And they are exacerbated by bad management, says Simon Long

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the first successful human-to-human blood transfusion, conducted by James Blundell, an English obstetrician working just across the Thames from The Economis

IN MAY 2014 DOZENS of mourners attended the funeral of a healer in the Kailahun District of eastern Sierra Leone.

An hour east of Johannesburg, on the rolling highveld plains, six massive cooling towers sit around two belching smokestacks.

Imagine building a small pile of wood and kindling in the smallest room in your house, and setting fire to it.

For the past drought-stricken year, most of the drinking water consumed in Beijing has travelled 1,432km (895 miles), roughly the distance from New York to Orlando, Florida.

In the 27 years since he became headmaster of a school in Trishal, in northern Bangladesh, Mohamed Iqbal Baher has noticed some changes in his pupils.

When it comes to energy, no country generates such bittersweet superlatives as China. It is the world’s largest consumer of coal and the second-largest of oil, after America.

OIL shaped the 20th century. In war, the French leader Georges Clemenceau said, petroleum was “as vital as blood”.

MR MCGUIRE had just one word for young Benjamin, in “The Graduate”: plastics.