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Business

Consumer boycotts warn of trouble ahead for Western firms in China

Previous spats have blown over, but the split over Xinjiang is both more intractable and more expansive

United States

Georgia’s new voting law triggers legal challenges

Plaintiffs say the state’s election overhaul discriminates against black voters

Science & technology

Aircraft-carriers take to the air

They may be safer and more effective there than at sea

Middle East & Africa

The jam in the Suez canal highlights Egypt’s taste for mega-projects

The money would be better spent on other things

Graphic detail

Opioid deaths in America reached new highs in the pandemic

Once a problem confined to the eastern part of the country, fentanyl has spread west

Finance & economics

Free exchange: The economics of falling populations

A shrinking global population could slow technological progress

Prospero

Silicon Valley lingo separates the insiders from the outsiders

Do you know your chaos pilots from your french fries?

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Covid-19 and medical science

Leaders

Bright side of the moonshots

Covid-19 has brought together biomedical technologies that will transform human health

Briefing

Covid-19 vaccines have alerted the world to the power of RNA therapies

And the molecule has many more tricks up its sleeve

Technology Quarterly

Covid-19 has shown what modern biomedicine can do

It can move very quickly, but needs to be well applied

Essay

Viruses have big impacts on ecology and evolution as well as human health

They are ubiquitous, diverse and very powerful

Readers’ favourites

United States

Why Joe Biden isn’t afraid of debt any more

Donald Trump and the covid pandemic have changed the politics of spending big

Europe

The French armed forces are planning for high-intensity war

After a decade of counter-insurgency, plans are changing

Finance & economics

Governments identify minerals needed for economic and national security

Obtaining them is another matter

Graphic detail

How a racist film helped the Ku Klux Klan grow for generations

Lynchings rose fivefold after “The Birth of a Nation” came to town

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Technology Quarterly: Racing against time

Covid-19 has shown what modern biomedicine can do

It can move very quickly, but needs to be well applied

Testing and tracing could have worked better against covid-19

Many countries did not use the technology to its utmost

Well conceived drug trials have saved hundreds of thousands of lives

But new therapies have been scarce

Novel vaccines have performed remarkably quickly and well

They may herald a new era of reprogramming cells

Watching SARS-CoV-2 evolve is fascinating and frightening

Variants of concern may require tweaked vaccines

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