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A new type of helicopter breaks speed records
THE ability of a helicopter to hover and land almost anywhere makes it an enormously useful machine. But helicopters have their limitations, particularly when it comes to flying fast. In a recent series of test flights, a new type of chopper has begun smashing speed records.
The X2 is an experimental helicopter being developed by Sikorsky, an American company, at a test-flight centre in Florida. It recently flew at more than 430kph (267mph), according to a report in Spectrum, published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The present record is held by a souped-up Westland Lynx helicopter, which managed 400kph in 1986. But most helicopters can’t fly at anything like these speeds and are typically flat out at 270kph. ...
The moves that make men attractive to women
THE need to identify a suitable mate is such a strong biological urge that the animal kingdom has spawned a bewildering array of courtship rituals. Hippo males fling their faeces; flatworms have penis-jousting contests; and humpback whales sing and leap above the ocean surface. Such competitive displays depend on the speed, strength and size of an animal, which is why they convey a measure of reproductive fitness.
Dancing is popular among animals for similar reasons. Scorpions and sandhill cranes, for instance, dance to impress. Humans also use dance as part of courtship, but it has been difficult for scientists to pin down exactly what it is about a dance that appeals to members of the opposite sex. This is because factors such as facial attractiveness, height and even social status tend to confound any attempt to judge the relative merits of a person’s gyrations. ...
A group of oceanic micro-organisms just might prove a surprising ally in the fight against climate change
UNDERSTANDING how the oceans absorb carbon dioxide is crucial to understanding the role of that gas in the climate. It is rather worrying, then, that something profound may be missing from that understanding. But if Jiao Nianzhi of Xiamen University in China is right, it is. For he suggests there is a lot of carbon floating in the oceans that has not previously been noticed. It is in the form of what is known as refractory dissolved organic matter and it has been put there by a hitherto little-regarded group of creatures called aerobic anoxygenic photoheterotrophic bacteria (AAPB). If Dr Jiao is right, a whole new “sink” for carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has been discovered.
The main way that carbon dioxide is absorbed by the ocean is through photosynthesis by planktonic algae. These algae are the basis of most food chains in the sea—being eaten by tiny animals that are, in turn, eaten by larger ones. When all these creatures die, their remains (those bits that are not immediately eaten, anyway) sink to the sea floor, where some are eaten and some are buried indefinitely. These remains are known in the jargon as particulate organic matter. ...
Colin Tennant (Lord Glenconner) and Vladimir Gavrilovich Raitz, providers of different sorts of holidays, died on August 27th and 31st respectively, aged 83 and 88
SUN, sea and alcohol, for at least two weeks a year, is now one of the unwritten rights of the British people. All classes claim it, from the scarlet-shouldered shop assistant to the pouting celebrity in Ray-Bans; and the Fates, that tricksy trio, have decreed that two men should disappear simultaneously who made both sorts happy. Colin Tennant, later Lord Glenconner, arranged holidays so exclusive that only the very rich and famous could apply for them. Vladimir Raitz invented the all-in no-frills package tour for Everyman.
On Lord Glenconner’s “fantasy island” of Mustique in the Grenadines, Michael Douglas would high-dive off cliffs into the cobalt sea, and Bianca Jagger would be carried on a palanquin under mosquito-netting to a ritual enthroning; David Bowie was the bar-room bore, while Prince Andrew and Koo Stark played flirtatious games on the beach; and most particularly, in spring and autumn, Princess Margaret would take up residence, sometimes with her gardener-lover, in her Formica-filled villa by the shore. On the package holidays Mr Raitz promoted, striving workers who had never dreamed of “abroad” suddenly found they could afford GBP40 or so to get to the Costa del Sol and back; so out of the charter flight they crowded, phrase-books and sun-oil at the ready, to pack like pilchards onto beaches and into the steadily high-rising hotels. On Mustique Lord Glenconner repelled all paparazzi, so that who was bonking whom behind the bougainvillaea stayed secret. On Mr Raitz’s tours a rayon-clad rep crammed all-comers merrily on to the coach together, with “Kiss me Quick” on their hats. ...
Hewlett-Packard is suing to block Mark Hurd, its former chief executive, from joining a rival, Oracle. HP alleges his hiring breaches Mr Hurd’s exit agreement and would result in the transfer of trade secrets. At HP, Mr Hurd attended meetings where plans for future products were discussed, the lawsuit points out. See article
HSBC’s chairman, Stephen Green, said that he would step down from his role at Europe’s biggest bank at the end of the year. He is to become trade minister in Britain’s coalition government. See article ...
As over 1m people protested on the streets, France’s government presented its pension-reform plan to the National Assembly. The government claims the overhaul, which would raise the retirement age from 60 to 62, will save €70 billion ($89.2 billion), but unions are threatening further demonstrations and strikes. See article
In a video statement, ETA, the violent Basque separatist group, said it had been operating a ceasefire for several months, but did not say how long the truce would last. The Spanish government rejected the announcement as “insufficient”, and said it would not resume peace talks. ETA’s previous ceasefire, in 2006, lasted nine months. See article ...
Tertiary education pays off, both for the individual and the wider economy. In countries where most of the workforce has an upper secondary education (ie, most industrialised countries), a college or university qualification gives recipients extra earning power and generates tax revenues for the country in which they work. On average across those rich countries that are members of the OECD, a think-tank, the total extra return for male graduates is greater than $230,000, more than half of which accrues to the individual. The net public return is almost three times the initial investment, according to OECD figures. The private return is reduced by the earnings forgone while the student was in education.
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Job openings in America rose in July by 178,000 to 3.04m. In August private payrolls made a better-than-expected showing, increasing by 67,000 (and July’s figures were revised to show 36,000 more jobs added than previously reported).
Canadian benchmark interest rates were raised by 25 basis points to 1%. ...
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, pictured right, is at risk of falling out with Iran’s clergy because of the rise of the controversial confidant who stands behind him
IN THE summer of 2009 Iran’s divided conservatives came together to save the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after his disputed re-election provoked huge street protests by the reformist Green Movement. To have lost Mr Ahmadinejad to a liberal “plot” would, they judged, have imperilled the Islamic Republic which succours them all.
All the same, many conservatives are far from enamoured of Iran’s president. Challenging him, however, is turning out to be a different matter. Barely a year into his second and constitutionally final term, his future is again the object of dark speculation, only this time by people who once professed to be his friends. His immediate entourage, in particular, is being castigated and none more so than the man whom, it is thought, Mr Ahmadinejad would like to succeed him: his old friend and relation by marriage, Esfandiar Rahim Mashai. ...
Despite the puritan clerical authorities, soap operas still draw huge audiences
FROM modest origins, peddling rusty antennae so that bored housewives can watch Persian-language pop videos from America, the satellite man has become an indispensable part of Iranian middle-class life. BBC Persian, a London-based current affairs channel, enjoyed phenomenal popularity last year thanks to its coverage of months of political turmoil, but it has now ceded ground to Farsi1, which is part-owned by Rupert Murdoch and specialises in dubbed soap operas and sitcoms. For the purveyors of dishes and receivers, it is a chance to turn an honest riyal. Tehran is full of stories of the satellite man who started the summer driving a battered Kia Pride, a version of an ancient Ford assembled in Iran, and ended it in a glistening Japanese Lexus.
Being illegal, the calling is not without risks. The authorities are sensitive to what they perceive as cultural assaults from the West. But their promotion of the state broadcasting company has had poor results, not least because its programmes are dull and heavily censored. ...
Bahrain’s rulers are taking no chances against an uppity second-class majority
LIKE many island states, Bahrain is more complicated than its small size and population would suggest. Not as rich as the other Gulf monarchies, because it has little oil, the kingdom still prospers as a banking hub, touting itself as a regional haven of lower taxes, lower living costs and relative liberality. It also hosts America’s Fifth Fleet, with its large and expanding base outside the capital, Manama. Yet, as a crackdown ahead of next month’s general election shows, Bahrain is not without headaches.
As in Iraq before 2003, Sunni Muslims dominate Bahrain’s government, though Shias make up two-thirds of its 500,000 citizens. Hard-line Sunnis aligned with next-door Saudi Arabia, with conservatives in the ruling Khalifa family, have long suspected the Shias of secret loyalty to Bahrain’s other big neighbour, the Shia regional power Iran, which dropped territorial claims to the archipelago only in 1970. ...
Lebanon’s prime minister does a volte-face over the murder of his father
EVERYONE knows it takes chameleon qualities to survive the fractious, shifting politics of Lebanon. Still, this week’s admission by its prime minister, Saad Hariri, that he had acted rashly and wrongly by accusing Syria of his father’s murder ranks as a particularly lurid change of hue. Mr Hariri’s outspoken belief in Syrian guilt for the car-bombing of February 2005 that killed his father Rafik, a billionaire five-times prime minister, was shared by many Lebanese. Their united anger sparked the Cedar revolution that spring. Massive anti-Syrian demonstrations prompted the abrupt withdrawal of Syrian “peacekeeping” troops and intelligence agents, ending nearly three decades of Syrian domination over its smaller neighbour.
But the pieces of Lebanon’s complex sectarian puzzle have been shaken since then. Swept into power by the Cedar revolution, the younger Hariri and his allies have held parliamentary majorities, but only just. Pro-Syrian factions, bolstered by the unrivalled armed muscle of Hizbullah, the Shia party-cum-militia that fought a war with Israel in 2006, harassed and hamstrung Mr Hariri’s government, forcing it into a power-sharing deal in 2008. His political alliance has gradually weakened, and his main foreign backer, Saudi Arabia, has repaired its own strained ties with Syria. To many Lebanese, it became clear that it was only a matter of time before Mr Hariri made peace with Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, and sought his help to keep the lid on Lebanon’s troubles. ...
Commercial and political marketing thrive in Islam’s month of fasting
RAMADAN is over. The world’s billion-plus Muslims are back to eating when they like. But the end to gruelling daylight abstinence and excessive night-time revelry is not the only relief. For some the chief hope is that prices, which tend to soar during Ramadan, will drop back to normal. Others may relish more their sudden freedom from being relentlessly prodded to spend and consume.
Just as with Christmas in the West, everyone from paupers to multinational corporations seems to have a special pitch. In big cities such as Cairo, beggars exploit the seasonal spirit of giving by marching reinforcements to such choice spots as mosque exits and traffic choke-points. Advertisers, too, surge to promote their wares, especially on television. The month’s mix of short working hours, hot, hungry afternoons and long post-breakfast evenings creates a captive audience of millions, too listless to do much but flip channels. ...
A well-intentioned governor is annoying frustrated commuters
THE traffic in Lagos, Nigeria’s chaotic business capital, is enough to make the most patient of travellers go mad. A rush-hour commuter can take three hours to go 15km (nine miles). Office workers try, often in vain, not to doze off at their desks after arduous, sweaty journeys. Globe-trotting managers are never sure they will catch their flights.
A rare beneficiary has been the okada rider. On his cheap motorbike taxi, named after a once-admired no-frills domestic airline of the past, he often carries an entire family or a week’s groceries, ducking and weaving through the traffic. His wildly time-saving tactics include riding on the wrong side of the road and ignoring red lights. ...
Why Mozambicans took to the streets
FOLLOWING recent riots in Maputo, the capital, and in other cities in Mozambique that have left at least a dozen dead and more than 400 injured, the government has called off a 30% increase in the price of bread. Police said they had to resort to live ammunition against protesters after running out of rubber bullets. The government has apologised, saying it had never authorised the use of lethal force.
Shops and banks were looted, cars stoned and roads barricaded with rocks and burning tyres during three days of alcohol-fuelled rioting that paralysed the capital and shut down the main airport. Nearly 300 demonstrators were arrested, including nine accused of “incitement” for sending out mobile-phone text-messages urging people to join the protests against rising utility, transport and food prices. ...
Europe’s biggest engineering firm used to be known for two things: making everything but a profit; and scandal. Now things look very different
IN A 100-year-old workshop in the centre of Berlin stands a gleaming piece of forged metal, four storeys high. It is thicker than a person’s body and weighs almost as much as Boeing’s new Dreamliner aeroplane. This single, enormous hunk of steel—in essence, a huge bolt—will soon be at the centre of a gas turbine big enough to meet the electricity needs of a small city.
Though precisely engineered, the bolt is not especially complex, technically speaking. Perhaps a dozen companies around the world can make something similar. Yet the fact that it stands in Germany’s capital city, at a time when industrial jobs are supposed to be leaving rich countries for cheaper places, serves as a powerful symbol of the resilience of the country’s manufacturing—and of the huge component’s maker, Siemens. ...
Expanding the middle class requires better schools and reforms in public spending
HOME to over 1.5m people, Nezahualcoyotl sprawls over a flat, dried-up lake bed on the eastern outskirts of Mexico City. Back in the 1980s it was an impoverished settlement of dirt streets and one-storey shacks built of grey concrete blocks. Today the shacks have become comfortable homes of two or three storeys, the streets are asphalted and the traffic-clogged thoroughfares are lined with businesses of every type, lots of restaurants and several imposing gyms to work off all those meals. Since last year they have been facing competition from a big new shopping mall that would not look out of place in a suburb in the United States, anchored by Sears and C&A, with scores of boutiques and a multiplex cinema. Next door stands a large Wal-Mart and a private hospital that offers low-cost treatment. Behind, on a former rubbish dump, a new outdoor sports centre with 19 football pitches opened in July, operated by the charitable arm of Telmex, a telecoms firm.
Few people in Neza, as it is known, are still poor. “Before, people wanted a bicycle to get to the market. Now the least they want is a secondhand Volkswagen. They can afford to go out to eat at the weekend and take a holiday once a year, going to Acapulco,” says Luis Ayala, a journalist who was born in Neza and now works for its mayor. His story typifies gradual upward mobility: his father was a factory worker; his elder son is studying at a university in Neza and wants to become an engineer, and his younger son is studying to be a dance teacher. This progress nearly always requires the extended family to pull together. Mr Ayala and his wife augment their income with two market shops. They live on a separate floor in his father’s house and have two cars. ...
Embraer bucks the trend
THEY may be the exception rather than the norm, but Latin America is clearly capable of producing world-class companies. Embraer, set up in 1969 as an aspiring national aircraft-maker by Brazil’s military government and privatised in 1994, has since established itself as the world’s third-largest producer of commercial jet aircraft and the market leader in jets with 50-120 seats.
To do so, it has had to be nimble. Its first commercial jet, the 50-seater ERJ-145, sold mainly to North American regional airlines keen to skirt union restrictions on the crewing of larger planes. With its bigger E-170-190 range (of 70-122 seats) the company broke out of that niche, finding customers among many of the world’s main airlines. In 2002 it set up a joint venture in China to manufacture the ERJ-145. It is now building factories in Florida and Portugal. ...
Too many of Latin America’s businesses are uncompetitive—or outside the formal economy
IF PRODUCTIVITY growth in Latin America since 1960 had kept pace with the rest of the world, real incomes in the region would be 47% higher than they are, reckons the IDB. Part of the problem is that the region neither saves nor invests enough. According to ECLAC, in 2008 it saved 23% of GDP and invested around 22%, which is better than it used to be but not nearly as good as China’s investment rate of close to 40% of GDP. But Latin America lags even further behind in total factor productivity, or the efficiency with which it combines capital, technology and labour. Between 1975 and 1990 both labour and total factor productivity actually fell in both industry and services (meaning that businesses became less, not more, efficient). Since 1990 productivity in industry has grown more slowly than in East Asia, and in services hardly at all (see chart 2).
Measuring productivity is not straightforward, and economists often disagree about it. Augusto de la Torre, the World Bank’s chief economist for Latin America, reckons that since 2002 productivity has been growing in several countries in the region, including Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and Panama. Heinz-Peter Elstrodt, who heads the Latin American practice of McKinsey, a consultancy, says that privatisations in the 1990s spurred productivity growth but is not so sure that this has continued in recent years. Certainly, no one is claiming that, leaving farming to one side, Latin America is a world leader in productivity. ...
Commodities alone are not enough to sustain flourishing economies
IT MAY seem a safe bet that billions of Asians will continue to gobble up oil, iron ore, copper, soyabeans and meat as they get richer. But one day they may not; and one day, too, the world will surely come up with alternatives to fossil fuels that emit less carbon. Indeed Brazil already has, in the form of ethanol from sugar cane, and Colombia and Central America are following suit.
Latin America is uncomfortably dependent on commodities. In the past decade they accounted for 52% of the region’s exports, according to the World Bank. That is down from 86% in the 1970s, but over the same period the figure in East Asia and the Pacific fell from 94% to 30%. Chile, Peru and Venezuela still rely on raw materials for more than three-quarters of their total exports. In all, as the World Bank notes in a report published this month, more than 90% of Latin Americans live in countries that are net exporters of commodities, the exceptions being in Central America and the Caribbean. Governments have also become more reliant on raw materials for their tax revenues (see chart 1). ...
A history of disappointment
OVER the past two centuries Latin America has seen bursts of exaggerated optimism interspersed with long periods of disappointment. It was the original “emerging market” long before the term was invented. Indeed, at the time of its first centennial celebrations in 1910 parts of Latin America seemed to have emerged already. Argentina was one of the world’s ten richest countries; in Mexico guests from around the world took part in lavish banquets organised by Porfirio Diaz to celebrate more than a quarter of a century of stability under his constitutional dictatorship.
But only weeks later the Mexican revolution broke out and was to last a decade. Argentina, for its part, started a long decline from 1930 onwards. Brazilian leaders in the 1950s and then again in the 1970s claimed that their country had taken off, only to see it engulfed by economic turmoil both times. ...
A richer, fairer Latin America is within reach, but a lot of things have to be put right first, says Michael Reid
AT DAWN on September 16th 1810 Miguel Hidalgo, the parish priest of Dolores, a small town in central Mexico, rang the bells of his church to raise the cry of rebellion against the Spanish crown. Mexico, Spain’s richest American colony, thus joined a struggle for independence which had already seen the colonial authorities ousted and rebel juntas installed in Caracas, Buenos Aires and other South American cities. Two years earlier, following Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of the Iberian peninsula, King Joao VI of Portugal and his court had been installed in Rio de Janeiro by a British fleet. Brazil would never again be governed from Lisbon.
As Latin America marks the bicentenary of the start of its struggle for political independence, many of its constituent countries have more recent cause for celebration too. The five years to 2008 were Latin America’s best since the 1960s, with economic growth averaging 5.5% a year and inflation generally in single digits. Even more impressively, a region which had become a byword for financial instability mostly sailed through the recent recession. After a brief downturn in late 2008 and early 2009, a strong recovery is now under way, with most forecasts suggesting economic growth of over 5% this year for the region as a whole. ...
Apart from the people mentioned in the text, the author would like to thank the following for their help, time and ideas in the preparation of this report: Hector Aguilar Camin; Carlos Amat y Leon; Fabio Barbosa of FEBRABAN; Juan Jose Bremer; David Calderon; Jorge Castaneda; Ernesto Cordero; Gino Costa; Nicolas Eyzaguirre; Damian Fraser; Rossana Fuentes Berain; Norman Gall, Patricia Guedes and Nilson Oliveira of the Braudel Institute, Sao Paulo; Jose Miguel Insulza; Carol Nogueira of Itau Social; Adrian Pires; Jase Ramsey; Arturo Sarrukhan; Michael Shifter and the participants in the Inter-American Dialogue’s Sol Linowitz Forum; Luis Tellez; and Alfredo Torres.
Boston Consulting Group, The 2009 BCG Multilatinas. ...
The reformers have won, but they have yet to consolidate their success
SUMMIT meetings involving Latin America’s presidents are so frequent these days (one is pictured above) that Mexico’s Mr Calderon has likened diplomacy in the region to a mountain range. Yet for all the talk of regional integration, political Latin America looks more divided than ever. Mr Chavez likes to threaten war against Colombia, which in turn accuses him of harbouring its FARC guerrillas. Sub-regional trade groups such as Mercosur and the Andean Community, which made progress in the 1990s, have stagnated or fallen apart.
Yet while the politicians bicker, corporate Latin America is quietly moving closer together. A growing army of multilatinas have expanded abroad. Some, like Embraer or Bimbo, have become global multinationals. Many others, including Chilean retailers and Brazilian banks and construction firms, have expanded within Latin America. Some Mexican firms, led by America Movil, a telecoms giant, are moving into Brazil. Until recently such firms tended to list their shares in New York, but now a Latin American capital market is poised to emerge. In three to five years there will be a seamless network of Latin American stock exchanges, including Mexico’s, reckons Mr Oliveira of BRAIN Brasil. ...
Visible disorder, hidden progress
EARLY in the morning on June 28th 2009 a group of soldiers barged into the official residence of Honduras’s president and bundled its occupant, Manuel Zelaya, onto a plane out of the country. Mr Zelaya’s opponents claimed he had violated the constitution, though their real fear was that he was plotting to hang on to power beyond his term with the help of his ally, Mr Chavez. He was replaced by the head of Congress, who organised an election in November last year won by Porfirio Lobo, a traditional politician not unlike Mr Zelaya.
To many in Latin America Mr Zelaya’s ousting recalled the nightmare of past military coups. The region’s presidents, led by Brazil, took a stern line: Honduras was suspended from the Organisation of American States and the new president has still not been recognised by many governments. But what happened in Honduras was an isolated incident. Nearly all Latin American elections now are free and fair. After a period of instability during the economic slowdown of 1998-2003, governments generally run their full term. ...
The drug business is a blight on societies
ASK community activists in Neza what their main problem is and the answer comes instantly: crime. This mostly involves “express kidnaps”, in which the victim is required to hand over all his cash, or extortion from small businesses. The perpetrators often claim to be from La Familia or the Zetas, two drug gangs notorious for their violent methods. The other threat, says Maria Elisa Solis of Fundacion Estrella, an NGO, is “the authorities themselves”, who rarely investigate crimes but demand bribes.
Powerful mafias who derive massive profits from the rich world’s demand for drugs, especially cocaine, have exploited the weakness of the rule of law in many parts of Latin America. This organised crime has brought increased violence (see chart 5), though not everywhere. In Mexico, for instance, the murder rate has probably doubled since 2006, when Felipe Calderon cracked down on the trafficking mobs, but officials stress that many parts of the country are peaceful. ...
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The electorate’s romance with Nicolas Sarkozy is well and truly over—not least because the president no longer seems to know what he wants
“THE French people,” he announced on the day he was sworn in as president, “have demanded change.” Proclaiming “a new era in French politics”, the dynamic young leader swept into office, vowing to modernise the face of government and the country. Despite a promising start, however, the global economic shock, combined with divisions on the political right, took their toll. In the end, Valery Giscard d’Estaing lost to the Socialists in 1981, after just one term in office.
Over the past 30 years, Mr Giscard d’Estaing is the only French president not to have won re-election. Now, for the first time, the spectre of a one-term presidency has begun to hover menacingly over France’s current leader, Nicolas Sarkozy. His popularity has dropped to record lows. Some 55% of the French say they want the left to return to power at the next presidential election, in 2012. One poll suggests that, in a second-round run-off, Mr Sarkozy would be beaten by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a socialist who is now the IMF boss in Washington, by a crushing 59% to 41%. ...
The end of DBC Pierre's trilogy of death
Lights Out in Wonderland. By DBC Pierre. Faber & Faber; 315 pages; GBP12.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
GABRIEL BROCKWELL has decided to commit suicide. But not yet. In a state of placid acceptance, his life in “limbo”, he embarks on one final debauched ride in search of the perfect death, his harmonious end-play. “Lights Out in Wonderland” is the final chapter in DBC (Dirty But Clean) Pierre’s loose trilogy of novels that deal with death and the human spirit. It follows the 2003 Man Booker prize-winning “Vernon God Little” and the less well-received “Ludmila’s Broken English”. ...
The epic story of labour in America
There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America. By Philip Dray. Doubleday; 772 pages; $35. Buy from Amazon.com
UNLIKE Europeans, Americans do not celebrate May Day. Their Labor Day falls instead on the first Monday in September. America’s unions are different, too. They have little truck with social democracy and none with socialism. But, according to Philip Dray, this was not always or necessarily so. In his partisan history of American unions, he shows American workers long torn between the socialist vision of Europe’s labour movements and their own country’s ideas of individual freedom, “the freedom to compete and to succeed or fail”. ...
Even Stephen Hawking doesn't quite manage to explain why we are here
The Grand Design. By Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. Bantam; 198 pages; $28 and GBP18.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
IN 1988, Stephen Hawking, a British cosmologist, ended his best-selling book, “A Brief History of Time”, on a cliff hanger. If we find a physical theory that explains everything, he wrote—suggesting that this happy day was not too far off—“then we would know the mind of God.” But the professor didn’t mean it literally. God played no part in the book, which was renowned for being bought by everyone and understood by few. Twenty-two years later, Professor Hawking tells a similar story, joined this time by Leonard Mlodinow, a physicist and writer at the California Institute of Technology. ...
How the bad boy of Brit-Art grew rich at the expense of his investors
IN 2008 just over $270m-worth of art by Damien Hirst was sold at auction, a world record for a living artist. By 2009 Mr Hirst’s annual auction sales had shrunk by 93%—to $19m—and the 2010 total is likely to be even lower. The collapse in the Hirst market can partly be ascribed to the recession. But more important are the lingering effects of a two-day auction of new work by Mr Hirst that Sotheby’s launched in London on September 15th 2008.
The sale was memorable for many reasons, not least its name, “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever”. The first session took place the very evening that Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. No one on Wall Street or in the City of London knew who might be next. Yet within the New Bond Street saleroom, collectors went on bidding, oblivious to the bloodletting without. ...
SIR – Your briefing paints a cheery picture of the potential for Brazil to meet the world’s growing food needs (“The miracle of the cerrado”, August 28th). However, two important facts should temper our optimism about this remarkable agricultural story.
First, Brazilian climate change law requires steep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2020: 36-39% below 2005 levels. The government plans to achieve this through an 80% reduction in deforestation in the Amazon region and a 40% reduction in deforestation of the cerrado savannah. It is on track to reach the Amazon goal, but will only succeed in curbing the 7,000-20,000 plus square kilometres of annual clearing in the cerrado if most agricultural expansion moves onto unproductive cattle pastures. An even greater challenge for Brazil and a world facing a dangerous climatic disruption will be to diminish agriculture’s dependence on fossil fuels and noxious chemicals. ...
His ambitions seem to have shrunk along with his poll ratings. Time to rediscover the original grand vision
WHEN Nicolas Sarkozy first burst into the French political consciousness he was unlike any other recent leader the country had known. He dared to tell the French what they did not care to hear: that they should work more, take more risks, promote more ethnic minorities, be nicer to America. He was not afraid to roll up his sleeves, confront his opponents and court unpopularity. He balanced firmness on immigration from abroad with fairness towards ethnic minorities at home. Never a fully fledged liberal, he nonetheless had enough liberal reflexes to understand that the French could preserve the best of their way of life only through reform.
What a shrunken version of that politician now occupies the presidency. Little more than three years into his five-year term, Mr Sarkozy seems to be a shadow of the reformer he once was on economic affairs and a caricature of the tough-cop leader on social matters. He bashes capitalism with one hand and now Roma (gypsies) with the other. His popularity has collapsed, the opposition Socialists are breathing down his neck and a series of mini-scandals has damaged his standing. Even his own camp has begun to doubt that he still has what it takes to carry them to victory again in 2012. ...
Latin America’s new promise—and the need for a new attitude north of the Rio Grande
THIS year marks the 200th anniversary of the start of Latin America’s struggle for political independence against the Spanish crown. Outsiders might be forgiven for concluding that there is not much to celebrate. In Mexico, which marks its bicentennial next week, drug gangs have met a government crackdown with mayhem on a scale not seen since the country’s revolution of a century ago. The recent discovery of the corpses of 72 would-be migrants, some from as far south as Brazil, in a barn in northern Mexico not only marked a new low in the violence. It was also a reminder that some Latin Americans are still so frustrated by the lack of opportunity in their own countries that they run terrible risks in search of that elusive American dream north of the border.
Democracy may have replaced the dictators of old—everywhere except in the Castros’ Cuba—but other Latin American vices such as corruption and injustice seem as entrenched as ever. And so do caudillos: in Venezuela Hugo Chavez, having squandered a vast oil windfall, is trying to bully his way to an ugly victory in a legislative election later this month. ...
Mahinda Rajapaksa’s new powers are unnecessary and dangerous
NATIONAL constitutions come in two main types. Some are prescriptive, enshrining freedoms, curtailing the powers of the state and generally hampering would-be dictators. Others, however, tend to the descriptive, and are often revised to catch up with changes that have already happened. Into this class can be put Sri Lanka’s 1978 constitution, this week amended for the 18th time, with unseemly haste.
The Sri Lanka described in the revised charter is not a pretty place. It is one where the forms of parliamentary democracy are preserved but the substance has become subordinated to almost untrammelled presidential power. With the opposition divided, his rival in the presidential election in January in detention and his popularity still high, President Mahinda Rajapaksa already seems monarch of all he surveys. ...
How to rebuild confidence in food markets after this summer’s spike in wheat prices
REGULARITY and repetition—of returning rains, of seasonal temperatures, of the cycles of life and death—are the essence of agriculture. So perhaps it is not surprising when events recur. In 2007-08, food prices soared. Mozambique and 30 poor countries endured food-price riots. Russia led a procession of grain exporters to restrict sales. And the world had to face up to changes in the pattern of food demand, reversing decades of declining real prices. It was the end of cheap food.
This summer, world wheat prices have spiked again (see article). Mozambique has been rocked by food riots. And Russia has banned wheat exports for the second time in three years. Is the world facing a new food-price upheaval? ...
There’s nothing wrong with profiting from education
“UNTIL recently, I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive as the subprime mortgage industry,” said Steve Eisman, a hedge-fund manager who made a lot of money during the financial crisis by shorting bank shares, to Congress in June. “I was wrong. The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task.”
America’s for-profit colleges are under fire (see article), and the Obama administration is preparing tough new regulations for them. Although recent scandals suggest higher education needs to be better regulated, discriminating against the for-profit sector could do wider damage. ...
Britain’s overstretched defence budget should be cut—but not in the ferocious way being contemplated
ONLY America among Western countries has been more willing than Britain to put its armed forces in harm’s way. After America, Britain is by some distance the second largest contributor in both troops and treasure to the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Yet the previous Labour government was reluctant to increase the defence budget in line with its grandiose ambitions—and now the coalition government is set to cut it. Defence spending can indeed be trimmed—but less quickly and deeply than that of many other departments.
One of the first actions of the current government was to set up a full-scale strategic defence and security review, the first since 1998 (see article). This will inform the overall review of public spending that George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, will present on October 20th. Given the need for huge savings to reduce the fiscal deficit, some wonder whether Britain can afford to carry on “punching above its weight” militarily; given the controversial nature of recent military adventures (especially in Iraq), some ask whether it should even try. Shouldn’t Britain reconcile itself to its post-imperial status as a middling nation, with suitably diminished military aspirations? ...
Barack Obama’s expected advantages are turning into handicaps in the war on terrorism
EVERY September 11th America mourns the people al-Qaeda murdered in the atrocities of 2001. And every year the anniversary compels an assessment of how the “war on terror” is faring. After a year that saw a successful terrorist attack and two near-misses on American soil, it is hard to be upbeat. In November Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an American, killed 13 comrades in Fort Hood, Texas. On Christmas Day Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, failed to set off his bomb properly on a Detroit-bound passenger jet. And in May Faisal Shahzad, a naturalised American, left a car bomb in Times Square in New York.
If the emergence of home-grown Muslim terrorism has been bad enough, the failure of Barack Obama to engineer the transformation some expected from him in the wider world has been no less dispiriting. After the toxic impact of George Bush on Muslim opinion, many hoped that the advent of a kinder, gentler president whose middle name was Hussein would help America to draw the poison. Mr Obama himself seemed to think that this might be possible. Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, told the New York Times earlier this year that Mr Obama counted his Cairo speech to the Muslim world of June 2009 as one of the three most important things he had done to combat terrorism. ...
The role of Latinos in American society is growing inexorably, with big political implications for the future
SWEEPING his hand in all directions, from the Mormon Temple to Utah’s State Capitol and the Great Salt Lake, Tony Yapias, the director of the Proyecto Latino de Utah and a leading Hispanic activist in the state, cannot suppress a smirk. “This was Mexico,” he says. In 1847, when the Mormon pioneers arrived, “no one asked Brigham Young for his papers.”
But today, Mr Yapias says ruefully, it is the Mexicans and Chicanos (American citizens of Mexican ancestry), as well as other Latinos such as himself (born in Peru), who tend to be asked for papers. And the Americans doing the asking are likely to be “Anglos”, as non-Hispanic whites are often called. This, certainly, is the tenor of SB1070, an Arizona law passed this year (but partially blocked by a federal judge) that aims to get tough on illegal immigrants, and of similar legislation likely to pass in states such as Utah. ...
Add drugs gangs to the long list of dangers facing migrants
ON AUGUST 24th an 18-year-old Ecuadorean approached a military checkpoint in Tamaulipas, a northern state in Mexico. He had been shot in the neck and explained that he had just escaped a massacre. Mexican marines followed his directions to a barn a few miles away. There they found 72 men and women shot dead. The teenager told how the group, migrants from Central and South America, had been kidnapped on their way to the United States by bandits claiming to belong to the Zetas, a Mexican drug-trafficking gang. When they refused to work for the gangsters, they were executed. There were only two confirmed survivors.
It is the worst known atrocity committed by Mexico’s drug-trafficking organisations to date, and a grim illustration of the dangers migrants face as they travel north. Last year, according to the National Foundation for American Policy, 417 would-be migrants died while coming to the United States, felled by exposure, dehydration, heatstroke and drowning. The record was set in 2005, with 492 migrant deaths. Murders—by kidnappers, bandits, coyotes (people-smugglers)—add perhaps several hundred more to the official toll each year. ...
Republicans chase a rural seat
WITH Labour Day over and less than two months before the mid-term elections, a poll this week from NBC/Wall Street Journal showed just how much trouble the Democrats are in, giving the Republicans a nine-point lead among likely voters. The Journal thinks there will be an “anti-incumbent wave” in November, which will sweep the Democrats from power in the House of Representatives. One candidate hoping to ride that wave is Todd Young, the Republican challenger in Indiana’s 9th congressional district.
Covering south-east Indiana, the 9th includes suburbs of Louisville, Kentucky, such as New Albany, that spill across the Ohio River into the bottom of the district, and the towns of Bloomington and Columbus at the top. In between is farm belt; it doesn’t take long when driving north from New Albany to come upon boundless golden fields awaiting the harvester. ...
Of friendship and fire, pigs and prizes
MOST people, it is fair to say, would not relish the thought of devoting one of summer’s last Saturdays to sitting in a cavernous room listening to a five-hour PowerPoint presentation—particularly if that presentation begins just before 8am. But then, most PowerPoints do not conclude with a good 60 pounds of perfectly smoked pork shoulder.
Welcome to the arcane and delicious world of barbecue-judging. Seminars on the subject drew 25 people to a small Mississippi town and another 30 to Nashville, Tennessee preposterously early one recent Saturday morning. Before you grow jealous, rest reassured that it’s not all eating high on the hog. Sometimes there are ribs, and every so often a whole hog as well. ...
Democrats may lose the seat once held by Barack Obama
LABOUR DAY brought blaring trumpets to downtown Chicago. The setting for the union rally was magnificent, an amphitheatre designed by Frank Gehry, with licks of steel curving from the stage. There were the electricians, the sheet-metal workers, the carpenters and the pilots in their star-spangled ties. Democratic leaders crowded the stage. But the pomp felt hollow. The theatre was less than half full. Many of the Democrats are struggling in the polls. At the end of one row was the nominee for Barack Obama’s old Senate seat, swaying awkwardly to the music. “God shed his grace on thee,” a choir bellowed. Democrats could use the help.
As Republicans stage attacks across the country, few states hold greater bounty than Illinois. Alexi Giannoulias, the Democratic state treasurer, and Mark Kirk, a five-term Republican congressman, are in a tight battle for Mr Obama’s old seat. Labour Day marked the beginning of the final sprint. ...
America’s longest-serving mayor says he will not seek re-election
RICHARD DALEY chose a good day to make his most important announcement for 21 years. September 7th showed Chicago at its best. Sunlight glinted off skyscrapers. Tourists strolled through Millennium Park. And in City Hall, Mr Daley declared that after more than two decades as mayor, he will not seek re-election next year. The city reeled.
His announcement should not be altogether surprising. Mr Daley’s wife has cancer. He is in his sixth term. But he has ruled Chicago for so long that it is hard to imagine the city without him. ...
The new proposals are designed more for political than economic impact
BUSINESS groups and Republicans have pummelled Barack Obama of late as a populist demagogue whose policies have failed to stimulate growth while blanketing companies with stifling uncertainty about taxes and regulation. This week Mr Obama unveiled a trio of proposals that look to have been designed less to power up the economy than to parry such attacks.
The boldest proposal would let businesses deduct the full cost of investment against their taxes next year instead of over three or more years. This would encourage them to bring forward their investment plans to 2011. The impact, however, will be muted by low interest rates (which diminish the value of an early tax refund) and the fact that businesses are much more worried about weak demand than their cost of capital. Still, Kevin Hassett, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, thinks this could boost investment by 5% to 10%. ...
Stephen Harper has tried to make his mild-mannered country a warrior nation. But his citizens have only so much stomach—and money—for the fight
LAST month a spokesman for Canada’s prime minister sent reporters a breathless e-mail recounting the exploits of two CF-18 fighter jets. It said they had forced Russian bombers heading for Canada’s Arctic airspace to turn around, and ended with a boast that the government was giving pilots “staring down Russian long-range bombers” the best equipment possible—like the 65 F-35 fighters the government plans to buy for C$16 billion ($15.4 billion). The cold war language was soon mocked—especially after NORAD, the United States-Canada defence body, said that such flights were routine and that NORAD itself had conducted a joint exercise with Russia a few weeks earlier. “The Russians aren’t coming”, read one headline.
Yet humour aside, the episode reflected a once-familiar scepticism about defence spending that has been largely absent since Stephen Harper took power in 2006. Until now, Canadians have supported his beefing up of the armed forces through more funding and combat. But with Canada’s mission in Afghanistan ending next year and a record budget deficit, his expansion of the armed forces, unprecedented in modern times, may be reaching its limit. ...
The state has taken on creditors and gangsters, but the economy is still weak
JAMAICA has long been one of the world’s most indebted and violent countries. This year the prime minister, Bruce Golding, made two belated attempts at shock therapy. In January the government opened a big debt swap. Four months later, security forces began a search for Christopher Coke, the country’s most feared gang leader. Over 70 people died in fighting in his supporters’ neighbourhood—which is also Mr Golding’s constituency.
Both initiatives were successful. The finance minister, Audley Shaw, says he appealed to creditors’ common sense and patriotism, noting that the choice was exchange or default, and that their holdings’ value would improve with the state’s credit rating. He also threatened to levy punitive taxes on holdouts. “I said if I have to haul us kicking and screaming into single-digit interest rates, I’ll do it,” he recalls. ...
Dilma Rousseff looks unstoppable. How much power will she wield?
BARRING a political cataclysm, on October 3rd Dilma Rousseff will be elected Brazil’s next president. Thanks to the support of the wildly popular incumbent, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the technocratic 62-year-old is expected to trounce her only serious rival, Jose Serra of the Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB). She faced a scare when rank-and-file members of her Workers’ Party (PT) were implicated in the unauthorised access of the tax records of Mr Serra’s daughter and his party’s vice-president, among others. But there was no evidence of her own involvement. The latest polls give her over half the vote.
With the outcome of the presidential election looking settled, attention is turning to local and legislative races that will determine the strength of the next government. All the state governorships and seats in the lower house of Congress are up for grabs, as are two-thirds of the Senate. ...
The chart in our article on Brazil’s ethanol industry, “Ethanol’s mid-life crisis” (September 4th), mistakenly identified the units of production as millions of litres. They are billions of litres. Sorry.
The perils of letting China dictate the terms of the debate
AS IS well known, some people in the West go soft in the head over Tibet. One tinkle of the temple bell, one whiff of incense, or one sip of rancid yak-butter tea, and they lose their critical faculties. They fawn over the Dalai Lama, who cloaks his sinister splittist ends in monks’ robes and jovial common-sense. They blind themselves to the misery of past mass monasticism and feudal serfdom. They wilfully overlook the wonders of the economic development China has brought to the lofty plateau.
Fortunately for the Chinese government, these inane sentimentalists neither make policy, nor, beyond the occasional tiresome protest, have much to do with China. Luckier still, those in the West who do deal with China often suffer even more acute mental squishiness over Tibet, with the opposite effect. So anxious are they not to “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people” in this especially tender sore spot, that they fall over backwards to make concessions that are neither necessary, nor, in many cases, even demanded. ...
Labor talks itself into power. It must keep talking to stay there
JULIA GILLARD emerged as Australia’s prime minister on September 7th promising an open parliament and a pragmatic government. She had little choice. The general election on August 21st had left neither the ruling Labor Party nor the conservative Liberal-National opposition with enough clout in the 150-seat House of Representatives to form a government. When two independent MPs at last pledged the support she needed, Ms Gillard breathed relief. But a tough election has left her bruised and vulnerable.
Labor won just 72 seats. During more than a fortnight of horse-trading, Ms Gillard won the backing of two new MPs: Adam Bandt, a Green, and Andrew Wilkie, an independent from Tasmania. Then in a nerve-jangling finale Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, two independents from rural New South Wales, guaranteed Labor 76 seats: a bare majority. The first minority federal government in 70 years will face tough talks to pass laws. ...
An heir-raising event in Pyongyang
DELEGATES from across North Korea gathered in Pyongyang for a special conference—probably the most significant official meeting held by the Stalinist state in 30 years. Posters were said to have appeared around the capital hailing the occasion as “shining forever in the history of our party and country”. South Korean officials suggested that tanks and missiles had been spied in the city, preparing for a giant military parade to mark the occasion.
Such conferences are rare: only two others have been held since the country was created after the second world war, and this is the first convened by Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s leader. In an extremely centralised country, where the armed forces and the Communist party hold sway, the Dear Leader had previously deemed such a conference unnecessary (though he has allowed slightly more showy party congresses to take place). So the fact that he has called one, shortly after making two trips to the country’s one big ally, China, is taken by most observers to indicate that political change is under way. ...
A bank run exposes more murky financial and political dealings
PALM JUMEIRAH, the giant palm-shaped peninsula in the Persian Gulf, is famous for its luxury homes. In Kabul one frond is known as Little Afghanistan because so many of the country’s political and business elite have set up there. Mahmoud Karzai, a brother of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, is a prominent figure there. Luckily for him, he had help paying for it. As with other luminaries, the bill was picked up by ordinary Afghans who put money into Kabul Bank, a scandal-wracked institution of which the brother is the third-biggest shareholder.
For years bank assets (of over $1 billion at one point) have been spent as shareholders saw fit, often defying bank regulations designed to stop risky investments. Hundreds of millions went into Dubai properties then handed to shareholders and their friends (Mahmoud Karzai says he made a profit of at least $800,000 after buying a villa in Dubai in 2007, using a loan from Kabul Bank). More went to loss-making firms, including an airline and a cement factory, run by shareholders and friends. ...
China hosts another tinpot dictator from next door
HALF a century ago, when China’s place on the world stage was smaller, its relations with Myanmar (then called Burma) were a priority. China’s first Communist prime minister, Zhou Enlai, visited his neighbour at least nine times between 1954 and 1965. Since then, as China has grown, the pace of cross-border diplomacy has slowed. Yet Myanmar’s bountiful resources and strategic location still command Beijing’s attention. On September 7th China welcomed General Than Shwe, leader of Myanmar’s ruling junta, for a four-day official visit. (He was hot on the heels of a fellow Asian dictator, Kim Jong Il of North Korea.)
The general’s trip came as economic activity between the two countries is picking up. This year alone China has invested over $8 billion in Myanmar—mostly in gas, oil and hydropower ventures—about two-thirds the total of the previous two decades combined. The volume of bilateral trade has also surged. ...
On the tusks of a dilemma
TWO farmers in Anekal, a forested bit of the south Indian state of Karnataka, were in their fields this summer when a pair of cow elephants and a calf emerged from the trees. Protective of the calf, the animals chased and trampled the men. Such deaths are not unusual: each year some 400 Indians are fatally stomped, and killings are getting more common, says a new report by India’s Elephant Task Force, a government-backed panel.
That is bad both for humans and jumbos. After the deaths in Anekal, villagers angrily demanded that officials control the elephants. Others are taking direct action: around 100 of the animals are being killed each year, according to “Securing the Future for Elephants in India”, published on August 31st. A booming human population and rapid economic development are shrinking the elephants’ habitat. In Anekal farmers encroach on the forest, disrupting a migratory route. This is happening across 90 such corridors, leaving the animal populations isolated. ...
Volatile wheat prices are as much a cause for alarm as are high prices
FEW rural pleasures match seeing a golden field of grain, rustling and ripe for reaping. But the harvest season in the northern hemisphere is being marked by turmoil on global wheat markets.
A big reason is to be found in one of the world’s largest wheat exporters, Russia. Hit by fires and drought which have wiped out a third of the grain crop, the authorities there have banned exports, first temporarily and now until next year’s harvest. As a result, wheat prices spiked: they have nearly doubled since the low point in June of $4.26 a bushel. That has prompted global jitters. When the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) called a special meeting to discuss rising prices, headlines suggested that the world was facing a food crisis to rival that of 2007-08. Riots in Mozambique in recent days, perhaps prompted by spiralling food costs (see article), added more fodder to the fears. ...
Where do graduates end up doing unskilled work? And earning most?
ACADEMIC qualifications’ value in the workplace is a big issue for students, policymakers and taxpayers, especially as the rising numbers of students in higher education make them less distinctive. In the latest annual report on education by the OECD, a rich-country think-tank, the answer is clear: the pay-off from tertiary education is still good, both for the individual and the economy. Most graduates take jobs fitting their qualifications, earn more than non-graduates, and thus tend to pay more in taxes.
The workforce is smartening up. In the OECD 35% of the 25- to 34-year-old workforce has completed tertiary education, compared with 20% of the cohort approaching retirement. Countries such as Japan and South Korea have invested so heavily in educating their young that more than half now hold post-school qualifications. Norway, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands are close behind. Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s chief of education research, reckons that these countries may well become more competitive as a result. ...
George Soros gives $100m to Human Rights Watch
George Soros has long planned to give away the vast bulk of his fortune, even before fellow billionaires such as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates made the idea fashionable. Now aged 80, the legendary investor no longer believes he can donate all his estimated $14 billion in his lifetime (not least because of his remarkable knack of making even more money). But nobody can accuse him of not trying. On September 7th, in the first in what is expected to be a series of whopping gifts, he gave $100m to Human Rights Watch, a global campaigning group. That should cement his reputation as the greatest backer of “freedom” as a cause, rather as Mr Gates has adopted public health. The gift will be paid out in annual chunks over the next decade, but with one big string attached: every dollar of his must be matched by another from someone else.
Turkey prepares to vote on a constitutional-reform package that pits the government against the generals
SALIH SEZGIN, a Kurd, was in Diyarbakir prison when Turkey’s generals seized power in 1980. “After the coup I was forced to eat my own shit and repeatedly raped with a truncheon,” he recalls. Should Turks approve a set of constitutional reforms that will be put to a nationwide vote on September 12th, the officers who committed such horrors on Mr Sezgin and more than half a million other Turks who were arrested and tortured after the coup will no longer be immune from prosecution.
Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has cast the reforms as a stab in the heart of the September 1980 coup plotters. The referendum falls on its 30th anniversary. But Mr Erdogan’s critics view the changes as a final assault on Ataturk’s secular republic. ...
Populism and the economic crisis are exposing the EU’s struggle to discipline its members
WHERE does the Euro-elite wind down after those arduous battles over budgets and directives? Some choose the Chateau Sainte-Anne, with its stately grounds and sports facilities, originally provided by the Belgian government for the relaxation of diplomats and Eurocrats. Others prefer the older and snootier Cercle Royal Gaulois Artistique et Litteraire at the opposite end of the Rue de la Loi from the European institutions.
Such exclusive venues could almost be a metaphor for the European Union itself. Membership is much sought-after, and the admission criteria are exacting: applicants to the clubs need sponsors and must often hold university degrees (ambassadors, educated or not, are automatically invited to join both the Chateau and the Cercle). But in one important respect, at least, the clubs are different from the EU: members who turn out to be undesirable, or impecunious, can be suspended or thrown out. Sadly, admits Anne Buisseret, director-general of the Chateau Sainte-Anne, some members have indeed been blackballes. ...
The war of words between Italy’s former coalition partners intensifies
MORE than a month after it began, Italy’s drawn-out political crisis has come to resemble a toy soldiers’ battle. The combatants rush to the fray with swords aloft, howling battle cries. Yet they remain eerily immobile.
On September 5th Gianfranco Fini, the speaker of the Chamber of Deputies and the man who started it all, delivered a keenly anticipated speech. It had been thought he might consummate his departure from the governing majority by announcing a new party, openly hostile to the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. ...
ETA’s ceasefire is more about Basque politics than a commitment to peace
IT WAS a strange way to declare a ceasefire. In a video sent to a British television station on September 5th, masked leaders of the violent Basque separatist group ETA not only proclaimed a truce but said they had halted attacks several months ago. Why wait so long to tell the world?
The answer lies in a double squeeze that has left Europe’s last big home-grown terrorist group gasping for air. On the one hand ETA is losing the armed struggle it began over 40 years ago. In recent years police forces across Europe have dealt it blow after blow, reducing its deadliness (see chart). But ETA is also being squeezed by its grassroots backers at home—and that may prove more decisive. ...
Ireland is still in the eye of the storm
WHEN Brian Cowen succeeded Bertie Ahern as taoiseach (prime minister) in May 2008, he inherited a popular coalition government with a comfortable parliamentary majority. But he was also set to preside over the deepest recession in the country’s history. As Ireland’s property bubble burst, it triggered a crisis in the public finances. Property-related revenue plummeted and the banking system came close to collapse.
By the time the recession ended earlier this year, GDP was 15% below its peak, unemployment had reached 13% and the cost of rescuing Ireland’s banks had soared beyond initial estimates. Dealing with the mess at the state-owned Anglo Irish Bank, which on August 31st reported an €8.2 billion ($10.8 billion) loss for the first half of 2010, the biggest corporate loss in Irish history, could cost taxpayers €25 billion. (This week the government split the bank into two: a “good” bank to manage its deposits and a “bad” one for its loans.) Despite belt-tightening measures, the Fianna Fail/Green coalition has struggled to rein in the budget deficit, which at 14.3% of GDP last year was the highest in the euro area (see article). ...
The Austrian bank at the centre of a growing web of scandal
IT SOUNDS like the plot of a James Bond film. On one side you have Balkan gun-runners, drug dealers, tycoons and politicians. On the other, a right-wing Austrian politician with a soft spot for Hitler. Then there are the bankers funnelling money via Austria, the Netherlands and Liechtenstein from the Balkans and back again.
At the heart of this tale lies Hypo Group Alpe-Adria, an Austrian bank with branches across the Balkans. In the 1990s Hypo transformed itself from a small, provincial outfit, based in Klagenfurt, capital of the Austrian region of Carinthia, into a large force in the region. But then, just as quickly, it crashed and burned. In December it was nationalised by the Austrian government to prevent its collapse. Last week it emerged that the bank lost €499m ($634m) in the first half of 2010. ...
The prime minister defends his record
VLADIMIR PUTIN looked smooth, tanned and rested. He had a fun summer, most of it televised by state channels. He took a spin on a Harley with a bunch of bikers, had a go at flying a firefighting jet and dropping water on the wild forest-fires in central Russia, fired darts at a grey whale, and most recently drove thousands of miles across Russia’s tundra in a canary-yellow Lada accompanied by dozens of foreign-made security cars and two spare Ladas—just in case.
Out of these antics emerged the image of a hands-on, no-nonsense and down-to-earth ruler who feels at ease with rough-speaking truck drivers. In any democratic country such public-relations stunts could have been mistaken for part of an election campaign. In Russia, where political competition is long gone, they are part of Mr Putin’s political housekeeping, helping to keep up his image as a good tsar who is the flesh and blood of his people. When the Valdai club, a group of mostly foreign experts on Russia, asked him over dinner on September 6th about his plans for the next presidential election in 2012, Mr Putin positively glowed with pleasure. ...
The dangerous power and inadvertent uses of Britain’s red-top newspapers
ON THE face of it, it is a question of rare urgency: did the Downing Street press chief, Andy Coulson, condone the illegal hacking of voicemail messages, back when he edited Britain’s most ferocious tabloid, the News of the World? At Westminster the tang of scandal hangs in the autumn air, after new witnesses popped up to allege that Mr Coulson knew more than he admits about the antics that saw one of the paper’s reporters jailed three years ago. But take a step back and the government’s critics may be asking the wrong question.
Mr Coulson had already resigned as editor of Britain’s biggest-selling Sunday paper when he was hired by David Cameron in 2007, initially as communications director of the Conservative Party, moving to Downing Street this year as a key member of the inner circle. Mr Coulson says he resigned to take responsibility for what happened “on his watch”, but knew nothing of the illegal voicemail hacking. That defence leads pretty remorselessly to one of two conclusions: either Mr Coulson was surprisingly incompetent and did not know where his own staff unearthed their scoops, or he is not telling the whole truth. That in turn suggests a bigger question: what does it say about Mr Cameron—about his judgment, the ruthlessness that lurks beneath his image of old-fashioned decency, and above all about the power of Britain’s tabloid press—that he hired Mr Coulson in the first place? ...
The government’s strategic defence review—and impending cuts to the defence budget—will define Britain’s approach to security for a decade and beyond
ON SEPTEMBER 17th the newly formed National Security Council (NSC), chaired by the prime minister, David Cameron, will begin discussing how to cut Britain’s defence budget. The conversation will be informed by the Strategic Defence and Security Review, which the coalition government embarked upon within weeks of taking office. Whereas the last such exercise, completed by the Labour government in 1998, took over a year to conclude, this one must be finished by October 20th, when the coalition will announce the results of its overall review of public spending. The outcome of these deliberations will define not just the shape of Britain’s armed forces, but also its role in the world and sense of itself as a nation.
It is not just the rush that is making this such a difficult and painful process. Britain’s annual defence budget is around GBP40 billion ($62 billion), including the extra cash (GBP4.6 billion this year) that the Treasury provides for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is munificent by international standards—Britain ranks third in global defence spending, behind America and China. But defence benefited much less than other departments from the largesse of the boom years (see chart). The Labour government was ignobly reluctant to meet the costs of its lengthy military engagements. ...
…the government will try to fix it anyway
WITH all the resources spent by political parties on focus groups and opinion polls, you might expect politicians and voters to have similar priorities. Well, it seems you’d be wrong.
Considering the deep cuts it is set to implement across the public sector, Britain’s coalition government will probably become extremely unpopular over the next couple of years. Nevertheless, it has already embarked on big, controversial reforms to both education and the National Health Service, picking up the baton of public-service reform from Labour, which made improving hospitals and schools the main domestic focus of its 13 years in office. ...
Ken Livingstone’s latest comeback
WHEN Ken Livingstone served as leader of the Greater London Council in the 1980s—a prototype of the London mayoralty he held between 2000 and 2008—all but one of the current candidates to become leader of the Labour Party were still students. The result of their race will be announced on September 25th.
The day before, the outcome of another Labour contest will be declared. Mr Livingstone is running to be Labour’s candidate in the capital yet again. If he wins, and goes on to replace the Conservative incumbent, Boris Johnson, in 2012, it will be his third stint in London’s top political job. ...
Manufacturing is once again driving Britain’s recovery from recession
DURING the long boom before the banking crisis, manufacturing fell out of political favour. But as the fragility of growth powered by finance was exposed, politicians began to extol the neglected virtues of industry. These days a revival in the fortunes of manufacturers is widely regarded as essential for a sustained export-led recovery. “Real engineering, not financial engineering,” runs a popular slogan.
Unfortunately, this sudden conversion to the merits of an industrial economy was mistimed. Along with construction, manufacturing was hit the hardest by the recession. Output dropped by 14.5% between early 2008 and the third quarter of 2009, whereas GDP fell by 6.4%. The slump in factory production reflected the sharp downturn in world trade: manufacturing accounts for about half of all exports. ...
The case for backing the motor industry
AT FIRST sight, Britain’s motor industry looks rickety. Last year the government supported car sales with a scrappage scheme, giving motorists GBP2,000 for swapping cars that were ten years old or more for new ones. That kept the domestic market ticking over until May 2010. Plunging domestic car sales this August, nearly 30% below those in August 2007 (before the distortions of the financial crash, and so a useful comparison), suggest the sector, still a mainstay of British manufacturing, is struggling.
In fact the global vehicle market is more important for British manufacturers than the stuttering domestic one: Britain exports over 70% of the cars and engines that it makes. Buoyed by rising demand in emerging economies, the global market is growing strongly. Moreover, the international motor industry is changing in ways that potentially favour Britain. Lighter, fuel-efficient and low-carbon vehicles are in vogue. Many of Britain’s designers and engineers, whether working for foreign manufacturers or racing teams, are at the forefront of this technology. ...
David Cameron’s media man faces more embarrassing questions about his previous life
IT IS hard to imagine that becoming David Cameron’s head of communications, as Andy Coulson did when he joined the Conservative leader’s team in 2007, could be considered a sideways career move. Yet measured by influence, prestige and salary, his previous job as editor of the News of the World was at least as grand. The Sunday tabloid is one of the world’s biggest-selling English-language newspapers.
But Mr Coulson’s tenure there was the source of immense controversy, which still dogs him and the government for which he now works. Even by the standards of British tabloids—including the Sun, also owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International—the News of the World was and remains tenacious in digging out sensational stories, preferably involving public figures (broadly defined). As became clear at a criminal trial in 2007, the methods its reporters use have on occasion included the illegal hacking of mobile-phone messages, for which Clive Goodman, the paper’s royal editor, was jailed, along with a private investigator who had helped him. ...
A chart accompanying our article on voting reform (“The new mapmakers”, September 4th) wrongly suggested that had Labour and the Conservatives won equal shares of the vote at the 2005 general election, Labour would have enjoyed an advantage of 11 seats. The correct figure is 111 seats. Sorry. This has been corrected online.
Why some people have power over companies and others don’t
HENRY KISSINGER was guilty of understatement when he said that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. In fact, power is the ultimate life-improver tout court. Powerful people not only have more friends than the rest of us. They also enjoy better health. Numerous studies demonstrate that low status is more strongly associated with heart disease than physical hazards like obesity and high blood pressure.
The benefits of power have grown dramatically in recent years. CEOs and other C-suite types have seen their salaries surge at a time when the median wage has either stagnated (in the United States) or grown slowly (in Europe). Politicians have learned how to monetise their pull. The Clintons earned $109m in the eight years after they left the White House. Tony Blair has turned himself into a wealthy man in the three years since his retirement from national politics. ...
Facing heavy-handed government regulation, America’s for-profit colleges are reforming themselves
“EGREGIOUS, outrageous, violated everything we stand for”: Don Graham’s denunciation of recent activities by some employees of his own firm is stark. On August 4th a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found evidence of deceptive recruitment tactics by 15 of America’s leading for-profit colleges, including one operated by Kaplan, which accounts for the bulk of the profits of Mr Graham’s Washington Post Company. Some of the colleges, which also included the giant University of Phoenix, insisted that the incidents—which ranged from misleading potential students about tuition costs and likely post-graduation salaries to encouraging them to file fraudulent loan applications—were isolated. But the mood is turning against them.
For-profit colleges, which range from beauty schools to institutions that resemble traditional universities, were already under attack. In June Steve Eisman, a hedge-fund manager who made a lot of money during the financial crisis by shorting bank shares, told Congress that the for-profit education business was as destructive as the subprime mortgage industry. Congress already seems eager to add to regulations that the government plans to introduce in November. ...
Two technology titans squabble over HP’s former boss
LARRY ELLISON, the chief executive of Oracle, likes a fight. Shortly after Hewlett-Packard (HP) parted company with its then CEO, Mark Hurd, last month amid claims he had filed inaccurate expense reports that appeared to conceal a relationship with a female contractor, Mr Ellison blasted its board for making what he dubbed “the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago”. Now Mr Ellison’s bid to profit from HP’s loss has triggered both a lawsuit and a fresh bout of mudslinging.
On September 6th Oracle announced it had hired Mr Hurd and given him a seat on the software behemoth’s board. The following day HP launched a lawsuit in California against Mr Hurd, seeking to block his move to Oracle on the ground that he would inevitably disclose HP’s trade secrets to his new employer. As well as giving Mr Ellison another reason to lambast HP’s behaviour, the suit is also a sign of growing tension between technology firms as they venture beyond their traditional markets. ...
Why expensive consultancy firms are giving away more research
IN THE run-up to the climate-change conference in Copenhagen last year, a curvy graph was passed around by policymakers and NGOs. It showed various options for cutting carbon-dioxide emissions. At one end of the chart were simple efficiency improvements which would both cut CO2 and save money; at the other end were costly technologies like nuclear power and carbon capture. Climate-watchers found the graph useful for demonstrating how many money-saving or cheap technologies there were. As one veteran put it, “We all speak McKinsey’s language now.” The graph was indeed put together not by a tree-hugging NGO, but by the for-profit consultancy.
All consulting firms seek to provide what they annoyingly call “thought leadership”. McKinsey’s rival, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), became well known in part by distributing its ideas freely. Consultancies now put out short opinionated papers as well as data-laden reports such as BCG’s recent one on wind power in China or PricewaterhouseCooper’s on electronic health records. Fiona Czerniawska of Sourceforconsulting.com says the number of such reports from the top 25 firms has quintupled since 2004. Free reports are expensive to produce: Tom Rodenhauser of Kennedy Information, a firm that monitors consultancies, reckons they cost up to 5% of gross revenues. Are they worth it? ...
E-commerce is becoming more social and more connected to the offline world
THOSE who cherish privacy will recoil in horror, but for digital exhibitionists it is a dream. At Swipely, a web start-up, users can now publish their purchases. Whenever they swipe their credit or debit card (hence the service’s name), the transaction is listed on the site—to be discussed by other users. “Turn purchases into conversations” is the firm’s mantra.
Swipely is among the latest entrants in the growing field of social commerce. Firms in this market combine e-commerce with social networks and other online group activities. They aim to transform shopping both online and off. Angus Davis, Swipely’s boss, points out that the internet has already disrupted the content industry. Commerce will be next, he says. ...
BP casts the blame for the Gulf oil spill widely
THE dramatic case study in corporate crisis-management acquired another chapter on September 8th. BP’s report on the causes of the accident that led to the loss of the Deepwater Horizon rig and the biggest oil spill in American history describes a litany of mistakes. Had this sequence of errors been halted, catastrophe might have been averted. Some of those mistakes, the report concludes, were BP’s. But its finger also points at Halliburton, which worked on the cement seal at the bottom of the well, and Transocean, which owned and ran the rig and maintained the “blowout preventer” which so signally failed to live up to its name.
The stakes are high. If BP is found to have been grossly negligent in its role as operator the fines it faces would increase by billions of dollars and its chances of recouping money from its junior partners in the project, Anadarko and Mitsui, would be reduced. BP’s report implies such a finding is unlikely. But it makes a protracted, reputation-damaging series of suits and countersuits between the companies involved seem almost inevitable. ...
A retailer shows Japan how to beat the curse of thriftiness
THE Japanese used to be to conspicuous consumption what the Chinese are to raw materials. When there was a fad in Tokyo for tiramisu in the early 1990s, the world market for mascarpone felt the strain—until a Japanese company invented a synthetic version. But those bubbly days are long gone. Two decades of economic stagnation have produced a generation in their 20s and 30s that Richard May, director of the Japan Consumer Marketing Research Institute, calls kenshohi—people who hate shopping (except on the internet and from thrift stores). But one mainstream firm has defied the trend. It is Yamada Denki, Japan’s largest consumer-electronics retailer.
Yamada Denki’s consolidated sales in the fiscal year ended in March reached YEN2 trillion ($24 billion), double their level of five years ago. It has been growing quickly (see chart). Pre-tax profits doubled over the same period to a record YEN102 billion. The firm’s market share is more than 25%, which makes it, as one analyst puts it, the Wal-Mart of home appliances in Japan. Some of its success last year was thanks to a temporary government stimulus programme, which gives people who buy low-energy appliances discounts on future purchases. Yet the firm’s growth since it was founded in 1973 is largely self-made. Yamada Denki has rewritten the rules of retailing in Japan. It has done so with a loyal following of foreign investors who have helped it more than Japan’s risk-averse banks. “We’ve always been evaluated better abroad than in Japan,” says Tadao Ichimiya, its president. ...
IT spending has hollowed out labour markets, to the detriment of middle-income workers
AN ODDLY entrancing YouTube video of a robot folding a pile of freshly laundered towels has been viewed over half a million times. Although it does this quotidian task better than any other robot, it is still much less adept than the average person. The difficulty of programming a towel-folding robot which can outdo humans may help to explain why the past couple of decades have been so unkind to middle-class workers in the rich world.
In the 1970s and 1980s employment in quintessentially middle-skilled, middle-income occupations—salespeople, bank clerks, secretaries, machine operators and factory supervisors—grew faster than that in lower-skilled jobs. But around the early 1990s, something changed. Labour markets across the rich countries shifted from a world where people’s job and wage prospects were directly related to their skill levels. Instead, with only a few exceptions, employment in middle-class jobs began to decline as a share of the total while the share of both low- and high-skilled jobs rose (see chart). The pattern was similar in countries with very different levels of unionisation, prevalence of collective bargaining and welfare systems. This “polarisation” of employment almost certainly had a common cause. ...
Lehman’s administrators face several more years of hard work
AS THE second anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy approaches, economists continue to debate whether the bank could or should have been saved. Its creditors and former clients are focused on the more practical question of what can be salvaged from the wreckage.
With over $600 billion of assets, Lehman was America’s largest and most complex corporate failure. Since then, Alvarez & Marsal (A&M), a restructuring firm, has been winding down Lehman’s holding company, untangling derivatives contracts and assessing more than 65,000 claims from clients, counterparties and other creditors. It has 200 people working on the derivatives book alone. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) is leading a similar effort at Lehman’s main European arm. ...
Economies and markets may be at the mercy of long-term forces
THE financial world seems to be obsessed with the short term. Fund managers are usually judged on their performance over a three-month period. The television news highlights daily moves in stockmarkets. Lots of hedge funds think in terms of milliseconds.
But some commentators take the opposite tack, arguing that history is subject to “long waves” that cause economies and markets to change direction at regular intervals. Roger Babson, an investment adviser who predicted the 1929 crash, claimed the markets were driven by Newton’s third law of motion: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Mind you, he also wrote a pamphlet entitled “Gravity—Our Number One Enemy”. ...
Bob Diamond wins the hot seat at Britain’s most aggressive bank
JOHN VARLEY, the departing chief executive of Barclays, says his priority when he took over in 2004 was to end the British bank’s dependence on its stodgy home market. Along with dodging a bail-out in 2008, internationalising the firm ranks as his biggest achievement—today about two-thirds of its activity is abroad. But another kind of dependence has taken its place. The firm’s investment bank, Barclays Capital, which barely existed a decade ago and which hit the big league after buying the rump of Lehman Brothers’ American business, now contributes most of pre-tax profit (see chart).
BarCap’s reverse takeover of Barclays seems to have been confirmed by the appointment this week of Bob Diamond, its long-standing boss, as Mr Varley’s successor (pictured centre and left, respectively). For some the personnel change, which will take effect in March, is a metaphor for the firm: a talented American with dazzling teeth and a whiff of a personality cult takes over from the posh, self-deprecating Brit with a first from Oxford and a taste for fishing. Those worried about “casino banking” claim Mr Diamond’s arrival is a provocation, particularly since a government-appointed commission is due to examine whether to split up big banks. ...
HSBC’s chairman joins in the musical chairs by taking a government job
IN A book published last year, Stephen Green, an ordained priest and chairman of HSBC, asked “Why should I do anything for posterity?” His answer was that service brought redemption and renewal. After 28 years at HSBC, that is presumably what he hopes to find when he arrives in his new job as minister for trade in Britain’s coalition government in early 2011. Much of the role involves banging the drum for British business abroad. Mervyn Davies, who had been chairman of Standard Chartered, HSBC’s rival in Asia, had a similar job under the previous government.
Mr Green’s departure will leave a gap at HSBC. Traditionally the chairman ran the bank. Mr Green changed that last year by handing more control to Michael Geoghegan, the chief executive, who is based in Hong Kong. The contemplative Mr Green and the restless Mr Geoghegan seemed to balance each other out. One option is to promote Mr Geoghegan to chairman, with Stuart Gulliver, the boss of HSBC’s investment bank, replacing him. But Mr Geoghegan may not be ready to step back from the fray. The alternative is to find another chairman, possibly a former Goldman Sachs banker, John Thornton, who is now a professor in Beijing and an HSBC director. ...
Funding poor students could be the next big thing in microfinance
“LENDING to get a student through college is a far better way to fight poverty than making small-business loans,” says Ganhuyag Ch. Hutagt, until recently boss of XacBank, a Mongolian microfinance lender. Graduates are more likely to take jobs that lift them into a far higher income bracket—which is why, five years ago, XacBank started offering higher-education loans, typically between $700 and $900, to the country’s more than 160,000 students.
Finding new ways to fund poor students in emerging markets has become a hotbed of innovation. Vittana, founded three years ago by Kushal Chakrabarti, a former software developer at Amazon, is raising loans for students in five countries, with more soon to follow, through “peer-to-peer” online lending, mostly by people from rich countries. Qifang, founded three years ago, is doing much the same in China, raising money online for Chinese students from Chinese lenders. Vittana is growing at over 30% a month; and Qifang has already lent over $1.3m. ...
The latest in our series of profiles of financial institutions looks at Britain’s biggest insurer
“IT WAS the banks that caused the problems,” says Andrew Moss, the chief executive of Aviva, Britain’s biggest insurance firm and the world’s sixth largest, pulling no punches when describing the financial crisis. “And it was insurers who had to carry the consequences.”
From afar, those consequences seemed relatively slight. Unlike banks, most insurers did not need huge dollops of public money. The few that did need bailing out were either tied to a failing bank, or had overstepped the bounds of insurance, as AIG did, by guaranteeing loans. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the crisis forced the industry as a whole to batten down the hatches. ...
Ireland’s crippled banks and sluggish economy spell big trouble
LIKE schoolyard bullies after the holidays, bond markets are again picking on the weaklings. This week the extra interest, or spread, that small euro-zone countries pay on their sovereign bonds compared with German Bunds widened sharply—to record highs for Ireland and Greece, and to levels not seen since May for Portugal. Ireland had been one of the tougher kids. But with its ten-year bond yields at 6%, investors can smell fear.
In December the Irish government pledged to reduce its budget deficit to 3% of GDP in five years. To meet that target it cut public spending for 2010 by €4 billion ($5.1 billion) or 2.5% of GDP, and committed to a further €6.5 billion budget adjustment before 2014. On that basis, it reckoned public debt would peak at 84% of GDP before falling back. Nervous bond investors are sure that target won’t be met but do not know just how high debt will rise. ...
Mathematicians make headway in understanding traffic congestion
JUST as London drivers steeled themselves on September 6th for traffic chaos in the wake of a strike by workers on the Tube, as the city’s underground railway is called, Britain’s pre-eminent scientific academy published a slew of timely papers. A special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society was devoted entirely to understanding and preventing road congestion.
These insights are welcome. At current rates, the number of cars and light trucks worldwide is set to double over the next 20 years, from today’s estimated 900m. Bashing out new cars is relatively easy; building new roads to accommodate them is anything but. Figuring out how to use the available road space more efficiently will thus be necessary to keep ever more cars from languishing in jams, and spewing out prodigious quantities of carbon dioxide as they do. ...
Ancient West African treasures embark on a journey round America
AFTER acclaim in Spain and Britain, “Dynasty and Divinity”, the first big exhibition devoted to sculpture from the Kingdom of Ife (in present-day Nigeria), begins an 18-month tour of America in Houston on September 19th. The show, which consists of works in stone, terracotta and metal made between the 9th and 15th centuries, is a revelation and a treat. Art from dramatically different cultures is often hard to connect with, but these sculptures are naturalistic and remarkably accessible. Whether the subject is an animal, a person or a mythical creature, each image is well observed and has tremendous presence.
More than 100 works are on view. All are loans from Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments. Some have left Africa for the first time. Text and photo murals on the walls instruct visitors about the kingdom, an unbroken monarchy for more than 800 years. Today Ife is a city of 600,000 people. Its present ruler or Ooni is Alayeluwa Oba Okunade Sijuwade, Olubuse II; now aged 80, he studied in Britain, became a businessman and is enjoyably wealthy. ...
Bill Bryson's book about his house
At Home: A Short History of Private Life. By Bill Bryson. Doubleday; 512 pages; $28.95 and GBP20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
THE fruits of Bill Bryson’s fluent and amusing writing have been fame and fortune, so he now lives in one of the most desirable dwellings in the world: an old rectory in an English country village. The social and technological history of this lovely old house is the theme of his latest book, published earlier this year in Britain and coming out in America next month. ...
Books about how people can and will adapt to climate change need not be Panglossian—as these two show
Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future. By Matthew Kahn. Basic Books; 288 pages; $26.95 and GBP16.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
Turned Out Nice: How the British Isles Will Change as the World Heats Up. By Marek Kohn. Faber & Faber; 368 pages; GBP14.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk ...
A biography of Myanmar's dictator
Than Shwe: Unmasking Burma’s Tyrant. By Benedict Rogers. Silkworm Books; 256 pages; $30. Buy from Amazon.com
“PERFECTION, of a kind, was what he was after” wrote W.H. Auden in his “Epitaph on a Tyrant”. Perhaps it is this ambition that moves Than Shwe, the “senior general” in the junta which has run Myanmar into the ground. It may explain an inexplicable folly: building Naypyidaw (“Seat of Kings”), a grand new capital in a remote malaria-ridden area 320km (200 miles) from Yangon, Myanmar’s main city and former capital. ...
A new thriller about oil and finance
The Garden of Betrayal. By Lee Vance. Knopf; 320 pages; $24.95. Corvus; GBP14.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
SINCE oil lubricates almost every geopolitical machination, triggering wars, coups and uprisings, it is a bit curious that there are so few thrillers written about the stuff. “The Garden of Betrayal” is a welcome addition to a tiny subgenre. ...
An adventure-laden expedition to Sierra Leone and Liberia
Chasing the Devil: The Search for Africa’s Fighting Spirit. By Tim Butcher. Chatto & Windus; 325 pages; GBP18.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
IN HIS bestselling book about the Congo, “Blood River”, Tim Butcher, a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, followed the route of Henry Stanley, an explorer with a reputation for colourful exaggeration, “a cocky chancer”. One place that Mr Butcher conspicuously failed to visit during his hectic dash through “the most daunting, backward country on Earth” was the leper colony that inspired Graham Greene’s 1960 novel, “A Burnt-Out Case”. Now he has made good this omission by trekking in the novelist’s footsteps through another neglected region of Africa, an expedition that resulted in Greene’s “Journey Without Maps”. For Mr Butcher it meant a 350-mile (560km) walk into the forests of Sierra Leone (“the poorest country on Earth”) and Liberia (“one of the world’s most failed and scarred states”). ...
In "Sham country, but not sham bard" (July 31st) we wrote that the kilt was banned by King George IV’s grandfather. We were a generation wrong: George II, who did the banning, was George IV’s great-grandfather. This has been corrected online.
SIR – Recent interest in industrial policy (“Picking winners, saving losers”, August 7th) has turned the discussion to how and when to do it better, rather than simply how to do it less. The distinction between leading and following the market is useful. Public investment in new industries where private investors have shown little interest (“leading”) is obviously riskier than where the private sector has already had some success (“following”). Leading can be made less risky by studying products being made in economies with incomes two- or three-times higher to see what domestically-based firms might be able to upgrade to or diversify into.
However, public assistance must be given against performance indicators, which may relate to export success, or product quality, or prices moving towards international levels. Failure to specify performance conditions has been the bane of industrial policy from India to New Zealand. And as for how to improve success—it is worth bearing in mind the dictum attributed to Thomas Watson, founder of IBM, “If you want to be more successful, increase your failure rate.” ...
How the threats to the internet’s openness can be averted
WHEN George W. Bush referred to “rumours on the, uh, internets” during the 2004 presidential campaign, he was derided for his cluelessness—and “internets” became a shorthand for a lack of understanding of the online world. But what looked like ignorance then looks like prescience now. As divergent forces tug at the internet, it is in danger of losing its universality and splintering into separate digital domains.
The internet is as much a trade pact as an invention. A network of networks, it has grown at an astonishing rate over the past 15 years because the bigger it got, the more it made sense for other networks to connect to it. Its open standards made such interconnections cheap and easy, dissolving boundaries between existing academic, corporate and consumer networks (remember CompuServe and AOL?). Just as a free-trade agreement between countries increases the size of the market and boosts gains from trade, so the internet led to greater gains from the exchange of data and allowed innovation to flourish. But now the internet is so large and so widely used that countries, companies and network operators want to wall bits of it off, or make parts of it work in a different way, to promote their own political or commercial interests (see article). ...
Central bankers are not magicians. Don’t count on them to conjure up remedies if the rich economies flag
OVER the past few years the reputations of the rich world’s central bankers have fluctuated wildly. When the financial crisis struck, they were blamed for allowing the housing and credit bubbles to build, and for failing to foresee the bust. Later they were lionised for preventing a new Depression with bold actions to support the financial system. Now a third stage is at hand, one of dangerously outsized expectations.
With most governments unable, or unwilling, to offer more fiscal stimulus, central banks are left solely responsible for propping up the flagging recovery. The phenomenon is most obvious in America. Its economy has weakened, yet the default path for fiscal policy is a hefty tightening as the Obama stimulus wanes, the states slash spending to balance their budgets and the Bush tax cuts expire. With any discussion of remedies by politicians drowned out by partisan positioning before the mid-term elections in November, disproportionate hope is pinned on Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve. Hence the attention paid to his recent speech at Jackson Hole, which laid out, with great confidence, what further steps the Fed could take. ...
Japan’s ruling party should cast its most famous member, Ichiro Ozawa, into the wilderness
NOT for nothing is Ichiro Ozawa known as “The Destroyer”. Over a career spent scheming in the back rooms of Japanese politics, he has made and broken alliances, toppled governments and, with laconic disdain, treated transparency and other democratic norms as so many Western pretences. Yet his latest ploy is one of his darkest. In challenging Naoto Kan, the prime minister, as leader of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), he threatens to bring down Japan’s third government in 12 months. Worse, he may destroy what remains of the trust that voters put in the DPJ when it ended 55 years of one-party rule last year. For the good of Japanese democracy, not to mention its own future, the DPJ must reject Mr Ozawa and all that he stands for.
If the challenger does pull off a victory in the vote on September 14th—and he may—he would take over the DPJ a mere three months after he had been forced to step down as secretary-general under the cloud of a political-funding scandal. He would also replace Mr Kan as prime minister—or, if he preferred to stay in the shadows, install a puppet leader in his place. That would be a disaster, even by the sorry standards of recent Japanese politics, in which four prime ministers have come and gone in the past four years. ...
The responsibility for Pakistan’s cricketing scandal lies ultimately with the country’s elite
NOT much unites Pakistanis more than cricket. The national game inspires widespread devotion and the national team justified pride. Led by wristy batsmen, like Javed Miandad, and blood-curdling fast bowlers, like Imran Khan, Pakistan has often excelled at the world’s most popular sport after football. Its side has tended to beat India’s, despite its more modest population. In a country suffering devastation from flooding, and long divided by ethnicity, region, religion and sect, which often seems to have little to boast of, or even reason for being, cricket should be a boon.
But Pakistan’s cricketers are advertising much that is wrong with their country. In-fighting (including with cricket bats), drug-taking, feigned injury, allegations of players being coerced into Islamic fundamentalism and other scandals have plagued the national side. But the most egregious involves match-fixing, to which Pakistani cricketers, allegedly including several of today’s crop, seem especially prone. ...
Seeking to buy off allies and cracking down on dissent: bad signs in South Africa
WHEN he became president of South Africa just over a year ago, Jacob Zuma promised to quench South Africans’ thirst for renewal. After the aloof and idiosyncratic Thabo Mbeki, here was a big-hearted, charismatic “man of the people” who would unite a fractious country and help it make itself felt in the world. Sure enough, Mr Zuma was at his beguiling best during the football World Cup, a festival that passed off even better than most had dared hope.
Yet even at the time of his election, it was not clear what Mr Zuma stood for. At home, in front of African National Congress audiences, he sounded like a nationalist and socialist. Abroad, he sounded like a free-market liberal. He never properly explained what he believed in. Pessimists suggested it was getting power and holding on to it. ...
A stance that helped Barack Obama and the Democrats to victory has become a near-irrelevance
WHEN he ran for president, few subjects distinguished Barack Obama more than his views on the war in Iraq. He had opposed it from the start, so he constantly reminded the electorate, unlike his main rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton. He was determined to withdraw the majority of American troops from the country within 16 months of coming to office, unlike his Republican opponent, John McCain, who had spoken of American troops being in Iraq for 100 years. All this formed a big part of Mr Obama’s appeal to voters, who were sick of the conflict and dismayed by George Bush’s handling of it. So when Mr Obama declared the fulfilment of his pledge (a little over three months late) and the “end of our combat mission in Iraq” in an address from the Oval Office on August 31st, it should have been a triumphant moment for the president and a cathartic one for the American public. Instead, the speech was a sombre affair, and the popular reaction muted.
In part Mr Obama was simply determined to avoid the mistakes of Mr Bush, who was endlessly lampooned for hopping gleefully out of a fighter jet dressed in a flightsuit in front of a banner reading “Mission Accomplished”, just as Iraq began to sink into a bloody insurgency. As Mr Obama was quick to concede, Iraqi politics are a muddle and “extremists will continue to set off bombs”. ...
Unsafe eggs are the latest food scare
AMERICANS are known as hearty eaters, so a string of recent food-safety scares has shaken them to their rather wide cores. The country has already endured the economic and gastronomic damage inflicted by recent recalls of unsafe spinach, peanut butter, beef and peppers. Now insult has been added to injury.
The latest scare involves eggs. Officials confirm that from May to July nearly 2,000 people have been sickened by salmonella traced back to tainted eggs. As this is several times the baseline rate of affliction, it has forced the recall of over 500m eggs. That is not a deadly blow, as the country produces over 6 billion eggs each month, but more recalls may be coming. ...
Extending the cuts for a while may turn out to be prudent policy
HOW dramatically the pendulum of fear has swung in the past year—from worries about the fragile recovery, to panic about the level of the national debt, and back to anxiety about growth again. Swinging along with it has been the fate of George Bush’s tax cuts, which are due to expire at the end of this year. Democratic Party leaders had hoped to make political capital, just before the mid-term elections in November, from the extension of the cuts for households earning less than $250,000 ($200,000 for single earners). At the same time, they hoped to paint the Republicans as hypocrites for moaning about the deficit while fighting to keep low taxes for the very rich. But these hopes, like the recovery, have withered away.
The tax cuts, which were supposed to last for only ten years, had their genesis in the 2000 presidential campaign, when both Mr Bush and Al Gore, the Democratic candidate, proposed to return a portion of the then budget surplus to voters. As the economy tipped into recession in 2001, stimulus became the rationale for the cuts, and for the 2003 law that phased them in more rapidly than originally planned. By then, reduced tax revenues were contributing to a steady increase in the deficit. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated the cost of the cuts over the ten years to 2011 at $1.7 trillion. ...
Democrats must energise their base if they are to win in November
STEVE DRIEHAUS is ready to speak to old folk at a community centre in Cincinnati’s western suburbs, but their game of bingo is not quite finished and the Democratic congressman has to wait. A woman sidles over to warn that it’s a tough crowd. She is right. Some in the audience are vexed at the $26 billion package of aid for teaching and other jobs that Mr Driehaus and his colleagues in the House recently passed. “It’s another union bail-out!” yells one lady. Mr Driehaus’s suggestion that some of the blame for America’s economic ills lies with the Bush administration does not go down well, either.
This is Ohio’s 1st congressional district. Covering most of Cincinnati and surrounding Hamilton County, it is a diverse political barometer with a Democratic urban core and suburbs full of Republicans and independents. George Bush carried the district in 2004; Barack Obama won it in 2008, by 11 points. Mr Driehaus was elected that year, defeating Steve Chabot, a Republican who had held the seat for 14 years and who now wants it back. ...
Why digging in Panama is bringing out the shovels on America’s east coast
SOMETIMES what is absent is more important than what is present. So it is with Savannah’s port, the fourth-busiest container port in America and one of its fastest-growing, where what is absent is the sea. Its busier rivals—Los Angeles, Long Beach and New York/New Jersey—sit on saltwater bays; Savannah’s port is almost 20 miles (32km) inland on the Savannah River, far from the city’s charming Victorian centre, in the distinctly unlovely suburb of Garden City.
Yet it is precisely that remote site that has allowed Savannah to grow as swiftly as it has: land is cheap and available. Home Depot, IKEA, Target and Wal-Mart all have distribution centres of more than 1m square feet (100,000 square metres) in the Savannah area to handle cargo coming through the port, which sits at a nexus of interstate highways and railway lines that provide quick access to the south-east and Midwest. During fiscal 2009 another 1.5m square feet of warehouse space came on-stream in the region; a further 20m square feet are planned. Georgia’s ports (of which Savannah is the largest) are a big economic engine for the state, responsible in 2009 for 8.6% of Georgia’s total production income ($61.7 billion), 6.7% of its employment (295,443 jobs) and $6.1 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue. ...
New Jersey’s governor has a plan to help America’s playground
FOR centuries Atlantic City has been a holiday spot. The Lenni-Lenape Indians spent their summer months there, though they called it “Absegami”. In 1850 Jonathan Pitney, a local doctor, saw the then undeveloped island as a “city by the sea”, a health resort where people could escape the dirty towns. Within a few years a train full of Atlantic City’s first spa guests arrived. A century and a half later that city by the sea boasts 11 casinos and the famous Boardwalk; but its fortunes have declined of late. People think of it as unsafe and unclean. Its jobless rate, at 12%, is higher than the national rate of 9.5%. A reported 24% of its housing units are empty. The city’s poverty rate is slightly higher than it was in 1978, when the first casino opened.
Gambling, long considered recession-resistant, was one of the first industries to be affected by the latest recession. It may also, according to Moody’s, a ratings agency, be one of the last to recover. On August 18th the Casino Control Commission announced that Atlantic City’s casinos had reported a 23% decline in operating profits during the second quarter of 2010. Net revenues were down by 7%. ...
A moderate force takes shape inside the Republican Party
THE Weekly Standard, the parish magazine of American conservatives, is not merely a wry observer of the political scene. From time to time it plays a direct part in Republican politics. In 2007 a clutch of its senior editors, visiting Alaska for a luxury cruise and lecture tour, were entertained by Sarah Palin in her governor’s mansion. They came away mightily impressed. On returning to Washington Fred Barnes wrote a gushing article about her. Bill Kristol later started to push her name as a possible running mate for John McCain. You might say that the rest is history, except that Ms Palin’s history in politics is far from over.
Later that year the Standard indulged in another round of Republican talent-spotting when it ran a cover story about three promising Republicans in the House of Representatives whom it called the “young guns”. The three men thus flattered—Eric Cantor from Virginia, Paul Ryan from Wisconsin and Kevin McCarthy from California—liked and adopted the moniker. They have since turned the Young Guns into a bigger, formal group, working with the National Republican Congressional Committee to pick talented congressional candidates. ...
The sugar industry produces food, fuel and environmental benefits. How fast it grows may depend on an argument about how it should be regulated
Correction to this article
IT IS what passes for a winter’s day in upstate Sao Paulo. The sun is blazing from a blue sky feathered lightly with cirrus cloud. In a large, sloping field overlooking the city of Piracicaba, a mechanical harvester chomps through a stand of three-metre-high sugar cane, fat and juicy from months of sunshine. The harvester slices the cane into 20cm chunks and regurgitates them into a 30-tonne trailer moving alongside that will lug them a few kilometres to the Costa Pinto mill (pictured). There the cane is weighed, washed, tipped onto a conveyor belt, crushed and then, depending on market conditions, crystallised into sugar or distilled into ethanol. The woody residue—the bagaco—is burned in two high-pressure boilers that, according to the flickering needle in the control room, are supplying around 50 megawatts (MW) of electricity to the local grid—enough to power half of Piracicaba. ...
How ten years in power have changed the former opposition leaders
SKULKING around Morelia after dark, a 17-year-old Agustin Torres would wait until midnight before sticking up posters for the National Action Party (PAN). Any earlier, and he risked being photographed by authorities monitoring subversives in the western city. “I wanted to be against the system, so I joined the PAN,” says Mr Torres, now 33 and a congressman.
These days, the PAN is part of the system. After 61 years in opposition, it wrested the presidency from the hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 2000 and held it in 2006. Its strengths reflect its legacy as the protagonist of Mexico’s transition to multi-party democracy. Unlike the big-tent PRI, the conservative PAN knows what it stands for. “Whereas the PRI is driven by power, the PAN tends to be driven by ideology,” says Luis Rubio, the head of CIDAC, a think-tank. And unlike the fractious Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), its leftist counterpart, the PAN runs a slick operation. It even boasts an international reach, winning 57% of the expatriate vote in 2006. ...
China’s economic rise has brought the rest of emerging Asia huge benefits. But the region still needs the West
WITH markets still on edge after the worst financial crisis in decades, and fears of renewed recession stalking the West, this week seemed a poignant moment for China’s People’s Daily to detect a “golden age of development”, for Asia at least. Yet developing Asia, led by China itself, is booming. China’s GDP barrelled along in the first half of the year, growing by 11.1% compared with a year earlier. The newly industrialised little tigers—Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan—as well as most of South-East Asia seem to have fully recovered from the downturn. Even Thailand, mired in political turmoil, grew by 9.1% in the second quarter.
The dream is that this gilded future is now insulated from rich-world downturns: that China—now having, after all, officially overtaken Japan as the world’s second-largest economy—can drive growth for the whole region. One day, maybe. Not yet. ...
What lies behind the Dear Leader’s latest trip to China?
NORTH KOREA’S leader, Kim Jong Il, must have been on an urgent mission when he boarded his bulletproof train and headed to China for the second time in less than four months on August 26th. With America’s former president Jimmy Carter in town, devastating floods in the north and a rare conclave of his ruling party only days away, Mr Kim had much to keep him at home. But buttering up China appears to be a new priority.
Both China and North Korea, as is their wont, kept quiet about the visit until after Mr Kim’s return on August 30th. By then Mr Carter had left with an American, Aijalon Gomes, who had been serving eight years’ hard labour for entering the country illegally in January. Mr Gomes’s release was a rare gesture of conciliation to America after months of heightened tension caused by the sinking in March of a South Korean naval vessel. ...
The South waves sticks and dangles footballs at the North
SOUTH KOREANS are unsure precisely how best to respond to the uncertain changes in the regime to the North. A hardline approach to its neighbour has been the official stance ever since the Cheonan, a Southern military corvette, was torpedoed in March. Sanctions, a diplomatic freeze and military exercises with the Americans all suggest that the authorities in Seoul are in no mood to back down.
Yet this week, the South Korean Red Cross said that it would send emergency aid, mostly food and medicine, worth $8.4m to help the North cope with floods. This would be the first aid to flow north since May, but the South’s government insists it is merely a temporary humanitarian measure. ...
The economy is powering on, but the Congress-led coalition is squandering an opportunity to improve India
THE weightlifting auditorium has a leaky roof. The athletes’ village has no kitchen. Stagnant monsoon water, abuzz with dengue-carrying mosquitoes, collects at most of the stadiums being hurriedly built for the Delhi Commonwealth games, which are due to begin on October 3rd. The security arrangements, in terrorism-stricken India, are shot to pieces because of 24-hour processions of workmen at most venues. Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, reiterates the official line that these will be the “best games ever”. That may depend on how you define “best”.
This shambles, for which corruption, feuding ministries, sapping bureaucracy and shoddy workmanship are all to blame, does not matter to many Indians. Athletics is not cricket. And few know much about their country’s image abroad. Yet it is depressing, not least because it mirrors how large parts of India are run. ...
An ancient pan-Asian university might yet open again
NALANDA is an unlovely place in the poorest state in India. Yet, as in much of Bihar, a prosaic present belies a poetic past. It is the site of one of the first great universities which, half a millennium before the founding of Oxford, flourished with some 10,000 students and monks from all over Asia. Mango groves and lotus pools circled its halls, and an 8th-century inscription touted its “row of pagodas the spires of which touched the clouds.”
If some scholars and diplomats have their way, a new generation of students will be enrolled. A bill has just snaked through India’s parliament calling for Nalanda’s revival, at a likely cost of several hundred million dollars. The Nalanda Mentor Group, led by Amartya Sen, an economics Nobel laureate, has overseen the project since it was first proposed in 2006. The Bihar state government has agreed to provide 500 acres for a new campus and India’s Planning Commission has proffered 1 billion rupees (some $21m) to get the project started. A chancellor has also been appointed. ...
Cheap labour will not yield gains for ever. But what comes next is unclear
ON THE edge of Hanoi brick-walled factories lie abandoned, weeds sprouting in their ruins. Surprisingly, this is a sign of progress. The land is slated for new housing; the state-owned textile firm that operated there is moving to an industrial park, where it can better meet booming demand for Vietnamese garments. Exports of textiles and garments rose by 17% in the first seven months this year, to $5.8 billion, suggesting that investors still favour Vietnam as a base for cheap manufacturing.
Its advantages have been amplified by recent labour unrest and rising costs in southern China’s factories. In Hanoi there is renewed talk of “China Plus One” as a strategy for multinationals keen to spread their bets. Vietnam could gain handsomely, thanks to its labour which is cheaper than China’s and its neighbours’ (see chart). Even after a pay rise, the monthly wage for a textile worker starts at $84, says Nguyen Tung Van, head of the Communist Party-run textile workers’ union, from his office in the abandoned compound. The industry employs around 1.7m people. Makers of footwear, furniture and more also gain from supplies of cheap labour. ...
Elections this month should not be quite as awful as last year’s presidential one
THE presidential poll in Afghanistan is still the stuff of nightmares for the technicians, diplomats and officials who had the misfortune to be involved in it. They shudder at the orgy of Taliban violence unleashed across the country on voting day, August 20th 2009, the most violent day in recent years. Voters stayed away from many polling stations, leaving corrupt supporters of the incumbent, Hamid Karzai, to stuff ballot boxes with perhaps 1m votes. And during the months of ballot auditing and recounts that followed, the business of government ground to a halt.
Relations between Afghanistan’s Western backers and Mr Karzai also sank to a wretched low after the West dared to point out the extraordinary level of electoral fraud. “God, it was just terrible,” says one shaken foreign election expert. “It just can’t happen again.” ...
A cross-border fraternity that strives to be seen, heard and heeded
NEARLY four years ago, a web-based political movement set itself the modest task of “closing the gap between the world we have and world most people everywhere want”. Calling their group Avaaz, which means “voice” in several languages, the founders aimed to reproduce globally some of the success which their progenitors—like America’s Moveon.org, and Australia’s Getup!—had enjoyed in national political arenas.
By its own lights, the movement, using 14 languages and engaged in a mind-boggling list of causes, has had some spectacular successes. Within the next few months, membership will top 6m. The number of individual actions taken (from bombarding a politician with a well-aimed message, or funding a poster campaign, to helping provide satellite phones to Burmese monks) is estimated at over 23m. Among the recent developments Avaaz claims to have influenced are a new anti-corruption law in Brazil; a move by Britain to create a marine-conservation zone in the Indian Ocean; and the spiking of a proposal to allow more hunting of whales. ...
Online as much as in the real world, people bunch together in mutually suspicious groups—and in both realms, peacemaking is an uphill struggle
IN 2007 Danah Boyd heard a white American teenager describe MySpace, the social network, as “like ghetto or whatever”. At the time, Facebook was stealing members from MySpace, but most people thought it was just a fad: teenagers tired of networks, the theory went, just as they tired of shoes.
But after hearing that youngster, Ms Boyd, a social-media researcher at Microsoft Research New England, felt that something more than whimsy might be at work. “Ghetto” in American speech suggests poor, unsophisticated and black. That led to her sad conclusion: in their online life, American teenagers were recreating what they knew from the physical world—separation by class and race. ...
The emperor Charlemagne is the wrong father-figure for Europe
BEYOND the octagon of Aachen cathedral lies the golden shrine of St Mary, holding ancient relics that are displayed every seven years: the cloak of the Virgin, the swaddling clothes of the infant Jesus, the loincloth of the Saviour on the Cross and the cloth that held the severed head of John the Baptist. Such wonders made Aachen one of the great pilgrimage sites of medieval Europe. In these more sceptical times, it is the other golden casket here that commands the visitor’s attention: the one bearing the remains of Charlemagne.
The Frankish warrior-king, crowned as heir of the Roman emperors by Pope Leo III in 800, is still revered locally as a saint. More importantly, he is the icon of Europe’s newer, secular faith: political and economic integration. Since 1950 Aachen has bestowed a yearly Charlemagne prize on the figure deemed to have done most to promote European unity. The winners are mostly a predictable cast of grandees. In 2002 the prize was awarded not to a person but to the euro. And in 2004 the judges conferred the prize on Pope John Paul II; a reversal, perhaps, of Leo’s coronation of Charlemagne. ...
Scapegoated abroad and the victims of prejudice at home, eastern Europe’s Roma are the problem no politician wants to solve
SLOVAKIA is in shock; France in uproar. The cause of both nations’ turmoil is the Roma (gypsies), or, rather, what is being done to them. This week a gunman in the Slovak capital, Bratislava, killed seven people and injured 14, before shooting himself dead. Six of the victims were a Roma family, killed inside their apartment; they appear to have been deliberately targeted.
In France the expulsion of hundreds of Roma immigrants, whom Nicolas Sarkozy’s government says were in the country illegally, has galvanised opposition from the pope, French churches, a UN committee and even several ministers in Mr Sarkozy’s own government. Yet further tough legislation is promised. ...
What looks obvious to outsiders is not clear to France’s Socialists
FRANCE’S opposition Socialist Party should be building up for its best crack at the French presidency in over a decade. The incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, is unpopular. Polls find that a majority of the French want the left to return to power. And, in Dominique Strauss-Kahn (pictured), the boss of the IMF in Washington, DC, the Socialists have a potential candidate with a real chance of victory in 2012. One new poll finds that, if a presidential election were to take place today, Mr Strauss-Kahn would beat Mr Sarkozy in a second-round run-off by a crushing 59% to 41%.
If only it were that simple. After its summer conference at the Atlantic resort of La Rochelle last weekend, where delegates discussed socialism over platters of fruits de mer, the party is certainly feeling upbeat. It put on a show of unity, with rival grandees posing together for the cameras in studious harmony. Yet Mr Strauss-Kahn, the party’s best potential candidate, may not get the nomination. ...
Angela Merkel agonises over a planned phase-out of Germany’s nuclear capacity
WHEN Angela Merkel cares about an issue she does not give a speech. Instead, she hits the road. Lately Germany’s chancellor has travelled to a wind park in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, a nuclear reactor in Lower Saxony, and an energy-generating house in Hesse. Aiming to draw attention to Germany’s dilemmas in deciding how much and what sort of power to produce and consume in the coming decades, Mrs Merkel will bundle her answers into a comprehensive “energy concept”, to be unveiled at the end of September.
This is like coming up with a menu that pleases both carnivores and herbivores. Much of the debate revolves around whether to scrap a plan devised by an earlier government to cease nuclear-power generation by 2022. The decision will affect Mrs Merkel’s political standing and the public finances, as well as Germany’s energy future. With roughly a quarter of generation capacity due to reach retirement age by 2020, decisions made now will shape the energy profile of Europe’s biggest economy for years. There is “a window of opportunity for good changes or for messing up the situation for the next 50 years,” says Olav Hohmeyer, an economist at the University of Flensburg. ...
Last week’s story on drug use in the former Czechoslovakia incorrectly conflated the velvet revolution and the velvet divorce. The country split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, not 1989. Our apologies for the error, which has been corrected online.
Bolstered by immigration and challenged by the economic downturn, the church is playing an ever more active role
TO SEE two faces of Catholic Britain, you need only walk a short way from Parliament. The train and bus stations of Victoria, where many migrants arrive to seek their fortunes, are even closer.
First there is the squat red brick of Westminster cathedral, home of England’s Catholic hierarchy; its Byzantine mosaics, glinting in candlelight, are a splendid setting for one of the country’s finest choirs. Round the corner things are more down-to-earth at a hostel and day-centre for the homeless (the largest in London, it is claimed) set up by a religious order, the Daughters of Charity. Among the duties of the priests and nuns who work at The Passage is liaison with police, hospitals—and undertakers, in the fairly common event that homeless people, often young, succumb to addiction or despair. ...
Excellent schools tend to choose their pupils. Is there another way?
PARENTS seeking the best education for their offspring often look to ancient institutions. Small wonder that schools run by either the Catholic church or the Church of England are often high on their list. Almost a quarter of all children in the state system attend a religious school, most of them Anglican- or Catholic-run primary schools.
In his drive to give parents more choice in educating their children, Tony Blair raised the profile of church schools by encouraging existing ones to expand and new ones to set up shop. The former prime minister was also keen on incorporating other religions into the state system. The first state-funded Muslim and Sikh schools opened soon after he took power, and the first Hindu school in 2008. ...
The town’s high-tech industry is weathering recession well
NEITHER the drab modernity of the suburbs nor the beautiful buildings in the centre hint that Cambridge is at the heart of one of Britain’s biggest clusters of high-tech businesses. But on the outskirts of the city, just off a busy dual carriageway, is the collection of low-rise, landscape-gardened buildings that make up the Cambridge Science Park.
The resemblance to the architecture of Silicon Valley is striking, and deliberate: the high-tech industry that has grown up around Cambridge is known as “Silicon Fen”. Built on the solid scientific research provided by Cambridge University—currently ranked fifth in the world by Shanghai Jiaotang University, which compiles an international league table—it features firms in sectors such as electronics, computing, software, scientific instruments and pharmaceuticals. The number of jobs in research and development is around five times the British average. ...
Tony Blair’s rather odd memoirs contain important truths for his successors
JUST who does Tony Blair think he is? In a revealing quirk of the English language, to ask the question is to level an accusation at the same time. The former prime minister has always been hard to pigeon-hole, by class or political tribe. He is the Oxford-educated barrister with unabashedly bourgeois tastes who led the Labour Party to three victories over Conservative rivals of humbler upbringing. The social liberal and self-proclaimed “progressive” who forged close bonds with George Bush (recently declaring the Texan an “idealist” of “genuine integrity”). The devout Christian who led his country into four wars.
Along with the invasion of Iraq, those shape-shifting qualities may go some way towards explaining the real loathing Mr Blair inspires in many British hearts. At least in his home country, three years out of office have done little to dim the dislike. The publication of his memoirs on September 1st was presented by much of the press as a trial to be endured. Even the announcement that he would give all the proceeds (amounting to millions of pounds) to a charity for wounded soldiers was greeted with eye-rolling, and talk of blood money. ...
An ancient market in need of an overhaul
THE City of London Corporation fears draconian financial reforms that might drive banks and brokers elsewhere. It has fewer qualms, however, about overhauling another market in its fief: that for wet fish.
Billingsgate, controlled by the City since 1327, lies a stone’s throw from the towers of Canary Wharf. Yet unlike those computer-driven establishments, the trading floor at Billingsgate is populated by boxes of glistening fish: eels, mackerel, salmon and exotics such as swordfish, octopus and barracuda. Merchants serve their customers while licensed porters, wearing special badges, manhandle the fish and lug them around on trolleys. ...
The first battle of the new parliament is already well under way
UNTIL it was abolished by the Reform Act of 1832, the “rotten borough” of Old Sarum elected two MPs with fewer than a dozen registered voters. If you believe Labour bigwigs, those days are back. The government proposes to redraw constituencies to make them much more equal in terms of voter population, and to shrink the House of Commons from 650 to 600 members. To create constituencies with around 75,000 voters, bits would be chopped off giant seats such as the Isle of Wight (which has more than 100,000 voters now), while sparsely peopled rural seats in places like Wales would be merged. A handful of (mostly Liberal Democrat) constituencies in the Scottish Highlands would be exempted.
In order to have new boundaries ready for the next general election, the government would scrap the formal public inquiries that have dragged out previous boundary reviews for years. In response Labour frontbenchers talk of the “worst kind of gerrymandering” and of abuses to rival rotten boroughs. ...
Scotland’s fishermen are up in arms as rivals commandeer a valuable catch
SCOTTISH skippers are not the cheeriest lot at the best of times. Now the escalating row over mackerel is adding to their dourness. This summer first Iceland and then the Faroe Islands unilaterally jacked up the amount of the fish they intend to let their fishermen catch. This will endanger stocks, complain Scottish fishermen, who land three-quarters of Britain’s mackerel quota and earned GBP135m from it in 2009.
Rich in trendily nutritious substances such as Omega 3 fatty acids, the Atlantic mackerel is big business. Every year the fish migrate northwards to summer feeding grounds around the northern coasts of Britain and Ireland and off southern Norway. These migrations are when fishermen lie in wait. Recently, however, the shoals have been foraging further north, to Iceland and the Faroes. Warmer temperatures are the most plausible explanation. ...
Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?
FIFTY years ago, in the glorious age of three-martini lunches and all-smoking offices, America’s car companies were universally admired. Everybody wanted to know the secrets of their success. How did they churn out dazzling new models every year? How did they manage so many people so successfully (General Motors was then the biggest private-sector employer in the world)? And how did they keep their customers so happy?
Today the world is equally in awe of American universities. They dominate global rankings: on the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy’s list of the world’s best universities, 17 of the top 20 are American, and 35 of the top 50. They employ 70% of living Nobel prizewinners in science and economics and produce a disproportionate share of the world’s most-cited articles in academic journals. Everyone wants to know their secret recipe. ...
Counterfeit drugs used to be a problem for poor countries. Now they threaten the rich world, too
DRUG smugglers can expect harsh penalties nearly everywhere—if the drugs in question are heroin or cocaine. Those who smuggle counterfeit medicines, by contrast, have often faced lax enforcement and light punishment. Some governments deem drug-counterfeiting a trivial offence, little more than a common irritant. After all, whose spam filter does not groan with ads for suspiciously cheap “Viagra”?
This could be changing, however. The pharmaceutical industry has persuaded several governments to stiffen regulations against fake drugs and to conduct more aggressive raids (see chart). Companies are also devising novel technologies to outfox the criminals. Even the Catholic church is joining the cause, issuing a stern statement in August that it is in “the best interest of all concerned that smuggling of counterfeit drugs be fought against”. ...
Paul Allen has rekindled a controversy over patent trolls
DEEP-FRIED beer may sound scrumptious, but is it patentable? Mark Zable, an inventive Texan, thinks it is. To protect his novel production process, which involves encasing the alcohol in batter and dunking it in a fryer, he recently applied for a patent. He wants to profit if others exploit his beery brainwave.
Without patents to protect their creations, inventors would have little incentive to invent. But some Americans fret that patent protection has grown too strong. The system breeds so many lawsuits, they worry, that it throttles the innovation it is supposed to promote. ...
How the mobile internet will transform the BRICI countries
BUYING a mobile phone was the wisest $20 Ranvir Singh ever spent. Mr Singh, a farmer in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, used to make appointments in person, in advance, to deliver fresh buffalo milk to his 40-odd neighbours. Now his customers just call when they want some. Mr Singh’s income has risen by 25%, to 7,000 rupees ($149) a month. And he hears rumours of an even more bountiful technology. He has heard that “something on mobile phones” can tell him the current market price of his wheat. Mr Singh does not know that that “something” is the internet, because, like most Indians, he has never seen or used it. But the phone in his calloused hand hints at how hundreds of millions of people in emerging markets—perhaps even billions—will one day log on.
Only 81m Indians (7% of the population) regularly use the internet. But brutal price wars mean that 507m own mobile phones. Calls cost as little as $0.006 per minute. Indian operators such as Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications sign up 20m new subscribers a month. ...
Old-media firms are firmly in control of internet video
LIKE stallholders in a busy market, technology companies hawked their online-video services this week. In Berlin, Sony announced it would begin selling films over the internet to Europeans. In San Francisco, Apple unveiled a smaller, cheaper Apple TV, a set-top box designed to play videos. It also said some television shows would be available a la carte for 99 cents. YouTube, a video-streaming website owned by Google, is trying to cut deals with studios that would allow it to rent newly released films. Amazon too is reportedly trying to build a subscription service. But while technology companies are making all the noise, old-media firms are quietly steering the market.
The main reason for all the activity is the abrupt appearance in shops of televisions that can plug into the internet, either through cables or wirelessly. NPD, a research firm, reckons that 12% of all the flat-screen televisions sold in America in the first seven months of this year were “connected”. That share is likely to soar. Technology firms spy an opportunity to bypass old-fashioned distributors and bring online video directly to the living room. ...
Brazil's oil giant may be paying too much to pump the stuff
FOUR years ago Brazil struck oil—up to 350km (220 miles) offshore and buried under deep water and thick layers of rock, sand and corrosive salt. In places, the oil fields are 7km below the surface, so getting the black stuff out was always going to be hard. Now it looks like finding the funding will be tricky too.
On September 1st, two months later than planned, Brazil’s government made public the price it will demand for an estimated 5 billion barrels, mostly in the Franco field off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. Petrobras, the national oil company that was partially privatised in 1997 (Brazil’s government still owns 40% and a majority of voting rights), will have to pay $8.51 a barrel. Analysts frown that $6 would be more reasonable. Oil is $74 a barrel, on the surface, but is worth much less underground. ...
Renting cars by the hour is becoming big business
CAR clubs, whose members pay an annual fee and then rent a car by the hour on a pay-as-you-go basis, are moving from a fringe fad for greens to a big global business. Carmakers have no choice but to pay attention: one rental car can take the place of 15 owned vehicles.
Car-sharing started in Europe and spread to America in the late 1990s, when the first venture opened in Portland, Oregon, a traditional hangout of tree-huggers. For years it was organised by small co-operatives, often supported by local government. It still has a green tinge. One in five new cars added to club fleets is electric; such cars are good for short-range, urban use. But sharing is no longer small. ...
Will Burger King be gobbled up by private equity?
SHARES in Burger King (BK) soared on September 1st on reports that the fast-food company was talking to several private-equity firms interested in buying it. How much beef was behind these stories was unclear. But lately the company famous for the slogan “Have It Your Way” has certainly not been having it its own way. There may be arguments about whether BK or McDonald’s serves the best fries, but there is no doubt which is more popular with stockmarket investors: the maker of the Big Mac has supersized its lead in the past two years.
Recession has favoured McDonald’s over BK, whose share price has fallen by half since the economy was flame-grilled in the summer of 2008. Shares in McDonald’s have risen, reaching an all-time high in August. Same-store sales at BK have fallen for five successive quarters. ...
An enclave of unbridled capitalism thinks again
IT HAS been mooted since 1932, but Hong Kong has never had a minimum wage. It soon will, however. In July a law was passed. And on August 30th, after endless meetings, an official commission agreed to recommend what the minimum hourly wage should be. That figure was not disclosed, but leaks suggest it will be HK$28-29 ($3.60-3.70).
That is halfway between what labour groups demanded and what business groups reluctantly suggested. It will please no one: the territory’s largest labour organisations vowed to fight for at least HK$33, plus annual increases. Prices are rising and wage grumbles are rife. Bus workers briefly went on strike in August. ...
Our story on shocking new accounting rules (“You gonna buy that?” August 21st) contained a shocking error. We should have said that the obligation to pay for a leased item will go in the liabilities column, not the debit column. Sorry.
Monetary and fiscal stimulus make a potent, if uneasy, combination
THE Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is the big event of the year for central bankers. But defining monetary policy is far harder than it used to be. In recent years central bankers have lurched ever closer to the realm of fiscal policy, mainly by buying government debt with freshly printed money. They can justify such “quantitative easing” (QE) on monetary grounds since they have already lowered short-term interest rates to, or close to, zero. But they also worry it is a slippery slope from QE to monetising government deficits and thence, inevitably, to inflation. When Phillip Swagel, then an official with the US Treasury, was asked why he attended the conference in 2008, he shrugged: “Fiscal policy, monetary policy—what’s the difference?”
For central bankers this is an unsettling thought. Their mistrust of fiscal policy was nicely captured in a paper presented at this year’s Jackson Hole conference by Eric Leeper of Indiana University*. As central bankers have become more independent, they have increasingly based their policies on rigorous economic analysis. By contrast fiscal policy is deeply politicised, with haphazard methods and few, if any, defined goals. ...
Theories about why some rich-world economies are doing better than America’s don’t stand up
AMERICA is used to making the economic weather. It has the world’s largest economy, its most influential central bank and it issues the main global reserve currency. In recent months, however, some rich-world economies (notably Germany’s) have basked in the sunshine even as the clouds gathered over America.
On August 27th America’s second-quarter GDP growth was revised down to an annualised 1.6%. That looked moribund compared with the 9% rate confirmed in Germany a few days earlier. America’s jobless rate was 9.5% in July (figures for August were released on September 3rd, after The Economist went to press). But in Germany the unemployment rate is lower even than before the downturn. Other rich countries, including Britain and Australia, have enjoyed sprightlier recent GDP growth and lower unemployment than America. ...
China restricts exports of some obscure but important commodities
BEHIND the rise of resource-poor countries like Japan, South Korea and China into industrial giants has been the readiness of other countries to sell them critical commodities, albeit sometimes at excruciating cost. An unfolding collision around a group of elements known as “rare earths” is seen by some as a test of China’s willingness to reciprocate.
Rare earths have become increasingly important in manufacturing sophisticated products including flat-screen monitors, electric-car batteries, wind turbines and aerospace alloys. Over the summer prices for cerium (used in glass), lanthanum (petrol refining), yttrium (displays) and a bunch of other –iums have zoomed upward (see chart) as China, which accounts for almost all of the world’s production, squeezes supply. In July it announced the latest in a series of annual export reductions, this time by 40% to precisely 30,258 tonnes. That is 15,000-20,000 tonnes less than consumption by non-Chinese producers, says Judith Chegwidden of Roskill Information Services, a consultancy. ...
A once-revered buy-out firm is going under. Who’s next?
FOR years people have been predicting the demise of private equity. Now they have a proper tombstone to point at. On August 31st Candover, once one of Britain’s leading private-equity firms, announced that it would unwind its assets and return money to shareholders and investors. The 30-year-old firm is the biggest buy-out victim of the crisis so far.
Bad investments during the boom helped undo Candover. Several companies in its portfolio have struggled under their debts over the past two years, including Ferretti, a luxury-yacht maker. In June Candover relinquished control of Gala Coral, a gambling company, to creditors. It has had to write down several other investments. ...
An alluring trade in “supergreenhouse” gas emissions is coming under scrutiny
ONE of the curiosities of carbon markets is that they do not just trade in carbon. Other greenhouse gases can be given a value, too—sometimes a very high one. Claims that these prices promote scammery are now prompting some searching questions.
The gas at the centre of the controversy is HFC-23, a greenhouse gas which, on a weight-for-weight basis, is 14,800 times better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. HFC-23 is produced as a by-product of the manufacture of HCFC-22, an ozone-destroying refrigerant. HCFC-22 is banned in developed countries, but developing countries can keep making it until 2030. ...
The IMF offers indebted governments some reassurance
ONE consequence of the deepest recession since the Depression has been the biggest peacetime build-up of public debt the rich world has ever seen. Some reckon that the debt position of many rich countries is now unsustainable. It is a measure of just how nervous people have become about the mountain of debt that the IMF—not usually known for taking doveish views—concluded in two papers released on September 1st that there is too much pessimism about public finances.
The IMF argues that despite historically high debt-to-GDP ratios, many countries still have room for fiscal manoeuvre. Typically, the debate on the point at which a country’s debt burden spirals out of control has tried to identify a single debt-to-GDP threshold, above which things are no longer sustainable. The fund’s economists argue that a universal debt limit does not make sense. ...
Investors should pay more attention to dividends
DIVIDENDS do not get the respect they deserve. Over the long run they provide the bulk of equity investors’ returns. Work by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton of the London Business School* found that over the period from 1900 to 2005, the real return from global equities averaged 5%. The mean dividend yield over that period was 4.5%.
Despite this, stockmarkets devote a lot more time to forecasting and analysing profits than they do to thinking about payouts. Profits can be easily manipulated and come in a bewildering variety of forms (operating, reported, post-tax, pre-exceptional, etc). Dividends are (mostly) paid in cash and so are hard to fake. ...
Germany’s biggest bank is trying to make investment banking boring. The latest in our series of profiles of financial institutions after the crisis
JOSEF ACKERMANN, the head of Deutsche Bank, combines a silky manner with blunt words. When the German government set up a bail-out fund to stabilise the country’s banking system, he said he would be “ashamed” to use it. When Europe and the IMF bailed out Greece, Mr Ackermann said he doubted it would pay back the loans. And when regulators and economists say that big banks should be broken up, with “casino” investment banks split off from “utility” retail banks, Mr Ackermann retorts that “smaller banks will not make us safer.”
Mr Ackermann speaks with the authority of a man who steered his bank through the crisis more deftly than most. Deutsche did not escape unscathed. In 2008, a year in which it had confidently forecast a record profit of more than €8 billion ($11.7 billion), it posted a net loss of almost €4 billion because of a huge hit to its investment bank (see chart). Yet it emerged from the crisis as the leading member of an exclusive club of large banks—others include Barclays and Credit Suisse—that did not have to take direct injections of public funds (although all, of course, benefited from a wide range of other government props to the system). ...
Or can you?
RICHARD FEYNMAN, Nobel laureate and physicist extraordinaire, called it a “magic number” and its value “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics”. The number he was referring to, which goes by the symbol alpha and the rather more long-winded name of the fine-structure constant, is magic indeed. If it were a mere 4% bigger or smaller than it is, stars would not be able to sustain the nuclear reactions that synthesise carbon and oxygen atoms. One consequence would be that squishy, carbon-based life would not exist.
Why alpha takes on the precise value it does, so delicately fine-tuned for life, is a deep scientific mystery. A new piece of astrophysical research may, however, have uncovered a crucial piece of the puzzle. In a paper just submitted to Physical Review Letters, a team led by John Webb and Julian King from the University of New South Wales in Australia presents evidence that the fine-structure constant may not actually be constant after all. Rather, it seems to vary from place to place within the universe. If their results hold up to scrutiny they will have profound implications—for they suggest that the universe stretches far beyond what telescopes can observe, and that the laws of physics vary within it. Instead of the whole universe being fine-tuned for life, then, humanity finds itself in a corner of space where, Goldilocks-like, the values of the fundamental constants happen to be just right for it. ...
Smallpox has gone, but monkeypox is now rearing its ugly head
ONE of the greatest public-health victories of the last century was the eradication of smallpox. After the disease was pronounced extinct, in 1980, people stopped using the smallpox vaccine. That seemed the ultimate symbol of technology’s triumph over a medieval scourge.
Alas, it turns out that the end of vaccination has unleashed new demons. Researchers have long suspected that smallpox vaccine also provides protection against diseases such as monkeypox and cowpox, and three decades ago a committee of experts weighed up whether ending vaccination for smallpox might allow one of those diseases to spread in humans. They decided this was unlikely. Now, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests they may have been wrong. A team led by Anne Rimoin of the University of California, Los Angeles, conducted surveys of people living in the centre of the Democratic Republic of Congo. They found a dramatic surge in monkeypox—a disease which, though not as bad as smallpox, kills up to 10% of those it infects. ...
Stimulating the brain delays, but does not prevent, dementia
AS THE baby-boomer generation contemplates the prospect of the Zimmer frame there has never been more interest in delaying the process of ageing. One consequence has been a dramatic rise in the popularity of brain-training games. But how effective really is a daily dose of cryptic crossword?
Robert Wilson, a neuropsychologist at Rush University in Chicago, and his colleagues decided to find out, by following a group of people without dementia. Participants were asked to rate how frequently they engaged in cognitively stimulating activities. The researchers were looking for such things as reading newspapers, books and magazines, playing challenging games like chess, listening to the radio and watching television, and visiting museums. ...
A call to reform the IPCC
IF THIS week’s report into the workings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by a council of national academies of science were the sort of report children take home from school, its main themes would be expressed as “could do better” and “needs to show workings”. Stern parents might read it as calling for a Gradgrind-like clampdown; more indulgent ones as an inducement for the little darlings to try a little harder.
At a meeting in Busan, South Korea, this October, the parents in question—the representatives of the IPCC’s member governments—will decide which sort they want to be. Read in detail, the report suggests that if they want credible climate assessments, a firm hand will be required. ...
Graham “Mont” Liggins, investigator of the mysteries of birth and breath, died on August 24th, aged 84
HE FORGOT about the sheep. He had meant to dump it in the incinerator on the way home from work. It was still in the car boot, and starting to smell. When he remembered, and forced it down the incinerator chute, it was already bloating, and the gassy innards instantly caught fire. The force of the explosion sent ash 200 feet into the air over Auckland.
Graham Liggins (grinning, above) was trying to find out what triggered labour. As a New Zealander, he had naturally turned to sheep. But his pursuit led to some of the most important discoveries in obstetrics, and the saving of hundreds of thousands of tiny, struggling lives. ...
Crowdfunding: Artists, musicians and writers are using the internet to aggregate lots of small donations to fund their work
WIKIPEDIA, a giant online encyclopedia compiled by volunteers, is the product of the aggregation of lots of people’s spare time. An example of “crowdsourcing”, it demonstrates that on the internet, as in the real world, many hands make light work. Can the same approach be applied to money as well as time? That is the idea behind “crowdfunding”, in which lots of small contributions are aggregated online to support artistic or creative ventures.
As crowdfunding has matured from a series of one-off efforts into something reproducible, the money has followed. Millions of dollars, in increments as small as $5, have poured into efforts that connect artists, musicians, writers and others with people willing to fund their projects. Venture capitalists have also shown an interest by investing in start-ups that facilitate crowdfunding. ...
Emergency medicine: Field medicine, for soldiers and civilians alike, gets smarter as medical monitoring technology improves
HALF way through a flight from Mumbai to London, a male passenger complained of a swollen right hand and an inability to bend his fingers. The flight attendants were uncertain about what to do and hooked the passenger up to a small device which took and transmitted vital signs, including his pulse, blood pressure and a picture of his hand, to a ground-based medical team.
As the passenger’s condition worsened, the device was also used to transmit an electrocardiographic (ECG) trace. The resulting information was used to rule out heart problems, and the passenger was stabilised and monitored with the assistance of a doctor on the flight. The decision was made to continue the journey rather than divert to the nearest airport. ...
Jet engines: A nifty new engine design promises to improve combustion efficiency, thus cutting fuel consumption and reducing emissions
IN A world worried about global warming, improving the cleanliness and efficiency of jet engines is a priority for airlines and aircraft manufacturers. It is not just altruism: greener engines also use less fuel, and so cut costs. Incremental improvements over the years have made a difference. Modern jets burn only half as much fuel per unit of thrust as their 1960s counterparts. But some people think it is time for a radical redesign. One of those people is David Lior, the boss of a small Israeli firm called R-Jet Engineering.
Jet engines rely on Isaac Newton’s third law of motion: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. When a jet is running, a compressor at the front draws in air and compresses it (see illustration). This air is guided and diffused by static blades to allow for easier ignition when it is mixed with fuel and ignited in a combustion chamber. The reaction comes in the form of rapidly expanding hot gases, which blast out of the rear of the jet and thus drive the aircraft forward. As they do so, they pass through another set of static blades which direct and accelerate the hot gases to turn a turbine. The turbine is connected by a shaft to the compressor at the front, thus turning it and keeping the whole process running. ...
Geothermal power: Deriving energy from subterranean heat is no longer limited to volcanic regions. By drilling deep wells into the ground, it can be made to work almost anywhere. Just watch out for the earthquakes
OVER the course of the next ten years a company called Geodynamics, based in Queensland, Australia, is planning to drill as many as 90 wells, each 4,500-5,000 metres deep, in the Cooper Basin, a desert region in South Australia with large energy reserves. But the company is not drilling for oil or gas. It is looking for an energy source that is far cleaner and more abundant than any fossil fuel: heat emanating from hot rocks deep beneath the Earth’s surface, a promising emerging form of geothermal energy. ...
Technology and development: A growing number of initiatives are promoting bottom-up ways to deliver energy to the world’s poor
AROUND 1.5 billion people, or more than a fifth of the world’s population, have no access to electricity, and a billion more have only an unreliable and intermittent supply. Of the people without electricity, 85% live in rural areas or on the fringes of cities. Extending energy grids into these areas is expensive: the United Nations estimates that an average of $35 billion-40 billion a year needs to be invested until 2030 so everyone on the planet can cook, heat and light their premises, and have energy for productive uses such as schooling. On current trends, however, the number of “energy poor” people will barely budge, and 16% of the world’s population will still have no electricity by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.
But why wait for top-down solutions? Providing energy in a bottom-up way instead has a lot to recommend it. There is no need to wait for politicians or utilities to act. The technology in question, from solar panels to low-energy light-emitting diodes (LEDs), is rapidly falling in price. Local, bottom-up systems may be more sustainable and produce fewer carbon emissions than centralised schemes. In the rich world, in fact, the trend is towards a more flexible system of distributed, sustainable power sources. The developing world has an opportunity to leapfrog the centralised model, just as it leapfrogged fixed-line telecoms and went straight to mobile phones. ...
Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of virtual-reality technology, has more recently become an outspoken critic of online social media
FROM “Wikinomics” to “Cognitive Surplus” to “Crowdsourcing”, there is no shortage of books lauding the “Web 2.0” era and celebrating the online collaboration, interaction and sharing that it makes possible. Today anyone can publish a blog or put a video on YouTube, and thousands of online volunteers can collectively produce an operating system like Linux or an encyclopedia like Wikipedia. Isn’t that great?
No, says Jaron Lanier, a technologist, musician and polymath who is best known for his pioneering work in the field of virtual reality. His book, “You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto”, published earlier this year, is a provocative attack on many of the internet’s sacred cows. Mr Lanier lays into the Web 2.0 culture, arguing that what passes for creativity today is really just endlessly rehashed content and that the “fake friendship” of social networks “is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers”. For Mr Lanier there is no wisdom of crowds, only a cruel mob. “Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless,” he writes, “but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.” ...
Biomedicine: Doctors are rerouting nerves to give patients more natural control of prosthetic arms and bring paralysed limbs back to life
IT IS known as “phantom limb syndrome” or “phantom pain”. But this strange phenomenon feels all too real to the people it affects, and can be agonisingly painful. Amputees and people who have become paralysed may still “feel” a missing limb or a part of their body, even though it is no longer connected to their nervous system. Yet such sensations offer confirmation that even when a limb has been severed or cut off from the nervous system, the nerves that once serviced it remain alive and well. Doctors are now finding ways to put these nerves to good use, by rewiring them to control prosthetic limbs or reanimate paralysed limbs.
Moreover, rewiring the nervous system should allow amputees to gain a sense of “embodiment” of a prosthetic. That is, by controlling and sensing the prosthetic using the same neural pathways and parts of the brain that once governed the real limb, the prosthetic can be made to feel and act like a genuine extension of the user’s body. And by stimulating the nerves in the legs or arms of paralysed patients—nerves that have been cut off from the central nervous system—it is possible to create co-ordinated movement of great subtlety. For example, the hands of paralysed patients have been stimulated to enable them to grasp and turn door knobs. And with careful control and co-ordination of the muscle groups in their legs, patients can even rise from their wheelchairs and take steps. ...
Software: A new approach to speech recognition gives users the chance to fix misunderstandings without having to repeat themselves
THERE is often something sweet, intimate even, about couples who finish each other’s sentences. But it can also be a source of irritation, especially when they get it wrong. A similar irritation (minus the sweetness) is often felt by users of speech-recognition software, which still manages to garble and twist even the most clearly spoken words. Might the solution lie in a more intimate relationship between the user and the software?
Modern speech-recognition programs do not merely try to identify individual words as they are spoken; rather, they attempt to match whole chunks of speech with statistical models of phrases and sentences. The rationale is that by knowing statistical rules of thumb for the way in which words are usually put together—an abstract probabilistic approximation of grammar, if you will—it is possible to narrow the search when attempting to identify individual words. For example, a noun-phrase will typically consist of a noun preceded by a modifier, such as an article and possibly also an adjective. So if part of a speech pattern sounds like “ball”, the odds of it actually being “ball” will increase if the utterances preceding it sound like “the” and “bouncy”. ...
Magnetic levitation: The same technology used to make trains go fast can help identify unwanted substances in food and water
TO MOST people magnetic levitation (maglev) connotes high-speed passenger trains. It is what enables the Shanghai Transrapid to glide over the tracks at speeds of as much as 430kph (267mph). But the same technology has recently found a much more pedestrian use in testing food and water.
One way to identify a substance without resorting to fiddly chemical methods is to determine its density. This will not provide a precise composition but it can give a decent approximation. The purity of minerals is often assessed in this way, as are things like the amount of fat in milk or salt in water. (The less fat there is in milk, the more dense it is; the less salt there is in water, the less dense it is.) ...
Computing: Quantum cryptography is unbreakable in theory. But like any security system, in practice it is only as safe as its weakest link
IT SOUNDS foolproof. One of the fundamental tenets of quantum mechanics is that measuring a physical system always disturbs it. If the system in question is a message written as a series of digital bits encoded in the polarisation of light, this means that intercepting and reading the message can no longer be done surreptitiously. The receiver should be able to detect an eavesdropper and take appropriate countermeasures.
To a hacker, though, the word “foolproof” is a challenge. And to prove the point, two groups of academic spies have now shown that whatever the theory says, practical attempts to hide messages this way can still be vulnerable. ...
Materials: Optical fibres made of piezoelectric materials can turn sound into subtle electrical signals, and vice versa
“GUITAR HERO”, a hugely popular video game, has done wonders to transform the flamboyant strumming of closet air guitarists into at least some approximation of music. But soon even the feigned exertions of fantasy rock stars may become unnecessary because researchers in America have developed an acoustic fibre, like a guitar string, capable of electrically plucking itself.
Electrical signals make the fibre vibrate to produce a sound (although rather quietly, so you must listen to it closely). But the process can also be reversed, which is potentially more useful. When acoustic waves cause the fibre to vibrate, it produces a corresponding electrical signal that can be detected. This means the fibres can also work much like a microphone. In short, the fibres can both sing and hear. ...
Software: A novel approach to generating images of suspects uses a range of tricks to achieve a dramatic improvement in accuracy
THE human brain is hard-wired to recognise faces. Babies learn to identify their parents’ faces within hours of being born, and even in old age people can remember what their childhood friends looked like. But remembering faces is not the same as being able to describe them. This is particularly apparent when witnesses are asked by the police to create a composite picture of a suspect. Even when the result is thought to be a good likeness by the witness, that does not mean that other people will also be able to recognise the face and thus identify the suspect.
Indeed, even when working from a fresh memory, the composite pictures people produce are, on average, recognisable to others only 20% of the time. And this percentage dwindles further if the witness is working from a memory more than a few days old. The problem is that face recognition is a holistic process: people are good at recognising faces as a whole, but struggle to identify or describe individual facial features, such as a person’s eyes, nose or mouth. ...
Software: From retailing to counterterrorism, the ability to analyse social connections is proving increasingly useful
TELECOMS operators naturally prize mobile-phone subscribers who spend a lot, but some thriftier customers, it turns out, are actually more valuable. Known as “influencers”, these subscribers frequently persuade their friends, family and colleagues to follow them when they switch to a rival operator. The trick, then, is to identify such trendsetting subscribers and keep them on board with special discounts and promotions. People at the top of the office or social pecking order often receive quick callbacks, do not worry about calling other people late at night and tend to get more calls at times when social events are most often organised, such as Friday afternoons. Influential customers also reveal their clout by making long calls, while the calls they receive are generally short.
Companies can spot these influencers, and work out all sorts of other things about their customers, by crunching vast quantities of calling data with sophisticated “network analysis” software. Instead of looking at the call records of a single customer at a time, it looks at customers within the context of their social network. The ability to retain customers is particularly important in hyper-competitive markets, such as India. Bharti Airtel, India’s biggest mobile operator, which handles over 3 billion calls a day, has greatly reduced customer defections by deploying the software, says Amrita Gangotra, the firm’s director for information technology. ...
Office technology: All kinds of technological tricks are being used to reduce the cost and environmental impact of office printers
THE dream of the paperless office has been around for years, but it has remained just that, despite the rise of e-mail and the web. True, paper consumption in American offices peaked in 2001, but since then it has declined only slightly from its high of around 150 pounds (68kg) of paper per worker per year. In Europe, meanwhile, each worker prints an average of 31 pages a day, seven of which were not even wanted, according to recent research by Lexmark, a printer manufacturer.
The cost of all that paper, toner and ink quickly adds up. Which is why, earlier this year, the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay adopted a novel strategy to save money on print supplies: it changed its fonts. Programs like Microsoft Outlook default to Arial, but a thinner-lined typeface such as Century Gothic requires less toner or ink to form its characters. A study in 2009 showed that switching to Century Gothic could save businesses as much as $80 per printer per year. The university predicts that this year it will reduce its $100,000 print-supplies bill by around 10% by making this simple change. ...
Motoring: Spies on the dashboard can teach people to drive more economically—and tick them off if they fail to do so
SOME people always take things to extremes. For those trying to save fuel there is hypermiling, in which the really dedicated try to use less than 4.5 litres/100km (ie, travel more than 80 miles on a gallon) in a car that under normal use might do only half as well. Apart from driving very slowly and trying not to use the brakes (which dissipates energy), hypermilers employ other tricks, such as wiring the fuel injectors up to lights mounted on the dashboard so they can see whether or not they are squirting fuel into the cylinders. Although this is all too much trouble for most motorists, the hypermilers do have a point: driving technique plays a big part in how much fuel a car consumes. Now various devices are being used to help teach more moderate ways of driving economically.
Not surprisingly, companies that operate fleets of cars and trucks are among the first users of fuel-saving “eco-assist” systems. The most popular of these are global-positioning system (GPS) units that use live traffic information and other data, such as weather and past trends, to plot not the fastest but the most economical route to a destination at a particular time. According to iSuppli, a Californian research firm, fewer than 1% of new cars have such “eco-routing” systems fitted, but it expects that by 2020 a third will. ...
According to the latest survey of foreign-exchange markets from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), trading in currencies surged by 20% in April this year from April 2007, when the last such survey was conducted. This marks a significant slowdown from the 72% growth seen between 2004 and 2007. Foreign-exchange swaps accounted for 44% of transactions in April this year, down from 52% three years earlier. Inter-bank trading accounted for only 39% of foreign-exchange transactions this year, down from 63% in 1998. For the first time this year, the BIS found that non-bank institutions like hedge funds and pension funds accounted for over half the transactions on the spot market.
Surveys of purchasing managers by Markit, a research firm, suggest that manufacturing expanded at a faster pace in August than a year earlier in most countries. A year ago, 11 countries had purchasing managers’ indices (PMIs) below 50, indicating that manufacturing industries there were still contracting. Now, contraction is apparent in only three of the 25 countries for which August data are available. After dipping into contractionary terrain in July, China’s August PMI of 51.9 once again signalled growth, though Chinese manufacturing has clearly slowed from a year earlier. In America, the Institute of Supply Management’s index for August pointed to growth for the 13th month in a row.
Israel’s prime minister sounds upbeat, even if no one else does
YET another bout of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations was launched this week amid a splurge of pious public talk tempered by sceptical punditry. Not much new in that, it seems, though it is almost two years since the previous direct talks took place (and ran aground).
Nothing new, either, in two ghastly shootings on the West Bank in the days before the talks. The first left four Israeli civilians dead, two of them the parents of six children and another a pregnant woman. Hamas proudly took the “credit” as a means of exposing, it said, the collusion between the Palestinian Authority and the occupying forces of Israel. The following day two more Israelis were wounded. ...
Domestic workers in the Middle East have a horrible time
AS a maid working in Saudi Arabia, Lahanda Purage Ariyawathie suffered at the hands of her Saudi employer and his wife, who skewered her body with at least 24 nails and needles (pictured). Her case was unusually brutal, but the abuse of domestic workers in the Middle East is all too common.
Huge numbers of migrant domestic workers, mostly from Asia and Africa, are employed throughout the region. Some 1.5m work in Saudi Arabia, 660,000 in Kuwait and 200,000 in Lebanon. Many work very long hours and receive little food, no time off and pay that is a fraction of any minimum wage, if it materialises at all. Human Rights Watch (HRW), a New York-based group, says at least one domestic worker died every week in Lebanon between January 2007 and August 2008. Almost half were suicides and many were as a result of falling from high buildings, often while trying to escape their employers. Mistreatment is so widespread that the Philippines, Ethiopia and Nepal no longer let their citizens go to Lebanon to work as maids, though such bans have had little effect. ...
