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“I AM BOTH impatient and disgusted.” So declares a letter on race sent on June 1st by Mary Barra, chief executive of General Motors (GM), to all of its suppliers. She is outraged by the killing of George Floyd, the latest in a long string of deaths of unarmed black Americans at the hands of…

A YEAR AGO your columnist joined a sailing trip to Islay, an island in western Scotland famous for peaty malt whisky that can singe the hair off your nostrils. The mooring was in front of a distillery called Ardbeg, its name painted in huge black letters on a whitewashed wall facing the sea. Its breakfast…

The crisis has hit tech’s spiritual home hard, but it is already planning aheadEditor’s note: The Economist is making some of its most important coverage of the covid-19 pandemic freely available to readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. To receive it, register here. For our coronavirus tracker and more coverage, see our hubFIRING…

Japanese firms are more vulnerable to cyber-attacks than Western peersJAPAN HAS a reputation for technophilia. Robots have even been enlisted to cheer players at professional baseball games while covid-19 keeps fans away from stadiums. Yet when it comes to more humdrum information technology (IT), the country lags behind other advanced economies—nowhere more so than in…

SCHUMPETER IS ONLY an amateur stargazer. His equipment is no fancier than a pair of eyes and a place in the countryside, away from London’s light pollution. That is enough to make out Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn—and, occasionally, the International Space Station crossing the firmament. In the past few years a new spectacle has…

China’s leading chipmaker looks unfazed by Uncle Sam’s semiconductor sabre-rattlingTIMES SEEM tough for China’s chipmaking champion, the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC). Over the past year America has attacked its supply chains, cutting it off from essential high-tech tools. It has slapped export controls on SMIC’s customers and enacted new rules which threaten to designate…

FACEBOOK WAS first to open its wallet. In April the social network said it would spend $5.7bn on a 9.9% stake in Jio Platforms, the digital arm of Reliance Industries, India’s biggest firm. The investment was followed in short order by nine other entities, including global private-equity (PE) giants such as KKR, as well as…