AT A packed sangria bar in Washington Heights, a neighbourhood in upper Manhattan, supporters of Adriano Espaillat danced and waved Dominican flags as they waited to hear the results of a primary election on June 28th. Mr Espaillat declared victory the same evening, but it was a full two days until his rival, Keith Wright, conceded. The winner will represent the Democratic party in the November election for New York’s 13th congressional district. The district is heavily Democratic; Mr Espaillat will therefore almost certainly go to the House of Representatives.
Mr Espaillat arrived in America from the Dominican Republic when he was nine years old. He had no papers. He will be the first non-black person to represent the district since 1944, the first Dominican-born immigrant to sit in the House and first congressman to have entered America as an undocumented migrant. The district is home to migrant populations from Dominican Republic, Senegal and Bangladesh. Dominicans from all over the New York region, including across the river in New Jersey, helped campaign for Mr Espaillat. His victory is an indication that migrants are tired of being...Continue reading
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THE first revival of the Silk Road—a vast and ancient network of trade routes linking China’s merchants with those of Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe—took place in the seventh century, after war had made it unusable for hundreds of years. Xi Jinping, China’s president, looks back on that era as a golden age, a time of Pax Sinica, when Chinese luxuries were coveted across the globe and the Silk Road was a conduit for diplomacy and economic expansion. The term itself was coined by a German geographer in the 19th century, but China has adopted it with relish. Mr Xi wants a revival of the Silk Road and the glory that went with it.
This time cranes and construction crews are replacing caravans and camels. In April a Chinese shipping company, Cosco, took a 67% stake in Greece’s second-largest port, Piraeus, from which Chinese firms are building a high-speed rail network linking the city to Hungary and eventually Germany. In July work is due to start on the third stage of a Chinese-designed nuclear reactor in Pakistan, where China recently announced it would finance a big new highway and put $2 billion into a coal mine in the Thar...Continue reading
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LAST year, a brush fire threatened the home of Ganhuyag Chuluun Hutagt, who lives in Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar. Instead of giving the fire brigade his address, though, Mr Ganhuyag had to guide them to the blaze by describing a series of landmarks along the way. That was because, like most buildings in Mongolia, his house does not have an address. Road names and building numbers are so sparse there that fewer than 1% of Mongolians do. But Mr Ganhuyag, who is on the board of the country’s post office, Mongol Post, proposes to do something about it.
Thanks to his urging, Mongol Post is adopting an ingenious new system of addresses that can locate any place in the country—and, indeed, in the world. Instead of house number, street name, town, province and so on, or the unwieldy co-ordinates of latitude and longitude, this system, the brainchild of Chris Sheldrick, boss of What3Words, a firm based in London, divides the Earth’s surface into nine-metre-square blocks. Each block is then given names consisting of trios of randomly selected, unrelated words. One patch of Siberia, for example, is called, in English,...Continue reading
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This photograph is of part of a bird wing preserved in amber from northern Myanmar. It dates from 99m years ago, during the Cretaceous period, and is described in this week’s Nature Communications by Lida Xing of China University of Geosciences, in Beijing, and her colleagues. It is one of two wings, the first known to have been preserved in amber, that her team discovered. Both belonged to juveniles of a group called the Enantiornithes that had claws on their wings (one such is marked with an arrow), probably to help them grip trunks and branches when they climbed trees.
VINGT-ET-UN, known to Americans as blackjack, is a card game in which players must decide whether the value of the two-card hand they are dealt is likely to be enough to beat the dealer’s unseen hand, or whether they should risk going bust by adding to it, one card at a time, as they seek to get as close as possible to a permitted maximum of 21 points. (Court cards are worth ten; aces score either one or 11, at the holder’s discretion.)
Making constant calculations is thus an essential part of this game—a fact that Kevin Holmes, a psychologist at Colorado College, in Colorado Springs, has used to test his hypothesis that such calculation will cause players to give away, by their eye movements, the sorts of hand they have. As he reports in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, it turns out that they do.
Dr Holmes knew from studies by others that when people are asked to perform a mental calculation and then to point to the location of the answer on an unmarked horizontal line (known as a number line) whose left-hand end represents a numerical value, such as zero, and whose right-hand end represents a larger one, such as 100, they have a tendency to get it wrong. Specifically, they point to the left of the correct location on the line if the problem was a subtraction and to the right if addition was involved. This applies even when...Continue reading
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Ready to rock and rollTHE easiest way to squirrel electricity away in times of plenty, for use when it is scarce, is to pump water uphill with it. Such pumped storage is widely employed where local geography and hydrology permit, but it does need two basins, at different heights, to act as reservoirs, and a supply of water to fill them. At least one of the basins is likely to have to be artificial. The two must be connected by a tunnel that lets water flow between them. And the tunnel must house turbines attached to electrical devices that can do double duty—as motors to turn the turbine blades when they are pushing water from the lower reservoir to the upper one, and as generators when the blades are rotated in the opposite direction by an aqueous downrush after the upper sluices are opened.
Where geography does not favour pumped storage, though, the search is on for alternatives. These range from giant batteries, via caverns filled with compressed air, to huge flywheels made of carbon-fibre composites. But one firm looking into the matter eschews all these. It has stuck with the logic of pumped storage, which is to move...Continue reading
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IN 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus proposed, in a mathematically rigorous way, that the Earth is not the centre of the universe, and thus that all things do not revolve around it. In fact, only the Moon does so. Seven decades later Galileo Galilei provided more direct proof of Earth’s lack of specialness. He looked at Jupiter through a primitive telescope and found that the planet had four moons of its own.
Four centuries after Galileo’s discovery, it remains impossible to understand the solar system without understanding Jupiter. The sun accounts for 99.8% of the solar system’s mass. But Jupiter, which is more than twice as massive as the other seven planets put together, makes up most of the rest. Its heft shapes the orbits of the other planets, the structure of the asteroid belt and the periods of many comets. And the four moons observed by Galileo (seen to the left-hand side of Jupiter in the picture above) have proved merely the biggest members of an entire solar system in miniature: at the moment Jupiter has 67 known satellites.
The picture was taken on June 21st by Juno, a probe belonging to NASA, America’s...Continue reading
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Feeling lucky, Putin?A LOT of work goes into preparing for NATO’s biennial summits. So the hope is that next week’s summit in Warsaw is not dominated by Brexit. Nobody will be keener than David Cameron, Britain’s soon-to-be-ex-prime minister, to present a picture of business as usual for the 28-member alliance. And there is plenty to do, most of it about Russia. Since Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, relations have grown dramatically more antagonistic.
That year’s summit, in Wales, returned NATO to its cold-war role of territorial defence. The Warsaw summit will, above all, be a progress report on the steps the alliance has since taken, known as the Readiness Action Plan, to reassure its nervous eastern members and re-establish effective deterrence.
There are also security issues in the south: the threat of Islamic State terrorism, and helping the European Union tackle people-traffickers and illegal migrants. But the summit will be dominated by the threat from Russia. NATO is especially worried about its Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, which borders Poland and Lithuania. Russia is pouring in mechanised...Continue reading
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THE morning after the suicide attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk International Airport on June 28th, a grim silence hung over the terminal. Taxi drivers waved down the few shocked passengers trickling out of the bomb-scarred building. In contrast with the long closure that followed the attacks at Brussels’ airport in March, flights had already resumed. Turkey is doing its best to maintain an air of normalcy. But with the prime minister, Binali Yildirim, suggesting that Islamic State (IS) was behind the attack, Turkey may find itself drawn ever further into the war in Syria.
The three suicide bombers who attacked the airport killed at least 42 people and left more than 200 wounded. One struck in front of the arrivals hall entrance on the ground floor. The two others forced their way into the departures hall upstairs, shooting travelers with machine guns. One of them headed back downstairs before detonating his suicide vest. Security-camera footage showed one of the bombers being shot by police, then blowing himself up.
If IS was responsible, the attack is the latest in a wave of bombings by the terror group that has killed nearly 200 people in...Continue reading
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THE idea of re-running a vote when the first result is unsatisfactory has been getting a bad press recently. But Spain’s second general election in six months, on June 26th, showed that if the goal is to break a political deadlock, do-overs can be useful. The big winners were Mariano Rajoy, the prime minister, and his centre-right People’s Party (PP). Though they failed to get an absolute majority, they took 33% of the vote, up from 29% in the December election, which was so splintered that no party could form a government. Now, with 137 seats in the 350-member Cortes (parliament), Mr Rajoy is set to remain prime minister, albeit at the head of a coalition or minority administration.
The election’s big surprise was that Podemos, a new far-left party dedicated to reversing austerity and defenestrating the traditional political class, stalled. Contrary to all poll forecasts, it failed to overtake the more moderate Socialist Party to become the largest force on the left. Podemos had merged with the old Communists of the United Left party for this election, but the merged force won 1m fewer votes than its constituent parts did last time.
The long faces of Podemos’s young leaders as the results came in were eloquent. The Socialists did poorly compared to the past, winning 22.7% of the vote and 85 seats (down five). But it felt like a victory for Pedro...Continue reading
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IN THE prelapsarian days before Britain kicked itself out of the European Union, a charming campaign called “Hug-a-Brit” was waged in Brussels. Designed to convince wavering British voters that they were wanted in Europe, it was only after the referendum that the idea took hold. Since that difficult day Brits in Brussels have been love-bombed by their European counterparts. Colleagues from countries with long histories of bloody tyranny have showered sympathy upon British friends for their country’s self-inflicted wound. Thoughtful Romanians stand ready to adopt British “Remainians”. Greeks, who endured their own referendum-related traumas one year ago, have been especially understanding. Rarely has your columnist felt so appreciated.
Yet if Britain’s citizens are now the subject of pity abroad, its government has become a target for contempt. There is a hint of steel to comments from some officials, particularly French or Italians. We feel your pain, they say, but if you’re leaving do not linger. Such sentiments have slipped into the speeches of hawkish EU officials. When Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, slams David...Continue reading
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IT LOOKED like a scene from a crime drama. First, the pictures of a burly Russian governor caught at a sushi restaurant in a swanky Moscow hotel, with wads of specially marked euros leaving fluorescent stains on his hands. Next, footage of the same governor in handcuffs, being escorted into the investigator’s office by balaclava-clad, Kalashnikov-wielding agents of the FSB, Russia’s secret police. The arrest on June 24th of Nikita Belykh, the liberal-minded governor of the Kirovsk region, was headline news on Russian state television. It even preceded the report on Vladimir Putin’s triumphal visit to China.
Mr Belykh is accused of receiving a €400,000 ($445,000) bribe and faces up to 15 years in jail. He has launched a hunger strike to protest against the charges. In the best Soviet tradition, the state media have reported his guilt long before any trial. Mr Belykh claims he was set up. He is the third governor in 15 months to be arrested on corruption charges; there have been similar arrests in Komi and Sakhalin. “This is the Kremlin’s new way of exercising control over regional elites,” says Kirill Rogov, a Russian political...Continue reading
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“MANY Pennsylvania towns once thriving and humming are now in a state of despair,” said Donald Trump in “Declaring America’s Economic Independence”, a speech he made on June 28th about jobs and the evils of free trade. This wave of globalisation has wiped out the middle class, claimed the presumptive Republican nominee for the presidency, tagging NAFTA “the worst trade deal in history”, and blaming China’s entrance into the World Trade Organisation for “the greatest jobs theft in history”. But it doesn’t have to be that way, he reassured his audience, for he alone can turn things round.
It was no coincidence that Mr Trump chose a Pennsylvania-based company, Alumisource, as the site for his speech, which the frequently unscripted candidate read from a teleprompter, using quotations from Washington, Hamilton and Lincoln and providing no fewer than 128 footnotes for the curious. Winning the rustbelt, especially in Ohio and western Pennsylvania, is central to his 15-state strategy, announced at the end of last month. In the evening of June 28th Mr Trump spoke at a rally at Ohio State University in St Clairsville.
The Midwest...Continue reading
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IN RECENT years it has usually been the House of Representatives which has waited until the last moment to avert an economic catastrophe, a government shutdown or a default. This week it was the Senate’s turn. On June 29th the upper house passed a bill, already approved by the House and backed by the president, allowing Puerto Rico to restructure its debts, two days before the Caribbean territory was set to default on a $2 billion payment.
Default was the only option left for the island. The government does not have the money to pay the bill, according to Puerto Rico’s governor, Alejandro GarcÃa Padilla. Nobody sane would lend it to them. But default was not itself the main worry; few will shed tears for the territory’s creditors. The real problem is that investors in Puerto Rican debt have filed lawsuits arguing that the island must pay them before buying things like fuel for police cars and medicine for hospitals. A concurring judge could kill-off the island’s public services, which the debt crisis has already wounded badly. For example, the neonatal unit in the island’s largest hospital, which Jack Lew, the Treasury secretary, visited in May,...Continue reading
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Nabbed: Burchfield in 1975, Arnold in 2016“EVERYBODY can change,” Bill insists; “everybody has the ability to turn their life around and do something good with it.” His own experience, after a youthful spell behind bars, vindicates that optimism: in many ways he is a heartening model of rehabilitation. In jail he realised that “I need to do better than this”; at liberty, he has “done everything I could to do the right thing.” Those who know him best think he has succeeded. He is “a very giving, caring person,” says his pastor, Charles Shelton, who recalls Bill taking in strangers who had broken down on the road. “Just a good man,” Mr Shelton attests. The only wrinkle is the way he gained his freedom.
That, and his crime, were a secret he guarded for 37 years until, on the evening of June 15th, two local detectives visited his home on the outskirts of London, a small town in Laurel County, Kentucky, in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. Bill recognised the men and wasn’t alarmed by their appearance on his doorstep: “I didn’t think nothing about it,” he says, “until they told me what...Continue reading
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Justice Kennedy’s new friendsLAST June, the Supreme Court capped its most liberal term in decades by backing a right to same-sex marriage and rescuing Obamacare from a second near-death experience. One year later, contrary to expectations, the justices have delivered another series of rulings to vex conservatives. These outcomes owe something to the death of Antonin Scalia halfway through the term. But it is unlikely that the court’s rulings in two of the most politicised issues of recent decades—abortion and affirmative action—would have come out the other way had Scalia lived. The justice responsible for steering the court to the left was Anthony Kennedy, Scalia’s fellow Ronald Reagan nominee.
On June 23rd Justice Kennedy surprised many when he wrote the majority opinion in Fisher v University of Texas, reaffirming the principle that public universities may give limited consideration to race when admitting students. He had never voted before to uphold a race-based affirmative action policy. But by a 4-3 vote (Elena Kagan recused herself), Justice Kennedy and three liberal colleagues rebuffed...Continue reading
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WHEN British Jews were asked to bring one treasure representing their faith to a Diamond Jubilee ceremony for Queen Elizabeth, four years ago, they chose a Hebrew Bible from 1189. Long admired as a rare manuscript, its true significance was discovered more recently when scholars pondered clues—distinctively English bookmaking techniques, an Anglo-Norman term for “seagull” in a list of non-kosher birds jotted in a margin—and concluded that this is the only known book to survive from the tiny, embattled Jewish community of medieval England. That history lends poignancy to neat pen-and-ink drawings hidden on a final page, showing two dogs hunting a lion: a coded lament over the persecution of Jews. In the year after that Bible was neatly dated by a scribe, England saw a wave of anti-Semitic riots, ending in the massacre of every Jew in the city of York.
Today that remarkable book lives in a business park near Oklahoma City airport, after its sale at auction last year for $3.6m. It is one of more than 40,000 biblical texts and artefacts, including fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls and sections from the Gutenberg Bible, collected since 2009 by the Green...Continue reading
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Blood from the sky“LAND of a thousand hills” is an apt nickname for Rwanda. The tiny, landlocked country ripples with steep, terraced hillsides. Under its single-minded president, Paul Kagame, it is also determined to become a technology hub for Africa. It is not, therefore, surprising that Rwanda will soon be a laboratory for one of the most hyped technologies around.
Zipline, a Silicon Valley startup, will start testing delivery drones (otherwise known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) at a site 40 minutes drive south-west of the capital, Kigali, in August. If deemed safe by the government, a month or two later the fixed-wing “Zips” will be dropping off blood for transfusions in small boxes with parachutes at 21 hospitals and health centres within a 75km (40 mile) radius. The aim is to open a second hub in the east to cover the rest of the country within a year, and to start delivering vaccines and other medicines as well as blood.
If all goes well, drones could cut a 3.5-hour trip by car to and from one of the country’s five blood banks to less than 45 minutes, a potentially life-saving difference for a...Continue reading
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IN MOST Muslim countries life slows down during Ramadan, the holy month in which the faithful fast during daylight hours. Many people nap during the day and feast at night. Working hours are reduced. Businesses open later and close earlier. In general, less gets done.
There is much anecdotal evidence that Ramadan, which ends on July 5th, has a negative economic effect on Muslim countries. But until recently, no one had properly studied the question. “There is a sensitivity when it comes to Islam,” says Rumy Hasan of the University of Sussex in Britain. But the holy month’s features actually make it easier to study.
The Islamic calendar is lunar, so Ramadan rotates through the seasons. In Egypt, for example, the holy month now falls during the long days of summer. But in 15 years, it will occur in winter, when the days—and, therefore, the fasts—are shorter. The opposite is true for Muslims in southern locales. This cycle, unrelated to other factors that might affect the economy, “presents a kind of naturally occurring experiment”, wrote Filipe R. Campante and David H. Yanagizawa-Drott of Harvard University in the New York Times. “Religious practice is precisely varied and everything else is left in place.”
In a study published last year in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Messrs...Continue reading
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Yes, colonel!MAZEN HAJJAR likes to say that barley was first domesticated—in the Middle East, mind you—for the purpose of brewing beer, not baking bread. Bread is now the region’s daily staple; beer barely registers. But the founder of 961, a Lebanese microbrewery, thinks there is a fertile market in the Fertile Crescent. “There is too much light fizzy tasteless stuff,” he says.
In Lebanon the trend is growing. Colonel Brewery in Batroun, a Christian seaside town, serves its beers in its garden and sells more to 70 Lebanese bars. Beirut Beer is another brand made by a winemaking family. Schtrunz is the latest to join, made by a family with Czech roots. But Lebanon is not the rest of the region. Is there room elsewhere?
Yes, say producers. Israel has a flourishing craft beer scene, and in the West Bank Taybeh (“tasty” in Arabic) has been producing a range of craft beers since the 1990s. Even Jordan has its own microbrewery, Carakale. Some brews are flavoured with regional herbs and spices such as sumac and thyme.
Most Arabs are Muslim and most Muslims agree that the Koran bans alcohol. But not...Continue reading
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THERE was no warmth to the announcements of a rapprochement between Israel and Turkey this week. The two governments have spent the past three years of a six-year period of tension negotiating the deal that restores full diplomatic relations. But when it was finally agreed, prime ministers Binyamin Netanyahu and Binali Yildarim gave separate press conferences. There was no festive summit, just a recognition by two regional powers that they cannot afford to remain at loggerheads during such a volatile period.
Israel agreed three years ago to apologise and to pay compensation for an incident in May 2010, when Israeli naval commandos intercepted a flotilla of boats that was attempting to reach Gaza. It resulted in the deaths of ten Turkish pro-Palestinian activists. (The Israeli commandos were attacked with metal pipes before they started shooting.) Talks then bogged down over each side’s additional demands. The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, eager to present himself as the protector of the Palestinian people, demanded that Israel lift its blockade of the Gaza Strip. Israel insisted that the Turkish government close down a Hamas headquarters in Istanbul which Israeli intelligence officials claim has been used to direct terror operations within Israel.
In the end, both sides were forced to give up most of their demands. The blockade of Gaza...Continue reading
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IF ANYTHING explains the poverty in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, it is not an unwillingness to work hard—most of the continent’s people still sweat to survive tilling fields with medieval tools. Nor is it because of a lack of enterprise and optimism: on the permanently traffic-jammed streets of Lagos, Nigeria’s main commercial city, hawkers gingerly ease their way between cars trying to sell almost anything from snacks to books, pirated DVDs and even toilet seats. Africans are far more likely to be self-employed than people in richer parts of the world, for the simple reason that without social safety nets, many of them must hustle or starve.
Yet for all Africans’ energy and ingenuity, the region struggles to produce enough of the productive and profitable small businesses it needs to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The World Bank reckons that sub-Saharan Africa has only a quarter as many small businesses as Asia, relative to its population. Members of the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, have about eight times as many formal small businesses per person.
Part of this is explained by the poor climate for...Continue reading
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I can’t talk right nowIT WAS only six months ago that China and Taiwan achieved a symbolic breakthrough in their decades-long standoff: the two countries’ presidents met for the first time since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, both looking chuffed that they had finally broken the ice. Now it is back to normal. On June 25th China shut down a channel for communication between the two sides because of the refusal of Taiwan’s new president, Tsai Ing-wen, to accept that there is but “one China”, and that Taiwan is a part of it. A new chill is descending over the Taiwan Strait.
When the news broke, Ms Tsai (pictured) was embarking on her first foreign tour since she took office in May—to Panama and Paraguay, among the very few countries that recognise Taiwan’s government, bracketed by transit stops in America. She would not have been surprised. During his meeting with her predecessor, Ma Ying-jeou, China’s president Xi Jinping had said his government was willing to have contact with any political party in Taiwan, as long as it accepted a “consensus” that was reached between the two sides in 1992 on...Continue reading
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THE first revival of the Silk Road—a vast and ancient network of trade routes linking China’s merchants with those of Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe—took place in the seventh century, after war had made it unusable for hundreds of years. Xi Jinping, China’s president, looks back on that era as a golden age, a time of Pax Sinica, when Chinese luxuries were coveted across the globe and the Silk Road was a conduit for diplomacy and economic expansion. The term itself was coined by a German geographer in the 19th century, but China has adopted it with relish. Mr Xi wants a revival of the Silk Road and the glory that went with it.
This time cranes and construction crews are replacing caravans and camels. In April a Chinese shipping company, Cosco, took a 67% stake in Greece’s second-largest port, Piraeus, from which Chinese firms are building a high-speed rail network linking the city to Hungary and eventually Germany. In July work is due to start on the third stage of a Chinese-designed nuclear reactor in Pakistan, where China recently announced it would finance a big new highway and put $2 billion into a coal mine in the Thar...Continue reading
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FOR this writer, a Londoner by birth, the weekly task of producing Banyan has been among the happiest spells in a 40-year involvement with Asia that began in August 1976, in what English-speakers then called Peking. China’s capital was a city of bicycles and earthquake shelters, of blue Mao suits and tinny propaganda blaring from loudspeakers, of poorly stocked shops and farmland reeking of nightsoil. The next month, Mao died. China soon began the reforms that have turned Beijing into a smoggy, traffic-clogged but dynamic metropolis. Much of Asia is similarly transformed. Hundreds of millions have lifted themselves out of poverty, albeit at dreadful cost to the environment; cities have mushroomed as farmers have left the land in droves; birth rates have plummeted. A continent’s parents have mostly been confident their children will lead better lives than they have done.
The “Asia” Banyan covers is a European cartographic concoction. It stretches from Kazakhstan in the north-west to New Zealand, and from the Maldives in the south-west to islands Japan disputes with Russia. Despite its arbitrary borders and bewildering diversity, this Asia is growing...Continue reading
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ON JUNE 23rd Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, flew to the Natuna archipelago in the South China Sea, along with several ministers, to hold a cabinet meeting on board a warship patrolling the surrounding waters. Only days earlier the same warship had fired warning shots at Chinese trawlers, detaining one of them and its crew, in the latest sign of escalating tensions in the area. Mr Joko, universally known as Jokowi, wanted to send a message to China.
Indonesian diplomats might once have registered their objections in private. But Jokowi has criticised China more openly than his predecessors. After one clash in March, when a Chinese coastguard vessel freed a Chinese trawler from the Indonesian patrol boat that had caught it, Jokowi summoned China’s ambassador for a scolding. The recent visit to the warship was Jokowi’s most public display of sovereignty yet.
It marks a sharp shift for Indonesia, which for decades positioned itself as a regional peacemaker. Unlike other South-East Asian maritime countries, it claims none of the contested rocks, reefs or islands in the South China Sea. China recognises Indonesian...Continue reading
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NARENDRA MODI, India’s prime minister, takes social media seriously, and wants members of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to do the same. A recent report by the BJP’s digital unit ranked all of its ministers and MPs by the number of their followers and diligence in propagating his government’s message. The implication was clear: those who want to be promoted should do more promoting. So were the results: anodyne obsequiousness. A certain C.T. Ravi, a BJP official from the state of Karnataka, recently tweeted: “Tremendous efforts by Shri @narendramodi & Team has resulted in Positivity trumping Negativity.”
Subramanian Swamy, a 76-year-old BJP activist who in April was handed one of the party’s upper-house seats, has bucked the trend. He spent weeks tweeting aspersions on the integrity, competence and patriotism of India’s respected central-bank chief, Raghuram Rajan. The barrage, which went unanswered by party bigwigs, subsided when Mr Rajan declared earlier this month that he would not seek another term of office.
Mr Swamy then turned his digital guns on Arun Jaitley, the finance minister, who is one of Mr Modi’s...Continue reading
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LAST year Japan lowered the voting age from 20 to 18. But Minami, a high-schooler from Tokyo, does not plan to vote in an election for the upper house of the Diet, or parliament, on July 10th. Like many Japanese, she finds politics dull. The upcoming election will probably not change their views.
The government, led by Shinzo Abe, is likely to trounce the floundering opposition. Mr Abe’s poll ratings have been boosted by the government’s competent handling of earthquakes that struck Kumamoto prefecture in April, and by Barack Obama’s emotional visit to Hiroshima the following month. Low turnout benefits his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which runs an effective get-out-the-vote machine.
Mr Abe also stands to benefit from the post-Brexit-vote financial turmoil. The government can now blame external factors for its economic woes, which include deflation, flaccid consumption and sluggish wages. Before postponing a planned tax hike on June 1st, he warned of an impending economic crisis, and was roundly mocked. Now he seems prudent. Economic upheaval may make his campaign themes of stability and competence all the...Continue reading
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TAJIKISTAN has the vainest ruler in Central Asia. Emomali Rahmon flies what may be the world’s largest flag atop what used to be the world’s tallest flagpole. His capital boasts that it will soon host the region’s biggest mosque, mainly paid for by Qatar. It already has the world’s largest teahouse, mainly Chinese-financed and mostly empty; and an immense national library—sadly devoid of books, according to whispering sceptics.
Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, a dentist who now runs Turkmenistan, is nearly as big-headed. He calls himself Arkadag (“the Protector”). He moved the 39-foot-tall, gold-plated statue of his predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov, that rotated to catch the sun, and erected a gold-plated statue of himself, bravely astride a golden horse on a majestic cliff-top (pictured).
Such absurd extravagances can only happen in a dictatorship—and indeed all five of the once-Soviet Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) suffer under repressive, cronyist governments. Their rulers fear “colour revolutions”, which toppled regimes in the former Soviet countries of Ukraine and...Continue reading
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