Archive for September 2016

Dragged from the temple of justice yet again

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Dragged from the temple of justice yet again

THE outcome was not quite so definitive as Roy Moore’s critics had demanded or as, in his secret heart, the man himself may have expected. In a ruling issued today by Alabama’s Court of the Judiciary (COJ), following a hearing last week, the state’s chief justice was suspended without pay for the remainder of his term of office. That does not have quite the dramatic, biblical overtones of removing him altogether, a verdict that would have conjured images of a righteous, berobed figure being dragged by heathens from the bench. But it is the end of Mr Moore’s long, grandstanding judicial career all the same.

Removal, remember, was the punishment that curtailed his first stint as Alabama’s chief justice in 2003 (he was re-elected in 2012). On that occasion he installed a granite monument to the ten commandments in the rotunda of the state judicial building, then defied a federal court’s instruction to remove it. This time the complaint, initially brought by the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC), a watchdog, stemmed from his rear-guard recalcitrance over same-sex marriage. The legal manoeuvring was complex; but, in essence, he counselled Alabama’s probate judges,...Continue reading

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Housing market bouncing back after Brexit vote

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Housing market bouncing back after Brexit vote


THE housing market is showing signs of a post-referendum pick-up heading into autumn as it recovers from “paralysis” in the immediate aftermath of Britain’s decision to quit the European Union.

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City News: Alton Towers, Argos, Heathrow

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City News: Alton Towers, Argos, Heathrow


ALTON TOWERS owner Merlin Entertainments said it had “learned every lesson” from last year’s Smiler rollercoaster crash as it revealed that visitor numbers were still being affected.

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A close, crucial race in North Carolina

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A close, crucial race in North Carolina

ON SEPTEMBER 28th, the day after her first presidential debate with Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton held a rally in Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina, where she ripped into Mr Trump’s “dangerously incoherent,” performance. Days earlier, the Democratic nominee had chosen Greensboro, one of the state’s largest cities, for another important appearance: Her first rally after a few days off the trail with pneumonia. As she faces a tightening race, Mrs Clinton is stepping up her efforts in North Carolina—where polls put her neck-and-neck with Mr Trump—in the hope that it will smooth her path to the White House in November.

For Mr Trump, the stakes in the Tar Heel state, are even higher. He has spent a lot of time in North Carolina and in recent weeks his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, a native, has been helping open Trump offices here. Mrs Clinton’s campaign was up and running in the state early on in the campaign, opening dozens of field offices and airing adverts. Mr Trump’s campaign has downplayed his campaign’s relative bricks-and-mortar absence, claiming that the election will be won or lost in the final weeks.

Many pundits believe that Mr Trump...Continue reading

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Boundary issues

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Boundary issues

HUNGARY will hold a referendum on October 2nd. (Such things have become a fad in Europe.) The question is: “Do you want the European Union to be entitled to prescribe the mandatory resettlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary without the consent of parliament?” (Note the neutral wording.) At issue is the EU’s Emergency Response Mechanism, adopted in September 2015, under which 160,000 of the migrants who began surging into Europe last year are to be shared out between member states according to quotas. The decision passed the European Council by majority vote, but four countries voted against it: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary. Hungary and Slovakia have challenged the system in the European Court of Justice. It is “unlawful, unworkable and dangerous”, says Zoltan Kovacs, a government spokesman. 

The referendum is largely a popularity ploy by Viktor Orban (pictured, right), Hungary’s populist prime minister, and will have no legal effect. It is also a challenge to the authority of Brussels and the leadership of Germany’s Angela Merkel, who champions the relocation scheme. Mrs Merkel sees accepting refugees as a...Continue reading

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Cocoa by candlelight

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Cocoa by candlelight
Topping the cosiness index

HOW big is the world’s appetite for things Danish? Foreign audiences have already binge-watched the country’s noir TV series (such as “The Killing” and “The Bridge”) and raved over the new Nordic cuisine of Noma, Copenhagen’s trend-setting restaurant. This autumn, publishers are testing the limits of the world’s Danomania. Before the Christmas season, at least nine English-language books will come out devoted to explaining the elusive quality of hygge.

Hygge is difficult to pronounce. (Try “hew-geh”.) It is also tricky to describe. Writers have tried “the art of creating intimacy”, “cosiness of the soul” and “cocoa by candlelight”. It is an attitude rather than a recipe, evoking relaxation with close friends or family. Many see it as a quintessential element of Denmark’s national character. There is some evidence for this: the Danes are Europe’s biggest consumers of candles, burning through about 6 kilogrammes (13 pounds) per person every year. Runner-up Austria manages just half that. Denmark often leads (highly...Continue reading

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Immune to reason

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Immune to reason
The HIV rate is shooting up

THE front line in the fight against Europe’s fastest-growing HIV epidemic runs through a dark blue bus parked on the outskirts of St Petersburg. Two friends enter late one September evening to collect clean needles and condoms, and duck into a side cabin for an HIV test with a nurse from Humanitarian Actions, a local NGO. “You barely feel it, don’t be afraid,” one says. Several minutes pass with bated breath. Then the results appear: all clear.

In most of the world the threat of HIV/AIDS has receded. The exceptions are eastern Europe and Central Asia. In Russia, which accounts for more than 80% of new infections in the region, 51,000 people were diagnosed in the first five months of this year. In January registered HIV cases there topped one million. Vadim Pokrovsky of Russia’s Federal AIDS Centre reckons the true figure may be 1.4m-1.5m, about 1% of the population; he warns there could be 3m by 2020. In some African countries prevalence can reach 19%, but the epidemic is slowing. In Russia, the infection rate is “getting worse, and at a very fast pace”, says Vinay Saldanha, UNAIDS’...Continue reading

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Brought to BUK

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Brought to BUK

THERE was never much doubt about what brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17th 2014, killing all 298 people on board: a Russian missile, fired from territory controlled by Russian-backed separatists. Still, it was important to see the facts confirmed. On September 28th the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT) laid out its case, backed by an array of photo, video and forensic evidence, satellite and radar data, interviews with eyewitnesses and intercepted phone calls. The investigators called the findings “irrefutable”.

The JIT’s preliminary report is the beginning of what is sure to be a long and trying path to justice for the victims. Many had boarded the flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur with suitcases stuffed with bathing suits, bound for beach holidays in South-East Asia. They were cut short, the JIT found, by a Russian-made BUK 9M38 surface-to-air missile, which had left Russia that morning. The launcher, and three unused missiles, returned there the day after. The launch site was a field near the town of Pervomaiskiy, under the control of pro-Russian fighters. Investigators say they have some 100 potential suspects, but...Continue reading

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A tale of two ethics

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A tale of two ethics

THE phrases “ethic of conviction” and “ethic of responsibility” mean little to most English-speakers. In Germany the equivalent terms—Gesinnungsethik and Verantwortungsethik—are household words. Pundits drop them casually during television talk shows. Hosts use them as conversation-starters at dinner parties. The concepts draw on the opposition between idealism and pragmatism that runs through politics everywhere. But they also capture a specific moral tension that is “very German”, says Manfred Güllner, a sociologist and pollster. Anyone interested in understanding German politics, on anything from the euro to refugees, would do well to get a handle on them.

The terms come from the sociologist Max Weber, who used them in a speech he gave in January 1919 to a group of leftist students at a Munich bookstore. Germany had just lost the first world war. The Kaiser had abdicated, the country was in the throes of revolution and Munich was about to become the capital of a short-lived “Bavarian Soviet Republic”. Armed with only eight index cards, Weber gave a talk that would become a classic of...Continue reading

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Chains of command

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Chains of command
Treading lightly

LIEUTENANT Mehmet Ali Celebi has not sat in a gunship cockpit for years, but will jump back in at a moment’s notice if the Turkish army comes calling. A promising helicopter pilot, Mr Celebi was sentenced to 16 years in jail in 2013, framed by policemen who uploaded numbers belonging to Islamist radicals onto his phone. He was released a year later, along with hundreds of other secularist officers who had been locked away on trumped-up charges by prosecutors close to the Gulen community, a secretive Islamic movement.

Since July’s thwarted coup, staged by an army faction believed to be led by Gulenists, the tables have turned. Today, it is Gulen followers in the bureaucracy who are being indiscriminately purged by their one-time patrons, the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party. Some 70,000 civil servants, including judges, prosecutors and teachers, have been sacked or suspended, sometimes on the thinnest of evidence. At least 32,000 people, including more than 100 journalists, are in prison.

The crackdown has left the second-biggest army in NATO in turmoil—this at a time when it is supposed to be fighting in...Continue reading

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Rich province, poor province

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Rich province, poor province

EARLY in the summer Xi Jinping, China’s president, toured one of the country’s poorest provinces, Ningxia in the west. “No region or ethnic group can be left behind,” he insisted, echoing an egalitarian view to which the Communist Party claims to be wedded. In the 1990s, as China’s economy boomed, inland provinces such as Ningxia fell far behind the prosperous coast, but Mr Xi said there had since been a “gradual reversal” of this trend. He failed to mention that this is no longer happening. As China’s economy slows, convergence between rich and poor provinces is stalling. One of the party’s much-vaunted goals for the country’s development, “common prosperity”, is looking far harder to attain.

This matters to Mr Xi (pictured, in Ningxia). In recent years the party’s leaders have placed considerable emphasis on the need to narrow regional income gaps. They say China will be a “moderately prosperous society” by the end of the decade. It will only be partly so if growth fails to pick up again inland. Debate has started to emerge in China about whether the party has been using the right methods to bring prosperity to backward...Continue reading

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The agony of Aleppo

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The agony of Aleppo

IN THE past week eastern Aleppo, a rebelheld area that is home to more than 250,000 people, has endured a typhoon of shrapnel. Rebel groups say the regime of Bashar al-Assad is pursuing “a scorched earth policy to destroy the city and uproot its people”. Mr Assad is trying to regain full control over the western slice of the country, where some 70% of Syrians live. His Russian allies are helping, using the same tactics and some of the weapons that turned the Chechen capital, Grozny, into a smouldering ruin in 1999.

Since the collapse of the short-lived ceasefire brokered by America and Russia, hundreds of air strikes and shells have slammed into the eastern part of the city. Activists counted 250 separate strikes on a single day last week as the regime seeks to seize the opposition’s last big urban stronghold. On September 27th the regime, backed by Shia militias from Iraq, Iran and Lebanon, launched a ground assault targeting rebel positions across the divided city.

“The situation is intense,” says one of the few remaining paediatricians in eastern Aleppo, who calls himself only Dr Hatem. “Many children have died. There is a...Continue reading

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The home guard     

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The home guard     

MOHAMMED JAAFAR, a commander of Nigeria’s Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), recalls his first arrest with relish. It was in 2013, shortly after the vigilante group had been formed to fight the Islamist rebels of Boko Haram. A distressed neighbour appeared at his door in Maiduguri, the birthplace of Boko Haram, reporting that a radicalised relative was hiding in his house. “I knew I was now a target,” Mr Jaafar says. So he summoned his men, scaled his neighbour’s wall and seized the suspect, who was an emir: one of Boko Haram’s spiritual leaders.

Many Nigerians are proud of such derring-do on the part of the CJTF, which has swollen into an army of over 26,000 in Borno, the state worst affected by the insurgency. As north-easterners, its members claim to know the suspects in their communities, saving innocent bystanders from being rounded up by ill-informed regular soldiers. They tried to protect their towns when Nigerian troops fled the front line (a common occurrence until early last year). Some fought bravely alongside the army, too. As Boko Haram advanced on Maiduguri in 2014, for example, the vigilantes helped avert the fall...Continue reading

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To sell or not to sell?

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To sell or not to sell?

AT THE biggest-ever global wildlife conference, khaki-clad hunters rub shoulders with animal-rights activists, nerdy scientists and blustering politicians. All have one thing in common: a desire to save endangered species from extinction. The similarity ends there. Pelham Jones, a South African, leads a group of private rhino owners arguing that legal trade in horn would stop the slaughter of their animals by criminal gangs. Across from his booth sits a Vietnamese delegation that claims to have reduced demand among consumers back home, where rhino horn is proudly used as “medicine”. Around the corner are conservation groups that think legalising the trade will doom the rhino to extinction. “It’s very clear in this room there is total polarisation,” Mr Jones says.

This is the first time for 16 years that Africa has hosted the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which regulates trade in plants and animals. This one has record attendance: some 3,500 participants are meeting from September 24th to October 5th in Sandton, a swanky suburb of Johannesburg. The stakes are high for the continent’s most iconic fauna. Rhino...Continue reading

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A burnt-out case

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A burnt-out case
Kabila’s not going anywhere

FROM the outside, the offices of FONUS, a political party in Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, look relatively unchanged. The gate is still in the blue and yellow colours of the national flag; the party president’s picture still hangs in the doorway. Inside, however, is chaos. Two large printing machines have been turned into a pile of blackened and twisted metal. The corrugated iron roofing is on the floor. A party member explains how at 3am on September 20th two jeeps full of soldiers arrived, broke in and poured petrol everywhere. Then one of them fired a rocket into the printing room.

The FONUS office was not alone. The road it sits on, opposite the national football stadium, is lined with buildings festooned with political flags and posters. Several of them, all from opposition parties, now have smashed windows and blackened walls. They were attacked after a protest on September 19th against President Joseph Kabila’s failure to organise elections. That turned into a looting spree, which was in turn put down with bullets by Mr Kabila’s personal guards. Around 50 people were killed; two police...Continue reading

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Crushed flowers

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Crushed flowers

ALEPPO’S location was always a blessing and a curse. It lay at the fork on the Silk Road where goods went south to Africa and the Middle East or north into Eurasia. Merchants milked the proceeds, helped by carrier pigeons from Baghdad bringing daily updates on shifting commodity prices. But it was also a prize. Empires battled for its wealth.

In the tenth century it shifted from Christian Byzantine to Shia Fatimid to Sunni Abbasid hands, sometimes every few days. Merchants nodded, checked the wind and kept out of the fray. Its location was too important not to overcome earthquakes or sacking by the Mongols or Tamerlane. “It was just about trading,” says Philip Mansel, who this year published a timely book on Aleppo’s rise and fall.

Prosperous local merchants invested in music, poetry and food, rather than shrines, of which there are remarkably few. “Excess is obnoxious, even in religious worship,” is an oft-quoted Aleppo proverb. Unlike Damascus, which traditionally was more devout, Aleppo embraced Turkish-speaking Ottoman rulers as readily as French imperialists. Access to their new markets was too attractive to do otherwise. The Ottomans made it their second city after they seized it in 1516. It was the only Arab city where their sultans spent much time.  

Aleppo’s architecture and culture reflected its grandeur. The Prophet...Continue reading

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A “weird and strange” campaign

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A “weird and strange” campaign
The forces of Justice and Development

SINCE making gains in municipal elections last year, things have gone downhill for Morocco’s ruling Justice and Development Party (PJD). First, a former candidate was accused of sexual harassment. Then in July a party member was arrested with three tonnes of cannabis. One of its governors is accused of trying to influence a big property deal. And in August two sexagenarian leaders of the party’s religious wing, one married, were caught by police in a “sexual position” on a beach.

This would be bad for any party, but the PJD is Islamist and its members are prone to moralising. So some Moroccans have revelled in its misfortune, especially as it comes in the run-up to parliamentary elections on October 7th. Over 30 parties will compete for 395 seats, but the real battle is between the PJD and the Party for Authenticity and Modernity (PAM), which vows to “liberate” Morocco from the Islamists. The PAM won about the same number of votes as the PJD in the municipal polls.

These are the second parliamentary elections since thousands of Moroccans took to the streets in 2011...Continue reading

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The dangers of farsightedness

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The dangers of farsightedness

IN PLANNING for the future, democratic politicians dare not look far beyond the next election, lest they lose power before the future arrives. Thailand’s military rulers have no such qualms. They have rewritten the constitution to guarantee themselves a guiding hand over future governments even after elections resume. That has given them the confidence to draw up a 20-year plan for the economy. In a speech in Bangkok on September 28th, Prayuth Chan-ocha, coup leader and prime minister, promised to turn Thailand into a developed country by 2036.

The junta sees Thailand climbing to a fourth stage of economic development (“Thailand 4.0”) beyond agriculture, light manufacturing and heavy industry. This next stage will feature new “growth engines”, such as biotechnology, the internet of things and “mechatronics” (a fusion of mechanics and electronics). 

In pursuit of this vision, some welcome structural reforms are under way. The junta has passed an inheritance tax; one on land and property will follow. It has also begun to reform the corporate governance of the country’s 56 state-owned enterprises, hoping to free them from...Continue reading

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Going into battle

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Going into battle

IN HER first two months on the job Yuriko Koike, Tokyo’s governor, has ruffled many feathers. She began before she was even elected, by running without the endorsement of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), of which she is a member but which supported another candidate. Since taking office she has revealed that the site to which the city’s main fishmarket is supposed to move has not been properly decontaminated; she is banning her staff from working past 8pm in the name of “life-work balance” and she has declared war on financial waste and corruption—taking the lead by pledging to halve her own salary. The hallmark of her tenure, she says, will be “major change” to the way the city is run.

In fact, it is a major change simply having someone like her as governor—mayor, in effect, of Tokyo prefecture, with a population of 13.6m and an economy roughly the size of Canada’s. Not only is she a woman (unlike 87% of Japanese parliamentarians). She is also neither a political dynast (unlike five of the past seven prime ministers), nor a party stalwart. That played to her advantage in the election, but, alas, will limit her clout when taking on the old-boys’ network of...Continue reading

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Death by water cannon

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Death by water cannon

“ANOTHER has been killed like this, again,” lamented the mother of Lee Han-yeol, who was fatally injured by a tear-gas canister in 1987 during a demonstration against the military regime of Chun Doo-hwan. She was among many attending the funeral of Baek Nam-gi, a 69-year-old South Korean activist and farmer. Mr Baek was knocked over by a blast from a police water cannon during a demonstration last year; after ten months in a coma, he died on September 25th.

Clashes between demonstrators and police have a special resonance in South Korean politics. The death of Mr Lee became one of the defining moments of the country’s transition to democracy. As he lay in a coma, fellow students circulated a photograph of him, bloodied and slumped in the arms of a friend. Almost 30 years on, protests, frequent and raucous, are still a big part of public life. But just how far it is legitimate for protests to go, and how police should respond, are still matters of fierce debate.

Mr Baek’s death struck a chord in part because he epitomised the dogged activism that helped to put an end to the authoritarian order that endured from the second world war until the late 1980s. He...Continue reading

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The velvet glove frays

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The velvet glove frays
An opposition politician’s lot

LIKE many old people new to social media, Hun Sen, Cambodia’s longtime strongman, has swiftly gone from sceptic to oversharer. Visitors to his Facebook page see him not only praying at temples and gravely shaking hands with world leaders; he also mugs for selfies with adoring crowds, plays with his grandchildren and hacks his way around a golf course. Scarcely a moment of his recent tour of the provinces went undocumented.

Politicians everywhere use social media to humanise themselves and connect directly with voters. Mr Hun Sen faces local elections next year and a national contest in 2018. On his recent provincial swing he pressed flesh, announced local infrastructure projects as though they were acts of personal largesse and even freed birds from captivity—a ritual good deed in local Buddhist practice. But in case his efforts to win hearts and minds fall short, he appears to have a contingency plan: intimidate the opposition and civil society.

At a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council this week, Samol Ney, Cambodia’s ambassador, insisted: “The judiciary is…an...Continue reading

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