SICKNESS AND shipping have a long shared history. The word quarantine is derived from the 14th-century Venetian practice of isolating ships at anchor for 40 days if plague was suspected on board. The latest ailment is a global pandemic that has killed at least 1m people and put the world economy, and global commerce, full…
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“THE APPRENTICE makes me $3m a day. Ker-ching. That’s the music it makes. It sure beats bricks and mortar, hey?” So a British businessman, imitating Donald Trump’s distinctive drawl, recalls a conversation the two men had by telephone years before Mr Trump became president. It was a high point of their relationship that the Brit…
IN THE PANICKY initial days of India’s covid-19 lockdown, the country could count on one venerable institution. Tata, a 152-year-old conglomerate, bought millions of dollars’ worth of medical supplies for clinics and hospitals. Its shut businesses did not lay off a single worker. A new subsidiary was conjured up to develop a one-hour coronavirus test…
SIR TIM BERNERS-LEE had a Romantic vision when he created the World Wide Web in 1989. In his words, he helped “weave” it together as a way of connecting anything to anything—as if he were sitting at a loom, not at CERN, a particle-physics laboratory in Geneva. But those were halcyon days. Now the web…
The case against the technology giant is at once narrow and grandIT WAS A long time coming. On October 20th the Department of Justice (DoJ) at last launched a federal antitrust lawsuit against Google. It is the first time American trustbusters have gone after big tech since their protracted battle against Microsoft 20 years ago.…
IN THE EARLY 17th century the best place to gather news in London was the old cathedral of St Paul’s, a place that buzzed with gossip on politics and was described—unusually for a house of worship—as “the ear’s brothel”. Some of the informants were entrepreneurs; they had recently started writing “letters of news” which they…
Demand for farm equipment has soared amid the pandemicWERE ANY more evidence needed to reflect how surprising 2020 has been, consider tractor sales. In April Hemant Sikka, president of Mahindra & Mahindra’s farm-equipment business—which makes around 300,000 of the things a year, more than any other company anywhere—sat in his Mumbai flat near his shuttered…
Antitrust cases over past behaviour have proved mostly ineffectual. So regulators are turning their attention to forward-looking rulesANY DAY now America’s Department of Justice (DoJ) will file a lawsuit against Google, accusing it of abusing its monopoly in online search. It will be the first big antitrust case in technology since the DoJ went after…
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