Pakistan’s top court is eager to take on any brief

Judge, benefactor, milkman

THE chief justice of Pakistan, Saqib Nisar, peers through a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles at the ingredients list on a packet of powdered milk, shakes his head in sadness and then shoos 20 lawyers for the industry away from the bench. He has a busy schedule. Consumed in recent months by a mission to deliver “clean air, clean water and pure milk” to Pakistan, the 64-year-old is spending a Saturday hearing 16 cases that he has taken up suo motu, or on his own initiative. Crowds throng the courthouse in Lahore, the capital of the state of Punjab, drawn by the spectacle of a judge dispensing verdicts like a king. The powder, he rules, must be relabelled post-haste. After milk, he turns to the owners of a factory allegedly dumping effluent into a river. An elderly villager in a white turban breaks forward, begging the justice to punish them. “I cannot let my children be poisoned,” thunders Mr Nisar (pictured).

Mr Nisar is not Pakistan’s first celebrity judge. In...Continue reading

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Nepalese nationalists force a Bollywood muscleman to retreat

The president of the Philippines wants to close paradise

STAND where the warm sea laps the gleaming white sand of the 4km-long beach on the resort island of Boracay and whip out your selfie stick. You can capture an image of yourself against the impossibly beautiful backdrop of an orange sun dropping from a pink sky into a deep blue sea. Or you could, if the parasailors and banana-boat riders would only get out of the way. And then there is the local feature that your camera cannot capture: the peculiar whiff wafting up from the water at your feet.

“Boracay is a cesspool,” President Rodrigo Duterte declared, with customary frankness, in a speech last month. “You go into the water, it’s smelly. Smells of what? Shit.” Look down, and your toes curl up in the green algae washed ashore from the shallows where it grows, fed by sewage that seeps untreated into the sea from the resorts and ancillary businesses that cram the island. Look up, and you see the start of the evening parade of tourists up and down the beach-front. They are Chinese or Koreans,...Continue reading

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India spends a fortune on defence and gets poor value for money

IN FEBRUARY India quietly passed a milestone. The release of its annual budget showed that defence spending, at $62bn, has swept past that of its former colonial master, Britain. Only America, China, Saudi Arabia and Russia lavish more on their soldiers. For nearly a decade India has also been the world’s top importer of arms. In terms of active manpower and the number of ships and planes, its armed forces are already among the world’s top five.

Measured by ambition, India may rank higher still. Its military doctrine envisages fighting simultaneous land wars against Pakistan and China while retaining dominance in the Indian Ocean. Having revealed its nuclear hand in 1998 with a series of tests, India has developed its own ground-hugging cruise missiles and is trying to perfect submarine-launched intercontinental ones, too. Since the Hindu nationalist party of the prime minister, Narendra Modi, took power in 2014 it has also adopted a more muscular posture. Last summer it sparred with China atop the Himalayas in the tensest stand-off in...Continue reading

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China’s Communist Party meets the world

A spate of hiring, firing and quitting leaves fewer checks on Donald Trump’s impulses

THE revolving door of Donald Trump’s administration is spinning fast. In the past couple of weeks the president has fired his national security adviser, H.R. McMaster (pictured, top left), and his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, and lost his chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn (bottom left), who resigned after failing to stop Mr Trump putting tariffs on aluminium and steel. John Dowd, the top lawyer representing the president in Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference, has also quit. Mr Trump is trying to hire his fifth communications director, following the resignation of Hope Hicks.

While such turnover is rarely good for morale or the crafting of coherent policy, a bigger problem lurks. The replacement cast will now be made up of advisers who could indulge Mr Trump’s worst instincts on national security, trade and legal defence rather than temper them. The next phase of his presidency could therefore be one of the unfettered id: Trump unbound.

Start with national security. In place of Mr McMaster, a...Continue reading

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How the Supreme Court and the next census could affect the electoral map

AS LONG as elections have been held, candidates have sought to bend the rules to their advantage. American political parties have taken gerrymandering to new heights, using computer models that enable districts to be crafted block by block for maximum partisan gain. The Supreme Court is now taking notice, having accepted two cases that question whether it is constitutional for legislators to choose their voters, rather than the other way round. But Republicans, whose victories in 2010 put them in a position to doctor far more districts than Democrats have, are taking no chances. A change to the questionnaire for the decennial census in 2020 is expected to increase the share of districts whose voters prefer Republicans.

The Supreme Court has ruled on gerrymandering before. In 2004 a majority of the justices agreed that it should be reined in, but they could not decide how. Now they are poised to re-evaluate that question.

On March 28th they were to hear Benisek v Lamone, a case pitting Republican voters in...Continue reading

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How and where growing numbers of Americans are taking their own lives

A bridge too fatal

THIRTY-THREE people leapt from the Golden Gate Bridge last year, plunging 75 metres to their deaths. Yet the tally could have been much worse. Another 245 contemplating suicide were talked down by the police patrols who diligently comb America’s most famous suicide site. Plans to construct a suicide-prevention barrier (a large net) have now been agreed on: it will be completed in 2021 and cost $204m.

Though jumping is a relatively rare way to end one’s life, it is on the rise. There were 1,123 such deaths in 2016 compared with 788 in 2010. The same trend holds for suicides by gunshot, overdose and hanging, according to an analysis by The Economist of mortality files from the Centres for Disease Control. In almost every demographic category—men and women, young Asians and elderly whites, city dwellers and rural folk—the problem is getting worse.

In nearly all other OECD countries, suicide has declined since 2000...Continue reading

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Republican governors try to avoid holding special elections

“WE SHOULD call him Walker the Rigger,” fumes Martha Laning. The chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin is up in arms about plans by Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s Republican governor, to change a law so that Republicans can avoid losing another special election. “He has already rigged the system so much that he thought he would not have to worry any more,” says Ms Laning, referring to districts gerrymandered to favour Republicans, which voters are challenging at the Supreme Court (see article), and voter-identification laws that make it harder for minorities and poor people to vote.

Until a few months ago Mr Walker expected to cruise to re-election in November for a rare third term. Yet the year started with a shock for him. In January a historically Republican district in a rural western region in Wisconsin voted for Patty Schachtner,...Continue reading

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Republicans seek alternatives to Obamacare’s pricey insurance markets

Religion to the rescue

REPUBLICANS may have abolished the “individual mandate”, an unpopular part of Obamacare that fines Americans for not buying health insurance. But most of the law’s rickety architecture remains intact. Having given up, for now, on sweeping legislative reform, the Trump administration and Republican-leaning states are seeking ways to help consumers circumvent the law.

During the latest annual enrolment period, which ran from November 1st to December 15th, just before the individual mandate was repealed, 11.8m Americans signed up for coverage on Obamacare’s “exchanges”. Several million more will have bought similar plans direct from insurers. These markets are designed so that anyone, however ill, can buy generous coverage at the same price as a healthy person. The individual mandate was designed to bring in enough low-risk customers to make the market profitable for insurers. Without it, enrolments for 2019 are likely to fall (though no one...Continue reading

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Why Donald Trump is unlikely to start a catastrophic conflict

AFTER Donald Trump gave the order to fire 59 cruise missiles at an air base in Syria last year, no one seemed more surprised than the president himself. Ordering military action wasn’t like deciding to buy a building, he mused on CBS News. “These decisions are unbelievable—you know, in terms of importance because it’s human—it’s…it’s…it’s killing. I hate it.” Is it credible that someone so shocked and tremulous after launching a strike that mangled a few planes and killed fewer than a dozen people could start a war in North Korea or Iran that might claim hundreds of thousands of lives?

Mr Trump seems to want people to think so. Despite denouncing America’s invasion of Iraq as “the single worst decision ever made” earlier this month, he has hired as his national security adviser one of the few people who still defends it. John Bolton has also advocated pre-emptive strikes against North Korea and Iran. “When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you don’t wait until it...Continue reading

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Can Spanish avoid America’s language graveyard?

IN A sunny classroom scattered with Spanish translations of “Green Eggs and Ham” and Spanish-English dictionaries, Anabel Barrón reads aloud to her second-grade class from a book about penguins. “Y los pingüinos vuelan?” she asked. “No, they don’t fly!” answered an eager boy with a neat crew cut. “En español, por favor, Justin,” Ms Barrón gently chided him.

The classroom is one of several that offers bilingual instruction at the Sandra Cisneros Campus, a charter school in the Echo Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles that serves mostly Latino children. Kindergarteners in its dual-immersion programme spend 80% of their days in Spanish and 20% in English. Each subsequent year they spend an extra 10% of their time in English until fifth grade, when 70% of their instruction is in English and 30% in Spanish.

The original theory underpinning such programmes was that they helped Spanish-dominant children perform better by easing them into English. Today, says Melissa Mendoza, the school’s principal, Latino parents are seeking...Continue reading

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Italy’s populists edge closer to forming a government

THE first duty of a newly elected Speaker of the chamber of deputies, Italy’s lower house, is to visit the president in his palace on the Quirinal hill. On March 24th Roberto Fico of the maverick Five Star Movement (M5S) was chosen for the job. But instead of following custom by slipping into an official limousine for the one-kilometre journey, Mr Fico walked up with his partner.

His election signalled not just a change of style, but a shift in the political landscape that shortened the odds on an all-populist government emerging from the consultations that President Sergio Mattarella is to initiate after Easter. Mr Fico, who began in politics as an environmental activist, won with the help of the populist-right Northern League and Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative Forza Italia party. Yet more strikingly, his colleagues in the Senate voted to make Elisabetta Casellati the new Senate president. Ms Casellati was the candidate of an electoral alliance including the League and Forza Italia. She is known for her loyalty to Mr Berlusconi, whose...Continue reading

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More market volatility seems likely

“FASTEN your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” Those famous lines of Bette Davis in “All About Eve” may turn out to be the motto for the markets in 2018. After the “volatility vortex” in February, sparked by concerns about inflation, markets have thrown a “tariff tantrum” after President Donald Trump sparked fears of a trade war with China.

In February stocks sank on heavy hints of American levies on imported steel and aluminium. The prospect of trade measures against China, signalled on March 22nd, again hit shares. Then reports that China and America were making progress in trade talks caused the S&P 500 index to rise by 2.7% on March 26th, its best day since August 2015. It promptly fell again by 1.7% the next day (see chart).

Further volatility seems likely, not least after the appointment of John Bolton, an ultra-hawk on foreign policy, as Mr Trump’s national security adviser. That raises the possibility of increased tension with North Korea, despite the...Continue reading

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We have seen the future and it twerks

CYNTHIA NIXON is the latest celebrity to run for office in America; the “Sex and the City” star is trying to be governor of New York. If she succeeds, she will follow in a long line of celebrities-turned-politicians including Sonny Bono, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura and most notably, Presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.

This may not be a uniquely American phenomenon. Beppe Grillo, a comedian, launched the Five Star movement, now Italy's biggest party. Silvio Berlusconi cultivated the celebrity style. George Weah, a footballer, has just been elected president of Liberia. Joseph Estrada, a movie star, was president of the Philippines.

Even conventional politicians are expected to show a bit of star quality. Al Gore failed in his run for president in part because his public demeanour was seen as wooden and dull (it was said he reminded women of their first husbands). The attempts in last year’s election campaign to create...Continue reading

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The Clock is Ticking Faster at Tesla

Tesla will soon need money again. The trouble is, raising it suddenly looks a lot more challenging.

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Kim Jong Un visits China

ON MARCH 28th a sandstorm descended on Beijing like a chemical-weapons attack, sending pollution-monitoring equipment off the charts and reducing visibility to a few metres. The same day the Chinese government announced that Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s leader, had met his Chinese opposite number, Xi Jinping, in Beijing, sending diplomatic speculation off the charts and leaving the prospects for talks about North Korea’s nuclear weapons as hard to discern as ever.

Mr Kim’s visit was shrouded in secrecy from the moment an armoured train, similar to the one his father and grandfather used for foreign trips, pulled into Beijing station, unannounced. The mystery continued throughout his two-day stay, Mr Kim’s first meeting with any head of state and his first known foreign trip since he took power in 2011. The visit was not even confirmed to have taken place until he had returned to Pyongyang. But if it added new puzzles to the geopolitics of North-East Asia, it also made a few things...Continue reading

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Why Apple Got Schooled by Google

Apple’s business model makes it hard to compete with Google in budget-conscious education market.

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BYD: Buffeted by Beijing

The electric vehicle maker is no longer the best—or only—way to bet on China’s new energy car market

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Lululemon Gets a Boost From E-Commerce

Reports of athleisure’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

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Tech's Risk Bill Comes Due

High valuations haven’t fully reflected new world of risks.

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Turkey’s last big independent media firm is snapped up by a regime ally

RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN has been on a roll lately. On March 18th the Turkish president announced the army’s capture of Afrin, a Kurdish stronghold in Syria, after two months of relentless attacks. Barely a week later, he scored another victory when a pliable mogul snapped up the last bastion of semi-independent journalism in Turkey, the Dogan group, for $1.2bn.

For one of the country’s largest media conglomerates, the sale must have felt like a coup de grâce. Dogan outlets, including two of the country’s four biggest newspapers, Hurriyet and Posta; a leading television channel, CNN Turk; and a news agency, among many others, have been squirming under government pressure for years. The group’s ageing owner, Aydin Dogan, one of the symbols of Turkey’s deposed secular order, has been hounded by tax inspectors and prosecutors. People close to his group say Mr Dogan conducted the sale without consulting any associates. Some believe the mogul faced arrest unless he sold his empire to one of the president’s men. Had that...Continue reading

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Paint Giants Prepped for Merger Endgame

The sale of Akzo Nobel’s specialty-chemicals business for $12.6 billion will create a pure-play coatings company potentially attractive to U.S. paint giants Sherwin-Williams and PPG Industries.

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A Trade War Might Be a Commodities Buying Opportunity

Oil and metals would probably take a big hit initially. But industrial metals in particular might benefit from China’s likely response.

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Turkey Is the One to Watch for Emerging Markets Risk

For investors concerned more broadly about problems being masked by a world awash in easy money, Turkey is the one to watch.

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A blaze in a shopping mall leaves scores dead

THE Winter Cherry mall in Kemerovo, a Siberian mining city, advertised itself as a family-friendly entertainment centre, complete with a cinema, trampolines and a petting zoo. On Sunday, when flames engulfed the four-storey building, it was filled with parents and children enjoying the first days of the school holidays. Some fled the fire by jumping from windows; harrowing footage from inside the building showed others trying to break through locked exit doors. Many did not make it out. As of late Monday, at least 64 people were reported dead in one of the deadliest fires in recent Russian history. Reports from Kemerovo suggest the final toll could be higher.

The tragedy appears to have been the result of corner-cutting on the part of the mall’s owners, as well as incompetence on the scene. Witnesses told Russian media that the fire alarm had failed to go off. Investigators say a security guard shut off the public-announcement system alerted to the fire. Four people have already been detained in connection with the incident. Russia’s...Continue reading

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Why Facebook Isn't So Easily Deleted

Facebook’s huge and highly profitable business makes it difficult to hurt.

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Barclays: Too Big For a Deal, Too Small to Compete

Does a leading U.K. retail and commercial bank belong with a mid-ranking U.S.-focused investment bank? If you were pitching this as a new business, you’d surely struggle to find backers. But this is where Barclays finds itself.

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Trade Wars Are A Pig of An Issue for WH Group

Assessing the macroeconomic impact of potential trade wars is hard enough: The effect on individual companies can be pretty tricky to gauge too.

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Donald and Jerome's Excellent Economic Adventure

Rising trade tensions and stimulative fiscal policy are similar to what would be seen in a recession while the Fed continues to tighten policy, creating an unusual situation.

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Something's Gotta Give in the Fed's Forecasts

A big slug of fiscal stimulus will hit the economy over the next two years, but the Federal Reserve doesn’t seem all that impressed.

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Students lead a vast protest against gun violence

ON MARCH 24th, less than 40 days after a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, hundreds of thousands gathered near Capitol Hill in Washington, DC to protest against America’s lax gun laws and implore Congress and President Donald Trump to fix them. The vast crowd—which included toddlers perched upon shoulders, students, teachers and parents—thronged down Pennsylvania Avenue, block after block. Many carried signs denigrating the National Rifle Association (NRA) and chanted a modern version of an old protest slogan: “Hey, hey, NRA, how many kids did you kill today?” 

Thanks to the impressive efforts of the eloquent survivors of the Parkland shooting, the media have not yet moved on from the tragedy. Parallel marches took place in 800 locations across the world. Whether the students’ new movement will bring serious policy change remains unclear. The Parkland survivors have banded together under the banner of #NeverAgain. Yet it has already happened again. On March 20th, a 17-year-old pupil,...Continue reading

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Did Kenya get a loan to build a railway, or vice versa?

WHEN Kenya launched its new railway last year, connecting the coastal city of Mombasa to the capital, Nairobi, passenger tickets sold out. Travelling between the country’s two biggest cities overland had meant crowding into a bus for 12 hours, or riding the old British-built railway, which might have taken 24 hours. The new line, run by Chinese engineers who wander up and down the carriages, has cut the journey to between four and six hours, depending on the number of stops. The seats are comfortable and, at just 700 shillings (about $7), affordable. Lucky passengers see elephants along the way.

Shuttling passengers, however, is not what the new line was built for. When Kenya borrowed $3.2bn from China for the railway in 2014, the aim was to move freight efficiently between the capital and the port at Mombasa, 484km (301 miles) apart. Unlike the passenger service, the cargo one has been a disaster. The second train out of Mombasa arrived a day late, because it didn’t have enough goods to leave the port. Passengers may find the biggest...Continue reading

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Most of Nigeria’s kidnapped Dapchi schoolgirls are freed

On their way home

IT WAS a crisis that ended as suddenly as it began. On the morning of March 21st gunmen from Boko Haram, a jihadist cult, swept back into Dapchi, a remote town in north-east Nigeria, and dropped off most of the 110 schoolgirls they had snatched a month earlier. The return was a rare victory for Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s president. It is also a sharp contrast to the kidnapping of 276 girls from Chibok, another remote town, in 2014. Many of them remain in captivity.

The abduction of the “Chibok girls” by Boko Haram drew international attention and came to define the administration of Mr Buhari’s predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan: incompetent, detached and corrupt, unable even to provide security to threatened schools. That played no small part in Mr Jonathan’s defeat at the ballot box in 2015, the first by an incumbent president since the end of military rule in 1999.

A year ahead of presidential elections scheduled for February, the...Continue reading

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After taking Afrin, Turkey looks for new targets in Syria

FOR President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the timing of Turkey’s victory in the Afrin region of northern Syria could not have been better. After a two-month offensive against Kurdish militants, Turkish troops took control of the enclave’s main town on March 17th. The next day Turkey celebrated the anniversary of the battle of Gallipoli, the only big Ottoman victory of the first world war. True to form, Mr Erdogan rolled the two conflicts into one, accusing Western powers of backing the Kurdish forces against Turkey. “In Gallipoli they attacked us with the most powerful army,” he said. “Now that they do not have the courage to do so, they come at us with the world’s basest, bloodiest, specially trained and equipped terrorist organisations.”

Capturing Afrin was easier than expected. By the time Turkish tanks rolled into the main town, the Kurdish militia known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, had melted away. Nearly 200,000 residents had already fled, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The Britain-based...Continue reading

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Forty-four African countries sign a free-trade deal

“LET’S get together,” sang the choir to the rhythm of Bob Marley, as a succession of African leaders signed an ambitious, continent-wide free-trade agreement in Kigali on March 21st. Although all 55 members of the African Union (AU) had been involved in negotiations around the grandly named Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA), not all were ready to sign as one. On the day, 44 put pen to paper. Among the holdouts was Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy. Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president and the host of the AU summit, had no time for sceptics. “Some horses decided to drink the water. Others have excuses and they end up dying of thirst.”

The logic of the deal is sound. Trade in Africa is still shaped by relationships and infrastructure dating back to the colonial era. Countries mostly sell primary commodities to other continents. Only 18% of their exports are traded within Africa, where they often face high tariffs. The CFTA is meant to change that by creating a “single continental market for goods and services”. UNCTAD, a UN agency,...Continue reading

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Egypt’s sham election features two candidates, but no choice

SINCE one in four Egyptian voters cannot read, political candidates pick symbols to identify themselves on the ballot. Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, the president, chose a star. It shines down from billboards across the country alongside his ubiquitous visage, smiling on a farm or peering through binoculars aboard a warship. His opponent in the coming election, Moussa Mustafa Moussa, chose an aeroplane. Walking past a poster of Mr Moussa, a man laughs at his choice: “It’s because he’ll need to fly away if anyone votes for him.”

There is little else to say about the election itself, which begins on March 26th and lasts three days. Mr Sisi will win. His opponent has lived up to a promise not to challenge the president. Across the whole of Cairo your correspondent has seen only four banners in support of Mr Moussa. The only question is whether the electorate will turn out in greater numbers than they did for the last presidential election, in 2014, when 47% voted. Mr Sisi’s critics have called for a...Continue reading

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A short history of Kurdish women on the front lines

A British warrior abroad

WHEN Anna Campbell heard that Kurdish women were fighting the jihadists of Islamic State in Syria, she left her job as a plumber in Britain and joined them. Ms Campbell (pictured), who was privately educated, said she wanted to defend the “revolution of women” in Kurdish-held parts of the country—even though the British government regards such volunteers as, in effect, terrorists. On March 15th a missile killed her as she fought with the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), the Kurds’ all-female militia, against the Turkish army.

Kurdish women first took up arms in the early 1990s, as members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged a decades-long war for self-rule in Turkey. Inspired by Murray Bookchin, an obscure American philosopher, Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK’s leader, sought to empower his female comrades. “The 5,000-year-old history of civilisation is essentially the history of the enslavement of women,” wrote the...Continue reading

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Britain pulls off a diplomatic coup against Russia at the EU

ONE question confronting Britain and the European Union is how to maintain foreign-policy and security co-operation after Brexit. Theresa May, Britain’s prime minister, often notes that failure to find agreement would harm the security interests of both sides. On March 22nd that observation found a pointed form of expression at an EU summit in Brussels, following the recent nerve-agent attack on a Russian émigré and his daughter in Salisbury. After some agile British diplomacy the EU’s 28 leaders issued a joint statement declaring that the only plausible explanation for the attack was that Russia was responsible for it. 

This language, tougher than Mrs May had dared to hope, clears the way for further collective EU action, including on beefing up defensive instruments against Russian hybrid warfare, later this year. Nor was the European response limited to words. The EU’s ambassador to Russia has been temporarily withdrawn to Brussels, and on March 26th several countries, possibly including France and Germany, are expected to...Continue reading

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Another jihadist killer strikes in France

THE attack appears depressingly similar to several others in recent years in France. On March 23rd a young man, reportedly of north African origin and of declared allegiance to the so-called Islamic State, spread terror by shooting random unarmed victims: the occupants of a passing car in the south-western town of Carcassonne; policemen out jogging; and finally shoppers in a supermarket in Trèbes, a village of 5,000 people a few kilometres to the east. He might have imagined the police would be slow to react in such a small community.

The attacker, who screamed “Allahu akbar” (God is great) as he went about his work, tried to prolong the assault by taking hostages, a tactic used by other violent extremists in France and elsewhere, most notably at the Bataclan theatre in Paris in November 2015, where 90 people died. The goal, in such cases, appears to be to attract as much attention as possible, and to stir up public frustration if police are slow to respond. This time, the reaction was relatively swift. By mid-afternoon, three hours after...Continue reading

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Mauricio Macri fights Argentina’s tradition of handouts for votes

JUST off Leonardo da Vinci Avenue, a long street of modest shops and foul-smelling gutters in the district of La Matanza outside Buenos Aires, stands La Juanita, a co-operative. Founded by unemployed workers in 2001, it occupies a former school. It runs a free kindergarten, a microcredit programme, a call centre and, nearby, a large community bakery, all with the aim of helping the unemployed get work. Since Mauricio Macri, a former businessman of the centre-right, was elected as Argentina’s president in 2015 La Juanita has become part of a political experiment.

La Matanza is in the heart of the conurbano, a sprawl of poor and crime-ridden suburbs around Argentina’s capital which contains some 10m people. It was a bastion of support for Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the populist Peronist president from 2007 to 2015. Peronism long controlled the conurbano through clientelism, providing handouts in return for political loyalty. This system stopped...Continue reading

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Lessons from a murder in Rio de Janeiro

Marielle Franco, now silenced

ON THE sweltering afternoon of March 18th some 2,000 people crammed the narrow streets of Maré, a favela in the north of Rio de Janeiro, to protest against the murder of a friend. Marielle Franco, a city councillor who grew up in Maré, was shot dead four days earlier in the city’s centre (along with her driver) after a meeting she had organised for young black women. “She was killed for trying to make things better,” said Diony, a supermarket employee watching the protesters parade slowly through Maré.

The assassination of Ms Franco, a young, black, gay activist, has reverberated far beyond her birthplace. It was the subject of 3.6m tweets in 34 languages in less than two days. Thousands of people marched in cities across Brazil. In February the president, Michel Temer, made Rio’s crime a national issue when he ordered the army to take control of the state’s police, prisons and fire services until the end of this year. This is the...Continue reading

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Why Canada’s prime minister is homeless

MOST heads of government have an official residence. It is normally an uncontroversial perk. Not so in Canada. Since 1951 the country’s prime ministers have lived in 24 Sussex, a 34-room limestone mansion in Ottawa. Justin Trudeau, the current prime minister, did as a child, when his father, Pierre Trudeau, had the job. But he has taken up residence at Rideau Cottage on the neighbouring estate of the governor-general, the queen’s representative in Canada. The problem is that 24 Sussex is too run-down to house Mr Trudeau, his wife and three children. And he does not want to take the political heat for approving repairs.

No one doubts that the 150-year-old house, built by a lumber baron, needs work. Ceilings and walls are impregnated with asbestos, a mineral so carcinogenic that Canada will ban its export next month. Some of the paint is lead-based. The place is infested with mice, which may be why Mr Trudeau’s predecessor, Stephen Harper, liked cats. The auditor-general warned a decade ago that the plumbing was clapped out, the 50-year-old...Continue reading

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The short unhappy presidency of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski

PERU’S president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, left office on March 21st much the way he had governed during his 20 months in power. He walked out of the massive doors of the presidential palace and started waving to onlookers before taking a call on his mobile phone and ducking into a car. It was a low-key exit for the former banker, who was elected with one of the slimmest majorities in recent history and had little support in congress or among the 30m Peruvians he governed. Most had little idea how Mr Kuczynski planned to help Peru become a solidly middle-class country with strong institutions, as he had promised. His administration, like his departure, seemed distracted.

What felled him, though, was his connection with Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction firm at the centre of multiple scandals across Latin America. In December congress obtained evidence that Westfield Capital, a company owned by Mr Kuczynski, had worked with Odebrecht while he was finance minister and prime minister in a government...Continue reading

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A local election tests Indonesia’s ruling coalition

SUDIRMAN SAID is smiling and shaking hands with shopkeepers selling everything from meat carcasses to herbal tonics. The crowded market in Semarang, the capital of Central Java, is not the sort of place one would expect to encounter a smartly dressed 54-year-old accountant. But as the opposition’s candidate to be governor of the province, Mr Sudirman must campaign in every corner to stand even a slim chance of victory. Few others were brave enough to seek the nomination. “They didn’t want to be losers,” Mr Sudirman chuckles. “Am I willing to be a loser?”

Millions of Indonesians will go to the polls on June 27th to choose governors, mayors and other officials. All three of the country’s most populous provinces—West, East and Central Java—face elections. The island of Java accounts for less than a tenth of Indonesia’s territory but almost half of its 190m-plus voters (the overall population is 266m, making Indonesia the world’s fourth-most-populous country). Moreover, Java played a pivotal part in the most recent presidential...Continue reading

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How Bangladesh vanquished diarrhoea

IN THE 27 years since he became headmaster of a school in Trishal, in northern Bangladesh, Mohamed Iqbal Baher has noticed some changes in his pupils. Although boys and girls are often absent because they are helping their parents in the fields, they miss fewer lessons because of illness. Mr Baher does not recall an outbreak of cholera in the past ten years. And, although he cannot be sure, he thinks that pupils are taller than they used to be.

If so, it is probably because they were healthier infants. In 1993-94, 14% of Bangladeshi babies aged between 6 and 11 months had suffered an attack of diarrhoea in the previous two weeks, according to their parents, who were responding to a household survey. That is an important stage in a child’s development, but also a period of great vulnerability to stomach bugs, as babies are weaned. By 2004 the proportion of stricken babies had fallen to 12%, and in 2014 it had dropped below 7%. Stunting—being extremely short for one’s age—has declined roughly in...Continue reading

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Why billboards are under attack in Pakistan’s business capital

The way things were

GONE are the 20ft-long bars of Dairy Milk. Gone the models with Veet-shaven legs. And gone the handsome cricketers, inviting you to open a refreshing can of Pepsi. Over the past 20 months officials have stripped Karachi, Pakistan’s throbbing business capital, of all billboards on public property. On a drive through its traffic-clogged streets, fresh views of concrete highways and pedestrian overpasses greet the eye. “The city is barren by comparison,” beams Sumaiya Zaidi, who campaigned for the purge.

The clean-up jars with Karachi’s reputation, for two reasons. First, the local government usually fumbles even basic tasks. Mafiosi sell water to many of the city’s 15m residents, driving tankers down pot-holed or unpaved roads. Second, the megacity is the heart of Pakistan’s retail market, whose latest annual growth of 8.2% is about the fastest in the world, according to Euromonitor, a market-analysis firm. Keen to hawk their wares within its...Continue reading

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Not all Japanese towns and villages are atrophying

Some towns are blossoming

THERE was nothing wrong with Chika and Takeshi Ota’s life in Osaka, Japan’s liveliest city, where she worked as a shop manager and he as a driver. But a visit to Tasmania, in Australia, convinced Chika of the superiority of rural life. In May last year, with two tiny children in tow, they moved to Shimanto, a sprawling town in Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands. Sitting in one of the sparse buildings that make up Kleingarten, a community of 22 basic houses with allotments they now call home, the couple, who are in their late 30s, describe how they hope to make a living through farming. “It is a risky choice, but we are happy,” says Chika.

Japan’s population is shrinking and ageing. Both trends are especially pronounced in the countryside, since young people tend to move to cities to find jobs, romance and good restaurants. The net inflow of Japanese to Tokyo rose from 96,500 in 2013 to 120,000 people last year, notes...Continue reading

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The chief justice of the Philippines is under attack

How do you solve a problem? Fire Maria

IN THE back room of a chicken restaurant famous for its banana ketchup, the small, neat, bespectacled chief justice tells a swarm of journalists that she has done her best “to fight for justice”. Maria Lourdes Sereno has been having to fight harder than usual in recent weeks. Congress is initiating impeachment proceedings against her, while the government is attempting to nullify through the courts her appointment as chief justice almost six years ago. On March 1st she took a voluntary leave of absence from the Supreme Court while she tries to defend herself. It is not yet clear when she will return.

Ms Sereno’s detractors have come up with no fewer than 27 complaints against her, from claiming unduly lavish expenses to failing to file all the necessary paperwork during her previous job as a university professor. But many believe the real reason for the campaign to remove her is her outspoken criticism of the government’s...Continue reading

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Hun Sen, Cambodia’s ruler, has been in power too long

A COUNTRY boy, Hun Sen gets up early and works hard. He is said to spend hours every morning on his treadmill, to counter the ravages of his earlier years as a field commander and chain-smoker. Like the best autocrats, Cambodia’s prime minister understands the importance of social media. Aware that dull state television repels viewers, he lives on Facebook, buying what followers he cannot attract—he now has 9.6m of them.

He also attends to his constituents. Twice a week he goes down to the garment factories that have burgeoned around the edges of Phnom Penh, the capital. They were once a heartland for the opposition, the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP). But he now delivers long, exhortatory speeches to the textile workers, without notes. He has put up their minimum wage to $170 a month, provided health care and even promised maternity leave.

Since you cannot be too careful, Mr Hun Sen has also abolished the opposition. In November the Supreme Court agreed that the CNRP was part...Continue reading

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