BUZZFEED recently broke an explosive story about Russia’s meddling in America’s elections. On August 3rd 2016, it reported, just as the presidential race was entering its final phase, the Russian foreign ministry wired nearly $30,000 through a Kremlin-backed bank to its embassy in Washington, DC, with a remarkable description attached: “To finance election campaign of 2016”. Worse still, this was only one of 60 transfers that were being scrutinised by the FBI. Similar transfers were made to other countries. The story created a buzz, but not of the kind its authors hoped for. “Idiots. The Russian election of 2016, not the US one, you exceptionalist morons,” tweeted a prominent Russian journalist, pointing out that Russia too held parliamentary elections in 2016 and that the money was most probably sent to the embassies to organise the polling for expatriates. This was confirmed by the Russian foreign ministry. BuzzFeed updated its story,...Continue reading
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THE nine justices of the Supreme Court are used to applying 18th-century principles to an America that would bewilder the constitution’s framers. Yet sometimes this is really hard. On November 29th the court considered how a 226-year-old rule, the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures, bears on one arrow in the government’s investigative quiver: tracking people’s movements via their mobile-phone signals. At least six justices seemed keen to widen the Fourth Amendment umbrella for the digital age, but no single way to do so emerged. “This is an open box”, a forlorn Justice Stephen Breyer said. “We know not where we go.”
The matter dates to 2011, when Timothy Carpenter was arrested for masterminding a string of armed robberies in Michigan and Ohio. The FBI built their case against Mr Carpenter on 127 days of mobile-tower data placing him near the scenes of the crimes. Under the Stored...Continue reading
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AS AN illustration of what ails congressional Democrats, Nancy Pelosi’s recent attempt to defend an 88-year-old party grandee who was alleged to have shown up to work in his pyjamas, fondled generations of female employees and to have asked at least one of them to “touch it”, is hard to beat. The Democrats’ long-serving House leader, who is merely 77, had been asked on NBC about the allegations against Representative John Conyers of Michigan, the House’s longest-serving member. She responded by calling him an “icon”. Asked whether she believed his accusers, Mrs Pelosi blustered: “I don’t know who they are. Do you? They have not really come forward.” At least five former staffers of Mr Conyers, who was until this week the ranking Democrat on the House judiciary committee and a force in the Congressional Black Caucus, had at that time accused him of inappropriate behaviour. One had received a pay-off from his office funds.
That Mrs Pelosi should be tarred by the culture...Continue reading
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FOR anyone concerned that American consumers have suffered from not having enough financial regulators on the beat, there is now clear evidence of too many. The post-Thanksgiving working week began at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) with two people claiming to hold the temporary leadership mantle, after the abrupt resignation of the previous director, Richard Cordray. Mick Mulvaney, who heads the Office of Management and Budget, was given a second job by the president, operating under the authority of a commonly used statute. He arrived at the agency with a bag full of doughnuts and an open invitation for employees to come by and grab one. As they munched away, they could read an e-mail signed by “Leandra English, Acting Director”, a relatively young staff member whom Mr Cordray promoted to deputy director on his way out, with the intention of putting her in charge under the authority of a clause in the Dodd-Frank...Continue reading
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ON THE first floor of a crumbling colonial building in Yangon, a teacher taps the words written on the board with a bamboo rod. “Repeat after me so you will remember this by heart,” she instructs. The whole class chants back in unison. The children have been regurgitating sentences all morning. No hands are raised, no questions asked. To earn promotion to the next form, there is no need to gain a proper understanding of the subject; memorising textbooks is all that is required. For the 40 pupils, rote learning will continue for years to come, until they complete high school.
Only one in ten students remains in school that long and passes the final exams. Although the vast majority of children in Myanmar enroll in primary school, half of them drop out by the second year of secondary school. Some do so because their families need the income they could earn by working. But most cite boredom, not poverty, as the main reason.
Myanmar’s schools were not always so bad. A centuries-old tradition of monastic education gave...Continue reading
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“THE hardest bit of the job is having enough sleep,” admits Martanto, a 29-year-old geophysicist at the monitoring centre for Agung, a volcano in Bali which started erupting on November 25th. For the past two weeks he and half a dozen others have relocated from Bandung, in West Java, to keep watch on Agung every hour of the day, occasionally in continuous 32-hour shifts. Their base is rudimentary: a room plastered with maps, graphs and lists of telephone numbers. In one corner sits a seismometer, a cylindrical machine which measures earthquakes; in another corner a radio is on standby, in case of an emergency. Outside, a huge plume of ash spews from the crater at Agung’s peak. The smell of sulphur hangs thickly in the air.
Indonesia is the most volcano-pocked country in the world, with 127 active ones. It was home to both the biggest eruption of modern times, that of Tambora in 1815, and the second-biggest, of Krakatoa in 1883. Agung’s previous eruption, in 1963, was the most...Continue reading
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HIS protest camp had been blocking a busy motorway for more than three weeks. He had been giving speeches to the protesters denouncing politicians as “pigs”, “pimps” and “dogs”. Yet Khadim Rizvi, a Muslim cleric, was not worried about being forcibly evicted by the army. “Why would they take action against us,” he asked, “when we are fulfilling their goals?” He meant that they all wanted to defend Islam, but he might just as well have been referring to humiliating and undermining the ruling party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N).
On October 30th the wheelchair-bound Mr Rizvi and around 5,000 supporters gathered at Faizabad interchange, an important junction on the road between Islamabad, the capital, and the nearby city of Rawalpindi. They brought in tents and water-tankers. Clerics riled up the crowd. Protesters vowed not to leave “even if they behead us”—which was hardly likely.
The fervour was prompted by a change the government approved on...Continue reading
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THE plot was made for Bollywood: a princess so beautiful that a lustful prince besieges a spectacular fortress to catch her, and so virtuous that she hurls herself into a fire rather than surrender. Movie producers were not the first to be inspired by the story of Padmini, the loyal wife of the Rana of Chittor. The French composer Albert Roussel’s “Padmavati”, an opera about this paragon of princesses, debuted in Paris in 1923. A century before that James Tod, a British officer and amateur historian, incorporated the tale in his “Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan”, a work widely translated and reprinted in India. His romantic version appealed especially to Rajputs, the Hindu warrior caste that supplied the rulers of numerous princely states in western India. The image of the radiant Padmini foiling a Muslim invader fitted a narrative of heroic resistance that was far more enchanting than the messy truth, which was that Rajput rulers generally fought each other as much as they did...Continue reading
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EARLY morning fusillades of gibberish are nothing new in the Trump presidency. Nor is a tendency to attack allies, or to give encouragement to racist groups. On November 29th, though, the president achieved a rare triple. On waking he seems to have grabbed his phone to attack CNN, give air to an old conspiracy theory and broadcast propaganda from a hitherto obscure band of British xenophobes to his 43.6m Twitter followers. Later in the day he had a go at Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, whose office had earlier criticised him for thinking with his thumb. One sound strategy for staying sane in 2017 has been to ignore Mr Trump’s tweets. Yet this morning barrage revealed traits that go to the core of the man in the Oval Office.
One is an astonishing lack of curiosity about where information comes from. Britain First, whose nonsense the president retweeted, was until this week at the fringe of the fringe of far-right English politics. Its...Continue reading
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WHEN it is finished, America’s imposing new embassy in Lebanon will be its second-biggest in the world. Yet it was France, not America, that stepped in to resolve Lebanon’s latest political crisis. Speaking from the Saudi capital, Riyadh, on November 4th, Saad Hariri, the Lebanese prime minister, abruptly announced his resignation. What followed was a bizarre two-week saga in which he seemed to be under house arrest in the kingdom. Though America’s State Department criticised the move, it fell to France to negotiate Mr Hariri’s return to Beirut. He has since suspended his resignation.
Nearly a year into his presidency, Donald Trump’s Middle East policy could best be characterised as one of neglect and confusion. His term coincides with a period of radical change in Saudi Arabia. King Salman and his son, Muhammad, the all-powerful crown prince, have abandoned the Al Sauds’ plodding caution in favour of a more aggressive foreign policy. Their actions have unsettled friends and neighbours. Even Israeli diplomats, no fans of...Continue reading
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