John Bolton, the world’s hope

JOHN BOLTON is not well-liked in Washington. A warmonger and bully, the national security adviser is disdainful of the bipartisan foreign-policy world and the governing institutions its members cycle in and out of. That he oversees one of them is typical of the plate-smashing Trump administration. Yet few doubt that Mr Bolton is a wily operator. As President Donald Trump’s third national security adviser—and the first with previous experience of civilian bureaucracy—he has already demonstrated his mastery of the inter-agency policy process. His role in derailing, at least temporarily, Mr Trump’s planned meeting with Kim Jong Un in Singapore therefore demands scrutiny.

Mr Bolton suggested the “Libya model” was what America wanted from North Korea. That was not illogical. Mr Trump had demanded Mr Kim take the same step as Muammar Qaddafi in 2003: denuclearisation in return for sanctions relief. Yet the fact that Qaddafi was later bombed from power by a NATO intervention, dragged from his...Continue reading

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Eight months after Hurricane Maria, the human toll is still unclear

MARIA was a brief visitor to Puerto Rico. The category-4 hurricane made landfall at 6am on September 20th last year and 11 hours later she was gone. She left a trail of destruction. Some 300,000 people were displaced; and the death toll? No one knows for sure.

The official estimate of 64 deaths seemed measly by contrast. That number includes only those directly killed by the hurricane, from flying debris and the like. Importantly, it excludes indirect deaths: disruptions to medical care or hurricane-induced suicides, for example. A back-of-the envelope calculation by The Economist of excess mortality above that expected by deaths in previous years puts the toll at about 1,200.

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Some good news from the fight against opioids

SOME 382,000 Americans have overdosed on opioids—a group of drugs that includes prescription painkillers, heroin and synthetics—since the year 2000. That is greater than the number of American combat deaths in the second world war and the Korean and Vietnam wars combined. Despite this epic toll, there are early signs that at least one battle may be ending.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provide the best data for tracking the opioid epidemic. Its latest data, which cover the 12 months to the end of October 2017, show that opioids were responsible for some 46,041 deaths (see chart) in that period. While provisional and subject to revision, that number was at least not dissimilar to the previous month’s figure of 46,202.

Two trends emerge from the numbers. The first gives cause for cheer: deaths from heroin and prescription opioids are falling. Combined, the two drugs were responsible for 29,600 deaths in the 12 months to October 2017, 4% below their...Continue reading

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American border officials are separating migrant families

MIRIAN and her 18-month-old son fled Honduras after soldiers threw tear gas into their home. They requested asylum at the American border with Mexico five weeks later. Mirian surrendered her Honduran ID card and her son’s birth certificate, which listed her as his mother, whereupon immigration officers took her son. “My son was crying as I put him in the seat,” Mirian told a court. “I did not even have the chance to comfort my son, because the officers slammed the door shut as soon as he was in his seat. I was crying too. I cry even now when I think about that moment.”

Since October, hundreds of children have been taken from their parents at the border and put in separate facilities. In March 2017, John Kelly, then secretary of homeland security, suggested his department would do that “to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network”. The administration has since backed away from the rationale of deterrence.

But this April Jeff Sessions, the...Continue reading

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Can a new mayor fix San Francisco’s housing and homelessness problems?

THE cliché of luxury penthouses and Gucci stores cheek-by-jowl with filth and poverty is usually reserved for poor-world entrepôts. But the contrasts in San Francisco—the richest city in America by median household income—could in places rival those in Mumbai. Fresh human excrement and discarded needles lie scattered on the streets of the Tenderloin district just a few blocks from the five-star hotels of Union Square in the city’s downtown. Complaints about shit in the street more than tripled, to 21,000, in the eight years to 2017; for needles the number shot up from 290 in 2009 to nearly 6,400 in 2017. The city’s sanitation department spends half its $60m street-cleaning budget on the stuff. Meanwhile, a typical one-bedroom flat now rents for $3,440 per month, according to Zumper, a rental website—the highest figure in the country. The median house price has nearly doubled in the past five years, to $1.6m.

On June 5th San Franciscans will elect a new mayor. The special election,...Continue reading

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California considers taking custody of some street people

IN 1967 Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, signed into law the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, an ambitious reform of the state’s mental-health laws. It was part of a wave of changes that closed asylums in the state and around the country. Half a century later, the state legislature is reviewing those decisions.

In February Scott Wiener, a state senator who represents San Francisco, introduced Senate Bill 1045. The bill aims to make it easier for his home city, as well as Los Angeles, to oblige chronically homeless people who suffer from mental illness or addiction to accept the appointment by a judge of a person or institution to look after them (a concept called “conservatorship”). London Breed, who is running for mayor of San Francisco, has backed the proposal.

The bill would affect between 40 and 60 homeless people in San Francisco, reckons Barbara Garcia of the city’s Public Health Department. That is less than 1% of its official homeless population. Along...Continue reading

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People in India often despair of their democracy

IN THE spring of 1947 the leaders of India’s independence movement reached a fateful decision. The right to vote in the soon-to-be-born Indian republic, they agreed, would no longer be restricted as under the British Raj, but open to every adult citizen. The move created the world’s largest democracy, and also burdened it with a colossal challenge. As Ornit Shani, an Israeli historian, deftly explains in a new book, the logistics alone were daunting. With more than 170m eligible voters to register—some 85% of them illiterate back then—it took tens of thousands of workers two full years just to compile the rolls for India’s first general election, conducted in 1951. At the time Rajendra Prasad, a politician who was to become the country’s first president, made a back-of-envelope calculation. Bound in one volume, he reckoned, the voter lists would be 200 metres thick.

Today that “phone book” is five times thicker. At India’s next general election, to be held sometime in the coming...Continue reading

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The legacy of Germany’s student protests in 1968

IT RESEMBLES just another Berlin courtyard—some straggly bushes and a bike rack—but Krumme Strasse 66 can claim to be a birthplace of today’s Germany. It was 1967; the Shah of Iran was at a performance of “The Magic Flute” at the nearby Opera; crowds of protesters had been forced into side streets; a shot rang out. Benno Ohnesorg, a 26-year-old, lay bleeding on the ground, his head cradled by another student in a photo that shocked the young Federal Republic and radicalised the movement for the demonstrations that swept German universities over the following year. Ohnesorg’s killer had been an unmarked police officer, later acquitted. This convinced protesters that, long after 1945, authoritarian violence still lurked in German society.

In Germany “1968” means more than just such events. It is a symbol—a “memory marker”, says Armin Nassehi, the author of a new book on the subject—that also denotes the wider downgrading of values like tradition, deference and unabashed national...Continue reading

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Uproar over new speed limits on French country roads

The good old days

PASSING through wide fields of wheat and potatoes, route D915 links the northern French port of Dieppe with Pontoise, north-west of Paris. On a straight stretch of single-carriageway road, lined with sycamores, cars tear along above the 90kph (55mph) speed limit, dodging oncoming traffic to overtake. Periodically, as on other similar roads, vehicles collide, killing their occupants. To curb the country’s accident rate, the French government is reducing the speed limit on country roads from July 1st. In rural France, few recent policies have prompted such indignation.

Speeding is the main cause of fatal traffic accidents in France, most of which, as elsewhere, take place on single-lane roads that lack a central reservation. Cars crash either into each other, or into one of the shade-providing trees that line many country routes. It was on just such a road that Albert Camus, at the age of 46, and his publisher, Michel Gallimard, were killed when their car...Continue reading

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Turkey’s opposition scents success against Erdogan

VICTORY for Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development (AK) party in presidential and parliamentary elections on June 24th should have been a foregone conclusion. The strongman enjoys unwavering support from his religious base, indirect control over practically all big news outlets, and emergency powers that allow him to rule by decree, lock up some critics and make others think twice before speaking.

The second-largest opposition party in parliament, the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), has been in effect banished from the airwaves. Its candidate for president, one of Mr Erdogan’s most outspoken rivals, Selahattin Demirtas, was arrested in 2016 on trumped-up terrorism charges, and is leading his campaign from a prison cell.

The president’s opponents are still the underdogs in the coming votes, to be held early and for the first time simultaneously. But they seem to have picked up momentum—and found the right candidates. Muharrem Ince, the nominee...Continue reading

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France’s strikes may now be starting to ebb

The last gasp?

ONE protester carried a placard depicting Emmanuel Macron as a Nazi. Another produced an effigy of the French president swinging from the gallows. As France prepares for its tenth week of strikes, the mood among protesters on the streets has ranged from festive to violent. On May 26th some 190 rallies and marches were held across the country in an attempt to create a “popular tide” against Mr Macron’s reforms of the railways, universities and much else besides.

At first glance, the pressure on the French president remains intense. Train drivers and other railwaymen are due to continue their rolling strike, on two days out of every five, until June 28th, as planned. On May 29th over half of train drivers were still observing the strike, thereby continuing to make life miserable for commuters. Last week civil servants also took to the streets to defend their special status. Fresh complaints by students arose after half of the 800,000 applicants to...Continue reading

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Ireland votes solidly to allow abortion

IN 1979, when Pope John Paul II visited the Republic of Ireland, 1.2m people attended his open-air mass in Phoenix Park in Dublin—more than a third of the population of the country at that time. As many again turned up at other smaller venues.

Four years later Catholic clergy and lay groups held back the tide of social reform sweeping across much of the rest of Europe by getting two-thirds of voters to back the eighth amendment to the constitution, banning abortion in any circumstances, including rape, incest and even an imminent threat to the life of the mother. Three years after that, in 1986, the same religious coalition persuaded 63% of voters to retain a constitutional ban on divorce.

By then, though, the power of the church had already passed its zenith. In 1985 the sale of condoms, previously tightly restricted, was liberalised despite the church’s best efforts. Divorce was permitted in 1995.

In 2012 Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old dentist, died of septic...Continue reading

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How welfare reform has hurt America’s poorest children

LAST month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing federal agencies to find ways to add new work requirements to welfare programmes and strengthen those that exist. He said that a bipartisan welfare reform made in 1996 had made progress in ending “long-term government independence” but that welfare designed to help families often still had the opposite effect, trapping many, “especially children, in poverty.” Tying welfare more closely to work would, the president said, “increase self-sufficiency, well-being and economic mobility.”

For some, perhaps. But it will also prevent welfare programmes from targeting many of the families who need them most. Indeed, this approach helps explain America’s comparatively poor performance in lifting children out of poverty.

A new paper shows how effective America’s welfare programmes are at ameliorating the effects of poverty on children. Its authors, Hilary W. Hoynes, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, both...Continue reading

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Plots and sackings in Ukraine

Ukraine’s security services seized the world’s attention this week by faking the murder of a Russian opposition journalist, Arkady Babchenko, as part of a purported sting operation. At the same time, another plot unfolded in the corridors of government: Oleksandr Danyliuk, Ukraine’s well-regarded finance minister, is being forced to resign, The Economist has learned.

Mr Danyliuk, an independent-minded reformer backed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has been under pressure from the country’s leadership before, as he pushed through fiscal reforms. Despite resistance, he has had successes: for instance, he helped secure an order in the London High Court to freeze $2.5bn worth of assets belonging to Ihor Kolomoysky, one of Ukraine’s most notorious oligarchs. But Mr Danyliuk had to act by stealth, and while working on the nationalisation of PrivatBank, brought to insolvency by Mr Kolomoysky, he had to move his family to a secret location for safety.

The...Continue reading

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Political chaos in Italy as new elections beckon

THE powers of an Italian president are few, but mighty. He—there has never been a she—can declare war, dissolve parliament and name the prime minister. The constitution also stipulates that the president names the ministers, “on the proposal” of the prime minister-designate—a provision that has been interpreted to mean that a prospective head of government must table a list of choices that the president can accept or, sometimes, reject.

On May 27th President Sergio Mattarella deployed the last of those powers to devastating effect, halting the formation of a populist coalition between the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) and the hard-right Northern League. He refused to swear in a Eurosceptic, Paolo Savona, as finance minister. After the prospective coalition partners refused to withdraw Mr Savona’s name, Giuseppe Conte, the lawyer who was to have headed their government, backed out.

His withdrawal raised the likelihood of an early election that could become a proxy...Continue reading

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Italy’s political crisis is roiling financial markets once more

HERE we go again. Financial markets don’t much like uncertainty. Thanks to Italy’s politicians, in recent days they have had plenty. By May 30th some calm had returned: it seemed possible that a pair of populist parties, the Five Star Movement and the Northern League, would form a government after all (see article). Markets had been in turmoil for two days, unsettled by a farcical back-and-forth between the populists and the country’s president, who had rejected the parties’ choice of a Eurosceptic economist as finance minister. The politicians may have done the markets a service, by shaking them out of complacency. Investors may have returned the favour, by shaking some sense into the politicians—at least for now.

Italy is perennially slow-growing and groans under public debt of around €2.3trn ($2.7trn), or 132% of GDP. The drama...Continue reading

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A critical task for the Greek economy enters a new phase

OF THE €57.7bn ($68.2bn) of loans that Piraeus Bank, one of Greece’s four dominant lenders, had on its books at the end of March, €20.5bn were more than 90 days overdue. A further €11.7bn were also deemed unlikely to be repaid. In all, at the end of 2017 Greek banks carried €95.7bn of such non-performing exposures (NPEs)—at 43.1% of loans, the heaviest burden in Europe. Still, the pile was €13bn smaller than at its peak in March 2016. The banks plan to reduce it by €30bn this year and next.

Dealing with bad loans to business—around 60% of NPEs, mostly to small firms—is the most daunting part of this monumental job. It means resetting the balance-sheet of much of Greece’s economy, from restaurants to manufacturing. But a new phase of this task is under way, with the first sale of secured commercial loans. On May 29th Piraeus said it had agreed to sell Amoeba, a €1.45bn bundle of loans to around 180 borrowers, to Bain Capital Credit, which has previously bought bad debts in Italy and Spain. The collateral, comprising about 1,700 properties, is mainly in big cities. Other banks have been watching keenly. Alpha Bank, another of the four big banks, is weighing a similar sale. Bankers and investors say Amoeba has helpfully spawned an ecosystem of buyers and advisers.

Clearing away the NPE rubble and renewing...Continue reading

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A critical task for the Greek economy enters a new phase

OF THE €57.7bn ($68.2bn) of loans that Piraeus Bank, one of Greece’s four dominant lenders, had on its books at the end of March, €20.5bn were more than 90 days overdue. A further €11.7bn were also deemed unlikely to be repaid. In all, at the end of 2017 Greek banks carried €95.7bn of such non-performing exposures (NPEs)—at 43.1% of loans, the heaviest burden in Europe. Still, the pile was €13bn smaller than at its peak in March 2016. The banks plan to reduce it by €30bn this year and next.

Dealing with bad loans to business—around 60% of NPEs, mostly to small firms—is the most daunting part of this monumental job. It means resetting the balance-sheet of much of Greece’s economy, from restaurants to manufacturing. But a new phase of this task is under way, with the first sale of secured commercial loans. On May 29th Piraeus said it had agreed to sell Amoeba, a €1.45bn bundle of loans to around 180 borrowers, to Bain Capital Credit, which has previously bought bad debts in Italy...Continue reading

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The Kremlin denies responsibility for MH17

IT WAS an important demand, if one with little hope of success. On May 29th the Netherlands’ foreign minister, Stef Blok, insisted at the UN Security Council in New York that Russia “accept its responsibility” in the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17. The airliner was shot down by an anti-aircraft missile over Ukraine in 2014, killing 196 Dutch nationals, 38 Australians and 64 others. Last week a UN-mandated Joint Investigation Team (JIT), led by Dutch prosecutors, announced it had determined that the missile belonged to a unit deployed to the area by the Russian Army’s 53rd anti-aircraft brigade, presumably to help Russian-backed secessionists fighting the Ukrainian army.

The Kremlin has always denied any involvement in the downing of MH17 or the war in Ukraine. (Asked about the JIT’s findings, Mr Putin responded, “Which plane are you talking about?”) Instead it has spread conflicting alternative theories blaming the Ukrainians, often backed up with demonstrably fake...Continue reading

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Donald Trump and the NFL

LAST week, the National Football League, a powerful organisation overseeing 32 teams worth a combined $80bn, announced that it would bar its employees from engaging in a peaceable and silent protest at work: kneeling during the pre-game national anthem. If they wanted to stay in the locker room “and out of sight during the anthem” that was fine. But “if they are on the field, they must stand”. The NFL also asserted its commitment to “advance social justice” and “promote positive social change” —precisely the goals of the kneeling protests. This is only the first of several contradictions inherent in the policy.

Roger Goodell, the NFL’s commissioner, rued the effect of the protests on the image of players. “It was unfortunate that on-field protests created a false perception among many that thousands of NFL players were unpatriotic,” he said in a statement. “This is not and was never the case.” But if the players weren’t unpatriotic then and still are not, why the major change in between?

In 2016, during...Continue reading

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Racist tweets from Roseanne spur ABC to cancel “Roseanne”

ONE of the defining features of life under Donald Trump is that even as his presidency reassures Islamophobes, xenophobes, misogynists, bigots and racists, it simultaneously stiffens the resolve of Americans who value tolerance and inclusion. Take the reaction to a tweet by Roseanne Barr, the eponymous star of the smash-hit reboot of a 20-year-old sitcom. On May 29th Ms Barr tweeted, in response to a thread discussing a loony conspiracy theory about the CIA spying on French presidential candidates in Barack Obama’s time, that “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj”. She was referring to Valerie Jarrett. Ms Jarrett, who was born in Iran but is not Muslim, is the daughter of a distinguished black pathologist and served as an aide to Mr Obama.

Ms Barr later deleted her tweets and apologised to Ms Jarrett. The response was nonetheless swift. Within hours of the tweet, ABC, the television network that airs “Roseanne”, cancelled a planned second season....Continue reading

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Did a police officer violate the constitution by inspecting a stolen motorbike?

FIVE years ago, Ryan Collins evaded police in Albermarle County, Virgnia by weaving through traffic at more than 140mph. But they caught up with him. Weeks later, after tracking down the extended-frame Suzuki Mr Collins had been driving, and finding it hidden under a tarp next to his girlfriend’s house, a police officer walked on the property, matched the licence plate to the rogue two-wheeler and got Mr Collins to admit he had bought the vehicle from someone who had stolen it. But when his case went to trial, Mr Collins claimed the officer’s investigation was a trespass and violated his Fourth Amendment rights; the evidence gathered during the search, he claimed, wasn’t admissible in court.

On May 29th, in Collins v Virginia, the Supreme Court sided with Mr Collins in an 8-1 vote by cabining the so-called “automobile exception” that has been in place for nearly a century. Police typically need a warrant to search someone’s property, but in 1925, the court adjusted the rules for automobiles. Cars, by their...Continue reading

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The Real End Game for CBS-Viacom

A little-noticed part of lawsuit says Redstone could sell a combined company and give up control.

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Red Flags Are Suddenly Rampant in Markets

Europe’s deepening troubles and disappointing global growth signals are sparking a sudden rally in haven bonds like U.S. Treasurys: Risk aversion is back.

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Italy’s bond yields rise as it heads for another election

ITALY’S president, Sergio Mattarella is expected to decide on May 30th whether to call a snap election as early as July in an effort to resolve a rapidly deepening political and economic crisis that has sent tremors through global financial markets.

The president had originally planned to put a former IMF economist, Carlo Cottarelli, at the head of a government of technocrats, tasked with steering the country back to the polls after the summer. But Mr Mattarella was reportedly considering changing tack after meeting Mr Cottarelli on May 29th amid growing evidence of support in parliament for an earlier vote. Not a single big party has declared its readiness to back Mr Cottarelli’s proposed administration in a necessary vote of confidence.

In a sign of investors’ concern, the yield gap between Italian and German benchmark government bonds soared from 190 basis points on May 28th to more than 300. The governor of the Bank of Italy, Ignazio Visco, warned his compatriots not to...Continue reading

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Why Aren't Companies Spending More?

The renaissance in capital spending the tax cut was supposed to bring about isn’t showing up in the economic data.

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Italy’s new government collapses before even getting started

ITALY’s governmental crisis was already the longest since the foundation of the republic after the Second World War. It has now become a constitutional crisis, with implications for the entire European Union. As the leader of its biggest party called for President Sergio Mattarella to be impeached for refusing to install Western Europe’s first all-populist government, Italy appeared to be heading for fresh elections at which anti-establishment parties were expected to increase their parliamentary majority.

On the morning of May 28th, Mr Mattarella summoned Carlo Cottarelli (pictured), an economist and former IMF official with no experience of politics, to the presidential palace amid speculation he would ask him to form an interim cabinet of non-party technocrats to steer the country back to the polls. Mr Cottarelli had been preceded to the palace on the night of May 27th by Giuseppe Conte, the candidate for prime minister of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) and the...Continue reading

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How Many Activists Does It Take to Change an Industrial Icon?

Two of the world’s top activist investors, Elliott Management and Cevian Capital are agitating for change at Thyssenkrupp.

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Why It Is Harder to Diagnose Hospital Stocks

New accounting rules make assessing financial health more difficult for hospitals and companies that work with them.

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Might Spain be headed for a snap election?

A DAY is a long time in Spanish politics. On the evening of May 23rd Mariano Rajoy, the conservative prime minister, was celebrating his minority government’s success in getting this year’s budget through Congress, opening the way for him to see out another couple of years. The next day came a bombshell: a court gave its verdict in a long-running corruption trial involving past officials of the ruling People’s Party (PP) and in which Mr Rajoy himself testified as a witness last summer. Not only did the court sentence the party’s former treasurer to 33 years in jail, but it also found that the PP had benefited from kickbacks and cast doubt on the prime minister’s evidence.

With that, his rivals pounced. On May 25th Ciudadanos, a liberal party that has helped to keep Mr Rajoy in office (the PP formed only a minority government after elections in December 2016) and is leading in many opinion polls, demanded that he call an immediate general election. Pedro Sánchez, the...Continue reading

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Stacey Abrams’s historic win

THIS WEEK, Stacey Abrams became the first African-American woman ever to win a major-party nomination for governor when she beat Stacey Evans in Georgia’s primary. Ms Abrams is a (Bill) Clintonian figure: deeply versed in policy, fizzingly intelligent, ambitious and a superb retail politician. As minority leader in Georgia’s Republican-dominated House, she has worked effectively across the aisle. And she has a compelling personal story: raised in a family of modest means in Gulfport, Mississippi, she graduated from Spelman College and Yale Law School, became Atlanta’s deputy city attorney before she was 30-years-old and has been a legislator since 2007 (she has also written several romance novels under the pseudonym Selena Montgomery).

The primary tested two competing theories of the electorate. Ms Evans, who is white and was raised in rural Georgia, believed she could attract more support in the general election from disaffected Republicans and conservative Democrats. Ms Abrams built the same coalition that carried Barack Obama to victory:...Continue reading

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Donald Trump is undermining the coalition he built against North Korea

TO DESCRIBE Moon Jae-in’s expression as “ashen-faced” would be an understatement. In a photograph released by his office early on May 25th, South Korea’s president (pictured, centre) looked a decade older than his 65 years. The downward turn of his lips suggested that he might be about to cry. The picture was taken at an emergency meeting Mr Moon had been forced to convene late the previous night after Donald Trump, America’s president, suddenly decided to cancel his planned summit with Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s dictator, in Singapore next month.

Mr Moon’s face captures the baffled disappointment with which the news of Mr Trump’s decision was met in South Korea. Mr Moon has made the creation of a lasting peace on the Korean peninsula a central goal of his presidency, and was instrumental in brokering the planned summit between Mr Trump and Mr Kim. But he was apparently not informed of Mr Trump’s withdrawal in advance. After hours of silence, he issued a statement saying...Continue reading

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Samsonite Needs to Make Its Case

Suitcase maker Samsonite has questions to answer about its accounting practices.

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Best Buy: Don't Touch That Omni-Channel

Best Buy beat analyst forecasts on Thursday but the stock sank in what seems to be a misguided reaction to slowing online sales.

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Celgene's Buybacks Are Coming Up Empty

Celgene’s shares rose after the biotech company announced an accelerated stock repurchase, but the pace of Celgene’s buybacks shouldn’t do much to reassure investors.

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Donald Trump cancels his meeting with Kim Jong-Un

IF THERE is one foreign policy goal to which President Donald Trump is unswervingly committed, it is to make America safe from Kim Jon Un’s nuclear weapons. That was the message the president’s foreign policy team quietly transmitted for most of the past year. Where, in light of Mr Trump’s announcement on May 24th that he had decided to cancel a historic summit with Mr Kim, which was scheduled to take place in Singapore next month, does that ambition now stand?  

For context, it is worth noting that Mr Trump’s decision in March to meet with Mr Kim seemed ill-considered but, on balance, probably justifiable. His decision to cancel the meeting, after recent indications that the North Koreans were making a fool of him, had come to seem almost inevitable. And almost everything else about the president’s approach to, ostensibly, the biggest foreign policy challenge of his tenure has appeared uninformed, ill-considered and potentially disastrous.

Mr Trump agreed to meet Mr Kim after South Korean diplomats brought him a...Continue reading

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Will Colombia’s next president imperil the peace deal with the FARC?

JUAN MANUEL SANTOS, Colombia’s president, won a Nobel prize in 2016 for ending a 52-year war with the left-wing FARC guerrilla group, but criminals with guns still terrorise parts of the countryside. That alarms people in cities, where most people live. Some 12,000 FARC fighters have disarmed and moved into designated zones, as envisaged by the peace accord. But the space they left has been partly filled with other gangs, including dissident members of the FARC, the ELN, another guerrilla group, and Clan del Golfo, a mafia whose origins are in right-wing paramilitary groups that demobilised in the 2000s (see map).

Their fights with each other and with security forces are caused in part by competition over the cocaine trade, which was one of the FARC’s main sources of income. In 2016 coca, the raw material for cocaine, grew on 146,000 hectares, three times the area it covered in 2012. Most of the fighting took place in about a quarter of the country’s municipalities. Just 5% of that area is now under...Continue reading

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A southern-hemisphere Stonehenge is found in Chile

Smarter than the average pile of rocks

ON THE winter solstice in 2017, a team of researchers waited in the pre-dawn chill of the Atacama desert. Before them stood two square piles of stones, each about 1.2 metres (four feet) high. A row of three other cairns stretched out 500 metres to the east. This line of saywas—roughly, “markers” in Quechua, an indigenous Andean language—intersected diagonally with an ancient path, part of a road network built five centuries ago by the Incas. The sun rose directly behind the closest columns, appearing to rest briefly atop them.

“It was an extremely moving experience,” says Cecilia Sanhueza, a historian at Chile’s Pre-Columbian Art Museum in Santiago. Her findings were made public last month. The alignment of the stones with the sun’s rise supported her thesis that they were not just milestones. At least some of northern Chile’s saywas had the “astronomical function”...Continue reading

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Colombians hope for change in the first post-war presidential election

EVERY afternoon in Samaná, a small coffee-growing town in the Colombian Andes, prosperous townspeople mount Paso Fino horses to ride from bar to bar, where they down shots of aguardiente, Colombia’s most popular tipple. Their tongues loosened by the anise-flavoured drink, they become garrulous on the subject of the country’s presidential election, the first round of which is scheduled for May 27th. Álvaro Uribe, a right-wing former president, “is a horseman just like us”, declares Brayan López, a horse-dealer. He, and almost everyone else in Samaná, it seems, will vote for Iván Duque, Mr Uribe’s protégé, who is leading in the polls.

As president from 2002 to 2010, Mr Uribe sent the army to expel from the area around Samaná the 47th Front, a unit of the FARC, a guerrilla group that had fought the state since 1964. The front’s leader, Elda Neyis Mosquera, known as “la negra Karina”, was one of the FARC’s few female commanders and is thought to have been...Continue reading

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What is an audit for?

AUDITS get noticed only when things go wrong. Last week British MPs issued a scathing attack on KPMG, an auditor, for failing to avert the collapse of Carillion, a contracting company. South African authorities are looking into Deloitte’s audit of Steinhoff, a retailer. PwC, another auditor, could face a court-damages verdict for hundreds of millions of dollars for not spotting fraud at Colonial Bank, a failed American lender. It is also fighting a $3bn lawsuit in Ukraine and a two-year ban in India.

Investors are also waking up to audits. They almost never vote against management’s choice of auditor. But last month over a third of shareholders at General Electric, an industrial conglomerate, voted against the reappointment of KPMG. Investors in Steinhoff are suing the company and Deloitte for $5bn for their losses.

These actions challenge an industry dominated by four big firms: Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC. Between them they earned $47bn from auditing most of the world’s largest...Continue reading

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Labour laws in 104 countries reserve some jobs for men only

EVEN as rich countries seek to rid workplaces of subtle gender bias, in many developing ones discrimination remains overt. According to the World Bank, women are barred from certain jobs in 104 countries (see map).

“Gender equality in labour law is associated with more women working and earning more relative to men,” says Sarah Iqbal of the Bank. Yet some countries publish lists of jobs deemed too dangerous for women (Russia’s 456 include driving a train or steering a ship). Others stop women from working in entire sectors, at night or in “morally inappropriate” jobs (in Kazakhstan women cannot bleed or stun cattle, pigs or small ruminants). In four countries women cannot register a business. In 18 a husband can stop his wife working.

The aim is often to protect the “weaker sex”. Some laws put women in the same category as children; they concern jobs seen as physically tough, such as mining, construction and manufacturing. Others relate to broader safety fears. In Mumbai, for...Continue reading

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How kidnapping insurance keeps a lid on ransom inflation

IN THE early 1970s, leftist guerrillas in Argentina discovered a lucrative new way to make money: kidnap millionaires. Panicking firms would agree to huge ransoms, more concerned with freeing their executives than driving down the fee. That was not just bad for businesses. It also became a textbook case of how poor negotiating can send future ransoms rocketing and attract new entrants to the kidnapping trade. In Argentina, this culminated in the payment of an undisclosed ransom in 1975 for the release of Juan Born, followed by a $60m ransom for his brother, Jorge. The latter figure, $275m in today’s money, is the highest ransom known in modern times.

One reason it marked a high point is the spread of kidnapping-and-ransom (K&R) insurance. This is involved in a minority of the $0.5bn-1.5bn thought to be paid out in ransoms each year, but the share is growing. Around three-quarters of Fortune 500 companies pay to cover some employees. Insurers reimburse the ransom and, at least as...Continue reading

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Dear oil helps some emerging economies and harms others

When they are not fretting about the American dollar or Chinese debt, policymakers in emerging economies keep a close eye on the oil market. The price of Brent crude has risen by nearly 50% in the past year to around $80 a barrel. It ranks as the 11th-biggest spike in the past 70 years (adjusted for inflation), according to UBS, a bank. So should emerging markets now worry that oil prices will carry on rising above $100, or that they will tumble below $50? The answer is yes.

Many emerging economies import oil; others export it. As a rule, higher prices hurt the first group and lower ones hurt the second. But it can be more complicated than that. Indonesia, for example, is a net importer of oil, but a net exporter of “energy”, more broadly defined, including coal and palm oil. Since coal, palm and oil prices tend to rise roughly in tandem, Indonesia would benefit overall from $100 oil, according to UBS. Mexico, like America, is also a net importer of crude. But in both countries a higher oil price will...Continue reading

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Why even bears about the government-bond market can find merit in Treasuries

JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH, a quotable economist, observed that one of the deeper mysteries is why, in a falling market, there is still a buyer for every seller. It is a conundrum that bond investors must now contemplate. Since January the yield on a ten-year Treasury bond has risen (and thus bond prices have fallen) with scarcely a backward step. It is above 3% for the first time in years.

In part, the fall in bond prices reflects a growing acceptance that the Federal Reserve will raise short-term interest rates to 2.75-3% by the end of 2019, as its median rate-setter expects. In part it reflects worries that tax cuts and rising oil prices will fuel higher inflation. And there is anxiety that the supply of Treasuries is about to increase (in order to pay for tax cuts) just as buyers may become scarcer. The Fed itself is running down its holdings. The higher cost of hedging currency risk in dollars is putting off some foreign buyers.

If sellers outgun buyers, prices will continue to fall. Who then...Continue reading

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Bad loans remain a concern in Italy and across southern Europe

ITALY’S next government, a coalition between the populist Five Star Movement and the far-right Northern League, is giving investors plenty to worry about. Leaked plans, hastily abandoned, suggested it might want to leave the euro or ask the European Central Bank to forgive €250bn ($292bn) of Italian debt. But less attention has been paid to what it might mean for Italian banks, and in particular for their biggest burden: non-performing loans (NPLs). Over €185bn of NPLs were outstanding at the end of 2017, the most for any country in the European Union (see chart).

By comparison with Greece, where NPLs are 45% of loans, Italy looks manageable, with just 11.1%. And it has made progress: in late 2015 NPLs were 16.8% of loans. But any wild policy lurches would put that progress in question. The clean-up of banks’ books has relied on openness to foreign investors. Huge volumes of NPLs (€37bn in 2016 and over €47bn in 2017, according to Deloitte, a consultancy) have been sold by banks, often to...Continue reading

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How psychotherapy improves poor mothers’ finances

IN 2005 and 2006, in northern Pakistan, some 900 pregnant women took part in an unusual experiment. All were in their third trimester and suffering from depression. Most families in the area rely on subsistence farming. Almost none of the women worked outside the home. This kind of life is hard. Perinatal depression (depression around the time of giving birth) is more common in poor countries than in rich ones.

As part of one of the largest psychotherapy trials ever run, the women were split randomly into two groups. Those in one received weekly visits from a health worker for the month before the birth, and less frequent visits during the ten months after. The rest received the same number of visits, but from health workers who had been trained to deliver cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) during the visits, too.

CBT is a talking therapy that aims to break the cycle of self-reinforcing negative thoughts. It focuses on the present, rather than trying to uncover the causes of...Continue reading

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Central banks should consider offering accounts to everyone

A RECESSION strikes. Central banks leap into action, cutting interest rates to perk up investment. But what if, as now, there is not much cutting to do, with rates already at or close to zero? In such cases the manual calls for purchases of government bonds with newly printed cash—quantitative easing, or QE—swelling the reserves each bank keeps at the central bank. Imagine instead that people also kept accounts at the central bank. New money could be added to their accounts, providing a direct, equitable boost to spending. That is one of several potential benefits of individual central-bank accounts, which are among the more intriguing of the radical policy ideas in circulation.

Central banks deal in two sorts of currency: cash, which anyone can hold, and digital money, accessible only to financial institutions through their accounts at the central bank. Individuals hoping to spend digital money must use a bank card or transfer (or a service, like Apple Pay, linked to a bank account), or a private...Continue reading

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Reformists and traditionalists are at war over Russian schools

THE schoolhouse in Vorsino stands next to the village chapel. Inside, a painting depicts a teacher standing and reading to pupils who sit obediently in rows. Yet in one classroom a different scene unfolds. Ogabek Masharipov, a 23-year-old with Teach for Russia, a programme that sends young college graduates to teach in rural schools, banters with pupils and begins his lesson with an interactive exercise. He laments the ageing equipment and lack of space for pupils to gather outside class in the Soviet-era building, but revels in having taught them to assemble solar-powered toy cars out of parts of old PCs. Before he came, computer classes mostly involved paper exercise books.

Vorsino offers a snapshot of the country’s schools. Russia has a strong crop of teachers, as well as a talented and well-educated population. Over 55% of working-age adults have degrees. Student performance in international tests has been rising steadily; Russia now scores around the average for OECD countries. Yet...Continue reading

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Vladimir Putin’s latest pet project: a school for clever students

Selfies with the tsar

AFTER talking to India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, in Sochi earlier this week, Vladimir Putin took him to one of his favourite places: the Sirius Centre for Gifted Education. “We discussed regional and international issues,” Mr Modi said. “But when we were talking about Sirius, he had a special look on his face.”

The centre offers intensive month-long courses to Russian students who demonstrate special talent in maths, science, sport or the arts. They live in a former four-star hotel and work in top-of-the-line laboratories in the former press centre built for the 2014 Winter Olympics. Elena Shmeleva, Sirius’s director, speaks proudly of its project-based learning and focus on new technologies. A full-time school will open in the autumn. The goal, Ms Shmeleva says, is to set an example for the whole country.

The project has had Mr Putin’s attention from the start; he is said to have come up with the idea, and even the...Continue reading

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A struggle between authoritarians and liberals in the heart of Europe

A YOUNG journalist investigating links between his country’s rulers and foreign gangsters is murdered at home by gunshot, alongside his fiancée. The prime minister, who features in the journalist’s reporting, holds a press conference offering to reward anyone who helps bring the killers to justice with €1m ($1.18m) in cash piled up on a table before him. Tens of thousands of demonstrators occupy the streets chanting for justice, but the prime minister, who has previously referred to journalists as “prostitutes” and “toilet spiders”, dismisses them as stooges of opposition parties or foreign speculators. Meanwhile journalists at the public broadcaster are laid off after they protest against the appointment of goverment spokespeople as news managers.

This account of the past few months describes not some dictatorship tipping into chaos but Slovakia, a member of the European Union and NATO. But this is what happened next. The protests lead, after some political wrestling, to the...Continue reading

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A bizarre new government takes shape in Italy

IN MANY another country, Giuseppe Conte would be politically a dead man walking. Instead, on May 23rd, he was asked to form Italy’s next government.

Despite a controversy that cast doubt on Mr Conte’s truthfulness, President Sergio Mattarella asked the little-known law professor to seek the backing of parliament for western Europe’s first all-populist cabinet. He is likely to succeed. The 53-year-old Mr Conte, who vowed to be “the defence counsel of the Italian people”, was a compromise candidate chosen by the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) and the hard-right Northern League after it became apparent that neither would let the other have the top job. Together, the M5S and the League have a solid majority of 37 in the 630-seat Chamber of Deputies, though a slimmer edge in the Senate.

Luigi Di Maio, leader of the M5S, and Matteo Salvini, head of the League, brushed aside evidence that Mr Conte had padded his professional CV with courses abroad that he had neither taken...Continue reading

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The growing strains between Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron

WHEN Emmanuel Macron won the French presidency last May, many hailed a new Franco-German dawn. Like Angela Merkel, he was a bookish centrist with few tribal allegiances. Like the chancellor, he saw Europe through the lens of the euro-zone crisis. “A little magic dwells in each beginning,” proclaimed Mrs Merkel at their first meeting as leaders in May 2017, quoting Hermann Hesse. The concept of “Merkron” was born.

A year on, the sheen has worn off. Flashes of irritation now mark the relationship between the two leaders, particularly over euro-zone reform. Allies of both Mr Macron and Mrs Merkel let it be known that their bosses are bridling at each other. The former considers the latter plodding and overcautious, the latter regards the former as rash and unreasonable.

At heart are two different understandings of the Merkron project. Mr Macron believes in the need for big-bang reform of the EU, with an overhaul of the currency union at its core, and has set out his agenda in speech...Continue reading

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Ireland looks set to decriminalise abortion

WHAT links Ireland with Venezuela, Somalia and Afghanistan? All four countries forbid abortions, except to save the mother’s life. Ireland’s eighth constitutional amendment, which 67% of people voted for in 1983, prohibits terminations even in rape cases. Yet that could change soon. On May 25th Ireland will hold a referendum on whether to repeal the amendment, thus allowing parliament to legalise abortion. Polls suggest that half the population favour doing so, with 30% disagreeing and 20% unsure.

Statistical analysis of global abortion rules reveals that almost no rich country has a greater mismatch between its law and its demographic profile than Ireland. True, a large Catholic contingent and high levels of piety are both associated with stricter rules. But a hefty GDP per head and high rates of women working are linked to greater laxity (as is a history of communist government, notes Jessica Hyne of the UN). Overall, Ireland resembles Austria or Spain, which both allow abortion on...Continue reading

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Turkey’s government takes new powers to censor the internet

TURKEY’s conspiracy theorists have had their hands full of late, uncovering the dark powers responsible for the collapse of the country’s currency, which has lost almost a fifth of its value against the dollar this year, attempts by foreigners to murder President Recep Tayyip Erdogan using telekinesis, and a coup attempt set in motion by a biscuit commercial. Now they have exposed a new plot—produced by Netflix. In early April, days after the streaming company released a new trailer for “Casa de Papel”, a popular series, a pro-government journalist concluded the video contained “subliminal messages” intended to trigger “an economic coup d’état, political assassinations, a wave of terror attacks, or a new treacherous scheme containing them all”. A former mayor of Ankara, the capital, immediately linked the show’s theme song to demonstrations which rocked Turkey in 2013, and called on the authorities to investigate. Weeks later, another pundit suggested that the series was to blame for...Continue reading

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America’s geriatric prison population is growing

ISMAEL IGARTUA got his first job, as a counsellor at a homeless shelter, when he was 55 years old. For the previous 29 years he was imprisoned on charges stemming from an incident during which he shot a police officer in the arm. In prison he earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in theology.

After his release, Mr Igartua says he had to learn how to order food in a restaurant, and relearn how to cross a busy New York street. At least he had a family to return to. Many older ex-convicts do not: more than 70% of prisoners above the age of 50 released in New York went directly to a homeless shelter.

Between 1993 and 2013 America’s crime rate fell from around 52 crimes per 1,000 people to 23. At the same time, largely because of America’s penchant for handing out long sentences, the number of people over 55 in state prisons rose from 26,300 to 131,500, and their share of the total more than tripled. According to the Osborne Association, a New York-based non-profit, by...Continue reading

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Juuling is popular—perhaps too much so

IT IS an entrepreneur’s dream: make a gadget so appealing that fans turn its name into a verb. “Juuling”, after a device known as a Juul that now accounts for 60% of e-cigarette sales in America, has become a youth fad. “I’ve been doing this work for 30 years and haven’t seen anything like this,” says Matthew Myers of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. Some schools have even removed toilet doors that were sheltering juuling gatherings.

Until recently teenage vaping appeared to be waning. Use of e-cigarettes by middle- and high-school pupils increased until 2015 but fell sharply the next year, according to the Centres for Disease Control. Teenagers have also become less likely to smoke or use most illicit drugs.

Consistent, up-to-date data on e-cigarette use are lacking. But it is possible that the Juul craze has rekindled enthusiasm. A survey conducted in 2017 by the University of Michigan found that 12% of 13- to 17-year-olds had vaped in the past 30 days. The...Continue reading

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Why are Dutch-Americans so different from the Dutch?

May your windmills spin for ever

PETE HOEKSTRA seemed a good choice for America’s ambassador to the Netherlands when President Donald Trump appointed him last year. Mr Hoekstra, a former congressman, was born in the Netherlands and grew up in Holland, a largely Dutch-American town in Michigan. Unfortunately, Mr Hoekstra had baselessly claimed in 2015 that politicians in the Netherlands were “being burned” by Muslim radicals. A Dutch television reporter in Washington duly asked him what he had meant. Mr Hoekstra denied having said it, prattling about “fake news”. The Dutch press corps was livid. Mr Hoekstra waited three weeks before formally apologising. The Dutch were also irritated by his opposition to same-sex marriage.

As it turns out, appointing a Dutch-American ambassador to The Hague was a diplomatic and cultural misstep. The Netherlands is among the most liberal countries in the world. Most Dutch-Americans, like Mr Hoekstra, are conservative....Continue reading

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We think the Democrats will take the House

ALTHOUGH they lack the intense personal drama of a presidential race, America’s mid-term elections in November will be hugely important. Every seat in the House of Representatives is up for grabs, along with 35 out of 100 Senate seats. A Democratic takeover of either chamber would unleash a flurry of investigations into President Donald Trump and wreck his hopes of passing more conservative laws on a partisan basis. If the Democrats take the House, Mr Trump might also be impeached.

This year’s mid-term campaign is extraordinary in another way. It is expected to be closely fought. Thanks to Americans’ tendency to...Continue reading

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