Track marks

We know where that came from

MOST of the world’s supply of cocaine comes from just three South American countries: Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. Much of it is headed for the United States and Europe. Law-enforcement officials from America patrol international waters in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, hoping to seize cocaine shipments before they reach their intended destinations. When they succeed in nabbing any smugglers, contraband samples are sent to chemists to help determine the source.

The drug’s origins can be identified from telltale “fingerprints” formed by the chemical composition of the coca plant, from which cocaine is derived. These compounds vary naturally. The amount of nitrogen-containing compounds, known as alkaloids, differs between coca cultivars. And ratios of stable isotopes (non-radioactive atoms of the same element that contain different numbers of neutrons) are indicative of different regions. Typically, ratios of carbon-13 to carbon-12, which change according to temperature and altitude, and ratios of nitrogen-15 to nitrogen-14, which vary based on precipitation and soil conditions, are...Continue reading

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A new brew

MORE than 7,000 years ago, people living in the Middle East discovered that they could ferment grapes to make wine. The yeast that they unknowingly harnessed for the process can now be found in every vineyard on the planet. As with wine, the processing of coffee beans and cacao, used to make chocolate, also requires some fermentation. But new research shows that coffee and cacao yeasts are far more genetically diverse than wine strains. This opens up the intriguing possibility of imparting entirely new tastes to the terroir of coffee and chocolate.

Cacao originated in the Amazon and was widely cultivated in Central America before Hernán Cortés brought it to the Old World in 1530. Coffee moved in the opposite direction. From Ethiopia it was disseminated throughout the Middle East by Arab traders during the 6th century and ultimately arrived in the New World during the 18th century, where nascent Americans may have seen drinking it as something of a patriotic duty after the Boston Tea Party.

As Europe’s thirst for coffee and chocolate grew, merchants keen to cash in on the crops started establishing vast plantations wherever the plants could be cultivated. In the first part of the 17th century, Dutch traders transported a Yemeni coffee plant to Holland. Shortly thereafter, they began cultivating its descendants in Sri Lanka and on Java and Réunion. Over...Continue reading

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Not an ex-parrot

Who’s a pretty Polly?

ONE of the problems suffered by a species on the brink of extinction is low genetic diversity. Initially this is caused by lack of numbers, but then it is exacerbated by the inbreeding which inevitably results. Inbreeding brings with it infertility and susceptibility to disease. Hence concern for the kakapo, a nocturnal parrot that lives in New Zealand. Like many other island-dwelling birds, it has become flightless. It is also, at up to 4kg, the world’s heaviest parrot. Both of these things make it an attractive target for predatory mammals, which thankfully were absent for most of the 80m years during which it and its ancestors have inhabited the archipelago.

The kakapo’s downfall began with New Zealand’s first wave of human colonisation, some 700 years ago, by Polynesians. These arrivals hunted it, and also brought rats with them, which ate nestling chicks. The second, European wave of immigrants brought cats and stoats to add to the birds’ woes. Humans also destroyed much of their habitat to make way for crops. Conservation efforts are not assisted by the birds’ reproductive habits. They...Continue reading

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Green giant

Tolba, pulling the world together

“PERHAPS the single most successful international agreement to date has been the Montreal protocol,” declared Kofi Annan, then head of the United Nations, back in 2003. Agreed 16 years earlier, the mechanism sought to limit damage to the stratospheric ozone layer that protects the planet from harmful ultraviolet radiation. The protocol phased out substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)—coolants in devices ranging from air conditioners to refrigerators—which deplete the ozone. They also contribute to global warming. To date, the agreement has averted the equivalent of more than 135 billion tonnes of carbon-dioxide (CO₂) emissions. One of its most important architects, Mostafa Tolba, an Egyptian scientist, died on March 28th, aged 93.

Educated in Cairo and London, Dr Tolba helped found the institutions of modern climate diplomacy. In 1972 he led his country’s delegation to the Stockholm conference from which the United Nations Environment Programme emerged. After a short stint as its deputy executive director, he took full charge from 1975 until 1992. The Vienna...Continue reading

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Money bags

“WE ARE on a wild ride,” Tom Mangas, the boss of Starwood, an American hotel group that owns the Westin and Sheraton brands, wrote to employees this week. He was referring to the bidding war over Starwood between Marriott, another American hotel operator, and a group led by Anbang, a Chinese insurer. Anbang this week raised its offer to $14 billion. But Mr Mangas could just as well have been talking about the wave of China-led mergers and acquisitions that is sweeping over the world economy.

Chinese firms with little international experience and lots of debt have emerged as the biggest buyers of global assets. They have announced nearly $100 billion in cross-border M&A deals this year, already more than their $61 billion of foreign acquisitions last year (see chart). To be sure, announcing deals is not the same as closing them. Between losing out to other bidders and rejection by regulators, China’s investment tally...Continue reading

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Hot in the city

GLOBALISATION has created a handful of metropolises that attract people, capital and ideas from all over the world, almost irrespective of how their national economy is doing. House prices in such places, unsurprisingly, outpace the national average. In our latest round-up of global housing, we find that prices have risen in 20 of the 26 countries we track over the past year, at an (unweighted) average pace of 5.1% after adjusting for inflation. Prices in pre-eminent cities in these countries, however, have risen by 8.3% on average.

In a survey conducted last year, fewer than one in nine residents of Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Paris, Stockholm and Zurich thought that it was easy to find reasonably-priced housing. In these cities, house prices have risen at an average pace of 6.5% a year over the past three years (again, unweighted), compared with a national average rise of just 3.2%. The value of homes in four cities on the Pacific—San Francisco, Vancouver, Sydney and Shanghai—has increased by 12% a year over the past three years, twice the average national pace.

The supply of housing is rather inelastic, so in the short term...Continue reading

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Million-dollar babies

THAT a computer program can repeatedly beat the world champion at Go, a complex board game, is a coup for the fast-moving field of artificial intelligence (AI). Another high-stakes game, however, is taking place behind the scenes, as firms compete to hire the smartest AI experts. Technology giants, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Baidu, are racing to expand their AI activities. Last year they spent some $8.5 billion on research, deals and hiring, says Quid, a data firm. That was four times more than in 2010.

 In the past universities employed the world’s best AI experts. Now tech firms are plundering departments of robotics and machine learning (where computers learn from data themselves) for the highest-flying faculty and students, luring them with big salaries similar to those fetched by professional athletes.

Last year Uber, a taxi-hailing firm, recruited 40 of the 140 staff of the National Robotics Engineering Centre at Carnegie Mellon University, and set up a unit to work on self-driving cars. That drew headlines because Uber...Continue reading

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The Burma road

Ripe for investment

SPEND a day in Yangon, shuttling among new high-rises and bars before retreating to your boutique hotel, and you can almost believe that after decades of isolation, Myanmar is squarely on the road to prosperity. Spend more than a few days, however, and the cracks start showing: intermittent power cuts, ancient sewage systems, insufficient housing for an influx of migrants from the countryside.

The situation is worse in rural Myanmar, where much of the population lives not just in extreme poverty, but also mired in debt. Bad roads make it costly to get goods to market and impede investment. Around three-quarters of the country’s children live in homes that lack electricity. Myanmar’s voters hope their first freely elected government since the 1960s, which took office this week, will change things for the better.

The task ahead is daunting: within South-East Asia, only Cambodia has a lower GDP per person. Its infrastructure (both physical and financial) is somewhere between crumbling and non-existent; its laws are archaic and, after decades of isolation and underinvestment in education, its...Continue reading

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Analyse this

WHAT is the most influential contemporary book about the world economy? An obvious choice is “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, a 696-page analysis of inequality by Thomas Piketty, a French economist. There is another candidate: “Valuation”, a 825-page manual on corporate finance and shareholder value. Some 700,000 copies of it encumber the bookshelves of MBA students, investors and chief executives around the globe.

Inequality and shareholder value are linked in the minds of many folk, who blame investors and managers for stagnant wages and financial crises. Ruthless corporations are a big theme in America’s election campaign. The near-collapse of Valeant, a drugs firm, seems to illustrate a toxic business culture. Its shares have fallen by 73% this year. It is restating its accounts and is in negotiations with its lenders and under investigation by regulators. Valeant describes itself as “bringing value to our shareholders”. While there is no indication of fraudulent or illegal practice, the company could end up joining a pantheon of corporate fiascos that includes Enron (which pledged to “create significant value for our...Continue reading

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Ante upped

TEN years ago African bonds were a rare sight. Of all the countries south of the Sahara, only South Africa had ever sold a dollar-denominated bond to foreign investors. Since then, 16 more have. Excluding South Africa, African countries issued $6.75 billion of dollar debt last year, just short of the record $7 billion sold in 2014. But depreciating currencies, low commodity prices and a rise in interest rates in America are taking the shine off.

Africa’s bond bonanza suited both investors and governments. With government bonds in their own countries offering measly returns, rich-country pension funds looked to Africa for higher yields. And by issuing debt in dollars, African governments could avoid the double-digit rates they pay to borrow at home. For a while, optimism reigned. Ghana’s debut dollar bond was four times oversubscribed. Zambia, buoyed by a copper boom, did even better: its ten-year bond, issued in 2012, was 24 times oversubscribed, and sold at a yield of 5.6%—lower than the equivalent Spanish bond at the time.

Governments were able to issue bonds thanks partly to debt cancellation, which brought down external debt in...Continue reading

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Recovery phase

Hoping for a miracle

DISASTER struck Malaysia Airlines twice in 2014. In March, flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, a Boeing 777 carrying 239 passengers and crew, disappeared an hour after take-off. Experts think it crashed in the southern Indian Ocean, though no one is sure why. Only a few fragments of debris have turned up, off Africa’s coast. Four months later Russian-backed militia in eastern Ukraine shot down MH17, another 777, killing all 298 people on board. Two years on, Malaysia’s struggling national carrier is still flying, but its financial health remains under scrutiny.

Both crashes appeared to have been beyond the firm’s control but hurt business nonetheless. Customers deserted the airline. Chinese flyers feared it was jinxed: sales in China, a crucial market, fell by 60% immediately after the first crash. Shortly after the second disaster, in August 2014, Malaysia’s government renationalised the airline, rescuing it from collapse.

In fact the airline was in a mess before the two tragedies. Malaysia last made a profit in 2010. In 2013 the firm lost $356m. As demand for air travel in the...Continue reading

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Double-crossed

THE bookmaker on Aldgate High Street, on the fringes of London’s financial district, attracts its fair share of risk-takers. But across the road, at the offices of LCH.Clearnet, part of the London Stock Exchange Group (LSE), the really big bets are handled. It and other clearing-houses now occupy a central position in high finance. They ensure that trillions of dollars are paid out on derivatives contracts each day. A decade of dealmaking has created five big beasts of clearing: LSE, Deutsche Börse, CME Group, ICE and HKEX. A planned merger between LSE and the Germans would reduce that to four.

LSE and Deutsche Börse take their names from their respective bourses. But they now make more money from their clearing-houses, LCH.Clearnet and Eurex Clearing. That is because the clearing of derivatives has become central to the modern financial system.

Imagine two banks want to hedge against interest-rate movements, but in opposite directions. They sign a contract that will lead to a payment from one to the other if rates rise, and the reverse if they fall. The potential loss or gain is theoretically unlimited, since there is no...Continue reading

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Blinded by the light

Some prospects are still dazzling

IN SOME respects this is a bumper era for solar energy. Last year, for the first time, the world invested more in photovoltaic cells than in coal- and gas-fired power generation combined. This year, new solar installations in America are expected to more than double (see chart ). China, which now has more solar capacity than any other country, plans to triple it by the end of the decade.

Yet this week two of the rich world’s most prominent solar-power developers have been flirting with disaster. Cheered on by yield-hungry creditors and investors, they had expanded too quickly, reliant on heavy borrowing and financial engineering. Not for the first time, some energy firms fooled themselves into believing that newfangled technologies and funding mechanisms could let them defy laws of financial gravity.

On March 29th SunEdison, an American firm that...Continue reading

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Hail, César!

Mr Alierta found his chair comfortable

SIXTEEN years was surely too long for anyone to remain as boss of Spain’s largest telecoms company, Telefónica. During his spell in charge, César Alierta, 70, who at last agreed to hang up his receiver this week, created a giant. Telefónica expanded far and wide in Latin America and Europe, yet the benefits to shareholders were hard to see.

A former stockbroker who was famously fond of cigars, Mr Alierta became one of the most powerful businessmen in Spain. Under his guidance, Telefónica’s debt-fuelled expansion mirrored Spain’s own overheated economic boom and subsequent slump. Early on he had shown caution: his tenure began with his cleaning up the mess that resulted from Telefónica’s dud investments during the dotcom bubble. Then, like bosses at other big Spanish firms such as Santander, a bank, Mr Alierta was tempted to splurge. Telefónica bought BellSouth’s Latin American mobile operations in 2004; acquired O2, a British telecoms firm, in 2006; and invested in China. By 2007 its market value exceeded €100 billion ($150 billion).

Its heft did help...Continue reading

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Bucking the trend

AT THE beginning of the year the dollar was on a tear. In trade-weighted terms, it had risen by almost 20% since the start of July 2014. With the Federal Reserve tightening interest rates for the first time since 2006, the greenback seemed destined to head higher.

In fact, doubts were already emerging. In mid-December fund managers polled by Bank of America Merrill Lynch thought that being bullish about the dollar was the most overcrowded trade in the financial markets and that the currency was overvalued.

The dollar continued to rise for the first three weeks of the year but then the tide turned: since January 20th, the currency has fallen by 3.8% in trade-weighted terms (see chart). The main reason may be a perceived shift in Fed policy; as the year began, investors were expecting three or four rate increases in 2016. The latest statement from the central bank suggests that only two rises are on the menu.

The dollar’s ascent may have played a part in the Fed’s stance, since a stronger currency, by itself, represents a tightening of monetary conditions. The central bank has lowered its forecast for growth this year...Continue reading

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Chairman of everything

SHORTLY before the annual session in March of China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress, two curious articles appeared in government-linked news media. The first, published in a newspaper run by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Communist Party’s anti-graft body, was called “The fawning assent of a thousand people cannot match the honest advice of one”. It was written in an allegorical style traditionally used in China to criticise those in power, in this case in the form of an essay praising the seventh-century emperor, Taizong, for heeding a plain-talking courtier. The article called for more debate and freer speech at a time when China’s president, Xi Jinping, has been restricting both. “The ability to air opinions freely often determined the rise and fall of dynasties,” it said. “We should not be afraid of people saying the wrong things; we should be afraid of people not speaking at all.”

The second article, in the form of an open letter, ran—fleetingly—on a state-run website. “Hello, Comrade Xi Jinping. We are loyal Communist Party members,” the letter began. It called on Mr Xi to...Continue reading

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Fighting on all fronts

THE prayers of Gyang Dahoro take on a decidedly political note. A dozen local chiefs, resplendent in traditional Nigerian dress, nod approvingly as he calls for protection from the “terrorists” who have “made us refugees in our own land”. The worshippers are Christians of the Berom tribe, farmers of north-central Nigeria, who have spent 15 years fighting Fulani herdsmen. Homes abandoned in the battle lie strewn across the rocky highlands from which their state, Plateau, derives its name.

Across Nigeria’s “middle belt”, indigenous tribes like theirs spar with “settlers” who are moving south as the Sahel encroaches on their pastures. Up to 300 people were reported dead after an attack by herdsmen in Benue state in February. The Institute for Economics and Peace, an Australian think-tank, reckons that Fulani militants killed 1,229 people in 2014, compared with 63 the year before. Berom leaders say their attackers are foreign-sponsored jihadists, though there is little evidence to support this, and the fight is not one-sided. Fulani chiefs living deep inside the Plateau claim that they are provoked by farmers who steal their herds—a serious...Continue reading

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The kingdom is king

IT MAY not be quite the country for the usual university experience: moving out of home; experimenting; dating. Nor does it have Egypt’s long history of scholarship, with the likes of the Al Azhar university, which has been going since the tenth century. But Saudi Arabia is gaining an unlikely reputation for learning in the Middle East. Earlier this year it gained three of the top four spots in an annual ranking of Arab universities by Times Higher Education (THE), a British weekly magazine. Topping the chart was King Abdulaziz University in the western city of Jeddah, which was founded only in 1967.

The kingdom rarely pulls things off as well as, let alone better than, its more savvy fellow Gulf states. But in higher education it has steamed ahead. One reason is that many Saudis have long gone to study in Europe and America. Some return with top-notch degrees and go into academic teaching. In recent years the kingdom has also had the cash to attract foreign academics on the promise they can carry out research. That has paid off with an increasing number of mentions in academic journals, which is one of the indicators used...Continue reading

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Jihadists on the run

LESS than a year after Islamic State (IS) burst onto the scene in June 2014, capturing Mosul and racing towards Baghdad, the jihadists stumbled. In early 2015 IS was pushed out of Kobane, in Syria, and Tikrit, in Iraq. But then its diehard fighters seized Ramadi and Palmyra, as Iraqi and Syrian troops fled.

Predicting the demise of IS is fraught with difficulty. But its opponents in Iraq and Syria now sound increasingly upbeat. Western and Russian bombers have pummelled the jihadists from the air, as local fighters push them back on the ground. Though its motto is to “remain and expand”, IS now seems unable to do either in the region. The “caliphate” is thought to have lost 20% of its territory in Syria and 40% in Iraq since its peak.

In fact, IS has not scored a big victory in its heartland since taking Palmyra, the site of Roman-era ruins, in May 2015. The jihadists made a show of destroying the temples of Bel and Baal Shamin, and the iconic Arch of Triumph—acts described as a war crime by the UN. But after weeks of fierce fighting, and with the aid of Russian air strikes, the Syrian army recaptured the city on March 27th. The...Continue reading

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Silver in the deep

THE sea cucumber—a warty, sausage-shaped creature that feeds on the ocean floor—can sell for half its weight in silver in the markets of Guangzhou in southern China. This fleshy sea-slug is prized as a delicacy, a traditional medicine reputedly capable of curing joint pain and fatigue, and a natural aphrodisiac. As overexploitation has depleted stocks throughout Asia, merchants have sought the creature further afield. Six years ago, two Chinese traders discovered that the waters around Sierra Leone’s Banana Island were teeming with sea cucumbers; islanders have been diving for them ever since.

The leathery echinoderms only emerge from their hiding-places in the dark. So when night falls, Emmanuel Pratt slides out to sea in his brightly-painted canoe. Wearing a wetsuit and flippers, he takes a last drag of his cigarette before pulling a mask down over his face, and slipping into the dark water. Moments later the beam of his waterproof torch appears a dozen feet down as he searches for his new livelihood.

When the Chinese traders, known to the islanders only as Mr Cham and Mr Lee, first turned up, locals say they promised to use some...Continue reading

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Signs of happier times

Right this way, your table’s waiting

IT IS not easy being the only restaurant critic in Baghdad. “Before when I wrote, I would say when something is bad,” says Anas al-Sarraf, the entrepreneurial founder of the online Baghdad Restaurant Guide. “But I stopped six months ago because I got a lot of threats. Someone who is spending $2m to open a restaurant can spend $5,000 to order a hit on me.”

Mr Sarraf says he has reviewed more than 600 restaurants since starting his hugely popular Arabic-language Facebook page in 2012. These days, he is careful to give less opinionated reviews of new restaurants; he instead invites diners themselves to provide the more candid comments. Other obstacles face the intrepid reviewer. At a restaurant in Baghdad’s Sadr City, he once found himself surrounded by security people and had to convince them he was taking photos for a review, not to plan an attack.

Mr Sarraf estimates that a new restaurant—anything from a small café to a multi-level culinary palace—opens in Baghdad every three days. Despite Iraq’s current financial crisis, he says, profit margins are around...Continue reading

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Let them weave their own

Recycling at work

GIKOMBA market, just north of Nairobi’s downtown, is a place to buy just about anything. At its entrance, where ragged minibuses splash their way through rutted red mud, stalls sell piles of pillows, plastic toys, cutlery and soap. But the most common wares are second-hand clothes. Piles of old T-shirts and jeans; winter jackets, incongruous in the equatorial heat; dresses and leather shoes; all are watched carefully by stallholders. This market is the biggest wholesale centre of the mitumba, or used-clothing, trade in east Africa. The raiments worn by the bulk of Nairobi’s population are sourced here.

Yet if the governments of the East African Community, the regional trade bloc which comprises Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, get their way, all will change. By 2019 the EAC wants to outlaw imports of second-hand clothes. The idea is that ending the trade in old clothes—mostly donated by their former owners in rich countries—will help boost local manufacturing. On March 10th Uhuru Kenyatta, Kenya’s president, met market traders upset by the idea, and defended the...Continue reading

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Dissociative disorder

UKRAINE’S efforts to reach an association agreement with the European Union have led to revolution, poisoned relations with Russia and caused war with Russian-backed separatists. After years of negotiations, Ukrainian and EU leaders at last signed the agreement in Kiev in March 2014, just after the Maidan revolution. But the deal may yet founder in a surprising place: the Netherlands. Dutch Eurosceptics have forced a plebiscite on whether to ratify it. The EU’s other 27 states have already done so; the Netherlands is the lone holdout, and most polls show that on April 6th “no” will probably win.

The referendum is not binding, but the Dutch government will have to respond to the outcome. Rejection would hobble European diplomacy and suggest that the EU is too fractured to maintain a common foreign policy in the face of Russian interference in Ukraine. And it would send a signal to Ukrainians that however much they want to be part of Europe, many Europeans want no part of them.

The campaign to block the association agreement began last summer when GeenPeil, a Eurosceptic social-media group, selected the issue as a test of the referendum...Continue reading

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Living in limbo

No turning back

SWEDEN seems idyllic to Munire, a 19-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker, and her two sisters. The three orphans travelled on their own from Iran, where they were living illegally and had no access to education. Now they live with a foster family and go to school while they wait to hear whether or not they can stay. But the respite may be short-lived. Unlike their brother, who has been a Swedish resident for several years, they could find themselves sent back to a country that, although their birthplace, is no longer their home.

The refugee crisis has created rifts in Europe between countries which have welcomed refugees, such as Germany and Sweden, and those which have not, such as Poland and Hungary. It has also exposed tensions in Europe’s asylum system as a whole. A well-designed and relatively effective process has, under the pressure of numbers, started to crumble. Afghans, the second-biggest group of migrants to Europe last year at nearly 200,000, are the most likely to lose out.

Asylum claims from Syrians, Eritreans and Iraqis are accepted at high rates across the European Union, at 97%, 87% and...Continue reading

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Once more around the bloc

TWO years ago a Ukrainian blogger, Mustafa Nayem, published a Facebook post calling people onto Kiev’s Maidan and launched the protest that toppled the government of Viktor Yanukovych. On March 27th Mr Nayem, who is now a deputy in the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, called people out again—this time to demand the dismissal of the country’s prosecutor-general, Viktor Shokin, who had conspicuously thwarted investigations into corruption. “Basta,” wrote Mr Nayem. “We once again have to come onto the streets.” His indignation was aimed at Petro Poroshenko, the president, who had protected Mr Shokin as a political crony.

Two days later, bowing to pressure from Ukrainian civil society and western donors, the Rada dismissed Mr Shokin. As a parting shot he fired his pro-reform deputy, David Sakvarelidze, who had uncovered corruption within the prosecutor’s own office. Worse, the request to fire Mr Sakvarelidze reportedly came from one of Mr Yanukovych’s former associates.

The strife in the prosecutor general’s office is the latest battle in a continuing war for the country’s European future. “We are on a brink of a...Continue reading

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Doubt of the benefit

Seongnam reflects on its social pool

TO ITS current occupant, Seongnam’s town hall, a gleaming glass structure, stands as an edifice to wastefulness. It was built for 320 billion won ($280m) under a former conservative mayor of Seongnam, a city of 900,000 a little to the south-east of Seoul, South Korea’s capital. Upon succeeding him in 2010, Lee Jae-myung, the current liberal mayor, declared a moratorium—a first for the country—on repayments of the 520 billion won in debt that he had inherited. Budget cutbacks and an anti-corruption effort have since helped pay down the debt. In 2014 Seongnam was rated South Korea’s most financially stable city by its interior ministry.

Yet the central government, led by Park Geun-hye of the conservative Saenuri party, thinks that Mr Lee, in his second mayoral term, is misusing taxpayers’ money. Last year Seongnam’s local assembly passed a series of social-welfare bills to offer free postnatal care to new mothers; free uniforms to secondary-school pupils; and cash handouts of 500,000 won a year to all of its 24-year-old residents amid high rates of youth unemployment, which it...Continue reading

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The battle for Punjab

YEARS of terrorism have had a numbing effect on Pakistan. Most of the nearly 10,000 attacks the country has suffered in the past six years took merely hours to fall from the view of politicians and the media. It generally takes child victims or an attack on Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous, prosperous and peaceable province, to galvanise attention for longer. A suicide-bombing on March 27th—Easter Sunday—in a park in Lahore, Punjab’s capital, had both these elements.

Poorer families had flocked to the Gulshan-e-Iqbal park for the affordable thrills of its fairground rides. After sunset a bomber sauntered in and blew himself up next to the queue for the dodgem cars. He killed 74 people, many of them children, and wounded over 300.

Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, an especially repugnant splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban, was quick to take credit, saying the bombing was intended to target Christians. In fact, most of those killed were Muslims: as if in justification, the group also said that it was avenging the government’s assault on militants operating out of Punjab. “We have entered Lahore,” it warned Nawaz Sharif, the prime...Continue reading

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Men-at-alms

JUST north of Bangkok, the Thai capital, stands an enormous golden stupa designed to last 1,000 years. Its gleaming exterior is made not from smooth tiles but from 300,000 tightly-packed statues of the Buddha; 700,000 more are hidden inside. Just as staggering is the vast apron surrounding the stupa, able to hold 1m worshippers. Worakate, a guide dressed in white, explains that followers of the Theravada school of Buddhism—dominant in Thailand and elsewhere in South-East Asia—have never had a gathering place as large as Mecca or the Vatican. She thinks the monument can be a meeting point for adherents from around the world.

The stupa is the centrepiece of a sprawling religious complex, not all of it quite so bling, inhabited by the Dhammakaya movement. An influential if controversial Buddhist sect, it was founded by a handful of monks in the 1970s and now claims more than 3m followers in some 30 countries. As many as 10,000 mainly middle-class Thais flock to its Sunday ceremonies. One of the temple’s senior monks, Phra Somchai Thannavuddho, says that slick modern management has helped. But a big draw, he says, is the purity and clarity of its...Continue reading

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Army manoeuvres

IT WAS an extraordinary moment, and seen by many as a happy culmination to a long, often bloody and always wrenching story: this week Myanmar swore in a new president as the titular head of the first civilian-led, democratic government to take office after decades of military-backed rule. It followed a landslide win for Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) in a November election that made crystal-clear what ordinary Burmese no longer wanted: the army running their affairs.

And yet. Look more closely, and the army has not vanished from political life but still lies at the heart of it. Take the matter of the president, who is chosen by the national assembly. Those voting for the NLD in November were really voting for Miss Suu Kyi, daughter of the country’s founding father, Aung San, and figurehead of the democratic movement during years of house arrest until her release in 2010. She would have been a shoo-in to be president had the constitution drawn up by the army not disqualified her, for having children with British passports. The ban on foreign spouses and children appears to have been written expressly with her in...Continue reading

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BANKING STORM: Unsustainable calm sparks fears of a market crash and ANOTHER crisis

FEARS are growing for some of the world's biggest investment banks, as experts warn mayhem could soon rip through markets over the coming weeks.

Source: Daily Express :: Finance Feed http://ift.tt/1pNw3UU

Extra ARMED police likely to be deployed to all British airports following Brussels attack

IN THE wake of a series of terror attacks it’s likely more armed police will be placed in British airports for extra security.

Source: Daily Express :: Travel Feed http://ift.tt/1UWAD04

What’s in a badge?

Mine’s “We Shall Overcomb”

CONTACT with this year’s presidential politics leaves many Americans hankering for a scrub with carbolic soap. But a hefty minority are relishing the contest so much that the traders who sell souvenirs outside campaign rallies are enjoying their best election in memory.

The most lucrative rallies are those hosted by Donald Trump, whose official campaign symbol is a red baseball cap bearing the slogan “Make America Great Again”. But the most revealing sales are of something humbler: political badges, or buttons. These have been a staple of presidential races since 1896, when they were first mass-produced from metal and plastic-covered paper.

A Trump rally on March 29th in Janesville, Wisconsin, drew dozens of itinerant traders. Ron Hillyard, a factory worker from Buffalo, New York, was using his annual leave to sell badges to rally-goers for $5 each, or $10 for three. The most popular featured an unusually benign portrait of the candidate, in a red cap, captioned “Trump for President 2016”. Runner-up was an image of Hillary Clinton behind bars and the caption: “Hillary for...Continue reading

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The biters bit

IT TAKES a lot to make a humdinger of a National Enquirer exposé look mundane; Donald Trump and his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, have just managed it. Mr Lewandowski, a former police officer known for his abusiveness and alleged habit of making drunken advances to female journalists in late-night phone calls, was on March 29th charged with battery against one, Michelle Fields. One of the lawyers hired to defend him, it was alleged, had himself been accused of biting a stripper. Asked to condemn his man, Mr Trump naturally went on the attack.

Ms Fields had accused Mr Lewandowski of grabbing her and barging her out of the way, as she was asking the Republican front-runner a question at a rally in Florida. Mr Lewandowski called her “delusional”; Breitbart News, the pro-Trump publication Ms Fields was working for at the time, seemed to side with him. Yet security-camera footage, released by the police, appeared to corroborate her claims. Unimpressed, Mr Trump suggested Ms Fields had been threatening him. “She had a pen in her hand which could have been a knife, it could just have been a pen, which is very...Continue reading

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Running against Roe

GAIL RIECKEN, a Democratic state representative in Indiana, is the grandmother of a five-year-old girl with Down’s syndrome, a genetic disorder causing intellectual disability and delay in physical development. Ms Riecken’s daughter learned about her child’s condition when she was pregnant; she decided to carry her to term. Today she is ecstatic about her choice which, Ms Riecken points out, will affect the rest of her life.

Soon women in Indiana will not be able to make such a decision for themselves. On March 24th Governor Mike Pence, a Republican who made his name as pro-life activist in Congress, signed a bill into law that prohibits abortions on the grounds of a diagnosis of Down’s syndrome or any other disability—as well as on grounds of race, skin colour, national origin, ancestry or the sex of the fetus. It mandates that an aborted fetus must be disposed of by burial or cremation. And it requires doctors to inform women about perinatal hospice care, a service for babies not expected to survive outside the womb. “It’s a mean bill,” fumes Ms Riecken. “All it does is punish the woman.” The bill was criticised by the American...Continue reading

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Heard on the trail

Character witness
“I’ve had talks about being presidential, about toning it down a bit, appealing to a broader group of people.”
Ben Carson is advising Donald Trump. Politico

Dad jokes
“Donald Trump has had several foreign wives. It turns out that there really are jobs Americans won’t do.”
Mitt Romney works on his stand-up routine

Childish things
“With all due respect, that’s the argument of a five-year-old.”
Anderson Cooper of CNN tries to give Donald Trump a time-out

Keep your enemies closer
“I’ve never had an event hosted by someone who three weeks earlier publicly called for my murder.”
Ted Cruz is amused that Lindsey Graham, who enjoyed imagining him dead on the Senate floor, is campaigning for him. Mr Graham confessed that his party “has gone batshit crazy”. Politico

A question for the ages
“Superman is better than Batman.”
Bernie Sanders...Continue reading

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Handed a victory

ON JANUARY 11th Rebecca Friedrichs, a California teacher challenging the way public-sector unions do business, bounded out of the Supreme Court wearing a big smile. Ms Friedrichs’s lawyer, Michael Carvin, had just argued her case in front of nine justices, five of whom gave her complaint a warm reception. But whilst Mr Carvin and Ms Friedrichs were celebrating beside the fountain on the Supreme Court plaza, they had no inkling that one of the expected votes in their favour would disappear with Antonin Scalia’s death in February, or that a court split down the middle would thwart their long-sought victory a month later.

It takes a majority of justices to overturn a lower-court ruling. So on March 29th, when the now eight-member Supreme Court released a terse, one-sentence decision in Friedrichs v California Teachers Association, it made all the difference that the ninth circuit court of appeals had turned back the challenge to the unions when it considered Ms Friedrichs’s case last year. That decision, the justices wrote in an unsigned ruling, “is affirmed by an equally divided court”. A near-certain blow to teachers, police and firemen’s unions in about half the country was averted by a vote of 4-4.

Ms Friedrichs’s target was a nearly four-decade precedent upholding state laws that allow unions to collect...Continue reading

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No, not one

“IF WE’RE gonna do what we did the other day,” Robert Bentley, the governor of Alabama, tells his aide in a recently released recording, “we’re gonna have to start locking the door.” Explaining himself, Mr Bentley—whose 50-year marriage ended last year—apologised for his “inappropriate” remarks but, despite the tape’s evidence, denied any “sexual activity”.

Many Alabamians did not expect such antics from a folksy, septuagenarian deacon of the First Baptist church in Tuscaloosa, who has assumed stridently judgmental stances on marriage and abortion. In truth, they shouldn’t be surprised. Beginning in 1834, when a congressman shot himself after reading a letter from his wife to Alabama’s governor, the office has furnished a rich chronicle of marital strife, paternity suits and phone-tapping. And, in fairness, for all the outrage their peccadillos engender, the politicians are not exactly outliers in Alabama. To a startling degree—and for reasons that may shed light on the presidential race—it and other southern states combine conspicuous religiosity with widespread loucheness.

Alabama ranks third in the nation...Continue reading

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Ted Cruz, false hope

THESE are ghastly times for thoughtful Republicans. If Donald Trump is their presidential nominee in November’s general election, they increasingly fear that the businessman will lead them to a defeat of epic, Napoleon-in-Russia proportions, after laying waste to their support among women, suburbanites, non-whites and those dismayed by thuggish violence. A growing number have decided that the remaining candidate with the best chance of halting Mr Trump’s march to the nomination is Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who has duly picked up endorsements from such former rivals as Jeb Bush, the ex-governor of Florida, and, most recently, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, whose state holds its presidential primary election on April 5th. But Mr Cruz is an unctuous ideologue whose entire pitch to date has been aimed at the most conservative third of the country, all but ensuring that—if he somehow became his party’s candidate—he would lead them to a merely conventional sort of November defeat.

A remarkable chance has been given to Mr Cruz by colleagues who never imagined they would need him so badly. Handed the battle-flag of the Stop Trump movement, he could...Continue reading

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What’s in a yeast?

Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1RNjdML

When is the ISA deadline? How to make the most of your tax-free allowance

SAVERS across Britain are rushing to add to their tax-free savings before the ISA deadline next week. But how can you make the most of your tax-free allowance?

Source: Daily Express :: Finance Feed http://ift.tt/1RNba2G

Bikini girl fishing on a boat reels in a DEADLY catch

THE GIRL looked like a keen fisherman but viewers weren’t expecting such a huge beast to take the bait.

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Tycoonomics

IN 1998 Peter Mandelson, a leading member of Britain’s then Labour government, said he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes.” Today Lord Mandelson is more uptight; he worries about the rising inequality and stagnating middle-class incomes brought about by globalisation. His volte-face is typical of the global elite. The head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, says that rising inequality casts a “dark shadow” over the global economy. A recent OECD report warns that rising inequality will be a “major policy challenge” for all countries.

In a new study, “Rich People, Poor Countries: The Rise of Emerging-Market Tycoons and their Mega Firms”, Caroline Freund of the Peterson Institute in Washington, DC, makes an important contribution to understanding this challenge. She draws a distinction between rich-world billionaires and those of the emerging economies, whose numbers have been rising at a faster rate. In 2004 the emerging world accounted for 20% of the 587 billionaires in Forbes magazine’s annual survey. By 2014 it accounted for 43% of the 1,645 billionaires on the list. In the rich...Continue reading

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MetLife wins a legal battle to be deemed unimportant

LIFE-INSURANCE companies usually go to inordinate lengths to demonstrate their dullness. That makes MetLife’s chief executive, Steven Kandarian, extraordinary. He did what the head of no other big American financial firm has dared to: challenge head-on the legitimacy of the business-shaping decisions made with increasing frequency by regulators in the wake of the financial crisis. More remarkable still, he won. On March 30th a federal court ordered the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), a new regulatory committee, to rescind its designation of MetLife as a “strategically important financial institution”—a label that required it to have a bigger, and thus more expensive, cushion of capital.

MetLife is one of only four non-banks to have been declared a SIFI. Prudential Insurance, one of the other three, acceded after grumbling a bit. General Electric said little but has since dispensed with much of its financial operations. AIG, another insurer, seemed gleefully to accept the new status, perhaps because being a SIFI is seen as being synonymous with being too big to fail, and thus implies a government backstop. AIG’s implosion had...Continue reading

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WATCH: London transformed into tiny PLANET in mesmerising time-lapse video

THE hustle and bustle of London's most famous landmarks have been captured in a mesmerising 360° video that transforms the city into a tiny PLANET.

Source: Daily Express :: Travel Feed http://ift.tt/1UutN22

Chairman of everything

SHORTLY before the annual session in March of China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress, two curious articles appeared in government-linked news media. The first, published in a newspaper run by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Communist Party’s anti-graft body, was called “The fawning assent of a thousand people cannot match the honest advice of one”. It was written in an allegorical style traditionally used in China to criticise those in power, in this case in the form of an essay praising the seventh-century emperor, Taizong, for heeding a plain-talking courtier. The article called for more debate and freer speech at a time when China’s president, Xi Jinping, has been restricting both. “The ability to air opinions freely often determined the rise and fall of dynasties,” it said. “We should not be afraid of people saying the wrong things; we should be afraid of people not speaking at all.”

The second article, in the form of an open letter, ran—fleetingly—on a state-run website. “Hello, Comrade Xi Jinping. We are loyal Communist Party members,” the letter began. It called on Mr Xi to...Continue reading

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Six cruise HOT SPOTS across the Arabian Gulf

THE Gulf - or at least Dubai - used to be a popular stop-off on cruises that were heading from the Med to much farther afield.

Source: Daily Express :: Travel Feed http://ift.tt/1SAIqNC

Fish swims through reef before getting swallowed WHOLE by this secret predator

THE OCEAN bed can conceal many predatory killers.

Source: Daily Express :: Travel Feed http://ift.tt/1SAIqxb

Go-kart racing, LASER TAG and hovercraft: First glimpse of Norwegian Joy

EAST meets West on Norwegian Cruise Line's new ship for China Norwegian Joy with a combination of ultra-luxury and exciting activities such as the first go-kart racetrack at sea, laser tag and hovercraft bumper cars.

Source: Daily Express :: Travel Feed http://ift.tt/1SAIqx7

Top 10 things to do in London that are FREE

TREAT yourself, 10 top London attractions for you to see, whatever the weather

Source: Daily Express :: Travel Feed http://ift.tt/1D2rIwj