequences from the crisis that it created, which began around ten years ago. But a report from New Financial, a think- ... Read more
FOR all the talk of banks deserting London as Britain’s departure from the EU looms, relatively little attention has been paid to the derivatives market. Yet this is a crucial area of business for Bri ... Read more
OUTSIDE, a patch of grass affording a spectacular view of the Sierra de Guadarrama is littered with cartridge casings. Inside the Club de Tiro de Madrid (Madrid Shooting Club), on the city’s no ... Read more
AFTER 4,000 years of development, you might assume that just about everything there is to be known about glassmaking has already been found out. Not so. Though the basic recipe of sand, soda and lime ... Read more
Fresh from the wind farm IN THE North Sea, wind power is booming. At the moment the world’s biggest offshore wind farm, with a capacity of 630MW, sits in the Thames Estuary. But the London Array, as t ... Read more
Another way to see the factory floor “WE ARE always short ten to 20 people,” says Jack Marshall, the manager of PPG’s plant in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. The company makes coatings, paint and speciality ma ... Read more
An unfamiliar sight for McKinseyites MCKINSEY, a global management consultancy known for its discreet profile and rarefied air, is unused to the sort of tub-thumping popular revolt it is experiencing ... Read more
Personae non gratae in Myanmar Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim “Other”. By Francis Wade. Zed Books; 280 pages, $24.95 and £14.99. THE gradual implosion of an autoc ... Read more