Lifelong learning

Donald Trump

Still campaigning

Spies and their masters

How America’s intelligence agencies are preparing to serve Donald Trump

Presidential ethics

Donald Trump’s plan to deal with his conflicts of interest

Shakers and movers

The dying out of the sect’s last members may not mean the end for the Shakers

Donald Trump’s cabinet

Jeff Sessions has some troubling ideas about justice

Barack Obama’s monumental legacy

Bears Ears and Gold Butte are the latest battlegrounds in a long-running debate about federal land in the West

Lexington

How to use superpowers

Bracing for impact

Donald Trump’s presidency is about to hit Mexico

Laggard on the lake

Toronto’s mayor tries to improve transport

Non-stick Narendra

India’s prime minister has a knack for shrugging off embarrassment

Return to sender

Thailand’s new king rejects the army’s proposed constitution

Not cast in iron

A spat over a statue puts South Korea and Japan at odds

Deep water

Sri Lankans protest against Chinese investment

Banyan

Asia is still just saying no to drugs

The lure of speed

China has built the world’s largest bullet-train network

Hunting white elephants

Opinion is divided on China’s massive infrastructure projects

Once upon a crime

Death in custody: a Chinese scandal that will not die

Set them free

Startups in the Arab world

A moderate, by Iranian standards

After Rafsanjani

Between rocks and hard places

Botswana feels the South African pinch

Ivory Coast

A mutiny in Ivory Coast

The sound of politics

Congolese pop music

Battling for survival

The French left faces a grim election year

Five Star mystery

It is harder than ever to understand Italy’s Five Star Movement

Opposites attract

Guy Verhofstadt’s strange, doomed flirtation with Beppe Grillo

Better than nothing

The Yugoslav tribunal shuts down, a Kosovo tribunal starts up

Going to bits

Europeans are splitting their votes among ever more parties

Charlemagne

The cruel sea

Into the unknown

Northern Ireland is pitched into crisis by the resignation of Martin McGuinness

Brexit’s labour pains

British firms prepare for a future with fewer European migrant workers

Beyond the boundary

Brexit’s unexpected consequence for cricket

Britain’s mental health check-up

Mental illness is at last getting the attention, if not the money, it needs

An academic dispute

A plan to shake up British universities meets opposition in the House of Lords

Making hungry where they satisfy

Wales is the latest devolved government to assume big fiscal responsibility

A matter of life or death

Police in Britain increasingly turn a blind eye to assisted suicide

Bagehot

Philip Hammond discusses Britain’s economic future

A legal quagmire

Guantánamo remains a stain on America’s reputation

Through a glass, silently

In Guantánamo, an alleged al-Qaeda killer awaits trial

Learning and earning

Lifelong learning is becoming an economic imperative

Cognition switch

What employers can do to encourage their workers to retrain

Old dogs, new tricks

How older employees perform in the workplace

The return of the MOOC

Established education providers v new contenders

Pathway dependency

Turning qualifications into jobs

The elephant in the truck

Retraining low-skilled workers

Nifty manoeuvres

A controversial transaction sits at the heart of Liberty Media’s takeover of Formula One

Who owns the blockchain?

A rush to patent the blockchain is a sign of the technology’s promise

Training wheels

A handful of startups are launching ride-hailing for children

A pig of a project

Africa’s largest iron-ore deposit has tainted all who have touched it

Advanced manufacturing

Adidas’s high-tech factory brings production back to Germany

Schumpeter

America leaves foreign firms out in the cold

A welcome revival

Inflation is on the way back in the rich world, and that is good news

Buttonwood

Marine Le Pen’s nerve-jangling plans to revive the French franc

Back to the fold

Argentina is admitted to a widely tracked bond index

Every little helps

How fintech firms are helping to revolutionise supply-chain finance

The meaty dollar

Our Big Mac index of global currencies reflects the dollar’s strength

Out of the box

Singapore tries to become a fintech hub

A red herring

Tokyo’s showy tuna auctions do not augur economic growth

Squeezed to life

China’s currency upsets forecasts by beginning the new year stronger

Through the glass, darkly

China’s reputation for low-cost manufacturing under attack

Free exchange

To be relevant, economists need to take politics into account

Awards

Rise of the supergrid

Electricity now flows across continents, courtesy of direct current

De Nova Stella

A “new” star should appear in 2022

Medical diagnostics

A cardboard centrifuge separates blood cells from plasma

Underwater drones

The ultimate angling aid: a fishing drone

A whale of a tale

Intergenerational conflict may explain the menopause

A walk across Washington

A tour of a changing capital

Spying in America

How Edward Snowden changed history

Shark of Persia

Obituary: Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani died on January 8th