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Seeking help from a suicide hotline or emergency services can leave innocent people homeless.

The House tax bill championed by President Trump finds many different ways to increase inequality.

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

In a rambling but dramatic and fascinating performance in Dublin, the comic addressed the fallout from her widely condemned Trump photo.

Years of war have devastated much of Yemen, but a combination of oil wealth and security have allowed Marib to grow.

Democrats’ broad-based election wins on Tuesday reflected the strength of the party’s diverse voters and the power of their anger over President Trump.

New Yorkers thought the end of World War I meant everlasting peace, and so erected many monuments to that effect. Then World War II came along.

His legal work undermined the press, posed a conflict of interest and helped conceal abuse.

The Los Angeles Rams, Dallas Cowboys and New England Patriots all seem primed for wins, but there is a quarterback controversy brewing in Minnesota.

With the fresh, spicy character typical of cool-climate viticulture, the red-wine grape shows another face of American winemaking.

Washington and Beijing are preparing to tackle thorny trade issues that went unaddressed by a meeting that stressed cooperation and muted rhetoric.

Devin P. Kelley, who killed 26 churchgoers in Texas, may have been deeply disturbed. But severe mental illness cannot explain most cases of mass murder.

A ferocious Frances McDormand plays a grieving mother seeking justice in Martin McDonagh’s movie, which mixes tears and tragedy with corrosive laughs.

Appier experience

IN HOTEL BARS in many parts of Africa, foreign businessmen like to regale each other with tales about the difficulty of arranging even simple things like accommodation or a safe ride from the airport. The head of a big American investment bank recalls how he bagged the last available room in a swanky Lagos hotel, only for the door to fall off as he entered. When he complained, the receptionist said, “No problem” and sent up two burly guards to stand in the doorway all night. Your correspondent’s contribution to this fund of stories is about the disturbed night he spent in a brothel after unwittingly booking into a hotel with a reassuringly international franchise in its name.

Nowadays such mishaps are becoming rarer, thanks largely to the sharing economy. A business traveller can hail a car from the airport using a smartphone app and travel directly to an apartment in Lagos or Accra rented through Airbnb, at a fraction of the cost of the offerings...

TO FLY NORTH from Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic (CAR), is to look down on a country that has become hell. The dark shadow cast by the UN helicopter passes over mile after empty mile of green, fertile land. The few signs of former habitation—a homestead on top of a hill, the remains of a once-ploughed field—have been burned to the ground or overrun by bush. After an endless succession of conflicts, almost all the people have fled to refugee camps guarded by the UN.

There are many reasons why the CAR is in such a wretched state, but high among them is that it is Africa’s most remote country, with almost no connections to the outside world. Even ideas struggle to cross its borders. Fast internet and mobile-phone reception is available only in and around Bangui. Its people are largely illiterate. It is, in short, a country that technology has skipped over.

Yet the CAR is an exception. Across the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, countries are on the cusp of a tech-...

WITH ITS SNAZZY technology hubs and army of bright young programmers, Kenya can rightly claim to be east Africa’s tech startup nation. It was here that mobile money first took off, and it is here that off-grid solar power is making its biggest impact. Even the election in August was meant to be a showpiece of tech wizardry, with voting stations automatically beaming the results via mobile internet to a computer in the capital, Nairobi, to prevent tampering. But it turned out that about a quarter of the country’s 41,000 polling stations did not have mobile-phone reception and sent in incomplete results, leading to allegations of vote-rigging. That helped persuade the courts to order a re-run.

Most other countries are far worse placed. On average, not even one in two people in Africa has a mobile phone, and many have to walk for miles to get a signal. The economic costs of this low penetration are enormous: every 10% increase in mobile-phone penetration in poor countries speeds up GDP growth per person by 0.8-1.2 percentage points a year. And when people get mobile internet, the rate of growth bumps up again.

Apart from being useful in their own right, mobile phones enable a range of other innovations such as mobile money that improve lives and speed economic growth. A study in Kenya by Tavneet Suri of MIT and Billy Jack of Georgetown University found...

ALONG A WINDING road down the edge of an airport near Pretoria, South Africa’s capital, is an aeronautical version of a Mad Max world. An old UN cargo plane rusts in a field. Jammed up against fences are aeroplanes of various vintages and states of disassembly. “Airheads” (aviation enthusiasts) scrounge for parts to get their machines aloft again.

Just around the corner is one of the most modern aircraft assembly plants anywhere in the world. In it stand two brand new prototypes of the Advanced High Performance Reconnaissance Light Aircraft, or AHRLAC, designed to fill a gap in the market for a rugged aeroplane jam-packed with sensors that can patrol borders, look for poachers and drop guided weapons on insurgents.

This is not the first military aircraft designed in South Africa. During apartheid the country circumvented an arms embargo by building its own attack helicopters. But these planes are a private venture aimed at a niche in the export market. The firm that makes them...

Improving on peanuts

AT LUNCHTIME IN Mombasa, Kenya’s humid port city, groups of men gather in the shade for the day’s bunge la mwananchi (people’s parliament), where they debate the latest news and politics. Everyone takes his turn to discuss whether the local governor is any good, or whether a group of men arrested on charges of drug-smuggling should be extradited to America. Then the debate turns to economics. “Why should we export all of our tea to Britain?” asks one man. “It is because of the law of comparative advantage,” retorts another. “How will Kenya ever be able to catch up with the rich countries in Europe and America?” To this, nobody has an answer.

That tech and innovation can play a big role in making some countries richer than others is not in question. About half the differences in GDP per person between countries are due to differences in productivity. Countries that encourage their firms to innovate, and that invest in...

WHEN SATELLITES TRAIN their cameras onto Africa at night, it is almost as if they are peering back to an age before electricity. The rich world is awash with great glowing orbs for the main population centres and orange tentacles for the roads that link them. But apart from speckles of light around the biggest cities, much of Africa is dark.

Of all the measures of the continent’s poverty, few are starker than that about two-thirds of its people have no access to reliable electricity. The Africa Progress Panel (APP), a group of experts led by Kofi Annan, a former UN secretary-general, puts the number of Africans without any power at 620m, most of them in villages and on farms. The panel found that in nine African countries fewer than one in five primary schools had lights. A study by the World Health Organisation found that about a quarter of clinics and hospitals in 11 African countries have no power of any kind, and many of the rest get it from generators that often break down or run out of...

WITH EMERALD-GREEN tea plantations stretching out as far as the eye can see, the town of Nandi Hills has its fortunes planted firmly in the rich, red soil of Kenya’s highlands. In the cool of a dark market, women traders surrounded by beans, mangos and bananas wait for custom. Bananas seem an uncomplicated crop, but Pauline, a middle-aged tea farmer who also grows fruit and vegetables, says she used to find it hard to know when to harvest and send them to market. They stay fresh on the tree for weeks, but ripen quickly once harvested. If she and several other farmers tried to sell them on the same day, there would be a glut and she would not even recover the cost of taking them on the half-hour journey. “Sometimes I would just bring them back to the farm and feed them to the animals,” she says. Yet on other days there might be no bananas available to buy at all.

This market failure, leaving both farmers and customers unhappy, is caused almost entirely by poor communications. It is also easily solved. 2KUZE, a simple e-commerce system devised by MasterCard with funding from the Gates Foundation, is now linking up thousands of farmers and traders in a virtual marketplace, using text messages on basic mobile phones. A trader might type in a request for honey that goes out to all the beekeepers in the area. Those with honey to sell will respond. A middleman who...