World Leader Pretend

Unlike theocratic or authoritarian societies, which simply stifle freedom of expression altogether, the conduct of the media in Western societies is legitimate from a legal standpoint: it violates no written rules, but the end result is the same. In Taliban’s Afghanistan, people knew little of the outside world because TVs and satellite dishes were

Mickey D delivers? You bet. While Americans suffering from a Big Mac attack typically pull up to the drive-through window, in the developing world the fast-food chain increasingly does the driving. In traffic-choked cities from Manila to Montevideo, McDonald's deploys fleets of motor scooters to get hot food to customers fast.

The Economist Intelligence Unit ranked and scored countries based on the strength of their information technology industries. The Economist scored each country on a scale of 1 to 100 for a study called The Means to Compete: Benchmarking IT Industry Competitiveness. Here are its top picks, from the United States to Iran.