What Apple's iPhone Launch Could Mean for Its Suppliers

Shares of companies that provide Apple with iPhone parts tend to underperform in the months following a new model’s launch.

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Now Comes the Hard Part at Teva

Investors love Teva’s new CEO, but falling generic drug prices and high debt will weigh on shares.

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The cost of the American dream

PAUL RYAN, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, recently tweeted that, “[i]n our country, the condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life. This is what makes America so great.” The idea that every American newborn has an equal opportunity to enjoy the good life is false. But it isn’t just the Speaker who radically underestimates the importance of the lottery of birth—his is a popular view country-wide. And that is one of the reasons why debates about tax in America are so heated.

Richer parents can afford to send their children to better schools and colleges and can offer financial support for housing and other expenses. For these and a host of other reasons, where and to whom you are born is a significant determinant of life outcomes, especially in America. Miles Corak of the University of Ottawa reports that it is possible to predict nearly 50% of the variation in wages of sons in the United States by looking at the wages of their fathers a generation before. That compares to less than 20%...Continue reading

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An Undervalued New Player in the Energy Industry

The merger between GE’s energy business and Baker Hughes has created a new company with more profitability levers to pull than peers while trading at a discount to them.

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Irma Misses Insurers' Danger Zone

Hurricane Irma has left a trail of destruction across Florida. But loss estimates have fallen, benefiting insurers now but leaving a tough pricing trend in place.

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Prada is Expensive Even After Price Cut

Prada’s handbags aren’t the ones to buy this year. Neither are its shares, which look expensive even after Monday’s 12% plunge.

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Beijing and Bitcoin Don't Mix

The Chinese authorities are growing ever more wary of cryptocurrencies—a fact that should chill bitcoin fans.

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Beijing's Latest Yuan Move Is All About Optics

The decision to reverse an arcane rule around currency derivatives is unlikely to check the yuan’s upward momentum.

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Apple's Trillion Dollar iPhone

Apple’s market value has surged in anticipation of a strong cycle, which makes further upside more challenging.

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The Chiapas quake shows that Mexico has learned from past disasters

THE earthquake that struck the coast of southern Mexico, late on September 7th, was a big one, with a magnitude of 8.2. At least 61 people were killed, mostly in the country’s south. In Tabasco, a toddler died under a collapsing wall and a newborn perished in his respirator when the hospital caring for him lost power. A video from Juchitán in the state of Oaxaca, which was especially hard hit, shows a man draping a Mexican flag on the debris of the partially destroyed city hall. Even in Mexico City, some 650km away from the epicentre, the Ángel de la Independencia monument, bathed in green and red light for upcoming national holidays, swayed. Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, called the quake the strongest in at least a century.

But it was not the most destructive. In 1985 a slightly smaller quake—measuring 8.0—off the coast of Michoacán state in the west killed at least 10,000 people, many of them in Mexico City. At least 40 live babies were pulled out of the rubble of a collapsed hospital. The quake was catastrophic for the country’s political establishment, too. Miguel de la Madrid, then the president, was already beset by multiple crises, including the effects of falling oil prices and excessive debt. He appeared paralysed by the disaster and initially rejected foreign aid.

Much of the rescue work in 1985 was carried out by...Continue reading

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The Department of Justice backs a baker who refused to make a gay wedding cake

LAST October, at a campaign event, Donald Trump proudly waved a rainbow flag a supporter had decorated with the words “LGBT for Trump”. If the image was puzzling then, it is jarring now. In his seven months in office, the 45th president has taken a number of steps to harm gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans. His Department of Justice (DoJ) recently argued, contrary to the position of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, that civil-rights laws do not protect gays and lesbians from being fired on the basis of their sexual orientation. He appointed a judge to Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals who has made homophobic comments and tosses around the word “faggot” in speeches. He withdrew an Obama-era policy instructing public schools to permit transgender students to use bathrooms matching their gender identity. And in July he said he planned to bar transgender soldiers from America’s military.

It is no great surprise, then, that Mr Trump’s DoJ has filed a brief in support of a Christian baker whose opposition...Continue reading

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Hurricane Irma Tests Risk-Reward of Catastrophe-Bond Market

Yield-chasing investors have taken on more risk for less potential return in cat bonds; now those investments are at risk.

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Investors Right to Fear Kroger's Future

Kroger says Amazon and discounters are clouding its outlook, which shareholders don’t like to hear.

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Will credit cause a slowdown?

IF THERE is a consensus at the moment, it is that the global economy is finally managing a synchronised recovery. The purchasing managers' index for global manufacturing is at its highest level for six years; copper, the metal often seen as the most sensitive to global conditions, is up by a quarter since May. 

But Steen Jakobsen of Saxo Bank thinks this strength will not...Continue reading

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A year on, Wells Fargo cannot shake off its mis-selling scandal

ON SEPTEMBER 8th 2016, Wells Fargo’s reputation plummeted abruptly from that of America’s finest bank to that of yet another dodgy company. It was revealed to have opened an enormous number of potentially unauthorised retail deposit, current (checking) and credit-card accounts. A year on, two questions have yet to be put to rest. How much harm did Wells do to its customers? And how much did the scandal hurt the bank itself?

Wells has not been passive in its response. It has produced report after report on its misdeeds and submitted to investigations by two federal regulators, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. It has purged its chief executive and the head of its retail bank, clawed back executive bonuses, transformed its board and simplified its formerly decentralised structure. It has created a comprehensive process for restitution and settled a class-action suit.

Yet it cannot put the scandal behind it. In July it...Continue reading

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Hurricane Harvey has exposed the inadequacy of flood insurance

THOSE who live on America’s coasts know to prepare for wrathful hurricanes in late summer—nailing plywood to their windows as the storm approaches. America’s property insurers and reinsurers are ready, too, using sophisticated models to track storms and estimate potential losses. But wind is not the only danger from hurricanes. Ask Houstonians who saw their homes inundated by Hurricane Harvey’s 52 inches (132cm) of rain in the six days to August 30th. Or those in tthe path of Hurricane Irma, which, as The Economist went to press, was wreaking havoc across the Caribbean. But whereas wind damage is covered under most standard insurance policies in America, flood insurance is a government-run add-on that far from all homeowners buy. As a result, of over $30bn in property losses in Texas, only 40% may be insured.

The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) was set up in 1968, after a series of large losses led private insurers to pull back. Those living within a...Continue reading

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Exchange-rate shifts have helped the global economy

STICKLERS for value have plenty of reasons to frown at financial markets. Much feels out of whack, from squashed bond yields to pricey stockmarkets. Yet currency markets, at least, seem to have shifted in line with fundamentals this year. Take the euro, for instance. Since the start of 2017 it has risen by almost 15% against the dollar, to $1.19 (see chart). That has taken it much closer to fair value by benchmarks such as purchasing-power parity (PPP), the exchange rate at which a basket of goods is worth the same in different countries. The OECD puts the euro’s PPP at $1.33. That is quite a stretch from $1.04 in January. “The elastic had to snap back,” says Kit Juckes of Société Générale, a French bank.

Of course, the euro’s revival is a result of more than its being cheap. The anxiety that elections in Europe might bring to power anti-euro populists, such as Marine Le Pen in France, has dissipated. The euro-zone economy has further strengthened, raising the prospect that monetary...Continue reading

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Governments need to rethink their attitudes to debt

GOVERNMENTS do not always make the best budget managers. Assuming it avoids an accidental debt default, America will run a bigger budget deficit this year than the last, despite a booming economy. Germany runs a surplus—but scrimps on critical investments and annoys its euro-area neighbours in the process. Japan, cowering under a mammoth public-debt pile, is weighing raising its consumption tax, though the last rise strangled a tenuous economic recovery. It is awkward, therefore, that the role of fiscal policy as a recession-fighting tool is only growing. The next downturn will be a painful and dangerous learning experience for many politicians.

When that comes, at some point in the next few years, the initial policy response is easily foreseeable. Central banks, nimbler than parliaments, will again move first. But markets reckon that two years from now the Fed’s benchmark rate will remain below 2%, the Bank of England’s below 1% and the European Central Bank’s close to zero. Rates can only go so negative before people abandon the banking system for cash. So cuts to interest rates will be limited. By contrast, in the relatively mild recession of 2001 the Fed cut rates by more than six percentage points. Central-bank asset purchases will follow, assuming they are not already happening, as they might well still be in Europe and Japan. Their effects will be less...Continue reading

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A new bond taps private money for aid projects in war zones

A giant leap for impact investing

INVESTORS might be expected to run a mile from a deal on offer in a conflict-torn part of Africa. At best, it will pay an annual return of 7%; at worst, 40% of the original investment is lost. But a dozen social investors have pooled SFr26m ($27m) to finance the world’s first “humanitarian impact bond”, issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). It will pay for three rehabilitation centres to be built and run in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and Nigeria.

The ICRC’s obligations are backed by “outcome funders”, ie, donors, mostly governments. The bond is an example of “impact investing”, in which private investors seek out social and financial returns, and of “blended finance”, in which public funds help them to do so. Variants have included a bond aimed at educating girls in India and a World Bank-led initiative to raise money to respond to pandemics. The novelty in the ICRC’s...Continue reading

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Why are investors so relaxed about the tensions in Korea?

A ROGUE state has tested what may be a hydrogen bomb and has sent a missile over the territory of a neighbouring country. The American president has promised “fire and fury” if threats continue. The Security Council of the United Nations has been locked in debate. This sounds like the plot of a Hollywood thriller or a paperback potboiler in which the world is heading for conflagration.

But international investors are not thrilled, and seem barely disconcerted, by the crisis on the Korean peninsula. Gold has risen a bit, the yield on Treasury bonds has dropped and the MSCI World equity index has fallen since the start of August. However, the moves have not been huge. Even the South Korean stockmarket, surely the most sensitive gauge of war risk, is well above its level at the start of the year.

What explains this remarkable insouciance? One possibility is that the markets may simply not be very good at assessing political risk. After all, investors failed to foresee either the...Continue reading

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Capacity cuts in China fuel a commodity rally and a debate

STEEL ran in Zhang Cheng’s family for three generations. His grandfather mined iron ore. His father got a job in the big state-owned steel mill just outside Jinan, capital of Shandong province. His mother worked in the on-site hospital. And Mr Zhang went to the mill-run school, graduating to a job in its foundry, where, in the heat of the blast furnace, he rolled metal into thin bars for construction. But after nearly two decades in Jinan Steel, he worked his last day there this summer. In the name of “capacity reduction”—a government policy to rein in excess production of steel—the plant stopped operating in July, and Mr Zhang went on the dole.

Since they worked for a state-owned company, the local government has helped him and the 20,000 others who lost jobs find new ones. But it has been a struggle for Mr Zhang, a soft-spoken man. Openings in Jinan are mainly in the service industry—as a waiter in restaurants or an attendant at a station on the new underground. He worries...Continue reading

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Ambarella's Newest Vision Worth a Look

Chip maker Ambarella has floundered with weak GoPro, drone sales. But computer vision chips offer a promising turnaround

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Ailing Akzo Nobel Keeps Deal Talk Alive and Well

Akzo Nobel seems less and less likely to retain its independence.

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Miners Risk Falling Down Same Old Hole

Mining firms are riding high as metal prices touch their loftiest levels in years. But rebounding investment in copper and iron mines could spell trouble next year.

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Russia votes, but will the Kremlin notice?

ON A brisk Monday evening early this month, Yulia Scherbakova watched her two young children walk to a park with their grandmother. Instead of joining them to play, she picked up a blue clipboard and set off to knock on doors in an unlikely campaign to become a Moscow district councillor. The canvassing can be dispiriting—of the 72 flats she approached in her first building that evening, only 16 opened their doors; many more told her to get lost. The unpaid post offers limited powers and a five-year commitment. But Ms Scherbakova sees such street-level politics as a rare chance to influence Russian civic life. “This is where you can change something in our country,” she says. “At the upper levels it’s not possible.”

She is not alone. Russians will take to the polls on September 10th to elect over a dozen governors and fill thousands of seats in regional and municipal parliaments. For the most part, the vote will be an exercise in stage-managed democracy, with...Continue reading

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Amazon Is Everywhere

Amazon is growing fast and managing such a rapid spread without tripping will be tricky. It can’t afford any slips, as its high valuation requires it to maintain its pace of growth.

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The Republican Party in California continues its long, slow slide

TEN years ago, Arnold Schwarzenegger made a speech at the California Republican Party’s convention that silenced the crowd. “Our party has lost the middle and we will not regain true political power in California until we get it back,” Mr Schwarzenegger, then the state’s governor, warned. “In movie terms, we are dying at the box office. We are not filling the seats.”

Back then, Republican registration in California had been falling for a decade. Nonetheless, Chad Mayes (pictured), until recently the Republican assembly leader, recalls being sceptical of the Terminator’s message. “Dying at the box office? Oh come on,” he recalls thinking to himself at the time. “Things ebb and flow.” Today, Mr Mayes looks back on the message as prophetic.

As of February 2017, just 25.9% of Californian voters were registered with the Grand Old Party—the lowest level since the 1980s and nearly 20 points less than the share of Golden State residents registered as Democrats. There are nearly as many Californians who...Continue reading

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Turkey’s president invokes a millennium-old battle

When the Turks rode in

IN A mighty motorcade, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, descended on the sleepy town of Malazgirt near the Armenian frontier on August 26th. He came to celebrate a millennium-old victory that Turks hail as the dawn of Muslim domination of these once-Christian lands.

Largely forgotten in the West, the battle of Manzikert in 1071 saw Seljuk Turks, led by King Alp Arslan, crush an imperial Byzantine army said to be twice their size. This Turkic push into Anatolia laid the foundation for the Seljuks’ eventual successors, the Ottomans, who took Constantinople, the Byzantine capital, in 1453 and whose empire at its peak extended from the gates of Vienna to the Indian Ocean.

Mr Erdogan’s commemoration of a 946-year-old battle is a bid to woo Turkish nationalists. Having foiled a coup in July last year and only narrowly won sweeping powers in a constitutional referendum in April, he is eager to find new supporters. At...Continue reading

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Emmanuel Macron is trying to change France’s psychology

STRANGE rituals have been taking place behind closed doors in Paris this summer. While much of Europe basked on the beach, elaborate rites and unfamiliar incantations could be overheard in the French capital. Paranormal activity was detected at unusual hours. In 300 hours of talks, which led to the unveiling last week of 36 reforms to the country’s notoriously complicated labour rules, it looked as if President Emmanuel Macron’s government and union leaders were simply negotiating a technical overhaul of France’s rigid employment law. In fact, they were exorcising some of the country’s most troublesome demons.

For decades, the spirit of Karl Marx and his inheritors has hovered over thinking about French labour reform. In 2000, when the Socialist government of Lionel Jospin introduced the 35-hour working week, the underlying idea was to share out existing work and create more jobs. Martine Aubry, the labour minister at the time, described the shorter week as a “project of...Continue reading

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Torture returns to Turkey

The iron fist

THE masked special-ops officers barged into their apartment in Diyarbakir, in Turkey’s south-east, in the dead of a December night, says Tulay Yer-Celik. For the next two hours Mrs Yer-Celik, her month-old son and her mother-in-law listened as the agents beat her husband, Omer, in the next room. The violence ended only when the police arrived. Mr Celik, a journalist for the pro-Kurdish Dicle Haber Agency, one of over 150 news outlets shut down since last year’s bloody, abortive coup, was detained in Diyarbakir for two weeks. He was then transferred to a maximum-security prison near Istanbul, where he remains. His crime, according to an indictment that appeared only in late June, was to have published news stories based on the hacked e-mails of Turkey’s energy minister. He faces a sentence of 16 years.

Turkey’s government, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, proclaimed a policy of “zero tolerance” for torture in the early 2000s. But...Continue reading

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Colombia’s FARC revolutionaries become a political party

ON SEPTEMBER 1st thousands of members and supporters of the FARC thronged the central square of Bogotá. At any other time in the past 50 years, such a sight might have meant that Colombia’s government had collapsed. But the group was not there to celebrate a military victory for the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), a feared guerrilla army. Instead, the fans were hailing the launch of the FARC (Common Alternative Revolutionary Force), a new political party.

Just 20 years ago, Colombia was nearly a failed state. From 1992-99, two-thirds of the world’s kidnappings occurred there, and the FARC controlled up to a third of the country’s territory. But starting in 2002, the government of Álvaro Uribe unleashed the army against the guerrillas, crippling them militarily. His successor, Juan Manuel Santos, kept up the pressure but also invited the FARC to peace negotiations.

After four years of talks, the two sides struck a deal in 2016. The terms were...Continue reading

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How one man and his lawyers slow US-Canada traffic

IN 1929 Joseph Bower built what was then the world’s longest suspension bridge between Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario. He called it the Ambassador Bridge to symbolise Canadian-American friendship. But there is nothing neighbourly about the battle between Manuel Moroun, who bought the bridge in 1979, and Canada’s government, which wants a rival span built 2km (1.2 miles) away.

The Ambassador Bridge is a glaring bottleneck. More than 10,000 lorries, making up 28% of all goods trade between Canada and America, cross it every day. In Windsor, the bridge disgorges traffic into narrow city streets. “You can drive from Montreal to Miami and only hit 17 stoplights,” an old truckers’ joke goes. “And all 17 are in Windsor, Ontario.” Even a brief bridge closure would be hugely disruptive.

In 2005 Canada unveiled plans for a new bridge named after Gordie Howe, a Canadian ice-hockey hero who played for the Detroit Red Wings. It said the project would...Continue reading

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Hurricane Irma strikes the Caribbean

With winds reaching 185 miles (300km) per hour, Hurricane Irma—one of the four strongest Atlantic storms in recorded history—slammed into the eastern Caribbean on September 6th. It first struck Barbuda, damaging 95% of buildings. Gaston Browne, the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, said the island of 1,600 people was now “barely habitable”. On St Martin, Irma destroyed the Caribbean’s third-largest airport. The storm’s eye then passed north of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Nine people have been reported dead, and the toll is expected to rise. Forecasting models predict that Irma will veer towards Florida, which has not been hit by a major hurricane in a decade, and local officials have issued a mandatory evacuation order for Miami Beach. Two other hurricanes, Katia and Jose, have formed in the region and will follow Irma.

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A missing-person case looms over Argentina’s midterm elections

A FEW months ago Santiago Maldonado, a 28-year-old craftsman and tattoo artist, moved to Patagonia, motivated by an affinity for the indigenous Mapuche people. On July 31st, according to his brother, he visited a campsite in the province of Chubut, where Mapuches are protesting to demand title to their ancestral land. He intended to participate in a ceremony for Pachamama, an Andean goddess.

But on the morning of August 1st protesters threw stones at a group of military police officers, injuring two of them. In response, 32 officers entered the camp. The police say they did not arrest anyone. But four witnesses have told a judge they saw the officers load Mr Maldonado into a white truck. He has not been seen since.

The case has become a political Rorschach test in a divided country where “disappearances” have a grim history. In the 1970s a right-wing military dictatorship abducted tens of thousands of citizens—no one knows exactly how many. A large number...Continue reading

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The appeal of Macronismo in Latin America

THE “pink tide” of left-wing hegemony in Latin America has ebbed. Yet rather than a period of strong centre-right government, what has followed in many places is political polarisation. Consider the campaigns for the heavy crop of elections in the region over the next year or so.

These begin with Argentina’s legislative contest next month, which features a close battle in Buenos Aires province, the key electoral district, between President Mauricio Macri’s centre-right coalition and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, his unrepentantly populist predecessor. Presidential elections next year in Colombia and Brazil may turn into a struggle between relatively hard left- and right-wing candidates. Mexico’s race is shaping up to be a referendum on Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the eternal populist candidate of the nationalist left.

If opinion polls are to be believed, most Latin Americans remain broadly in the political centre. They want a market economy, and better state...Continue reading

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Cutting taxes on profits earned abroad would be a pointless giveaway

THE White House has long promised to fund tax cuts by scrapping unspecified loopholes and deductions. As Congress fills in the blanks, there is one source of revenue that looks all but certain to be tapped: the staggering pile of cash America’s firms keep in foreign subsidiaries, which totalled $2.6trn in 2015, according to an estimate by the Joint Committee on Taxation. (The president says the figure is $3trn-5trn today.) Unfortunately, this would probably result in a windfall for shareholders, with few gains for anyone else.

Firms keep profits offshore primarily to avoid paying corporate tax, which is levied only when money is repatriated (monies paid to foreign governments are knocked off the bill). As untaxed profits have piled up, politicians from both parties have eyed them greedily. Hillary Clinton once hoped to start an infrastructure bank with money raised from firms’ foreign cash.

Getting firms to bring more money home has been tried before. In 2004 Congress enacted a tax holiday to that end. Firms were charged a bargain rate of 5.25%, instead of the usual 35%, on repatriated profits. The law’s advocates said it would spark an investment boom, despite warnings from President George W. Bush’s economic advisers that none would materialise. The wonks were right. According to the best available study, repatriations did not increase domestic...Continue reading

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The judicial philosophy of Richard Posner

IN a profession marked by pomp and pretence, Richard Posner, who is retiring from the judiciary, is a renegade. For Dick, as he is known to his staff, the tradition of clerks addressing their bosses as “judge” exemplifies the judiciary’s stodginess and resistance to innovation. In his decades as a writer and a jurist, Mr Posner, aged 78, “changed the legal landscape”, says Eric Segall, his collaborator and a law professor at Georgia State University. Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School says Mr Posner has had a “uniquely broad influence” on the legal academy and on America’s courts.

Few of the nearly 200 circuit-court judges who handle appeals from America’s 94 district courts make headlines. Mr Posner grabs many. The judge’s “staggering work ethic” and “fierce intellect” start to explain his renown, Mr Segall says. Mr Posner is the most-cited legal scholar of all time, according to a 2000 study. He has written more than 3,000 judicial opinions,...Continue reading

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Alaska’s remote villages have a trashy problem

Meet the new garbage man

MANAGING rubbish in Alaska’s bush villages—small communities accessible only by boat or aircraft and often hundreds of miles from the nearest highway—is hard. Waste—including freezers, computers and vehicles—piles up with no easy way to remove it. Rural landfills, which are mostly open, unlined and unmanaged, spill across tundra and into nearby rivers, and hazardous materials leach into soil and water. Smoke from burning trash blows into villages, sometimes closing schools. From 2020, funding from the Environmental Protection Agency that has been essential for dealing with rubbish in these remote places will disappear.

Jan Olson is the City Administrator in Hooper Bay, a village of about 1,200 people at the edge of the Bering Sea, where children learn Yupik in school. Mr Olson describes his home as a “hunter’s dream, a gatherer’s dream”. Open tundra stretches for miles. A short distance from the village, residents can...Continue reading

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Arguments over free speech on campus are not left v right

The cisheteropatriarchy at rest

FRESHMEN crowded the lecture hall at 9am for Humanities 110, the first class of their college careers. Elizabeth Drumm, the head of the programme, made some introductory remarks, her voice quavering. As some faculty members moved to take their places at a panel discussion, three demonstrators emerged from the wings of the auditorium. “We’re protesting Hum 110 because it’s Eurocentric,” one began. “I’m sorry, this is a classroom space and this is not appropriate,” Ms Drumm said, immediately cancelling the lecture. Thus began another academic year at Reed College, a liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon.

Last academic year, a dozen or so students continuously occupied the three-day-a-week lecture series by sitting in front of the auditorium with cardboard signs, sometimes taping their mouths in protest at the absence of non-white voices in the syllabus. One even took to lecturing the freshman class on the podium...Continue reading

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The New America Foundation falls into a familiar trap

BARRY LYNN does not waste time. Two days after being sacked from the New America Foundation, a think-tank where he had worked for 15 years, he stands calmly directing staffers in an immaculate grey suit in an office just around the corner from his old gig. The trouble began for Mr Lynn and his Open Markets team, a research outfit that advocated anti-monopoly regulations, after he published a statement praising the European Commission for levying a $2.7bn fine on Google—a big donor to the think-tank. Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google’s parent company, was upset. Susan Molinari, Google’s chief lobbyist, spoke to Anne-Marie Slaughter, New America’s president and chief executive.

What transpired next is disputed. A few hours after he published the offending statement, says Mr Lynn, he received a call from Ms Slaughter. In his telling, she said that Mr Schmidt and Google, which had donated more than $21m to the foundation, wanted to cut off all ties—and that Mr Schmidt...Continue reading

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Donald Trump ditches DACA

WHEN Karla Robles was 16 years old, she tried to register for college-entrance exams, like hundreds of thousands of high-school juniors in Chicago. She found that she could not—she lacked a social-security number. That was how Ms Robles learned she was in the United States illegally. Her parents brought her and her two brothers from Mexico when she was eight years old. Her father delivered pizzas, pumped petrol and drove trucks; her mother cleaned houses. Like many of America’s other 11m or so undocumented immigrants, Ms Robles and her brothers may have been heading for similar lives in the grey economy.

In June 2012, however, Barack Obama created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme. DACA gives two-year work and residency permits to undocumented immigrants younger than 31, without criminal records, who were brought to America before they were 16, provided they are in or have graduated from high school or university or were honourably discharged from the armed...Continue reading

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Our columnist bids farewell

AS LEXINGTON writes this, his 244th and final column on America, a black-and-white photograph looks down from an office wall. Taken in New York in about 1940, it shows your columnist’s late father, then a serious young man in his 20s, hard at work for a British government agency tasked with bringing America into the second world war. This mission involved both appeals to high-minded principle and to sentiment—tales of British civilian pluck were a staple—to counter the rhetoric of the America First Committee and other isolationists.

During two postings to Washington, DC, this Lexington has tried to remember that history lesson. America remains an indispensable nation. But understandably, the will to bear that burden cannot be taken for granted. For Americans to remain open to the world, at once leading and profiting from a post-war order that their country in large part designed, both heads and hearts must be won. With each new generation, that work needs...Continue reading

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Why the number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean is falling

Libya’s version of catch and release

OVER the past three summers, tens of thousands of migrants piled into boats to make the perilous journey across the Mediterranean. This summer, though, the sea was unusually empty. Since the European Union and Turkey struck a deal in 2016—in effect closing the eastern route to Greece—Italy has been the main destination for migrants. But the number of arrivals there in July was down by more than half compared with last year. In August it fell even further: fewer than 4,000 people came ashore, against more than 21,000 in August 2016. It was the lowest monthly figure recorded in nearly two years.

No one quite knows why. Italy has provided equipment and training to Libya’s coastguard, which has stepped up patrols. The seas have also been rough. But two militias in the western city of Sabratha, thought to be behind much of the people-smuggling, have a different explanation. They claim that Italy offered them money and...Continue reading

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Kenya’s presidential election has been overturned. What next?

IF AT first you don’t succeed, try, try again. That, it seems, is the advice of Kenya’s supreme court to its electoral commission. In a shock decision on September 1st, the court ruled that the presidential election held last month, in which Uhuru Kenyatta, the incumbent, beat Raila Odinga (pictured), an opposition stalwart, was “invalid, null and void”. The vote, it said, had not been conducted in accordance with the constitution—so it must be redone.

As a display of judicial independence, the court’s decision is without precedent, not just in Kenya but across Africa, where it was widely acclaimed. It represents an opportunity—so optimists believe—to build genuine trust in the country’s institutions, especially its highest courts. Yet it also plunges east Africa’s biggest economy back into uncertainty and creates a new risk of violence. Arguments have already erupted over the timing of the new vote, which the electoral commission says it will hold on October 17th. Many...Continue reading

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The Saudis may be stretching out the hand of peace to their old foes

FROM the forecourt of the Prophet Muhammad’s mosque in Medina during the annual haj pilgrimage, which ended on September 4th, came the still, small voice of Shias praying. Saudi security guards fanned them helpfully against the heat. At the al-Baqi cemetery nearby, the resting place of many of the Prophet’s descendants, Sunni vigilantes and puritans scowled at Shia worshippers but, in contrast with previous years, they held back from beating them with sticks. And as over 2.3m Muslims perambulated around Mecca’s great black basalt stone, the Kaaba, Prince Khalid al-Faisal, the province’s governor, singled out 86,000 Iranians for a special welcome.

Change may be afoot in Saudi Arabia’s hostile relations with Shias and their champion, Iran. For decades the kingdom has been the font of Sunni Islam’s anti-Shia dogma. The media issued screeds against the rawafidh, or rejectionists, deemed beyond the pale of proper Islam. But...Continue reading

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Another defeat for Islamic State

The Syrian army pushed into the eastern city of Deir ez-Zor on September 5th, breaking the three-year-old siege of a government-held enclave by Islamic State (IS). It is a victory for Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s blood-soaked dictator, and yet another defeat for the jihadists, whose self-proclaimed caliphate is shrinking fast. American-backed Kurdish and Arab fighters have driven IS out of most of Raqqa, its putative capital, 140km to the west. The group is expected to make its last stand in a ribbon of towns, including Deir ez-Zor, along the Euphrates river.

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A report card for Liberia’s charter schools

Laughing and learning

WHEN 14 years of civil war ended in 2003, Liberia was left with decrepit schools. Many children carried Kalashnikovs rather than textbooks. Since then Liberian governments have tried to start afresh. But, in part because of the outbreak of Ebola in 2014, efforts to improve education have made halting progress.

The consequences are grim. Less than 40% of school-age children attend primary school. By the time they are 18, girls are more likely to be married than literate. Just one woman in four who has finished primary school can read a sentence. According to a study published in 2014, more than 40% of girls have been asked for sex in return for better grades, money or school supplies.

One reason for optimism, however, is Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL), a pilot scheme run by the education ministry with help from Ark, a British education group. Drawing on American charter schools and English academies, last year the...Continue reading

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The race to lead the African National Congress has turned ugly

SOUTH AFRICA’S ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), is on the verge of tearing itself apart with “dirty tricks”, says Gwede Mantashe, its secretary-general. As the ANC prepares to elect new leaders at a conference in December, a vicious battle is under way. The fight is broadly between those aligned with the party’s current leader, Jacob Zuma, who is the president of the country, and those who want to break his grip on the ANC.

Mr Zuma would like to see his ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the former head of the African Union, succeed him as leader of the ANC. Cyril Ramaphosa, the deputy president, is her strongest opponent and, he claims, the victim of a “dirty war” by his comrades. Earlier this month his personal e-mails were hacked and leaked to a pro-Zuma newspaper editor, supposedly revealing extramarital affairs with at least eight women.

The story probably did Mr Ramaphosa no serious harm, not least because Mr Zuma has set new...Continue reading

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A new plan to protect the water around the Seychelles

THE Seychelles is an archipelago of 115 mostly tiny islands, whose collective area, at 460 sq km, is only about a third of London’s. But the country’s granite islands and coral atolls sit within an exclusive economic zone of 1.4m sq km. It is here, in the ocean, that conservationists are working on a new way for small countries to protect their marine environment.

The Seychelles’ economy relies on tourism and tuna. These depend on healthy seas. But paying for conservation is a challenge, says Didier Dogley, the environment minister. So last year the country struck a deal with The Nature Conservancy (TNC), an American NGO. It promised to protect 30% of its waters by 2020—half of this area will be off-limits to fishing. In return, TNC bought up $21.6m of debt owed by the Seychelles to the Paris Club of international creditors. It will allow the country to pay it back at a lower interest rate over a longer period.

Some of the money that the Seychelles saves on...Continue reading

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Massive Chinese investment is a boon for Pakistan

NEVER mind that the two countries’ slogan factory has always been based in China, or that it started off with some truly clunky products. What matters is that Communist China and Pakistan have a joint venture churning out declarations of friendship that date back almost to the two states’ respective founding, some seven decades ago. China and Pakistan have long hailed each other as “all-weather friends”, or “iron brothers” as close as “lips and teeth”. The mutual bond is, leaders from both countries affirm, “higher than the Himalayas, deeper than the deepest ocean, and sweeter than honey”.

And then, from China, come the lover’s gifts. Never has Pakistan been so wooed. The original promised dowry, of $46bn in Chinese grants and soft loans for infrastructure projects, has only grown, to $62bn. This munificence is dubbed the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), launched amid fanfare in 2015, on a visit to Pakistan by President Xi Jinping.

Most of the...Continue reading

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