Our bulldozers, our rules

Our bulldozers, our rules
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...

Addressing the world

Addressing the world
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...

Palaeontology

Palaeontology
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...

Telling it like it is

Telling it like it is
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...

Sisyphus’s train set

Sisyphus’s train set
Ready to rock and roll THE 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...

By Jove!

By Jove!
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...

Trip-wire deterrence

Trip-wire deterrence
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...

Soft target

Soft target
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...

Revolution cancelled

Revolution cancelled
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...

And shut the door behind you

And shut the door behind you
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,...

Prelude to a purge

Prelude to a purge
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....

Rustproofing

Rustproofing
“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....

Exodus postponed

Exodus postponed
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...

Billy the kid

Billy the kid
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,...

Two left feats

Two left feats
Justice Kennedy’s new friends LAST 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...

More than a hobby

More than a hobby
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...

Help from above

Help from above
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...

Less work and more pray...

Less work and more pray...
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...

Of brewers and bureaucrats

Of brewers and bureaucrats
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...

Let’s try again

Let’s try again
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...

Opportunities galore

Opportunities galore
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...

Great stonewall

Great stonewall
I can’t talk right now IT 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...

Our bulldozers, our rules

Our bulldozers, our rules
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...

The forest and the trees

The forest and the trees
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...

Annoyed in Natuna

Annoyed in Natuna
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...

A pulpit for bullies

A pulpit for bullies
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...

Master plan

Master plan
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...

Stans undelivered

Stans undelivered
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...

Labour is on the brink of complete self-destruction

Labour is on the brink of complete self-destruction
THE machinations surrounding the Labour leadership have become so farcical it is difficult to believe that this is the party which swept all before it in 1997, winning three elections and eliciting forecasts that the Conservatives...