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Eurocrats offer up half-baked ideas to prevent a future sovereign-debt scare

NOW that Greece has given in to pressure from its peers for a more austere budget, the euro zone’s policy brass suddenly seems more sympathetic towards its most troubled member. On reflection, perhaps the fault with Greece’s parlous public finances lay not just with its budgetary profligacy but also elsewhere: in the absence of a central euro-zone authority for helping out cash-strapped countries; or with the credit-rating agencies that had unhelpfully downgraded Greek government bonds; or with the amoral speculators who had bet against those bonds and helped drive up borrowing costs.

It was mildly surprising that some of the messages of support came from Germany, where fiscal indiscipline is least tolerated. On March 7th the finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, floated the idea of a European Monetary Fund (EMF) to act as a lender of last resort to euro-zone countries that could not raise funds in capital markets on tolerable terms. He offered few details about how an EMF would be financed or how it would operate. It would not be a “competitor” to the IMF, based in Washington, DC, though it would seek to police the fiscal policies of lax member countries. ...

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process resumes, after a fashion

IT WAS a wretched beginning to what had been hailed as the hopeful resumption of peace talks, albeit indirect ones, between the Israelis and Palestinians under the aegis of an American mediator. Barely had America’s vice-president, Joe Biden, begun a visit to Israel to herald a new era of compromise and goodwill than it was announced, as if deliberately to poison the mood, that 1,600 new houses would be built for Jewish settlers in a big Jewish suburb in the Israeli-annexed eastern part of Jerusalem that Palestinians see as their fledgling state’s future capital. Palestinian politicians were united in fury. Arabs and other peacemaking outsiders viewed the action as the illest of omens. Mr Biden sharply “condemned” the action as “precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now.”

A sheepish-looking Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, let his aides claim implausibly that he had been unaware of the building decision. The next day his minister of interior dismissed it as a “routine, technical” step, while conceding that the timing was unfortunate, and apologised. Unsurprisingly, the incident increased scepticism towards the promised new round of talks. ...

AIG reluctantly hands its crown as America’s global life insurer to MetLife

ANOTHER week, another opportunity for AIG’s rivals to expand at the American insurer’s expense. Days after sealing a $35.5 billion deal for its Asian life-insurance operations with Britain’s Prudential, the firm, which is being dismembered to recoup bail-out costs, agreed on March 8th to sell another crown jewel, Alico. The acquisition propels New York-based MetLife, which is paying $15.5 billion, into the industry’s global elite. Though it is the biggest life insurer in America, where its Snoopy logo is ubiquitous, it has been tentative abroad. Alico will give it a presence in 64 countries, up from 17 now, taking its non-American revenue from 15% of the total to 40%.

The biggest leap will be in Japan, the world’s second-largest life market, in which Alico is a top-tier competitor. But MetLife’s boss, Robert Henrikson (who took over in 2006 from Robert Benmosche, now AIG’s chief executive), also has his eye on the faster-growing markets in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Latin America that make up almost a quarter of Alico’s business. Another attraction is its distribution network: 60,000 agents, brokers and other local middlemen. ...

Did protectionism force EADS to scrap a $35 billion bid to supply the American air force?

THE announcement on Monday March 8th that Northrop Grumman and its European partner EADS were pulling out of a bid for a $35 billion contract to build air-refuelling tankers for the United States Air Force was no surprise. Northrop had said that it would not contest the terms of the latest contract proposal, even though it thought they had been drawn up to favour the rival Boeing bid. The British and German governments, along with the European Commission, expressed concern at what they see as the Pentagon rejecting open competition in order to bolster Boeing. Lord Mandelson, the British business secretary, said it was “very disappointing” that the Ameircan-European bidders felt the procurement process was so biased against them that it was not even worth making a bid.

The outcome is a blow to EADS, which on Tuesday announced a loss for 2009 caused by the need to post a €1.8 billion ($2.5 billion) charge because of cost over-runs on another military project, the A400M military troop carrier, and further charges caused by delays to its A380 super-jumbo passenger aircraft. ...

Brazil fires another salvo in its dispute with America over cotton subsidies

HOW serious is the decision by Brazil’s government, announced on Tuesday March 8th, to raise duties on a number of American-made imports? The increases are sizeable for goods such as cosmetics (tariffs will double, to 36%) and many household wares (tariffs will also double, to 40%). And the timing is significant: the news came as America's commerce secretary, Gary Locke, was due to arrive in Brasilia to promote an export-promotion initiative in America's 10th-largest export market.

Yet the decision is not entirely surprising, as it relates to a long-running trade dispute. Asked about the dispute at a press conference last week Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, said “I feel like I have walked into a movie that has been going on for years”. Brazil complained to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) nearly eight years ago about America's counter-cyclical subsidies to its cotton growers, which are designed to cushion them against fluctuations in the cotton price, and a programme guaranteeing loans for international buyers of American cotton. ...

Sectarian violence kills hundreds in Nigeria

THE number plates in Nigeria’s Plateau State declare it to be the “Home of Peace and Tourism”. This has seemed ever more optimistic in recent years, as the state capital, Jos, has been battered by brutal violence, with fresh attacks over the weekend reportedly leaving hundreds dead.

In the early hours of the morning of Sunday March 7th gangs attacked villages near Jos, according to the Red Cross. Houses were razed and many women and children killed. Locals say the gang members belonged to the mainly Muslim Fulani tribe while the villages were populated by the mostly Christian Berom group. The death toll is hard to verify, with estimates ranging from 200 to 500. ...

Counting begins after Iraq's modestly hopeful general election

DESPITE a wave of violent attacks, millions of voters took part on Sunday March 7th in the second full parliamentary election in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. In a country slowly emerging from years of bloody fighting, voters faced a choice between a Shia-dominated government and a non-sectarian one. Neither option offers an obvious path to full peace and prosperity.

Much of the effect of the election depends on the horse-trading and coalition building that is to follow. But the election result will give an indication of who is to lead the oil-rich nation. The prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, should do well in the main Shia population centres of Baghdad and Basra. His rivals from the Iraqi National Alliance, comprising a number of Shia religious parties, expect to win most of their votes along the lower stretches of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the Shia heartland. Non-sectarian alliances are expected to do well in Baghdad and Anbar province, once one of the most restive parts of the country. ...

Renewed diplomatic efforts over Iran's nuclear activities

• AFTER Iran announced that its long-delayed Bushehr civilian nuclear plant will be operational within a few months, American diplomats will renew efforts to obtain further sanctions against the Islamic republic over its suspected efforts to build a nuclear bomb. Hillary Clinton, the American secretary of state, has been trying to persuade members of the UN Security Council, including Russia, which has been helping to build the Bushehr plant since 1995, to accept to a new round of sanctions against Iran. The country's government refused to agree to a compromise plan for its uranium to be enriched in Russia.

• AMERICA’S vice-president, Joe Biden, tries again to untangle the knot that is Middle Eastern politics. He travels to the region on Monday March 8th and will meet the leaders of Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt and Jordan in an attempt to encourage the resumption of peace talks. George Mitchell, Barack Obama’s envoy, is adding his weight to efforts reopen negotiations. A recent row over historical holy sites has not helped to warm relations, as Israeli archaeologists in East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians see as their future capital, are intent on uncovering evidence of Jewish ties that could be used to undermine the Arab presence there. ...

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Congress reconsiders America’s official position on the Armenian genocide

TWO questions faced an American congressional panel on Thursday March 5th as it considered the mass killings of Armenians during and after the first world war by forces of the Ottoman Empire. First, was it genocide? The historical debate is as hot, and unsettled, as ever. Armenians continue to insist that it was the first genocide of the twentieth century, while Turks call the killings merely part of the chaos of the break-up of empire.

But the second question on the minds of congressmen in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives was more urgent. What is more important, fidelity to history or concern for the present? The vote took place as warming relations between Turkey and Armenia have cooled again and those between Turkey and America are under increasing strain over Iran, Israel and other affairs in the region. Turkish diplomats and politicians gave warning before the vote that the consequences would be felt across the range of issues of shared concern to the two countries. In the end the panel narrowly decided against pragmatism and chose to set straight the historical records. A resolution recognising the killings as genocide was sent to the House by a vote of 23 to 22. ...

China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, offers some gestures of conciliation

AT THE opening of the annual session of China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, could not resist a bit of boasting. China’s economy, he said, in a two-hour speech, had been the first in the world to make a turnaround. With an implied sneer at the West’s continuing malaise, he spoke of socialism’s “advantages”: quick decision-making, effective organisation and an ability to “concentrate resources to accomplish large undertakings”.

Yet despite China’s swagger at having achieved 8.7% GDP growth last year (under the “firm leadership” of the Communists, Mr Wen reminded the nearly 3,000 party-picked delegates in the Great Hall of the People), its government has used the launch of the ten-day NPC session to make an unusual gesture of conciliation. The budget submitted to the legislature calls for the lowest rate of growth in defence spending since 1988, a period in which almost every budget has called for double-digit increases. This year it proposes a mere 7.5%, quite a plunge from last year’s growth of 17.8%. ...

Barack Obama unveils his final strategy for pushing health reform in America

“EVERYTHING there is to say about health care has been said and just about everyone has said it…now is the time to make a decision.” So declared President Barack Obama on March 3rd to an audience of doctors and nurses gathered at the White House. After a year of dithering, he is now leaping into action.

His speech contained no policy surprises, but is worth noting for three reasons. First, he instructed congressional Democrats to embrace several Republican proposals—for example, modest measures to reform malpractice laws and fight insurance fraud—that were put forward during last week’s bipartisan summit on reform. Second, he made it clear that he now wants Democrats to forge ahead with whatever procedural manoeuvres are necessary to pass his health bill. And finally, he declared that he wanted to see “an up-or-down vote” in the “next few weeks”. ...

Greece’s new austerity measures may prove to be enough—if they are fully implemented

GEORGE PAPACONSTANTINOU, the overworked Greek finance minister, likens the effort to steer Greece away from economic disaster to “changing the course of the Titanic.” Until this week it looked as if the country was headed for an iceberg labelled default. Two austerity packages had failed to convince Greece’s European partners—or the financial markets—that measures to cut the budget deficit this year from 12.7% of GDP to 8.7% would work.

Critics in Brussels said that Greece’s Socialist government was relying too heavily on pledges to cut tax evasion and soak the rich, rather than slash spending, especially on public-sector pay and pensions. The markets pushed spreads on Greek bonds over their German equivalents to record highs. Greece’s ten-year bonds were offering mouth-watering yields of some 6%, twice the German level. ...

Under pressure, GM is now putting up half the money needed to rescue Opel

THE mood at this week’s Geneva motor show, if not exactly upbeat, was in contrast to the fear that gripped the event last year. Europe’s car market is expected to fall in volume terms by around 10% in 2010 as the scrappage schemes that helped underpin demand for smaller cars last year are withdrawn. But slowly returning sales of larger, more profitable vehicles should underpin revenues. Moreover, the action carmakers have taken to strengthen their balance sheets is working: most are expecting to generate cash this year. The big exception is Opel/Vauxhall, the European unit of General Motors.

On Tuesday March 2nd, the first day of the show, GM staged a surprise by announcing it was tripling to €1.9 billion ($2.6 billion) in loans and equity the contribution it was ready to make to its original €3.3 billion plan for restructuring Opel. It was an admission both of how fragile Opel remains and how cross with the German government still is with GM. ...

A late, and philosophical, return to American political campaigning for Jerry Brown

THE dark, floppy hair has gone, and the face is a little rounder, but otherwise Jerry Brown, at 71, looks much as he did when he slept on a futon on the floor of his office and squired Linda Ronstadt round town. He was California’s Democratic governor then, from 1975 to 1983, and on Tuesday March 2nd he officially announced that he hopes to be governor again.

Apart from a spell studying Buddhism in the east—no surprise to anyone—Mr Brown has not disappeared in the interim from California politics. He has been mayor of Oakland and is now the state’s attorney-general. He has a Jesuit education, a prodigious intellect, a fine pedigree (his father, Pat Brown, was one of the state’s best governors) and a protean political identity that allows him to become almost any sort of candidate, as needed. “Action and contemplation joined together” he said in full Zen mode last June, “is what I would call the highest path that we can follow.” ...

The arrest of a Bosnian war leader threatens to reopen deep wounds in the Balkans

THE timing could not have been more inauspicious. Radovan Karadzic who had escaped arrest for alleged war crimes for so long had just begun his testimony at the UN’s war crimes tribunal in The Hague on Monday March 1st. The Serbian struggle during the Bosnian war of 1992-95, including the bloody siege of Sarajevo, had been “holy and just” he claimed. At about the same moment British police arrested, at the request of the Serbian government, a wartime Bosnian-Muslim (Bosniak) leader, Ejup Ganic. He was intercepted at London’s Heathrow airport.

As the Bosnian war erupted in April 1992, Ejup Ganic was a member of the country’s collective presidency. Bosnia had declared independence from the Serb-led former Yugoslavia and the Serbian siege of Sarajevo had begun. On the hills around the city Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb commander, ordered his men to fire indiscriminately into Sarajevo. Unlike Mr Karadzic, he still evades arrest and is believed to be hiding in Serbia. Yugoslav army soldiers still within Sarajevo were besieged. They then captured Bosnia’s president, Alija Izetbegovic, and his daughter. ...

World trade is on the mend, but the strength of the rebound remains uncertain

IS THE glass half empty or half full for world trade? Figures released on March 1st by the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB), which maintains a close watch on global trade volumes, point to renewed vigour at the end of 2009. Trade volumes rose by 6%, quarter-on-quarter, in the final three months of the year.

But these figures also underline just how severely trade was affected by the global recession. The CPB reckons that volumes shrank by a staggering 13.2% during 2009. They have fallen in only two other years since 1961, when comprehensive data begin. But those declines—by 1.9% in 1975 and 0.9% in 1982—pale in comparison with last year’s huge drop. ...

Chile counts the cost of a devastating earthquake and makes plans for recovery

RELIEF was the initial reaction in Chile to what seemed relatively limited damage given the scale of the earthquake that shook the centre and south of the country in the early hours of Saturday February 27th. That picture has been replaced gradually by dismay as the full extent of the cost begins to emerge. By Sunday evening, the number of confirmed deaths had reached over 700 and is still likely to rise, according to President Michelle Bachelet. This is still a low toll, however, for a quake of 8.8magnitude, one of the largest in the world since 1900.

Felt throughout almost all the country, the quake hit most strongly in six central regions, from the capital, Santiago, and the nearby port of Valparaiso in central Chile to the city of Temuco in the Araucania region of the south. These parts of the country are home to about 60% of Chile's 17m inhabitants and account for around 70% its GDP. An estimated 1.5m homes are thought to have been damaged and around a third may have to be demolished. ...

A huge earthquake hits Chile but it has fared far better than poverty-stricken Haiti

JUST six weeks after an earthquake killed over 200,000 people in Haiti, another huge tremor has shaken Latin America. Early in the morning on Saturday February 27th, a massive 8.8-magnitude quake—the fifth-largest recorded since 1900—rocked the Pacific coast of central Chile. Lasting for nearly 90 seconds, it knocked out electricity, water, and telephone services in a wide stretch of the country, and damaged the Santiago airport terminal, some 325 kilometres from the epicentre. The resulting tsunami prompted evacuations as far away as Japan, although the waves inflicted little damage outside Chile and the warnings were later cancelled.

At least 76 aftershocks followed. Michelle Bachelet, the country’s president, said it would take three days to produce the first reliable evaluations of the quake’s impact, but she estimated that 1.5m homes were damaged and 2m people were affected by the disaster. Government officials have already confirmed over 700 deaths. ...

An election in deeply divided Iraq

• IRAQIS finally go to the polls on Sunday March 7th to vote in their long-delayed national elections. But with many candidates barred from standing because of former ties to Saddam Hussein's Baath party, sectarian rivalries have once more come to the fore. It is far from certain that any single group will win enough votes to form a government, prompting fears that relations between Sunnis and Shias will deteriorate even further and threaten the country's fragile recovery.

• A VOTE by the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday March 4th threatens to sour relations between America and Turkey. The congressional committee will consider whether to label the mass slaughter of Ottoman Armenians by Turkish forces in 1915 as a genocide. Previous similar resolutions never made it to a vote in the House of Representatives for fear of damaging relations with an important ally in the Middle East. But a House vote is more likely this time after Barack Obama’s election pledge to recognise the episode as genocide. ...

The courts block Alvaro Uribe from seeking a third term as Colombia's president

COLOMBIA'S Constitutional Court, by blocking President Alvaro Uribe from seeking the presidency ever again, resolved the two-time leader’s quandary over whether to try to stay in power or leave with his legacy intact. The country had been on tenterhooks for months while it awaited the approaching decision of the court which finally made its ruling late on Friday February 26th.

By a vote of 7 to 2 the court concluded that a referendum that would have sought to allow Mr Uribe to run for a third term in elections in May was unconstitutional. The court ruled that the measure was fraught with irregularities and “substantial violations to democratic principles.” With the court resolving what Mr Uribe had called his “dilemma of the soul” over whether to run again, the popular president said after the ruling that he would work for Colombia “from any trench” for the rest of his life. ...

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Barack Obama’s bipartisan summit on health policy accomplishes more than meets the eye

IT IS tempting to dismiss the bipartisan health-reform summit convened by Barack Obama on Thursday February 25th as a colossal waste of time. After all, the gabfest involving senior Congressional leaders from both parties lasted well over six hours, with no tangible results. Neither side moved one jot on any issue of substance and not one vote is likely to have changed on either side as a result of the summit.

And yet, the televised gathering was not pointless. For one thing, the sight of America’s leading politicians sitting together amiably for an entire day to discuss a matter as inflammatory as health reform (think “death panels”) was itself heartening. Surprisingly, given the bitter partisan wrangling of late, they did so in a manner that was mostly civil and substantive. Towards the end of the long day, Joe Barton, a House Republican from Texas, even declared that he had never seen “so many members of the House and Senate behave so well for so long before so many television cameras.” ...

Italy's statute of limitations saves Silvio Berlusconi's former lawyer from going to prison

ITALIAN courts may be slow. But no one could claim that they were arbitrary. Defendants get the right to a trial (sometimes after a pre-trial), and then up to two appeals: one on the merits of the case, and another on points of law. Often, the result is that a case will be timed out by a statute of limitations before it can run that long course.

On Thursday February 25th, Italy’s highest appeal court decided that that is what had happened in the politically explosive trial of David Mills, a British lawyer who once advised Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, on offshore finance. Mr Mills had been convicted by a lower court of having taken a $600,000 bribe, allegedly supplied by Mr Berlusconi, for holding back evidence at two trials involving the prime minister in the 1990s. ...

A triumphant Viktor Yanukovich is inaugurated in Ukraine, but his problems have only just begun

EVEN in Ukraine, elections can end. After two rounds of voting and weeks of legal rumbles, Viktor Yanukovich was inaugurated on Thursday February 25th as Ukraine’s fourth democratically elected president. In November 2004 he tried and failed to steal the crown. Now he has played (mostly) by the rules—and won. Although Yulia Tymoshenko, his charismatic rival (and Ukraine’s prime minister), refuses to recognise Mr Yanukovich’s victory, she withdrew her legal appeals this week. Ukraine’s highest office has thus moved from an incumbent to an opposition leader: a rare achievement in an ex-Soviet republic.

Mr Yanukovich’s legitimacy is now accepted by the world’s leaders, and not just by Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, who rashly congratulated him on his rigged victory in 2004. This time Moscow made no such crude statements. Instead, it asserted its feelings of fraternity towards Kiev by dispatching Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, to bless Mr Yanukovich before his inauguration. This says as much about Mr Yanukovich’s piety as about Moscow’s tactic of using the church to extend its influence. Rarely have the Russians used soft power so well. Yet Mr Yanukovich, conscious of his pro-Russian image, tried to downplay the patriarch’s visit, and is planning his first foreign visit to Brussels, not Moscow. ...

For once, the anniversary of a wartime battle in Latvia should pass off peacefully

THAT March follows February is not a state secret, but it sometimes seems to come as a surprise to Latvian officials. Sometime in February, they notice that March 16th is approaching and start worrying, belatedly, about what outsiders will think.

...

Branding in the New York art world

VIPs criss-crossed Manhattan last week to attend museum shows, conference panels, champagne brunches, curator tours and the stands of nearly 500 galleries exhibiting in 11 fairs. The week was vibrant but confusing due to poor co-operation between event organisers and some amateur branding.

The first problem was an illogical association of name and place. Every March the Armory Show sets up shop in New York. This year, the Art Dealers' Association of America (ADAA) decided to hold its smaller but more prestigious fair in the same week. While the ADAA's exhibition took place in the historic Armory building on Park Avenue, the Armory Show was held in two piers on the Hudson River (see slideshow below). “It must drive them as crazy as it drives us,” admitted Giovanni Garcia-Fenech, the Armory Show's communications director. ...

Industry’s move from the rich to the poor world is confusing the carbon accounts

ON MARCH 4th The Economist ran a story about the challenges facing scientists who are trying to find out which greenhouse gases come from where. On March 8th a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Steve Davis and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s campus at Stanford University brought to the fore a further problem in trying to figure out who emits what—one that turns not on how carbon flows through the atmosphere and biosphere, but on how it flows through the world economy. Who should be held responsible for the greenhouse-gas emissions involved in making, say, a flat-screen television? The country where the television is made? Or the country where it ends up being used?

Looking at the carbon emissions associated with a country’s consumption, rather than its production, does not change the general outline of what is going on in the world: rich people still emit more carbon dioxide than poor people do. But it does heighten the contrast. Rich countries which import manufactured goods from poorer ones end up with even higher emissions; poor countries that export a lot of manufactured goods with lower ones. Using figures from 2004, the most up to date that have the sort of industry-specific data they need, Dr Davis and Dr Caldeira reveal the striking scale of this effect. They find that roughly a quarter of the world’s emissions end up being consumed somewhere other than where they are produced. For a few small and reasonably post-industrial countries, such as Switzerland, the emissions associated with total consumption (emissions produced in Switzerland minus those associated with goods produced there and subsequently exported plus those associated with goods imported) are more than twice the emissions actually produced on Swiss territory. ...

Some innovations help women more than others

TWO recent innovations have garnered a lot of attention for the way they empower women. One is microcredit, a system of lending to very poor people, the majority of whom are female microentrepreneurs who are thus helped to climb out of poverty. The other is the mobile phone, which among other things has led to the emergence of an army of “telephone ladies” in countries such as Bangladesh, who earn a decent living by buying a phone and renting it out to other villagers.

That said, some innovations have been harmful to women, especially in the developing world. As the cover story of the latest issue of The Economist points out, at least 100m female lives have been lost in recent decades due to “gendercide” in countries such as China, where the number of live male births recorded enormously exceeds the number of live female births. One factor in this has been new technology that allows parents to determine their embryo’s sex early in a pregnancy—and thus to abort females in countries where male offspring are valued more highly. Other innovations also bring more benefits to men than women. For example, women are estimated to be only 25% of internet users in Africa, 22% in Asia, 38% in Latin America and just 6% in the Middle East. ...

Few companies are ready to accept cloud computing

THE hype surrounding “cloud computing” has become deafening of late. Your correspondent suspects the evangelists, promoters and others hoping to cash in on the computing-services-in-the-sky movement are getting nervous about the way corporate customers, big and small, have not exactly rushed to embrace the new data-processing paradigm.

Perhaps that is because they have heard it all before. A couple of years ago, the fashionable term for it was “software as a service”. Before that, it was part and parcel of “grid computing”. Sure, each of the previous approaches brought a somewhat different set of technologies to bear, but the objective was broadly the same: to make it possible to buy data processing and storage from a service provider like electricity. Being flexible, extensible and virtual, customers would use as much or as little of the utility as they needed—and pay only for what they consumed. Despite the promise of cheaper processing, though, the vast majority of information-technology departments have continued to buy and maintain their own servers, data-storage units and network gear—preferring to keep their data on the premises rather than have it processed elsewhere. ...

Eastern Europeans should strive to present a more modern face to visitors

IMAGINE that you are attending a conference (call it Agenda 2010) in the capital city (call it Klow) of a generic ex-communist country (call it Ruritania). The discussion will be mostly about the present and the future. After a night-owl session on “the impact of the economic crisis on regional security”, you will stagger to a red-eye breakfast on “Engaging Russia: how, when and where?” But the cultural programme in the afternoon is resolutely backward-looking. An excursion to admire the beautiful historic buildings includes a chance to goggle at the horrible Stalinist ones. A mandatory stop is something on the lines of “The Museum of Ruritanian Struggles and Suffering”, which shows the country’s heroic and horrible past from the dawn of recorded history to NATO membership, via occupation, obliteration and a lot of historical myths.

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What really happened in 2009

ONE of the common assumptions about the art market in 2009 was that the stunning success of the three-day Yves Saint Laurent/Pierre Berge sale in Paris—the highest grossing single-owner sale ever—would allow France to reclaim its position as the third-biggest art market in the world after America and Britain. It didn’t.

Clare McAndrew, a Dublin-based analyst of art-market statistics and the founder of Arts Economics, was the first to prove categorically that France’s century-long pre-eminence in the art world had been usurped by China. That was in 2007, and many presumed it was no more than a blip. But Ms McAndrew’s most recent report, the latest in a series commissioned by The European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF) and published to coincide with the start of TEFAF’s Maastricht art fair on March 12th, proves categorically that China’s art market is getting bigger all the time. ...

The best way to make hospitals green is to keep people out of them

IN JANUARY the National Health Service (NHS) in England calculated its carbon footprint as the equivalent of 21m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year—just short of the amount emitted by the Drax coal-fired power station in Yorkshire, western Europe’s largest. Unlike the power station’s emissions, though, those of the health service have been increasing: they have grown by half since 1990. Other countries fare no better. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimates that America’s health-care industry accounts for 8% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. In Germany, a study by the Viamedica Foundation showed that a hospital’s energy expenditure per bed was roughly the same as that of three newly built homes.

The past few years have seen efforts to make things greener. The King Edward Memorial hospital in Mumbai, for example, was recently remodelled with solar heaters and rainwater-collection units. Many hospitals are switching from standard light-bulbs to compact fluorescent or LED lights. The Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin, Texas, was the first hospital to be certified “platinum” under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards of the United States’ Green Building Council—the highest designation there is. ...

Hank Paulson on journalists’ role in the crash

“THOSE people who know me well know I’m pretty direct,” Hank Paulson told a room full of journalists in New York on March 1st, as he analysed the performance of news organisations during the economic crisis. The former treasury secretary, addressing a meeting of the Committee of Concerned Journalists (your columnist was on the discussion panel), was certainly direct in highlighting several examples of failures by the media, though he also handed out plenty of praise for, as he put it, professionals doing a tough job in difficult circumstances.

The first failure, he said, was a tendency to run inaccurate or half-baked stories because of the pressure to deliver scoops. One example of these “premature stories with unexpected consequences” was a report in December 2008 that the government was planning to use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to provide low-cost mortgages to reduce foreclosures. According to Mr Paulson, this misrepresented as policy an idea that was still being considered as one option among many and was quickly rejected. “I can think of no industry more competitive than the press,” he said—and as a former investment banker he should recognise competition when he sees it. ...

A lazy man’s guide to cutting energy costs

WITH an apocalyptic sense of humour, Angelinos quip they have four seasons—wildfires, downpours, mudslides and earthquakes. The first three usually occur during autumn and winter; the last whenever the fractured rocks beneath the Los Angeles basin decide it’s time to release some megatons of pent-up energy.

Actually, because the region is bounded by a frigid ocean on one side and a baking desert on the other, while the sky above is cloudless for over 300 days a year, the temperature varies more dramatically than is generally appreciated. So much so, indeed, that once every month or two your correspondent has to reprogram his home’s heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) system to adjust for the change in temperature and humidity. ...

The ex-communist states of eastern Europe are leaving their pasts behind

WHERE would they be without their past, the ex-captive nations? (Or "ex-communist countries", "former Soviet satellite states", "the old Eastern block": so much history even in the category). The region between the Baltic and the Black Sea is so shaped by history that at first sight the question seems absurd. Trianon, Yalta, Molotov-Ribbentrop, Munich—the gloomy echoes of past betrayals and atrocities are inescapable.

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A sale in Dubai shows off the vision of Egyptian modernists

BETWEEN the first and second world wars, the Egyptian port of Alexandria gained a reputation for being one of the most attractive cities of the Mediterranean. Visitors remembered it for its warmth and cosmopolitanism, gracious living and the scented wind that came off the sea through the palm trees.

In 1956, at the age of 21, a young Saudi Arabian named Mohammed Said Farsi was among a small group of students sent abroad to expand their horizons. He went to Alexandria, where he studied architecture and town planning and developed a passion for Egyptian modern art and sculpture. Over the years he returned several times to the city, first to complete a masters degree and then a doctorate, writing a thesis on Mecca and the haj cities. ...

Nathan Myhrvold's proposal for a market in “invention capital”

WITH his enthusiastic endorsement of nuclear power as the key to a green, energy-abundant future, Bill Gates grabbed the headlines at the TED conference, a gathering of wealthy nerds (plus a smattering of celebrities) held in California this month. What has inspired Mr Gates to give nuclear energy both his moral and financial support is a new design of reactor developed by Intellectual Ventures, a firm run by an old friend and business partner, Nathan Myhrvold.

Mr Myhrvold’s new method of generating power from uranium, the travelling-wave reactor, is being taken up by TerraPower, a firm in which Mr Gates is investing. One of the features of the technology he finds most attractive is the difficulty of making nuclear bombs from its byproducts. The reactor’s other benefits include never having to be refuelled despite a potential lifespan of several hundred years. ...

The 2010 Winter Olympics

THE record-breaking warmth experienced in Vancouver over the weeks running up to the Winter Olympics left the ski slopes slushy and bumpy, with many of the world’s best skiers tumbling like novices on a double black diamond. It also put something of a dent in the attempts by Vanoc, the organising committee for the 2010 Winter Olympics, to make its games greener than any that have come before. The poor conditions have required the shipping in of snow (more like slush by the time it gets there) from further north, using lorries and helicopters, and the application of a lot of extra effort into tending what snow there is naturally.

It is a measure of the amount of energy that such games require, though, that the dent made in the games’ carbon budget by all those lorries, helicopters and all-night snowcat operations has been, in relative terms, remarkably small. “If we used helicopters every day from this point until the end of February for eight hours a day, it would increase our carbon footprint by less than one percent,” Linda Coady, vice-president of sustainability for Vanoc, told reporters at the beginning of the month. ...

Building quality into cars was easier before they went digital

LATE one night in a Ginza bar, a veteran executive at Nissan recounted to your correspondent the early days of exporting to America, when his firm’s cars were known abroad as Datsuns. Before being shipped, all export models went through additional inspections because the cost of fixing warranty claims so far from the factory and its supply chain would wipe out any profit made on them. On the rare occasions they did break, the parts had to be shipped in from Japan.

One day, the story goes, a plane carrying a crate of such parts lost an engine over the Midwest and had to jettison its cargo to save weight. On the ground below, a farmer noticed the debris falling from the sky. “Ah,” he mumbled to himself, “it’s raining Datsun cogs.” ...

Eastern Europe-friendly boycotts are difficult to pull off

VOTING with your wallet is a tempting substitute for real politics. Time was when the British left demonstratively boycotted South African oranges. The same people usually regarded Israel as no better than the apartheid regime. They also ruled out “fascist” Spain and Portugal, and Greece under military dictatorship. Barring the odd shipment from Costa Rica or Cuba, progressive politics was bad for the fruit bowl.

Much the same dilemma now faces those who care about the security of the ex-communist region. In Tallinn last week, your columnist, wining and dining one of the country’s top foreign-policy thinkers, learned a new Estonian phrase: “Palun tooge eesti kraanivett jaaga” [Estonian tap water with ice, please]. The only bottled water available at the otherwise admirable O restaurant was Vittel or Perrier, both French brands. Paris has just agreed to sell some formidable amphibious-warfare ships to the Russian navy, with potentially dire consequences for the security of the Baltic states. French foodstuffs are encountering a certain froideur across the region as a result. ...

Recent sales of contemporary art reveal a vibrant yet capricious rebound

The contemporary art business has bounced back faster than many expected, but the market still lacks the coherent drive of the boom. Whereas evening sales in 2007 had the exhilaration of a Formula One race, last week's contemporary sales at Sotheby's, Christie's and Phillips had a rambling feel, as if bidders were driving cross country in a wide range of vehicles.

Sotheby's kicked off the week with an evening sale on February 10th that brought in GBP54.1m ($84.5m), the second-highest total for a February contemporary auction and three times more than last year's paltry GBP17.9m. Of the 79 lots on offer, more than half came from the highly credible but hitherto uncommercial collection of Gerhard and Anna Lenz, who have concentrated on a branch of apocalyptically minimal art called “Zero”. The artworks, which Sotheby's catalogue associated with “a grey emptiness... a cultural cemetery and a knowledge vacuum”, were not what you'd normally think of as surefire auction lots. Nevertheless, most of them were met with enthusiastic bidding and 19 works achieved record prices. Sotheby's European chairman of contemporary art, Cheyenne Westphal, explained that buyers “took great comfort in the time, care and consideration invested by Mr and Mrs Lenz in assembling such a coherent group.” ...

Can hedge funds save the world? One pundit thinks so

“HEDGE funds are fundamentally evil and there is no way to view them in any other light. You’re a great guy, but let’s not be ridiculous!” This was the response that Jed Emerson received from several erstwhile supporters when he circulated a draft paper claiming that, in at least some circumstances, the activities of hedge funds could be good for society and even for the planet.

Many people might struggle with the idea of hedge funds being a force for good, regarding them as obsessively focused on short-term financial gain regardless of the environmental or social consequences. And Mr Emerson makes an unlikely defender of them, since he is as green in tooth and claw as a capitalist can be. Having first worked organising projects for the homeless, then as one of the first “venture philanthropists”, he made his name with a series of academic papers on what he calls blended value—the notion that the performance of a business should be judged not just by its profitability, but also by its impact on society and the environment. ...

What countries are currently offering on climate

SINCE the fractious negotiations that produced a last-minute “accord” at the Copenhagen climate-change meeting last year, those in and out of government who concern themselves with climate policy have been in a state of some befuddlement. They wonder what it all means, how to build on it and whom to blame for its perceived deficiencies and the troublesome circumstances of its birth. Despite this the accord has already achieved a couple of the aims its framers intended. Neither is, of itself, earth-shattering, far less Earth-saving. But they are worth noting, not least for what they reveal about where climate diplomacy should be focusing.

The accord provided a way for countries to make public, if non-binding, commitments on climate change. By the early February deadline that was set for this, some 90 of them had done so. In the weeks since, various stalwarts of the climate-wonkery circuit have been working out what those commitments might mean. That process is made complex by the fact that countries can express their intentions in different ways, and that many have provided two or more levels of commitment: a low one that they say they will pursue regardless, and one or more higher ones that they will try for if enough other countries are also going high. ...

Across the region, an array of tactics for keeping the peace

ON THE plane out of Lhasa, I sit next to a Nepali businessman who frequently visits Lhasa to buy shoes. He puts them in containers to be taken by lorry to Nepal, where most of them are re-exported to India. He has his complaints: about the duties he has to pay at the border, and the snow that sometimes blocks traffic. But of the road from Lhasa to Nepal, he is full of praise. It once took three days by lorry, he says. Now it is a day and a half. “China is so developed,” he says wistfully, looking out of the window at the ribbons of light marking highways and city streets below. He has little positive to say about Nepal and its roads.

China has been pouring money into its infrastructure in the past few years, and—from a business perspective at any rate—Tibet has been a big beneficiary. On my last visit to Lhasa, in 2008, I went by train. The railway line, Tibet’s first such link with the Chinese interior, had been opened just two years earlier and is one of the country’s most spectacular engineering accomplishments. Critics of Chinese rule in Tibet condemn its impact on the environment and the encouragement it gives to a flood of immigrants from the rest of China. But as a feat, it amazes: the $4.2 billion line crosses higher terrain than any other in the world, including permafrost—which requires elaborate ground-cooling measures to protect the rails from changes in temperature. ...

The Bella Centre grows crowded and tense

INSIDE the Bella Centre, the second week of talks feels subtly different from the first. Outside, it is very different indeed. In both cases, the difference is more people. Inside, that just means crowding; outside it means long queues of people failing to get in. ...

Gloom and doom in a very big room

Some 35,000 asked to get in, but the convention centre holds only 15,000. I am one of those lucky 15,000, here to cover the opening of the Copenhagen climate conference (COP15), which is supposed to hash out some sort of agreement to follow the Kyoto protocol. ...

The race for Atlanta's top job goes down to the wire

THE saying has it that after you die, whether you’re going to heaven or hell, you’ll have to change planes in Atlanta. Hartsfield-Jackson airport is the world’s busiest by passenger traffic. Rather like the city it serves, it is massive, sprawling, almost efficient and often charming (those dated-futuristic trains, the uncannily uniform—to a northeasterner, anyway—friendliness of its workers). ...

Where car ownership is highest

LUXEMBOURG'S roads are jammed with 647 cars for every 1,000 people, the highest ownership rate in the world. The tiny country is rich, which probably accounts for its motor-mania. Car ownership is also high in wealthy countries with remote rural populations, such as Iceland and New Zealand. Surprisingly, America, home of the motor vehicle, has fewer cars per person than either Australia or Canada.

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How the financial crisis has affected the rich

EVEN the rich suffer in a financial crisis. Over a third of American millionaire households said they lost at least 30% of their net worth since September, according to a new report by Spectrem Group, a financial consultancy. Property, mutual funds, shares and annuities took the biggest knocks. Unsurprisingly, financial advisors are under more scrutiny, with satisfaction levels falling from 60% earlier in the year to 40%. A majority of the wealthy say they may not be able to support their lifestyles and nearly 20% will delay retirement.

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In 2008 America's stockmarkets suffered their second-worst year since 1825

INVESTORS are told that the value of their shares may go down as well as up. Rarely, however, do they plummet as far as they did in 2008. The total return of the S&P 500 index fell by nearly 40% last year, the second-worst performance by America's stockmarket since 1825, according to calculations by Value Square, a Belgian asset-management firm. Comparisons to the Depression are clear: only in 1931 and 1937 were there similarly abysmal losses. The firm looked at various predecessors of the S&P 500 from 1923 onwards, and for earlier years took data from a working paper by Yale Management School on the returns of companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Since 1825, 129 years saw rising returns, whereas 55 suffered falls—four of them in this century.

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Countries with the most, and fewest, doctors

UNSURPRISINGLY access to health care is closely tied to wealth. African countries have the fewest doctors per head of population, with Malawi the worst off. Beyond Africa, Bhutan is particularly short of doctors. Turkmenistan and Cuba have the most doctors to go around, more even than rich countries. Other former communist countries such as Belarus and Georgia are also well endowed with members of the medical profession.

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Which countries produce most coffee?

THERE is indeed an awful lot of coffee in Brazil. And there is quite a bit in Vietnam and Colombia too. But while these three countries produce the most coffee their wares are drunk mainly in places where it would not grow quite so well. Americans drink the most of the invigorating beverage though Brazil gets through quite a bit too. Germany and Japan also outdrink those traditional homes of coffee swilling—France and Italy.

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Demand for mobile phones will grow in 2009

FROM the world's poorest countries to the very richest, the demand for mobile phones will not be derailed by tougher economic times. Globally, subscriptions will swell by 8%, bringing the total to some 4 billion worldwide. In the developed world growth will be spurred by the need to upgrade to ever more powerful, internet-enabled phones, while in emerging economies heavy investment in network infrastructure will mean that virtually anyone, just about anywhere, will be able to get reception. In recession-hit economies, however, customers will delay their upgrades and cut back on pricier usage plans.

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Fewer Europeans will go to the polls in 2009

THE European Union is in little danger of being mistaken for a vibrant democracy. A reputation for deals forged in backrooms and the failure to ratify the Lisbon Treaty, which would have conferred greater powers on the EU parliament, are all likely to dissuade too many of the half a billion EU citizens from turning out for parliamentary elections in 2009. Since direct elections began in 1979, at five-yearly intervals, turnout has fallen each time, to 46% in 2004. This hides lower turnout in countries such as Britain, and truly appalling statistics in some new member states which joined in 2004.

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Business investment in big economies will shrink in 2009

IN UNCERTAIN times for businesses, cash is king, and those (mostly mature) firms that have fat margins and strong cash flow will have an edge over firms that are in critical phases of their investment cycle, especially start-ups that are burning rather than breeding cash. Many firms will slash discretionary spending and scale back growth plans to conserve cash until they get a clearer sense of the economic outlook. Before the market panic of September 2008, the OECD predicted that business investment would slump in first half of 2009, rebounding a bit in the second half, but to a much lower growth rate than had been the norm until recently. Even that now looks overly optimistic.

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The battle for the world's biggest observation wheel

THE world's great capital cities engage in a rivalry that is generally unspoken. But occasionally this yearning to be the best erupts into the open and onto the skyline. And nothing proclaims your city's greatness like a vast Ferris wheel, the first of which was built for the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. In 2009 Berlin plans to outdo the 135-metre London Eye in Britain's capital—Europe's largest—with a wheel 50 metres higher. But Beijing will steal the show with its own 208-metre Great Observation Wheel, the biggest in the world.

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Why it pays to go abroad for medical treatment

AROUND 46m Americans lack health insurance, and tens of millions more are woefully under-insured. As they face huge out-of-pocket expenses, deductibles and “co-payments” for operations, they are increasingly heading overseas to cheaper facilities. Many common operations can be done in world-class hospitals abroad for a fifth or less of the price charged by American hospitals. As more employers and health-insurance firms add the “global option” to their plans, the number of American health tourists will soar to over 2m in 2009—rising to 10m by 2012, according to forecasts by Deloitte, a consultancy.

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America and Japan have the most computers per person

Growth in the sales of personal computers will continue to slow in 2009, especially in more saturated markets such as North America, where there is already almost one PC for every person. Demand will remain relatively strong in emerging markets where penetration rates are still relatively low. The falling cost of laptops and the growing availability of cheaper internet-enabled devices will help to fuel demand worldwide. As a result, laptops will outsell desktop computers for the first time in 2009.

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Google offers some insights into life's big questions

THE oldest questions are still the most puzzling. According to Google's annual list of popular search terms, even in these times of economic crisis, people are most concerned with working out what love is. The nature of gout, an ailment most commonly associated with gentlemanly excess, has fallen off the list since 2007. With fewer expensive meals and bottles of wine on offer, it is likely to be less of a problem in these frugal times. Interest in the identity of the president-elect, Barack Obama, reached such a fever pitch that he has replaced God on the list. John McCain could perhaps take comfort from the fact that more interest was shown in him than in his running mate, Sarah Palin.

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Analysing the causes of conflicts

THERE have been nine wars and almost 130 violent conflicts across the world this year, according to an annual report released on Monday December 15th by the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research, a think-tank. The study classifies conflict broadly to include peaceful disputes over politics or borders (low intensity), as well as those involving sporadic or constant violence (medium or high intensity). In 2008 previously non-violent conflicts escalated into violence in countries such as Kenya and Yemen. Ideological change is both the most common cause of conflict and the root of most wars, but there is rarely only one cause of dispute. Congo's ongoing conflict encompasses a battle for its mineral resources and, according to some, an invasion by another state, Rwanda.

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Where people are most, and least, promiscuous

HOW much do sexual habits vary between countries? A great deal, according to a study of 14,000 people in 48 countries. The survey asked respondents to consider seven questions related to sex. Some questions were factual: how many sexual partners have you had in the past year and how many one-night stands have you had? Other questions were about attitudes to sex: is sex without love acceptable, or sex with casual partners? From the answers, the researchers compiled an index of promiscuity for respondents from each country. The result appears to show that Finns and other Europeans are the most promiscuous, whereas respondents from more conservative countries, such as Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, are less promiscuous. Around the world men and women vary in their attitudes to casual sex. Men are more likely to seek it out in their late twenties. Women wait until their thirties when the chances of a casual encounter resulting in pregnancy are less.

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Ranking rich countries' commitment to the developing world

AMERICA ranks 17th out of 22 rich countries in its commitment to fostering prosperity in the developing world, according to the Center for Global Development, a think-tank in Washington, DC. The Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Denmark take the top four spots thanks to the generosity of their foreign aid relative to the size of their economies. But aid is not all that matters. Countries such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada score well by dint of good trade and security policies. Environmental, technology and migration policies count too. America’s relatively low trade barriers, the generosity of its citizens’ private aid flows, and policies promoting pro-poor technologies save it from last place.

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Which big organisations and companies are accountable

THE International Olympic Committee is the least accountable global organisation according to a survey published on Wednesday December 10th by One World Trust, a British think-tank. The study ranks 30 companies, inter-governmental organisations, and voluntary groups and charities, according to an index based on criteria such as transparency, participation with outsiders and how complaints are dealt with. The IOC was found to be the least transparent in its workings, while the International Atomic Energy Agency and Care International were found to be worst for setting out ways to deal with external complaints or whistle-blowing. Businesses are most likely to respond to complaints and banks score best for transparency. Charities and aid agencies are most likely to involve outsiders in decision-making.

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Firms paying bribes in foreign countries

RUSSIAN companies are seen as the most likely to pay bribes in foreign business dealings, according to Transparency International, an anti-corruption NGO. In its “Bribe Payers Index” published on Tuesday December 9th, almost 3,000 senior business executives ranked firms from Russia as the worst among 22 countries for offering backhanders to everyone from politicians to low-level public officials. Firms from other big emerging economies such as China, Mexico and India were next in the bribery stakes. Companies from richer countries are less likely to grease palms (with the exception of Italy), with Belgium and Canada seen as least likely to pay bribes.

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House prices continue to fall in most countries

HOUSING markets look grim all over the world. In the third quarter of 2008, house prices fell in 11 of 16 countries measured by The Economist’s house-price indicators. The worst fall was in Britain, where prices tumbled a whopping 5.5% in the three months to September, following a 2.7% drop in the previous quarter. America's housing bubble was the first to burst in 2006, and it has been deflating rapidly since. Many places that recorded gains in the first quarter, such as Hong Kong and China, are now seeing declines. Only in Sweden and Switzerland did house prices grow by more than 1% in the third quarter. Germany, France and South Africa saw tiny rises. Global house prices are expected to fall by 15% in the next two years.

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America's troubled carmakers look set for a bail-out, and other news

• CONGRESS is set to vote on giving America's embattled carmakers a huge handout to save them from the scrapheap. The bosses of Detroit's Big Three recently visited Washington, DC, to ask for some $34 billion to keep their firms in business. General Motors and Chrysler have given warning that they will not make it to the end of the year without extra cash. If, as seems likely, the troubled car firms get a vast dollop of taxpayers' money, it is unlikely to be enough to return them to good health. So America's politicians should prepare themselves for another visit.

For background, see article ...

SIR – I am pleased that you acknowledged the important work carried out by the European Commission in enforcing competition laws (“Unchained watchdog”, February 20th). The commission’s success in this field is built on sound legal and economic analysis, fair and transparent procedures and a fining policy that seeks to deter misbehaviour. Given what is at stake for consumers, companies and the internal market, I am fully aware of the need to balance effective enforcement with procedural fairness.

Regarding those who think “Europe’s trustbusters should be kept on a tighter leash”, companies under investigation have the opportunity to defend themselves fully and present their case in both written and oral evidence. In terms of transparency and accountability, our administrative system compares favourably with many others. In competition matters the commission is actually kept on a tight rein by the European courts, which require our decisions to be fully reasoned. They subject that reasoning to a very close scrutiny and ensure that the rights of the defence are fully respected. Notably, the courts have unlimited powers to reduce, or indeed increase, antitrust fines imposed by the commission. ...

SIR – Your leader on Ukraine characterised the demise of the orange coalition as a case study in how to “entrench” and to “squander” the gains from a revolution (“Bloodless orange”, February 13th). I could not agree more, but perhaps not in the way you described. “Revolution” was never the best term to depict the historic events of 2004. Ukraine did not undergo a transformation of state or society, as it did when an imperialist Russia was replaced by a communist one, or when the Soviet Union fragmented into independent states that embraced capitalism. Rather, Ukraine experienced an act of civil disobedience, one large enough to prevent an election from being stolen by an incumbent regime represented by its then candidate, Viktor Yanukovich.

Move on to 2010 and Mr Yanukovich was declared Ukraine’s legitimately elected president after a run-off. Domestic and international independent election-monitors appear to have confirmed that. This subtle yet telling point should not be lost: if 2004 was a victory or “revolution” for the Ukrainian people, the fact that years later the vanquished emerged victorious by way of the ballot is equally significant. ...

SIR – You are right to stress the urgency of labour-market reforms in Spain if it is to avoid the same fate as Greece (“So hard to bend”, February 13th). Spain’s jobs market requires a complete overhaul and the labour-bargaining process is indeed a good place to start. But Spain’s predicament cannot be resolved by redesigning its labour market alone. The reform process needs to be widened to take in other parts of the economy and should include a restructuring of savings banks, upgrading the education and training system, and applying the European Union directive for services in order to improve competition and create new firms. Spending priorities need to change too, with less money going to non-productive enterprises and more on tax policies that encourage work, savings, investment and innovation.

A bold reform of the overall economy is the best way forward to secure more and better jobs and establish the new growth model to which Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the prime minister, frequently refers. Whether or not Mr Zapatero is the man for the job remains to be seen. ...

SIR – Unfortunately, your claim that “relations with China are…one of the few things George Bush junior got mostly right” is mostly wrong (“By fits and starts”, February 6th). After China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001 with the blessing of Mr Bush it proceeded to violate virtually every free-trade rule in the book. From massive export subsidies and currency manipulation to intellectual property theft and forced technology transfer, China has made a mercantilist mockery of everything that the WTO and free trade stand for.

The abject failure of Mr Bush and Hank Paulson, his treasury secretary and chief negotiator with China, to hold China accountable for its mercantilist and protectionist trade practices has contributed mightily to huge global trade imbalances as well as pernicious structural imbalances in both the American and Chinese economies. With China too heavily dependent on export-led growth and America weakened by a decade of overconsumption, it is hardly surprising that the Chinese economy continues to grow at 10% a year while the American unemployment rate hovers around 10%. ...

SIR – Your leader on the growth of the state expressed a preference “to give power to individuals, rather than to governments” (“Stop!”, January 23rd). Would that the world were so simple. What about corporate power or, if you prefer, the market? Insatiable in its greed and utterly blind to any vision of humanity or of ethics, no government or political party is immune to its influence; “money talks” is its watchword.

As corporate leverage becomes the life force of a government’s power, “individuals” find themselves left far, far behind. Surely, that is a central and clear message of the current economic crisis. ...

SIR – You stated that Barack Obama “has no choice but to move back to the centre” (“The man who fell to earth”, January 23rd). But how far “left” is he? The president’s economic team is stuffed full of establishment figures who implement policy in co-operation with a Republican-appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve. Mr Obama has retained George Bush’s secretary of defence and has not significantly altered America’s military approach. In fact, he escalated the war in Afghanistan and increased assassination strikes against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Although he has a preference for the “public option” of government-backed health insurance, he is willing to accept any reasonable compromise on health reform and has backed a Senate plan that is almost a clone of the scheme implemented by Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts. His one “protectionist” measure was an insignificant tariff on tyres, a shot across the bow to China. ...

SIR –“Eastern Europe” may be a geographic oddity, as you argue, but the term is not likely to be changed by any locational arguments (“Wrongly labelled”, January 9th). Greece is farther east than most countries usually thought of as belonging to the region, but it was never behind the Iron Curtain. It is political and military demarcations that separate the East from the West, rather than geography.

And although you are certainly right that countries that used to be behind the Iron Curtain are quite different from each other, their political past unites them in many ways that will not quickly disappear on account of new political divisions. Communist ideology is still alive in many a bosom and often in surprising ways, such as attitudes toward job security, health insurance and public safety. And so is the resentment for having been left in Soviet clutches for such a long time, which still feeds all the complaints about false geographical divisions of Europe. Geographic labelling is thus best left alone. ...

SIR – The notion that Pakistan’s President Asif Zardari is “whipping up sub-nationalist sentiment” by playing the “Sindh card” is disproved by the actions taken by this government (“Peccavi”, January 2nd). It has pursued a politics of national consensus among all of Pakistan’s provinces and taken action to forge an understanding between them, which is unprecedented in the history of Pakistan. A new vitality has been injected into the federation by addressing the grievances of smaller provinces when allocating national finances and resources.

Take the package given to Baluchistan and the amnesty to political dissidents, which address long-held complaints by making a sincere effort, for the first time, to listen to the people of Baluchistan with sympathy. President Zardari has tendered an apology to the Baluch people for past injustices. Similarly, the rights of the people of Gilgit and Baltistan have been recognised and they have been given the status of a province. ...

SIR – I am writing to express the Canadian government’s concern over your false characterisation of the prorogation of Parliament (“Halted in mid-debate”, January 9th). Contrary to your assertion, this did not curtail the government’s agenda. All of the government’s stimulus and budget measures had been adopted and implemented. Other priority legislation was far from completion or was blocked in either the House of Commons or the Senate by opposition parties, which together command a majority of seats in both chambers.

Under Canada’s parliamentary tradition, prorogation is a routine, constitutionally legitimate process that has occurred on 105 occasions in the 143 years of our national history. The average session of Parliament lasts approximately one year. The length of the last session? Approximately one year. The most recent session of Parliament ended according to constitutional convention. The established Canadian practice to obtain the governor-general’s approval to prorogue Parliament was followed in this case, which, incidentally, has not typically included a meeting. And it is not correct to suggest that prorogation will enable the government to avoid parliamentary scrutiny. When Parliament returns, the government will face immediate, and unavoidable, confidence votes in the Commons. ...

SIR – Your article praising the relative welcome given to immigrants in the United States missed a central point (“A Ponzi scheme that works”, December 19th). Unlike even the most liberal of European and Asian countries, America has not only assimilated immigrants into its own culture, but also absorbed their cultures into its own.

By the end of the 19th century the earlier wave of Irish immigration had made the United States partly Irish. By the second half of the 20th century Italian and east European Jewish immigrants had changed the cultural mix to include theirs—think pizza and bagels. The same is now happening with Hispanic and Asian immigrants. ...

SIR –The Economist continues to propagate the myth that a carbon tax is preferable to carbon trading (“Stopping climate change”, December 5th). There are three good reasons for not favouring a carbon tax over a cap-and-trade solution.

First, a “one size fits all” tax requires an impossible calculation of the average cost of reducing emissions over a given period of time. Compare this with an emissions-trading system that works on the free-floating marginal cost of abating emissions. Second, carbon taxes would be levied locally and so impossible to properly administer on a global scale. A global carbon-market price is perfectly pervasive. And third, taxation cannot guarantee a reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions; emitters could opt to pay the tax and continue emitting at will. Conversely, a cap-and-trade solution introduces a carbon ceiling and the price acts as no more than a useful barometer of how close we are to achieving that goal; prices will tend to zero as the requisite level of emission reductions is achieved. ...

SIR – You accurately highlighted the complicated circumstances surrounding the political turmoil in Honduras and rightly questioned the level of perfection of its recent election (“Honduras defies the world”, December 5th). However, I firmly refute your claim that the Organisation of American States was “absurdly maximalist” at the start of the crisis by “refusing talks” to overcome the emergency.

Immediately after the coup in June the OAS acted swiftly and clearly, calling for the restoration of democratic order. The OAS supported the efforts of Oscar Arias, Costa Rica’s president, to mediate a resolution and sent delegations of foreign ministers and officials to San Jose to promote acceptance of the accords. ...

SIR – Passion is the root problem in what you term “the modern argument over climate change” (“A heated debate”, November 28th). You state, for instance, that the “majority of the world’s climate scientists have convinced themselves” that human activity is the cause of climate change. I know of no poll that confirms this, but your choice of words is telling. In science, our interpretations of nature are based on observation, experiment and evidence, not self-conviction.

Those of us who are dismissed, often derided, as sceptics have waited a long time for the chicanery behind the global-warming movement to come to light. But we should not blame scientists—however unprincipled—nor UN organisations, nor national governments. The true culprits are the latter-day Nostradamuses who, under their icons of cuddly pandas and polar bears, have misused science to stoke fear, guilt and a craving for atonement in the minds of the public. Governments have been browbeaten to respond to these catastrophists, and some scientists, dependent on public money, have fashioned their behaviour accordingly. ...

SIR – Many of the recommendations in your leader on reducing America’s budget deficit were spot-on: acknowledging that it is essentially a spending problem, offering common sense ideas on making entitlements sustainable, reforming agricultural programmes and removing the impediments to economic growth in our Byzantine tax code (“Dealing with America’s fiscal hole”, November 21st).

Yet your reluctant conclusion to outsource the tough decisions to a commission fell short. Contrary to popular belief, politicians are elected to solve problems, not punt on them. Americans should be treated like adults and offered bold solutions, as I’ve done with my comprehensive entitlement-reform proposal, “A Roadmap for America’s Future”, which tackles overdue reforms to Social Security, health care, the tax code and our broken budget process. Pessimism with our political process is understandable, but the United States has faced more difficult challenges in the past. ...

Blaming speculators for sovereign-debt woes is misguided. Banning them would be worse

GREECE had a budget deficit of 12.7% of GDP in 2009. It has a record of dodgy accounting. Its own leaders acknowledge how dire its fiscal situation is. George Papaconstantinou, the country’s finance minister, summed it up pretty well last month. “People think we are in a terrible mess. And we are.”

That hasn’t stopped his boss, George Papandreou, and other European leaders from jabbing fingers elsewhere. To judge by this week’s political rhetoric, the blame for Greece’s woes lies largely with speculators, who stand accused of buying sovereign credit-default swaps (CDSs), a form of insurance against government default, in the hope of profiting from jitters about sovereign debt. “Unprincipled speculators are making billions every day by betting on a Greek default,” said Mr Papandreou in a speech in Washington, DC. ...

Why Germany needs to change, both for its own sake and for others

ELSEWHERE in the world, Europe is widely regarded as a continent whose economy is rigid and sclerotic, whose people are work-shy and welfare-dependent, and whose industrial base is antiquated and declining—the broken cogs and levers that condemn the old world to a gloomy future. As with most cliches, there is some truth in it. Yet as our special report in this week’s issue shows, the achievements of Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, tell a rather different story.

A decade ago Germany was the sick man of Europe, plagued by slow growth and high unemployment, with big manufacturers moving out in a desperate search for lower costs. Now, despite the recession, unemployment is lower than it was five years ago. Although Germany recently ceded its place as the world’s biggest exporter to China, its exporting prowess remains undimmed. As a share of GDP, its current-account surplus this year will be bigger than China’s. ...

The best thing American politicians can do to encourage a stronger Chinese currency is keep calm

ONE of the few good things about the Great Recession of 2008-09 was a merciful absence of complaints from America’s Congress about China’s currency. The yuan’s gradual appreciation stopped in July 2008, and China has since kept its currency tightly pegged to the dollar. But even as America suffered its worst downturn in the post-war period, its legislators steered clear of ranting against China.

That restraint was driven partly by fear. At the depths of the crisis even the most myopic Congressmen worried about a descent into 1930s-style protectionism. And it was driven partly by the facts. As investors’ flight to safety strengthened the dollar in late 2008, the yuan rose along with it. With America’s imports slumping it was hard to blame Chinese workers for American joblessness. And thanks to its huge domestic stimulus China added to global demand last year, as its current-account surplus shrank sharply. ...

Natural gas is becoming less like oil and more like coal, which is a good thing

WOODY ALLEN, in earlier, funnier days, told a joke about two women in a resort in the Catskills bemoaning the cuisine: “The food at this place is really terrible,” says one. “Yeah, and such small portions,” replies her friend. Thus the current thinking about fossil fuels. They are dangerous things, their production and transport often unpalatable, the less visible environmental consequences of their use worse still. And there is not enough of them. The current boom in “unconventional” gas (see article) seems likely to provide good news on both fronts.

The three conventional forms of fossil carbon—oil, coal and gas—differ both in the way the Earth stores them and the way its people use them. Oil is found in relatively few places, and its energy density, pumpability and ease of use in internal-combustion engines makes it particularly well suited as a transportation fuel. Coal is found in many more places—a whole geological era’s worth of rocks, those of the Carboniferous, are named in its honour—and it cannot be pumped around, but can be crushed and burned and so produces baseload power. Gas, typically found and exploited in the same sort of places as oil, is easily moved around through plumbing but is not, usually, seen as a transportation fuel. It has filled niches in between: Europeans warm their homes with it and many developed countries generate some of their electricity with it. ...

Both Turkey and the Armenian diaspora should look for ways of rewriting a familiar script

NOT for the first time, Armenians sense a moment of vindication in their struggle for the acknowledgment of the tragedy that befell their forebears during the first world war. Turkey is angry. And America’s administration is straining to limit the damage.

The latest Turkish-American rift over the Armenian question—after a congressional committee voted on March 4th to recognise the killings of 1915 as genocide—looks wider than some previous ones. It coincides with a general scratchiness between America and its ally. Turkey is reluctant to slap sanctions on Iran. Anti-Americanism is running high among Turks. Some suspect that Barack Obama retains his view (expressed as a senator in 2008) that “the Armenian genocide is not an allegation…but rather a widely documented fact.” ...

Indian policymakers should see agriculture as a source of growth, not votes

INDIA’S industry is going from strength to strength. Manufacturing grew by 14.3% in the fourth quarter of 2009, compared with the same period in 2008. Politicians celebrate the achievements of “India Inc”, applauding its acquisitions abroad and welcoming the foreign investment it attracts.

They do not show anything like the same confidence in “Bharat Inc”, which is how India’s rural economy is sometimes described. Bharat, which means India in Hindi, is a different country. The rural heartland is courted for votes, smothered with regulations, and shielded from the global economy that corporate India is busy conquering. Yet the government cannot achieve the “inclusive” growth it aspires to without robust progress in agriculture, which still employs about half of India’s workforce. Agricultural growth cuts poverty twice as fast as other kinds, because the poor are mostly rural and they spend more than half of their household budgets on food. ...

Killed, aborted or neglected, at least 100m girls have disappeared—and the number is rising

IMAGINE you are one half of a young couple expecting your first child in a fast-growing, poor country. You are part of the new middle class; your income is rising; you want a small family. But traditional mores hold sway around you, most important in the preference for sons over daughters. Perhaps hard physical labour is still needed for the family to make its living. Perhaps only sons may inherit land. Perhaps a daughter is deemed to join another family on marriage and you want someone to care for you when you are old. Perhaps she needs a dowry.

Now imagine that you have had an ultrasound scan; it costs $12, but you can afford that. The scan says the unborn child is a girl. You yourself would prefer a boy; the rest of your family clamours for one. You would never dream of killing a baby daughter, as they do out in the villages. But an abortion seems different. What do you do? ...

Even Javanese democrats cannot always rule by consensus

IN THE coming days you will read plenty of good things about Indonesia. Barack Obama’s return later this month to his childhood home, Jakarta, will give an underreported country a moment in the international spotlight. It will be a chance for reminders that, just 12 years after the toppling of the 32-year Suharto dictatorship, the world’s third-most populous democracy seems remarkably stable; that, with more Muslims than any other country, it is a bastion of tolerance; that its economy has weathered the global downturn well; and that, in Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, it has a president who enjoys a huge popular mandate at home and respect abroad as a model reformer. All of this is true. So it is a shame that of late Indonesia’s politicians have been giving democracy a bad name, and that Mr Yudhoyono himself has been doing precious little in the way of either reforming or leading.

This week saw a climax of sorts in a lengthy parliamentary probe into the government’s rescue in 2008 of Bank Century, a small local lender (see article). The debate in the lower house degenerated into rowdy uproar; outside police used water-cannon and tear gas to disperse a rent-a-mob. Were the bail-out really at issue, this might have been less ugly. But in fact, the probe had become a witch-hunt against the two leading reformers in Mr Yudhoyono’s cabinet—his vice-president, Boediono, and his finance minister, Sri Mulyani Indrawati. Both are technocrats rather than politicians. Both have good reputations for competence and honesty. Both, therefore, are the natural enemies of the businessmen and their politician cronies who lorded it in the Suharto days. Far from respecting Mr Yudhoyono’s decisive electoral mandate, the old elite has been trying to undermine it and scupper his reformist agenda. ...

Iraq may ask for more American help. Barack Obama should not hold back

SEVEN years after the Americans invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein, two momentous events are approaching: a general election on March 7th and the promised departure of all American combat troops by the end of August. Yet governments across the world, most notably Barack Obama’s, seem to have turned their attention elsewhere. Iraq is already yesterday’s story. This is a grave error. The country has been devastated, in good part thanks to the miscalculations of America and its Western allies. It is progressing shakily and still needs outside help. And it is vital to the stability of the region. The mission has by no means been accomplished.

Iraq is far less dangerous than it was three years ago, when the Americans damped down a civil war with their last-gasp military surge. Since American troops withdrew to encampments outside the towns, their death rate has happily dived (see chart). But Iraq is still bloody. Several hundred Iraqis are still dying violently for political reasons every month—more, by the way, than in Afghanistan. Iraq’s nationalist insurgency has faded, but al-Qaeda is still wreaking carnage every month or so. Flashpoints, particularly along a “trigger line” between Iraq’s Arabs and Kurds, threaten the peace. Baghdad is not open for normal business, except for firms that can afford their own bomb-proof security systems. ...

Throughout the rich world battle lines are being drawn in the coming fight over deficit reduction

WHEN friends go out to dinner, the convivial atmosphere can be shattered once the waiter brings the bill. A pleasant evening can descend into a dispute about who had a starter and who ordered the lobster. Running a public-sector deficit is similar: the arguments start when the tab has to be paid.

The battles will be all the more fierce this time around because the deficits are so large and likely in the short term to stay that way. With developed economies still weak, many governments are (often rightly) keen to run large deficits for a while longer. But the bond markets are getting impatient, especially with weaker European countries. Greece was forced to announce a third austerity package this week, after its initial efforts failed to reassure either the markets or its neighbours (see article). Although Britain has a lower debt-to-GDP ratio than Greece and its debt has an average maturity of 14 years, sterling also wobbled this week, with investors spooked by the prospect of a hung parliament. True, the three biggest rich-world economies, the United States, Germany and Japan, are under less pressure. But Japan has high debt levels and America has the government-bankrupting cost of ageing baby-boomers. ...

The real issue raised by Lord Ashcroft’s tax status is David Cameron’s judgment

THE ennobling of Michael Ashcroft, a controversial businessman and Conservative Party donor, in 2000 was a messy matter; for he partly lived, and had extensive business interests, in Belize. As a condition of his peerage, he agreed to take up “permanent residence” in Britain. Ever since, senior Tories have been forced into humiliating contortions when asked whether Lord Ashcroft, who is now deputy chairman of the party, was resident in Britain for tax purposes: ask him, they blustered, knowing that he was unlikely to answer.

Now he has. But his response has provoked new questions about his own affairs, and a big one about David Cameron, the current Tory leader—who, despite a recent dip in the polls, is still the man most likely to be prime minister after the general election that is expected to be held on May 6th. ...

The Kirchners could have more oil if they stopped bullying Argentine business

ONCE again an unpopular Argentine government is making aggressive noises towards the Falkland Islands. In 1982 the country’s military dictators gambled that grabbing the islands, a far-flung relic of the British empire, by military invasion would allow them to cling to power on a wave of popular acclaim. Fortunately for the islanders the junta was defeated by Margaret Thatcher’s dispatch of a task-force (though it was a far closer-run thing than she would ever acknowledge and cost 650 Argentine and 260 British lives). The conflict had a silver lining for Argentina, in the form of its swift return to democracy. Now an elected, but unpopular, president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, is working herself into a nationalist frenzy over the arrival of an oil rig.

Seismic studies of the islands suggest there may be a lot of oil and gas beneath waters that Argentina has always claimed as its own. Ms Fernandez’s government pledges to prevent their discovery and development, and has restricted the use of Argentine ports and waters by island shipping. Argentina wisely insists that it will not resort to military action (in contrast to 1982, the Falklands are now well-garrisoned whereas its own armed forces have shrunk). Instead it is counting on regional solidarity and diplomatic pressure. This week it won the support of a summit of the leaders of 32 countries from Latin America and the Caribbean. ...

The success of genetically modified crops provides opportunities to win over their critics

IN THE 14 years since the first genetically modified crops were planted commercially, their descendants, relatives and remixes have gone forth and multiplied like profitable, high-tech pondweed. A new report (see article) shows that 25 countries now grow GM crops, with the total area under cultivation now larger than Peru. Three-quarters of the farmland used to grow soya is now sown with a genetically modified variant, and the figures for cotton are not that far behind, thanks to its success in India. China recently gave the safety go-ahead to its first GM rice variety and a new GM maize that should make better pig feed. More and more plants are having their genomes sequenced: a full sequence for maize was published late last year, the soya genome in January. Techniques for altering genomes are moving ahead almost as fast as the genomes themselves are stacking up, and new crops with more than one added trait are coming to market.

Such stories of success will strike fear into some hearts, and not only in GM-averse Europe; a GM backlash is under way in India, focused on insect-resistant aubergines. Some of these fears are understandable, but lacking supporting evidence they have never been compelling. On safety, the fear which cuts closest to home, the record continues to look good. Governments need to keep testing and monitoring, but that may be becoming easier. More precise modifications, and better technologies for monitoring stray DNA both within plants and in the environment around them, mean that it is getting easier to be sure that nothing untoward is going on. ...

It is time India got serious about the Maoist insurgency in its eastern states

SINCE 2006, when Manmohan Singh described the Maoist insurgency as the “single biggest internal-security challenge” India had ever faced, it has spread rapidly. Maoist guerrillas are now active in over a third of India’s 626 districts, with 90 seeing “consistent violence”. Last year the conflict claimed 998 lives. This month alone the Maoists—or Naxalites, as they are known—slaughtered 24 policemen in West Bengal and 12 villagers in Bihar (see article). Yet neither official concern at the highest level nor continuing horrific violence have prompted a concerted and coherent strategy for dealing with the insurgency. It is time for the government to devise one.

Mr Singh may have overstated the security threat to the Indian state; but not the damage to Indian society. The government has faced bloodier threats, on its borders: from separatists in Punjab in the 1980s and in Kashmir and the north-east still. But the Kashmir valley has only 5m people, Manipur, most troubled of the north-eastern states, only 2.5m; Naxalites are scattered among 450m of India’s poorest people, feeding on the grievances of tribal inhabitants of eastern and central India against what is all too often a cruel, neglectful and corrupt administration. This makes the Naxalites hard to treat in the way that India has treated its other insurrections: as military threats to be dealt with by force—often brutally so. ...

Businesses, governments and society are only starting to tap its vast potential

EIGHTEEN months ago, Li & Fung, a firm that manages supply chains for retailers, saw 100 gigabytes of information flow through its network each day. Now the amount has increased tenfold. During 2009, American drone aircraft flying over Iraq and Afghanistan sent back around 24 years’ worth of video footage. New models being deployed this year will produce ten times as many data streams as their predecessors, and those in 2011 will produce 30 times as many.

Everywhere you look, the quantity of information in the world is soaring. According to one estimate, mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes. Merely keeping up with this flood, and storing the bits that might be useful, is difficult enough. Analysing it, to spot patterns and extract useful information, is harder still. Even so, the data deluge is already starting to transform business, government, science and everyday life (see our special report in this issue). It has great potential for good—as long as consumers, companies and governments make the right choices about when to restrict the flow of data, and when to encourage it. ...

Japan’s prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, should jettison his Svengali, Ichiro Ozawa

WHEN the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) swept a mildewed 55-year-old regime from power last year, nowhere epitomised the sense of energy and enthusiasm better than Nagasaki in south-western Japan. There, a bob-haired 28-year-old drove from office a grizzly 68-year-old, known as “the Bear”, who had won nine consecutive elections for the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Less than six months later, an electoral defeat in the same city has shown how quickly Yukio Hatoyama’s government has dimmed those hopes. He needs to act boldly and decisively to stop his administration sinking into the very swamp of financial scandal and policy paralysis that it was elected to drain. And that requires him to rid himself of Ichiro Ozawa, the DPJ’s secretary-general, electoral wizard—and, now, its biggest handicap.

This week’s defeat of the DPJ’s candidate for governor of Nagasaki was an indictment of Mr Hatoyama and of Mr Ozawa, both of whom have been immersed in financial scandals. The setback was compounded by the loss of a mayoral election in a quarter of Tokyo where Mr Ozawa had stooped to campaign. “My lack of virtue is to blame,” Mr Ozawa said afterwards, in the sort of half-baked apology that Japan has heard so often lately—not least from the boss of Toyota, the fault-prone carmaker that has added to the national malaise. ...

A higher inflation target for central banks would be a bad idea

EVEN in economics, the guardians of orthodoxy are not given to capricious changes of mind. So when economists at the IMF question received wisdom and the fund’s established views twice in a week, it is no small matter. Two new papers have done exactly that. The first reversal, on inflation targets, makes less sense than the second, on capital controls.

The initial firecracker came on February 12th, with an analysis of the lessons of the financial crisis for macroeconomic policy, led by Olivier Blanchard, the IMF’s chief economist. The report called for several bold innovations. The most radical of these is that central banks should raise their inflation targets—perhaps to 4% from the standard 2% or so. ...

Enforcement of competition law in Europe is unjust and must change

EUROPE’S trustbusters have plenty to boast about. Over several decades the European Commission’s competition directorate has evolved into perhaps the most important regulator of its kind in the world. It has been rigorous in the development of antitrust theory and an energetic enforcer of the law. While antitrust policy across the Atlantic has veered between the activism of the Clinton administration and the relative laissez-faire of the Bush years, it has shown consistency. More than any other body it has upheld the principles of the single market, often incurring the wrath of powerful member states. Yet despite its fine record, there are deep flaws in the way the directorate operates. The priority of the new competition commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, must be to address them.

The problems are not new, but they have been given fresh salience by the fallout from the European Union’s case against Intel (see article). Last May the commission fined the chipmaker a record €1.06 billion ($1.5 billion) under Article 82 (now 102) of the European treaty, which forbids dominant firms from abusing their power. The specific complaint against Intel, brought by its smaller rival, AMD, was that it had bribed PC-makers to buy its own processors. ...

The euro zone’s rescue plan for Greece is flawed

ON FEBRUARY 15th Greeks celebrated Clean Monday, the start of Orthodox Lent, by flocking out of towns and cities to eat shellfish and fly kites. For a country in the throes of an economic crisis, a national holiday to listen to the bouzouki smacks of self-indulgence. But then Greeks and other members of the euro zone are perhaps allowing themselves to believe that, after an awful, bickering month, things are looking up. Fortified by a couple of European Union summits, plus a more ambitious Greek pledge to cut the deficit and a euro-zone counterpledge to stand behind the country, the market for Greek government debt looks stable.

But for how long? The bond market’s assault has indeed abated, but only the most carried-away kite-flying oyster-eater could believe that this crisis is over for good. At some point in the next few months, during which Greece has to raise at least €20 billion ($27 billion) in the bond markets, its finances are likely to be tested again. Greece’s plans to restructure its economy lack credibility, the euro zone’s promised rescue is vague and the whole confection threatens to be needlessly expensive. European leaders bought time this week. They should use it to devise something better. ...

Modernisation is hard to argue with. But it may not be what Russia needs

IMAGINE a town or settlement of 30,000 people, probably near Moscow. Its high-tech laboratories and ultra-modern glass houses make California’s Palo Alto look ancient. It has a greater concentration of scientists than anywhere else in the world. The atmosphere in the town is free, cosmopolitan and creative, almost anarchic at times. Police harassment is minimal, “at least to start with”. Riff-raff and drunks from surrounding villages are kept away by tight security.

The streets are clean, and shops are stuffed with organic food to stimulate the brain. Here, in this exclusive “zone of special attention”, the state is extracting creative energy from Russian and foreign scientists that is driving the country along the path of modernisation and innovation. ...

Newly economic, widely distributed sources are shifting the balance of power in the world’s gas markets

SOME time in 2014 natural gas will be condensed into liquid and loaded onto a tanker docked in Kitimat, on Canada’s Pacific coast, about 650km (400 miles) north-west of Vancouver. The ship will probably take its cargo to Asia. This proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant, to be built by Apache Corporation, an American energy company, will not be North America’s first. Gas has been shipped from Alaska to Japan since 1969. But if it makes it past the planning stages, Kitimat LNG will be one of the continent’s most significant energy developments in decades.

Five years ago Kitimat was intended to be a point of import, not export, one of many terminals that would dot the coast of North America. There was good economic sense behind the rush. Local production of natural gas was waning, prices were surging and an energy-hungry America was worried about the lights going out. ...

Increasing budget deficits and rising government debts are likely to entail fierce political battles—not least between taxpayers and public-sector workers

WHEN times are hard, many people are tempted to let their credit cards take the strain for a while. And when economies fall into recession, many governments are happy to let their budget deficits widen, to tide the economy over.

Sensible as this may be, deficits in several countries have increased so much and so fast during the economic crisis of the past 18 months or so that it is generally agreed that remedial action will be needed in the medium term. Deficits of 10% or more of GDP cannot be sustained for long, especially when nervous markets drive up the cost of servicing the growing debt. ...

Iraq, having beaten most of its insurgents, holds an election on March 7th. But its institutions may be too weak, and its politicians too greedy, to save democracy

THINGS had been going well for Iraq’s footballers. They had re-established a national league, won the 2007 Asian Cup and last summer played host to their first post-Saddam international. Then, in November, a column of armoured police cars turned up at the headquarters of the Iraqi Football Association in eastern Baghdad. Uniformed men stormed the building, setting up sandbagged machinegun positions. They were acting on the orders of the Iraqi Olympic Committee, which is in the hands of Iraq’s Shia-dominated government. The Football Association is still run mainly by Sunnis. Its directors were accused of irregularities by the government and asked to give up control. When they refused, the army moved in.

There is more than one way of looking at this. FIFA, the world football body, took a dim view of armed interference in the affairs of one of its members, and banned Iraq from all international competitions until the takeover was reversed. But America’s military commanders in Iraq saw progress: after all, no shots had been fired and nobody was hurt. “We used to wake up every morning with another 100 bodies in the river,” remarked General Stephen Lanza, a spokesman. Detecting an overall “maturing” of institutions along with striking improvements in security, he believes Iraq is coming right. But is it? ...

What really went wrong at RBS? And how can it be put right?

THERE is a road to nowhere in Royal Bank of Scotland’s campus just outside Edinburgh. It ends abruptly amid rolling parkland and was laid on the presumption that a new building would eventually be added to the bank’s already big office complex. That sense of destiny, that the bank would always get bigger, is dead. The executive wing is being refitted for humble workers. The art has been taken from the walls and loaned to British galleries. Stephen Hester, the chief executive, has split his predecessor’s office in two and occupies only half of it. He says the restructuring of RBS is the biggest and most complex of any bank in the world.

Mr Hester may be the kind of big, brisk City banker who has the average braveheart reaching for his claymore, but his superlatives are part of an RBS tradition. It is one of the world’s oldest banks, founded in 1727. At its peak it was the world’s sixth-largest bank by risk-adjusted assets. In 2007 it led the consortium that made the largest ever takeover of a bank, ABN AMRO. A year later it needed Europe’s biggest bail-out; its former boss, Sir Fred Goodwin, was one of the most vilified bankers around. RBS was, if you believe a government minister, “the worst-managed bank this country has ever seen.” ...

While some private businesses in Argentina have faced harassment or even nationalisation, others have flourished thanks to political contacts

WHEN Nestor Kirchner took over as Argentina’s president in 2003, his country’s economy was already on the mend after a sickening collapse 18 months earlier that had prompted debt default and devaluation. Lambasting the IMF and privatisation, Mr Kirchner extended the state’s control over the economy. Rising world prices for Argentina’s farm-commodity exports and government pump-priming unleashed an economic boom. This made Mr Kirchner a popular hero, and secured the election of his wife, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, as his successor in 2007. She has continued his policies. Mr Kirchner was last year elected as a congressman, but according to former officials he still takes many executive decisions.

Enjoying almost complete political dominance, Argentina’s first couple swatted away critics who accused them of everything from illegal enrichment to wrecking institutions. They are still trying to do so. Ms Fernandez frequently accuses Argentina’s leading newspapers of making up stories to discredit her government. But it is getting harder. Thanks to the world recession, rising inflation and a series of political errors, her approval rating in opinion polls has fallen to 20%. After losing a working majority in a congressional election last year, the government is on the verge of losing control of key committees of Congress as well. ...

Such a lovely little earner

SET amid natural grandeur, where the southernmost Patagonian steppe meets the Andes and turquoise icebergs bob in Argentina’s biggest lake, the small town of El Calafate has become a magnet for well-heeled foreign tourists. It is also the adopted hometown of Cristina Fernandez, Argentina’s president, and her husband and predecessor, Nestor Kirchner. They own a 45% stake in Los Sauces, one of the town’s most expensive hotels, where golf buggies are parked outside and Celine Dion songs are piped through the dining room. The Kirchners also own 98% of Hotesur, a company whose main asset is Alto Calafate, another luxury hotel in the town.

The first family’s business dealings have come under scrutiny since the release of the president’s official declaration of assets for 2008. This showed an increase in the first family’s wealth from $2.3m in 2003 to over $12m. During that time neither of the Kirchners had jobs outside politics. According to the declaration, most of their money comes from property deals in Santa Cruz province, where Mr Kirchner was governor before he became president. ...

Governments are increasingly turning to private insurance in order to widen access to health care and make it more efficient. Are they expecting too much?

OTTO VON BISMARCK believed that the ordinary worker “is unsure if he will always be healthy and he can predict that he will reach old age and be unable to work. If he falls into poverty, and be that only through prolonged illness, he will find himself totally helpless.” So in 1883 Germany’s Iron Chancellor introduced a health-insurance law that required both companies and workers to contribute to the costs of care.

Until then health insurance had been essentially a voluntary affair. In many parts of Europe private non-commercial organisations (such as mutuals) had sold health insurance for centuries. Bismarck’s “social” insurance scheme found many imitators. Most of the world’s health care is financed directly by governments, but private insurance, which now makes up nearly a fifth of the total, looks set for a state-sponsored boom. ...

The fate of health-care reform is a test-case in how initiatives fail. Is it also a sign of much deeper trouble in America’s political system?

ACCORDING to Paul Krugman, the winner of a Nobel prize for economics and a columnist for the New York Times, modern America is much like 18th-century Poland. On his telling, Poland was rendered largely ungovernable by the parliament’s requirement for unanimity, and disappeared as a country for more than a century. James Fallows, after several years in China as a writer for the Atlantic Monthly, wrote on his return that he found in America a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent and “a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke”. Tom Friedman, another columnist for the New York Times, reported from the annual World Economic Forum in Davos last month that he had never before heard people abroad talking about “political instability” in America. But these days he did.

The growing idea among influential pundits that America is “ungovernable” is being driven in large part by Barack Obama’s failure so far to pass some of the main laws he wants to. And it is, indeed, a puzzle. Here, after all, is a president who only just over a year ago won a handsome mandate: 53% of the popular vote and big majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. He bounded into office with a mountainous agenda, including plans to overhaul America’s health-care system and cut its greenhouse emissions. He seemed until quite recently to be doing reasonably well. In a folksy December interview with Oprah Winfrey he awarded himself “a good, solid B-plus”. ...

Policymakers are wondering when and how to start a delicate task: weaning the world economy off fiscal and monetary stimulus

THE world economy has been injected with the biggest Keynesian cocktail yet seen in peacetime. In the past 18 months governments have pumped cash into their economies to fight financial seizure and recession. Central banks have slashed interest rates (see chart 1); the rich world’s largest ones have supplemented ultra-cheap money with a special drug, quantitative easing (QE). Finance ministries have cut taxes and boosted public spending.

This infusion has had a dramatic effect. It prevented the biggest financial bust since the 1930s from triggering an economic catastrophe. Banks were stabilised, asset prices rebounded and the global recession, though the deepest since the second world war, was no second Depression. The pace of recovery varies, but every big economy has stopped shrinking. ...

A bail-out for Greece will not be the end of the euro area’s fiscal troubles

AS FINANCE ministers from the European Union gathered in Brussels for a two-day “informal” summit on February 11th, there was only one topic on the agenda: how best to help Greece avoid defaulting on its debts while, at the same time, reassuring bond markets that other euro-area countries with big budget deficits, such as Ireland, Portugal and Spain, were still safe bets.

As The Economist went to press, only the basic elements of a possible backstop for Greece had emerged. Pride is at stake, so it will be a “European solution”, with the IMF limited to an advisory role. It will be a joint effort led by France and a somewhat reluctant Germany, the country with the deepest pockets. Berlin frets that a rescue will only encourage further profligacy. ...

A prime minister caught between the unions and the bond market

IT WAS the week Spanish Socialists would rather forget. Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Spain’s prime minister, began it on January 28th at the World Economic Forum in Davos where he found himself sharing a platform with the leaders of Europe’s lamest ducks, Greece and Latvia. Mr Zapatero had gone to Davos determined to instil confidence in his country, the only big developed economy still in recession. Instead, he raised more doubts, chiefly this one: is Mr Zapatero the man to lead Spain into recovery?

At Davos he boldly announced proposals to raise the retirement age from 65 to 67. But that provoked fury from his trade union allies at home. Then his finance ministry sent a deficit-reduction plan to the European Commission. Union anger, however, forced it to be watered down. Mr Zapatero’s next trick was to flag a package of proposals for labour reform, an issue on which he has stalled for almost two years. It turned out to leave all decision-making to employers and the unions, who of course disagree. ...

Rigidities in the labour market make recovery even harder

EVERY member of the eurozone has weaknesses that limit its potential. Spain seems to contain a continent’s-worth of frailties in just one country. Like Ireland, its consumers are weighed down by huge mortgage debts. Spain has a rigid system for setting wages, also a source of inefficiency in Greece and Portugal. The attempt to free up Spain’s jobs market by allowing temporary work contracts has reduced incentives to train workers, holding back productivity. That is true also of Italy. And, like all these countries, Spain has steadily lost cost competitiveness against the euro zone’s “core” countries, centred around Germany. As a member of the euro, it cannot address that problem by devaluing the currency.

Politicians in Spain have woken only recently to the need for reform. The wage system demands it most urgently. Pay is set centrally through a complex system of agreements across regions and industries. That means wages adjust only slowly to changes in business conditions. Despite a deep recession and zero inflation, pay growth averaged 3% last year, according to the OECD. That helps explain why Spain’s jobless rate shot up so quickly; it now stands at 19.5%. In Britain, by contrast, though the recession was equally savage, firms could limit pay; they therefore did not have to shed as many jobs, and unemployment rose less steeply. ...

First task: persuade the middle classes to be honest about their taxes

UP AND down Greece, public-sector workers, from teachers to rubbish-collectors, left their jobs on February 10th. They braved the persistent rain to chant slogans against a pay cut for civil servants, the first anyone can remember. It means that chief executives at state corporations could have their real salaries cut in half, and even cleaners and drivers will see their earnings slip by 4%. That is the net result of a freeze in basic pay combined with a slashing of allowances.

For all its sound and fury, the protest was a relatively tame affair, organised by unions who are close to the ruling Socialists but feel obliged to let off steam. The exception was a protest by farmers, whose tractors have been blocking many Greek highways, and the main border crossing with Greece’s EU neighbour Bulgaria, for the past three weeks. But by mid-week even these were trundling home. ...

The sorry state of Greece’s public finances is a test not only for the country’s policymakers but also for Europe’s

SOME would say that tragedy was inevitable from the moment, nine years ago last month, when Greece was admitted to the euro zone. Others would claim that woe was sure to befall such a disparate currency union sooner or later: if not Greece, then some other weak member of the club would have been the cause. Avoidable or not, trouble has arrived. At best, Greece has to undergo a dramatic budgetary tightening. Its fellow Europeans, or the IMF, may yet have to organise a humiliating bail-out. Some even talk—probably mistakenly—of the beginning of the end of the euro area.

Last year Greece’s budget deficit reached 12.7% of GDP. Worries over whether the Greeks would act to cut it have caused paroxysms in the bond markets: late last month the yield on ten-year Greek government bonds vaulted to 7.1%, the highest since the country joined the euro area and about four percentage points more than that on German bunds, the euro zone’s safest investment. The panic abated on February 3rd, when the European Commission endorsed the Greek government’s plan to cut the deficit to 3% of GDP by 2012. The day before, Greece’s prime minister, George Papandreou, had used a television address to announce higher taxes on fuel and an extension of a public-sector wage freeze to include low-paid civil servants. ...

As China and America square off in the latest round of recriminations, how bad are relations really?

IT IS probably the most important relationship of today’s world, and even more of tomorrow’s. If the United States and China cannot co-operate, what hope of stemming climate change and the spread of nuclear weapons, or returning the global economy to a path of stable growth? Over the past decade, the established superpower and the rising one have rubbed along reasonably well; relations with China are, by common consent, one of the few things George Bush junior got mostly right. But under Barack Obama, after a cordial start, slights have been building up for a while. The past week has produced a sharp reminder of how sensitive the relationship can be—and how quickly it might spin out of control.

The issue, as so often in the past, was Taiwan, and in particular America’s promise to defend the island republic from the Communist mainland, which continues to claim sovereignty over it. America’s Congress has embodied this commitment in law: the United States is obliged under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 to provide the island with the arms it needs to defend itself. On January 29th the Obama administration gave Congress notice of more than $6 billion-worth of arms sales it had determined to be necessary for Taiwan’s defence. These included some sophisticated weaponry, including Harpoon anti-ship missiles and Black Hawk helicopters. ...

What the president’s re-election means for his sorely divided country

HAD Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s war-winning leader, lost his island-state’s presidential election on January 26th, it would have been described as a Churchillian defeat. But that would have underdone the drama. Imagine Britain’s wartime prime minister falling out with his feted general, Montgomery, removing him, then losing to him in the 1945 general election. That is how victory for General Sarath Fonseka, Mr Rajapaksa’s main challenger, would have seemed.

Many predicted this. As army chief, General Fonseka oversaw the rout of Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger rebels in a sweeping offensive that ended a 26-year war in a seaside bloodbath last May. When he announced his candidature in November, opposition parties rallied behind him, including the biggest, Ranil Wickremesinghe’s United National Party (UNP). In campaigning, the rather wooden general and his backers gave voice to the serious gripes that Sri Lankans have with their government: economic hardship, after years of high inflation; rampant top-level corruption; and cronyism in a government that includes 109 ministers and allegedly hundreds of Mr Rajapaksa’s neighbours and relatives. But it mattered naught. Mr Rajapaksa won with 58% of the vote. ...

The return of big government means that policymakers must grapple again with some basic questions. They are now even harder to answer

FIFTEEN years ago it seemed that the great debate about the proper size and role of the state had been resolved. In Britain and America alike, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton pronounced the last rites of “the era of big government”. Privatising state-run companies was all the rage. The Washington consensus reigned supreme: persuade governments to put on “the golden straitjacket”, in Tom Friedman’s phrase, and prosperity would follow.

Today big government is back with a vengeance: not just as a brute fact, but as a vigorous ideology. Britain’s public spending is set to exceed 50% of GDP (see chart 1). America’s financial capital has shifted from New York to Washington, DC, and the government has been trying to extend its control over the health-care industry. Huge state-run companies such as Gazprom and PetroChina are on the march. Nicolas Sarkozy, having run for office as a French Margaret Thatcher, now argues that the main feature of the credit crisis is “the return of the state, the end of the ideology of public powerlessness”. ...

In an article on China’s economy (“Not just another fake”, January 16th), we quoted a UBS report: “China’s steel capacity of almost 0.5kg per person is slightly lower than America’s output in 1920 (0.6kg) and far below Japan’s peak of 1.1kg in 1973.” All those figures should be tonnes, not kilograms. This has been corrected online.

...

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But eastern and western Germany may never quite meet

THE capitalist West had Kodak, Agfa and Fuji. East Germany snapped its photos on ORWO film, which had drawbacks. The images were easily smudged and the colours were weird. In Wolfen, where ORWO was manufactured, people said you could develop the film by dipping it in the river Mulde. Neighbouring Bitterfeld, a hub of the East German chemical industry, was known as the “dirtiest city in Europe”.

Since German unification in 1990 the federal and state governments have spent €230m on detoxifying the area. ORWO no longer makes film. Bitterfeld still produces chemicals, but hundreds of well-groomed firms have replaced the cheerless Kombinat (industrial conglomerate), and the chemical park now looks out over a nature reserve. Next to Wolfen is Solar Valley, a cluster of renewable-energy companies. ...

Germany’s education system is a work in progress

GERMANY invented the modern university but long ago lost its leading position to other countries, especially America. These days the land of poets and thinkers is prouder of its “dual system” for training skilled workers such as bakers and electricians. Teenagers not bound for university apply for places in three-year programmes combining classroom learning with practical experience within companies. The result is superior German quality in haircuts as well as cars. Dual training “is the reason we’re the world export champion”, says Mrs Schavan, the education minister. Azubis (trainees) acquire not just a professional qualification but an identity.

But the dual system is under pressure. The number of places offered by companies has long been falling short of the number of applicants. Almost as many youngsters move into a “transitional system”, a grab-bag of remedial education programmes designed to prepare them for the dual system or another qualification. Often it turns out to be a dead end, especially for male immigrants. ...

United Germany is becoming more comfortable in its skin

“GERMANY is plagued by a severe economic malaise and by uncertainty about its place in the world,” wrote The Economist in a special report in 2002. A lot has changed in eight years. These days Germany lectures other countries on economic management and sends troops to Afghanistan. It may still not be a “normal” country. But now that the Federal Republic is a matronly 60 and unification is approaching a post-adolescent 20, the likely shape of normality is becoming clearer.

Germany has become more at ease with itself. That became obvious during the football World Cup held in Germany in 2006, when its black, red and gold flag fluttered above cars and balconies as though patriotism had never gone out of fashion. Atonement for Germany’s awful past is woven into the constitution and still shapes foreign and domestic policies; it is one reason why Germany is Israel’s best friend in Europe. But now it is invoked less often as an excuse to avoid doing something that would otherwise make sense. The economic crisis, ironically, has been a psychological boost; to Germans, the social-market economy looks more like a solution than a cause. ...

In addition to the people quoted in this report, the author is grateful to the following: Jutta Allmendinger, Reinhard Pollak and Wolfgang Merkel, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fur Sozialforschung; Jorg Drager, Bertelsmann-Stiftung; Sebastian Dullien, HTW Berlin; Jeanne Fagnani, CNRS; Clemens Fuest, University of Oxford; Matthias Gabriel, ChemiePark Bitterfeld Wolfen; Markus Grabka, DIW; Christine Grunert, Stadt Ulm; Ulrike Guerot, European Council on Foreign Relations; Wolfgang Herrmann and Bernhard Rieger, TU Munchen; John Kornblum, Noerr LLP; Cornelia Kristen, Georg-August-Universitat; Roland Manger, Earlybird; Paul Nolte, Freie Universitat Berlin; Lothar Probst, Universitat Bremen; Kai Peter Rath, Anja Hartmann and Eckart Windhagen, McKinsey; Holger Schafer, IW Koln; Hilmar Schneider, IZA, Bonn; Daniela Schwarzer, SWP Berlin; Dennis Snower, Institut fur Weltwirtschaft, Kiel; Werner Tillmetz, Zentrum fur Sonnenenergie- und Wasserstoff-Forschung; Ingrid Weinhold, MABA.

Sources ...

A second wind for German industry?

THE Roding Roadster, a sports car unveiled at last September’s Frankfurt motor show, has a powerful motor and lightweight construction that promise a thrilling ride. But at Munich’s Technical University (TUM), which the Roding’s designers attended, there is even more buzz about the Tesla, a battery-powered car from California. It shows that electro-mobility “could be fast and fun”, says Markus Lienkamp, who teaches car technology at TUM. Annoyingly, Tesla opened a dealership in Munich on BMW’s doorstep.

Germany invented the modern internal-combustion engine and intends to be a leader in any future automotive technology. It has helped to spread the idea that modern life can be transposed into planet-friendly technology. The government’s promise to put 1m electric cars on the road by 2020 is one of many initiatives to ensure that Germany cashes in. So Tesla’s brash entrance into the green enclosure was met with a mixture of derision and fear. Surely slapdash American engineering will be put to shame by the inventive perfectionism of the German Tuftler, car folk mutter. But that is a hope, not a certainty. Mr Lienkamp welcomes the threat. “When a German engineer gets angry,” he advises, “watch out.” ...

Angela Merkel and the art of the possible

IT IS hard to think of another big country where a recent election was such a non-event. Both America and Japan responded to the economic crisis by electing governments of a different colour, and Britain may do the same in a few months’ time. In Germany, after a flaccid campaign last September, voters made a judicious adjustment. Angela Merkel was re-elected as chancellor but the grand coalition she had been heading did not survive. Her conservative union—the CDU plus its Bavarian sibling, the Christian Social Union (CSU)—acquired a new coalition partner, the liberal Free Democratic Party.

The result was both an endorsement and a rebuke. Voters rewarded Mrs Merkel for her deft handling of the economic crisis. Polls show that Germans’ trust in government rose during the crisis. Yet turnout in the election was a record low of 71%, and the two big parties that have dominated post-war politics were humiliated. The SPD’s 23% of the vote was a disaster, and the CDU and CSU’s combined 34% was their worst result in 50 years. Only the strong showing of the FDP, which won a record 15% of the vote, spared Mrs Merkel from having to continue a grand coalition that her party did not want. ...

Germany scandalously underuses immigrants and women

HEINZ BUSCHKOWSKY, the mayor of the Berlin district of Neukolln, is famous for being blunt. He is in charge of an ethnic goulash: 140,000 of his 305,000 constituents are Turks, Arabs, Yugoslavs or other migrants. The local unemployment rate is 26%, and probably twice that among the immigrants. Work disappeared when subsidies to industry were withdrawn after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But Neukollners are all too willing to live off Hartz IV social-security benefits, which provide a family with children with enough to get by. “Long-term welfare paralyses people,” Mr Buschkowsky observes, sounding more like an American Republican of the 1980s than a leading member of Berlin’s Social Democratic Party. Children grow up thinking “money comes from the state,” drop out of school and then raise children who repeat the cycle.

Neukolln’s problems loom large partly because it is in Berlin which, unlike Paris or London, is poorer than the country it governs. In Ulm, which has more factories, Hartz IV is a less appealing option. Still, Mr Buschkowsky’s message matters anywhere in Germany. He lambasts not only welfare dependency but also conservative shibboleths like the three-tier high-school system (“once at the bottom, always at the bottom”) and paying women to stay at home with their children (he thinks the money would be better spent on pre-school education so that immigrant children could learn proper German). He is equally impatient with liberal multiculturalism. Immigrants have a chance, he says, “when they not only live in Europe but become European”. ...

For all its stolid reputation, Germany has become surprisingly flexible, says Brooke Unger (interviewed here). But it needs to keep working at it

ULM, like many German towns, is arrayed around a central church like an expectant congregation. Its Gothic spire is the tallest in the world. The city is also famous for being the birthplace of Albert Einstein. But Ulmers do not live in the past. They are too busy making things, or working out how to make them better, and dispatching them to the rest of the world. The family-owned Mittelstand firms that cluster in and around this modest town alongside the Danube river were among the prime beneficiaries of Germany’s export boom, the main source of growth until the world economy slumped in late 2008.

That disaster has not shaken Ulm’s self-confidence. Since the financial crisis Germany’s economy has shrunk more than most, by around 5% in 2009 (see chart 1). That of Baden-Wurttemberg, Ulm’s home state, dived by as much as 8%. But the region around Ulm itself held up better than the rest of the state because its economy is diversified, reckons Otto Salzle, managing director of the region’s chamber of industry and commerce. Some local firms are in hard-hit industries like cars and machine tools but many are not: Ulm also makes pharmaceuticals and James Bond’s favourite firearm, the Walther PPK. The region’s unemployment rate rose from 3.3% to 4.6%, still well below the national rate. “We are the strongest region in Germany,” crows Mr Salzle. ...

How Germany weathered the recession

“THIS is what we love,” exclaims Jan Stefan Roell, presenting an intricately worked ingot of gleaming steel as though it were a piece of jewellery. It belongs somewhere in the innards of a testing machine made by Zwick Roell, the firm he owns. One model rips the eyes off teddy bears (to see if children can), another pokes computer keyboards. Mr Roell wants the visitor first to admire the part, next the Swabian craftsmen who fashioned it and then the German genius for making expensive and indispensable things. His customers expect German thoroughness, he says.

Ulm-based Zwick Roell, which has 950 employees and sales of €150m ($202m) a year, is a typical Mittelstand firm. Until the 1930s it made buttons from cow horn imported from Argentina, but when plastic took over it switched to testing machines. Like many Mittelstand enterprises Zwick works backstage, making things that are used in making other things. The thousands of Zwick-like firms that constitute the engineering sector are a cornerstone of Germany’s industrial economy. They employ nearly 1m workers, more than any other industry, and export almost 80% of their production. Often the product is not merely a machine, but also a panoply of services that go with it. ...

Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier (interviewed here)—but also big headaches

WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, due to come on stream in Chile in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days.

Such astronomical amounts of information can be found closer to Earth too. Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress (see article for an explanation of how data are quantified). Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos. And decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs—which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2003, but can now be achieved in one week. ...

The best way to deal with all that information is to use machines. But they need watching

IN 2002 America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, best known for developing the internet four decades ago, embarked on a futuristic initiative called Augmented Cognition, or “AugCog”. Commander Dylan Schmorrow, a cognitive scientist with the navy, devised a crown of sensors to monitor activity in the brain such as blood flow and oxygen levels. The idea was that modern warfare requires soldiers to think like never before. They have to do things that require large amounts of information, such as manage drones or oversee a patrol from a remote location. The system can help soldiers make sense of the flood of information streaming in. So if the sensors detect that the wearer’s spatial memory is becoming saturated, new information will be sent in a different form, say via an audio alert instead of text. In a trial in 2005 the device achieved a 100% improvement in recall and a 500% increase in working memory.

Is this everybody’s future? Probably not. But as the torrent of information increases, it is not surprising that people feel overwhelmed. “There is an immense risk of cognitive overload,” explains Carl Pabo, a molecular biologist who studies cognition. The mind can handle seven pieces of information in its short-term memory and can generally deal with only four concepts or relationships at once. If there is more information to process, or it is especially complex, people become confused. ...

The uses of information about information

AS DATA become more abundant, the main problem is no longer finding the information as such but laying one’s hands on the relevant bits easily and quickly. What is needed is information about information. Librarians and computer scientists call it metadata.

Information management has a long history. In Assyria around three millennia ago clay tablets had small clay labels attached to them to make them easier to tell apart when they were filed in baskets or on shelves. The idea survived into the 20th century in the shape of the little catalogue cards librarians used to note down a book’s title, author, subject and so on before the records were moved onto computers. The actual books constituted the data, the catalogue cards the metadata. Other examples include package labels to the 5 billion bar codes that are scanned throughout the world every day. ...

Regulators are having to rethink their brief

TWO centuries after Gutenberg invented movable type in the mid-1400s there were plenty of books around, but they were expensive and poorly made. In Britain a cartel had a lock on classic works such as Shakespeare’s and Milton’s. The first copyright law, enacted in the early 1700s in the Bard’s home country, was designed to free knowledge by putting books in the public domain after a short period of exclusivity, around 14 years. Laws protecting free speech did not emerge until the late 18th century. Before print became widespread the need was limited.

Now the information flows in an era of abundant data are changing the relationship between technology and the role of the state once again. Many of today’s rules look increasingly archaic. Privacy laws were not designed for networks. Rules for document retention presume paper records. And since all the information is interconnected, it needs global rules. ...

Governments are letting in the light

FROM antiquity to modern times, the nation has always been a product of information management. The ability to impose taxes, promulgate laws, count citizens and raise an army lies at the heart of statehood. Yet something new is afoot. These days democratic openness means more than that citizens can vote at regular intervals in free and fair elections. They also expect to have access to government data.

The state has long been the biggest generator, collector and user of data. It keeps records on every birth, marriage and death, compiles figures on all aspects of the economy and keeps statistics on licences, laws and the weather. Yet until recently all these data have been locked tight. Even when publicly accessible they were hard to find, and aggregating lots of printed information is notoriously difficult. ...

Information is transforming traditional businesses

IN 1879 James Ritty, a saloon-keeper in Dayton, Ohio, received a patent for a wooden contraption that he dubbed the “incorruptible cashier”. With a set of buttons and a loud bell, the device, sold by National Cash Register (NCR), was little more than a simple adding machine. Yet as an early form of managing information flows in American business the cash register had a huge impact. It not only reduced pilferage by alerting the shopkeeper when the till was opened; by recording every transaction, it also provided an instant overview of what was happening in the business.

Sales data remain one of a company’s most important assets. In 2004 Wal-Mart peered into its mammoth databases and noticed that before a hurricane struck, there was a run on flashlights and batteries, as might be expected; but also on Pop-Tarts, a sugary American breakfast snack. On reflection it is clear that the snack would be a handy thing to eat in a blackout, but the retailer would not have thought to stock up on it before a storm. The company whose system crunched Wal-Mart’s numbers was none other than NCR and its data-warehousing unit, Teradata, now an independent firm. ...

New ways of visualising data

IN 1998 Martin Wattenberg, then a graphic designer at the magazine SmartMoney in New York, had a problem. He wanted to depict the daily movements in the stockmarket, but the customary way, as a line showing the performance of an index over time, provided only a very broad overall picture. Every day hundreds of individual companies may rise or fall by a little or a lot. The same is true for whole sectors. Being able to see all this information at once could be useful to investors. But how to make it visually accessible?

Mr Wattenberg’s brilliant idea was to adapt an existing technique to create a “Map of the Market” in the form of a grid. It used the day’s closing share price to show more than 500 companies arranged by sector. Shades of green or red indicated whether a share had risen or fallen and by how much, showing the activity in every sector of the market. It was an instant hit—and brought the nascent field of data visualisation to a mainstream audience. ...

How internet companies profit from data on the web

PSST! Amazon.com does not want you to know what it knows about you. It not only tracks the books you purchase, but also keeps a record of the ones you browse but do not buy to help it recommend other books to you. Information from its e-book, the Kindle, is probably even richer: how long a user spends reading each page, whether he takes notes and so on. But Amazon refuses to disclose what data it collects or how it uses them.

It is not alone. Across the internet economy, companies are compiling masses of data on people, their activities, their likes and dislikes, their relationships with others and even where they are at any particular moment—and keeping mum. For example, Facebook, a social-networking site, tracks the activities of its 400m users, half of whom spend an average of almost an hour on the site every day, but does not talk about what it finds. Google reveals a little but holds back a lot. Even eBay, the online auctioneer, keeps quiet. ...

Monstrous amounts of data

QUANTIFYING the amount of information that exists in the world is hard. What is clear is that there is an awful lot of it, and it is growing at a terrific rate (a compound annual 60%) that is speeding up all the time. The flood of data from sensors, computers, research labs, cameras, phones and the like surpassed the capacity of storage technologies in 2007. Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, generate 40 terabytes every second—orders of magnitude more than can be stored or analysed. So scientists collect what they can and let the rest dissipate into the ether.

According to a 2008 study by International Data Corp (IDC), a market-research firm, around 1,200 exabytes of digital data will be generated this year. Other studies measure slightly different things. Hal Varian and the late Peter Lyman of the University of California in Berkeley, who pioneered the idea of counting the world’s bits, came up with a far smaller amount, around 5 exabytes in 2002, because they counted only the stock of original content. ...

In the corporate-tax armoury the next government must pick carefully

WHAT do Shore Capital, a boutique financial firm, and Ineos, the remnant of various giant chemical companies, have in common? Both announced plans this month to move their headquarters to countries with lower taxes—Shore to Guernsey and Ineos to Switzerland. As Britain’s cash-strapped exchequer faces shrinking revenues from recession-hit businesses, the exodus of these firms and others raises an important question. Is Britain’s company-tax regime competitive?

The system isn’t fit for the 21st century, says Michael Devereux, professor of business taxation at Oxford’s Said Business School. It is a 19th-century apparatus, struggling—like many tax regimes around the world—to keep fiscal tabs on global earnings, intra-group cashflows, migration of intellectual property and the elusive proceeds of financial and other services. ...

An infamous murder returns to the national consciousness, with worrying implications

MOST eras have their symbolic murders: crimes that are not only terrible but seem also to reflect the nation’s pathologies. Victorian London had Jack the Ripper; modern Britain has the death of James Bulger, a two-year-old who in 1993 was abducted from a Merseyside shopping centre, tortured and killed by Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, both aged just ten. Their trial inspired national fury, revived in 2001 when they were released under new names. Mr Venables has now been returned to custody for an unspecified breach of his licence. Unspecified by the government, that is; channelling the ire the crime still arouses, newspapers have gleefully relayed rumours of his offence.

It is not surprising that this incident retains its power to appal: the grainy CCTV image that captured the small boy being led away by a bigger one has become an icon of depravity. The trouble is, the case held up a mirror less to the real state of Britain than to its dark, psychic fears. The confusion of those things has led to mistaken conclusions being drawn from it. They may be again. ...

Giving parents a real choice

BRENTWOOD in Essex is an unremarkable town, once derided as the most boring in Britain. It is home not only to Brentwood School, a moderately well-known independent school founded in 1558, but also to two more modern establishments: Sawyers Hall College and, five minutes down the road, Shenfield High School. In 2006 Sawyers Hall was deemed a failing school, one that was not educating its pupils as required. Since then, parents have voted with their feet. Rolls have fallen even as efforts to improve results have paid off. Sawyers Hall is slated to close as a comprehensive in the summer; a further-education outfit teaching hairdressing and the like will take its place.

The college is just one of many schools fingered for closure. On March 10th the schools inspectorate announced that 10% of the 2,140 schools it had assessed over the four months to the end of December were “inadequate”, a category that might more accurately be termed “dire”. Some of these will be turned around by good new head teachers. Others, though, will close. ...

Why independent candidates may yet break the political mould

ESTHER RANTZEN gestures at the gaslit machines in Wright’s hat factory in Luton. The iron machines are more than 100 years old, but the aluminium moulds on which the hats are shaped are new. “The queen may favour it, but I don’t like the asymmetric brim. How difficult is it to make a new mould?” she asks the milliner, Philip Wright. A little expensive, but not too difficult if you know how, he replies.

The television celebrity is hoping to redesign more than hats in Luton South, a marginal constituency about 30 miles north of London. She, like other independent candidates in the coming general election, would also like to break the mould of British politics. A flurry of them have appeared in seats where incumbent MPs were discredited in last year’s parliamentary-expenses scandal. ...

Even for the lords spiritual, the times are changing

TO OUTSIDERS, one of the oddest features of Britain’s semi-theocracy is that 26 Anglican bishops have the right to sit in the upper chamber of the legislature, even though their church can claim the active adherence of less than 5% of citizens. But the “lords spiritual” still have clout, especially when the established church acts as an advocate for religion in general. That became clear in February, when the government backed away from a confrontation over the question of whom churches should employ—and, in particular, over which posts can be barred to gays.

The government’s hopes were fairly modest. It was not questioning the right of religious bodies to follow their own beliefs when hiring priests or imams; it merely wanted to clarify that, in recruiting for non-religious jobs (accountants, for example), churches must obey the law and refrain from discrimination against gays. But pursuing even this cautious aim was deemed unwise at a time when many religious leaders, including Pope Benedict, were opposed (and perhaps considering how their flock should be encouraged to vote). ...

Justice and policing are now devolved. What difference will it make?

THE Northern Ireland peace process passed another milestone this week when the Belfast Assembly voted by a large majority to approve the transfer of policing and justice powers from London. It was a significant breakthrough, given that quite a few assembly members have themselves attracted the attention of the police in the not-so-distant past. Now even those once considered dangerous will have a say on how the remaining paramilitary rumps are dealt with.

But, as is so often the case in Belfast, the advance took place not amid harmony and good cheer but against a background of attention-seeking and discord, as a single party held out against all the others. The Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), once Northern Ireland’s largest but today a shadow of its former self, insisted on voting against devolution of policing and justice powers. The measure passed nonetheless, by 88 votes to 17. ...

Professional fathers are downing tools to play with their children

AS THE rich have got richer and those in work ever busier, people with children have discovered a new way of spending their money: on handymen to do the sorts of odd jobs fathers used to roll up their sleeves and take care of. Despite the recent recession, dads, it seems, would rather spend quality time with their offspring than put up shelves or fix dripping taps at the weekend. So their wives, themselves hard pressed, are hiring other men to change fuses and the like, thus making time to dine out, kick a football or visit museums en famille.

Domestic help has long been a mostly female preserve, involving nannies, cleaners and laundry maids. That is changing, according to a forthcoming study by Majella Kilkey of the University of Hull and Diane Perrons of the London School of Economics. The pair reckon that nowadays 39% of domestic helpers in Britain are men, up from 17% in the early 1990s; in London, many are also migrants. Many households hiring handymen already employ a small army of nannies, cleaners and gardeners. ...

The Liberal Democrats prepare for battle—in their own way

NICK CLEGG doesn’t do “What if?” politics, he says. The leader of the Liberal Democrats is politely Delphic in the face of The Economist’s inquiries, in an interview on March 9th, about his plans in the event of a hung parliament after the coming general election. A Labour or Conservative minority government is an option, but he will not rule out (or in) joining a coalition. This reticence is elementary politics: he knows any speculation would strike voters as “the height of arrogance” and hand his bigger rivals an electoral advantage.

It could also reflect an awareness that his vaunted role as kingmaker—ready to crown either Gordon Brown, the recently resurgent prime minister, or David Cameron, his Tory opposite number—may be exaggerated. If either of the two main parties is only a few seats short of an overall majority, they may be able to strike a deal with another, smaller party. If one has many more seats than the other, the Lib Dems would have no choice but to help the larger form a government or precipitate a second election. Only if both Labour and the Tories were well short of the required 326 seats for a majority, and had roughly the same number, would the Lib Dems, who now field 63 MPs, become crucial. ...

The corporation will become smaller, but no less potent

ON MARCH 2nd the BBC did something unprecedented: it volunteered to cut itself down to size. The broadcaster wants to abolish two digital radio stations, shrink its website and spend less on imported shows and sport. Mark Thompson, the director-general, says he will abandon the goal of churning out more and more programmes to suit every taste. Commercial media firms, which have been complaining for years about the BBC’s heft, did not know what to make of it. Is the world’s first, and mightiest, national public broadcaster turning modest?

Not a bit of it. The report signals an important retreat from the policy of all-out expansion that has guided the BBC in recent years. But it is a pragmatic, limited retreat that will allow the corporation to marshal its forces elsewhere, in products and places where it can be more effective. “Every organisation goes through phases of expansion and consolidation,” says Claire Enders, a media analyst. “This is the consolidation phase.” ...

Dissatisfaction among the faithful followers of Manchester United

EIGHT minutes into the final of the Carling Cup on February 28th, the referee held up play for a few seconds. No goal, no injury: Phil Dowd merely wanted the players to burst the yellow and green balloons littering the pitch. These are the colours sported by Manchester United fans protesting against the Glazer family, the Americans who have owned the club since 2005. United, England’s (and possibly the world’s) most popular football club, usually play in red and white, but yellow and green were worn by their 19th-century forebears, Newton Heath, and as away kit in the early 1990s. Wear a scarf in these colours or blow up a few balloons and you show where your loyalties lie.

A well-heeled group of fans, dubbed the Red Knights, want to put their money where their scarves are and bid for the club. Their inner circle includes Jim O’Neill, chief economist of Goldman Sachs and a former director of United, and Paul Marshall, founder of Marshall Wace, a hedge fund. They are allied with the Manchester United Supporters Trust (MUST), which has been campaigning for a takeover by fans. MUST’s membership is rising by several thousand a day. By March 4th it had topped 100,000—24,000 more than can fit into Old Trafford, United’s stadium. ...

The Tories’ unexpected weakness may yet haunt Labour: what if the party had ditched Gordon Brown?

BOTH were ageing bruisers facing impossible odds. Both were pitted against younger men widely expected to obliterate them. Both were pulverised in the early stages of the contest, before their adversaries’ stamina seemed to wane…

All right, on the face of it leaden Gordon Brown may not have much in common with fleet Muhammad Ali. But it has begun to seem possible that Mr Brown might just stage a recovery as unlikely as Mr Ali’s in the famous “rumble in the jungle” in Kinshasa. In 1974 Mr Ali was pounded by the fearsome George Foreman, but rallied to knock him out. Is it conceivable that in 2010 Mr Brown might bounce off the ropes to deny David Cameron his victory—or even, amazing as it sounds, win himself? ...

Devolved Scotland goes its own way

NOT so long ago, Alex Salmond, Scotland’s cocky first minister, ebulliently predicted that his Scottish National Party (SNP) would win 20 of Scotland’s 59 seats at Westminster in the general election due by June 3rd. That was in 2008, when he was still riding the wave of the SNP’s spectacular win in the 2007 elections to the Scottish Parliament; today that target looks well out of reach. The oddity of Scottish politics is not that the Nationalists must trim their ambitions (given the worst economic conditions in decades and the prospect of fiscal stringency for years to come, any government, even a minority one like Mr Salmond’s, expects some loss of enthusiasm). It is that the Conservatives are struggling so to take up the slack.

Opinion polls give varying versions of the political temperature north of the border. A YouGov survey on February 28th predicted 21% of the vote for the SNP; the next day an Ipsos MORI poll put the figure at 30%. In both surveys, however, the Tories skulked in behind the Nationalists but above the Liberal Democrats, at 20% and 17% respectively, while Labour was well in front at 38% and 36%. Cheering though Ipsos MORI was for Mr Salmond, that support would still yield him only ten seats, three more than his party has at present. Miserably for David Cameron’s Tories, they would pick up only one seat, bringing their grand Scottish total to two. ...

Tories and Scot Nats get down and dirty

BOASTING the headquarters of two of Scotland’s biggest companies (Stagecoach, a bus firm, and Scottish and Southern Energy, a utility), surrounded by rich farmland and the country estates of aristocrats and wealthy city-dwellers, Perth looks as though it should be comfortable Conservative territory. But since 1995 and a by-election at the height of the Tories’ unpopularity, the town and county constituency, which has elected a lord, a knight, a colonel and even a duchess, has embraced the left-leaning Scottish National Party (SNP).

Perth’s MP, Pete Wishart, says he has held on to the seat through vigorous campaigning on local issues, such as persuading the local council, run by the SNP and Liberal Democrats, to rescind plans to build an incinerator in the town. “That type of public engagement has been the focus of my work,” he says. ...

The Conservative donor ends a decade of speculation

DAVID CAMERON’S fluency deserts him when he is forced to talk about Lord Ashcroft. The Conservative leader rarely sounds as ill at ease as he did on March 2nd, when he was asked to respond to the admission by the Tories’ deputy chairman that he is non-domiciled in Britain for tax purposes. Lord Ashcroft (shown below) may have clarified matters because the government, prodded by a freedom of information request, was about to.

The vexed question of his tax status goes back a decade, to when he got his wish and became a peer of the realm. He had twice been rebuffed due to concerns that he spent much of his time in Belize, a former British colony. On March 23rd 2000 he gave a written assurance that he would “take up permanent residence in the UK again” by the end of that calendar year. ...

The currency will remain vulnerable to worries about a hung parliament

THE pound came under fierce assault this week, panicking many in the markets. On March 1st it lurched down against the dollar by 2%. Although it then regained a little ground, sterling has in fact been sliding for weeks. Since the end of January it has lost 6% against the dollar and over 4% against even the troubled euro. This latest plunge makes sterling the weakest of the main currencies this year.

It is wrong to blame these jitters mainly on Britain’s economy, fragile though it remains. The recent signals are still mixed. Revised figures out on February 26th showed that the green shoots sprouting in the fourth quarter of 2009 were a bit sturdier than first reckoned. GDP grew by 0.3%, rather than the initial glum estimate of 0.1%. The growth was from a lower base, though, and the cumulative loss of output to the trough in the third quarter was 6.2% rather than 6.0%. A business survey on March 1st showed that manufacturing did well in February, with a promising rise in new export orders, while another on March 3rd revealed a sharp increase in the services sector. Yet mortgage approvals for home purchase dipped in January. ...

Building firms are struggling to emerge from the recession

CAN the construction industry keep its head above water, given the twin uncertainties of a change of government and a possible second dip into recession? For all the gloomy talk, so far it has held up reasonably well. The government’s stimulus package maintained momentum in social and low-cost housing as well as new schools and hospitals, at least until the middle of last year (see chart).

As a result, although employment in the sector had shrunk by 186,000 by the end of September, this was a relatively small decline from its peak of 2.3m a year earlier. There are 300,000 building firms, but only 1% went bust last year, according to Atradius, a trade-credit insurance company. But the writing is on the wall. Insolvencies are expected to rise, especially if the government ends a scheme, running since April, that allows struggling companies to defer tax payments. Building firms are particularly vulnerable as the country comes out of recession, says Marc Henstridge, head of British and Irish risk at Atradius: long-term contracts may have tided them over but, even if they manage to replenish them, they may still have a problem getting finance to carry them out. ...

How much does a prime minister's character matter?

AN INTERESTING little volume of essays by Clement Attlee, Labour’s sainted post-war prime minister, was published last year. The book is called “Attlee’s Great Contemporaries”, with the subtitle “The Politics of Character”. “If [a politician] doesn’t display courage,” Attlee argues, “the chances are that he will never become the leader, or that if he does, he won’t last very long.” Neither will he endure “if he cannot trust”. No one can lead who “is afraid of losing his job”. The collection is edited by Frank Field, a saintly Labour MP. In his introduction, Mr Field writes that, for Attlee, personal behaviour was an outward sign of the kind of society he wanted to create. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Mr Field is also a fierce critic of Gordon Brown.

The book, and the Aristotelian view of leadership it advances—that a leader is the sum of everything he does—came to mind when the latest allegations about Mr Brown’s behaviour were aired in the Observer. He stands accused (again) of insulting and even manhandling staff, and of abusing assorted inanimate objects. A remark from Alistair Darling, the chancellor of the exchequer, about the “forces of hell” unleashed against him by Mr Brown’s spin machine in 2008, reinforced the impression of darkness and dysfunction in Number 10. (“The intriguers”, Attlee wrote perceptively, “are usually the victims of intrigue.”) ...

Bad news for dodgy journalism—and for libel tourists

LIBEL law in England is too expensive and restricts free speech. But journalistic dirty tricks are a disgrace and self-regulation of the media isn’t working properly. So the rules need lots of tweaks and a couple of big changes. Those are the conclusions of a much-awaited parliamentary committee report on the British press.

It makes uncomfortable reading for many. But the sharpest criticism was reserved for the News of the World, a tabloid that is Britain’s best-selling Sunday newspaper; its owner, Rupert Murdoch’s News International; and its practice of stealing messages from the voice mailboxes of prominent people, including members of the royal family. A reporter, Clive Goodman, was jailed for four months for the offence, later receiving a generous pay-off from his erstwhile employer for “unfair dismissal”. ...

New rules on helping those who wish to end their lives but are unable to do so

TERRY PRATCHETT, a best-selling author, wants to do it sitting on his lawn, to the sound of the choral works of Thomas Tallis and with a brandy in one hand. Mark Cato, a lawyer who writes a popular blog, is hoping for a decent bottle of Bollinger, a log fire and a good cigar, surrounded by his family. Both are terminally ill: Mr Pratchett has Alzheimer’s disease, which is slowly destroying his brain; Mr Cato suffers from motor-neurone disease, a muscle-wasting condition that will leave him unable to breathe. They wish to choose the circumstances of their deaths. Because they are frail, they think they will need help to end their lives. On February 25th Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, published guidelines setting out the conditions under which those who help them might escape prosecution.

Although committing suicide was decriminalised in 1961, helping someone commit it is illegal in England and Wales. The law requires the director of public prosecutions to use his discretion in deciding whether to bring such cases to trial. ...

The pioneer of home births in Hungary faces jail

IF HISTORY were a guide, obstetrics in Hungary should be wonderful. In 1847 Ignac Semmelweis pioneered mother-friendly childbirth, insisting that doctors should wash their hands between autopsy and delivery rooms (they objected to this slur on gentlemanly cleanliness).

Obstetric care in Hungary is indeed excellent today. It is tightly run by skilled doctors, with low mortality rates. But those who challenge the medical profession still face problems. Agnes Gereb, a pioneer of home births, is facing up to eight years in jail. Prosecutors are going after her over one fatality in childbirth, one case in which a baby died some months after birth and two births that ended up as emergency hospital admissions. In the eyes of many Hungarians, such incidents show that home births are insanely risky and that those who promote them are little more than irresponsible cranks. ...

The Slovak leader deploys national culture as a political weapon

IN THE run-up to Slovakia’s parliamentary election in June, Robert Fico, prime minister and leader of the centre-left Smer party (pictured), is busy bolstering his nationalist credentials. His supporters say that ordering schoolchildren to sing the national anthem is just an example of a legitimate effort by a newish country to strengthen its sense of self (Slovakia became fully independent only in 1993, after the break-up of Czechoslovakia). Critics find Mr Fico’s cocktail of history and culture stodgy or downright creepy.

The focus of protests is a new “patriotic act” just passed by parliament that awaits presidential approval. It mandates weekly anthem-playing in all state educational establishments. School officials who disobey risk being sacked. Its champion is Jan Slota, the bombastic leader of a nationalist party that is part of Mr Fico’s coalition. Mr Fico himself takes a softer line, defending only what he calls “reasonable historicism”. But even this is sparking angry squabbles over Slovakia’s past. ...

The new president of the European Council will be worth watching

TO ENGLISH ears, the word “compromise” often has a shabby ring. When safety or quality are compromised, people get hurt. Yet in continental Europe, compromise is often a political ideal. Nowhere is this truer than in Belgium, a country whose Dutch- and French-speaking populations tolerate each other (just), thanks to endless fudges and deals lubricated with taxpayers’ money. Belgium’s six governments are all baggy coalitions that balance social-market capitalism with a free-spending public sector (one in three active adults works for the state).

A third of parliamentarians from Flanders would like Belgium to vanish, says one senior politician. Belgian governments fall often, yet the place trundles along because most leaders agree to disagree. One thing that unites them is faith in deeper European integration. Apart from those on the extreme right, most Belgian politicians would welcome European Union taxes, a European army and nation-states reduced to a vestigial role. It is not hard to see why: to Belgian leaders trapped in the national equivalent of a bad marriage, the EU’s free love must look like bliss. ...

Child-abuse scandals in the Catholic church come a bit nearer the pope

THE Domspatzen have been singing in Regensburg, Bavaria, for a thousand years. But in the 1960s some choirboys there were victims of a “refined system of sadistic punishments connected with sexual lust”, according to Franz Wittenbrink, a composer who attended the choir’s boarding school until 1967. Their traumas are among scores of cases coming to light at Catholic institutions across Germany and elsewhere in Europe, mostly decades after the crimes were committed. The church is struggling to dispel the impression that it is the most flagrant abuser of its own principles. And Germany’s political leaders seem torn between their concern for children’s welfare and their ties to the church.

Christianity matters in Germany. Around two-thirds of west Germans identify themselves as Catholics or Protestants. Christians who pay income tax hand over an extra “church tax” that accounts for two-thirds of church revenue. Germans are not devout: 4% of Protestants and 14% of Catholics in the west are weekly churchgoers. But, says Detlef Pollack of the Wilhelms University in Munster, many count on the church to succour the sick, to offer counsel in times of need or to educate their children. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of Chancellor Angela Merkel, daughter of a Protestant pastor, has its roots in the pre-war Centre Party, which was closely linked to the Catholic church. ...

The ruling party of Nicolas Sarkozy is bracing itself for a bad result in France’s regional elections

THIS ought to be a buoyant time for Nicolas Sarkozy. France’s economy is holding up better than its neighbours’: GDP rose by 0.6% in the fourth quarter of 2009 over the previous quarter, whereas it was flat in Germany. No big French bank has had to be rescued, nor has there been a wave of mortgage repossessions. The top 40 quoted companies have just reported combined profits of €47 billion ($64 billion) for 2009. The French president has a big parliamentary majority and faces no credible opposition leader. He even has a popular prime minister, Francois Fillon.

Yet Mr Sarkozy faces an imminent political humiliation, as disillusioned voters snub him in regional elections. The two-round poll, being held on March 14th and 21st, will elect governments in France’s 22 mainland regions (plus four overseas). All the opinion polls agree that the results will be terrible for Mr Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party. As it is, the party runs only Alsace and Corsica. With turnout likely to be low, and uncertainty over the vote for the far-right National Front, there could still be a surprise. But even the UMP has resigned itself to at best one region gained—and, at worst, Corsica and even Alsace lost. ...

An international court ruling injects new life into fast-fading peace talks

ON ANY small Mediterranean island, property is jealously protected. Orange and olive groves can be as valued as posh villas and sea views. Nowhere more than in Cyprus, split into Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot zones ever since Turkish troops invaded in 1974 after a coup aimed at Enosis, or unification with Greece.

For Greek-Cypriots who lost homes and businesses in the north, a settlement on property is key to reunifying the island. “Who gets their home back, who gets another property in exchange, who gets compensation: this is what really matters,” says a seasoned observer of the Cyprus talks. In 18 months of UN-sponsored negotiations, Demetris Christofias and Mehmet Ali Talat, respectively the Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot leaders, have broadly agreed over how a bizonal, bicommunal Cyprus should be governed. But they have avoided discussing in any detail the thorniest issues, including property. ...

A farcical failure to register candidates in time

THE elections on March 28th and 29th in 13 of Italy’s 20 regions were meant to seal Silvio Berlusconi’s resurgence after a run of scandals over his private life. Eleven regions are held by the centre-left opposition. The prime minister, coasting on a wave of sympathy after an attack by a mentally unstable man in December, had hoped his People of Freedom (PdL) movement might oust up to five centrist and left-wing governors. But its campaign is in chaos—and the government’s ratings are plunging.

To think that it all started with a bread roll. That is what Alfredo Milioni, a former bus-driver charged with registering the PdL’s candidates in Lazio (which includes Rome), first said had lured him from the queue at the electoral office on February 27th. He later offered two other explanations for missing the deadline. Party leaders claimed he had fallen into a trap set by the opposition. But nobody disputes that he returned after the deadline had expired. Electoral officials duly refused to accept the PdL’s slate. That, and two failed court appeals, has left the ruling party out of the race in Lazio, one of five potential swing regions. It was almost excluded in Lombardy too, this time because some of its signatures seemed dubious. ...

Italy’s prime minister becomes an unlikely crusader against corruption

LAUGH or cry? On March 1st Silvio Berlusconi’s cabinet approved an anti-corruption bill just two days after the resumption of the prime minister’s trial for allegedly bribing a court witness.

David Mills, the British lawyer who was the witness, had already been convicted of accepting a $600,000 bribe. Mr Mills took the money for withholding evidence at two trials in the 1990s in which his client was a defendant. But on February 25th his offence was extinguished by Italy’s highest appeal court. The judges decided it had been committed three months earlier than previously reckoned and was thus covered by a statute of limitations. The time limit had been shortened by Mr Berlusconi’s previous government, one of several measures pushed through that make it exceptionally hard to secure a conclusive conviction for any white-collar crime in Italy. ...

More arrests and court cases revive bad Balkan memories

FROM one end of former Yugoslavia to the other, people are worrying about justice. On March 1st Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, opened his defence at his war-crimes trial in The Hague. British police arrested Ejup Ganic, a wartime Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) leader, at Heathrow airport at the request of Serbia. And in Spain a Montenegrin alleged to have murdered and raped in Sarajevo during the war was arrested at the request of the Bosnians.

Since the Karadzic arrest in 2008, only two Serbs have been left on the wanted list of The Hague war-crimes tribunal. The most important is Ratko Mladic, who led Bosnian Serb forces during the war and is believed to be hiding somewhere in Serbia. Serbia’s president, Boris Tadic, has been trying to persuade the Serbian parliament to pass a resolution to condemn and commemorate the murder of up to 8,000 Bosniaks by Bosnian Serb troops in Srebrenica in 1995. ...

United in the cause of undermining Russian pipeline monopolies

DOES “Central Europe” exist? It depends on the political climate. Amid worries that France and Germany are stitching up the European Union’s decision-making, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia are reviving their ties and pushing shared ideas on energy security and relations with the east.

The alliance began in Visegrad, a Hungarian town, in 1991, when even the EU’s waiting-room seemed distant. Once dreams of joining Western clubs became reality, co-operation all but dissolved. New members shunned anything that made them seem different from the rest. Squabbles, most recently over the treatment of ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia, dominated Visegrad meetings. Some even suggested winding the club up. ...

More high-level captures point to a systematic weakening of ETA

ANOTHER big fish from the violent Basque separatist group, ETA, was caught this week. On February 28th Ibon Gogeaskoetxea, ETA’s military boss, was arrested at a country cottage in Normandy, in north-west France. Two of ETA’s experienced assassins, Jose Ayestaran and Beinat Aginagalde, were taken with him.

The arrests offer further proof of ETA’s decline. Mr Gogeaskoetxea, who once tried to kill King Juan Carlos, is the fifth military chief to be captured in just two years. He was in charge for only ten months. Mr Ayestaran and Mr Aginagalde were apparently preparing a kidnapping and bombing campaign in Spain. Several remote-controlled bombs were found. This is the third time in recent weeks that the police have foiled attempts to send ETA terrorists into Spain. ...

Last week's story on the Netherlands said that calls for a cordon sanitaire on Geert Wilders's Freedom Party would not go down well with the 10% of the voters who are foreign-born. It meant to say that isolating the party would not go down well with its many voters (very few of whom are foreign-born). Sorry.

...

Most Europeans are doing better than they think, and can take more fiscal austerity

IMAGINE two cousins. One comes from continental Europe, France, perhaps. A hypochondriac, his life is filled with vague complaints—stress, fatigue and mysterious aches—for which he takes fistfuls of pills. He is sure that strenuous exercise is a menace to his fragile health. The other cousin is American (or British, take your pick), a risk-taker devoted to extreme sports. Shunning doctors, he feels as strong as an ox, although he has been drinking and overeating for years. Eventually, in 2008, he succumbs to a massive heart attack while out jogging. As far as his French cousin is concerned, a deep truth has thus been confirmed: that exercise is bad for you.

Substitute free-market competition for exercise, and you have the European debate over the financial crisis. Sober discussion about how to manage the instability of markets is giving way to a simpler fable. Too many voters now believe that the credit crunch has proved that globalisation is bad for you. And too many politicians are happy to endorse such views. In a televised meeting with voters in January the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, denounced Renault for planning to build a new car in Turkey, saying “I do not accept that cars sold in France should be manufactured abroad.” ...

The ramifications of a likely no vote may not be pleasant

ICELAND’S president is usually an apolitical and little-known figurehead. But Olafur Ragnar Grimsson has become a national hero for his refusal to sign a law passed narrowly in late December by the Althingi, Iceland’s parliament, to repay Britain and the Netherlands. The British and Dutch governments had felt obliged to bail out their depositors in Icesave, a bust internet operation owned by Landsbanki, a failed Icelandic bank, and they now expect Iceland to reimburse them. But thanks to the president’s obduracy, the law is going to a referendum on March 6th, and it seems certain to be rejected by a huge majority.

The voters and the president will doubtless rejoice, but the aftermath of a negative vote may not be good for either the country or its government. Johanna Sigurdardottir, the prime minister, leads a coalition that was shaky before the vote and could yet collapse altogether. Even more worrying is the knock-on effect for Iceland’s $4.6 billion IMF programme. The fund says that this should not depend on the Icesave dispute. But the Nordic countries that are offering bilateral loans in support of the IMF’s rescue package are refusing to go ahead. Without their backing, the IMF deal is frozen. The financial pressure is mounting. To satisfy its creditors, Iceland must find some $2 billion in 2011 and $500m in 2012. Moody’s has given warning that the dwindling chances of a deal over Icesave may lead it to join other rating agencies in downgrading Iceland’s debt to junk. ...

The government’s new austerity measures may prove to be enough—so long as they are fully implemented

GEORGE PAPACONSTANTINOU, the overworked Greek finance minister, likens the effort to steer Greece away from economic disaster to “changing the course of the Titanic.” Until this week it looked as if the country was headed for an iceberg labelled default. Two austerity packages had failed to convince Greece’s European partners—or the financial markets—that measures to cut the budget deficit this year from 12.7% of GDP to 8.7% would work.

Critics in Brussels said that Greece’s Socialist government was relying too heavily on pledges to cut tax evasion and soak the rich, rather than slash spending, especially on public-sector pay and pensions. The markets pushed spreads on Greek bonds over their German equivalents to record highs. Greece’s ten-year bonds were offering mouth-watering yields of some 6%, twice the German level. ...

More arrests stoke the battle between the army and the government

FOR decades Turkey’s meddlesome generals inspired fear and respect. These days they rouse pity and even scorn, as scores of retired and serving officers are arrested and jailed for alleged plots to overthrow the Justice and Development (AK) party, which has ruled the country since 2002.

Nearly 50 officers were rounded up this week. Twenty, including several admirals, were charged with drawing up plans for a military coup. Other big cheeses, including former chiefs of the navy, air force and special forces, remain in detention over an operation called “Sledgehammer” that was exposed in embarrassing detail a month ago. The plan called for bombing mosques, downing Greek fighter planes and herding thousands into a stadium should they resist the army’s moves. Cetin Dogan, a retired general said to have masterminded Sledgehammer, insists to prosecutors that it was no more than a “simulation exercise”—even though it foresaw the creation of a “caretaker” government with the names of real people. ...

Latvia’s economic free fall has halted, and it may now do better than Greece

DOOM-MONGERS are licking their wounds. For two years bankers have said that a Latvian devaluation was inevitable. The struggle to save the lat’s peg to the euro was bound to end in tears. And a panic in Latvia could topple the wobbly economies of Estonia and Lithuania, which have similar exchange-rate regimes, with repercussions extending across eastern Europe and to Scandinavian banks that lent recklessly in the Baltics.

Yet despite a fall in GDP last year of 17.5%, Latvia seems to have achieved something many thought impossible: an internal devaluation. This meant regaining competitiveness not by currency depreciation but by deep cuts in wages and public spending. In a recent discussion of Greece, Jorg Asmussen, a German minister, praised Latvia for its self-discipline. ...

The trouble with the European Union’s attempts to woo Russia

ASK some west Europeans why they disliked George Bush’s America, and you will receive complaints about values and talk of American militarism and nationalism. You may hear Mr Bush accused of calling the European Union an ally but working to divide the block into friends and foes. Or you may get grumbles about anti-terrorist work undermining the rule of law. Foot-dragging on climate change might come up, or the power of Big Oil. So might social values: the religiosity of the Bushies, even their hostility to gay rights or their macho love of hunting.

Yet here is an odd thing. Those same “un-European” values can be observed in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but do not cause similar offence, at least in the chancelleries of western Europe. The EU leaders who clashed most with Mr Bush swooned over Mr Putin. Germany’s Gerhard Schroder described the Russian as a “flawless democrat”. France’s Jacques Chirac called Mr Putin a personal friend. (To be fair, Mr Bush himself started it all when he famously looked into Mr Putin’s eyes in Ljubljana in 2001.) ...

A scandal in the south-west shows up the metropolitan party’s weaknesses

HIS detractors call him an incorrigible racist with a “dictator-like personality”. One likens him to Mussolini. His supporters insist he is brave, authentic and in tune with plain-talking local attitudes. Georges Freche, president of Languedoc-Roussillon, is an old-style Socialist baron. But his uncanny ability to offend everybody, from black footballers to Jews, has pitched him into battle against his party bosses—and reawakened anti-Parisianism on the left.

Mr Freche has a record of gaffes. Three years ago, he was expelled by the party for complaining of too many black players in France’s football team. “There are nine blacks out of 11,” he said. “Ordinarily, there should be three or four.” He called harkis, Algerians who fought for France in the war of independence, “subhuman”. Now he has said Laurent Fabius, a Socialist ex-prime minister of Jewish origin, has “not a Catholic face”. ...

As Barack Obama embraces exports, trade friction looms

A GLOOMY office park in suburban Chicago is the home of NewMedical Technology. At the moment the young company has only one main product, silicone strips to reduce scarring after surgery. But in its tiny warehouse, employees busily pack boxes to be shipped to Brussels. In the past year the firm’s business has expanded quickly; NewMedical now exports to South America, Europe and Asia.

It is the type of growth Barack Obama dreams of. Consumers are nursing battered balance sheets and the government is wallowing in debt. That puts the burden on exports to carry the recovery; Mr Obama wants them to double over the next five years. ...

The president is trapped between an angry Congress and a stubborn China

HE HAS missed his own deadlines, he may not have enough votes and even if the measure passes it is likely to be a watered-down affair. That is the position in which Barack Obama finds himself not only on health reform but also in his efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a bomb.

As with health care, Mr Obama entered office with a bold idea. He would break with his predecessor and extend the hand of friendship to Iran. If Iran failed to grasp it or to come clean about its nuclear activities, the world would know whom to blame for the continuing enmity between the two countries. That would enable the UN Security Council to impose a fourth lot of economic sanctions—“crippling” ones this time—that would force the ayatollahs to comply with their nuclear obligations. ...

Religion is causing the president headaches

IT COULD all come down to abortion. Health-care reform hangs in the balance. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives, is desperately trying to round up the last few votes. If the House passes a bill the Senate passed in December, it can then be tweaked through the “reconciliation” process and sent to President Barack Obama for signature. But every single House Republican is likely to vote no, so Ms Pelosi needs 216 Democratic votes (out of 253) for a majority. This is proving surprisingly hard. Among the holdouts are a dozen or so pro-life Democrats, several of them Midwestern Catholics, who object to the abortion provisions in the Senate bill.

Thanks to the Supreme Court, abortion has been legally protected since 1973 and neither Congress nor any state has the power to ban it. But a law called the Hyde amendment bars federal funding for abortion, except in cases of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother. The question now is whether Obamacare will use taxpayers’ money to subsidise abortion more widely. Mr Obama insists that it will not. Under his plan, many individuals and small businesses will buy subsidised health insurance through state-sponsored exchanges. Under the Senate bill, they would only be able to obtain abortion coverage through these exchanges if they paid for it with a separate, unsubsidised, cheque. Thus, federal dollars would be kept out of abortion clinics, say the bill’s supporters. But many pro-lifers are not convinced. So the version of the health bill that was passed by the House would have required those who wanted abortion coverage to buy a completely separate insurance policy. The Democrat who wrote the House abortion provision, Bart Stupak, says he won’t back the Senate bill. Several other pro-life Democrats may also balk. ...

Alabama’s small cities are poised for recovery

TUCKED between the Tombigbee river and a rural highway meandering north from Mobile sits a warren of huge buildings in Willy Wonka-colours: sea-foam blue and green, desert beige and mauve. Though they look like a modern-art installation, in fact they comprise a new steel mill being built by ThyssenKrupp, a German company. According to ThyssenKrupp the $3.7 billion mill represents the largest German investment in America ever. When it reaches full capacity in 2012, it will employ 2,700 workers and produce some 5.1m tons of carbon and stainless steel per year.

In a ranking of 378 American metropolitan areas by job-growth prospects conducted by Moody’s Economy.com, Mobile ranked 12th. Three regions in Alabama finished above it: Huntsville and Auburn-Opelika ranked first and second, and Columbus-Phenix City, which straddles the Georgia border, ranked seventh (the state’s two largest cities, Birmingham and Montgomery, ranked 83rd and 22nd). These areas are quite diverse: Huntsville benefits from an aerospace and defence legacy, as well as from military base realignments that will centralise several commands in the area; Mobile has ThyssenKrupp’s plant as well as continued recovery from the effects of Hurricane Katrina; Auburn-Opelika has Auburn University, recipient of some $47m in stimulus money; and Phenix City abuts a large Kia plant in Georgia and is near Fort Benning, also due to grow thanks to base realignment. ...

Mexico’s drugs gangs are getting ever more clever

ONE case that sticks out, says Jay Abbott, is that of Margarita Crispin. Mr Abbott is the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s El Paso bureau, and Ms Crispin was a customs agent working at the busy port of entry between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, in Mexico. The FBI had been tipped off in 2004 that Ms Crispin was crooked, so they started to watch her. Once, in 2006, a van ran out of petrol in her lane, and the driver ran away. It turned out that there was almost 6,000 pounds (2.7 tonnes) of marijuana inside. The next year the FBI had enough evidence for an indictment. The strange thing, says Mr Abbott, was that Ms Crispin had no interest whatsoever in a plea bargain. He reckons the Mexican drug-traffickers had made it clear to her that giving evidence against them would not be a wise move.

Was the Crispin case an aberration, or a sign of things to come? Most of America’s foreign-grown marijuana comes from Mexico, and most of the cartels’ profits come from the American market. In a speech last March the Mexican president, Felipe Calderon, argued that here was evidence of vexing hypocrisy: “How can you account for such a large drug market in the US, the biggest in the world, without corruption of American authorities? I’d like to know which high-ranking officials, like the ones I’ve put in jail, have even been investigated there.” ...

Why is the recovery jobless? Maybe because it isn’t a recovery

IN FEBRUARY, for the twenty-fifth time in 26 months, the American economy shed jobs. The toll—a decline of 36,000—was smaller than feared for a month of severe winter weather. But it was distressing nonetheless; another bit of evidence pointing towards a jobless recovery. Most economists estimate that the recession in America ended around the close of the second quarter of 2009, the last quarter in which GDP shrank. But during the second half of last year the economy still managed to lose more than a million jobs.

One explanation for the divergence of output and employment, which started to emerge while the economy was still shrinking, is that firms are now able to wring more productivity out of their workers. Rising labour productivity is a common feature of the early stages of recovery, as employers respond to increases in demand by working staff harder and delaying new hiring. But this time round productivity figures have been well above normal. Last week the Bureau of Labour Statistics reported fourth-quarter labour-productivity growth of 6.9%, after increases of 7.6% and 7.8% in the previous two quarters. That amounts to one of the strongest nine-month productivity performances America has notched up in the post-war period. ...

Colleges nationwide are asking students to pay more for their education

“NO ONE should go broke because they chose to go to college,” Barack Obama said in January in his state-of-the-union speech. But American college students worry they might, thanks to recent fee increases at technical colleges and universities. On March 4th students and disgruntled faculty staged protests at around 100 campuses in over 30 states, calling on state legislators and university administrators to put a halt to recent tuition hikes and funding cuts. In Oakland, California, student protesters marched onto a big highway and stopped the traffic. Elsewhere students carried coffins to symbolise the death of affordable education.

According to the Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think-tank, at least 39 states have decreased their funding for public colleges and universities or increased their tuition charges. In California some public universities have increased fees by more than 30%. At the same time they are cutting back on their offerings. Many have tried to save money by laying off staff, closing academic departments and reducing the number of classes offered. Some are admitting more out-of-state students, who pay higher fees. ...

The sign is still there, but the film crews increasingly aren’t

MORE than 41m Americans tuned in on March 7th to watch “The Hurt Locker” win the award for best picture at the Oscars, the annual ritual of glitz that reminds the world that Hollywood is the global centre of the film and entertainment industry. “The Hurt Locker”, however, was filmed in Jordan, not Hollywood. Perhaps that is as it should be for a film set in Iraq. But what about “Battle: Los Angeles”? Hitting cinemas next year, it is a film about marines fighting an alien invasion. And it is being shot in Louisiana.

California has been worrying about “runaway production” since 1998, when Canada began luring producers and their crews away from Los Angeles with tax breaks. Other places followed, and all but seven American states and territories and 24 other countries now offer, or are preparing to offer, rebates, grants or tax credits that cut 20%, 30% or even 40% of the cost of shooting a movie. ...

The gossip surrounding the president’s chief of staff is getting out of hand

“LET me tell you a story about Rahm Emanuel. I was a congressman in my first eight weeks, and I was in the congressional gym, and I went down and I worked out and I went into the showers. I’m sitting there showering, naked as a jaybird and here comes Rahm Emanuel not even with a towel wrapped around his tush, poking his finger in my chest, yelling at me because I wasn’t going to vote for the president’s budget. Do you know how awkward it is to have a political argument with a naked man?”

So, on television on March 8th, said Eric Massa, a Democratic congressman from New York who faced a spot of bother in Congress after allegations of groping a male staffer and has now resigned. Sources in the White House say the encounter with Barack Obama’s chief of staff never happened. No matter. True or not, the story is in character: Mr Emanuel is famous for being the president’s most pugnacious panjandrum and congressional and media manipulator, and proud of it to boot. Just as Britain’s affable Tony Blair took care to keep a foul-mouthed master of dark arts, Alastair Campbell, at his side, so is it the calling of Mr Emanuel to bludgeon underlings at the White House and former colleagues in Congress into obeying his master’s commandments. ...

A new attempt to save the most vital workers in the orchards

AT THIS time of year Gordon Wardell loves to stand amid the almond blossoms in California’s San Joaquin valley, listening to the “low-pitch, warm, happy hum” of millions of bees. But the bees are not as happy as they sound, which is why Mr Wardell, who has a PhD in entomology and is a de facto bee doctor, is here.

More than 80% of the world’s almonds are grown in California and, to pollinate them, the 7,000 or so growers hire about 1.4m of America’s 2.3m commercial hives. Thousands of trucks deliver the hives in February—from Maine, Florida, the Carolinas and elsewhere—and will soon pick them up again. The bees’ job is to flit from one blossom to the next, gorging themselves and in the process spreading the trees’ sexual dust. ...

Rick Perry and Bill White move from the primary to the real election

THERE’S no sense changing horses in midstream. On March 2nd Texan voters decided that Rick Perry, already in his tenth year as governor, will be the Republican nominee once more. “Looks like he’s going to keep that title for quite a while,” said Granger Smith, a country singer, before resuming his honky-tonk song at Mr Perry’s election-night party. Supporters ate piles of beef brisket and toasted marshmallows at the fire pit. Not even a third of the votes were in when Kay Bailey Hutchison, the state’s senior senator, called Mr Perry to concede. The governor ended up with 51%, leaving Mrs Hutchison with 30% and a third candidate, Debra Medina, with 19%.

Party bosses dread primary fights, which often leave the victor poor and bloodied for the actual election. But intra-party warfare can be productive if it forces the candidate to stake his ground or sharpen her message. Watchers thought the Texas gubernatorial primary could turn into a battle for the soul of the Republican Party, a contest between Mr Perry’s come-and-take-it conservatism and Mrs Hutchison’s more genteel, pearly style. As it turned out, the primary was not such a crucible. In fact, it was barely a contest. ...

The scandals surrounding New York’s governor and its leading representative in Washington mark the demise of a powerful political machine

IN LESS than a week the legendary “Harlem Clubhouse” has suffered two mortal blows. On March 3rd Charles Rangel (above), the last of the political machine’s original “Gang of Four” still in elected office, stepped down as chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives amid charges of ethics violations. Officially this is a temporary leave of absence, but he may not return. Five days earlier David Paterson, New York’s governor, ended his election campaign amid allegations that he had abused his position, and intense pressure for his resignation. Mr Paterson is the son of Basil, another member of the Gang of Four, which mentored both Malcolm X and Al Sharpton and, since the 1960s, has been a launch-pad for New York’s black political leaders.

The fall of the Clubhouse—not a physical place but an elitist fraternity—comes not long after its two greatest triumphs. Mr Rangel had become the first black chairman of the powerful spending committee, after a long wait, in 2007, at the age of 76. Mr Paterson became New York’s first black governor—as well as its first legally blind one—in the wake of another scandal, as Eliot Spitzer, his predecessor and running-mate, was forced to resign after being caught consorting with prostitutes. At first, the unexpected promotion of Mr Paterson was widely welcomed; he was a likeable, pragmatic alternative to the arrogant Mr Spitzer, and seemingly scandal-free. (Asked if he had ever gone with prostitutes, he quipped: “Only the lobbyists.”) However, it was not a good omen that the day after taking office he was forced to admit to a string of adulterous affairs. ...

A late, and philosophical, return to political campaigning

THE dark, floppy hair has gone, and the face is a little rounder, but otherwise Jerry Brown, at 71, looks much as he did when he slept on a futon on the floor of his office and squired Linda Ronstadt round town. He was California’s Democratic governor then, from 1975 to 1983, and on March 2nd he officially announced that he hopes to be governor again.

Apart from a spell studying Buddhism in the East—no surprise to anyone—Governor Moonbeam has never disappeared from California politics. He has been mayor of Oakland and is now the state’s attorney-general. He has a Jesuit education, a prodigious intellect, a fine pedigree (his father, Pat Brown, was one of the state’s best and most popular governors) and a protean political identity that allows him to become almost any sort of candidate, as needed. “Action and contemplation joined together”, he said in full Zen mode last June, “is what I would call the highest path that we can follow.” ...

Gradually, the story emerges of what happened on the Danziger bridge

A WEEK after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, on September 4th 2005, the police shot six civilians as they were crossing the Danziger bridge across the Industrial Canal. Two were killed; the others were seriously wounded, one losing an arm. On February 24th a high-ranking officer with a long police career pleaded guilty to orchestrating a vast cover-up of what took place there. It is likely to be only the start of a traumatic reckoning for the city’s long-troubled police department.

Police officers at first portrayed the shoot-out as a heroic victory by lawmen over the lawless. The official version was that some of the civilians involved had been shooting at the police, but the police rallied and justice prevailed. That story was quickly contested. No guns were collected from the scene, and the victims said the police’s claims were bunk. They insisted they were ambushed by officers, though some also mentioned a group of teenagers near the bridge shooting at passers-by. One of the dead, shot in the back by police, was retarded, and the other victims were generally respectable citizens. ...

The Supreme Court is poised to strike down gun controls

IT HELPS to have a sympathetic plaintiff. Otis McDonald is a 76-year-old African-American grandpa. His folks were sharecroppers in Louisiana. He grew up hunting squirrels, racoons and possums. He served in the army and worked hard all his life. And now he lives in a rough part of Chicago, where teenage thugs have broken into his modest house three times, pinched his TV and threatened to kill him. He wants a handgun to defend his family. And the city of Chicago says he can’t have one.

Now a gun-grabbing liberal might point out that Mr McDonald already owns a hunting rifle, which was one of the things those thugs broke into his home to steal. But Mr McDonald will have none of this. The advantage of a handgun is that the bad guys don’t know whether or not you’re packing heat. So they might think twice about messing with you. ...

Barack Obama unveils his final strategy for pushing health reform

“EVERYTHING there is to say about health care has been said and just about everyone has said it…now is the time to make a decision.” So declared President Barack Obama on March 3rd to an audience of doctors and nurses gathered at the White House. After a year of dithering, he is now leaping into action.

His speech contained no policy surprises, but is worth noting for three reasons. First, he instructed congressional Democrats to embrace several Republican proposals—for example, modest measures to reform malpractice laws and fight insurance fraud—that were put forward during last week’s bipartisan summit on reform. Second, he made it clear that he now wants Democrats to forge ahead with whatever procedural manoeuvres are necessary to pass his health bill. And finally, he declared that he wanted to see “an up-or-down vote” in the “next few weeks”. ...

Will piqued pale males hand the Republicans a victory in November?

RACISM explains a lot of white opposition to Barack Obama, say some Democrats. It would be foolish to dismiss this argument out of hand. Lexington walked into a shop in Millington, Tennessee last week and asked the white gentleman behind the counter what he thought of the 44th president. “He’s a fucking nigger,” came the reply. The shopkeeper then helpfully explained that he was “not bashful” about expressing his opinions.

Bigotry cannot explain, however, why Mr Obama’s approval rating among white Americans has fallen since he took office, from roughly 60% to 40%. As the president pointed out in September: “I was actually black before the election.” White voters have changed their view of Mr Obama not because of his skin colour, but because of what he has done—and what he has failed to do—since he took office. And although he is not on the ballot this year, this matters. The less people admire the president, the less likely they are to vote for his party in the mid-terms. ...

One of California’s most powerful political forces may have peaked

DON NOVEY used to be the most important man in Californian politics that no one had ever heard of. As president of California’s prison-guards’ association from 1982 to 2002, Mr Novey turned that union into the most powerful in the state. On his watch, California built 21 new prisons. Mr Novey’s organisation also sponsored or supported tough laws that helped to fill those prisons to almost twice their capacity at times. It helped elect two Republican governors and one Democratic one, besides countless state legislators. “We sent candidates 13 questions,” he happily recalls, ranging from their stance on the death penalty to labour issues.

He is especially proud that he won his members by far the most generous wages and benefits that prison officers get anywhere in the country. Under the last deal he negotiated, which expired in 2006, the average member of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) earned around $70,000 a year and more than $100,000 with overtime. (Since then, wages have gone up again.) Mr Novey negotiated pensions of up to 90% of salary starting at as early as 50—more than teachers, nurses or firefighters get, and matched only by the state’s highway patrol. ...

The recession may hurt America’s vulnerable children

OVER the past few years, a growing number of America’s parentless children have found homes. In 2008 there were 463,000 children in foster care, a system where the government places orphans and children with parents who are abusive or unable to take care of them in the care of guardians. That is 11% down since 2002, and great news. But experts worry the trend might now go into reverse.

Some welfare advocates fear that the bad economy may cause parents with frayed nerves to abuse and neglect their children, and even cause some to abandon them. Already, several hospitals across the country have reported an increase in the frequency and severity of injuries from child abuse. ...

Attempts to stop drugs money corrupting public life in Guatemala are making some progress. In Jamaica (see article) the worries are growing

FOR the second time in less than a year, Guatemala’s national police chief has become one of its most prominent criminal defendants. Last August Porfirio Perez Paniagua was arrested for stealing drugs and cash. He was replaced by Baltazar Gomez (pictured above, left), a respected officer who had passed a polygraph test. Yet on March 2nd Mr Gomez was himself apprehended, along with Nelly Bonilla, the country’s anti-narcotics tsar. They were charged with involvement in drugs trafficking and with thwarting the investigation of a firefight last April, when five corrupt cops attempting to seize cocaine for resale were killed by the drugs’ owners. This parade of police chiefs in the dock shows both how much progress has been made in the fight for justice in Latin America’s most lawless country, and how much remains to be done.

Just a few years ago, such high-level arrests would have been unthinkable. Guatemala’s 36-year civil war was the Americas’ worst armed conflict of the 20th century: it killed 200,000 indigenous people, and was declared a genocide by a commission sponsored by the United Nations. Yet unlike most of its regional peers, the country was unable to establish a clear break with the past after a peace treaty was signed in 1996. A generous amnesty law meant that no members of the army were jailed for their participation until last year. One of the authors of a truth-commission report, Juan Jose Gerardi, was bludgeoned to death two days after its publication. Efrain Rios Montt, who was president of the military regime when the worst atrocities took place, remained a congressman until his unsuccessful bid to return to the presidency via the ballot-box in 2003. ...

Bereft of controversy, lawmakers chew seal meat and sing a sexist anthem

WHEN Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, prorogued Parliament in December for more than two months, to avoid some bothersome debates, he said this was so his minority Conservative government could “recalibrate” its policies. Now that the recession was over, he said, the emphasis needed to shift towards budgetary control. However, as the new session began on March 3rd, the throne speech outlining the legislative programme was notable for its dearth of new ideas. Likewise the rather dull budget speech the next day.

The Liberals, the main opposition, were so stumped for something to quibble with in the budget that they decided not to vote it down, which at least spares Canadians a third general election in just over four years. So, with little of substance to joust over, lawmakers have been turning their attention to some less urgent matters. In response to a proposal by a Liberal senator, the parliamentary canteen served seal meat for the first time on March 10th. The idea is to show solidarity with hunters, on Canada’s Atlantic and Arctic coasts, who are enraged at the European Union’s recent ban on imports of seal products. Last year Canada’s governor-general, Michaelle Jean, caused a stir by eating raw seal meat on a visit to the Arctic. The lawmakers enjoyed theirs cooked, in a port sauce. ...

American anger at Jamaica’s slowness in handing over an alleged gang boss

UNTIL recently the United States was pleased with the co-operation it was getting from Jamaica over the extradition of people accused of serious crimes. The Jamaican authorities were responding promptly to requests and, last year, sent 15 suspects to the United States. But the case of Christopher “Dudus” Coke seems to be different. The American authorities have become frustrated at what they see as foot-dragging by Jamaica’s government over their request last August for the extradition of a man they say is the leader of an “international criminal organisation”.

A “Gang Threat Assessment Survey” conducted by the Jamaican government last year reckoned there were 268 criminal groups in Jamaica, earning cash from extortion, selling cannabis, transporting cocaine, contract killings, prostitution and international cybercrime. Many of them are merely small-time thugs. But the United States Justice Department has put Mr Coke on its “world’s most dangerous” list, accusing him of directing drug deals as far away as New York. ...

A dispute over land becomes an argument about race

OF ALL the peoples that make up Brazil, the quilombolas have perhaps the most remarkable story. Like the Saramaka in Suriname or Jamaica’s Maroons, they claim to be descended from groups of runaway slaves who founded settlements, or quilombos, deep in the forests. Most still live in the countryside, farming rice, bananas and other staples, but increasing numbers now live in towns. In the 1988 constitution, drawn up after the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship (exactly a century after slavery was abolished), the quilombolas were granted special guarantees to the title on their land, in recognition of their ancestors’ suffering.

These rights were amplified in a decree from President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in 2003. A bill that would, among other things, solidify their land claims has passed in Brazil’s lower house and is now in the Senate. However, not everybody is carried away with the romance of it all. ...

A richer, better organised country fared less badly than Haiti. Even so, the government struggled to respond to the massive scale of the destruction

THE mood in Chile over the past few days has swung as violently as buildings did in the early hours of February 27th. The terror of the massive 8.8-magnitude earthquake—so intense that many still cannot bear to talk about it—quickly turned to relief, at least in the capital, Santiago, which escaped relatively unscathed. That was tribute to the quality of the country’s building standards. Even the sheet-glass of modern office and apartment blocks was unbroken, despite the alarming swaying they suffered. But farther south, where the devastation and disorder was much more severe, anger set in.

By March 3rd the deaths of over 800 people had been confirmed, but officials said that several hundred remained missing. Worst hit were a string of towns and villages on the coast either side of Concepcion, the country’s second city, as well as the remote Juan Fernandez islands. The earthquake triggered several giant waves that swept away thousands of houses. The victims included fishermen and farm workers—some of Chile’s poorest people—as well as campers and backpackers who had been enjoying the last week of the country’s summer holidays. ...

A familiar mistrust descends

THE Cubans who hawk second-hand books from makeshift stalls in Havana’s Plaza de Armas were thrilled when Barack Obama was elected. Could millions of American tourists be far behind, they wondered. Word went out that the vendors were in the market for pre-revolutionary American paraphernalia such as Life magazines and Coca-Cola signs or newspapers from the Spanish-American War. But hopes that Mr Obama and his Cuban counterpart, Raul Castro, would end a 50-year freeze in relations between their countries have proved wildly premature.

Mr Obama began with some gestures. Last April his administration lifted curbs on visits and remittances by Cuban-Americans imposed by George Bush. It also said that it would allow American firms to provide telecoms services to Cuba. It quietly switched off an electronic ticker-tape on the wall of the United States’ Interest Section in Havana which had relayed news (propaganda, complained the Cubans, who erected a barricade to obscure it). The administration also restarted talks on practical issues, such as migration, that had been halted under Mr Bush. ...

Use solar power, not firewood

IT MIGHT seem callous in the aftermath of 230,000 deaths in January’s earthquake to talk about the opportunity offered by the rebuilding of Haiti. But merely restoring the most benighted country in the Americas to its previous misery would be culpable. Among the opportunities is to improve Haiti’s energy infrastructure.

Lacking domestic fossil-fuel supplies, Haiti was spending some $500m a year importing them. Its energy infrastructure was dismal, most Haitians having no access to electricity. Of those who do, perhaps half are hooked up illegally. The grid lost about half the generated energy, and missed out swathes of the country. ...

Suddenly, a wide-open race among half-a-dozen would-be successors

FOR months Colombian politics has come down to just one question: would Alvaro Uribe, the country’s tough and popular president, succeed in his effort to change the constitution to allow him to run for a third term at a presidential election in May? Such has been Mr Uribe’s sway over his country’s institutions that many pundits assumed the answer was yes. But when it finally came on February 26th the ruling by the Constitutional Court was a rejection sufficiently emphatic as to seem inevitable in retrospect. And with that Colombia finds itself suddenly contemplating a wide-open election.

The court ruled by seven to two that the re-election law would have violated the spirit of the constitution as well as being vitiated by irregularities and “substantial violations of democratic principles”. Their verdict means that Mr Uribe is barred from ever seeking the presidency again, not just this year. This spirited defence of judicial independence and checks and balances was met by immediate, if emotional, acquiescence from the president. The important thing, he said, was that his “democratic security” policy, which has beaten back left-wing guerrillas and demobilised right-wing paramilitaries, should continue. ...

Sporting success and brash patriotism

CANADIANS used to think of themselves as being quiet, modest and unassertive. No longer. After their athletes topped the medals table with 14 golds at the winter Olympic games, some 100,000 flag-waving locals took to the streets of Vancouver and the nearby ski resort of Whistler, deliriously singing the national anthem. The crowning triumph had come with victory over the United States in the men’s ice-hockey final. Even though this mood of brash patriotism had been building steadily both before and during the games, it took outsiders and even some Canadians by surprise.

The Vancouver Olympics got off to a dreadful start. Early on the opening day, a Georgian athlete, Nodar Kumaritashvili, was killed during a practice run when his luge flipped over, throwing him into a steel pole and raising questions about the track’s safety. Foreign journalists pounced on a series of glitches. The Olympic torch did not burn properly during the opening ceremony, an ice-making machine broke down as did several buses, and unseasonably mild weather caused events to be postponed. Visitors to Vancouver were frustrated that the outdoor Olympic flame was cordoned off behind a chain-link fence (it was quickly opened up). “The worst games ever,” wrote a columnist in The Guardian, a British newspaper, much to the annoyance of Canadians. ...

When a Canadian is not a Canadian

THE dozen chiefs who make up the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake expected criticism when they began presenting eviction notices this month to 25 non-natives living on their 13,000-acre (5,260-hectare) reserve just south of Montreal. They hoped Canadians would understand their desire to protect a threatened language and culture, and refrain from interfering in internal Mohawk affairs. But many saw their action as a racist and illegal denial of Canada’s constitutional Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Despite centuries of coexistence, the First Nations, as Canada’s indigenous people call themselves, and other Canadians still live in mutual incomprehension. For a start the Mohawks do not see themselves as Canadians.

The council passed a bylaw in 1984, supported by the majority of the reservation’s 8,000 residents, which stipulated that a person must have at least four Mohawk great grandparents to live or own property there. Any Mohawk who marries a non-native must leave. “Everyone knows the law: if you marry out, you stay out,” says Joe Delaronde, a spokesman for the council. “If we don’t protect who we are, we will become Canadian citizens.” ...

It’s a tough life being a Latin American president nowadays, with so many summits to go to. The latest, involving 32 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, took place this week in Playa del Carmen, a resort on Mexico’s Caribbean coast. The leaders agreed to set up a permanent regional body. That seems sensible. But there is a subtext: despite protestations to the contrary, the new body will be a rival to the Organisation of American States, which includes the United States and Canada, but not Cuba. It also looks like a Mexican riposte to the Brazilian-inspired South American Union. And all this escalating summitry takes place as Latin America is more divided than ever, between its liberal democracies on the one hand and Venezuela and its allies on the other, with Brazil trying to paper over the divide. Time, perhaps, for fewer but better summits.

...

Jaime Bayly’s breath of fresh air

WHEN it comes to Peruvian writers seeking the presidency, history threatens to repeat itself as farce. In 1990 Mario Vargas Llosa, one of Latin America’s foremost novelists, enraged by a government attempt to nationalise his country’s banks, cast aside his pen and threw himself into politics. Opinion polls at first made him a shoo-in for the presidency. Fortunately for the cause of literature, if not for Peruvian public life, he was defeated by Alberto Fujimori.

This month Jaime Bayly, a writer of humorous novels of rather lesser stature who is also a television talk-show host, has launched his candidacy for a presidential election due in April 2011. Like Mr Vargas Llosa, Mr Bayly is a liberal. But he is a highly irreverent one. Mop-haired and rumpled, he talks freely about his bisexuality (he says that at the moment he prefers women but that this might once again change); his taste for mood-altering pills that are apparently damaging his liver; his past cocaine habit and his continuing fondness for an occasional joint. His television programmes, broadcast in Colombia and Peru (he previously worked in Miami), mercilessly mock Venezuela’s leftist president, Hugo Chavez. ...

Many corruption scandals stem from the high cost of politics, and unrealistically tight campaign-finance rules

WHERE money, politics and scandal meet in Brazil, there is usually a camera somewhere nearby to take the pictures that will make any later profession of innocence ring hollow. Roseana Sarney’s presidential bid was killed in 2002 when images of half a million dollars in banknotes found at her husband’s office were broadcast on television. But the scandal that has been rumbling on since the end of November in Brasilia has bested all previous efforts in this genre.

The secretary of Jose Roberto Arruda, the governor of the Federal District, was filmed handing over bundles of cash to his boss’s various allies. They stuffed it down trousers, into handbags and, when other pockets were full, into socks. But this film has a surprising ending. On February 11th Mr Arruda was placed in police custody, to await trial for coercing a witness and attempting to destroy evidence. (His deputy governor has resigned over the affair, leaving the capital leaderless.) This is unusual in a country where politicians accused of corruption often lose nothing more precious than their mandates or their dignity—and even then they seem to bounce back quickly. ...

A break in a history of mistrust

JUST two days after Haiti’s earthquake, Leonel Fernandez, the president of the neighbouring Dominican Republic, ordered a helicopter to fly him over the border for an unannounced visit. He was worried that his Haitian counterpart and friend, Rene Preval, was still incommunicado. What made this neighbourly gesture remarkable was that the two countries that share the island of Hispaniola have long been divided by mutual suspicion. During a previous term in the 1990s, Mr Fernandez became the first Dominican president to visit Haiti in 60 years.

Mr Fernandez says he found Mr Preval alone in a small, dark back office at a police station near the airport. They talked about how the Dominican Republic could help. It has, a lot. Crews of Dominicans, including engineers, telecoms technicians and the Red Cross, were among the first to join the relief effort. Mr Fernandez dispatched 15 mobile kitchens to provide hot meals to survivors. He is now sending 100 old buses, refitted with desks and chairs, to serve as temporary classrooms. Dominican health teams are helping to treat earthquake survivors at a makeshift hospital in Jimani, on the border. Victor Atallah, a Dominican cardiologist, is building a rehabilitation clinic in Jimani where he plans to fit amputees with prosthetic limbs. ...

Drilling a vein of nationalism

EACH year a well-rehearsed performance takes place at the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonisation. Argentina’s government protests that Britain’s sovereignty over the islands it calls the Malvinas is a colonial injustice, and that the principle of territorial integrity demands that they be reunited with the mainland. Representatives from the Falkland Islands counter that they have a right to self-determination; that they have no wish to be part of Argentina; and that they do not consider themselves to be a colony of Britain anyway. Most of the time the argument gets no further than that. After going to war over the islands in 1982, Britain and Argentina have enjoyed reasonably cordial relations for the past 20 years. But the arrival of an oil exploration rig in the Falklands, due this month, has given new fuel to a dispute that dates back to 1833.

On February 16th Anibal Fernandez, chief of staff to Argentina’s president, announced that ships sailing between Argentina and the Falklands, or to them through Argentine waters, would henceforth require a permit. Earlier the government barred a ship which it said had called at the islands from loading a cargo of pipes. (Techint, the Argentine manufacturer of the pipes, said they were destined for the Mediterranean.) Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Argentina’s president, said she would “work unceasingly for our rights in the Malvinas, for human rights.” ...

A prairie echo of the tea party

WHEN the Progressive Conservatives won power in Alberta, Richard Nixon was still in the White House and Britain had only just abandoned shillings. Under various leaders, they have ruled continuously for almost four decades. Alberta, the home of oil, gas and cattle, has become the bedrock of Canadian conservatism. Yet now the Progressive Conservatives face a rebellion on the prairies—from the right, rather than the left.

Ed Stelmach, Alberta’s premier since 2006, won 72 of the 83 seats in the legislature at an election just two years ago. Now he is Canada’s least popular premier, with an approval rating in a recent poll of 14%. The recession has not helped. It has driven up unemployment in a province accustomed to the good life during a prolonged commodity boom, and caused Alberta’s finances to fall into the red for the first time in 15 years. The premier has antagonised the oil and gas industry, first with a bungled attempt to raise royalties and then by his lacklustre defence of the province’s tar sands from attacks on their carbon emissions by greens at home and abroad. ...

It may have come late, but the president’s emergency plan to save the country’s fifth-biggest city from carnage and crime looks promising

WHEN Arturo Valenzuela addressed Felipe Calderon at a meeting on public safety in Ciudad Juarez on February 11th, Mexico’s president had already apologised for arriving two hours late. “Two years too late,” retorted Mr Valenzuela, a surgeon who treats two gunshot victims a day in the border city that has become Mexico’s murder capital. That rebuke summed up the icy welcome the president received on a rare visit to what has become the central battlefield in the “war” on drug gangs that he launched on taking office more than three years ago.

Juarez, in the northern state of Chihuahua, is a critical site for the traffickers. It is Mexico’s second-largest local drug market. Its Texan neighbour, El Paso, lies on vital American freight routes. For nearly two decades, a mob called the Juarez “cartel” controlled the trade in the city. Two years ago the Sinaloa gang, Mexico’s largest, began an aggressive takeover battle. The resulting carnage prompted Mr Calderon to send 10,000 troops to pacify the city. Officials have insisted that the violence is a sign that weakened gangs are scrapping over diminished spoils, and will soon subside. Yet despite the army’s presence, the killing continues: 2,660 of Juarez’s 1.3m residents were murdered in 2009, making it the world’s deadliest city outside a war zone. ...

In our story on Brazil’s economy (“Joining in the carnival spirit”, February 13th), we quoted economists at Itau, a bank, as arguing that the government would have to strip out 496 billion reais, or half its total discretionary spending, to meet its fiscal-surplus target. In fact they said 49 billion reais and a quarter of its discretionary spending. Our apologies to them, and to the government. This has been corrected online.

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Shelter is now the pressing need

A MONTH after the catastrophic earthquake that flattened much of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and according to the government killed perhaps 230,000 people, there has been some fragile progress. Hospitals are working, though not before thousands of survivors died of their injuries. The World Food Programme says that it has handed out a two-week supply of rice to 2.5m people in the capital and nearby areas. Most streets in Port-au-Prince have been cleared of rubble.

The immediate worry now is providing shelter robust enough to withstand the rains (and landslides) that normally begin in earnest in May, and the hurricanes that may follow from June onwards. Around 550,000 people have gathered in 337 makeshift camps; almost as many are sleeping rough. With aftershocks continuing, they are too scared to venture back into their houses even when these survived. Some have been issued with tents. But relief workers reckon that simple plastic tarpaulins, suspended on poles, are a more durable option. One says that some tarpaulins handed out after floods in 2004 are still doing duty. The plastic can later be incorporated into huts. ...

A religious issue is threatening the government’s cohesion

AFTER a year in office, Israel’s right-wing-cum-religious coalition is feeling an ominous tremor of internal discord. The issue, the bane of so many past coalition governments, is state and synagogue. A bill easing conversion to Judaism, championed by the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, and his ex-Soviet immigrant party, Yisrael Beitenu, has run into furious resistance from the ultra-Orthodox party, the United Torah Judaism (UTJ), a coalition partner.

“When I die, I’ll go straight to heaven just for having pushed through this bill,” says David Rotem, chairman of parliament’s law committee and a member of Yisrael Beitenu (meaning “Israel is our home”). “I don’t know where opponents of the bill will go.” Ultra-Orthodox members, apparently confident of their place in heaven, protested. A member of the Labour party, another coalition partner, said that if the ultra-Orthodox were in heaven he would rather not go there. ...

A government reflecting the people’s will should slowly and messily emerge

DOZENS of explosions woke up voters in Baghdad on March 7th, heralding the day of the general election. Every few minutes another thunderous bang reminded them to stay at home, away from polling stations. Officials said the city had been hit by a barrage of mortars. Voter turnout was lower than before, in Baghdad little more than 50%. It was hardly a shining model of democracy.

The American army played down the violence. Most of the bangs, said its spokesman, had been caused by water bottles stuffed with explosives. Insurgents had put them in bins around the city and set them off by mobile phones to terrify voters. Two big bombs had killed at least 38 people but nobody was badly hurt by the bottle-bombs, said General Ray Odierno, the American commander. The bangs were an act of desperation by a fading insurgency. The turnout overall was said to be 62%. Despite the fear, many Iraqis were plainly determined to assert their democratic right to choose their leaders. Barack Obama called the election a “milestone in Iraqi history”. ...

Few of the participants have much hope that the resumption of talks, to be held indirectly through American mediators, will soon lead to a two-state solution

IT WAS a wretched beginning to what had been hailed as the hopeful resumption of peace talks, albeit indirect ones, between the Israelis and Palestinians under the aegis of an American mediator. Barely had America’s vice-president, Joe Biden, begun a visit to Israel to herald a new era of compromise and goodwill than it was announced that 1,600 houses would be built for Jewish settlers on the Israeli-annexed eastern rim of Jerusalem that Palestinians see as part of their future capital. Palestinians were united in fury. Peacemaking outsiders viewed the action as the illest of omens. Mr Biden sharply “condemned” it as “precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now.”

A sheepish-looking Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, let his aides claim lamely that he had been unaware of the decision. The next day his minister of interior apologised, conceding that the timing was unfortunate, but said that the announcement was merely a “routine, technical” step. Unsurprisingly, all this only increased scepticism about the promised new round of talks. ...

The unity government is stuck. An early election might break the logjam

WITH a power-sharing government plainly going nowhere, Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, has announced that fresh elections could be held early next year, whether or not a new constitution is ready. At the age of 86, he says he is ready to stand again—if, he adds coyly, his ruling ZANU-PF party wants him to. Next month he will celebrate 30 years of untrammelled power.

Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s prime minister and leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which was forced into a unity government despite winning a general election in the face of violence and fraud two years ago, wants South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma, to intervene. Talks to encourage Mr Mugabe to implement fully the power-sharing agreement he signed 18 months ago under the aegis of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), a 15-country regional grouping, have foundered. ...

A terrible tit-for-tat is causing untold misery—and seems unlikely to end

THE number-plates in Nigeria’s Plateau state declare it to be the “Home of Peace and Tourism”. In the past decade this slogan has sounded ever more fanciful, as the state’s capital, Jos, suffers bouts of the most brutal ethnic violence. The latest took place before dawn on March 7th, when gangs attacked villages south of the city, razed houses and hacked their occupants with machetes. The death toll is hard to know. Aid and human-rights groups say that between 200 and 500 people were killed. The police put the total at 109.

Locals say the gang members belonged to the mainly Muslim Fulani tribe, whereas the villagers were mostly from the Christian Berom group. The killings looked like revenge for a clash in Jos in January, when hundreds died, most of them Muslim, although there were Christian victims too. “This appears to be some kind of reprisal attack,” said Robin Waudo, a spokesman for the Red Cross. ...

The IMF says it wants to help Africa handle climate change

THE global recession was slow to hit Africa. Its banks and stock exchanges were isolated enough from the wider capital markets to suffer few shocks. Foreign investment remained steady. Oil-rich countries such as Angola continued to boom. But dampened demand for African exports last year, together with the shrinking of many venture-capital funds, has now hit the continent hard after a long period of unusually perky growth. Countries south of the Sahara together grew by less than 2% in 2009. In many places income has fallen and unemployment started to rise.

So the bullishness of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF’s head, who has been touring Africa, struck some as strange. He went out of his way to praise Africa’s central banks. He even said Africa’s economies were more dynamic than most of Asia’s. The main point, he said, was that Africa was recovering from the global crisis faster than expected. ...

The return of Mohamed ElBaradei from abroad is rattling Egypt’s rulers

EGYPTIANS may breathe a sigh of relief. Seven of their political parties have formed a united front to defend the country against a foreign plot. Whether this conspiracy is Zionist or perhaps American remains unclear. But the parties agree that it aims to undermine Egypt’s stability and that its spearhead is none other than Mohamed ElBaradei, winner of the Nobel peace prize and the recently retired head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog.

The revelation of such a plot surprises few in Egypt. Ever since November, when Mr ElBaradei declared that, if rules were made fair, he might just consider running for president in 2011, expectations have grown that allies of Egypt’s current ruler, Hosni Mubarak, would find ways to attack this upstart rival. When Mr ElBaradei arrived in Cairo last month for a ten-day visit, such expectations soared. Not only did the thousand cheering fans who mobbed him at the airport outnumber the active membership of the seven government-sponsored opposition parties now aligned against him. The soft-spoken former diplomat became the talk of Egypt’s chattering classes, as scores of prominent intellectuals declared their backing for him, and membership of a Facebook support group rocketed to 160,000. ...

A mysterious murder exposes a rift within the country’s ruling circle

LATE last month Chouaib Oultache walked into Algeria’s police headquarters with a score to settle. What happened next is not entirely clear, but official reports say Mr Oultache pumped three bullets into the head of Ali Tounsi, the country’s powerful police chief, before being shot and wounded himself.

A few years ago, Mr Tounsi had hired Mr Oultache, a retired air force colonel and a close friend, to head the police helicopter unit. By the official account, Mr Oultache went crazy after reading in the newspapers that he was being investigated for corruption. He may have suspected a betrayal by his old friend. ...

President Paul Kagame has improved people’s lives at the expense of freedom

THE government of Rwanda is doing a lot of things right. It is pretty open in its handling of aid money. Most foreign governments and charities are so impressed by its detailed plans and apparent lack of corruption that they are funnelling more of their aid directly through Rwanda’s government. President Paul Kagame says he expects direct budget support to rise by a quarter this year, to $519m.

The country has recovered valiantly from its year zero in 1994, when 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered. Its centralised state is leading the way in economic and technological reform in the region. It is improving the country’s infrastructure, education and farming, and seeks to preserve its ecology. It pushes equality for women, who comprise half the government and parliament. ...

Israel builds still more facts on Palestinian ground, while stalemate persists

EVEN as the Americans strive to jump-start fresh talks between Israelis and Palestinians, the Israeli government has been using the hiatus to intensify the refashioning of East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians see as their future capital. This week the city’s Israeli mayor, Nir Barkat, unveiled his latest plan to turn Palestinian districts into Jewish biblical heritage parks. Fearing that their half of the city is being cast in an increasingly Israeli mould, Palestinian stone-throwers clashed with Israeli forces on the Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, which Muslims venerate for its al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third-holiest shrine, and which Jews revere as the site of the biblical Temple. While George Mitchell, Barack Obama’s envoy, is yet again bidding to open “proximity talks” between the two sides, the Palestinians have been literally losing ground.

Unlike previous Israeli prime ministers, who built on the open hilltops above Arab population centres in the West Bank and on the edge of Jerusalem, Binyamin Netanyahu and his officials are concentrating on Jewish settlements bang in the midst of them. Car-parks and conservation areas, rich with Israeli symbols, are sprouting across East Jerusalem. Settlers with state protection are opening religious schools there. Scarcely a week passes without an Israeli newspaper heralding new Jewish housing units being built in Arab districts. Israeli archaeologists are scraping away the eastern parts of the city’s Arab surface in search of a Jewish past. Last month one of them declared she had “probably” found King Solomon’s city walls. ...

A round-up of Israeli spies

WITH a lot less exposure in the world’s press than it got for its recent Dubai operation, Israel has quietly suffered a string of setbacks in Lebanon, a front-line state with which it has often been at war. Lebanon’s security service says that since November 2008 it has broken up no fewer than 25 Israeli spy rings. The reported arrest this month of a colonel in Lebanese army intelligence, identified solely by the initials GS, brings the number of those charged to 70-plus; 40 of them are in Lebanese police custody.

For a force better known for its failure to manage traffic, let alone resolve Lebanon’s sorry catalogue of political murders, the counter-intelligence sweep is an unprecedented coup. The arrests are said to have exposed a series of agents for Israel, ranging from a retired Lebanese army general who ran a housecleaning service to a garage owner who specialised in supplying Hizbullah, Lebanon’s Shia party-cum-militia, with vehicles that he secretly fitted with tracking devices. ...

In the wake of the assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai, presumably by Mossad, the agency’s effectiveness, attitude and leadership are under scrutiny

ALTHOUGH they stolidly refuse to admit that their external security service had done it, Israeli officials say they are confident that in Europe and elsewhere outrage over the recent assassination in Dubai of a Hamas commander will quickly blow over. Israeli ambassadors were called in and carpeted in London, Canberra and Dublin over stolen passports and identities used by the team that killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh and was later exposed by the Dubai police. eu foreign ministers have “strongly condemned” the action. But the Israelis, seeking to minimise the damage, note innocently that the complaints focused on the passports rather than the actual killing—and anyway stopped short of explicitly fingering Mossad.

Indeed, despite the meticulous closed-circuit television records of the comings and goings through Dubai’s airport and hotels, Mossad people still say, with an almost straight face, that the evidence is circumstantial. A former spymaster, Rafi Eitan, even suggested half in jest that a rival service may have framed the Israelis. ...

An outsize statue symbolises the defects of the president and his family

IT IS either a glorious tribute to the African Renaissance, as the government proclaims, or an overblown monument to the outrageous vanity of President Abdoulaye Wade, as many Senegalese believe. Either way, at least the vast statue that now dominates the skyline of the Senegalese capital of Dakar leaves no one indifferent. At 50 metres tall, a shade more than New York’s Statue of Liberty, it is designed to provoke.

To Mr Wade and his supporters the statue’s bronze rendering of a nuclear family represents Africa rising from centuries of “ignorance, intolerance and racism”. Senegal’s selflessness in giving physical expression to this grand theme is meant to reflect the country’s exalted standing on the continent. After all, it is the leader of Francophone Africa—at least since Cote d’Ivoire imploded—and is Africa’s only successful and stable Muslim democracy. The backers of the statue, which is to open officially in April, say it will become one of the continent’s top tourist sites. ...

The strongest Islamist militia is now formally linked to al-Qaeda

THE war in Somalia between the Islamist militias known as the Shabab and the Western-backed supposedly “transitional” government headed by Sharif Ahmed, himself an Islamist who promotes sharia law, is getting even bloodier. The UN says that ferocious fighting in the capital, Mogadishu, has caused at least 8,000 residents to flee this month, to add to the 1.5m Somalis already displaced, out of a population that once exceeded 8m. Government forces, which control a shrinking slice of the capital, are still on the defensive. But independent reports are scanty; it is hard to say exactly what is going on from day to day. Chaos and terror prevail.

For instance, when three Shabab fighters were found dead this week in Mogadishu’s Bakara market, each shot in the head, it was unclear who had killed them. Some said government forces. Others blamed Ethiopian spies. Or was it Hizbul Islam, a radical Islamist outfit that has fallen out with the Shabab? Or perhaps the Shabab itself was dealing with turncoats. ...

There’s still a vacuum

IN THE early hours of February 24th Umaru Yar’Adua, Nigeria’s ailing and long-absent president, finally came home. After three months in a clinic in Saudi Arabia, the saga over who is in charge of Africa’s most populous country is bound to resume.

The matter seemed to have been solved just two weeks ago. Goodluck Jonathan, the vice-president, took over the top job on February 9th after the prolonged power vacuum had seen government business slow down, investors grow querulous and militants in the oil-rich Niger Delta threaten to resume their rebellion. ...

The African Union tut-tuts but the people appear to welcome a coup

WHEN soldiers seized power last week in Niger, thousands took to the streets of Niamey, the dusty capital, to celebrate. The new rulers, who kidnapped President Mamadou Tandja on February 18th, say they simply want to oust a tyrant and hold elections. Many of the desert state’s 15m people seem to believe them.

Mr Tandja, aged 71, had been growing ever more authoritarian as the end of his tenure approached last year. He changed the constitution to junk term limits and pushed elections back to 2012. He also dissolved parliament and tightened his grip on the press. Local human-rights campaigners say the army has indeed halted a worrying turn of events. The United Nations says Niger is the world’s least developed country. ...

A budget that gives little to the left

LEFT-WING trade-union allies of President Jacob Zuma have reacted with fury to the business-friendly budget, unveiled on February 17th, threatening to call a general strike in the second half of the year. The first of Mr Zuma’s ten-month-old government, the budget spurned left-wing calls for tax increases, nationalisation of the mines and dropping inflation-targeting by the central bank. Instead, the finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, is pursuing broadly the same prudent macroeconomic policies that prevailed under Thabo Mbeki’s presidency from 1999 to 2008.

Mr Zuma has been accused of weak leadership, particularly since his dreary state-of-the-nation speech earlier this month. But he has again shown—this time via Mr Gordhan—that he is not beholden to his noisy allies on the left who helped catapult him to power. ...

Due to an editing error in our article last week on Kenya (“The politicians just don’t seem to get it”), we said that Najib Balala, the minister of tourism, was a former mayor of Nairobi. He was actually a former mayor of Mombasa. Sorry. This has been corrected online.

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Kenya remains east Africa’s commercial hub, yet the bickering and dithering of its dodgy and unwieldy government could ruin what is left of its reputation

Correction to this article

“WE ARE sharpening our pangas [machetes],” says a man in a jam-packed matatu, the ubiquitous minibus taxi that is Kenya’s main means of public transport. “It is not if but when” is the commonest answer to the question, “Will political violence resume?” ...

In a sea of international opprobrium. But a compromise may be at hand

IF YOU’RE tempted by a slab of meat gristle which surrenders little but an ooze of grease when chewed, then you’ll love whale. Add to the sensory experience the accumulated mercury to be found in whale meat. Consider the suffering caused by the hunt to these intelligent mammals; and a military-industrial approach to their extermination. Japan going a-whaling is, to borrow from Oscar Wilde, the unspeakable in pursuit of the almost uneatable.

As with foxhunting in Britain, views seem irreconcilable. Since 1986 the International Whaling Commission (IWC) has imposed a moratorium on commercial whaling. Yet every Antarctic summer, Japan sends a whaling fleet south to catch hundreds of whales for “research”. And every year at the IWC’s meeting, pro- and anti-whaling camps gather in sullen deadlock. On the whaling grounds the Japanese fleet encounters the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. The ocean warriors hurl rancid butter on Japanese decks, use warps to foul propellers and attempt citizen’s arrests of the whaling captains. Early this year a Sea Shepherd boat sank after a collision. Now an American film has turned a spotlight on Japan’s coastal hunt for cetaceans. “The Cove”, shot largely in secret, shows the annual dolphin slaughter in Taiji, a village on Japan’s main island. This week it won an Oscar. ...

The generals leave nothing to chance

THE junta ruling Myanmar has had 20 years to digest the lessons from the country’s most recent election. It was trounced by the National League for Democracy, even though the opposition’s charismatic leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, was already under house arrest. This year on an unnamed date (perhaps its astrologers cannot agree) the junta will hold another election. It will not lose this one.

Election laws published this week do not quite spell out the result. But a “political-parties registration law” bars Miss Suu Kyi and other political prisoners, of whom there are more than 2,000, from belonging to a party because of their criminal convictions. Cut off from politics by her house arrest, Miss Suu Kyi is anyway barred from office as the widow of a foreigner. Her party now has to expel her and other detainees. The law also bans civil servants from joining parties, along with monks, who led anti-government protests in 2007. ...

That some liberals want and local governments fear

A GRANDMOTHER killed trying to stop developers flattening her home; university graduates forced to live in crowded slums: China’s ebullient property market has generated many tales of woe, and a promise from the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, to “rein in” the speculators. But calls for this to be achieved with a new property tax have put the government in a bind.

In the past year property prices have surged to new highs in some places, helped by a torrent of carefree lending from state-run banks. Mr Wen made his pledge on March 5th, in a speech to China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), launching its annual ten-day session. The NPC is filled with party loyalists. But some have fretted openly about property bubbles. The government says house prices in 70 cities rose 10.7% in February compared with a year earlier, the fastest rise in 20 months. There are early signs that this is denting sales. In both January and February the volume of housing sales fell sharply from the previous month. ...

Technology complicates life for vote-riggers and counters alike

RIGGED elections and the instability they create have been the bane of the Philippines for much of its democratic history. Filipinos are fervently hoping that the computerisation of the vote-counting in May’s presidential, congressional and local elections will solve the problem. But faith in the technology is less fervent. Many fear it is no solution.

In past elections voters had to write down the names of their preferences for up to 32 national or local positions on blank ballot forms. Their votes were tallied by hand at the precinct, municipal, provincial and finally national levels. Definitive results could take weeks to emerge, giving ample opportunity for vote-padding and shaving. Vote-rigging by President Ferdinand Marcos led to his downfall in 1986. The incumbent president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, has had a shaky grip on power since she was accused of rigging her election in 2004. ...

The DPJ stumbles in its efforts to grant foreigners the vote

BY RIGHTS, giving long-term South Korean residents in Japan the right to vote in local elections should be uncontroversial. They pay taxes, speak Japanese, and come from families that have lived in Japan for decades. Most were dragged here to work under the colonial cosh before and during the second world war.

A limited move to enfranchise them came from the very top of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). It swept to power last September promising to end prejudices built up under the ousted Liberal Democrats. Yukio Hatoyama, the prime minister, backs it. The DPJ’s secretary-general and puppeteer-at-large, Ichiro Ozawa, even assured Lee Myung-bak, South Korea’s president, that he would soon push it through the Diet, or parliament. ...

Najib wavers over undoing affirmative-action policies

WHEN Najib Razak took office last April as Malaysia’s prime minister, the timing could hardly have been worse. The export-led economy was in recession. The ruling coalition was in the dumps after an unprecedented near-defeat in elections in March 2008. Opponents warned that Mr Najib’s government would crack down on political dissent to save its skin.

Against the odds, though, Mr Najib, a British-educated economist, has emerged as a more sure-footed, and less scandal-prone, leader than many expected. He has stimulated the economy back to life and liberalised some financial services. Growth is likely to exceed 4% this year—reaching 6%, in his own optimistic forecast. There are ambitious new targets for cutting crime and building roads, among other populist policies. Foreign businesses have been encouraged by Mr Najib’s promises to liberalise the broader economy, spur innovation and raise productivity. Everyone agrees that Malaysia needs to move beyond run-of-the-mill electronics and focus on knowledge-based industries. ...

An historic change in the offing; but India’s ruling party may be overreaching itself

YELLING dementedly, seven lawmakers mobbed the chairman of the Indian parliament’s upper house on March 8th and tore at the document, containing the women’s reservation bill, he was reading from. Yet the bill passed the next day, with the two-thirds majority needed to change India’s constitution. With broad political support, including from the Congress party that leads India’s coalition government and the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the bill could soon clear the lower house and win the support it needs in at least 15 out of 28 state assemblies. The president would then sign it into law: imposing a 33% quota for women in India’s federal and state assemblies.

This would be momentous, especially for India’s half a billion, badly served women. Today’s Lok Sabha, or House of the People, as India’s lower chamber is known, contains 58 women, a record number, but fewer than 11% of the seats. By greatly boosting women’s membership of India’s legislatures, the proposed amendment, its supporters say, will also begin to make a dent in their more grievous suffering—in a country where female fetuses are often aborted, where wives are battered and women earn on average $1,200 a year, less than a third of the male average. A woman can take credit for this: Sonia Gandhi, Congress’s leader, who has pushed the long-mothballed bill against a furious band of dissenters—of a kind that persuaded previous BJP- and Congress-led governments not to touch it. ...

Worries about renewed overheating

DURING Tet, the lunar new year holiday, money is everywhere in Vietnam. It is dished out to children, gambled in roadside card-games, and splurged on gifts, feasts, and trips to home villages. This leads to an annual bump in inflation. And this year’s spike in the consumer-price index, which rose by 2% in February, seemed bearable at a time of rapid growth. GDP grew by 5.3% last year. It came, however, among some more worrying signs.

On February 10th, just before Tet, the central bank devalued the currency, the dong, by 3.4%, following a devaluation of 5.4% in November. The aim was to entice holders of dollars to buy dong. A dollar shortage has been starving Vietnam’s exporters of the currency they need to purchase imported parts and materials. ...

Politicians vie for poor-Muslim votes

FIFTEEN years after he migrated with his family to the bright lights of Delhi, Muhammad Naushad has little to show for it. An illiterate 20-year-old weaver, he earns 2,000 rupees ($43) a month, half of which he sends to his mother in the poor state of Bihar. Amid the evening babble of Nizamuddin, a fly-blown Muslim quarter in the heart of India’s capital, Mr Naushad says his only ambition is to get a better job. It is hard to guess what that might be.

He is all too typical of India’s 160m Muslims. Found mostly in its northern and eastern states, poor giants such as Uttar Pradesh (UP), Bihar and West Bengal, they are among the country’s poorest and least educated people. According to a 2006 government-commissioned report, Muslims are almost as badly off as dalits, Hinduism’s former “untouchables”—a finding made tragic by the dashed hopes it represents: many Indian Muslims once converted from Hinduism to escape that reviled low-caste status. ...

The defining battle of Lee Myung-bak’s presidency nears its climax

ODDLY for a politician, South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, has never hidden his loathing of politics. During his successful presidential-election campaign he vowed to “take politics out of Youido”, a reference to the island on the Han river that houses the National Assembly in Seoul. Mr Lee’s hero is the dictator Park Chung-hee, architect of South Korea’s rise from basket-case to industrial powerhouse. Much like him, Mr Lee believes politicians are impediments to his country’s progress. Unlike Park, however, Mr Lee has to operate in a robust democracy. He is making rather a hash of it.

In a bitter twist of fate, his nemesis is Park’s daughter, Park Geun-hye. She was the rival Mr Lee defeated in 2007 to become the presidential candidate of the Grand National Party (GNP). The two have never been reconciled. Mr Lee believes his election entitled him to rule without opposition within the GNP. But Miss Park has never accepted her defeat and still commands a group of as many as 40 loyalists in parliament. ...

Some scent compromise; more fear a looming showdown

IN THAILAND politics has long been about compromise rather than conviction. Political parties run on expediency, not ideology, which makes it possible to cobble together all manner of oddball coalitions. But in recent years pragmatism has given way to more rigid loyalties. Rival camps rally their base with fiery talk of an all-out struggle for the nation’s soul, all the while tugging relentlessly at its seams.

Might compromise yet make a comeback? Some scented a whiff of detente on February 26th, when the Supreme Court ruled on the family fortune of the former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. But that still seems wishful thinking. The nine judges found Mr Thaksin guilty of abusing his powers while in office to favour Shin Corp, his family-owned telecoms group, which was sold in January 2006 to Temasek, a Singaporean sovereign-wealth fund. The court decided to seize $1.4 billion of the $2.3 billion in proceeds from that sale, which had been frozen after the army deposed Mr Thaksin in September 2006. ...

To a sitting room, mobile telephone or supermarket screen near you soon

ON MARCH 1st China Daily got its biggest makeover since the newspaper was launched in 1981 as China’s first English-language daily. As well as a new look, the paper is boosting the number of its foreign correspondents. With a new investigative-reporting feature, China Daily said that it was aiming to “set the news agenda instead of just follow it”.

So far, this agenda seems unlikely to set foreign pulses racing. Next to this bold new feature China Daily splashed an “exclusive” interview with the foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, under the headline “FM: China is doing all it can in foreign affairs”. Still, the makeover marks a departure for the vapid broadsheet. And China Daily is only the latest Chinese media organ to revamp itself in what President Hu Jintao calls an “increasingly fierce struggle in the domain of news and opinion”. ...

After a hard-won battle, President Yudhoyono has a chance to start again

FEZ-WEARING members of Indonesia’s parliament called each other transvestites, yelled and scuffled. Outside, the police turned water cannon on protesting students. The climax this week of a parliamentary investigation into a government bail-out of a private bank in 2008 superficially recalled 1998, and the chaos surrounding the fall of the dictator Suharto. But this time the stakes were smaller; the government of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was never going to fall. At issue was how well it could govern.

The Bank Century scandal had riveted the press for months. But most of Indonesia’s 240m people have preferred chat shows and Hollywood movies, content that the economy has been doing well, growing by 4.5% last year. Inflation last year was just 2.8%, unemployment is down, and consumer confidence booming. That, however, did not deter Mr Yudhoyono’s enemies from plotting to embarrass him and paralyse his government. They managed to do both. Yet he still enjoys an approval rating of about 75%. ...

A rigged vote keeps the ruling party in power in a failing state

TO THE surprise of no one, the governing People’s Democratic Party of Tajikistan (PDPT) won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections on February 28th, with almost 72% of the vote. Nor was anybody taken aback by the myriad irregularities on election day. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which monitored the polling, said it “failed to meet many key OSCE commitments”. It noted a high prevalence of family- and proxy-voting and cases of ballot-box stuffing.

Preliminary results give the PDPT, led by Emomali Rakhmon, the president, 53 seats out of 63 in the lower house of parliament. The Islamic Revival Party, Central Asia’s only religiously based party, came second, with 7.7% of the vote and two seats. The party’s leadership, which expected to win around 30% of the vote, has cried foul, and plans to sue the election board. ...

Making sure that China’s supreme legislative body is toothless

YAO LIFA, a primary schoolteacher who in 1998 became one of the first legislators in China to be elected without the backing of the Communist Party, is wearily resigned to frequent summons by the police. As China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), prepares for its annual session from March 5th, jittery authorities are stepping up surveillance of Mr Yao and others they fear might use the occasion to air grievances about the party’s grip.

The cautious experiment with grassroots democracy that saw Mr Yao elected to his town’s legislature in the province of Hubei was all too brief. By the next poll in 2003, Mr Yao—by then lionised as a daring independent political voice even by some official newspapers—had no chance of winning again. A handful of other independent candidates did manage to gain seats that year in county and township “people’s congresses”. But in the following elections in 2006 and 2007, the authorities did all they could to stop them winning, from gerrymandering and vote-rigging to intimidation. Mr Yao says he was detained five times last year to keep him quiet during politically sensitive occasions, including the NPC session last March. ...

Life gets harder for Thailand’s guest-workers

THEY sew bras, peel shrimps, build blocks of flats and haul fishing-nets. In return, migrant workers in Thailand are paid poorly, if at all, and face exploitation and abuse at the hands of employers and the security forces. Up to 3m migrants, many undocumented and mostly from Myanmar, fall into this category. So a scheme to start registering this workforce and bring it into the legal fold sounds like a step forward. Migrants have been ordered to apply to their home countries for special passports so that they can work legally in Thailand and, in theory, enjoy access to public services, such as health care.

But the plan has run into practical and political difficulties, mostly among workers from Myanmar, who rightly fear their awful government and do not want to return home, even temporarily. Many are unaware of the registration drive. So the first applicants have come mostly from migrants from Laos and Cambodia, where the authorities are more willing to help. ...

To understand North Korea, look not to Confucius or the Soviet Union, but to fascist 1930s Japan

THE face that North Korea presents to the world is widely held to be unreal. Kim Jong Il once told Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, that the bombast in honour of himself and his late, great father, Kim Il Sung, was so much nonsense. Bruce Cumings, an historian, wonders what Mr Kim can be thinking, “standing there in his pear-shaped polyester pantsuit, pointy-toed elevator shoes, oversize sunglasses of malevolent tint, an arrogant curl to his feminine lip…and a perpetual bad-hair day? He is thinking, get me out of here.”

The notion that North Korea does not always believe what it is doing colours even diplomacy, which may soon start up again after months of tantrums on the part of the North. The aim is to get North Korea to give up its nuclear programmes as a prelude to normalising relations on the Korean peninsula. Many policymakers in America believe—against the evidence—that Mr Kim can be persuaded to do a deal. Some think that behind his antagonism lurks a desire for accommodation—and even an alliance. ...

Hamid Karzai’s shenanigans make the going even harder for NATO

EVER since the aftermath of last year’s disastrous presidential election in Afghanistan, Western diplomats have been talking tough about the need for thorough reform of the country’s rotten electoral system. Never again, the envoys said, would foreign governments pour cash into a machine that was controlled by the president, Hamid Karzai (right), oversaw fraud on an epic scale and handed a propaganda coup to the Taliban.

They promised that foreign support for the next parliamentary election, due in September, would depend on a cull of dodgy officials from the Independent Election Commission (IEC), the body that organised the voting. Most felt that Mr Karzai should lose the right to appoint its chairman and leadership board. ...

India’s Maoist guerrillas carry out two slaughters, then offer a truce

SHORTLY before midnight on February 17th residents of Phulwari, a village in India’s northern state of Bihar, were roused by gunfire, explosions and a shrieking mob. It was led by a few of the Maoist guerrillas encamped on a wooded ridge outside the village. Wearing camouflage-green uniforms, they carried assault rifles and explosives. Around 100 rival villagers, of the locals’ own Kora tribe, came with them, with bows and arrows and a few small children.

Peeping from his mud hut, Kashi, a middle-aged tribal, considered loosing off a few retaliatory arrows, dipped in poison. “But there were too many,” he recalled this week, standing beside the heap of fine, grey ashes that was his home. His aunt and nephew were incinerated inside it. Kashi’s brother—their husband and father—was shot dead while trying to flee with him. In all, 12 villagers were killed that night and around 30 houses destroyed. ...

It takes many hands to reconcile two peoples so divided by history

FOR centuries, a stone bridge spanning the emerald green waters of the Akhurian River connected the southern Caucasus to the Anatolian plains: a strategic pivot on the Silk Road, running through the ancient Armenian kingdom of Ani. Today the bridge would have linked tiny, landlocked Armenia to Turkey. But war and natural disasters have reduced it to a pair of stubs—a sad commentary on the relations between the two states.

This grim image prompted an Ankara-based think-tank, called Tepav, to devise a plan to rebuild the bridge and in so doing to reopen the long-sealed land border by stealth. “The idea is to promote reconciliation through cross-border tourism,” explains Tepav’s director, Guven Sak. Turkey’s doveish president, Abdullah Gul, has embraced the plan. The Armenian authorities and diaspora Armenians with deep pockets are also interested. If all went to plan, the bridge’s restoration would only be the start of a broader effort to repair hundreds of other Armenian architectural treasures scattered across Turkey. ...

In the aftermath of fighting or repression, people are often told to forget things. But in free societies, selective memory cannot be imposed for ever

THE 15 boxes of bones were wrapped in the red, yellow and purple flag of the Second Republic. Each held the remains of a man whose support for a brief political experiment in the 1930s had proved fatal. At a ceremony in Madrid on March 6th the bones were given to descendants: mostly middle-aged grandchildren, but sometimes already aged sons or daughters.

They wept for men they had mostly never known. The victims had died of hunger and disease in one of the makeshift prison camps set up by General Francisco Franco in the early days of his 36-year dictatorship, established after the republic’s defeat in a bloody, three-year civil war. ...

Struggling to cope with a dearth of brides

BALJEET SINGH dandles his baby daughter on his knee, a picture of contented fatherhood. Last year the 37-year-old Hindu truck driver became the envy of his friends when he married a 16-year-old Muslim from Assam, in India’s north-east. The unorthodox marriage suited both. Mr Singh’s romantic life had become a casualty of India’s preference for boy babies, which in his state, Haryana, has led to the most skewed sex ratio in India: 116 to 100, according to the 2001 census, compared with a national average of 108. By the age of 30, says Mr Singh, he had given up hope of finding a girl from his own village, Nandgaon, or from his state. His wife, Sona Khatum, comes from an impoverished family in one of India’s poorest states, though village rumour mutters that she may be an illegal migrant from Bangladesh. Mr Singh paid handsomely. “Here, I’ve always been made comfortable,” she says shyly, from beneath her veil.

Ms Khatum is one of an increasing number of brides imported into Haryana, one of India’s richest states. The Red Cross Society of India, which campaigns against gendercide in the country, reckons that at least 100 brides have been brought into Bhiwani, one of Haryana’s 21 districts. Nandgaon, a village of some 1,700 people, most of them farmers, is a microcosm of bachelor angst. The Red Cross reckons that at least 100 bachelors have passed the age range thought ideal for marriage, which is 20 to 25. At least five have married women from other states, and “lots of my friends ask me, how can I find one?” says Mr Singh. ...

Technology, declining fertility and ancient prejudice are combining to unbalance societies

XINRAN XUE, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes (see article), “when we heard a moan of pain from the bedroom next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder—and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accusingly: ‘Useless thing!’

“Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xinran remembers. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail. The midwife must have dropped that tiny baby alive into the slops pail! I nearly threw myself at it, but the two policemen [who had accompanied me] held my shoulders in a firm grip. ‘Don’t move, you can’t save it, it’s too late.’ ...

America is rallying its friends to concentrate minds in the Islamic Republic

SURELY it is clear by now, many people feel, that Iran would rather go on enriching uranium than talk to America or anyone else about its suspect nuclear activities. If efforts to tempt it round have failed, could a tight economic squeeze lead the regime to think again about the costs of its defiance?

A new sanctions resolution will soon be up for discussion at the United Nations Security Council. But suppose the UN cannot get Iran to halt its work to process uranium and plutonium—for use in as yet unbuilt civilian nuclear-power reactors, Iran says, though others suspect they are for bomb-building. In that case, a lot more governments may have to be induced to impose eye-watering economic pain so as to get the regime’s attention. ...

A new pattern in opinions about bureaucrats, business and charity

UNTIL recently, opinions about the public and private sectors tended to move in mirror image. Some societies mistrusted the state but expected a lot from private firms. In others the state was revered and the reputation of firms was in doubt. And in countries like China where respect for the state ran deep, people were also sceptical of private efforts to do good.

Over the past year, patterns have shifted. The latest in a series of annual polls of the “informed public”—successful, educated people who follow the news—in 22 countries shows that in most, trust in government and the private sector is moving in step, either up or down. In Russia confidence on both fronts is down. In Germany the latest year showed a modest rise (from 35% to 41%) in trust in government and an equal climb (from 33% to 39%) in the number who had high hopes of business. Britain was an outlier. There, trust in the state fell (from 41% to 35%), whereas trust in the private sector inched up, from 45% to 47%. ...

The professional and presumably state-directed killing of a leading Palestinian has been exposed in embarrassing detail. Perhaps such methods have had their day

USING subterfuge to entrap and kill adversaries, in locations far from any battlefield, has been a feature of conflict for the past 3,000 years or so—at least since Jael, one of the warrior heroines of ancient Israel, lured the enemy commander Sisera into her tent, lulled him to sleep with a refreshing drink of milk, and then used a tent peg to smash out his brains.

In modern times targeted killing is a more elaborate business, and many of the finer points—how the victim is stalked, how many people are involved—usually remain under wraps. But the plot to eliminate Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a Hamas commander who was found dead in a Dubai hotel room on January 20th, has been laid bare in stark detail by the police in that country, not normally regarded as a model of open government. ...

Modern technology makes killing easier—but harder to get away with

ONLY a decade ago the assassins who killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh would have disappeared into oblivion. Now that is much harder, and not merely for the obvious reason that lenses are ubiquitous. Modern cameras capture more than blurred images: they record the precise bone structure of people’s faces. Digitised and interpreted by an algorithm, this information is fed to police computers all over the world.

The net is closing around old-fashioned secret-service methods. Biometric passports are already the norm in most European countries. Their chips hold easily checkable data such as retina scans, which are both unique and unfakeable. The thought of an easily disproved false identity fills spymasters with horror. They remember the fate of western agents, in the Soviet Union after the second world war, whose painstakingly forged identity documents had a fatal flaw: they used stainless steel staples, rather than the soft iron fastenings found in authentic Soviet documents. The tell-tale absence of rust allowed Stalin’s secret police to spot them. ...

In last week’s story about governments and data, we called Sir Tim Berners-Lee the inventor of the internet. What he really invented was the world wide web. Sorry. This has been corrected online.

...

In many prosperous democracies, a crisis-driven backlash against the political right failed to materialise. Why so?

“THIS financial crisis”, said Daniel Cohn-Bendit in 2008, “is for capitalist neoliberals what Chernobyl was for the nuclear lobby.” As the recession began claiming the livelihoods of ordinary workers, other politicians of the left avoided the incendiary glee of the German MEP and former street fighter. Still, many shared his expectation of a popular backlash against their foes on the right.

It seemed plausible at the time. The conservative predicament was embodied a year and a half ago by John McCain, whose campaign floundered on the issue of the economy as the implosion of Lehman Brothers portended a banking crisis. And some obituaries for the centre-right had been written at least a year earlier. The subprime mortgage storm was brandished by America’s Democrats as a repudiation of a deregulatory fad that began in the Reaganite 1980s. ...

Why some countries welcome children being taught at home and others don’t

UNLIKE many of the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” that have sought refuge in America, the Romeike family comes from a comfortable place: Bissingen an der Teck, a town in south-western Germany. Yet on January 26th an American immigration judge granted the Romeikes—a piano teacher, his wife and five children—political asylum, accepting their case that difficulties with home schooling their children created a reasonable fear of persecution.

Under Germany’s stringent rules, home schooling is allowed only in exceptional circumstances. Before emigrating, Mr and Mrs Romeike had been fined some €12,000 ($17,000); policemen had arrived at their house and forcibly taken their children to school. The Romeikes feared that the youngsters might soon be removed by the state. ...

In several countries more official data are being issued in raw form so that anybody can use them. This forces bureaucrats and creative types to interact in new ways

Correction to this article

YOU might think that Clay Johnson, a campaigner for transparency, would be pleased to see a ferret, with a deerstalker hat and magnifying glass, pop up on his screen. This creature is the mascot for BetaDataFerrett, an online application offered by America’s Census Bureau. ...

Amid catastrophe in Haiti, a new controversy about adoptions

IT MUST have seemed like a good idea at the time. The New Life Children’s Refuge, a Christian group from Idaho, saw no need to bother with paperwork or official permission when they decided to take 33 Haitian children to the Dominican Republic where they apparently hoped to build an orphanage.

Furious officials arrested ten of the group’s members on charges of kidnapping (which they deny). Many of the children turned out to have families. A similar row erupted in 2007 when workers from Zoe’s Ark, a French charity, were accused of kidnapping 103 children in Chad. Ostensibly orphans from the Darfur region of Sudan, destined for adoption in France, many turned out to be local children, and not orphans. Six charity workers were jailed. ...

It was too soon to say that Osama bin Laden’s followers were on the wane—but pessimism should not be overdone

ONLY a few months ago, intelligence experts were saying that al-Qaeda and its allies were in decline, both militarily and ideologically. But two bombs less than a week apart, one failed and the other successful, have put an end to such optimism.

The talk of al-Qaeda’s downfall did not come from thin air. In the view of many analysts, the network’s central leadership had been decimated through drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal belt; al-Qaeda’s Saudi branch was all but defeated; its brethren in Iraq were marginalised; and those in other regions could mount only local attacks. Al-Qaeda had failed to land a blow in the West since the London bombs of 2005. Funds were dwindling, and more Muslims were eschewing global terror. ...

The politics of global disruption, and how they may change

THE 1990s was “the age of abundance”, argued Brink Lindsey in a book of that title. Round the world, incomes were rising; capital markets were processing endless flows of money and investment; technological gains meant that ever more information was available ever more cheaply. And politics in the age of abundance, Mr Lindsey claimed, was all about values. In America this was the period of the “culture wars” over abortion and gun ownership; internationally, there was a huge expansion in concern over human rights.

The 2010s, it is sometimes said, will be an age of scarcity. The warning signs of change are said to be the food-price spike of 2007-08, the bid by China and others to grab access to oil, iron ore and farmland and the global recession. The main problems of scarcity are water and food shortages, demographic change and state failure. How will that change politics? ...

Should the economic squeeze mean cuts, reform or more spending on education?

IN CALIFORNIA the students are revolting—not against their teachers, but in sympathy with them. The state’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has cut $1 billion, some 20% of the University of California’s budget, as he tries to balance the state’s books. Fees may rise by a fifth, to over $10,000. Support staff are being fired; academics must take unpaid leave.

That is part of a global picture in which cash-strapped governments in the rich world are scrutinising the nearly 5% of GDP they devote to education. Those budgets may not be the top candidates for the chop, but they cannot fully escape it. ...

Enrolling the world’s poorest children in school needs new thinking, not just more money from taxpayers

DAWN has just broken but classes have already started at the village school in Aqualaar, in the Garissa district of Kenya’s arid north-east. Around 30 children, mostly from families of Somali herders, sit listening as an enthusiastic 18-year-old teacher, Ibrahim Hussein, gives an arithmetic lesson. The school is really little more than a sandy patch of ground under an acacia tree. Mr Hussein’s blackboard hangs from its branches. There are no desks or chairs. Pupils follow the lesson by using sticks to scratch numbers in the sand.

The lack of basic kit is only too typical of schools in poor countries. What is unusual, sadly, is that Mr Hussein was actually present and teaching when his school was visited by Kevin Watkins, the lead author of “Reaching the Marginalised”, a new report on education in the developing world by UNESCO. ...

A disturbing decline in global liberty prompts some hard thinking about what is needed for democracy to prevail

MORE than at any time since the cold war, liberal democracy needs defending. That warning was issued recently by Arch Puddington, a veteran American campaigner for civil and political rights around the world.

This week the reasons for his concern became clearer. Freedom House, a lobby group based in Washington, DC (where Mr Puddington is research director), found in its latest annual assessment that liberty and human rights had retreated globally for the fourth consecutive year. It said this marked the longest period of decline in freedom since the organisation began its reports nearly 40 years ago. ...

The rising profile of Muslim students in the Western world

WHEN news emerged of the life-story of the Nigerian who tried to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, there were cries of bewilderment in some quarters, groans of dismay in others, and shouts of “I told you so” from a small army of Cassandras.

Whatever motivated Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to become a terrorist, it was not material deprivation; he came from a rich family. The biographical detail that fascinated many terrorism-watchers was his record as president of the Islamic Society at University College London, where he had studied engineering. ...

The administrative costs per $1m lent by the World Bank and the International Development Bank during 2009 were $20,600 and $15,314 respectively, not $19,000 and $26,833 (“Cap in hand”, March 6th). And despite "general consensus", shareholders of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development do not vote on its capital-increase plan until May. Sorry.

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Temporary work may dim future employment prospects

IS ANY job better than no job? Some research has suggested that unemployed workers should take up any job they can get, including temporary work, as a bridge to higher-paying employment. But what may be good for the economy, reducing the drain on government coffers, may be bad for the individuals concerned. In a forthcoming paper in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Susan Houseman of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Michigan show that taking up temporary work after a spell of unemployment can hurt future earnings.

The authors looked at data from Detroit’s “Work First” welfare-to-work initiative, which uses placement agencies to put low-skilled unemployed people into paid jobs. They then assessed participants’ earnings and job tenure before and after their involvement in the programme. ...

Beijing signals a crackdown on borrowing by local governments

ENDLESS arcane pronouncements spew forth from China’s bureaucracies. But some matter much more than others. In recent weeks a number of the country’s senior leaders and regulators have signalled an end to the practice of local governments extending guarantees on loans taken out by their special financing entities. That could spell big trouble for Chinese banks.

The comments have focused attention on research done by Victor Shih, a professor of Northwestern University in America, into China’s local investment companies. These financing vehicles allow municipalities to circumvent central-government restrictions on direct borrowing. As many as 8,000 of these investment companies may exist, estimates Mr Shih, whose work draws on regulatory filings and various government announcements. ...

The merits of inflation as a solution to the rich world’s problems are easily overstated

IT HAS long been considered a scourge, an obstacle to investment and a tax on the thrifty. It seems strange, then, that inflation is now touted as a solution to the rich world’s economic troubles. At first sight the case seems compelling. If central banks had a higher target for inflation, that would allow for bigger cuts in real interest rates in a recession. Faster inflation makes it easier to restore cost-competitiveness in depressed industries and regions. And it would help reduce the private and public debt burdens that weigh on the rich world’s economies. In practice, however, allowing prices to rise more quickly has costs as well as benefits.

The orthodoxy on inflation is certainly shifting. A recent IMF paper* co-authored by the fund’s chief economist suggests that very low inflation may do more harm than good. Empirical research is far clearer about the harmful effects on output once inflation is in double digits. So a 4% inflation target might be better than a goal of 2% as it would allow for monetary policy to respond more aggressively to economic “shocks”. If the expected inflation rate rose by a notch or two, wages and interest rates would shift up to match it. The higher rates required in normal times would create the space for bigger cuts during slumps. ...

A financial system in suspense

THAT old Spanish stereotype of putting things off until manana still applies today. For nearly two years bankers have been talking about the need to restructure a bloated financial system, particularly the country’s 45 unlisted savings banks, the cajas de ahorros. About half of the cajas, which are controlled by local politicians, have announced their intention to merge, hoping to tap into the €99 billion ($135 billion) Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring (FROB), which was created in June.

Regional politicians, reluctant to give away their piggy banks, are prepared to sanction some internal mergers. Catalonia, for example, has allowed some consolidation, as has Andalusia. Progress is slower elsewhere. Caixanova, a savings bank in Galicia, is resisting a union with Caixa Galicia, a rival. The sector has also been waiting for Spain’s second-largest savings bank, Caja Madrid, to make a move. Until recently, it was paralysed by a political power struggle at the top. ...

AIG reluctantly hands its crown as America’s global life insurer to MetLife

ANOTHER week, another opportunity for AIG’s rivals to expand at the American insurer’s expense. Days after sealing a $35.5 billion deal for its Asian life-insurance operations with Britain’s Prudential, the firm, which is being dismembered to recoup bail-out costs, agreed on March 8th to sell another crown jewel, Alico. This will propel New York-based MetLife, which is paying $15.5 billion, into the industry’s global elite. Although it is the biggest life insurer in America, where its Snoopy mascot is ubiquitous, it has been tentative abroad. Alico will give it a presence in 64 countries, up from 17 now, taking its non-American revenue from 15% of the total to 40%.

The biggest leap will be in Japan, the world’s second-largest life market, in which Alico is a top-tier competitor. But MetLife’s boss, Robert Henrikson (who took over in 2006 from Robert Benmosche, now AIG’s chief executive), also has his eye on the faster-growing markets in eastern Europe, the Middle East and Latin America that make up almost a quarter of Alico’s business. Another attraction is its distribution network: 60,000 agents, brokers and other local middlemen. ...

The alarming future for Japan's finances

CASSANDRA’S curse was that her warnings would never be believed. Doom-mongers in the Japanese government-bond market have suffered a milder fate: they were just far, far too early.

The trade has seemed obvious for years. Japan has run continuous fiscal deficits and seen its debt downgraded by the ratings agencies. With its bonds yielding between 1-2%, the downside risk of a bearish bet has been limited while the upside potential has looked huge. ...

Microfinance focuses on lending. Now the industry is turning to deposits

IT IS hard for people in the rich world to imagine what it is like to live on $2 a day. But for those who do, the problem is often not just a low income, but an unpredictable one. Living on $2 a day frequently means living for ten days on $20 earned on a single day. The task of smoothing consumption is made more complicated if there is nowhere to store money safely. In an emergency, richer people might choose between dipping into their savings and borrowing. The choice for the great mass of the unbanked in the developing world is limited to whom to borrow from, often at great cost.

That they can borrow at all is partly due to the rapid growth of microfinance, which specialises in lending small amounts to poor people. Several big microfinance institutions (MFIs) also offer savings accounts: Grameen Bank in Bangladesh is a prominent example. But the industry remains dominated by credit, and the ability to save through an MFI is often linked to customers’ willingness to borrow from it. Of 166 MFIs surveyed in 2009 by the Microfinance Information Exchange, a think-tank, all offered credit but only 27% offered savings products. Advocates of a greater variety of financial services for the poor argue for more balance. ...

Insuring crops with a mobile phone

ONE of the things holding back agriculture in developing countries is the unwillingness of farmers with small plots of land to invest in better seed and fertiliser. Only half of Kenyan farmers buy improved seed or spend money on other inputs. Many use poor-quality seed kept from previous harvests. That is understandable when drought or deluge can destroy their crop, but it has the effect of reducing yields. A new microinsurance scheme promises to help.

Kilimo Salama, which in Kiswahili means “safe farming”, uses a combination of mobile phones and 30 automated solar-powered weather stations to provide crop insurance. It has been set up by UAP Insurance of Kenya, Safaricom, Kenya’s biggest mobile-network operator, and the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, part of a big Swiss agribusiness group. After a successful trial with 200 farmers last year, Kilimo Salama has just been expanded in the hope of attracting 5,000 farmers in western and central Kenya this year. ...

Eurocrats offer up half-baked ideas to prevent a future sovereign-debt scare

NOW that Greece has given in to pressure from its peers for a more austere budget, the euro zone’s policy brass suddenly seems more sympathetic towards its most troubled member. On reflection, perhaps the fault with Greece’s parlous public finances lay not just with its budgetary profligacy but also elsewhere: in the absence of a central euro-zone authority for helping out cash-strapped countries; or with the credit-rating agencies that had unhelpfully downgraded Greek government bonds; or with the amoral speculators who had bet against those bonds and helped drive up borrowing costs.

It was mildly surprising that some of the messages of support came from Germany, where fiscal indiscipline is least tolerated. On March 7th the finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, floated the idea of a European Monetary Fund (EMF) to act as a lender of last resort to euro-zone countries that could not raise funds in capital markets on tolerable terms. He offered few details about how an EMF would be financed or how it would operate. It would not be a “competitor” to the IMF, based in Washington, DC, though it would seek to police the fiscal policies of lax member countries. ...

The central bank loses a vice-chairman but starts to regain its standing

THE Federal Reserve, accused by critics of monetary and regulatory malpractice, has seen its standing plummet. The House of Representatives has passed one bill to audit its monetary decisions and proposed others to strip it of regulatory duties. Almost a third of the Senate voted against confirming Ben Bernanke to a second term as chairman.

It appears, however, that its rehabilitation has begun. As part of negotiations on a financial-reform bill, Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, is considering a proposal that would let the Fed retain most of its regulatory duties. Mr Dodd originally wanted to take oversight of banks away from the Fed and other regulators and give it to a new body. He wanted to hand oversight of consumer protection to another new creation, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. ...

The insurance industry’s biggest-ever acquisition has prompted the largest-ever rights issue: AIG and Prudential are both playing for huge stakes

INSURANCE is a pretty stodgy business. This week’s agreement by Prudential of Britain to buy AIG’s Asian life-insurance operations, AIA, is anything but. If the $35.5 billion deal goes through—and given the convulsions in both companies’ share prices, that is not certain—it will radically alter both Prudential and AIG and will provide a closely watched test of what can and cannot be done by financial firms as they try to build Asian franchises.

On paper, the transaction would transform Prudential into the region’s dominant insurance company. It will have a leading, if not the leading, presence in 15 big markets with a vast sales force offering critical health and investment products to a population that is becoming wealthy enough to appreciate them. Assuming the transaction goes through successfully, the proportion of sales Prudential generates from Asia should eventually expand from 30% to 80%. Prudential is paying a fraction of what AIA would have gone for prior to AIG’s implosion. It is a remarkable opportunity at a rather pedestrian price. ...

Does India’s government pay any heed to its economic advisers?

ECONOMISTS like nothing better than giving advice to governments. But why do they, of all people, imagine that anyone listens? In their models economists assume that governments, like other actors in the economy, have objectives of their own, which they seek to advance as best they can. They are not disinterested servants of the public good. So governments will ignore a recommendation from their advisers unless it suits them, in which case they would have done it anyway.

In his book “Prelude to Political Economy”, published in 2000, Kaushik Basu of Cornell University wrestled with this paradox. “If, seeing high unemployment in an economy, a person… advises entrepreneurs to employ more labourers, or consumers to demand more goods, this typically causes economists to share a laugh.” And yet economists routinely advise governments to act in the economy’s interests rather than their own. ...

Countries don’t like bad news about their creditworthiness

WHEN the subprime crisis broke in 2007, credit-rating agencies were among the first groups to take the blame. Critics argued that investors had drawn false comfort from the AAA ratings that the agencies handed out on complex packages of mortgage-related debt. Furthermore, the raters were hamstrung by the conflicts of interest inherent in being paid by issuers to assess their bonds. Never again, it was solemnly proclaimed, should the markets rely on the word of the agencies.

Now that investor attention has shifted to sovereign risk, the three big agencies (Fitch, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s) once more find themselves at the centre of the action. Upgrades of sovereign debt exceeded downgrades in every year between 1999 and 2007. That has changed as a result of the financial crisis (see chart). ...

Countries compete to weaken their currencies

ONCE upon a time, nations took pride in their strong currencies, seeing them as symbols of economic and political power. Nowadays it seems as if the foreign-exchange markets are home to a bunch of Charles Atlas’s 97-pound weaklings, all of them eager to have sand kicked in their faces.

First the dollar took a battering in 2009 when the return of risk appetite, and the ability to borrow the currency at very low rates, sent money flowing out of America for use in speculative “carry trade” transactions. Then the euro got pummelled because of concerns about the euro zone’s exposure to sovereign-debt problems in southern Europe. Finally sterling hit the canvas this week because of concerns about the British government’s deficit and the policy gridlock that may result from a hung parliament after a general election expected in May. ...

Should every child receive a bank account at birth?

YOU come into the world with nothing, the saying goes. A new campaign proposes to change that by giving every newborn child in the world an online bank account with $100 in it. The aim of the FinancialAccess@Birth (FAB) campaign is to do something about the fact that half the world’s population has no access to mainstream financial services. This is a huge handicap, exposing people who are typically already on the poverty line to risks that wealthier folk can manage through savings or insurance, and leaving them to pay unregistered moneylenders through the nose.

The campaign is the brainchild of Bhagwan Chowdhry, a finance professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is starting to attract some prominent supporters, including Peter Singer, a well-known philosopher, and Vijay Mahajan, an Indian social entrepreneur. ...

A difficult time for a fund-raising spree

Correction to this article

A SENIOR World Bank official describes its efforts to secure an additional $3 billion-5 billion in paid-in capital as a “once-in-a-generation increase to deal with the effects of a once-in-a-generation crisis”. The bank agreed to lend $32.9 billion to poor countries in the year to June 2009, two-and-a-half times the previous year’s outlay of $13 billion. If it carried on at this rate, Robert Zoellick, the bank’s president, warned in October, its lending would face constraints by the middle of this year. ...

The new problem with Asian sovereign debt—scarcity

ELEVEN months ago Indonesia’s government paid almost 12% to raise long-term money on the international capital markets, while America was financing its own debt for less than 3%. By early January the rate on America’s debt had climbed a bit, but Indonesia’s financing costs had plunged to a shade under 6%.

This remarkable shift in financing costs is not unique to Indonesia. The Philippine government issued a dollar-based bond in January carrying an interest rate of 5.7%. A year earlier, its outstanding bonds carried an effective rate of 8.4%. Malaysia and South Korea are also rumoured to be in the market for debt, and in sharp contrast to some rich-world issues, the buyers are likely to be at least as eager as the sellers. ...

Trustbusters want to put less emphasis on market definition when assessing mergers

WHAT line of business are you in? It is hard for a lot of people to answer this question with a straight face. As tasks become more specialised and firms occupy ever-smaller market niches, job titles and business categories can sound comically obscure. It is a source of embarrassment for antitrust agencies, too. To assess whether there is a enough competition in a market, trustbusters must first decide what the market is. The results can be risible. For instance, Britain’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT) said this month that the purchase of a job-lot of theatres by the Ambassador Theatre Group did not raise competition concerns. The OFT’s definition of the relevant market in this case (the “provision of regional theatres for medium-scale national touring productions”) is unlikely to be found on anyone’s business card.

Some economists doubt whether defining a market is useful at all when judging marriages between very specialist firms. The issue has a growing saliency because America’s trustbusters are currently rewriting the guidelines for “horizontal” mergers (tie-ups between firms that offer the same sorts of products). The update is partly an exercise in good housekeeping: the current guidelines were written in 1992 and do not reflect advances in economic theory and changes to actual practice since then. It is also an opportunity for American policymakers to shift the analysis of mergers away from an obsession with “structure”—the size of the combined market share of merging firms—to focus instead on how big a constraint each firm is on the other’s pricing. ...

One of the scourges of modern life may have been profoundly misunderstood

BEING fat is bad for you. On that, almost everyone agrees. It is just possible, though, that almost everyone is wrong. In fact, getting fat may be a mechanism that protects the body. The health problems associated with fatness may not be caused by it but be another consequence, another symptom, of overeating.

That is the heretical proposal of Roger Unger and Philipp Scherer. Dr Unger and Dr Scherer, who work at the University of Texas, in Dallas, have been reviewing the science of what has come to be known as metabolic syndrome. This is a cluster of symptoms such as high blood pressure, insulin resistance and fatness that seem to increase the risk of heart disease and strokes, late-onset diabetes and liver disease. Metabolic syndrome is found in a sixth of the American population. ...

Advances in brain-to-machine connections

THE possibility of operating a machine using thought control has long fascinated researchers. It would be the ultimate video-game controller, for one thing. On a more practical level, it would help disabled and paralysed people use computers, artificial limbs, motorised wheelchairs or robots. New developments in brain-to-machine interfaces show that such possibilities are getting closer.

For many years it has been possible for people to manipulate relatively simple devices—such as a computer’s on-screen cursor—by thinking about moving them. One way is by implanting electrodes into the brain to measure the electrical activity associated with certain movements. Another uses electroencephalography (EEG), which detects the same activity using electrodes placed on the scalp. In both cases, a computer learns to associate particular brain signals with intended actions. ...

Body, mind and genes all play a role in influencing the perception of pain

PAIN, unfortunately, is a horrible necessity of life. It protects people by alerting them to things that might injure them. But some long-term pain has nothing to do with any obvious injury. One estimate suggests that one in six adults suffer from a “chronic pain” condition.

Steve McMahon, a pain researcher at King’s College, London, says that if skin is damaged, for instance with a hot iron, an area of sensitivity develops around the outside of the burn where although untouched and undamaged by the iron the behaviour of the nerve fibres is disrupted. As a result, heightened sensitivity and abnormal pain sensations occur in the surrounding skin. Chronic pain, he says, may similarly be caused not by damage to the body, but because weak pain signals become amplified. ...

Scouring blogs for useful information

“I NOTICED that the doormat was at a slightly crooked angle. I reached down and moved the mat back into its correct place.” Thus began a recent entry on The dullest blog in the world. Although this publication is something of a satire on the internet’s inane blogs, scientists are finding—to their surprise—that useful information can actually be mined from the tedium of the blogosphere.

Andrew Gordon and his colleagues at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies in Los Angeles have been trying to teach computers about cause and effect. Computers are not good at dealing with causality. They can identify particular events but working out relationships is more difficult. This is particularly true when it comes to using computers to analyse the human experience. ...

You might think that measuring the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would be a priority. If you did think that, though, you would be wrong

IN NEGOTIATIONS on nuclear weapons the preferred stance is “Trust but verify”. In negotiations on climate change there seems little opportunity for either. Trust, as anyone who attended last year’s summit in Copenhagen can attest, is in the shortest of supplies. So, too, is verification.

Barack Obama was asked when he was in Copenhagen whether a provision by which countries could peek into each others’ assessment processes was strong enough to be sure there was no cheating. He answered reassuringly that “we can actually monitor a lot of what takes place through satellite imagery”. That statement conjured up thoughts of the sort of cold-war satellite system that America used to identify and count Russian missiles. But the president was being a bit previous; at the moment, no such system exists, because America’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), a satellite that would have fulfilled the role, was lost on launch this time last year. The purpose of OCO was to work out the fate of carbon dioxide that is emitted by industrial processes but does not then stay in the atmosphere—about 60% of the total. ...

If females must compete, evolution will furnish them with weapons to do so

WHEN a species evolves traits that seem to have little to do with individual survival—bright colours, say, or oversize horns, it is typically the male alone who sports these excesses. Observing this, Charles Darwin proposed the idea of “selection in relation to sex” as a follow-up to his theory of natural selection. He defined it as the struggle between members of one sex, “generally male”, to possess the other. The plumage of peacocks attracts peahens. The stag’s antlers are there to fight off other stags. And so on.

But females, it turns out, have some tricks of their own. Nicola Watson and Leigh Simmons of the University of Western Australia have published a paper this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society about Onthophagus sagittarius, a species of dung beetle in which not only do both sexes sport horns, but those of the females are larger than those of the males. They set out to discover whether female competition accounted for these impressive armaments, and whether there was a trade-off between horns and fecundity. ...

How to predict the consistency of snow

“THE wrong type of snow” became famous as a lame excuse in Britain in February 1991 when, caught out by a cold snap, British Rail blamed severe disruption to its services on problems clearing unusually soft and powdery snow from its tracks. But British Rail had a point. There are, indeed, different types of snow—and people who live in mountainous areas, or visit to ski, like to know which ones to expect. Forecasting what sort of snow will fall is not easy. But a pair of researchers at the University of Utah think they have cracked the problem.

Jim Steenburgh and Trevor Alcott carried out their research in the Alta ski area, which is about 3,000 metres (10,000 feet) up in the Wasatch range. Good record-keeping at the resort, including precipitation measurements that are taken automatically every hour, allowed them to analyse 457 snowfalls that took place between 1999 and 2007. ...

The earliest animal tracks yet found have been unearthed in Canada

ONE of the greatest mysteries of the history of life is the Cambrian explosion. Prior to 560m years ago, animal fossils are rare. Then, in a geological eyeblink, they become common. Shelly creatures such as trilobites and brachiopods, of whose ancestors there is little sign in the rocks, are suddenly everywhere. Biologists would dearly love to know what happened.

Recent discoveries at the delightfully named Mistaken Point, in Newfoundland, serve to lift the veil slightly. These findings are not of Precambrian animals themselves, but of their tracks. And these, paradoxically, may be more useful. ...

In "Signs of life" (February 27th) we said that the Square Kilometre Array radio-telescope collaboration planned to build its grid over a square kilometre of land. In fact, it is the combined collecting area of the telescopes involved that is one square kilometre. The instruments themselves would be scattered over several hundred square kilometres.

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How to analyse smuggled uranium

BETWEEN 1992 and 2007, according to Ian Hutcheon of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, 17kg of highly enriched uranium was seized from smugglers around the world, along with 400 grams of plutonium. In neither case is that enough for a proper atom bomb, but it is still worrying. Presumably, more is out there. Even if it is not, the material that has been found could have been used to make a “radiological” weapon, by blowing it up and scattering it around a city using conventional explosives. Dr Hutcheon is one of those charged with analysing this captured material, to discover how dangerous it really is and where it came from—and thus whether it has been stolen from legitimate nuclear projects or made on the sly. At the AAAS meeting in San Diego, he showed off some of the tricks of his trade.

His main tool is a device called a secondary-ion mass spectrometer. This measures the flight path of ions (electrically charged atoms) through a magnetic field. The lighter an ion is, the more the field bends its trajectory. The spectrometer can thus distinguish between, say, 235U (the fissile sort, from which bombs are made) and 238U (which has three extra neutrons in its nucleus and is much less fissile). Natural uranium has only seven atoms per thousand of the former. Weapons-grade uranium is 95% 235U. The “depleted” uranium used in armour-penetrating shells, by contrast, is almost pure 238U. ...

Researchers say an afternoon nap prepares the brain to learn

MAD dogs and Englishmen, so the song has it, go out in the midday sun. And the business practices of England’s lineal descendant, America, will have you in the office from nine in the morning to five in the evening, if not longer. Much of the world, though, prefers to take a siesta. And research presented to the AAAS meeting in San Diego suggests it may be right to do so. It has already been established that those who siesta are less likely to die of heart disease. Now, Matthew Walker and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that they probably have better memory, too. A post-prandial snooze, Dr Walker has discovered, sets the brain up for learning.

The role of sleep in consolidating memories that have already been created has been understood for some time. Dr Walker has been trying to extend this understanding by looking at sleep’s role in preparing the brain for the formation of memories in the first place. He was particularly interested in a type of memory called episodic memory, which relates to specific events, places and times. This contrasts with procedural memory, of the skills required to perform some sort of mechanical task, such as driving. The theory he and his team wanted to test was that the ability to form new episodic memories deteriorates with accrued wakefulness, and that sleep thus restores the brain’s capacity for efficient learning. ...

This year’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science looked at, among other things, fire, siestas, alien life and nuclear forensics

CALIFORNIA, though regarded by some as one of the more civilised parts of the world, is prey to wildfires. Last August, for example, a fire took hold to the north of Los Angeles. Over the course of almost two months it devoured 65,000 hectares (160,000 acres) of chaparral and forest, destroyed 89 houses and claimed the lives of two firefighters. Over the past few years other parts of the American west have burned in similar fashion. Australia, too, saw serious fires last year. The question on many people’s minds, therefore, is whether such fires are becoming more common, and if they are, whether that is a result of climate change.

To examine this question (and many others, in many fields of scientific endeavour), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) held its annual meeting this year in San Diego. On February 19th a session was devoted to the environmental role of fire. It brought together palaeontologists and ecologists, as well as climate experts, because fire is a natural and useful part of both past and present ecosystems—a fact that human fire controllers have only reluctantly come to recognise in their zeal to snuff out any blaze as soon as possible. ...

As the search for alien life turns 50, its practitioners find new methods

Correction to this article

HALF a century ago a radio astronomer called Frank Drake thought of a way to calculate the likelihood of establishing contact with aliens. He suggested the following figures should be multiplied: how many stars are formed in the galaxy in a year; what fraction of these have planets and thus form solar systems; the average number of planets per solar system that have the potential to support life; on what percentage of those where it is possible do such biospheres actually form; what percentage of such biospheres give rise to intelligent species; what percentage of intelligent life is able to transmit signals into space; and for how long could such intelligence keeps sending signals. ...

A way to turn out lighting by the metre

THE printing of body parts (see article) will probably remain a bespoke industry for ever. Printed lighting, though, might be mass produced. That, at least, is the promise of a technology being developed in Sweden by Ludvig Edman of Umea University and Nathaniel Robinson of Linkoping. Dr Edman and Dr Robinson have taken a promising technique called the organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, and tweaked it in an ingenious way. The result is a sheet similar to wallpaper that can illuminate itself at the flick of a switch.

An OLED is a layer of semiconducting polymer sandwiched between two conductive layers that act as electrodes. When a current is passed between these electrodes, the polymer gives off light. The light is created by electrons released from one electrode layer falling into positively charged “holes” that have been generated by the polymer’s interaction with the other layer. These holes are gaps in the polymer’s electronic structure where an electron ought to be, but isn’t. ...

The Americans may still go to the moon before the Chinese

WHEN America’s space agency, NASA, announced its spending plans in February, some people worried that its cancellation of the Constellation moon programme had ended any hopes of Americans returning to the Earth’s rocky satellite. The next footprints on the lunar regolith were therefore thought likely to be Chinese. Now, though, the private sector is arguing that the new spending plan actually makes it more likely America will return to the moon.

The new plan encourages firms to compete to provide transport to low Earth orbit (LEO). The budget proposes $6 billion over five years to spur the development of commercial crew and cargo services to the international space station. This money will be spent on “man-rating” existing rockets, such as Boeing’s Atlas V, and on developing new spacecraft that could be launched on many different rockets. The point of all this activity is to create healthy private-sector competition for transport to the space station—and in doing so to drive down the cost of getting into space. ...

A machine that prints organs is coming to market

THE great hope of transplant surgeons is that they will, one day, be able to order replacement body parts on demand. At the moment, a patient may wait months, sometimes years, for an organ from a suitable donor. During that time his condition may worsen. He may even die. The ability to make organs as they are needed would not only relieve suffering but also save lives. And that possibility may be closer with the arrival of the first commercial 3D bio-printer for manufacturing human tissue and organs.

The new machine, which costs around $200,000, has been developed by Organovo, a company in San Diego that specialises in regenerative medicine, and Invetech, an engineering and automation firm in Melbourne, Australia. One of Organovo’s founders, Gabor Forgacs of the University of Missouri, developed the prototype on which the new 3D bio-printer is based. The first production models will soon be delivered to research groups which, like Dr Forgacs’s, are studying ways to produce tissue and organs for repair and replacement. At present much of this work is done by hand or by adapting existing instruments and devices. ...

The coup de grace that shatters ice shelves is administered by ocean waves

IN 2008 part of the Wilkins ice shelf on the edge of the Antarctic peninsular suddenly disintegrated. It was seen by some as a portend. If other, larger shelves—huge ice sheets that have slipped off the land but are not floating freely on the sea—were to break up in a similar way, their non-floating ice (which is not subject to Archimedes’s principle that it displaces its own weight of water) would be converted into floating ice (which is), and the sea level would rise.

The Wilkins shelf may or may not have been the victim, ultimately, of climate change. Regardless of what weakened it, though, it was not rising temperatures that caused the sudden break up. Peter Bromirski of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego thinks he knows what did: a little-studied phenomenon called infragravity waves. ...

Tiny microphones provide a new way to eliminate background noise

MANY of those who talk loudly into their mobile phones are just inconsiderate show-offs for whom no punishment is too evil. Sometimes, however, there is an excuse. Noise in the background can make it hard for your interlocutor to hear what you are saying. Raised voices are an inevitable consequence.

Soon, though, this excuse will vanish. Thanks to advances in manufacturing techniques, which allow miniature mechanical components to be built into electronic chips, it is now possible to add better noise-cancelling features to phones, and also to other products, such as the small “earbuds” used to listen to music players. ...

Are the bugs in wild animals resistant to antibiotics?

BACTERIA that are resistant to antibiotics are becoming disturbingly common in people. More worrying still is that the genes which confer this resistance are also showing up in bacteria found in other animals. When resistant bacteria hop between species, that can increase the rate of evolution and, over time (through the sharing of independently evolved traits) turn a mildly resistant bug that is merely a nuisance into a serious threat.

This has left researchers wondering how resistant bacteria get into animals in the first place. One possibility is that genes for antibiotic-resistance circulate naturally in wild populations. Many antibiotics are, after all, derived from the natural defence mechanisms of other micro-organisms, so it is not unreasonable to think that antiantibiotics, too, are widespread in nature. Another possibility is that human antibiotic use has promoted the circulation of resistance genes to other species. ...

In America, the number of people employed outside agriculture fell slightly, by 36,000 during the month of February. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 9.7%. A little under 41% of unemployed Americans, or 6.1m people, have been out of work for six months or more. The number of people working part-time because they cannot find full-time work rose by 0.5m to 8.8m.

GDP in the euro area edged up by 0.1% during the three months to the end of December compared with the previous quarter. GDP declined by 2.1% year-on-year. ...

In 27 out of 36 countries surveyed by Manpower, an employment-services firm, more companies said they expected to add workers in the three months to the end of June than said they expected to reduce their workforce. The difference between the proportion of hirers and firers was highest in Brazil and India, at 38 and 36 percentage points respectively. Throughout Asia, companies have become more optimistic about hiring than they were a year ago, most dramatically in Singapore and only marginally in Japan. Things look less rosy in Europe. In Spain and Italy, more companies expect shrinkage in their workforce than expect it to grow. In Italy and the Netherlands (not shown) the outlook has darkened from a year ago.

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During the past twelve months many major currencies have risen against the dollar. The appreciation has been most marked for the Australian dollar, which has strengthened by 41.9% against the greenback. New Zealand’s currency, which has appreciated by 40.9%, follows closely behind. Sterling also appreciated against the dollar over the past year, though its recent bout of weakness can be seen in a 7.3% drop since December 31st 2009. Several other rich-world currencies, like the Swiss franc and the euro, have also fallen against the dollar since the end of last year. Emerging-market currencies like the rouble, the Indian rupee and the zloty have all appreciated against the dollar over the same period.

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Real Madrid have defended their title in Deloitte’s annual Football Money League. The Spanish club was the biggest earner for the fifth consecutive year and the first to generate revenues of more than €400m ($560m). On the pitch, however, rivals Barcelona rank top, winning the domestic double and the UEFA Champions League, and increasing total revenues by 18% to take second place in the Money League, displacing Manchester United. Arsenal returned to the top five after a year’s absence with a 7% increase in revenue in sterling terms. Despite the recession, most clubs posted revenue growth. The combined revenues of the top 20 clubs exceeded €3.9 billion in 2008-09, an increase of €26m on the previous year.

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Bonuses on Wall Street are bouncing back, even though its banks may only be alive thanks to government support. New York City’s financial industry paid its employees bonuses of $20.3 billion last year, according to figures released by the New York State Comptroller’s office. The average Wall Street employee took home nearly $124,000 on top of his base salary last year—a quarter more than in 2008 but still less than the average bonus in 2006, when the figure peaked at a staggering $191,360 per head. In 2008, when the industry lost a record $42.6 billion, it paid out $17.4 billion in bonuses. Total compensation on Wall Street may have exceeded $55 billion in 2009, which would be a new record.

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