Russia will raise pension ages that date back to Stalin

WHEN the Soviet Union started paying pensions in the early years of Josef Stalin’s rule, the retirement age was set at 60 for men and 55 for women. It has not been raised since. Experts have urged change for decades, but squeamish politicians have balked. Vladimir Putin declared in 2005 that it would not go up as long as he was president.

So it was with trepidation on June 14th, a month into Mr Putin’s fourth presidential term, that the government revealed plans to raise the retirement age to 65 for men and 63 for women. They announced the move along with an increase in value-added tax from 18% to 20%, hoping to bury the bad news under the opening of the World Cup that day.

Yet Russians have taken notice. Some 2.5m have signed an online petition opposing the change; according to a government pollster, Mr Putin’s approval ratings dropped to “only” 72% on June 17th, levels not seen since before the annexation of Crimea. “They want to solve the government’s money problems at...Continue reading

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Women-only clubs get a makeover

MOST Finns celebrate the summer solstice with a long night of sweaty sauna sessions and binge-drinking. But this year, on an island off the coast of Raseborg, an hour-and-a-half’s drive from the capital Helsinki, a group of women from around the world gathered for the opening of a private island resort to cleanse their bodies and minds of toxins—including, it seems, the patriarchy. “SuperShe Island” is a place for ambitious women to network while experiencing a “vacation on steroids”, says Kristina Roth, the resort’s German-American founder. Men are strictly banned.

The island resort is just one of a crop of new women-only spaces hoping to bring a sea-change in the way women network. The Allbright, a new club in London, focuses on creating business networks for working women. An American firm called The Wing is an all-female co-working space, and plans to open a London branch later this year. Her Global Network, originally from Sweden, helps women find business contacts in 14 cities...Continue reading

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The obstacles on Macedonia’s road to the EU

SOLZA GRCEVA’s face curdles into a sneer as she traces the betrayal of her nation. Over coffee in Skopje, the capital of the country that may soon no longer officially be known as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Ms Grceva outlines her grievances. The government’s “illegal” agreement with Greece last month to rebrand the country North Macedonia, she says, was a “gesture of weakness and capitulation”. What Macedonians call themselves will now be judged in Athens, forging an “Orwellian” state. Ms Grceva, a former MP now running a new centrist party, is far from alone in her anger. When your columnist asks for the bill, it turns out to have been settled by a sympathetic eavesdropper.

The name issue is one of the sillier disputes in a region hardly lacking them. The Greeks believe that plain “Macedonia” implies a claim on their northern regions of the same name; a suggestion the (ex-Yugoslav) Macedonians consider offensive and absurd. To say that passions run deep on this is...Continue reading

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Erdogan inaugurates a new political era in Turkey

AMID a frenzy of honking, a young woman leant out of the window of a car, one of the hundreds that besieged the headquarters of the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party in Ankara, making an Islamist salute with her left hand and an ultranationalist one with her right. Outside the building, thousands of cheering, singing AK supporters awaited their leader, fresh from his big victory at the polls. “This is Turkey’s new liberation,” yelled a man hoisting a flag emblazoned with the image of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the coat of arms of the Ottoman empire, his voice barely audible over the din. “The West will not boss us around,” said another man, a schoolteacher. It was the evening of June 24th, day one of what Mr Erdogan calls the New Turkey, a synthesis of Islamic nationalism and Ottoman nostalgia, and possibly the last day of the old republic founded by Kemal Ataturk.

Hours earlier, despite predictions of a much closer race, Mr Erdogan and his party, plus their ultranationalist...Continue reading

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Confusion over immigration and crime is roiling European politics

AS MAYOR of the small Swedish town of Haparanda, Peter Waara has had his share of problems with refugees and with crime. The first refugees arrived in September 2015 (“the middle of moose-hunting season,” Mr Waara recalls), when Haparanda, which sits on the Finnish border, was deluged by busloads of Syrians and Iraqis who thought Finland would welcome them. They were met by the Soldiers of Odin, a far-right group, who demonstrated to stop them at the border. Police had to be called in to protect the migrants. Today a few hundred refugees remain in Haparanda. The town’s crime problem, however, mainly involves European drug-traffickers operating from Sweden.

Haparanda is typical: Europe’s immigration problems and its crime problems are mostly unrelated. But they are inseparable in politics. In Sweden, where an election is due in September, the far-right Sweden Democrats blame immigrants for a recent spate of shootings. The party’s leader, Jimmie Akesson, claims immigration has made Sweden a place where women are “gang-raped, mutilated and married off against their will”. Polls show them in a virtual tie for second place with the centre-right Moderates, and only a few points behind the ruling Social Democrats.

Similar fears of immigrant crime have helped create a political crisis in Germany. The interior minister, Horst Seehofer, has threatened...Continue reading

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Why Hot Money Is a Problem for Britain at Just the Wrong Time

Britain seems to be developing a hot-money problem just as its economic future is becoming more uncertain. That’s a big risk for local business and foreign investors alike.

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The Good Times Are Over for China's Property Stocks

The yuan’s decline is the latest blow for the sector’s heavily indebted companies, which have loaded up on dollar debt.

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Justice Kennedy is retiring. What happens now?

LAST June, progressives breathed a sigh of relief when Anthony Kennedy (pictured) stuck around to serve a 30th term on the Supreme Court. But a year later, with Justice Kennedy announcing he is ending his tenure on July 31st 2018 and handing another high-court vacancy to President Donald Trump, the left is gasping for air. Abortion, environmental protections, gay and lesbian rights, racial equality and voting rights are all newly vulnerable.

As the court’s median justice for more than a decade, the 81-year-old Reagan appointee has sided with the liberals in certain key cases. He stood up for abortion rights and protected affirmative action at universities. He helped to save the anti-discrimination protections at the heart of the Fair Housing Act in 2015. Most famously, he wrote four gay-rights rulings, culminating in a 2015 decision opening marriage laws to gays and lesbians. Yet Justice Kennedy closed his third decade on the court in a decidedly rightward pose. This term the court issued 63...Continue reading

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A Frozen Foods Deal to Melt the Competition

Conagra Brands and Pinnacle Foods, two leaders in the fast-growing frozen food category, are finally merging after months of speculation.

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Emmanuel Macron leads a new effort on European defence

WHEN Emmanuel Macron, the French president, gave his first big policy speech on Europe at the Sorbonne last September, it was so packed with ideas that many have long since been forgotten. On June 25th, however, one of them—a “European intervention initiative” (EI2)—was signed into being by nine European Union countries at a meeting of defence ministers in Luxembourg. The idea is both to prepare a coalition of willing countries for joint European action in crises, and to tie post-Brexit Britain into the continent’s future military co-operation.

Mr Macron’s idea was born out of French impatience with the EU’s efforts at defence co-operation, known inelegantly as Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO). Fully 25 countries signed up last December to this arrangement, which commits members to developing joint defence capabilities. Germany has been keen on this mechanism, which keeps efforts at joint European defence within existing EU structures. Its critics, though, regard...Continue reading

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Old Economy Could Trump the New in Chinese IPOs

While the size of handset maker Xiaomi’s IPO has withered under intense scrutiny, an old-fashioned Chinese infrastructure stock’s float could prove a better bet.

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Tariff Talk Has Slammed the IPO Window Shut for Car Makers

Luxury car makers are in the eye of the trade storm unleashed by U.S. President Donald Trump. One consequence: Hoped-for IPOs of Aston Martin, Volvo Cars and possibly Jaguar Land Rover are looking unlikely, even though most brands are reporting record sales.

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Memory Unlikely to Fade Fast for Chips

Consolidation and growing demand for cloud and AI servers have kept chip prices stable—and high.

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Banks Are Playing Chicken With Brexit

Banks are running out of time to prepare for a sudden break in relations between the U.K. and Europe.

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The justices vote 5-4 to uphold Donald Trump’s travel ban

ON JUNE 26th, after months of legal wrangling over Donald Trump’s executive orders banning travel from several Muslim-majority countries, the Supreme Court effectively put an end to the battle. Officially, the five-justice majority’s opinion in Trump v Hawaii, which upholds the third version of the travel ban, sends the matter back to lower courts to ask again whether Mr Trump’s policy violates a constitutional bar on religious discrimination. But it is unlikely that further scrutiny will yield a different result. The most recent proclamation, from September 2017, fulfilling the president’s campaign promise to keep Muslims out of America is consistent, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, with both immigration law and the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court traditionally defers to presidents in matters of immigration and national security, and Chief Justice Roberts left no doubt, early in his opinion, that nothing about Donald Trump changes that. The...Continue reading

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The Supreme Court upholds voting maps that had been ruled discriminatory

IT HAS not been a good month for voting rights at the Supreme Court. On June 11th, the justices gave the green-light to states experimenting with new ways of removing voters from the rolls. A week later, the court told America that procedural tangles prevented it from doing anything to curb partisan gerrymandering—at least for now. On June 25th the five conservative justices formed a bare majority to mostly absolve Texas of findings it had discriminated against Latinos when lawmakers redrew congressional and state-legislative maps following the 2010 census.

Abbott v Perez was written by Justice Samuel Alito, author of Husted v Philip Randolph Institute, the voter-purge ruling earlier in the month. In both cases, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a strident dissenting...Continue reading

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Has the Big Yuan Short Finally Arrived?

Trade wars are brewing, Chinese stocks are tanking and investors are getting nervous about Chinese growth again.

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Why Visa and Mastercard Should Thank the Supreme Court, Too

A court victory for Amex will help the three big card companies continue charging high fees and hurt upstart payment companies.

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Private Equity: So Hot Even Second-Hand Funds Can Sell at a Premium

The market for unwanted stakes in private-equity funds used to be where investors who desperately needed cash offloaded holdings at steep discounts.

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Chip-Equipment Makers in Crosshairs of Trade War

Semiconductor-equipment firms have reason to worry about latest escalation.

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Why Size Alone Won't Help Old Media Beat Netflix

Even if incumbents such as Disney and AT&T bulk up, tech companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple will still have more leeway to spend.

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The Trade War's First Casualties

With their escalating trade feud showing little evidence of hurting their economies, the U.S. and China aren’t close to backing down. Investors may get squeezed between the two giants before one of them cracks.

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An emergency EU summit makes little progress on migration

IT WAS billed as the summit to save Angela Merkel. Instead it simply highlighted the unending difficulty that Europe’s leaders face in managing illegal immigration from outside the continent. At Mrs Merkel’s request, 16 EU leaders convened in Brussels today for an impromptu summit. The chancellor is under siege from a coalition partner that wants to turn away asylum-seekers at Germany’s borders. That, she fears, could trigger a domino effect across the EU, endangering its passport-free Schengen system. Having earned herself ten days breathing space at home, she arranged the meeting to work on what she calls a “European solution”.

But Italy’s new government, a populist coalition with a strong anti-immigrant streak, has other ideas. Giuseppe Conte, the prime minister, brought to Brussels a ten-point “Multi-level Strategy for Migration”. Much of it trod familiar ground. The Italians want “disembarkation” points in North Africa, where migrants, including those saved at sea,...Continue reading

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Why Indonesia is so bad at lawmaking

Parliament needs cleaning up

THIS May, to mark the start of Ramadan, Sharp Indonesia, an offshoot of a Japanese electronics giant, launched the world’s first halal fridge. Not a fridge for halal food; an appliance that is itself supposedly sharia-compliant (though the Koran does not mention fridges). At a press conference the firm’s executives donned batik shirts and huddled around it, giving a cheery thumbs-up.

The stunt was primarily a marketing exercise, but soon Indonesian shoppers will be able to snap up many more improbable, halal-certified goods. For that they can thank a vaguely worded law which comes into effect in October next year. It stipulates that most products must be halal-certified, without precisely defining which products it means. Lawyers argue that it could apply to inedible goods, such as fridges, and even to services like consulting.

That is by no means Indonesia’s only woolly law....Continue reading

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India’s national government and the city of Delhi are feuding

AMONG the world’s megacities, Delhi, India’s capital, has a good claim to several dubious distinctions: foulest air, hottest summer, most precarious water supply. It is currently in the running for a new distinction, too: the world’s most dysfunctional metropolis. As a dust-storm swirled earlier this month, its chief minister and other elected officials held a sit-in and hunger strike at the residence of the lieutenant-governor, who is appointed by the central government. The main opposition leaders held a similar protest at the chief minister’s office. And the city’s top-ranking bureaucrats pursued a work-to-rule boycott of their elected bosses.

Considering the way Delhi’s government is set up, it is a wonder that the city functions at all. Like India’s 29 states, Delhi is run by a government drawn from an elected assembly. In contrast to the states’, however, the powers it exercises are severely restricted. The unelected lieutenant-governor must sign off on nearly any...Continue reading

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In Myanmar, sex education comes from smartphones

MASTURBATION does not exist in Myanmar—not the practice, which is presumably common enough, but the word itself, which is absent from the government-approved dictionary. When it comes to sex, accepted terms are hard to find. Linguists disagree as to whether “vagina” and “penis” have proper equivalents in Burmese. Most people simply point at their body parts or use euphemisms, says Nandar, a local activist who translates feminist literature. Parents tend to speak coyly of “flowers” and “pumps”—if they talk to their children at all about the birds and the bees.

In theory, sex education is offered in schools, but most teachers skip the topic. They are often too embarrassed to talk about sex in the classroom. Most parents do not want them to anyway (it could arouse children’s curiosity, many argue). Last year an MP from the ruling National League for Democracy proposed giving the subject more prominence. The government did not take up her suggestion.

Laws about sex are a...Continue reading

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Pakistan’s army is using every trick to sideline Nawaz Sharif

EARLIER this month a spokesman for Pakistan’s army decided to respond to claims that it was attempting to fix next month’s general election. It would not be the first time. In 1990, for instance, the army-dominated spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, funnelled cash to opponents of the left-wing Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), helping to secure its defeat. The military spokesman, General Asif Ghafoor, sternly denied that any such “engineering” was going on this time around. But a pile of evidence to the contrary is poking through the camouflage.

The object of the army’s meddling is Nawaz Sharif, who was ousted as prime minister by the courts last year. Mr Sharif had been the beneficiary of the army’s largesse in 1990, when he began his first stint as prime minister. But they soon fell out.

He resigned under pressure from the army in 1993 and was toppled again by it in a coup in 1999. Mr Sharif returned to power in 2013 eager to assert civilian control of foreign and...Continue reading

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Democracy is foundering in the Maldives

Mr Gayoom’s new milieu

A LOW-SLUNG archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the Maldives faces long-term danger from the global rise in sea level. In the shorter term, it risks sinking in a different sense. Ten years after being launched, its experiment with democracy is listing badly, unable to keep afloat.

The 19-month jail sentence handed down on June 13th against an ex-president, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, is just the latest of many distress signals. Mr Gayoom, who is 80, ran the Maldives for three decades with an iron fist before being voted out of office in 2008. He was convicted of aiding an alleged coup plot against his own half-brother, Abdulla Yameen, the country’s president since 2013. His imprisonment marks the end of a long feud between the two siblings and also the culmination of a campaign by Mr Yameen to clear the way, ahead of national polls set for September 23rd, for his own re-election.

The campaign got going in February, when Mr Yameen...Continue reading

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China has militarised the South China Sea and got away with it

LESS than three years ago, Xi Jinping stood with Barack Obama in the Rose Garden at the White House and lied through his teeth. In response to mounting concern over China’s massive terraforming efforts in the South China Sea—satellite images showed seven artificial islands sprouting in different spots—the country’s president was all honey and balm. China absolutely did not, Mr Xi purred, “intend to pursue militarisation” on its islands. Its construction activities in the sea were not meant to “target or impact” any country.

As Steven Stashwick points out in the Diplomat, a journal on Asian affairs, these denials were always suspect, given the growing evidence of radar installations and bomber-sized bunkers made of reinforced concrete. Last month came the revelation that China had installed anti-ship and surface-to-air missiles on three islands in the Spratly archipelago west of the Philippines—far, far from its own shores. (Some or all of the Spratlys are...Continue reading

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Latin America searches for redemption on the football pitch

THIS football World Cup is barely a week old, but already Latin America has stolen the limelight. There have been memorable performances on the pitch: Mexico’s humbling of Germany, Peru outplaying Denmark but contriving to lose, flashes of magic from Brazil and three goals for Diego Costa, Spain’s Brazilian-born striker. There have been shocks, too, such as Argentina’s draw with Iceland and a battling ten-man Colombia losing to Japan. But more than the players, it is the fans who have caught the eye.

Multitudes of Latin Americans have packed the stadiums in deepest Russia as if they were attending home games. According to FIFA, the organisers, five of the seven countries that (after Russia itself) snapped up most tickets in advance were Latin American. They were Brazil (73,000), Colombia (65,000), Mexico (60,000), Argentina (54,000) and Peru (44,000). Many of the fans from the United States (89,000), too, are Latinos who may support their countries of origin, and to them should be added Latino...Continue reading

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A Supreme Court ruling heralds the end of tax-free online shopping

FOR 50 years, savvy Americans have enjoyed a sales-tax loophole. By ordering a product from an out-of-state company, consumers could often avoid paying the tax their states and cities impose on purchases. Consumers had two Supreme Court decisions to thank for the savings: long-standing rulings that have prohibited states from requiring stores with no physical presence within their borders to collect sales tax on purchases. But on June 21st, the justices voted 5-4 to end this half-century-old gift.

The ruling in South Dakota v Wayfair featured an unusual line-up. Swing Justice Anthony Kennedy, who all but invited the lawsuit by noting his displeasure with the precedents in 2015, was joined in his majority opinion by three conservatives (Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas) and one liberal (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg). The dissent was penned by the rather conservative chief justice, John Roberts, and signed by three of his liberal-leaning...Continue reading

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Beijing Paddles Hard as a Bear Market Threatens

Chinese stocks are down nearly 20% from their most recent high. Beijing has to balance its desire for market stability with a need to keep up the impression of calm.

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For Investors, Europe is Back to Muddling Through

Confidence can more easily be lost than won. After 2017’s strong growth and political calm brought hopes that Europe was finally turning a post-crisis page, 2018 is back to unfinished business.

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Germany becomes the last big Western power to buy killer robots

TO THE relief of commanders and the dismay of pacifists, Germany’s armed forces have crossed a threshold. On June 13th a Bundestag committee voted to approve the spending of nearly €1bn ($1.1bn) to lease from Israel five drones which can be equipped with deadly weapons. Hitherto Germany has been the only big Western country not to buy “killer robots”. In part this reflects antipathy to America’s use of remotely controlled missiles for “targeted killings” of terrorist suspects (and the people standing next to them) in places like Pakistan and Yemen.

The Israeli order does not instantly change that situation: the machines are described as “weaponisable” but not “weaponised”. A new decision will be needed to endow them with destructive power. However, critics and supporters feel their eventual use in combat is almost certain. In the words of Ulrike Franke, a German expert on unmanned aircraft, “It would be absurd to pay for the use of these expensive drones and then not to arm...Continue reading

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The incredible disappearing French Socialist Party

They ran out of other people’s votes

THE 19th-century mansion on the chic left bank of Paris, with its tiled floors and sweeping stone staircase, was for decades an iconic part of French Socialist history. François Mitterrand arrived there in 1981 to celebrate his victory as the first Socialist president of modern France. Ségolène Royal, the party’s presidential candidate in 2007, waved valiantly to crowds from the building’s balcony after her defeat. Late last year, however, the cash-strapped party had to sell its grand headquarters and find new premises in a modern office in an unfashionable suburb. The episode serves as a cruel metaphor for the ailing party.

Last year, a party that has supplied two Fifth Republic presidents and nine prime ministers was rudely rejected at the ballot box. Its presidential candidate, Benoît Hamon, came in a humiliating fifth place with just 6% of the vote. At the legislative elections that followed the party was almost...Continue reading

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How Matteo Salvini is dominating Italian politics

When in Rome, persecute Roma

ANGELA MERKEL is not the only head of a European government with a disruptive interior minister. Since entering the Italian cabinet on June 1st Matteo Salvini has managed for different reasons to annoy the governments of Tunisia, Malta, France and Spain. And he can scarcely have endeared himself to Mrs Merkel by openly making common cause with his German counterpart, Horst Seehofer. On June 18th Mr Salvini even picked a fight with Cambodia. In the latest of several excursions outside his ministerial bailiwick, Mr Salvini, who is also a deputy prime minister and leader of the hard-right Northern League, threatened to ban ships carrying Cambodian rice from docking in Italian ports. He claimed the rice, which is exempt from EU tariffs, was competing unfairly with Italian produce.

With his bull-in-a-china-shop approach Mr Salvini has dominated the political agenda from the start, even though his party is the junior partner in a coalition with the...Continue reading

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The politics of migration in Germany

GERMANY’S centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) can move fast and brutally against a leader whose time is up. In 1999 Angela Merkel knifed Wolfgang Schäuble in a steely newspaper op-ed implicitly linking him to the corruption scandal that had consumed Helmut Kohl, his political mentor. Support for the then-leader dissolved and within weeks she had taken his place.

Ghosts of the past haunt the party. Now it is Mrs Merkel, twelve-and-a-half years into her chancellorship, who is wobbling. The Christian Social Union (CSU), the CDU’s more conservative sister party, faces an election in its home state of Bavaria in October at which it fears the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany will deny it its traditional majority. To dissociate themselves from the chancellor’s decision to keep Germany’s borders open during the refugee crisis, the Bavarians are pushing her to the brink. Whether she goes over it depends on the CDU.

The dispute concerns an immigration plan presented to Mrs...Continue reading

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Europe’s passport-free zone faces a grim future

FIVE junior politicians, chuckling away on a pleasure boat. There is only one known photo of the day, in 1985, when Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Germany and the Netherlands agreed to end border controls between their countries. It was a low-key start for what was to become one of the European Union’s signature achievements. The Schengen accord, named after the Luxembourgish village nestled along the river on which it was signed, is the world’s only large passport-free zone. It now covers 26 countries, including four non-EU members.

The village itself, just yards from borders with France and Germany, took a while to cotton on to the potential that history had given it, but now offers tourists a museum, sculptures made from Luxembourgish steel and two slabs of the Berlin Wall. The most emotional reactions come from visitors outside the zone, says Martina Kneip, the museum’s director. In the 2000s eastern Europeans made pilgrimages to the village whose name had become synonymous with the freedom...Continue reading

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Turkey’s President Erdogan may yet be defeated

MUHAMMAD SHEIKHOUNI came to Turkey from Syria in 2006, long before his native country plunged into civil war, and fell in love with Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A decade later, after setting up a tourism and construction company in Bursa, the former seat of the Ottoman empire, the businessman joined the president’s ruling Justice and Development (AK) party. This year, after Mr Erdogan called early elections for June 24th, Mr Sheikhouni decided to run for a seat. In the meantime, he also changed his last name—to Erdogan.

Inside his election tent, pitched on one side of a large square in Bursa, Muhammad Erdogan can hardly peel his eyes from the president’s image, printed on one of the walls, as he delivers his talking points. “There’s no one else like our reis,” he says, using the Turkish word for chief. “He opened his doors to the people of Syria, he helped the Somalis and he stood up for Palestine. He’s not only the leader of Turkey, but of the whole Muslim...Continue reading

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How Sierra Leone is beating tropical diseases

SIXTEEN years ago Hannah Taylor woke up with a fever. Her legs began to swell to four times their normal size. They have been that way since. People shunned her because of their putrid smell. “For six years, I thought my big fut was caused by evil witchcraft,” she said outside her shack in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone.

The lymphatic filariasis (elephantiasis) ailing her was caused by a mosquito-born infection that could have been treated safely with a pill costing no more than $0.50 before it progressed. Instead, microscopic worms infested her body, causing catastrophic and irreversible damage.

Elephantiasis is one of 17 neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) that affect 1.5bn people, disabling children and keeping multitudes poor. Huge progress has been made against these diseases since an agreement in 2012 by pharmaceutical firms to donate billions of dollars’ worth of drugs. Even so, many African countries struggle to get the necessary...Continue reading

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The UN’s refugee agency for Palestinians is running out of cash

YOU may think that after a dozen years of blockade by Israel, three devastating wars and the rule of a harsh Islamist government, life in Gaza could hardly get worse. But the prospect of another war and a dire shortage of cash to pay for the UN’s Relief and Works Agency, better known as UNRWA, mean that it can. Last year President Donald Trump’s administration said it would withhold $305m of the $365m that has annually serviced the agency, which has supported most of Gaza’s 2m people for the past seven decades. Now the cash is running out.

Moreover, since the end of March a series of protests near the border fence with Israel has seen at least 120 Gazans shot dead by the Israeli army. Hamas, the Islamist movement that runs Gaza, has been sending a defiant wave of home-made rockets and mortars into Israel, plus makeshift kites laden with devices to set fire to Israeli farmland. Israel has responded with air raids. Gazans are terrified that Israel may be preparing for another full-blooded war to...Continue reading

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Why Arabs are watching a pirated World Cup feed

ARABS have little to cheer in this year’s World Cup. The four teams from the region lost all seven of their early matches. Russia and Uruguay beat both Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Morocco beat itself, scoring an own goal against Iran. Tunisia lost to England. The real competition is off the pitch: in the Middle East, even watching the game is fractious.

A Qatari network, beIN Sports, paid a small fortune for the broadcast rights. It had planned to recoup that by charging fees of up to $150 per subscriber. But last year four Arab countries imposed a blockade on Qatar. The embargo excluded beIN from its largest market, Saudi Arabia, where it had 900,000 customers. And it left Saudis wondering how they would watch their team, which had qualified for the first time since 2006.

The answer came from a mysterious group of hackers. In August someone launched a bootleg version of beIN, cheekily known as “beoutQ”. With a cheap decoder, Saudis (and other Arabs) can watch with only a slight delay....Continue reading

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Boris Becker, African diplomat

His Excellency, Baron von Slam

WHEN people say “diplomatic service”, they seldom mean an envoy who can slam an ace over the net at 130 miles per hour. Yet Boris Becker, a German former tennis star who could once do just that, told a London court on June 14th that he should be excused from proceedings because he has diplomatic immunity.

After Mr Becker was declared bankrupt last year he faced claims to his assets from a private bank. Instead of coughing up, Mr Becker said that he is, in fact, a representative of the Central African Republic (CAR), a failed state wedged between Congo and Chad. This, Mr Becker said, should end the “farce” of his being pursued by creditors.

In fact the farce had only just begun. On June 19th officials in the CAR’s foreign ministry told AFP, a newswire, that the diplomatic passport was a fake, possibly from a batch of passports stolen in 2014. Mr Becker had claimed to be a sports envoy for the country, working out of its...Continue reading

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Elite private schools are booming in Kenya

LAST year stories appeared in the press, illustrated by pictures of bloody clothing, of an initiation ceremony at Alliance High School outside Nairobi, in which boys were beaten and made to lie on the founders’ graves. The country was shocked, in part because Alliance is regarded as one of the country’s top schools, and the headmaster resigned. The scandal has hastened a shift that is changing Kenyan education.

Alliance, which sits in wooded grounds in Kikuyu, a small town north-west of Nairobi, was founded in 1926 by missionaries to educate bright Africans and, by selecting boys from all the country’s regions and tribes, to build a country. After independence in 1963 it became one of Kenya’s “national” schools, similar to Britain’s selective state “grammar” schools. Eight ministers in the post-independence cabinet in 1963 were Alliance old boys. Alumni still proliferate in the top ranks of the professions, government and business.

On a hilltop 20 miles to the east are...Continue reading

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Bridge Academies battles its enemies

“BRIDGE is unauthorised and illegal,” says Wilson Sossion, the secretary-general of the Kenya National Union of Teachers. “The curriculum they teach and the medium they use are not approved. The teachers are untrained and unqualified. They should be closed down.”

Bridge International Academies is the world’s most controversial low-cost for-profit chain of schools. It has raised about $140m in investment from the likes of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private-investment arm of the World Bank. Some 120,000 children are enrolled in its schools in Kenya, Uganda, Liberia, Nigeria and India. It gets results: in Kenya, its biggest market, costs per pupil are $190 a year (parents pay an average of $84 a year), compared with $313 in government schools, and 86% of children score well enough to pass into secondary school, compared with a national average of 76%. Since half the primary-school pupils in the developing world cannot read or...Continue reading

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A blot against America

THERE is a moment in “The Plot Against America”, Philip Roth’s tale of America succumbing to 1930s-style authoritarianism, when the nine-year-old protagonist experiences a profound revulsion at the foibles on which wickedness thrives. “Never in my life had I so harshly judged any adult,” he recalls of his Jewish aunt’s preening over a brief interaction with the anti-Semitic president, Charles Lindbergh. “Nor had I understood till then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others.” That is as much respite as the recently deceased author, who combined a stubborn faith in America with a gloomy view of its politics, allows his reader. There is no chance of America sharing his awakening. The power of the boy’s epiphany lies not only in its clarity, but also in its futility.

Roth’s pessimism about the prospect of national redemption should be instructive to critics of President Donald Trump’s policy of caging migrant children in isolation from...Continue reading

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A lawsuit reveals how peculiar Harvard’s definition of merit is

Admission of gilt

ABBOTT LAWRENCE LOWELL, the president of Harvard from 1909 until 1933, thought the university had too many Jews. In the first year of Lowell’s presidency, they made up 10% of the student body. By 1922 their numbers had more than doubled. To address what he called “the Hebrew problem”, Lowell proposed an explicit Jewish quota of 15%. When that proved controversial, he set about making “a rule whose motive was less obvious on its face” to deny admission to students suspected of being Jewish. Admission to Harvard, previously granted by meeting a clear academic cut-off, became more nebulous—based more heavily on the “character and fitness” of applicants. The new “holistic” admissions policy worked as intended, successfully suppressing Jewish admissions.

Harvard, like many of America’s top universities, retains a holistic admissions process. Unlike elite universities in most other countries, American colleges do not simply...Continue reading

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In praise of gentrification

GENTRIFIER has surpassed many worthier slurs to become the dirtiest word in American cities. In the popular telling, hordes of well-to-do whites are descending upon poor, minority neighbourhoods that were made to endure decades of discrimination. With their avocado on toast, beard oil and cappuccinos, these people snuff out local culture. As rents rise, lifelong residents are evicted and forced to leave. In this view, the quintessential scene might be one witnessed in Oakland, California, where a miserable-looking homeless encampment rests a mere ten-minute walk from a Whole Foods landscaped with palm trees and bougainvillea, offering chia and flax seed upon entry. An ancient, sinister force lurks behind the overpriced produce. “‘Gentrification’ is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy,” wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates. It is “the interest on enslavement, the interest on Jim Crow, the interest on redlining, compounding across the years.”

This story is better described as an urban myth. The...Continue reading

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Ford has ambitious plans for Detroit’s most beautiful ruin

Fixer-upper

DETROITERS still know how to throw a party. On June 19th more than 4,000 of the Motor City’s residents, government officials, artists, employees of Ford and members of the Ford family gathered at Michigan Central Station, a huge, dilapidated 18-floor Beaux-Arts hulk covered with graffiti, to celebrate its planned rebirth with speeches, music and poetry. Once the world’s tallest railway station, the vacant building became emblematic of the city’s descent into bankruptcy and despair. ‘“The train station is dead’ meant ‘Detroit is dead’,” said Mike Duggan, the mayor of Detroit, who was among the revellers. From the moment the last train left the station in 1988, its demolition was often discussed. Then Ford struck a deal to buy what Detroiters now hope will become a symbol of the city’s rebirth.

Detroit’s comeback is still tentative. Nearly all the recovery has happened in downtown and midtown, an area covering just seven of the city’s 139...Continue reading

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Small-town American newspapers are surprisingly resilient

JAY NOLAN surveys his media empire from a shed-like building outside London, Kentucky. On his desk is a stack of eight newspapers, including the Berea Citizen (“established in 1899”, circulation 4,511), the Mountain Advocate (“since 1904”, circulation 4,500) and the Pineville Sun-Cumberland Courier (“celebrating 109 years”, circulation 1,646).

Each paper is under local management, with its own publisher and editor, but Nolan Group Newspapers owns a majority stake in all of them and prints them at its press outside London. Together, the eight papers have a combined circulation of about 25,000 and employ a dozen journalists and nine ad-sales representatives. They bring in around $2m in revenue, perhaps $3m in a good year, with a profit margin of about 10%, says Mr Nolan.

The local-newspaper business is not going to make him rich. Which is why he also owns J. Frank Publishing, which undertakes contract...Continue reading

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