Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

The founding ideal of cryptocurrencies was independence from overweaning governments,

but the crypto crowd also wants legitimacy in the financial world. Now those two barely

compatible ideas are crashing together as regulators step in. And it's not uncommon for North

Korean women to make more than their partners, yet they're still expected to play obedient

homemakers too. They're getting so fed up of that double burden that they've coined

new words to describe deadbeat husbands.

But first, in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, people have been fleeing towns and villages,

following heavy fighting in the country's latest civil war.

We left behind everything we have worked for for years, says one man. We could not even

take our clothes with us. We just took our children and left.

Hara is a region caught in the middle. To the north is the Tigray region, home of the

Tigrayan people's Liberation Front or TPLF. It was a ruling party of the country for decades

until it was ousted in 2018. To the south, the capital Addis Ababa, where Prime Minister

Abiyachmed has been directing federal forces and sometimes joining them to put down a TPLF

rebellion that began last November.

And Abiyachmed said that would take just weeks. As it's stretched to a year, the war has

become more complicated. Local militias and ethnic forces have been drawn into the fight.

Neighboring states have become part of the calculus, and the people of Tigray have been starved

of food and aid. Meanwhile, the balance of power in this war just keeps shifting.

So I visited the town of Gashena a few days ago, and this is a small town on a strategic

...