El Diario de Tristán

RELISHING their country’s reputation as the graveyard of empires, Afghans are proud of having vanquished all the foreign armies that have ventured onto their soil. Yet the Soviet army, the most recent, was not exactly defeated: it withdrew in 1989 because it had wearied of an unpopular war that it struggled to justify to the people at home. Nearly 25 years later, America and its allies risk a similar failure of nerve and will.This week Leon Panetta, America’s defence secretary, has aired hopes that NATO soldiers in Afghanistan can finish their combat mission as much as 18 months early—by the second half of next year, rather than the end of 2014 (see article). He has also raised doubts that the outside world can afford to stick to its plans to pay for a permanent 350,000-strong Afghan security force. Such a shift has obvious attractions. Operations in Afghanistan cost a fortune and take precious lives. It does not help that some of the killers are NATO’s supposed partners: rogue Afghan soldiers murdered four unarmed French trainers last month and...

NORMALLY it is the press that hounds celebrities, politicians and judges, not the other way round. But for the past three months a public inquiry led by Lord Justice Leveson, an appeal-court judge, has pulped the British newspaper industry. A parade of people—some famous, some not—have told of ill-treatment at the hands of reporters and photographers. A normally aggressive press has been cowed.The inquiry began following the revelation that the News of the World, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, had illegally accessed messages left on the mobile phone of a girl who turned out to have been murdered. But it has gone far beyond that narrow outrage. Lord Justice Leveson has heard of a young woman driven to suicide; of people accusing their families of spilling their secrets when in fact their phone messages were being listened to; of a mother (Joanne Rowling, author of the “Harry Potter” books) opening her five-year-old daughter’s school bag to find a note from a journalist inside.It is no surprise that the press often treats people callously. But the sheer volume of complaint has...

CHINA’S economy is so huge, and its significance to the world so great, that it is easy to forget the country’s property market is still in its adolescence. Two decades ago most city folk were consigned to dilapidated quarters provided by their state-owned employer. In the years since then house building has boomed and the cult of home ownership has taken a hold on the Chinese psyche. But the market has seen epic swings, and prices are now falling in many big cities.This is having a big impact on China’s local governments. They carry out over four-fifths of the country’s public spending, but pocket only half of the taxes (see article). To help make up the difference, they rely on expropriating land from farmers and flogging it to bullish property developers. But as developers struggle, land sales are dwindling. As a result, local-government revenue is drying up. Popular resentment, meanwhile, is not. In Wukan, in the southern province of Guangdong, aggrieved villagers rose up in December against land-grabbing officials, chasing the local...

THE 16m French people who tuned in to Nicolas Sarkozy’s television interview on January 29th could have been forgiven for thinking they were watching a challenger for the presidency rather than the man who has occupied the Elysée since 2007. Lamenting France’s lack of competitiveness, Mr Sarkozy repeatedly suggested that German-style reforms were needed to get France back to work and to restore its economy. He announced plans to trim the social charges paid by employers to the state, and to raise taxes on consumers to pay for that. He said that firms should have more freedom to negotiate changes in working time with employees. It was as if he wanted a “rupture” with the past—though voters are still waiting for the rupture he promised when running for president five years ago.France certainly needs dramatic reform. Its economy has probably slipped back into recession. The unemployment rate is 9.9%. In 2005 the current account swung into a deficit that has steadily deepened since. In January Standard & Poor’s, a ratings agency, hammered home how France has lost economic clout by taking away its AAA credit...

IT ALL began as a lark. Mark Zuckerberg posted pictures of his fellow Harvard students online to let viewers comment on who was hot and who was not. Eight years later, Facebook is one of the hottest companies in the world. On February 1st the social network announced plans for an initial public offering (IPO) that could value it at between $75 billion and $100 billion (see article). This is extraordinary. Investors believe that a start-up run by a cocky 27-year-old is more valuable than Boeing, the world’s largest aircraftmaker. Are they nuts?Not necessarily. Facebook could soon boast one billion users, or one in seven of the world’s population. Last year it generated $3.7 billion in revenue and $1 billion in net profits. That is nowhere near enough to justify its price tag. But there are reasons to bet Facebook will justify the hype, for it has found a new way to harness a prehistoric instinct. People love to socialise, and Facebook makes it easier. The shy become more outgoing online. The young, the mobile and the busy find that Facebook is an...

THERE is a lot to like about Newt Gingrich, who won a stunning 13-point victory in South Carolina’s Republican primary on January 21st and is now ahead in some polls for the next state, Florida, on January 31st (see article). He is a ferociously intelligent one-man ideas factory, gushing forth an endless stream of new policies and arguments.As Speaker of the House of Representatives after he led his party to victory in the 1994 mid-term elections, his clever “Contract With America” made him a tea-partier before there was ever a tea party. He fought against excessive spending, to the point of being prepared to see the federal government shut down. Recovering from the backlash that this caused, he managed to work with Bill Clinton to balance the budget and enact welfare reform. When it comes to wrestling Leviathan, Mr Gingrich has a good record.But he also has serious problems to overcome in making a convincing case that he should be the one to take on Barack Obama in November. He is erratic. At times he has argued powerfully in...

GREECE, progenitor of the euro zone’s debt drama, is back at centre-stage. The reason is a battle between the Greek government, its European and IMF rescuers, and the holders of Greek bonds over the terms of a “voluntary” reduction in its private debts. Greece’s economy is in far worse shape than when the outlines of a deal were put together last October, so there is a bigger financial hole to plug. Germany and other rescuers don’t want to offer more money, not least because Greece’s politicians have broken so many of the promises they made to reform. Bondholders don’t want to take a bigger hit.

If no deal is in place by March 20th, when a big bond payment is due, Greece will be pushed into a chaotic default, which would increase the risk that the country is forced out of the euro. That is a frightening prospect. The ensuing chaos and contagion could fell the single currency, not least because Europe’s governments have made little progress on building a “firewall” around countries like Italy and Spain.What is the best way out of this mess? Step one is to force private bondholders to take more losses. They...

IN THIS issue we launch a weekly section devoted to China. It is the first time since we began our detailed coverage of the United States in 1942 that we have singled out a country in this way. The principal reason is that China is now an economic superpower and is fast becoming a military force capable of unsettling America. But our interest in China lies also in its politics: it is governed by a system that is out of step with global norms. In ways that were never true of post-war Japan and may never be true of India, China will both fascinate and agitate the rest of the world for a long time to come.Only 20 years ago, China was a long way from being a global superpower. After the protests in Tiananmen Square led to a massacre in 1989, its economic reforms were under threat from conservatives and it faced international isolation. Then in early 1992, like an emperor undertaking a progress, the late Deng Xiaoping set out on a “southern tour” of the most reform-minded provinces. An astonishing endorsement of reform, it was a masterstroke from the man who made modern China. The economy has barely looked back since....

“I STICK my neck out for nobody,” drawls Rick in “Casablanca”. “A wise foreign policy,” says Captain Renault. But is it? Over the past ten months Syria has slid to the brink of civil war. Firefights, ambushes, massacres and bombings take place almost daily. Defying international sanctions, the regime kills protesting citizens by the dozen. The opposition, once hostile to all violence, has started to take up arms that increasingly pour in from neighbouring Lebanon. Aided by army defectors, it gains and loses control of small patches of territory, but it will not soon win the upper hand without more help.Some outsiders, including the emir of Qatar and a growing number of analysts at American think-tanks, have begun to call for military action. One argument for intervention is consistency: the bloodshed in Syria is even worse than it was in Libya under Qaddafi. If outside powers have a responsibility to protect people from a mass-murdering tyrant, then surely Syria, where more than 5,000 have been killed in a campaign of state violence, is a prime candidate. Another is that several regional powers are already...

THE public has never loved the way that private-equity titans make a buck—or billions. But now that Mitt Romney’s career at Bain Capital, a buy-out firm, is fodder for his Republican rivals, it has become fashionable to demonise private equity as “vulture” capitalism and “worse than Wall Street”. Do Mr Romney and his ilk deserve such opprobrium?Two charges are generally made against private equity. The first is that it plunders companies and slashes jobs. The other, underscored this week when Mr Romney released his tax returns, is that private-equity executives are obscenely rich in part because they do not pay enough tax.Private-equity firms claim to make money by taking over poorly managed companies, improving their performance and selling them on. Often that involves cutting jobs. At a time when American unemployment is stuck at a worryingly high level, this has made private-equity firms a target for anger from both Republicans and Democrats.Yet the direct employment losses that result from private-equity deals are not as large as critics claim: on average employment declines by only 1% two years after a buy-...

LIMITED liability—a commercial venture that protects its shareholders from personal bankruptcy—is one of the greatest wealth-creating inventions of all time. The law allows companies to borrow money, to take risks and to make contracts as if they were people, but without the human beings who own it going bust if things go wrong, as they would in an unlimited partnership. Limited liability allowed Elizabethan adventurers to finance voyages to spice islands; it allows Silicon Valley technologists now to make similarly risky bets.But limited liability is a concession—something granted by society because it has a clear purpose. It is unclear why in parts of the world anonymity became part of the deal. Efforts to withdraw that unjustified perk deserve to succeed.In dozens of jurisdictions, from the British Virgin Islands to Delaware, it is possible to register a company while hiding or disguising the ultimate beneficial owner. This is of great use to wrongdoers, and a huge headache for those who pursue them (see article)....

IN AN ordinary American presidential election, a candidate who had earned a fortune in business and then paid an absurdly low tax rate would barely raise eyebrows. Americans have long considered wealth something to admire and pursue, not vilify and redistribute. Alexis de Tocqueville said he knew “of no country…where a profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.”But this is no ordinary election. That so much scrutiny has fallen both on how Mitt Romney earned his fortune (in the ruthless world of private equity) and his tax rate (15%, less than what some middle-class families pay) is a sign something has changed. For that, credit a decade in which the median family in America saw its real income fall by 7%, even as the top 1% grabbed a share of national income unseen since the 1920s (see article), and a level of unemployment that, though falling, remains troublingly high. Not many Americans like the tactics or fashion choices of Occupy Wall Street, but quite a few share the movement’s...

SADLY, the lull proved but brief. The first two weeks of the year were surprisingly calm for the storm-tossed euro zone. But a gale is blowing again. First a series of downgrades from Standard & Poor’s, a leading debt-rating agency, coincided with a stand-off in the “voluntary” restructuring talks between Greece and its private bondholders. Now there are signs of a continent-wide recession. The euro crisis is back.Indeed, the next few weeks could be decisive for the single currency’s future. Several euro-zone governments must sell huge amounts of debt in bond auctions. They are also due to wrap up negotiations over the new “fiscal compact”, demanded by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to enforce budget discipline, at a European Union summit at the end of January. And the brinkmanship in Greece’s debt talks could yet lead to a disorderly default (see article).What happens in Greece could be dramatic and painful, especially for the Greeks. If their country is forced out of the euro zone after a chaotic default it will cause...

OVER the past 15 years striking corporate headquarters have transformed the great cities of the emerging world. China Central Television’s building resembles a giant alien marching across Beijing’s skyline; the 88-storey Petronas Towers, home to Malaysia’s oil company, soar above Kuala Lumpur; the gleaming office of VTB, a banking powerhouse, sits at the heart of Moscow’s new financial district. These are all monuments to the rise of a new kind of hybrid corporation, backed by the state but behaving like a private-sector multinational.State-directed capitalism is not a new idea: witness the East India Company. But as our special report this week points out, it has undergone a dramatic revival. In the 1990s most state-owned companies were little more than government departments in emerging markets; the assumption was that, as the economy matured, the government would close or privatise them. Yet they show no signs of relinquishing the commanding heights, whether in major industries (the world’s ten biggest oil-and-gas firms, measured by reserves,...

IRAN is facing sanctions of unprecedented severity. On December 31st Barack Obama signed into law measures demanded by Congress to punish any foreign financial institution transacting business with Iran’s central bank, the conduit for most of its oil contracts. On January 23rd the European Union, which buys about a fifth of Iran’s exported oil, is set to ban future purchases. Under American prompting, Japan and South Korea, which together take a similar amount of Iran’s oil, are looking for alternative supplies. These measures follow November’s report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s watchdog, detailing aspects of Iran’s nuclear activity that make sense only if the aim is to be able to make nuclear weapons. The sanctions are also meant to show a jumpy Israel that there is an alternative to a military attack.This newspaper has favoured sanctions because an Israeli assault might start a regional conflagration, dragging in America—and even then might not succeed. But given that a variety of sanctions over the past 30 years has failed to change Iran’s behaviour, sceptics, and not just...

INDIA’S economy might be thriving, but many of its people are not. This week Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, said his compatriots should be ashamed that over two-fifths of their children are underfed. They should be outraged, too, at the infant mortality, illiteracy, lack of clean drinking water and countless other curses that afflict the poor.Poverty has many causes, and no simple cure. But one massive problem in India is that few poor people can prove who they are. They have no passport, no driving licence, no proof of address. They live in villages where multitudes share the same name. Their lack of an identity excludes them from the modern economy. They cannot open bank accounts, and no one would be so foolish as to lend them money.The government offers them all kinds of welfare, but because they lack an identity, they struggle to lay hands on what they have been promised. The state spends a fortune on subsidised grain for the hungry, but an estimated two-thirds of it is stolen or adulterated by middlemen. The government pays for an $8 billion-a-year make-work scheme for the rural poor, but much of the...

THE Republican primaries are meant to last six months, allowing all 50 states to have their say in the nomination of a candidate to take on Barack Obama in November. Amazingly, they may be all over only days after they started.On January 10th, a week after his victory in conservative Iowa, Mitt Romney trounced his six opponents in liberal New Hampshire, winning nearly twice the share of his nearest rival (see article). The polls predict a victory for him in South Carolina on January 21st, and another in Florida on the 31st. Even if the race staggers on beyond that, he has raised as much money and built a bigger organisation than the rest of the Republican field combined. Barring an upset, Mr Romney is likely to win the nomination. The polls suggest that, should he do so, he has a real chance of ousting a president who has squandered much of his standing with the political centre.But he has a lot of work to do. At the moment many Americans find him a bit of an enigma: a flip-flopper on some big issues, wooden in public, and a...

AFTER three hundred years of union, Scots are to be given the chance to vote for independence. The offer of a legally-binding referendum, probably in 2014, comes from David Cameron, who is not just prime minister of the United Kingdom but also leader of an outfit formally known as the Conservative and Unionist Party. It is more than a remarkable concession. Since the Scots may indeed plump for independence (see article), it is also quite a risk.Mr Cameron’s move has not, however, been met with overwhelming gratitude in Scotland. Widely described as a “Westminster Eton toff” north of the border, he is suspected of setting a trap by trying to bounce Scotland into a vote on terms that would tip the balance in the union’s favour.Mr Cameron wants a straight in-or-out question. Alex Salmond, Scotland’s first minister and leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP), which dominates the legislature in Edinburgh, is not so sure. He has said he favours a simple question. But he also points out there is a powerful view in Scotland that the country...

WHEN things went wrong for Middle Eastern tribes a couple of millennia ago, the accepted remedy was to send a sacrificial goat out into the wilderness to placate the gods. The practice continues today, but the voters have replaced the gods, and highly paid businesspeople the goats.The growth of inequality all over the world encourages these rituals, and recent trends in remuneration certainly make bosses harder to sympathise with than goats. In Britain, where the latest bout of politicking about pay has broken out, chief executives can expect to receive average compensation in excess of £4.5m ($6.9m) this year. Pay at the top grew by over 300% between 1998 and 2010. At the same time, the median British worker’s real wage has been pretty stagnant. These trends mean the ratio of executive to average pay at FTSE 100 firms jumped from 47 to 120 times in 12 years.This is feeding the view that there is something wrong with British capitalism. Britain’s political parties, although deeply divided on most economic policy, are competing for a middle ground which demands action on pay. The prime minister, David...

COMMERCE has long been at the mercy of the elements. The British East India Company was almost strangled at birth when it lost several of its ships in a storm. But the toll is rising. The world has been so preoccupied with the man-made catastrophes of subprime mortgages and sovereign debt that it may not have noticed how much economic mayhem nature has wreaked. With earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand, floods in Thailand and Australia and tornadoes in America, last year was the costliest on record for natural disasters.This trend is not, as is often thought, a result of climate change. There is little evidence that big hurricanes come ashore any more often than, say, a century ago. But disasters now extract a far higher price, for the simple reason that the world’s population and output are becoming concentrated in vulnerable cities near earthquake faults, on river deltas or along tropical coasts (see article). Those risks will rise as the wealth of Shanghai and Kolkata comes to rival that of London and New York. Meanwhile,...

POLITICIANS like to promise better times ahead. But these days many are peddling gloom. In her new year’s address, Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, predicted that 2012 would be more difficult for the euro zone than 2011. Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, spoke of “the year of all risks”. Half a world away, Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, warned Indians not to take fast growth for granted.In one way this pessimism looks a little overdone. The worst outcomes—a collapse of Europe’s single currency or a hard landing in China—are avoidable. The latest crop of statistics, particularly better-than-expected figures on global manufacturing prospects, argue against a sudden slump. America may do a bit better than forecast. The overall effect should be sluggish, not dire: global output may grow by 3%, the slowest since 2009 and well below the average of the past decade.But in another way, the sombre warnings are apt, and profoundly depressing. One reason why the outlook is so lacklustre is that politicians—especially in the West—will do little to help (and may harm) their economies. It could be better....

SEEN from the state’s point of view, multiple citizenship is at best untidy and at worst a menace. Officials would prefer you to be born, live, work, pay taxes, draw benefits and die in the same place, travel on one passport only, and bequeath only one nationality to your offspring. In wartime the state has a unique call on your loyalty—and perhaps your life. Citizenship is the glue keeping individual and state together. Tamper with it, and the relationship comes unstuck.But life is more complicated than that. Loyalty to political entities need not be exclusive: indeed, it often overlaps. Many Jews hold Israeli passports in solidarity with the Jewish state (and as an insurance policy), alongside citizenship of their native country. Teutons may be proud to be simultaneously Bavarian, German and European. Irish citizens can vote in British elections. The old notion of one-man, one-state citizenship looks outdated: more than 200m people now live and work outside the countries in which they were born—but still wish to travel home, or marry or invest there.The wrong response to this is political protectionism, with...

VIKTOR ORBAN, Hungary’s conservative prime minister, seems an unlikely villain. A firebrand dissident in communist times, he had already served one term as a respectable if somewhat populist prime minister before he led his Fidesz party back into power in 2010. Yet with the implementation on January 1st of a new Hungarian constitution, accompanied by a barrage of new fundamental laws, Mr Orban stands accused by his critics at home and by Hungary’s friends abroad of steering his country back in the direction of a new autocracy.Mr Orban’s supporters claim that the need to sort out an economic mess, clean up corruption and eradicate remaining traces of communism justify his radical approach. They maintain that, because Fidesz won the 2010 election with a two-thirds majority, the government has a mandate to push through big constitutional changes, even if some of these appear illiberal and nationalist. Yet democracy is not just about winning elections. Even a two-thirds majority should not entitle Fidesz to grab power over supposedly independent outfits such as the media regulator, the judiciary, the central bank and...

EVEN by the standards of one of the world’s great conspiracy theorists, it was wacky stuff. On hearing the news that Argentina’s Cristina Fernández had become the fifth left-of-centre Latin American leader to be diagnosed with cancer in the past three years, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, himself unlucky enough to be one of them, mused that the United States might have developed technology to “induce cancer” in its political foes. “I don’t want to make any reckless accusation,” Mr Chávez said disingenuously, “but it’s very, very, very strange.”This could be just another piece of self-evident nonsense from Mr Chávez. After all, several of the other stricken leaders have friendly relations with the United States and the health scares have thus far increased the popularity of both Mr Chávez and Ms Fernández: Latin American politics has featured a maudlin streak ever since the early death (yes, from cancer) of Eva Perón. But Mr Chávez may have been putting up a smokescreen. The recent cancer cases offer not just stories of personal suffering but also a striking contrast in the way that the leaders affected have handled the...

ATTACKS on bankers by protesters from Occupy Wall Street, Occupy London and Occupy any city where a financier might have the temerity to turn a quick buck have spiced up the dreary economic news of the past year. Yet hostility is not confined to the left. Even the bankers’ supposed allies are putting the boot in—and nowhere more so than in Britain. The prime minister, David Cameron, has promised to “end excess” in the City of London. His ministers boast about their efforts to “rebalance” the economy away from dodgy finance to honest manufacturing. Sir Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, has made a habit of lambasting the Square Mile’s short-term “profits next week” culture. In continental Europe the City is viewed with a mixture of loathing (on the ground that it single-handedly caused the euro crisis) and covetousness (on the ground that all those clever French and Italian financiers should ply their trade in Paris and Rome instead).The European leaders’ attacks, at least, should have an upside: their hypocrisy and self-interest should serve to remind Britons what is at risk. London is by many...

IN JANUARY the battle to become the world’s most powerful person begins—with small groups of Iowans “caucusing” to choose a Republican nominee for the White House. It is a great opportunity for them. Barack Obama is clearly beatable. No president since Franklin Roosevelt has been re-elected with unemployment as high as it is now; Mr Obama’s approval rating, which tends to translate accurately into vote-share, is down in the mid-40s. Swing states like Florida, Ohio and even Pennsylvania look well within the Republicans’ grasp.Yet recent polls show the president leading all his rivals: an average of two points ahead of Mitt Romney, eight points over Ron Paul and nine points over Newt Gingrich, according to RealClearPolitics.com. No doubt some rather flawed personalities play a part in that; but so does the notion that something has gone badly wrong with the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Rather than answering the call for a credible right-of-centre, pro-business party to provide independents, including this newspaper, with a choice in November, it is saddling its candidate with a...

TO HIS many victims, and to anyone with a sense of justice, it is deeply wrong that Kim Jong Il died at liberty and of natural causes. The despot ran his country as a gulag. He spread more misery and poverty than any dictator in modern times, killing more of his countrymen in the camps or through needless malnutrition and famine than anyone since Pol Pot. North Koreans are on average three inches shorter than their well-fed cousins in the South. One in 20 has passed through the gulags. Once somebody is deemed a political enemy, his whole family can be condemned to forced labour too. Now, Kim Jong Il will never be held to account.Kim was pathologically indifferent to the misery of his people. By his own lights, life was sweet. He enjoyed cognac, fine cheeses and sushi. He relished wielding power over his people and his ability, through nuclear provocation, to milk and manipulate the outside world. He bombed an airliner. He indulged his passion for cinema by kidnapping a South Korean director. The whole country was his movie set, where he could play God and have the people revere him (see our...

“LET Truth and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?” asked John Milton in Areopagitica, his rousing defence of a free press, in 1644. But in an era when a blog can be set up with a few clicks, not everyone agrees that more voices and more choices improve the quality of debate. Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, has argued that by allowing people to retreat into “information cocoons” or “echo chambers” in which they hear only views they agree with, the blogosphere fosters polarisation—a fear widely shared by politicians. Forbes once called blogs “the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective”.Previous publishing revolutions, such as the advent of printing, prompted similar concerns about trivialisation and extremism. But whatever you think about the impact of blogging on political, scientific or religious debate, it is hard to argue that the internet has cheapened the global conversation about economics. On the contrary, it has improved it.Research (by two...

BARACK OBAMA put a brave face on the ignominious exit, just before Christmas, of all American troops, once numbering around 170,000, from Iraq. He was fulfilling an election promise to extricate America from a war he never supported, that cost more than 4,400 American lives and $800 billion, and earned his country the enmity of much of the world, especially of Arabs and Muslims. The president sought to reassure those who worry about an over-speedy exit that Iraq is not the bloodbath it once was. It has held pretty fair elections. It has a coalition government led by a solid-looking prime minister. Its copious oil is flowing faster again. And it is again undeniably sovereign. Time, then, for the West to heave a huge sigh of relief and for Iraqis to stride towards democracy and prosperity?If only. For one thing, the manner of Mr Obama’s retreat was not what he had chosen. He had been persuaded by his generals and by his new CIA boss, General David Petraeus, a former commander in Iraq, that a residual American force of 10,000 or so troops should stay, with Iraqi acquiescence, to help keep the peace for a year or two...

CHRISTIANITY is growing almost as fast as humanity itself, but its 2.2 billion adherents cannot count on safety in numbers. That is partly because the locus of the world’s largest religion is shifting to hotter (in several senses) parts of the world. According to a report published by the Pew Forum in December, the Christian share of the population of sub-Saharan Africa has soared over the past century, from 9% to 63%. Meanwhile, the think-tank says, the Christian proportion of Europeans and people in the Americas has dropped, respectively, from 95% to 76% and from 96% to 86%.But moving from the jaded north to the dynamic south does not portend an easy future. In Nigeria scores of Christians have died in Islamist bomb attacks, targeting Christmas prayers. In Iran and Pakistan Christians are on death row, for “apostasy”—quitting Islam—or blasphemy. Dozens of churches in Indonesia have been attacked or shut. Two-thirds of Iraq’s pre-war Christian population have fled. In Egypt and Syria, where secular despots gave Christianity a shield of sorts, political upheaval and Muslim zeal threaten ancient Christian groups....

FAR from being at the heart of a happening continent, for much of modern times Central Asia stagnated on the periphery. Now, 20 years after breaking from the Soviet Union, things are changing for the “Stans”. For one thing, huge and growing quantities of oil and gas are being uncovered. Seven-tenths of all the increase in oil output outside OPEC is coming from Central Asia. Led by Kazakhstan, an energy boom is under way.Partly because of that, pipelines, roads and railways are reshaping the continent. A pipeline opened in 2009 that runs for 7,000km (4,400 miles) from gasfields in Turkmenistan to energy-hungry China. Railway plans are ambitious. China’s schemes would mean that by 2025 a Shanghai resident could reach his tailor in London’s Savile Row by train in two days.The “central” is being put back into Central Asia. East-west links are forming between Europe and East Asia which may one day knit the Eurasian land mass together. Some, notably America’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, talk of the north-south possibilities too. America will need a new regional policy once it pulls its troops out of...

THE euro zone is probably already back in recession. The emerging markets are starting to show signs of slowing down. Thank heavens, one might say, for America, which is finishing the year with the nearest thing to good economic news to be found on this benighted planet.Growth in the third quarter clocked in at around 2%, and in the fourth quarter it looks likely to be significantly stronger than that. Unemployment is edging downwards, the Dow is back up at around 12,000, house sales are rising and spending on consumer durables, most notably cars, is improving at a fairly cheerful clip. Might America, as so often in the past, provide a locomotive for global growth in 2012?Sadly not. That is partly because the economy, on closer inspection, is less speedy than it first appears. But it is also because America’s politicians look likely to do nothing whatsoever to help growth in 2012. Indeed, the immediate priority is to stop them doing yet more harm to it.The current rate of growth is actually pretty anaemic, amounting to no better than a return to the long-term trend. After the depths plumbed in the recession...

AS YOU read this, lawyers are busily drafting a European fiscal “compact” designed to restore discipline to the euro zone’s economies. In the new year all but one of the European Union’s 27 members are to start thrashing out this treaty’s details. Meanwhile the British government, having fallen out with all its 26 partners, is promising that it will remain a central part of the union—and that London will remain Europe’s financial capital. All is well.Except that it isn’t. Merely to set out these purported achievements of the latest EU summit in Brussels is to show how hollow they are (see article). Once again Europe’s leaders have failed to solve the euro crisis. The new treaty could easily be killed by the markets or by its rejection in one or more euro-zone country. The EU has suffered plenty of disappointing summits without the sky falling in—a good many of them in the past year. But unlike the marathon dispute over a new constitution, the euro is in a race against time because markets are pushing countries to insolvency. As...

IN PHYSICS, the trick is often to ask a question so obvious no one else would have thought of posing it. Apples have fallen to the ground since time immemorial. It took the genius of Sir Isaac Newton to ask why. Of course, it helps if you have the mental clout to work out the answer. Fortunately, Newton did.It was in this spirit, almost 50 years ago, that a few insightful physicists asked themselves where mass comes from. Like the tendency of apples to fall to the ground, the existence of mass is so quotidian that the idea it needs a formal explanation would never occur to most people. But it did occur to Peter Higgs, then a young researcher at Edinburgh University, and to five other scientists whom the quirks of celebrity have not treated so kindly. They, too, had the necessary mental clout. They got out their pencils and papers and scribbled down equations whose upshot was a prediction.The reason that fundamental particles have mass, the researchers calculated, is their interaction with a previously unknown field that permeates space. This field came to be named (with no disrespect to the losers in the...

RUSSIA’S elections are not intended to produce surprises, just as its streets are not meant to heave with protesters and its political leaders are not supposed to be publicly booed. The country’s “managed democracy”, with the media muzzled, only tame opposition candidates allowed and widespread vote-rigging, is designed to hand big victories to Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party. Yet the Duma election on December 4th produced an upset: United Russia’s share of the vote fell from 64% to under 50%, giving it only a slim majority. Even more remarkably, demonstrators took to the streets in the biggest protests Russia has seen in years, chanting “Russia without Putin” before troops poured in to stop them (see article). Smaller protests took place in other cities. Now some 17,000 people have signed up for a protest on December 10th in Revolutionary Square, Moscow’s main public space. The government has asked them to find a different location.These events constitute the biggest crack in Russia’s regime since Mr Putin first came to power in late...

IS THE Arab spring turning into bleak midwinter? Earlier this year the revolutions sweeping through the region seemed encouragingly modern and secular. Indeed, the young Facebookers and Twitterers braving the bullets in Cairo and Tunis seemed to give the lie to the dictators’ claims that the only alternative to the thuggery of a strongman was mullah-led theocracy. But look across the Arab world today and political Islam has jumped to the fore (see article).Egypt offers the most dramatic example. The relatively mild-mannered Muslim Brotherhood, the best-organised of the Arab movements espousing an ideology that bases its message on the texts of Islam, is winning the three-stage election to Egypt’s parliament by a wider margin than pundits predicted, with 46% of the seats so far. Far more frightening is the party coming second, with 21% of the seats. The Salafists, whose name denotes a desire to emulate the “predecessors” who were early followers of the Prophet Muhammad, decry alcohol, pop music and other aspects of Western lifestyle. They want to...

WHEN the history books are written, will December 8th-9th be seen as a turning-point in the euro crisis? That is when Europe’s leaders were due to meet for the latest in a string of much-ballyhooed summits at which they repeatedly promise big reforms to their rules to save the single currency.As The Economist went to press, the focus of this summit was already clear, thanks to a deal on December 5th between the two people who matter most: the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. It will be all about tightening the euro’s fiscal rules. The “Merkozy” duo have decreed that the priority should be a march towards greater fiscal discipline, to be enforced by strong referees.Yet such a priority is dangerously lopsided. If the euro is to survive, Europe needs a more balanced plan to build the fiscal and financial integration that matches today’s monetary union. Finding ways to police governments and prevent fiscal profligacy is part of that. But it is only part; it is not the most important component; and, on its own, it is unlikely to work.A set of...

CHINA’S efforts to join the World Trade Organisation (WTO) dragged on for 15 years, long enough to “turn black hair white”, as Zhu Rongji, China’s former prime minister, put it. (His own hair remained Politburo-black throughout.) Even after membership was granted, ten years ago this week, Mr Zhu expected many “headaches”, including the loss of customs duties and the distress of farmers exposed to foreign competition.Yet the bet paid off for China. It has blossomed into the world’s greatest exporter and second-biggest importer. The marriage of foreign know-how, Chinese labour and the open, global market has succeeded beyond anyone’s predictions.It is instead China’s trading partners who now contemplate its WTO membership with furrowed brows (see article). They have a variety of complaints: that China exports too much, swamping their markets with cheap manufactured goods, subsidised by an undervalued currency; that it hoards essential inputs, such as rare earths, for its own firms; and that it still skews its own market against foreign...

OLD stereotypes die hard. Picture a video-game player and you will likely imagine a teenage boy, by himself, compulsively hammering away at a game involving rayguns and aliens that splatter when blasted. Ten years ago—an aeon in gaming time—that might have borne some relation to reality. But today a gamer is as likely to be a middle-aged commuter playing “Angry Birds” on her smartphone. In America, the biggest market, the average game-player is 37 years old. Two-fifths are female. Even teenagers with imaginary rayguns are more likely to be playing “Halo” with their friends than solo.Over the past ten years the video-game industry has grown from a small niche business to a huge, mainstream one (see our special report). With global sales of $56 billion in 2010, it is more than twice the size of the recorded-music industry. Despite the downturn, it is growing by almost 9% a year.Is this success due to luck or skill? The answer matters, because the rest of the entertainment industry has tended to treat gaming as being a lucky...

Correction to this articleTHE shops are stacked six feet high with goods, the streets outside are jammed with customers and salespeople are sweating profusely under the onslaught. But this is not a high street during the Christmas-shopping season in the rich world. It is the Onitsha market in southern Nigeria, every day of the year. Many call it the world’s biggest. Up to 3m people go there daily to buy rice and soap, computers and construction equipment. It is a hub for traders from the Gulf of Guinea, a region blighted by corruption, piracy, poverty and disease but also home to millions of highly motivated entrepreneurs and increasingly prosperous consumers.Over the past decade six of the world’s ten fastest-growing countries were African. In eight of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan. Even allowing for the knock-on effect of the northern hemisphere’s slowdown, the IMF expects Africa to grow by 6% this year and nearly 6% in 2012, about the same as Asia.The commodities boom is partly responsible. In 2000-08 around a quarter of Africa’s growth came from...

OPTIMISTS reckon that India’s trajectory is self-correcting. Its messy democracy may not give it the sense of purpose that China’s one-party state does. But if the economy gets wobbly enough, the politicians will eventually react, pushing through painful reforms that will keep India’s miracle intact. That cheery logic is being put to the test this week, as a proposal to let foreign supermarkets into the country has provoked an almighty row. The government must hold its nerve, for what is at stake is not just where India buys its onions, but whether it is able to make hard choices.The opening, announced on November 24th, is only partial. Multi-brand foreign chains, such as Walmart and Tesco, must operate as joint ventures, of which they may now own up to 51%, and may operate only in cities of 1m people or more. But this should still shake things up. Indian retailing is backward. Stores are tiny. Supply chains are rickety and shockingly wasteful. Perhaps a third of vegetables rot before reaching a plate. Foreign firms will make life harder for small shopkeepers and middle men. But their cash and know-how could help...

MOST people have long since made up their minds about the Western campaign in Afghanistan. After a murderous adventure in Iraq, it has seemed like a waste of money and lives—a futile attempt to force modernity upon the corrupt rulers of an unwilling country. Yet, as governments gather in Bonn next week, a decade after the first assault on al-Qaeda’s Afghan training camps, they need to look beyond that bleak assessment. The real threat to Afghanistan today is the conviction that the outside world is powerless to make a difference.The Bonn meeting comes a few months after the NATO-led force has begun to wind down. Its 130,000 Western troops are due to have pulled out by the end of 2014 and the plan is to leave a small force of 20,000 Americans to help Afghanistan’s own security forces bear down on the insurgency. Although Bonn is not a donors’ meeting, the outside world needs to show that, even if its soldiers are going home, support for Afghanistan will remain. That means giving Afghans money and a chance of half-decent elections.Better than what?Nobody could pretend that Afghanistan is the Utopia...

IN HARD times governments are consumed by short-term problems. But this does not mean the archetypal long-term problem, climate change, has gone away. Science continues to support the case for curbing greenhouse-gas emissions so as to minimise the risks of catastrophe. Meanwhile it is clear how wretchedly the world is failing to do so. Even if countries honour their promises, the UN reckons that by 2020 emissions will exceed the trajectory for keeping warming under 2°C by up to 11 gigatonnes. That is equivalent to more than double the emissions of every car, bus and truck in 2005.Why is the world failing so badly? In part because changing the basics of how industrial economies are run is difficult, trying to do it at a rush harder still. Tax fossil fuels high enough and they will fall out of use. But the impact on the economy, and on powerful vested interests, of doing so at high speed may not be manageable. That is why many, including this newspaper, accept that a dash to stay under 2°C is no longer plausible. More deliberate action has more manageable costs.What the world is seeing, though, is scarcely...

REMEMBER the Big Society? Free schools? Health reform? Nor does anybody else. With Britain having barely emerged from recession and the outlook darkening in Europe, all politics is now about the economy.The chancellor of the exchequer’s autumn statement, not guaranteed to capture the public interest, dominated the airwaves on November 29th and the front pages this week. George Osborne’s announcement raised two questions which will determine the future of both the country and the government. How bad are things likely to get? And is the chancellor making things better or worse?Back towards the thunderThe independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), a newly established fiscal watchdog, provided Mr Osborne with the official answer to the first question. The OBR reckons that although growth will be much weaker this year and next than had been forecast in March, Britain will narrowly avoid a second recession. That sadly already looks too optimistic.The OBR’s forecast assumes that the euro crisis can be resolved without too much fuss, which seems increasingly unlikely—and the uncertainty is...

NO WONDER that, even in his moment of triumph, Mariano Rajoy seemed impatient with the jubilant celebrations by supporters of his conservative People’s Party. On November 20th Mr Rajoy led the PP to an absolute majority in the Spanish parliament with the biggest margin of victory since 1982 (see article). He did so despite (or perhaps because of) his promise to be more rigorous than the outgoing Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in imposing austerity to keep Spain in the euro zone. Yet Mr Rajoy knows that, with the markets in a eurofunk and bond yields at eye-watering highs, mere promises count for little.His victory was in part a tribute to the dogged persistence and quiet moderation of a man who has led his party for eight years. But it owed more to Spaniards’ rejection of his predecessor. Mr Zapatero will be remembered for liberalising measures, such as on gay marriage and abortion, that helped to make Spain a more modern, tolerant place. But he was slow to see that a housing bubble masked a loss of...

NO MATTER what the “content-should-be-free” crowd says, copyright theft robs artists and businesses of their livelihoods. Creative industries employ millions of people in the advanced world (and could be a rung on the ladder for poorer countries too, if, say, unscrupulous European content thieves did not habitually purloin the efforts of African musicians). The damage may be less than the annual $135 billion that the entertainment and publishing industries claim. These firms could change their business models to reduce the pirates’ profits, especially in countries where an album costs a day’s wages. But mispricing does not justify crime.So far, attempts to stop online piracy have largely failed. Lawsuits did shut down file-sharing services such as Napster and Grokster, but others have taken their place—such as Pirate Bay and the new “cyberlockers” (see article) that operate in hard-to-reach jurisdictions. Many users of these sites think they are swapping, not stealing, material. But the cyberlockers make money with extra charges for heavy users....

AT A recent shindig in London of the shale-gas industry, energy firms gave a rosy view of the fuel’s prospects in Europe. Like America, Europe has vast beds of shale rock, in which innumerable bubbles of natural gas are trapped. By cannoning water, sand and chemicals at them, a process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, the bubbles can be released. This, the firms said, could bring Europe the same bonanza of cheap gas and new jobs in the industry that America is now enjoying (see article). It would also lessen Europe’s irksome dependence on Russian gas.Outside the venue, meanwhile, protesters chanted, “Flaming water from our tap, we don’t want this fracking crap.” They referred to fears that fracking can cause contamination of aquifers by the methane and naturally occurring radioactive material it displaces, or by the chemicals it uses. Another worry is that fracking may cause earthquakes. A recent British study suggested that 50 tiny quakes in Lancashire were the result of fracking nearby.Such issues have been raised in...

NOT since revolution erupted nearly a year ago has the Arab world been in such turmoil. Tunisia, where it all began, is going well enough (see article). But in Libya the triumphant militias that toppled Muammar Qaddafi and recently seized his son and heir urgently need a democratic bridle (see article). In Syria the fate of democracy hangs in the balance, though its tyrant, Bashar Assad, is on the defensive. Chaotic Yemen’s embattled dictator has again promised to step down. And in Egypt, the army and young protesters are once more clashing violently in Cairo’s Tahrir Square (see article).Egypt, above all, must not fail. It is the biggest Arab prize by virtue of history, geography and population, now more than 85m-strong. It is the seat of the rejuvenated 22-country Arab League. It should be the Arabs’ breadbasket and economic motor. It was the first Arab country to make peace with Israel and has been America’s...

EVEN as the euro zone hurtles towards a crash, most people are assuming that, in the end, European leaders will do whatever it takes to save the single currency. That is because the consequences of the euro’s destruction are so catastrophic that no sensible policymaker could stand by and let it happen.A euro break-up would cause a global bust worse even than the one in 2008-09. The world’s most financially integrated region would be ripped apart by defaults, bank failures and the imposition of capital controls (see article). The euro zone could shatter into different pieces, or a large block in the north and a fragmented south. Amid the recriminations and broken treaties after the failure of the European Union’s biggest economic project, wild currency swings between those in the core and those in the periphery would almost certainly bring the single market to a shuddering halt. The survival of the EU itself would be in doubt.Yet the threat of a disaster does not always stop it from happening. The chances of the euro zone being...

IT WAS not a very ambitious target. All that the congressional “supercommittee” was required to do was to figure out a list of measures that would reduce America’s budget deficits by $1.2 trillion over the next ten years. That sounds a lot, until you realise it is only 0.6% of GDP, not even a quarter of the $5 trillion or so that is really needed to right the books in Washington, and less than 3% of the $44 trillion that the federal government is expected to spend over that period. To reach a goal that a business cost-cutter would regard as desultory, the bipartisan committee of 12 senators and congressmen was accorded exceptional powers. Its work was to be subject to a simple up-or-down vote, with no possibility of amendment; and the Senate would not be able to use its power to filibuster. Yet on November 21st, after three months of deliberation, the team was forced to admit that it had failed.On paper this failure might not seem to matter very much. Supposedly, spending cuts equivalent to the same $1.2 trillion figure will now automatically be triggered, starting in 2013, with $600 billion hacked out of...

IN THE past fortnight, Bashar Assad’s regime has become both lonelier and bloodier. As the isolation of the president and his country have become more stark, you would think that he would become keener to negotiate his way out of his murderous impasse. Yet he seems to be doing the precise opposite. After the Arab League’s offer to mediate, his security forces have sharply increased their rate of killing. Rather than engage seriously with the democratic opposition, Mr Assad seems ever more determined to crush it. As a result, the league took the dramatic step, on November 12th, of suspending Syria from membership. Unless Mr Assad changes course, he risks ending up like Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Yet even at this late hour it is still worth trying to make him see sense (see article).As peaceful protests against Mr Assad’s regime gathered steam, he had reckoned that Syria’s pivotal place in the Arab world would dissuade his fellow Arabs, as well as Turks and Persians, from turning against him. Instead the pace at which he is running...

THE Congress party which has dominated India since even before the British left is in turn dominated by the Nehru-Gandhi family, the democratic world’s most successful political dynasty. Its current leader, Sonia Gandhi, seems sadly to be ill: she has not resumed full duties since receiving treatment abroad for an undisclosed illness, probably cancer. Her son, Rahul, has long been cultivated to take charge of the family firm. But there is a problem with the mild-mannered heir.Mr Gandhi, a quietly clever 41-year-old free of the accusations of graft that dog so many Indian politicians, is popular. But he seems neither enthusiastic about the job of leading a billion people, nor especially well-equipped to manage India’s feuding politicians (see article). He has spurned the front-line, preferring to confine himself in youth and rural politics. Two years ago he turned down the offer of a cabinet post from the prime minister, Manmohan Singh. He hardly ever speaks in India’s boisterous parliament. When helping deal with a populist anti-...

WITH thunderclouds looming over the trans-Atlantic economy, it was easy to miss a bright piece of news last weekend from the other crucible of world trade, the Pacific Rim. In Honolulu, where Barack Obama hosted a summit of Asia-Pacific leaders, Canada, Japan and Mexico expressed interest in joining nine countries (America, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam) in discussing a free-trade pact. Altogether, the possible members of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) produce 40% of world GDP—far more than the European Union.Regional trade deals are not always a good idea. If they distract policymakers from global trade liberalisation, they are to be discouraged. But with the Doha round of global trade talks showing no flicker of life, there is little danger that the TPP will derail a broader agreement; and by cutting barriers, strengthening intellectual-property protections and going beyond a web of existing trade deals, it should boost world trade.The creation of a wider TPP is still some way off. For it to come into being its architects—Mr Obama, who faces a tough...

THIS is not a good time to be foreign. Anti-immigrant parties are gaining ground in Europe. Britain has been fretting this week over lapses in its border controls (see article). In America Barack Obama has failed to deliver the immigration reform he promised (see article), and Republican presidential candidates would rather electrify the border fence with Mexico than educate the children of illegal aliens. America educates foreign scientists in its universities and then expels them, a policy the mayor of New York calls “national suicide”.This illiberal turn in attitudes to migration is no surprise. It is the result of cyclical economic gloom combined with a secular rise in pressure on rich countries’ borders. But governments now weighing up whether or not to try to slam the door should consider another factor: the growing economic importance of diasporas, and the contribution they can make to a country’s economic growth.Old networks, new...

EVEN by Europe’s cacophonous standards, German policymakers sent mixed signals on the euro this week. At her party’s conference on November 14th the chancellor, Angela Merkel, left no doubt about the gravity of the euro crisis (see Charlemagne). “If the euro fails, then Europe fails,” she said.On the same day Jens Weidmann, the president of the Bundesbank, roiled financial markets with hardline comments designed to close off options for managing the crisis. He ruled out relying on the European Central Bank (ECB) as a lender of last resort to governments, arguing it would be illegal and wrong for the bank to hold down bond yields. Even the current (limited) bond purchases needed to stop. The only way to restore investor confidence in countries such as Italy, he believes, is for their governments to introduce bold reforms.Mr Weidmann is not a lone ideologue. Mario Draghi, the ECB’s new Italian president, has ruled out acting as a lender of last resort to governments, albeit less categorically (see article). Mr Weidmann has his...

ALTHOUGH it came after scandal, scheming and a truly dismal record as prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi’s resignation pledge was no more cathartic than any other of the remedies that the euro zone has so far concocted. The gesture was too little because Mr Berlusconi is so distrusted, after a total of eight and a half disastrous years in charge, that even now some fear he will find a way to hang on to office or stand again. It was too late because, by the time he promised to resign, Italy’s bonds were consumed by panic. At one point yields gapped up towards 7.5%—a level that would eventually pitch Italy into insolvency and long before that triggers a run on its banks.When the world’s third-largest bond market begins to buckle, catastrophe looms. At stake is not just the Italian economy but Spain, Portugal, Ireland, the euro, the European Union’s single market, the global banking system, the world economy, and pretty much anything else you can think of. Greece is important because it sets precedents for the euro—over such things as debt write-downs and rescues (see...

GIVEN that flying people around the world is the ultimate globalised industry, there is oddly little competition in the airlines business. Passengers who are prepared to change planes once or twice to get to their destinations have lots of choice, but on transatlantic routes between hubs there are often only one or two carriers to choose from.This lack of competition is partly the result of collusion sanctioned by regulators. On transatlantic routes members within each of the world’s three big alliances—Star, oneworld and SkyTeam—share costs and agree on prices. They are spreading their tentacles around the world (see article). The expected purchase by BA (a oneworld member) of a smaller rival, bmi, from Lufthansa (a Star member), may boost oneworld’s position by adding bmi’s Heathrow slots to oneworld’s already dominant position in transatlantic flights.America’s Department of Transportation (DoT), which has some antitrust powers, has not only given its blessing to the rise of alliances, but actually requires airlines to...

CONGRESS guards its privileges jealously, so when it agrees to delegate much of its power, even temporarily, the moment should not be squandered. That is why so much depends on its Joint Select Committee, a group of six Democrats and six Republicans drawn equally from the House of Representatives and the Senate, which has been charged with hacking away at America’s swollen deficit.By November 23rd, this “supercommittee” is supposed to come up with a plan to save at least $1.2 trillion-1.5 trillion over the next ten years. Exceptionally, any plan it agrees on will not be subject to amendment, only to a straight up-or-down vote, and it will need only a simple majority in the Senate, not the usual 60 votes out of 100. And as a final incentive, if the package fails to get through, harsher and more immediate cuts will automatically be imposed, in ways that politicians of both stripes would hate. In short, if there was ever an incentive for Barack Obama’s party and its Republican opponents to do what they should have done a long time ago, it is this.Few outsiders know what is going on inside the supercommittee,...

MANCHESTER’S town hall is a Victorian neo-Gothic temple to local government, packed with murals commemorating episodes from the city’s history. As the capital of Britain’s long-gone cotton trade, the city is particularly well-endowed with 19th-century civic grandeur; but all over the country, the juxtaposition of the splendour of the old buildings with the impotence of modern councils speaks eloquently of the decline of local government in Britain.Now the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government wants to shift power to locally elected mayors. The aim is a worthy one, and the only thing wrong with the plans is that they do not go nearly far enough.For more than a century governments have sucked power away from Britain’s cities. These days most mayors have little more than a gold chain to show for their offices, and local government is kept on a short financial leash by Whitehall, which provides most of the money that it spends, thus undermining its power and its responsibility.The previous Labour government went some way towards reversing that trend by encouraging a few cities, including London, to vote for mayors...

THE debate about timelines is almost over. This week’s report on Iran’s nuclear programme by the UN’s watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is its most alarming yet. Although no “smoking gun” proves beyond doubt that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, the evidence gathered in a 12-page annex is hard to interpret in any other way.Concerted efforts by Western intelligence agencies and the Israelis to sabotage the Iranian programme have been less effective than was previously believed. Iran has already begun moving part of its uranium-enrichment capacity to Fordow, a facility buried deep within a mountain near Qom. Intelligence sources estimate that if Iran opted to “break out” from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), it could have at least one workable weapon within a year and a few more about six months after that. Iran’s leaders may not choose that path. But what happens next depends less on Iran’s technical or industrial capabilities than on politics. For the time being at least, ambiguity almost certainly serves Iran’s purposes better than a confrontation. But in Israel, talk of a...

EVEN by the euro zone’s undemanding standards, a summit deal that survived less than a week is lamentable. Early on October 27th Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, hailed a “comprehensive package” to save the euro. Yet by the time The Economist went to press, their plans were in tatters. Greece’s prime minister, George Papandreou, looked doomed, rejected by some of his ministers, many in his party—and, possibly, most of his country.The shallowness of the summit’s achievements has been brutally exposed. Instead of settling into a period of calm, markets were thrown into new turmoil (see article). One way or another, the euro is destined for an unavoidable test of popular support. Unless the euro zone’s leaders shape up, this is an encounter their currency may well lose.Heed the messengerMr Papandreou was in part the author of his own misfortune. Seeking the backing of the Greek people in a referendum, he was immediately condemned in the capitals...

DEEP in the South Atlantic, a vast industrial operation is under way that Brazil’s leaders say will turn their country into an oil power by the end of this decade. If the ambitious plans of Petrobras, the national oil company, come to fruition, by 2020 Brazil will be producing 5m barrels per day, much of it from new offshore fields. That might make Brazil a top-five source of oil (see article).Managed wisely, this boom has the potential to do great good. Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, wants to use the oil money to pay for better education, health and infrastructure. She also wants to use the new fields to create a world-beating oil-services industry. But the bonanza also risks feeding some Brazilian vices: a spendthrift and corrupt political system; an over-mighty state and over-protected domestic market; and neglect of the virtues of saving, investment and training.So it is worrying that there is far more debate in Brazil about how to spend the oil money than about how to develop the fields. If Brazil’s economy is to benefit...

“THIS is a war between humans and technology. While that war is being fought, we should not talk about bankruptcy.” So says a Japanese official responsible for channelling the first tranche of ¥5 trillion ($64 billion) in government support to Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) following the meltdown of its three reactors at Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant after the tsunami on March 11th.The support has two valid aims. It helps pay compensation to the 89,000 people forced to abandon their homes within a 20km (12.5-mile) radius of the plant: in the twilight zone only farm animals and the odd feral ostrich roam the streets (see article). It also spares Tepco the chaos of insolvency as it races towards a year-end deadline for Fukushima’s full shutdown.Don’t let it off the hookYet the aim must surely be to create a stronger, safer energy industry as well. Tepco’s continued existence as a private, gravely crippled entity works against that. The government should act fast to nationalise Tepco and hold it temporarily in public...

IN THEIR awakening this year, many Arabs have looked to Turkey for inspiration. Turkey is not just a fellow Muslim country and their former imperial power. It also offers, for all its faults, a shining (and rare) example in the Islamic world of a strong democracy and a successful free-market economy. And the Turks have responded well, if sometimes belatedly. They were early to call for change in Egypt. They endorsed NATO’s intervention in Libya. They are now unequivocally backing the opposition to the Assad regime in neighbouring Syria.Yet Turkey’s active foreign policy has attracted censure in parts of the West, especially America. Critics in Washington recall the Turks’ 2003 refusal to allow American troops to cross their territory to invade Iraq. Nowadays they accuse the Turkish government of turning its back on the European Union and NATO. They point to continuing harsh treatment of Turkey’s Kurds and soft treatment of Iran. Above all, they blame Turkey for switching from being a firm friend of Israel, the only other established democracy in the region, into an implacable foe.Are such sweeping accusations...

IT IS a year until Americans go to the polls, on November 6th 2012, to decide whether Barack Obama deserves another term. In January the Republicans start voting in their primaries, with the favourite, Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, facing fading competition from Herman Cain, a pizza tycoon, and Rick Perry, the governor of Texas. Already American politics has succumbed to election paralysis, with neither party interested in bipartisan solutions.This would be a problem at the best of times; and these times are very far from that. Strikingly, by about three to one, Americans feel their country is on the wrong track. America’s sovereign debt has been downgraded. Unemployment remains stubbornly above 9%, with the long-term unemployed making up the largest proportion of the jobless since records began in 1948. As the superpower’s clout seems to ebb towards Asia, the world’s most consistently inventive and optimistic country has lost its mojo.Some of this distress was inevitable. Whatever the country’s leaders did in Washington, the credit crunch was always going to cause a lot of suffering. Rising...

YOU can understand the self-congratulation. In the early hours of October 27th, after marathon talks, the leaders of the euro zone agreed on a “comprehensive package” to dispel the crisis that has been plaguing the euro zone for almost two years. They boosted a fund designed to shore up the euro zone’s troubled sovereign borrowers, drafted a plan to restore Europe’s banks, radically cut Greece’s burden of debt, and set out some ways to put the governance of the euro on a proper footing. After a summer overshadowed by the threat of financial collapse, they had shown the markets who was boss.Yet in the light of day, the holes in the rescue plan are plain to see. The scheme is confused and unconvincing. Confused, because its financial engineering is too clever by half and vulnerable to unintended consequences. Unconvincing, because too many details are missing and the scheme at its core is not up to the job of safeguarding the euro.This is the euro zone’s third comprehensive package this year. It is unlikely to be its last.Words are cheap…The summit’s most notable achievement was to forge an...

STUDENT loans are based on a simple idea: that a graduate’s future flow of earnings will more than cover the costs of doing a degree. But with unemployment rates in parts of the rich world at post-war highs, that may no longer hold true for many people. The consequences will be felt by everybody.All over the world student indebtedness is causing problems—witness this month’s violent protests in Chile (see article). In Britain, according to a recent parliamentary report, rising university fees mean that student debt is likely to treble to £70 billion by 2015. But, partly because higher education there is so expensive, the scale of the problem is far greater in America. When the next official estimates of outstanding student debt there are published, it is expected to be close to $1 trillion, higher than credit-card borrowing (see article). Credit quality in other classes of consumer debt has been improving; delinquency rates on student loans are...

AFTER a slow summer, the Arab spring has turned into a turbulent autumn. The past few days have seen the gruesome end of Muammar Qaddafi, the more edifying spectacle of an orderly and open election in Tunisia (see article) and the death of Saudi Arabia’s ancient crown prince Sultan amid demands for the kingdom to modernise faster. Egypt, by far the most populous Arab country, is poised to hold its first proper election next month. Revolts and civil strife continue across the region, from Syria to Yemen and Bahrain.For the West, whose ties to Arab dictators once gave it great clout in the Middle East, events in the region have spun way out of control. That fact was underlined this week by the Iraqis’ insistence that all American forces must quit the country by the end of the year. Yet the West should not regret this turn of events. The power that it has lost in the short term should, in the long run, be replaced by influence born of good relations with decent governments.It’s still on courseOn balance, the Arab...

RATHER as jumping into swimming pools from hotel balconies has become a compulsive fad among some young holiday-makers, macho displays of Euroscepticism are a rite of passage for many Conservative MPs. But even by the Tory party’s standards, this week’s antics were staggeringly self-indulgent: pointless, confected—and dangerous.Give the Eurosceptics their due: their views that Britain should stay out of the euro, and that its design was flawed, have been vindicated. But being proved right has only enraged them further. This week the House of Commons voted on whether a referendum should be held asking if the country should remain in the European Union, leave, or renegotiate the terms of its membership (see article). The motion was defeated, but, astonishingly, almost half of David Cameron’s backbench MPs defied his call for them to vote against it. The eccentric timing of this debate—held as the euro zone struggles to avoid meltdown—was only its most glaring failing.Renegotiation is not reasonableEurope and...

DOUGLAS ADAMS, the late lamented author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, dreamed up many comic creations. One of his greatest was the Babel fish. This interstellar ichthyoid neatly disposed of a problem all science-fiction authors have: how to let alien species talk to one another. It did so by acting as a mind-reader that translated thoughts between different races and cultures. Universal communication did not, unfortunately, lead to universal harmony. As Adams put it, “The poor Babel fish has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”For the moment, mind-reading is still science fiction. But that may not be true for much longer. Several lines of inquiry (see article) are converging on the idea that the neurological activity of the brain can be decoded directly, and people’s thoughts revealed without being spoken.Just imagine the potential benefits. Such a development would allow both the fit and the disabled to operate machines merely by choosing what they want those machines to do. It...