An obscure communist newspaper is shaping Japan’s politicsStories by Shimbun Akahata consistently pack a punch Since Japan’s parliamentary session began three months ago, one issue has dominated the agenda: a financial scandal within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). At the end of last year, prosecutors launched an investigation into factions of the LDP which had failed to report revenue

Three men kneel on the ground, topless and blindfolded. One of them is light-skinned. His interrogator, who is also white, addresses him in Russian. The group are part of “PMC Wagner”, answers the prisoner, adding that about 100 Wagner mercenaries had entered Sudan from the Central African Republic. On the interrogator’s arm is an owl insignia, the mark of Ukraine’s military intelligence, which is

AMERICAN POLITICS is paralysed by a contradiction as big as the Grand Canyon. Democrats rage about how re-electing Donald Trump would doom their country’s democracy. And yet, in deciding who to put up against him in November’s election, the party looks as if it will meekly submit to the candidacy of an 81-year-old with the worst approval rating of any modern president at this stage in his term. Ho

Almost everyone agreed that the mid-2010s were a terrible time to be a worker. David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, coined the term “bullshit jobs” to describe purposeless work, which he argued was widespread. With the recovery from the global financial crisis of 2007-09 taking time, some 7% of the labour force in the oecd club of mostly rich countries lacked work. W

Asian geopolitics is often described in terms of two giants: America, the incumbent superpower, and China, a rising one, standing astride the region and competing to pull smaller countries to their sides, including the ten members of ASEAN, the Association of South-East Asian Nations. But this misses a lot. It elides smaller countries’ agency and oversimplifies what is rarely a Manichaean divide.

FIVE MONTHS into its counter-offensive, Ukraine has managed to advance by just 17 kilometres. Russia fought for ten months around Bakhmut in the east “to take a town six by six kilometres”. Sharing his first comprehensive assessment of the campaign with The Economist in an interview this week, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, says the battlefield reminds him of the great conf

The woefully inauthentic Tuscan joint is an all-American favourite. New research shows that its 1,800 branches also serve a social purpose. Maxim Massenkoff of the Naval Postgraduate School and Nathan Wilmers of MIT Sloan School of Management used mobile data to track where millions of Americans spend their time. By matching people’s movements to socioeconomic data on where they live, they were ab

BEN WALLACE is the great survivor of the most tumultuous recent period in British politics. He has held ministerial office, uninterrupted, from the premierships of David Cameron to Rishi Sunak. He emerged from the Boris Johnson years with his dignity intact and adoring support from the Conservative Party. His relentless backing, as defence secretary, for Ukraine has earned plaudits abroad. He had

“Adam is a special child,” says the voice-over, as the camera pans across abandoned classrooms and deserted maternity wards. “He’s the last child born in Italy.” The short film made for Plasmon, an Italian brand of baby food owned by Kraft-Heinz, a giant American firm, is set in 2050. It imagines an Italy where babies are a thing of the past. It is exaggerating for effect, of course, but not by as

Could the war in Ukraine go nuclear?Sixty years after the Cuban missile crisis, the world again worries about nuclear war Sixty years ago the world was staring at a nuclear cataclysm. The Cuban missile crisis began in October 1962 when America detected Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. It blockaded the island, and debated invading it. The Soviets yielded, removing their nukes; America secretly remo