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[Aug 23rd 2025]

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The world this week

Politics
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

Volodymr Zelensky travelled to Washington, DC, to meet Donald

Trump for talks on ending the war in Ukraine. Mr Zelensky was
backed by seven European leaders including the heads of NATO and
the European Commission. The American president proposed a
bilateral meeting between Mr Zelenksy and Vladimir Putin, Russia’s
president, after which he would join them for three-way talks. Russia
has yet to respond to the proposal.

Mr Trump was equivocal on the nature of any security guarantees·

that America might offer Ukraine. The Kremlin has said attempts to
settle Ukraine’s security guarantees without Russian participation are
a “road to nowhere”.

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Spain sent around 2,000 soldiers to battle some of the country’s
worst wildfires· on record. At least four people were killed as fires
ravaged hundreds of thousands of acres of land. The area destroyed
by fires is said to be twice the size of London. Pedro Sánchez,
Spain’s prime minister, returned early from holiday to deal with the
crisis.

Asylum-seekers· will be removed from a hotel in Essex after an

English court granted a temporary injunction to stop them being
housed there. The decision follows weeks of protests outside the Bell
Hotel in Epping after a man staying there was charged with sexual
assault. He denies the charges. The ruling is a further blow for the
Labour Party and a boon for the populist Reform UK , which
supported the protests. Nigel Farage, Reform’s leader, welcomed the
ruling and said he hopes it “provides inspiration to others across the
country”.

In the first round of Bolivia’s presidential elections·, voters

turfed out the ruling socialist party, after nearly 20 years in power.
Neither of the front-runners secured enough votes to win outright.
Rodrigo Paz, a centrist senator, and Jorge Quiroga, a right-wing
former president, will head to the polls in a run-off on October 19th.

America is beefing up its military presence in the southern

Caribbean, sending air and naval forces and 4,000, marines and
sailors. Officials told Reuters the aim is to combat drug threats in the
region; in February America designated several gangs as foreign
terrorist organisations. The build-up suggests an attempt to rattle
Venezuela’s leader.

He’s back

Canada’s Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre· won a parliamentary

seat after a by-election victory in rural Alberta. Mr Poilievre secured
80% of the vote in the safe Conservative riding. He had lost his seat
in Ottawa, a constituency he had represented for more than 20

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years, when the Conservatives suffered a general-election defeat in
April of this year.

Hamas said it had accepted a ceasefire deal under which it would

release ten living hostages and the bodies of 18 more in exchange
for a 60-day halt in the fighting. Israeli officials say they will accept
a deal only if it returns all of the 50 remaining hostages, around half
of whom are thought to be alive. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis
took to the streets to protest against the government’s decision to
continue the war and its failure to secure the release of the
hostages. Israel says it has begun the first steps of its planned
offensive in Gaza City. The Israel Defence Forces called up 60,000
reservists ahead of the plan, which has been met with widespread
international condemnation.

Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right Israeli minister, said a controversial

settlement plan has been approved. The E1 project would split the
occupied West Bank in two and in effect cut it off from East
Jerusalem. Mr Smotrich said “the Palestinian state is being erased
from the table”.

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A UN commission said it was likely that members of Syria’s interim
government forces as well as fighters linked to the former regime
had committed war crimes during an outbreak of sectarian violence
in March. Around 1,400 people were killed, most of them were
civilians, said the report.

M23 ,a rebel group backed by Rwanda, killed at least 140 people in

eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in July, according to a
new report by Human Rights Watch. The report is a reminder that
violence in the region continued despite peace agreements brokered
by America and Qatar.

Choguel Kokalla Maiga, the former civilian prime minister of Mali,

was charged with embezzling public funds and jailed awaiting trial.
Mr Maiga, who was appointed by the military junta following a coup
in 2021, was dismissed in November last year.

In America the Justice Department is expected to begin providing

documents to a congressional investigation related to the deceased
child-molester Jeffrey Epstein by August 22nd. The scandal will
probably continue to cause headaches—many congressmen who
returned home during the summer recess have faced questions from
constituents, and Democrats plan to force it onto the agenda when
they return in September.

Six Republican governors promised to send National Guardsmen

to Washington, DC, to aid President Donald Trump’s crackdown on
crime and homelessness. As many as 1,900 troops have been
mobilised to patrol the capital, including the 800 guardsmen that
America’s president called up on August 11th.

J.D. Vance, America’s vice-president, was heckled by protesters

while visiting troops in Washington, DC. The Justice Department is
reportedly investigating the city’s official statistics, which suggest
that violent crime spiked in 2023, but then fell dramatically.

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Closing arguments began in Hong Kong in the trial of Jimmy Lai·, a
pro-democracy media tycoon. Mr Lai is accused of colluding with
foreign forces and sedition; he denies the charges. The 77-year-old
faces life imprisonment if found guilty.

More than 300 people were killed in floods that swept through
north-west Pakistan.

With friends like these

Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, met Narendra Modi, India’s prime
minister, on a visit to Delhi amid warming relations. Mr Modi hailed
“steady progress” and said he “looked forward” to seeing Xi Jinping
in China this month.

Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s dictator, said the country must
rapidly boost its nuclear arsenal in the wake of “hostile” joint
American-South Korean military drills. Mr Kim called the exercises an
“obvious expression of their will to provoke war”, according to state
media.
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The world this week

Business
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

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Howard Lutnick, America’s commerce secretary, confirmed that the
Trump administration was considering taking a 10% stake in Intel·.
Mr Lutnick said the deal would convert the grants allotted to the firm
under Joe Biden’s CHIPS Act into equity. Meanwhile SoftBank, a
Japanese tech investor, announced it would invest $2bn in Intel.
Shares in the floundering American chipmaker, which had risen on
early reports of the government’s plan, climbed higher following
SoftBank’s announcement.

Other American tech stocks slid amid worries about high valuations
and low returns from artificial intelligence. The NASDAQ , a tech-

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heavy index, dropped by 2.5% in the week to August 20th. Shares in
Nvidia, a maker of AI chips, fell by 2.8%. Those of Palantir, a
software firm, fell by nearly 12%.

Mr Trump extended his campaign against the Federal Reserve.

America’s president called for Lisa Cook, one of the governors on the
Fed’s board, to resign after Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal
Housing Finance Agency, accused her of falsifying bank documents
and property records to obtain a mortgage. Ms Cook said she had
“no intention of being bullied to step down”. Mr Trump has urged the
Fed to cut interest rates and lambasted its chairman, Jerome Powell.

The bosses of Rio Tinto and BHP , two mining companies, met Mr
Trump to discuss Resolution Copper, a long-delayed project in
Arizona. Rio says the mine would provide 25% of America’s copper
demand for 40 years. On August 18th, a day before the meeting, an
appeals court temporarily blocked its development. Mr Trump
slammed the ruling, writing: “our Country, quite simply, needs
Copper—AND NOW!”

A Japanese startup, JPYC , said it had won regulatory approval to

issue a stablecoin pegged to the yen this autumn. Like dollar
stablecoins, which are usually backed by Treasuries, the tokens will
be backed by assets such as Japanese government bonds. JPYC
plans to issue tokens worth ¥1trn ($6.8bn) over the next three
years.

Wide of the mark

Target posted a 22% drop in net profit, year on year, in the second
quarter. The ailing American retailer said that Michael Fiddelke, a
company insider, would take over as its boss next year. That did not
reassure investors. The company’s shares fell by nearly 10%.

Novo Nordisk halved the price of Ozempic, its weight-loss drug, for
Americans who cannot obtain it through their health-insurance

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schemes. The Danish drugmaker reckons 98% of Ozempic’s
American users get the drug through their insurers. But the firm is
under pressure from cheap competitors. Shares in Novo, which have
plunged over the past year, rose on the
news.https://t.me/+NA8muckncd4yNDUx

Annual inflation in Britain rose to 3.8% in July, up from 3.6% in

June. That is the highest figure since January 2024. Traders trimmed
bets that the Bank of England, which lowered its key interest rate to
4% on August 6th, will cut rates next month.

Flight attendants ended a three-day strike after union leaders

reached a deal with Air Canada, the country’s largest carrier. The
action grounded hundreds of flights, affecting around 500,000
travellers. Air Canada will start paying attendants half their hourly
rate for boarding passengers, which was previously unpaid.

BlackRock struck an $11bn deal to lease natural-gas facilities from

Saudi Aramco. The American asset manager will lease them back
to the state-owned energy giant for 20 years. In recent years
BlackRock has poured cash into infrastructure deals in Saudi Arabia,
which is eager to attract foreign capital.

Indonesia’s central bank lowered its main interest rate from 5.25%
to 5%. It attributed the decision to low inflation and the need to
boost growth. In the second quarter the economy grew at an annual
rate of around 5.1%, the fastest in two years.

Xiaomi’s revenue rose by 31% year on year in the second quarter.

The Chinese tech firm’s earnings from its smartphone business
dropped slightly over the same period. Its electric-vehicle unit
narrowed its losses to 300m yuan ($42m), down from 500m yuan in
the previous quarter. Xiaomi expects its EV business to turn a
monthly or quarterly profit by the end of the year.

Grinning from ear to ear

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Sales of Labubu dolls pushed Pop Mart’s net profit up by 400%
year on year in the first half of 2025. Collectors outside the Chinese
toymaker’s home market have gone crazy for the smiling, elvish
trinkets. Some 40% of sales were abroad. The firm, whose shares
have risen by nearly 250% since the start of the year, is worth more
than three times as much as Mattel and Hasbro, America’s biggest
toymakers, combined.
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The world this week

The weekly cartoon

8月 21, 2025 04:07 上午

Dig deeper into the subject of this week’s cartoon:

Who will America’s president listen to next on Ukraine?·

Security “guarantees” for Ukraine are dangerously hazy·

Trump wants a Nobel prize. Europe can exploit that to help Ukraine·

The editorial cartoon appears weekly in The Economist. You can see
last week’s here.

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this-week/2025/08/21/the-weekly-cartoon

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Leaders
Donald Trump’s fantasy of home-grown
chipmaking
All-American silicon :: To remain the world’s foremost technological power, America
needs its friends

A new opposition could be a healthy sign

for Syria
Syrian politics :: Ahmed al-Sharaa, the new president, needs to bring his critics closer

Who will America’s president listen to next

on Ukraine?
The war for Donald’s ear :: The problem with Donald Trump’s fast-moving,
unpredictable diplomacy

Pregnant women need protecting from

heatwaves
In the oven :: As temperatures rise, so must understanding of the risks

Britain leads the world in a new global

business—a criminal one
Rogue Britannia :: What to do about its rampant steal-and-export industry

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All-American silicon

Donald Trump’s fantasy of

home-grown chipmaking
To remain the world’s foremost technological power, America needs
its friends
8月 21, 2025 08:14 上午

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HOW LOW mighty Intel has fallen. Half a century ago the American
chipmaker was a byword for the cutting edge; it went on to
dominate the market for personal-computer chips and in 2000 briefly
became the world’s second-most-valuable company. Yet these days
Intel, with a market capitalisation of $100bn, is not even the 15th-
most-valuable chip firm, and supplies practically none of the
advanced chips used for artificial intelligence (AI ). Once an icon of

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America’s technological and commercial prowess, it has lately been a
target for subsidies and protection. As we published this, President
Donald Trump was even mulling quasi-nationalisation.

More than ever, semiconductors hold the key to the 21st century.
They are increasingly critical for defence; in the AI race between
America and China, they could spell the difference between victory
and defeat. Even free-traders acknowledge their strategic
importance, and worry about the world’s reliance for cutting-edge
chips on TSMC and its home of Taiwan, which faces the threat of
Chinese invasion. Yet chips also pose a fiendish test for proponents
of industrial policy. Their manufacture is a marvel of specialisation,
complexity and globalisation. Under those conditions, intervening in
markets is prone to fail—as Intel· so vividly illustrates.

To see how much can go wrong, consider its woes. Hubris caused
the firm to miss both the smartphone and the AI waves, losing out
to firms such as Arm, Nvidia and TSMC . Joe Biden’s CHIPS Act, which
aimed to spur domestic chipmaking, promised Intel $8bn in grants
and up to $12bn in loans. But the company is floundering. A fab in
Ohio meant to open this year is now expected to begin operations in
the early 2030s. Intel is heavily indebted and generates barely
enough cash to keep itself afloat.

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The sums needed to rescue it keep growing. By one estimate Intel
will need to invest more than $50bn in the next few years if it is to
succeed at making leading-edge chips. Even if the government were
to sink that much into the firm, it would have no guarantee of
success. The company is said to be struggling with its latest
manufacturing process. Its sales are falling and its plight risks
becoming even more desperate.

The Biden administration failed with Intel, but Mr Trump could make
things worse. He has threatened tariffs on chip imports, and may try

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to browbeat firms such as Nvidia into using Intel to make
semiconductors for them. These measures might buy Intel time but
they would be self-defeating for America. Chipmaking is not an end
in itself but a critical input America’s tech sector requires to be
world-beating. Forcing firms to settle for anything less than the best
would blunt their edge.

What should America do? One lesson is not to pin the nation’s hopes
on keeping Intel intact. It could sell its fab business to a deep-
pocketed investor, such as SoftBank, which has reportedly expressed
interest in buying it and this week announced a $2bn investment in
Intel. Or it could sell its design arm and pour the proceeds into
manufacturing. Intel may fail to catch up with TSMC even then.
Either way, the federal government should not throw good money
after bad. Taking a stake in Intel would only complicate matters.

That leads to a second lesson: to look beyond Intel and solve other
chipmakers’ problems. TSMC is seeking to spread its wings. It is
running out of land for giant fabs in Taiwan and its workforce is
ageing. It has already pledged to invest $165bn to bring chipmaking
to America. A first fab is producing four-nanometre (nm) chips and a
second is scheduled to begin making more advanced chips by 2028.
Samsung, a South Korean chipmaker that is having more success
than Intel, is setting up a fab in Texas. But progress has been slow:
Samsung and TSMC have both struggled with a lack of skilled
workers and delays in receiving permits.

The last lesson is that, even if domestic chipmaking does make

America more resilient, the country cannot shut itself off from the
rest of the world. One reason is that the supply chain is highly
specialised, with key inputs coming from across the globe, including
extreme-ultraviolet lithography machines from the Netherlands and
chipmaking tools from Japan. The other is that Taiwan and its
security will remain critical. Even by the end of this decade, when
TSMC ’s third fab in America is due to begin producing 2nm chips,
two-thirds of such semiconductors are likely to be made on the

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island. TSMC ’s model is based on innovating at home first, before
spreading its advances around the world.

To keep America’s chip supply chains resilient, Mr Trump needs a

coherent, thought-through strategy—a tall order for a man who
governs by impulse. No wonder he is going in the wrong direction.
On Taiwan he has been cavalier, confident that China will not invade
on his watch, while failing to offer the island consistent support. His
tariffs on all manner of inputs will raise the costs of manufacturing in
America; promised duties on chip imports will hurt American
customers. He thrives on uncertainty, but chipmakers require
stability.

A sensible chip policy would make it attractive to build fabs in

America by easing rules over permits and creating programmes to
train engineers. Instead of using tariffs as leverage, the government
should welcome the imports of machinery and people that support
chipmaking. Given the bipartisan consensus on the importance of
semiconductors, the administration should seek a policy that has
Democratic support—with the promise of continuity from one
president to the next.

Economic nationalists should also see the progress of chipmakers in

allied countries as a contribution to America’s security. Samsung is
aiming to start producing 2nm chips in South Korea later this year.
Rapidus·, a well-funded chipmaking startup in Japan, is making
impressive progress. Both countries have a tradition of
manufacturing excellence, and may have a better shot at emulating
Taiwan.

The chipmaking industry took decades to evolve. It is built for an

age of globalisation. When economic nationalists build their policies
on autarky, they are setting themselves a needlessly hard task—if
not an impossible one. ■

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Syrian politics

A new opposition could be a

healthy sign for Syria
Ahmed al-Sharaa, the new president, needs to bring his critics closer
8月 21, 2025 05:06 上午

DURING MUCH of the first half of this year, things were looking up for
Ahmed al-Sharaa. Syria’s new president was basking in Donald
Trump’s decision to lift sanctions on his country. After more than a
decade of civil war, Damascus and other cities had begun to hum
again. Investors from the Gulf and Turkey piled in. Our polling
showed that the public mood was buoyant. After ousting Bashar al-
Assad’s regime, Mr Sharaa, a former jihadist, had not imposed the
Taliban-style rule that some had feared. The vast majority of Syrians
said they were optimistic for the future.

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Unfortunately, as the euphoria fades, Syrians are growing
increasingly frustrated. Mr Sharaa has disappointed them by failing
to ease the sectarian divisions that have long made their country a
tinderbox. He exhibits creeping authoritarianism. Now civil-society
activists are building an organised opposition·. How Mr Sharaa
responds to this political challenge will define both his presidency
and his country’s future.

The president has often acted pragmatically. But there have been
terrible lapses. In March, when Sunni militias linked to Mr Sharaa’s
forces slaughtered around 1,400 people in coastal Latakia, he was
slow to respond. The region is the heartland of Syria’s Alawite
minority, the sect from which Mr Assad and many of his loyalists
came. Four months later clashes in Suwayda, a province dominated
by the Druze, a mystical religious minority, ended with massacres,
some by troops loyal to the government. Again Mr Sharaa was
unable—or unwilling—to stop the violence. The atrocities there gave
Israel, which has a Druze minority, an excuse to interfere. It
launched strikes on the province and on Damascus.

Signs of authoritarianism are hard to miss. When Mr Sharaa ruled

Idlib province during the final years of the Assad regime, he ran a
competent government that oversaw a flourishing economy. But he
also became increasingly brutal, imprisoning many of his critics. He
has brought some aspects of that leadership to the presidency,
centralising power among a small group of loyalists, leaning on
Sunni tribes (he is Sunni) and sidelining minorities. His supporters
sometimes argue that broad representation is a luxury in a country
ravaged by war, and that narrow rule is the price of efficiency.
Centralisation, however, has not brought good governance, let alone
security.

A loose coalition of activists, some of them veterans of the anti-

Assad era, has now begun pressing for urgent political reform. They
have called for Mr Sharaa’s hastily drafted constitutional declaration
to be rewritten so as to allow the formation of political parties and to

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give more scope for civil society to operate. It is the first stirring of
co-ordinated opposition to the regime.

Mr Sharaa has yet to lock up any of his new opponents. But he

should do more than tolerate critics; he should welcome them and
bring them into his government. Syria needs an open constitutional
process, a deal with the Kurds, broader leadership in the security
forces and an electoral framework to ensure that the committees
choosing members of an interim parliament in September do not opt
overwhelmingly for hardline Sunnis.

Towards the end of Mr Sharaa’s rule in Idlib, protesters chanted for

his downfall. His critics have not yet gone that far. He has no
replacement, and a power vacuum in a country hollowed out by civil
war would be dangerous. Yet, in a functioning polity, the opposition
can be a stabilising force rather than a threat. For fragile, divided
Syria, that is the best chance of avoiding another descent into civil
war. ■

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which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
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The war for Donald’s ear

Who will America’s president

listen to next on Ukraine?
The problem with Donald Trump’s fast-moving, unpredictable
diplomacy
8月 21, 2025 05:06 上午

IN FEBRUARY VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY lasted less than an hour inside

the Oval Office before he was ordered to leave the building. When
he returned to the scene on August 18th, many feared something
even worse. Donald Trump had, three days earlier, rolled out the red
carpet for Vladimir Putin in Alaska. On his way back he announced
that he was no longer pressing for a ceasefire, but now favoured a
comprehensive “peace” deal that could see Ukraine hand over a big

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chunk of fortified territory in return for a promise from Mr Putin that
—cross his heart—he would not invade Ukraine for a third time.

In the sense that Mr Trump can cause Ukraine harm that it cannot
protect itself against, America’s president is even more dangerous to
Mr Zelensky than Mr Putin. Many feared that at Monday’s meeting he
would force a terrible one-sided deal on America’s supposed allies.
Thankfully, that did not happen. Amid profuse thanks and ego-
stroking, Mr Trump did not talk about territory. He even said that
America would consider backing new security guarantees for
Ukraine.

By contrast with the diplomacy, the battlefield is leaden. The war in

the south and east of the country grinds on. Russian drones and
missiles pummel Ukraine’s cities nightly, demoralising its citizens,
crippling its economy and poisoning its politics. Russia is losing men
at several times the rate that Ukraine is, though it has a great many

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more men to lose. Although Ukraine is slowly ceding ground, without
a collapse of its lines Russia will not take the land Mr Putin wants to
gain through a peace deal—at least not without sacrificing tens of
thousands of troops a month over many months or years.

That is why Mr Trump’s diplomacy, much faster-moving and less

predictable, remains so threatening. During the meetings on
Monday, the president broke off to call his Russian counterpart, and
all the indications are that he still dreams of a deal that might win
him a Nobel prize. He wants Mr Zelensky to sit down with Mr Putin in
the next week or two. If land swaps are Mr Putin’s price, the
likelihood is that Mr Zelensky will again come under huge pressure to
give up ground.

That would put Ukraine and Europe in a quandary. If Mr Zelensky

and Europe refuse, Mr Trump could cut off the supply of weapons
and crucial military intelligence at any time; he has done it before. A
furious American president could impose tariffs on Europe. He could
threaten to withdraw American support for NATO .

However, more than 250,000 people live in the part of the Donbas
that Russia seeks. Freezing a war along contact lines has happened
many times in the past. But the lines are there for a reason: they
mark where Ukraine has fallen back to defensible positions, and vast
amounts of effort and treasure have been expended on securing
them with trenches, “dragon’s teeth” and elaborate fortifications. If
Russia is allowed to take them over, it will become far harder for
Ukraine to resist another advance. That would be an incentive for Mr
Putin to attack again.

The only territorial concession Ukraine can sensibly make would be

some form of de facto recognition of Russia’s existing occupation of
around 19% of its territory. That would mark a victory for Mr Putin;
deeply unpalatable, but arguably worth conceding in the interests of
stopping a war that has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives
on both sides. But what should Ukraine get in return? Mr Trump’s

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answer, and indeed that of the Europeans, is “security guarantees”.
The problem is that Mr Trump is evasive about what they mean.

The most solid form of security guarantee·—a commitment to use a

large army to resist a Russian attack—is not on offer. Europe’s
leaders have been trying to assemble a “coalition of the willing” that
would deploy inside Ukraine, so that Russia could not violate a peace
deal without risking direct conflict with Western countries.
Unfortunately, the numbers committed are too puny to put up a fight
against Russia. Also, to establish true deterrence, any force would
depend on the certainty of American support.

Mr Trump has suggested that the Europeans will have his backing,
though no troops, for these guarantees, but can he be relied on? On
the face of it, not really. He threatened Mr Putin with “crippling”
sanctions if he would not agree to a ceasefire, but when they met he
meekly dropped all talk of them. He declines to say what sort of
support he will provide to the reassurance force, or even whether
the supply of defensive weapons to Ukraine will be guaranteed.

A better way to achieve a degree of deterrence would be ironclad

pledges to equip and fund Ukraine’s own army, which is far larger
and tougher than anything the Europeans can muster. By contrast, it
is hard to imagine anything more destructive to European security
than a peacekeeping force that is not backed up if it is attacked.
That would be the victory Mr Putin most longs for. ■

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which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
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In the oven

Pregnant women need

protecting from heatwaves
As temperatures rise, so must understanding of the risks
8月 21, 2025 05:06 上午

CONSULT THE internet on what to avoid while pregnant, and the

answer seems to be: everything. Worried women can find advice
suggesting that they abstain from sex, spicy foods, swimming and
sunscreen (in fact, all are fine; it might be wiser to avoid Google).
Other things such as smoking, drinking alcohol and eating mercury-
rich seafood, though, are rightly regarded as dangerous. Heat should
be on that list, too.

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Being too hot for too long is bad for anyone. But physiological
changes in pregnancy—such as a faster metabolism, greater heat
production, and heavier demands on the heart—make expectant
women particularly vulnerable to higher temperatures·, with
worrying consequences for mother and child. Improvements in
maternal and newborn health, once a key concern for governments
and humanitarian agencies, have stalled in recent years. That is due,
in part, to attention shifting to other issues, including climate
change. But it turns out the problems are related .

Studies from every part of the world now provide unassailable

evidence that women are more likely to give birth before the 37th
week of pregnancy as temperatures rise. A recent meta-analysis of
198 studies across 66 countries found that the odds of pre-term
birth increase by 4% for every 1°C rise in temperature in the month
before birth, and more over longer periods. Being in a locally defined
heatwave—be it in Sweden or Senegal—increases the odds by more
than a quarter, though the risks are predictably highest in the
hottest, poorest places. Complications from pre-term birth cause
40% of all newborn deaths worldwide; survivors are far more likely
to suffer from disabilities and disorders. Hotter weather has also
been linked to stillbirths and certain congenital defects, and to
gestational diabetes and pre-eclampsia, which can be fatal for the
mother.

The problem is growing as global warming increases temperatures in

general, and makes dramatic spikes more frequent and extreme.
Already, climate change has at least doubled the annual number of
hot days that can increase pregnancy risks in 222 out of 247
countries, according to Climate Central, a research group. It is
deemed responsible for around a third of all heat-related newborn
deaths in some countries, and more than a quarter of the pre-term
births caused by heatwaves each year in China. Even if the world
cuts emissions precipitously, modelling indicates that such impacts
will continue to worsen.

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But things can be done to help. The first is simply to make pregnant
women aware of the risks, so they can take protective action.
Though the link between heat exposure and negative outcomes is
evident, the underlying mechanisms are unclear. So the advice is
fairly broad: try to keep cool; stay hydrated; plan activities to avoid
hot periods and heatwaves; and seek medical help at the first sign of
heat stress. Yet such choices are constrained by circumstance, so
efforts must be made to support those with the fewest resources. In
America, for example, several states now let Medicaid, which
provides health cover to poorer people, contribute to the cost of air-
conditioning for the most vulnerable. Yet being poor and pregnant
isn’t enough to qualify; it should be. In worse-off places,
interventions such as adding awnings to homes can reduce
temperatures. Health workers everywhere should be taught about
the dangers of heat exposure in pregnancy and ways to reduce it, as
should officials in charge of responding to heatwaves.

Newly knowledgeable pregnant women will no doubt want more

information. Good. That demand will drive funding for research to
work out exactly how and why hot weather harms pregnancies, and
what interventions work best. The first large-scale studies are now
under way. Much is still unknown, including which biological systems
are most implicated, or when in pregnancy the risk is greatest. Filling
those gaps will help inform practical policies and allow treatments to
be developed. Governments should start collecting the data needed
to track progress. But recognising the problem is the first baby step.
■

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which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
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Rogue Britannia

Britain leads the world in a

new global business—a
criminal one
What to do about its rampant steal-and-export industry
8月 21, 2025 05:06 上午

WALK DOWN the street in London and you might notice two things.
First, although many pedestrians are glued to their phones, a few
will periodically look over their shoulder, scanning for an assailant
arriving at high speed. Second, some of the fancy cars, particularly
SUV s, will have a steering lock. This does not mean that Britain is
“lawless”, as the government’s critics complain. But both are signs of

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something worrying: a criminal enterprise that spans the world, but
is flourishing most in Britain. We call it Grand Theft Global Inc.

Expensive consumer goods are, increasingly, being stolen in the rich

world and exported to distant markets·. The idea is hardly new. In
the 1990s European cars and electronic goods headed east to former
communist countries. “Visit Albania,” ran one joke. “Your car is
already there.” What is novel is that the enterprise is globe-
spanning, and underpinned by a sophisticated supply chain. London
is the best place to see how it works, though other places should
watch out. Grand Theft Global’s business model is spreading.

Roughly 70,000 phones were snatched in London last year—almost

one for every 100 people. Britain accounts for 40% of phone thefts
in Europe. (Phone-snatching is also growing elsewhere: 40,000
Parisians said adieu to their devices last year.) British thieves’
favoured method is to approach from behind on an electric bike,
grab an unlocked phone and put it in a “Faraday bag” to prevent
tracking; most of the nicked phones end up in China. Meanwhile,
around 130,000 cars were stolen in Britain last year, a rise of 75% in
a decade. SUV s are popular targets, for export to the Gulf and Africa,
where they can handle poor roads.

Behind all this is a criminal enterprise that has all the trappings of a
regular global business, including specialist service providers and
seamless communications. Moving goods around the world adds
cost, but distance is a feature, not a bug: Grand Theft Global
depends on getting goods to places where they cannot easily be
found. African countries have little capacity to check for stolen cars.
China does not make it hard to sell stolen phones. The market is
remarkably efficient. In April 2024 flooding in the UAE damaged
many cars, and dealerships faced delays in replacing them. In the
following months, Britain’s police saw a sharp uptick in SUV thefts.

Grand Theft Global seems destined to grow. As Africa and Asia

become wealthier, demand for expensive goods will only increase—

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and the streets of rich-world cities offer a ready supply of nickable
goods. In addition, many rich countries hardly monitor their exports
at all. Moral hazard further complicates matters. The cost of Grand
Theft Global is broadly spread among consumers via higher
insurance premiums. That means no one has a really strong interest
in tackling it.

But it needs to be tackled. Some suggest pressing countries where

the stolen goods end up. That is unlikely to work: they have little
reason to curb the trade, even if they could. A better idea is to stop
Grand Theft Global at the border. Hampering exports would have a
cost, but freight companies could be asked to know their customers,
as banks must to help fight fraud, money-laundering or sanctions-
busting. Booking a container, for example, could require a face ID .

What about squeezing manufacturers? In the past, regulation has

forced them to prioritise security, for example by adding immobilisers
that make it harder to steal cars. But the rapid evolution of
technology for breaking into vehicles suggests that a simple
regulatory fix does not exist. The same is true for phones. Apple-
bashing British MP s are wrong to think a quick tweak could end the
blight of snatching.

That leaves policing, which has been left in the dust. Victims pull
their hair out when they manage to track down their stolen car or
phone and still the police do nothing. No Grand Theft Global kingpins
have been caught. Authorities should clamp down on their latest
tricks, for instance by making it illegal to possess break-in tools, and
by seizing electric bikes that are not restricted to legal speed limits,
which for now can serve as ideal getaway vehicles for urban
wrongdoers.

Most of all, police need to understand what they are facing.

Currently forces do not see these thefts as “high-harm”, yet the
thieves’ impunity is corroding trust in law and order, and the same
gangs are also involved in violence and drugs. Crimes are left to

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stretched local officers, with little to go on. To get to grips with
Grand Theft Global, police must recognise it as the organised
criminal enterprise it has become. ■

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which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
and reader correspondence.
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Letters
How significant is the rise of fraudulent
scientific papers?
A selection of correspondence :: Also this week, higher education in Britain, AI
security, greeting colleagues at work

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A selection of correspondence

How significant is the rise of

fraudulent scientific papers?
Also this week, higher education in Britain, AI security, greeting
colleagues at work
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

Fake science

Your article on the rise of fraudulent scientific papers drew on the

work of a recent paper in PNAS that looked at the issue (“Inside job”,
August 9th). We must indeed weed out fraudulent “paper mill”
companies that produce this stuff.

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However, both the original paper and your coverage rely on
language and a figure that greatly overstates the scale of the
problem. In 2020, the last year with actual data, paper-mill products
were estimated at approximately 0.7% of all scientific articles.
Tackling misconduct is vital, but misleading representations and
exaggerated projections risk undermining trust in science and lend
weight to sceptics, rather than fostering effective reform.

GUILLÉN FERNÁNDEZ
Scientific director
Radboud University Medical Centre
Nijmegen, Netherlands

As an editor of Neurology I oversaw the publication of an article (by

Mark Bolland et al in 2016) that uncovered scientific misconduct on a
large scale. Although this helped correct the literature, some of the
papers that were retracted had been published years before, making
it possible that their retraction may not have affected subsequent
citations or inclusion of the data in guidelines or policy.

The study in PNAS is another strong effort to focus attention on

unreliable scientific literature. Although this study could not
distinguish between fraud (whether by authors, editors, or both) and
poor adherence to scientific standards, it underlines that a reader
cannot always believe all the findings. The identification of the
networks at the core of this less reliable data is a service to science.
It will take years of training programmes, at journals and at
publishers, to bring rigorous standards to bear that will ensure the
integrity of scientific literature.

DR ROBERT GROSS
Professor of neurology, emeritus
University of Rochester Medical Centre
Rochester, New York

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Traditional education

You rightly observe in your article that Britain’s universities spend a

lot on research and campuses (“Leaner learning”, July 19th). There
certainly is an arms race on the latter—however, the financial
problem for most universities is research. Britain does not need 157
research-active universities, most of which are not producing any
significant volume of world-leading or internationally excellent
research.

Academics derive little or no prestige from teaching, and are

therefore driven into research. Huge amounts of money are wasted
in the system that produces little or no new useful ideas. The
government needs to concentrate research funds on the core
research-active universities: the Russell Group and what used to be
known as the red-bricks. The others should stop or only do applied
research they can get the private sector to pay for. There are many
other problems within the sector related to the rankings, but getting
it financially stable is the priority.

HENRIETTA ROYLE
Former chief operating officer
City St Georges
University of London

I noted the “bold” proposal to split Britain’s bankrupt universities into

“national” and “local” institutions. National universities, such as
Oxford and Cambridge, would focus on research and attracting the
brightest minds. Local colleges “would offer the best possible
training at the best possible cost”. Are the authors of this “radical”
thinking aware that they have just reinvented the polytechnic? I
agree with the prescription, but the thinking behind it is scarcely
bold, more a reversion to a model of higher education that worked.

SARAH TRAVERS
London

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Making sure AI is secure

Your briefing on the prospects for economic growth from the

adoption of artificial intelligence (“Eureka all day long”, July 26th)
explored a variety of AI- related risks and correctly highlighted the
risk from biohazards as a particular concern. The actions you listed
that labs could take to mitigate the risks omitted a critical
component: security. Even if AI labs achieve overwhelming success
in all the mitigations you mentioned, and even if they solve accidents
and structural risks to boot, this would still be insufficient to prevent
irreversible harms.

Models that are capable of causing a deadly man-made epidemic can

be perfectly obedient (or “aligned”), closed-source and behind
interfaces with aggressive guardrails, but if the model itself can be
stolen by malicious actors and used outside a company’s data centre
the epidemics will still happen. If we incorporate AI systems into
critical infrastructure and national-security operations, as many
governments are rushing to do, a single malicious modification of
the behaviour of that system could endanger national safety. Good
security is a prerequisite. Alignment of AI models is only helpful if
they’re aligned to actually benefit society rather than harm it.

Many frontier AI companies seem to be on a worse trajectory for

security than they are for safety. OpenAI recognises that its models
could lead to a significantly increased likelihood and frequency of
biological or chemical terror events, but it makes no commitments to
any concrete security measures, benchmarks or processes.

In our report, “Securing AI Model Weights”, we outline 167 security

measures that frontier AI labs can deploy to protect themselves. AI
can’t be reliable and sustainable without being safe, but it also can’t
be safe without being secure.

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SELLA NEVO
Director
Meselson Centre
RAND
Santa Monica, California

Although no one knows exactly how this will pan out, it seems more
likely that many top labs and countries could reach AGI capabilities
simultaneously. Parallel efforts, leaks, shared research, or converging
strategies may lead them to cross a blurred and ill-defined line
together, each peering sideways at the others.

Each lab may claim its system truly crossed the threshold. In
practice, we won’t get consensus, we’ll get a contested and chaotic
landscape of rival use-case domains, where AGI s are aggressively
marketed as smarter, safer and more aligned with your values. “Use
ours” (any American Big Tech). “Don’t trust theirs” (any China Big
Tech). The frontier will not be declared; it will be sold. If Silicon
Valley’s forecasts are anywhere near accurate, expect unprecedented
promotion and upheaval.

DR MARK ROBINSON
Oxford

It’s not surprising that critical thinking is inversely related to the use
of memory aides. My wife says that I keep no appointments in my
brain since I discovered Google Calendar. Now I drive an electric
BMW that constantly downloads new software and has cameras with
a 360-degree view of my surroundings. A question for your readers.
Would you feel safer riding with a dumb person driving a smart car
or a smart person driving a dumb car?

DR WILLIAM KOCH
Clinical professor emeritus
University of British Columbia Medicine
West Vancouver, Canada

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Bow do you do?

Bartleby’s agony uncle, Max Flannel, tackled the question of how to

greet people at work (August 9th). Just before the beginning of the
pandemic, when social distancing was proposed but not yet
enforced, we got to grips with that question down at the pub. Some
of us thought that fist bumps, elbow bumps or ankle bumps might
be acceptable. I disagreed. I thought the Imperial Chinese custom of
shaking hands with oneself would be far better. But although I would
have preferred the Imperial, I knew that namaskar, the Hindu
tradition of pressing one’s hands together and bowing the head,
would be more widely recognised, so I adopted it. I still use it as a
greeting or farewell. I probably shall for the rest of my life. To date,
no one has queried it.

RICHARD LARKIN
London
This article was downloaded by calibre from
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fraudulent-scientific-papers

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By Invitation
Margaret MacMillan on the promise—and
perils—of wartime summits
After Anchorage :: Leaders’ set-pieces have become more common, but not always
more productive

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After Anchorage

Margaret MacMillan on the

promise—and perils—of
wartime summits
Leaders’ set-pieces have become more common, but not always
more productive
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

IF ONLY HE had thought of it in time. President Donald Trump could

have used his favourite colour to turn the American base in
Anchorage into a 21st-century Field of the Cloth of Gold as Henry
VIII of England and Francis I of France did near Calais in 1520.
There were meetings, sumptuous banquets, jousts and a solemn
mass. It was a marvellous spectacle and produced very little. Two

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years later Henry aligned with Francis’s great rival, the Holy Roman
Emperor.

Summits so often promise more than they can deliver. The Russians
have spun the Anchorage summit as a great victory, and perhaps it
is for them, but the Americans can make no such claim. There will,
of course, be more jaw-jawing—Mr Trump met Ukraine’s President
Volodymyr Zelensky and a host of other European leaders at the
White House three days after Anchorage, and Mr Zelensky may yet
get a bilateral summit with Vladimir Putin followed by a three-way
one involving Mr Trump, too. But if this is a peace process, it has not
had the most auspicious of starts.

Even the best-planned summits—and Anchorage was not—depend

heavily on the personalities and chemistry of the leaders. With
powerful leaders, feelings matter. An assumption of superiority, or
conversely wounded pride and a desire for revenge, can lead to
future trouble. Joseph Stalin treated Mao Zedong like a subordinate
after the communist victory in the Chinese civil war and kept him
hanging around in Moscow for months before offering some
grudging aid to China. It left a lasting mark on the Chinese and
contributed to the Sino-Soviet split. At their Vienna summit of 1961
Nikita Khrushchev humiliated President John Kennedy. Khrushchev
concluded that Kennedy was a weakling and later took the hideous
gamble of stationing nuclear weapons in Cuba. Kennedy vowed he
would never be pushed around again.

The staging of summits can signal contempt—Adolf Hitler

summoning the hapless Austrian chancellor to Berchtesgaden to
threaten his country, for example—or friendship, as with Mr Trump
applauding the arrival of Mr Putin on the tarmac in Anchorage. But if
a summit only papers over differences it can lead to war rather than
peace. Napoleon and Alexander I of Russia met on a raft on the
River Neman near Tilsit in 1807 to negotiate peace and an alliance.
They also divided up Prussia, infuriating the Prussians, whose king,
uninvited to the raft, wandered sadly along the river bank. Yet the

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two great powers never resolved their underlying differences. Five
years after Tilsit Napoleon invaded Russia.

In their first meeting during the second world war, off Newfoundland
in the summer of 1941, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano
Roosevelt made formal visits to each other’s warships and prayed
and sang hymns together with their sailors to underline their
countries’ friendship. They and their military top brass had serious
conversations about the war in Europe, their new ally the Soviet
Union, the worsening conflict with Japan and the shape of the post-
war world. The meeting was a milestone in a deepening relationship
without which the war could not have been won.

Summits work when they are underpinned by shared goals, trust

and a commitment to work together. It also helps to be well-
prepared. At a critical meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt in
Casablanca in January 1943 to decide on the overall strategy for the
war in the following months, the British, who had brought detailed
papers and a shipload of experts, persuaded the Americans to delay
a landing in France until 1944. As an American general complained,
“We came, we listened, and we were conquered.”

The same could be said of Anchorage. It was a Russian triumph and

an American embarrassment. Mr Putin conceded nothing, not even a
ceasefire—and for the Americans to claim getting the big deal is
more important is wishful thinking, since Mr Putin will surely spin out
the talks if he can keep fighting and grabbing more land. Mr Trump’s
suggestion in subsequent meetings with European leaders that
America could support security guarantees for Ukraine will have
done little to ease concerns across the continent about the
dependability of his administration.

Anchorage may yet produce something useful—by raising the

question of whether summits are the best way to conduct
international relations. So often, they are heavily choreographed and
all the real work has been done already. Or, as has happened with

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Mr Trump, the leaders can ignore their advisers and briefing papers
and pride themselves on getting through to their opposite numbers
to make deals. Such freelancing, as Mr Trump has shown, can be
unproductive or unpredictable.

Summits have increased in frequency since 1945 partly because

leaders, whether of democracies or dictatorships, like them. They
are a welcome distraction from domestic politics: Richard Nixon once
mused about leaving all that to his cabinet while he dealt with the
global issues that interested him. Leaders like to feel that they are
making history.

Yet often the results are much less than advertised. Neville
Chamberlain brought back a piece of paper from Munich signed by
himself and Hitler that symbolised, he said, the desire of their two
peoples never to go to war again. A year later Britain and Germany
were at war.

It remains to be seen what Anchorage and this week’s follow-on

summits will produce, apart from yet more meetings and, probably,
a continuing war. Pressure from America on Ukraine to give up even
land Russia hasn’t taken? Resistance from Ukraine and the European
powers? A Trump visit to Moscow? Perhaps not the Nobel peace
prize for him just yet. ■

Margaret MacMillan is emeritus professor of history at the University

of Toronto and Oxford University, and the author of “War: How
Conflict Shaped Us (2020)”.
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invitation/2025/08/18/margaret-macmillan-on-the-promise-and-perils-of-wartime-
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Briefing
The world’s biggest chipmaker needs to
move beyond Taiwan
TSMC :: Easier said than done

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TSMC

The world’s biggest

chipmaker needs to move
beyond Taiwan
Easier said than done
8月 21, 2025 03:34 上午 | TAIPEI

TAIPEI, A CITY of over 2m people, stopped moving at 1.30pm on July

17th. Sirens rang out across the capital as residents rehearsed a
civil-defence drill for a Chinese invasion. Half an hour later, as
phones buzzed to mark the end of the drill, the top brass of TSMC ,
the world’s largest chipmaker, gathered in a hotel in the city centre
for their quarterly earnings call. They brought good news: record

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profits, good progress on global expansion, a confident forecast of
more.

The disjuncture was hard to miss. As an island contemplated war, its

most important company carried on with business as usual. TSMC
has fared exceptionally well in Taiwan, growing into a giant of the
global technology industry. But, for reasons both internal and
external, it has embarked on a tricky expansion beyond its home.

In terms of revenue, TSMC produces two-thirds of all chips made by

foundries—firms that manufacture semiconductors designed by
others. In the most advanced segment, including processors for
smartphones, laptops and data centres, the company’s share
exceeds 90%. The artificial-intelligence boom is powered by the AI
accelerator, a type of chip designed to train and run large language
models. Almost all of them are made by TSMC . Nvidia, the world’s
most valuable company, relies entirely on the Taiwanese firm. So
does its closest rival, AMD , another chip designer. Big tech firms like
Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, each designing their own
bespoke silicon, also turn to TSMC .

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Swelling demand from tech firms has pushed TSMC to extraordinary
heights. Between 2014 and 2024 its annual revenues rose from
$24bn to $88bn. TSMC ’s market value has reached $1trn, making it
the eleventh-most valuable company in the world (see chart 1).
Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, TSMC ’s share price
has more than doubled. Unfortunately, the larger and more
dominant the firm grows, the more it looks like a problem.

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For most of its history, TSMC made all of its cutting-edge chips in
Taiwan. Although the firm has long operated a few overseas plants
making less sophisticated chips, it has only recently begun shifting
some of its most advanced manufacturing abroad. Over the past five
years it has embarked on a $190bn global expansion. Of that,
$165bn is going to the American state of Arizona, where the firm
plans to operate six leading-edge factories or “fabs”. Replicating
TSMC ’s precision on American soil will be difficult. Shielding its core
operations from geopolitical risk may prove harder still.

Despite its size and importance, TSMC avoids the spotlight. In an

interview with The Economist, Wendell Huang, the firm’s finance
chief, admitted it prefers to “stay low profile” and is “still adjusting”
to the more intense scrutiny it receives these days. That aversion to
publicity is woven into its culture. TSMC was built to let customers
shine while it stayed in the wings.

When Morris Chang founded the firm in 1987, chipmakers like Intel,
AMD and Texas Instruments designed and produced their own
semiconductors. Mr Chang made a contrarian bet: that a firm
focused on manufacturing could outperform vertically integrated
rivals. By specialising, TSMC could create manufacturing processes
that others could not equal. By serving many customers, the
company could achieve economies of scale and cut costs.

Its bet paid off, and an industry was transformed. Evercore, an

investment bank, estimates that in the first decade of this century
more than 20 firms made leading-edge logic chips. By 2012 only
three remained: TSMC , Intel and Samsung, a South Korean
electronics firm. Today only TSMC is thriving. Samsung has struggled
with manufacturing issues at its most advanced fabs. Intel·, once the
standard-bearer of the industry, has fallen behind in chip technology
and is trying to build a foundry business as its sales dwindle.

The presence of foundries like TSMC made it easier for upstart

“fabless” technology firms to focus on chip design and not worry

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about the manufacturing process. That shift unbundled the industry,
triggering an explosion of chip startups. Jensen Huang, the boss of
Nvidia, has said that his firm “would not be possible without TSMC ”.
Many rivals tried to copy TSMC ’s pure-play foundry model, but none
of them managed to survive at the technological frontier.

Chips with everything

To understand why TSMC is so dominant, peer inside the fabs.

Moore’s law, the idea that computing power doubles roughly every
two years, relies on shrinking the transistor, a microscopic electrical
switch. In 1971 a typical processor held 200 transistors per square
millimetre. Nvidia’s B 200 AI chip, released in 2024, squeezes in about
130m—making for smaller, more energy-efficient computing.
Manufacturing such devices, with features measured in nanometres
(nm, millionths of a millimetre), requires factories that cost $20bn
apiece and are capable of producing around 25,000 silicon wafers,
each containing many chips, per month.

TSMC ’s fabs are enormous. In Taiwan, it operates four “gigafabs”,

each with at least four times the capacity of a typical factory. Fab 18
in Tainan alone spans 950,000 square metres. Its cleanroom, the
sterilised factory floor where chips are etched layer by layer,
occupies one-sixth of that area and is cleaner than an operating
theatre. Few other firms can match TSMC ’s scale or precision. Its
yields, the share of chips on a wafer that meet quality standards, are
exceptionally high.

Its employees are even more formidable. Sassine Ghazi, chief

executive of Synopsys, a maker of chip-design tools, says that
TSMC ’s manufacturing discipline is “unbelievable”. That discipline is
shaped by how the firm sees itself: as a manufacturer first and a
technology company second. Insiders describe a culture where
employees are pushed to find efficiency gains even when systems
are running smoothly. Any improvement in one fab is swiftly
replicated across all others. Failures are hunted down obsessively.

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The company’s finances reflect its rigour. In 2024 TSMC ’s net profit
margin was 40%, more than three times the average for rival
foundries. Given its dominance, could it charge more? Mr Huang of
TSMC says the firm is often asked that. His reply is that it succeeds
only when its customers do. What he does not say, but is true, is
that the firm is paranoid about losing ground to rivals. Pushing too
hard risks driving clients away eventually.

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Staying ahead is costly. TSMC outspends its rivals by a wide margin.
TrendForce, a research group, estimates that in 2025 the company’s
capital expenditure will amount to between $38bn and $42bn.
Samsung plans to spend around $3.5bn on its foundry arm, Intel
between $8bn and $11bn. TSMC directs spending where it matters
most. In 2025, 52% of revenue is expected to come from chips
produced on its most advanced nodes—typically “5nm” and below,
although that is a marketing term rather than a precise
measurement. By 2027 the share is expected to reach about 70%
(see chart 2).

For years the firm’s growing dominance in chipmaking was hardly

noted. Few outside the technology industry had even heard of TSMC .
That began to change in 2019, when the first Trump administration
sounded alarms over America’s reliance on Taiwanese chips. Then
came the pandemic. Covid-19 closed factories, causing a global chip
shortage that halted production in industries from electronics to
cars. As supply chains faltered, governments fretted. TSMC was no
longer a mere manufacturer. It had become strategic infrastructure.

In 2022 President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS Act, a $50bn package
of subsidies and tax credits designed to boost chipmaking in
America. TSMC , which announced it would spend $12bn on a factory
in Arizona in 2020, tripled that amount by late 2022. The AI boom
made American politicians even keener to bring more fabs to their
country. President Donald Trump, who derided the CHIPS Act as
wasteful, has pushed TSMC to make more chips on American soil by
threatening tariffs. In response, the firm pledged to invest another
$100bn in Arizona. C.C. Wei, TSMC ’s boss, explained that a smaller
sum “wouldn’t even make Trump open his eyes”.

Res in Arizona

Perhaps sensing that the firm can be swayed, some American

officials have floated the idea of TSMC partnering with Intel to help
jump-start the American firm’s foundry business. Mr Huang

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responds, frankly, that the company is not interested. He compares
such a deal to pouring gasoline into a diesel engine. TSMC ’s
processes are not compatible with Intel’s fabs, nor could the firm
help run them. The American government is now considering a stake
in Intel.

Attempts to entice and bully TSMC to manufacture more chips

outside Taiwan happen to align with the company’s thinking.
Increasingly, the firm seems too large for its island home. S &P
Global, a research firm, estimates that in 2023 TSMC accounted for
8% of the island’s electricity use. By 2030 its share could rise to
nearly a quarter.

Power is not the only limitation. Stephen Su of the Industrial

Technology Research Institute, a tech incubator in Hsinchu, points
out that competition for engineers will grow fiercer as the working-
age population shrinks. Taiwan has few immigrants and a fertility
rate of just 0.9, whereas a rate of 2.1 is necessary to sustain the
population. Land is another constraint. TSMC ’s newest fab in
Kaohsiung, which spans 79 hectares, was built on a former oil
refinery and required a good deal of soil reclamation. Finding sites
for future fabs is becoming harder.

Expansion abroad brings fresh challenges. The company is

constructing new fabs in Japan and Germany, though its biggest bet
is in Arizona. One fab has begun production; two more are under
construction, with another three to follow. All told, Arizona could
house as much as a third of TSMC ’s most advanced capacity. The arid
environment has taken some getting used to. Mr Huang admits the
company was surprised by delays in the local permit process. In
Taiwan, he says, managers know what permits are required and
“how to handle it”. In Arizona, they assumed that, with Intel already
operating plants nearby, local authorities would be familiar with fab
construction.

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Things have since improved. The first Arizona fab is reportedly
producing chips for Apple at yields comparable to those in Taiwan.
They are not cheap, though. Lisa Su, the boss of AMD , estimates
that chips made in Arizona may cost up to 20% more than those
from Taiwan. The hope is that customers will be willing to pay a
premium for supply-chain resilience.

A bigger worry is the difficulty of importing an engineering culture.

An executive at a chip-design firm likens TSMC ’s operations in Taiwan
to a machine with “its own heartbeat” and suggests that workers
elsewhere do not possess the same rigour. Stories of an intense,
self-sacrificing work culture abound. After a powerful earthquake hit
Taiwan in 1999, employees quickly filled TSMC ’s car park to assess
the damage. In the mid-2010s the company created a “nightingale
programme” with engineers working the night shift as it raced to
close the gap with Samsung and win Apple’s phone business.

Mr Chang has long maintained that transplanting such a work ethic

across borders would be difficult. The company is trying. Around
1,000 Arizona-based engineers were sent to its “mother fab” in
Tainan for 12 to 18 months of training. A similar number of

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Taiwanese engineers later joined them in Arizona. Over time, the
number of transplants ought to fall. Growing automation may help,
too. Jon Yu of Asianometry, a YouTube channel on business history,
notes that TSMC still requires a pool of skilled technicians to operate
its fabs. Given higher labour costs and different work norms abroad,
the firm may be more willing to automate.

Silicon shield

Geopolitics adds other pressures, which are harder to anticipate and

respond to. In Taiwan, TSMC is more than just a company. Locals
refer to it as “the sacred mountain that protects the country”, and in
hard-to-measure ways it contributes to national security. As long as
China relies on TSMC for its chips, goes the theory, it will hesitate to
attack the island. That makes the firm’s global expansion politically
delicate. Becca Wasser of the Centre for a New American Security, a
think-tank in Washington, says that Taiwan faces a difficult balancing
act. It needs to keep enough of TSMC ’s operations at home to
remain strategically indispensable, while accommodating allies who
are eager to reduce their dependence on the island’s fabs.

The events of the past few years may have made the task harder.
Since 2019 ASML , a Dutch firm that supplies technology to
chipmakers, has been barred by that country’s government from
exporting its most advanced tools to China. That has hobbled
Chinese firms’ ability to produce semiconductors at the 7nm level
and below. In November 2024 the American government tightened
restrictions further, prohibiting TSMC from offering its most advanced
services to Chinese customers. Some analysts warn that cutting
China off from the technological frontier could increase the risk of
military action.

The stakes of this balancing act are immense. In 2022 Mark Liu,
then TSMC ’s chairman, warned that a Chinese invasion would render
the company’s fabs inoperable, since they depend on a “real-time
connection with the outside world”. Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s

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current policy chief, has gone further—suggesting that the fabs
should be destroyed if China invades. Either way, the result would be
the same: a global supply chain in chaos.

TSMC sees little value in dwelling on hypotheticals. Mr Huang

believes markets are more pragmatic now. Though he does not say
it outright, the message is that investors have already priced in
geopolitical risk and are less anxious about it. He suggests that if
war were to break out, it would not be confined to Taiwan but would
engulf its neighbours too. In that case, there would be much more
to worry about than chip production.

That view may be too sanguine. Even if the Arizona fabs function as
well as expected, two-thirds of the world’s most advanced chips will
still be made in Taiwan. The firm’s most advanced manufacturing
technology will remain there, as will nearly all its research and
development. Its overseas fabs, by design, will lag at least one
generation behind.

Beyond geopolitics, other risks loom. As TSMC pushes the limits of

process technology, it could stumble. The firm pulled ahead of Intel
in 2015 when the American firm faltered on newer nodes. Its rivals,
though bruised, remain formidable. Samsung recently signed a
$16.5bn deal to supply advanced chips to Tesla, a lift to its foundry
ambitions. The AI boom, which has fuelled much of TSMC ’s recent
growth, could slow down. Tariffs may sap demand for consumer
electronics, which account for 40% of the firm’s revenue. And the
semiconductor industry is notoriously cyclical. Firms tend to
overbuild in good times, only to face a glut when demand slows.
TSMC ’s current expansion is bigger than anything in its history.

TSMC ’s greatest challenge may be the least tangible. Mr Huang says

outsiders often assume that chipmaking success is simply about
money. Yet, he notes, there are examples where governments have
“poured money into a certain company” and still failed. What they
lack is TSMC’ s edge, its resilience, discipline and relentless drive to

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improve. For the company to keep growing, it must succeed abroad.
That will depend on whether it can export its exacting culture. For a
firm that has weathered typhoons and earthquakes, and lives under
the shadow of war, going global may prove the harder test.■

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Asia
Japan storms back into the chip wars
Roaring back? :: The country used to be a semiconductor powerhouse. Can it be one
again?

TSMC could revolutionise rural Japan

When the chips are up :: Its “Silicon Island” is getting a second chance at success

How fair are India’s elections?

Poll politics :: Rahul Gandhi, an opposition leader, raises some uncomfortable
questions

Pakistan is critical in the fight against

Islamic State terrorism
Terror trade :: It is helping the West but wants arms and intelligence in return

The world is learning to live with the

Taliban
Banyan :: Four years after the fall of Kabul, governments are quietly recognising the
insurgents

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Roaring back?

Japan storms back into the

chip wars
The country used to be a semiconductor powerhouse. Can it be one
again?
8月 21, 2025 05:06 上午 | Chitose

KOIKE ATSUYOSHI likes to go fast. The 73-year-old semiconductor

engineer is a motorcycle aficionado. He brings the same tempo to
his latest company, Rapidus. Founded in 2022, the firm opened its
massive semiconductor factory, or “fab”, last year in Chitose, a small
city on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost main island. In December
Rapidus became the first Japanese entity to acquire an extreme
ultraviolet lithography (EUV ) system from ASML , the Dutch company
that makes the unique devices; Rapidus had the complex up and

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running within months. In mid-July, Mr Koike announced the
successful pilot production of two-nanometre (2nm) transistors, the
thinnest, most advanced chips yet. “A company that’s been around
less than three years managed to do it,” he boasts. “It’s an incredible
pace.”

Rapidus is the most ambitious element of a broader effort to revive

the semiconductor industry in Japan. In the boldest industrial policy
push in a generation, the Japanese government ploughed ¥3.9trn
($27bn) into support for semiconductors between early 2020 and
early 2024. As a share of GDP , that amounts to a bigger commitment
than America made to its semiconductor industry through the CHIPS
Act. Japan wants both to revive its domestic champions and to
attract foreign ones, such as TSMC , the Taiwanese semiconductor
giant, which now makes chips in southern Japan. At the launch of its
fab there last year, Morris Chang, the TSMC founder, spoke of a chip
“renaissance”.

Japan once dominated the semiconductor industry. In the 1980s,

Japanese firms accounted for more than half of the global market,
and an even bigger share of the cutting-edge chips of the time. But
trade friction with America led to limits on Japanese chip exports,
creating an opportunity for rivals in Taiwan and South Korea.
Japanese companies also struggled to shift to an era of increasing
specialisation in semiconductor production. Whereas some Japanese
firms retained strong positions in the materials and equipment
necessary for making semiconductors, from coating chemicals to
silicon wafers themselves, they fell behind in cutting-edge
manufacturing. By 2019, Japan accounted for less than 10% of the
world’s semiconductors.

The Japanese government came to see this state of affairs not only
as a commercial disaster, but also as a national-security risk. Supply-
chain disruptions during the pandemic helped raise public awareness
of the crucial role chips play in modern life. The war in Ukraine
fuelled fears of Chinese designs on Taiwan—and highlighted the risk

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of depending on a single firm there for most of the world’s high-end
chips. The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI ) has
only heightened the strategic importance of semiconductors. Japan’s
latest National Security Strategy, released in 2022, explicitly sets a
goal of strengthening “next-generation semiconductor development
and manufacturing bases”.

Japan’s semiconductor strategy consists of two main pillars. First is

indispensability, which means, in effect, “being influential over
others”, says Mireya Solís of the Brookings Institution, an American
think-tank. The idea is that if Japan can control parts of a long
supply chain it can leverage that interdependence to keep others (ie,
China) from weaponising their control over certain inputs.

The second pillar is autonomy, or having domestic production

capacity. “The world will be divided into two groups: countries that
can supply semiconductors and countries that buy them,” says Amari
Akira, a former lawmaker with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party
(LDP ) who led semiconductor policy. “The countries that supply will
be the winners, and the countries that buy will be the losers.”

The government has refreshed its industrial-policy toolkit to meet

the challenge. The LDP passed a series of new laws in recent years
enabling broader and longer-lasting government support for chip
firms like Rapidus. While such measures involve taking sizable bets
with taxpayer money, they have broad political support. “Of course
there are risks involved—but there are also risks of doing nothing,”
says one LDP bigwig involved in the policies.

The measures have begun to bear fruit. Big subsidies helped entice
TSMC to set up shop in Kyushu. Its first fab there produces chips of
12-28nm—the most advanced type of semiconductor to be produced
in Japan so far, but still well behind its state-of-the-art models. The
firm has already announced plans to build a second facility for even
higher-end logic chips there; talks about a potential third fab are
reportedly under way. TSMC ’s arrival has enticed suppliers and

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partners to expand on Kyushu, which has positioned itself as “Silicon
Island”.

Micron, an American memory chipmaker, has also received more

than $1bn in subsidies to expand its chipmaking facilities in
Hiroshima. Meanwhile Samsung, a South Korean electronics giant, is
building a cutting-edge research facility in Yokohama, south of
Tokyo.

Another nascent ecosystem is emerging around Rapidus. The firm is

the highest-risk and highest-reward bet of the bunch. Born of a
partnership with IBM , which developed a new method for making
next-generation transistors, a type of electrical component, Rapidus
hopes to leapfrog across a generation of semiconductor engineering
and catch up with global pace-setters. It has attracted investment
from a consortium of eight blue-chip Japanese firms, including Sony,
Toyota and SoftBank. The government has also bankrolled much of
the initial cost, to the tune of ¥1.72trn ($12bn) through early 2025.

The success of Rapidus hinges on meeting three big challenges, says

Ota Yasuhiko of Hokkaido University. First is cultivating enough
talented cadres. Universities across Japan are launching programmes
to train a new generation of semiconductor engineers. But in the
meantime, Rapidus has had to rely largely on older specialists who
came of age during Japan’s first chip boom; the average age of its
recruits was initially over 50. Roughly 150 top engineers were sent
to train at IBM ’s research facility in New York.

Another challenge is developing a sustainable business model.

Samsung and TSMC are advancing towards 2nm chips of their own,
and have established relationships with the buyers of high-end
semiconductors. Rapidus is positioning itself as a boutique option,
able to make smaller lots of specialised chips, rather than large
batches of one-size-fits-all offerings. “We have no intention of
directly competing with TSMC —the markets are different,” Mr Koike
says. He is counting on generative AI becoming a tailwind, boosting

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overall demand for chips and increasing interest in offerings that can
improve efficiency and reduce power consumption.

But first Rapidus must make the leap to mass production, which the
firm aims to begin in 2027. While the successful pilot wafer is an
encouraging sign, the true test will be whether Rapidus can make
lots of them of the quality necessary to be commercially viable. The
production process for such semiconductors is closer to handmade
crafts than to assembly-line widgets: engineers must constantly
adjust equipment to maintain correct parameters. For Mr Koike,
motorcycles offer another lesson here. A lifetime of riding, he says,
has taught him “about how a machine and a human being can work
together closely”. Japan’s chip renaissance depends on it. ■
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When the chips are up

TSMC could revolutionise

rural Japan
Its “Silicon Island” is getting a second chance at success
8月 21, 2025 03:34 上午 | Kumamoto

HOSPITALITY IS NOT in short supply in Kikuyo, a small town in

Japan’s southern prefecture, Kumamoto. At a local shopping centre,
Kumamon—the prefecture’s bear mascot—grins with a sign saying
“Welcome” in traditional Chinese. Supermarkets now stock
Taiwanese snacks and cooking ingredients. The gestures are aimed
at the hundreds of Taiwanese engineers and their families who have
arrived since TSMC , the world’s most advanced chipmaker, set up a
plant nearby.

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TSMC is transforming Kumamoto and the wider Kyushu region, an
island in the south-west. Its first factory—run through JASM , a joint
venture with Sony, a Japanese electronics giant, and Denso, a car-
parts supplier—began producing logic semiconductors for cars and
electronics in December. The move was part of Japan’s push to
rebuild domestic chip capacity, driven by fears over Taiwan’s
vulnerability and a broader effort to regain technological superiority.
A second plant, set to produce more advanced chips, will break
ground this year and should be running in 2027.

Beyond its strategic role, the project has created a boom locally. It is
now closely watched as a test case for the rest of the country. Since
TSMC ’s arrival, over 60 companies have established a presence in
Kumamoto. Wages are rising, pushed up by TSMC ’s relatively high
pay. Japanese newspapers marvelled at its job listings, including
positions in the factory canteens that offered ¥3,000 ($20) an hour—
roughly triple the prefecture’s average wage. Land prices have
soared, hurting local renters but boosting tax revenues. Growth
extends beyond the chip industry itself to surrounding sectors such
as logistics and hospitality. Kyushu Financial Group, a regional
banking firm, estimates the economic impact in Kumamoto will reach
¥11trn ($76bn) in total over the next decade.

Kumamoto won the plant partly for the prefecture’s proximity to

Taiwan; it is also near lots of water, needed for chipmaking. But it
also had industrial heritage. In the 1980s, when Japanese firms
dominated the global semiconductor market, Kyushu was nicknamed
“Silicon Island”. Since then Japan has fallen behind Taiwan and
South Korea. Officials hope TSMC ’s arrival will help reverse the trend.
Kimura Takashi, Kumamoto’s governor, argues that opening up to
foreign firms in the region, especially those from Taiwan, is vital to
Japan’s future. The prefecture is planning to build a science park to
connect universities, suppliers and startups.

Now, across Kumamoto, the influence of the Taiwanese workers can

be seen everywhere. Signs in residential areas near the plant are

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printed in Japanese, English and Chinese. Local city halls have hired
Chinese-speaking staff. State schools have expanded language
assistance, while a new international school opened last year in
order to accommodate the new Taiwanese families. “The area has
suddenly become so multicultural,” says Chiu Kuei-fen, a Taiwan-
born longtime resident in Kikuyo, who runs a website which helps
newcomers navigate everyday life.

An island of change

But the speed of development has brought strain, too. Komatsu

Atsushi, a local official, points to traffic jams that have worsened as
workers poured into the area. Environmental concerns persist,
especially over water use. Officials say the impact is minimal and
that the company will recycle most of what it uses. But some
residents are not reassured. “Maybe some people are excited about
TSMC ’s arrival,” grumbles one carrot farmer in Kikuyo, who says
some of her neighbours have been pushed out by soaring land
prices. “But for people like us, it’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

The biggest challenge, however, may be talent. Japan faces a big

shortage of semiconductor engineers. Until very recently the chip
industry was seen as stagnant. “People stopped seeing the sector as
a promising one,” says Okano Hideyuki of the Kyushu Economic
Research Centre. He reckons TSMC ’s arrival is slowly starting to
change that perception.

Local universities are scrambling to adapt, launching chip-focused

courses and seeking closer ties with industry. Tanaka Hisao,
president of Japan Material, a supplier that built a plant in
Kumamoto after TSMC moved in, also sees a deep cultural problem.
“People don’t feel proud to work in semiconductors any more,” he
says, recalling the 1980s heyday. If Japan’s chip revival succeeds,
that could soon shift. ■
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Poll politics

How fair are India’s

elections?
Rahul Gandhi, an opposition leader, raises some uncomfortable
questions
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

Rallying behind Rahul

AN ADDRESS WITH a house numbered zero; a household with 80

people; a person named “dfojgaidf”. Bureaucratic snafus are
common in India. But according to Rahul Gandhi, these irregularities
in Mahadevapura, a suburb in the city of Bangalore, were part of a
grander “vote chori” (vote theft) scheme that helped the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP ) win last year’s general election. In a detailed
presentation this month Mr Gandhi, the leader of Congress, India’s

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main opposition, said there were thousands of such examples and
accused the Election Commission of India (ECI ), the constitutional
body that organises the country’s polls, of colluding with the BJP .

Mr Gandhi’s allegations have rocked the ECI , which was already

under pressure. On June 24th it began a “Special Intensive Revision”
of the electoral rolls in Bihar, ahead of polls due there by November.
The exercise has been controversial for both its timing and
execution. Such electoral revisions are rare—the last one in Bihar
was in 2003—and are usually planned in great detail. This revision
was announced abruptly and will be completed for a state with
130m people in a matter of weeks. Questions also hover over the
review’s result, in which 6.5m voters were struck from the list
(approximately 8.3% of the total voter count).

The ECI has dismissed such concerns. It says that its deletions were
due to deaths, duplicate entries and migration. The commission has
been even more defiant in the face of Mr Gandhi’s allegations. On
August 17th Gyanesh Kumar, the ECI ’s boss, issued an ultimatum to
the Congress leader, ordering him to file an affidavit to the courts
under oath outlining his charges or to apologise to the country.
“There is no third option,” he said.

The controversies add to growing concerns about the integrity of

India’s polls. For years, the ECI has been seen as the bedrock of
Indian democracy, earning plaudits for organising the world’s biggest
elections. On indices compiled by the V -Dem Institute, a Swedish
think-tank, India’s electoral process has long outperformed its peers
in the region. But its score has been sliding over the past decade,
dragged down by declines on several measures, including those
tracking voter irregularities and freedom for parties to operate.

One explanation lies in the nature of Indian politics. Since 2014 the
BJP has been the country’s dominant political power. In the era of
coalition politics that preceded its rise, it was in everyone’s interests
for the ECI to ensure a level playing-field. But today, in an era of

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single-party hegemony, that neutralising force has lost its power. The
head of the ECI , for instance, is nominated by a panel, which
includes the prime minister, leader of the opposition and another
minister—and is hence skewed towards the executive. (The Supreme
Court had recommended that the third member should be the Chief
Justice of India, but that was ignored by the government.)

Similarly, critics argue that the model code of conduct, which the ECI
uses to monitor election campaigns, is unfairly applied. They say
clear violations, such as inflammatory language, by BJP leaders,
including the prime minister, Narendra Modi, have been ignored. In a
new study examining the integrity of the general election in 2024,
Milan Vaishnav, a political scientist, writes that there are signs that
elections in India “are free but not necessarily always fair”.

For now, the opposition has been galvanised by the issue and is
pressing for reforms. On August 17th Mr Gandhi embarked on a
“Voter Adhikar Yatra” (Voter Rights March) in Bihar to educate
people about their electoral rights. Opposition parties have even
mooted impeaching Mr Kumar, the election commissioner. But such
changes require legislation passed by parliament, where the BJP and
its allies enjoy a comfortable majority.

The BJP itself has dismissed allegations of collusion and shown little
appetite for change—despite seemingly acknowledging electoral
irregularities. A week after Mr Gandhi’s presentation, Anurag Thakur,
a BJP parliamentarian, accused the Congress of conducting its own
vote chori, pointing to alleged “doubtful voters”.■

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Terror trade

Pakistan is critical in the fight

against Islamic State
terrorism
It is helping the West but wants arms and intelligence in return
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午 | Islamabad

Lines of extremism

FOR MOST of the past 25 years, “phenomenal” was not a word many
Americans used to describe Pakistan’s co-operation on counter-
terrorism. Yet that is how General Michael Kurilla, then head of
America’s Central Command, characterised it in June. His praise was
striking not just because American officials have long accused
Pakistan of covertly backing the Afghan Taliban and sheltering

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Osama bin Laden, who was killed by American special forces in a
Pakistani garrison town in 2011. The remark also came seven weeks
after India blamed a terrorist attack in Kashmir on Pakistan, which
has a long history of sponsoring similar assaults on Indian soil.

What explains the change of tune? The answer lies in the lawless
borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan. That is now the
stamping ground of the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP ), an
offshoot of the group that established a “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria
in 2014. America and other Western governments see ISKP as their
biggest international terrorist threat. Partly because of this, many
governments are quietly engaging with the Taliban in Afghanistan·.

At Western governments’ request, Pakistan has stepped up joint

efforts to kill and capture ISKP leaders in the last year or so. Among
them was the alleged planner of an ISKP suicide attack in Kabul that
killed 13 American service members and about 170 civilians in
August 2021. Pakistan arrested him in February and extradited him
to America in March, earning rare public praise from Donald Trump.
That also helped Field Marshal Asim Munir, Pakistan’s army chief, to
score an invitation to a White House lunch in June, just over a
month after a brief conflict with India. The field marshal, a devout
Muslim who appears to be more ideologically minded than his
predecessors, returned to America for more talks this month.

Even so, ISKP still has about 4,000-6,000 fighters, including Tajiks,
Uzbeks and Turks who mostly operate in eastern Afghanistan and
Pakistan’s north and south-west, according to officials tracking the
group. It is considered especially dangerous because it attracts
experienced fighters and recruits aggressively online, often
encouraging lone-wolf attacks abroad. And despite coming under
pressure from Afghan and Pakistani authorities, it “retains the
capability and intent to attack Western interests abroad with little to
no warning”, General Kurilla told a congressional hearing on June
10th.

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Further co-operation from Pakistan could come with conditions
attached. It is not as worried about ISKP because the group, which
adheres to the puritanical Salafist school of Sunni Islam, mainly
targets Shia Muslims (including in Iran) along with Westerners and
Russians. Pakistan is far more concerned about other insurgents on
its territory who have separatist aims or who want to impose sharia
law.

So Pakistan is now seeking American support for its efforts against

those groups, especially the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP ), active
in its northern tribal areas, and separatist groups in the south-
western province of Balochistan. In 2024 alone, Pakistan says that
1,081 of its people were killed in terrorist attacks: a 45% increase
from 2023.

One of Pakistan’s requests is that America works to recover the vast

quantities of weapons it left behind after withdrawing from
Afghanistan in 2021. Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry,
Pakistan’s military spokesman, says that America should buy them
back on Afghanistan’s black market to prevent more falling into the
hands of insurgents there and in Pakistan. “Everything is available to
the highest bidder” in Afghanistan, he says.

Pakistan also wants America to provide it with more intelligence and

to resume supplying Pakistani forces with weaponry to help fight
insurgents. American officials may be open to supplying equipment
such as mine-resistant armoured personnel carriers and night-vision
goggles, which they believe would not alter the military balance with
India. But provision of any such kit would be fiercely opposed by
India’s government, a far bigger buyer of American military
hardware.

Pakistan’s other main demand is more challenging. It wants America

and other Western governments to accept its claims that India is
backing the TTP and Baloch separatists. Pakistan recently presented
foreign governments with what it says is fresh evidence. And it

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wants them to put pressure on India to stop such alleged activity.
Western officials, while examining that evidence, have yet to be
convinced. They also have to balance such claims with compelling
evidence of Pakistan’s longstanding links to terrorism in India.

Despite this, there is no sign of Pakistan withholding co-operation

against ISKP . Field Marshal Munir sees it as an important part of his
calculus about how to draw close to the Trump administration. Nor is
ISKP only a concern for the West. Russia considers it a serious
threat. So does China: one of its citizens was killed by ISKP in
Afghanistan in January. Iran, too, deems ISKP dangerous, after it
killed more than 100 people in a bomb attack in the city of Kerman
in 2024.

Still, as Pakistan steps up its counter-terrorism partnership with the

West, familiar tensions are emerging. On the Western side, some
suggest that Pakistan has hyped up the importance of some ISKP
figures it has killed or captured (something it often did with alleged
al-Qaeda leaders in earlier years). On Pakistan’s side, some officials
suggest that ISKP is covertly backed by America to strike against
Russia and Iran and to undermine Chinese interests in Pakistan and
Afghanistan. America’s security co-operation with Pakistan may be
on the up. But in the words of one veteran in that field, there is only
one constant in the relationship: mutual distrust. ■
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Banyan

The world is learning to live

with the Taliban
Four years after the fall of Kabul, governments are quietly
recognising the insurgents
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

AS INSURGENTS , the Taliban spent 20 years wearing down the

world’s most powerful army. As diplomats they needed just four to
break out of their international isolation. Since seizing power in
August 2021, most countries have refused to recognise the Taliban
as Afghanistan’s government, acknowledging them only as “de facto
authorities”. That changed in July this year, when Russia officially
recognised the group. The Taliban flag was raised at the Embassy of
the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in Moscow. Unofficially, other

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governments are following suit. On August 20th the Taliban hosted a
trilateral meeting with China and Pakistan.

The Taliban were supposed to remain in the diplomatic doghouse

until they abandoned their abhorrent treatment of women and
broadened their all-male Pashtun cabinet. Neither has happened.
Girls are banned from secondary school, women from working for
NGO s and going to parks. Vice-and-virtue police patrol Kabul, the
capital, with increasing zeal to check that women are covered up
and accompanied by a male relative, according to one of the city’s
few remaining female corporate executives.

The front against the Taliban has nonetheless steadily cracked. At

least 15 mostly regional countries have ambassadors in Kabul,
including China, Russia, Iran and several Gulf states. Many more
operate at a lower level of diplomatic representation. The thaw is
accelerating: the United Arab Emirates accepted a Taliban
ambassador in August 2024. China followed in January. Both China
and Russia eye Afghan minerals while fretting about Islamic State
spillover. Business is picking up, too. Chinese, Turkish and Iranian
firms are cutting deals. As a Kabul-based diplomat notes, when the
Taliban must choose between an Uzbekistan energy contract and
“another Western lecture on girls’ education”, the choice is obvious.

Western states are performing diplomatic contortions to engage with

the Taliban on multiple issues without conceding recognition, a
process an American diplomat calls a “charade”. Britain is among the
few to have acceded to Taliban demands that countries must
withdraw recognition from the former regime’s diplomats. It has a
special envoy who has met Taliban officials at least once since being
appointed in June. The EU has an office in Kabul. Norway received a
Taliban diplomat in January. In March Switzerland reopened its
humanitarian office.

Migration is a factor. Germany accepted two Taliban diplomats in

Berlin and Bonn in July to co-ordinate the deportation of convicted

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Afghan criminals. More than 100 have been flown to Kabul since
August 2024, despite UN warnings that Afghanistan is unsafe. But,
even so, the Taliban won’t agree to solve the West’s illegal refugee
problem “for free”, notes one foreign diplomat.

Similarly, America has between 12,000 and 15,000 illegal Afghan

migrants it would like to return, according to an American diplomat.
In January, the Biden administration traded prisoners with the
Taliban. America has also lifted $10m bounties on three top Talibs,
including Sirajuddin Haqqani, the interior minister, who orchestrated
suicide-bombings against Western forces. Mr Haqqani remains on
the terrorist list, but this barely matters: in 2022 sanctions were
diluted to the point that businesses are free to deal with his ministry.

Until recently, Taliban officials met weekly with American diplomats

in Qatar. Topics included human rights, drugs and counter-terrorism.
The meetings ended when Mary Bischoping, an official hostile to
engagement while the Taliban held American hostages, took charge.
Her recent reassignment has been quietly celebrated by State
Department pragmatists.

The Taliban’s trump card is the strength of their regime. In 2021

observers expected their support would crash along with the
economy. Instead, they have cut corruption, halted poppy
cultivation, ended 40 years of war and helped hammer the local
Islamic State franchise (ISKP ). Crucially, there is no credible
opposition, in both Afghanistan and in exile. The Taliban feel so
secure that they are slashing their bloated security apparatus to save
money.

Things could still be destabilised by the cuts by Donald Trump’s

administration to humanitarian aid, the pushback of refugees by Iran
and drought. But the Taliban have endured worse. “You have the
clocks, we have the time,” they told the occupying foreign powers.
Now they have both.■

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China
Hong Kong’s courtroom dramas
Judicial independence :: Jimmy Lai’s trial raises questions about how justice now
works

China’s mid-year economic wobble

The second act :: The government experiments with small handouts to households

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Judicial independence

Hong Kong’s courtroom

dramas
Jimmy Lai’s trial raises questions about how justice now works
8月 21, 2025 05:06 上午 | Hong Kong

CLOSING ARGUMENTS are under way in the trial of Hong Kong’s most
famous media mogul. Jimmy Lai’s publications cheered the millions
who marched against the territory’s government in 2019. The
charismatic billionaire could have fled. But Mr Lai stayed, and now
stands accused of sedition and collusion with foreign forces. The
verdict is expected to be delivered in a few weeks or months; few
observers doubt that the 77-year-old will be found guilty. Already
serving another jail term, he could face a sentence of life in prison.

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In the wake of the unrest, which turned violent, China’s ruling
Communist Party engineered sweeping changes in Hong Kong’s laws
to prevent further upheaval. These are being used to crush even
peaceful activism that is deemed a threat to the party or the
government in Hong Kong.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be after Britain passed Hong

Kong back to China in 1997. China promised to preserve freedoms. It
allowed Hong Kong to keep a common-law legal system, which set
the bar high for putting dissenters in jail. But two new laws have
transformed the legal landscape. The first was the National Security
Law (NSL ), promulgated by the legislature in Beijing in 2020. It
created sweeping, fuzzy categories of crime that Hong Kong had not
known before, such as secession, subversion and the collusion of
which Mr Lai stands accused. The other was last year’s “Article 23
legislation”. It imposed tougher sentences for offences related to
national security and ditched a requirement that the crime of
sedition (which existed before the NSL ) should be linked to violence.

Business people still seem bullish—increasingly so, even. The

American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong regularly surveys its
members about how they feel. In January 83% said they were
confident in the territory’s legal order. In 2022 only about a quarter
felt that way. Their assumption seems to be that the authorities will
target activists and leave business alone. But the new laws feel
oppressive to many Hong Kongers. Large, peaceful protests, once
common, no longer happen. Government critics fear speaking out.

The legislation also weighs heavily on the courts. Judges lack

precedent they can draw on for determining how to understand new
legal parameters. Almost all the 78 concluded cases under the NSL
have resulted in guilty verdicts, but appeals abound. It may take
years for these to work through the system. That process will help
provide more clarity about where exactly the law’s red lines are.

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Legal blows against dissent raise questions about Hong Kong’s
judicial independence. The territory still ranks highly on global rule-
of-law indices. In 2019 it was placed 16th by the World Justice
Project, an American NGO . America was 20th on its list of 126
countries and territories. Since the imposition of the NSL Hong Kong
has fallen only slightly to 23rd (out of 142), keeping its lead over
America, which trails at 26th. (Mainland China has fallen from 88th
in 2020 to 95th, just above Tanzania.)

But Hong Kong’s overall score masks a sharp deterioration in one

category: fundamental rights. In this area it has fallen from 33rd—
six places behind America—to 62nd (25 behind). It is still far ahead
of mainland China (close to bottom at 139th). Clearly, however, it
has changed, with its courts now regularly jailing people for
dissident activities that once would have been allowed. Critics
wonder if judges are taking cues from Chinese officials, and to what
degree the system is becoming more like that of the mainland.
There the Communist Party, not the judiciary, determines the
outcome of cases that involve matters relating to its interests.

Wigs and gowns

Officials counter that the territory’s judicial system is as robust as

ever. A senior adviser to Hong Kong’s government, Ronny Tong—
himself a lawyer—dismisses suggestions that the judiciary is pliant.
He calls allegations of political pressure on judges a “very unjustified
myth”. Leaders in Beijing are adamant that they want to protect the
territory’s common-law system.

In cases not involving dissent, this system indeed remains intact.

And even in trials of political activists, Hong Kong’s courts still
operate very differently from those of the mainland, where such
events are often pro-forma, usually wrapped up in days and without
media access. In Hong Kong they can last months, with evidence
and witness testimony argued over in detail. Journalists can watch
and report. There is no sign that the Communist Party intervenes

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directly in trials as it does on the mainland, where outcomes in
politically sensitive cases are determined by its shadowy “political-
legal” committees.

Yet the party has other ways of influencing outcomes. The NSL and
Article 23 legislation allow related trials to be held without a jury—
they now always are. Verdicts in these sorts of case are reached by
three judges chosen from a special pool. Its members have
renewable year-long terms, but the NSL says that if a judge “makes
any statement or behaves in any manner endangering national
security” while doing the job, they can be dismissed from the pool.
China’s rubber-stamp parliament has the final say in the NSL ’s
interpretation. The Communist Party sees criticism of its rule as a
national-security threat.

Disquiet is mounting. The territory’s Court of Final Appeal (CFA ) has

invited both local and overseas judges onto its bench since the
handover. The latter came from other common-law jurisdictions such
as Australia and Britain and took up temporary seats. Five foreigners
have quit the CFA since 2022; some have cited concerns about the
political environment. (There is little chance a visiting overseas judge
would be chosen to adjudicate an NSL case in the CFA , though
foreign judges who are resident in Hong Kong have done so.)

One trigger was a case involving 47 people who were accused of

subversion for their roles in organising an unofficial primary election
to maximise the chances of opposition politicians taking control of
the legislature, and using that majority to force Hong Kong’s leader
to step down (its constitution allows that). Two were acquitted; the
remainder were sentenced to between four and ten years in prison
last year.

Citing their treatment, Lord Sumption, formerly of Britain’s Supreme

Court, left the CFA after four and a half years in service. “It seemed
to me that in cases, particularly criminal cases about which the
Chinese government was known to feel strongly, the courts were not

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prepared to operate independently of the wishes of China,” he says.
Hong Kong’s government rejects his views. In a statement of nearly
3,000 words in June 2024, it declared that any suggestion that
judicial independence has been compromised “would be utterly
wrong, totally baseless, and must be righteously refuted”.

They face difficult times in ill-charted territory

For judges, these are difficult times in ill-charted territory. Lord

Sumption recalls a “very senior” one telling him that the West offers
only second passports and moral lectures. “We have nowhere else to
go, unlike you,” he quotes the judge as saying. “What are we to do?
We are not able to conduct a guerrilla war against China. And if we
tried, we’d probably get something worse. We have to face realities.”

Many of the judges may not be liberals, anyway. China insists that
they must be “patriotic”, which in its view involves accepting the
party’s monopoly of power. A law professor says a few have not
studied human-rights law. The NSL requires Hong Kong to adhere to
the UN ’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. But
judges know that any attempt to apply these principles in a way that
prevents the party getting its way could end in frustration. The party

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makes clear its views using its local mouthpieces, especially two
newspapers Ta Kung Pao and Wen Wei Po. These portray even
peaceful protesters as guilty of heinous crimes against the state.

Many appeals are likely to end up eventually in the CFA; some may
be upheld. In March it quashed the convictions of three former
members of a now-disbanded pro-democracy group, the Hong Kong
Alliance. It was a rare exoneration of activists by the territory’s
highest court. But it was on a technicality. One of them, along with
fellow former leaders of the group, is expected to be put on trial in
November on more serious charges. And when the party’s interests
could be affected, the Hong Kong government occasionally invites
China’s parliament to step in. In 2022 the national legislature
allowed the territory to sidestep a CFA ruling that Mr Lai’s defence
team could use an overseas barrister.

Over time, the judiciary’s strength may erode as the best lawyers in
Hong Kong avoid taking on the job. “A lot of the gloss of a judicial
appointment disappeared with the feeling that the judges are no
longer as independent as they used to be,” believes Lord Sumption.
The law professor says new law students barely remember the
unrest six years ago. They “do not associate 2019 with anything
positive”, he says. Neither does the Communist Party. ■

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The second act

China’s mid-year economic

wobble
The government experiments with small handouts to households
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午 | Hong Kong

IN RECENT YEARS China’s economy has obeyed a three-act dramatic

structure, recognisable to any playwright. Growth starts the year
brightly, suffers troubling setbacks as spring turns to summer, then
prevails in the end, after a hurried government stimulus helps it
meet the official GDP target, with precious little to spare.

This year’s difficult second act has now begun. After reporting brisk
year-on-year growth of 5.3% in the first half of 2025, China’s
statisticians have just released disappointing figures. Retail sales

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grew by only 3.7% in July compared with a year earlier, before
adjusting for inflation. The volume of home sales fell by 8% over the
same period. Households were so reluctant to take out mortgages,
or any other kind of credit, that the yuan loan books of China’s
banks shrank in July for the first time in two decades (see chart).

The job market also looks wobbly. Urban unemployment, which does
not count people who retreat to the countryside when they cannot
find work in the cities, edged up from 5% to 5.2%. And things may

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get worse. China’s highest court has recently ruled that employers
cannot waive pension contributions (and other social-insurance
payments), even if workers want them to. The ruling could raise the
cost of labour by about 1% of GDP if enforced, according to Société
Générale, a bank.

Contributing to the slowdown, China’s policymakers seem to be

keeping tighter tabs on its flagship stimulus policy—a scheme that
encourages households to trade in old cars, phones and appliances
for new ones. The central government did not rush to replenish
funds when several local authorities recently exhausted the latest
instalment of money that was set aside for the scheme.

The purse-strings have also tightened for officials themselves. In

May the government revised regulations on “promoting frugality”
and “opposing extravagance” among government and Communist
Party workers. “Working meals must not include high-end dishes,
cigarettes or alcohol,” it decreed. That may have damaged China’s
once booming schmoozing sector. On August 8th a commentary
published by Xinhua, an official news agency, acknowledged worries
that the revised rules were harming motivation and curbing
consumption. Such concerns, it said, must be viewed “dialectically”.
The word is a nod to Marx and Hegel. Alas “The Phenomenology of
Spirit” is a poor substitute for the phenomenology of spirits.

Curtain up

If China’s economy is to triumph again in its third act, hitting the

government’s growth target of 5% for this year, it will need more
stimulus. The government has recently announced a variety of
measures to help. Families will now get 3,600 yuan (about $500) a
year as a childbirth subsidy, for each sprog under the age of three.
From the start of this autumn term, they can also enrol their children
in the final year of a state pre-school free, or collect an equivalent
subsidy for a private one. The elderly with moderate to severe
disabilities can get a monthly voucher worth up to 800 yuan to pay

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for care. Employers who hire unemployed young people will also get
a government payout of up to 1,500 yuan.

To boost banks’ loan books, the central government will subsidise

consumer credit for the first time. The new policy, released on
August 12th, will shave one percentage point off the interest rate for
small personal loans and also subsidise bigger loans for cars, elderly
care, education and training, childbirth expenses, culture and
tourism, home furnishings, electronics and health care.

Unlike China’s traditional efforts to lift demand, these measures

encourage consumption, not investment, and emphasise the
purchase of services, rather than things. “These new programmes
show the government becoming more comfortable with income
transfers to households,” Ernan Cui of Gavekal Dragonomics, a
consultancy, has pointed out. And the handouts are not confined to
the poor.

But though they are novel, these transfers are small. The childbirth
payouts and consumer-loan subsidy will each add less than 0.1% to
GDP this year, according to Goldman Sachs, another bank. If that is
not enough to get China’s economy through its mid-year wobble, the
government will need to offer additional stimulus. China-watchers
expect increased infrastructure-investment growth. One example is a
controversial new 2,000km railway between Xinjiang and Tibet. A
state-owned firm to oversee the project was formally registered on
August 8th.

In the three-act drama that is China’s economy, the government’s

new consumer subsidies offer a novel twist. But it may be a stock
character—infrastructure investment by state-owned enterprises—
that ultimately saves the day. ■

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United States
Does it make sense for America to keep
subsidising a sinking city?
Muskrat ramble :: Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans faces a different
kind of risk

Welcome to the YIMBYest neighbourhood

in America
Swampoodle, No More :: Lessons for the country, from a few blocks north of the
Capitol

The Democrats who find abundance

liberalism threatening
When abundance meets resistance :: A call for more building runs into trouble in
NIMBY-land

The young American female soldiers of

TikTok
No-man’s-land :: An app that Congress considers to be a national-security risk helps
to recruit soldiers

Marjorie Taylor Greene wants to stop them

from making it rain
Cloudbusting :: The opponents of cloud-seeding come for geoengineering

How Washington became Donald Trump’s

chew toy
Lexington :: The politics are particularly potent today, but their origins are older than
the republic itself

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Muskrat ramble

Does it make sense for

America to keep subsidising a
sinking city?
Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans faces a different
kind of risk
8月 21, 2025 05:06 上午 | NEW ORLEANS

STAND ON THE rim of the grassy levees and you can see New
Orleans’s dilemma: rising water on one side, a sinking city on the
other. The people who call this place home have learned to live with
water. Storms punctuate time as birthdays and holidays do in other
parts of America.

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Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina tore through the Gulf coast and
shattered New Orleans, the city remains as defiant—and precarious
—as ever. In its aftermath the federal government spent $125bn, in
today’s dollars, to rebuild a region that is home to just 1.4m people,
making Katrina America’s costliest storm. Had the government not
invested so much, the city would have probably followed the path of
Galveston, Texas, which ceded its place as the state’s ocean-side
economic engine to Houston and fell off the national radar after a
devastating hurricane in 1900.

New Orleans was spared that fate by federal money. But it could not
be described as thriving. Its three biggest industries—tourism,
shipping, and oil and gas—are losing jobs. It is bleeding residents
faster than any other city of its size in America. Last week the mayor
was indicted on corruption charges. Those could be dismissed as
short-term problems. Rising water cannot. Even the levees, some of
which doubled in height after Katrina, are slipping into the sea. The
city is a project that begets more projects. To preserve it will cost
much more. How long can this carry on?

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Problems have been brewing since New Orleans was settled by
French colonists. Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville convinced his
colleagues in Paris that the capital of French Louisiana should sit on
the swampland where the Mississippi river met the Atlantic. The port
gave the French an edge in commerce and defence. But, in 1719, a
year after New Orleans was founded, it flooded. For the next century
the city fought against water, as French rule gave way to Spanish
and then American. By 1840 New Orleans had become the biggest
city in the South and the fourth-busiest port in the world. The
political heroes of the day were the “drainage kings” who engineered
dry land. In 1914 the mayor went on a national tour to advertise the
extraordinary feat of reclaiming New Orleans.

Around that time an architect noticed cracks in St Louis Cathedral,

the city’s grandest church. New Orleans was sinking below sea level.
The levees that engineers had built to stop the flooding prevented
the river depositing sediment to replenish the land as it always had.
The city was also losing its natural defences against tropical storms.
In the 20th century oil and gas companies carved 10,000 miles of
canals through the marshes of coastal Louisiana. That killed the
cypress groves that slowed the rush of water towards the city, and

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2,000 square miles of land sank into the ocean. “The paradox is that
the very devices that made New Orleans possible had sowed the
seeds for its undermining,” says Richard Campanella of Tulane
University.

Locals knew the city was vulnerable, but relished living in a place
where food fused the cultures of three continents and deaths were
honoured with jazz parades. When Katrina breached the levees on
the morning of August 29th 2005, they paid a price. Flooding killed
1,800 people and caused $200bn worth of damage. Hundreds of
thousands of people fled. Parts of the city filled up like a bathtub.
Yvonne Blue sat in her attic in the Lower Ninth Ward with her
grandchild in her arms and her feet in the water. When a boat came
to rescue her ten hours later she held her breath and swam under to
unlock the door.

Katrina sparked a ferocious partisan argument about who was to

blame for failing to prepare: the city (whose Democratic mayor
botched the evacuation and stoked panic about violence in shelters)
or the federal government (which was ultimately responsible for the
levees). Democrats blamed President George W. Bush and won a
thumping victory in the national mid-term elections of 2006.

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The destruction also raised existential questions. Was draining the
swamps a mistake? While first responders were picking bodies out of
homes, Russel Honoré, the army general in charge of the recovery,
briefed Washington politicians aboard a warship at the port. During
his update Dennis Hastert, then the speaker of the House of
Representatives, interrupted to ask whether New Orleans should be
rebuilt. He was not alone in thinking: perhaps not. Religiously
inspired pundits drew parallels to the biblical story of Sodom and
Gomorrah; environmentalists were arguing for moving the city up
the river. Nancy Pelosi, then the minority leader, stood up and struck
the map before them in anger. “We’re going to rebuild this damn
city,” Mr Honoré remembers her saying. President Bush agreed.

And so they did. The decision to rebuild went back to Bienville’s

economic argument: most of the country’s agricultural exports
flowed through the port and a robust military industry had built up
around it. But there was also something about the culture of the city
that people near and far wanted to protect. New Orleans was like a
funny-shaped piece in the American puzzle—without it there would
be a hole. Robert Carlisle, a construction worker who rebuilt 300
homes after the storm, remembers plastering over mouldy wood to

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get people back in quickly. “Some of those houses—we were just
patching them up,” he says, but “it made sense because of the way
the people felt about this city.”

Some found better, or easier, lives elsewhere and did not return.
Franklin Avenue Baptist Church, the biggest in New Orleans, lost
3,000 congregants. Neighbourhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward
started to resemble the teeth of a jack-o-lantern: houses
interspersed with empty lots where the grass now grows waist-high.
Despite the shrunken population, the federal government doubled
down. In the decade that followed it spent $14bn to build a system
of levees and floodwalls to withstand another storm as strong as
Katrina. This time the government promised “risk reduction”, not
“protection”. “It’s an American adage that we’re not going to
abandon one of our great cities,” says Michael Hecht of Greater New
Orleans, an economic-development group, “but the humbling of
Katrina made people understand that we are never going to defeat
Mother Nature.”

On the 20th anniversary of Katrina, New Orleans is a city of even

more paradoxes. Some good has come from its overhaul. After

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switching to a fully charter-school system, educational results in New
Orleans dramatically improved. Its flood-control system is now the
envy of other vulnerable places like Houston and New York. The
West Closure Complex, its largest pumping station, could empty an
Olympic swimming pool in five seconds. The system works
remarkably well. Residents on the western bank pay around $150 a
year for it to be maintained and their homes rarely flood. South of
the city, where the fingers of the bayou stretch into the ocean,
houses now sit on stilts. A group of volunteers there, who call
themselves the “Cajun Navy”, travel to other parts of the country to
help when it floods.

The place is nonetheless in peril. In the next 50 years Louisiana is

expected to lose as much coastal land as it did in the past 100. The
probability of huge storms will more than double. Since 2020 the
feds have declared four times the number of weather disasters in all
Louisiana parishes as in the average American city, and far longer
blackouts. Kasey Sullivan, a shrimp seller, says she gets panic attacks
whenever her phone buzzes with a weather alert: “you can’t breathe
and you gasp for air, and you’re like, ‘What’s my next move?’”

And the waters assuaged

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Preparing the city to withstand future shocks will take more colossal
investment, and New Orleans is a poor city in a poor state. Locals do
not see retreat as an option. “If we stop investing in New Orleans,
where would we ask people to move?” asks Allison Plyler of the Data
Centre, a research firm. She is right that other American cities have
become more vulnerable, too. Saltwater is threatening Miami’s
drinking water, Los Angeles periodically goes up in flames and
extreme heat in Phoenix is giving people asphalt burns. When
Hurricane Helene destroyed North Carolina’s mountain towns last
year, it became clear that places once seen as climate refuges are
now susceptible to the deadliest storms. But because Congress
appropriates funds, spending in one place comes at the expense of
another. Louisiana already takes far more money from the
government than it sends back in taxes.

Ms Blue, who swam to safety during Katrina, reckons that New

Orleans will “go down” in the next 50 years, regardless of how much
money is poured in. These days she spends hours watching storm
clouds from her porch, just blocks from where her old house once
stood. Because of how damp the soil is, the small patch of grass in
her front yard grows so fast that she has to mow it twice a week.
She considers that a sign of what will become of her city. “I may not
be here to see it,” she says, “but it’s nothing but swamp and it will
go back to being swampland.” ■

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Swampoodle, No More

Welcome to the YIMBYest

neighbourhood in America
Lessons for the country, from a few blocks north of the Capitol
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午 | WASHINGTON, DC

PERSUADING YUPPIES to move to “Swampoodle” was always going to

be an uphill battle. So when the ex-industrial zone next to
Washington, DC ’s main railway station was slated for redevelopment
in the 1990s and 2000s, the authorities ditched the neighbourhood’s
original 19th-century name, which had already fallen into disuse.
Instead, they christened the wider area “NoMa” (“north of
Massachusetts Avenue”), a syllable or two away from trendy locales
like NoMad (in New York) and Soho (in each of New York, London
and Hong Kong).

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And come the yuppies have, in their thousands. The zipcode that
encompasses NoMa has had more new apartment units added than
anywhere else in the country since 2017, according to data from
Yardi, a real-estate software company (see chart). Long Island City,
just across the East River from Manhattan, is in second place. Not
far behind is Navy Yard, a nearby Washington, DC, neighbourhood

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with a similar feel, though with a reputation for housing a slightly
Trumpier crowd.

A visitor disgorged from the NoMa metro stop, which is now the
sixth-busiest in the city, will almost immediately be barraged by
“now leasing” signs, boasting rooftop pools, full-featured gyms and
one-month-free rental offers. The buildings around were generally
put up only five or, at most, ten years ago. Most have a blocky,
plastic-clad look, that telltale feel of late-2010s and early-2020s
American apartment developments. Café chains like Blue Bottle and
Maman sell their residents $8 lattes and $5 chocolate-chip cookies.

NoMa is, in short, not far off the stuff of YIMBY dreams. “Yes in my
backyard” activists—often 20- or 30-somethings radicalised by the
high cost of rent in big cities—want to make it easier to build more,
and denser, housing to raise the supply of homes and ultimately pull
down property prices. Many YIMBY s have flocked to NoMa; the
Institute for Progress, an influential YIMBY think-tank, has its
headquarters there.

Aesthetics aside, then, has the flood of new apartments in NoMa

made a difference to housing affordability? Very possibly. Home
prices in the Greater Washington area rose roughly in line with other
big American cities in the 1990s and 2000s, but have lagged behind
them over the past decade or so–just as the building boom in areas
like NoMa and Navy Yard got going. That has hardly left the city
cheap, but has made it at least less exorbitant than east coast peers
like New York or Boston.

The political bargain that has allowed NoMa to deliver all those units
quickly, and cheaply, was a relatively unusual one. For a start, very
few people had lived in the area since the original residents of
Swampoodle were turfed out in the early 20th century to make way
for Union Station. That meant no local NIMBY s to complain about
new construction ruining their surroundings. Serious residential
development in the area became viable only after a new metro

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station for the neighbourhood was added in 2004, jointly funded by
local government, the federal government (keen on new office space
near Capitol Hill) and housing developers.

Washington’s government was also in dire financial straits in the

1990s, when NoMa’s redevelopment was conceived, making the
extra tax revenue particularly appealing. Salim Furth, an economist
at George Mason University, also points out that unlike many other
big cities, Washington, DC, proper is dwarfed by its suburbs. That
fosters a virtuous sort of competition: if Washington fails to house
people who work there, they can move to Maryland or Virginia and
take their tax dollars with them. Even then, zoning codes in much of
Washington remain highly restrictive. Tall buildings are
banned entirely, giving the city a squat skyline

The build-out of NoMa is now three-quarters complete, estimates

Maura Brophy, who runs NoMa’s business-improvement district. The
final leg of building should take another decade or so. America will
need many more NoMas. After a century of mainly expanding
outwards, cities across the country are nearing the limits of
suburban sprawl. Next comes building upwards. NoMa was YIMBY ism
on easy mode. Cracking the politics of that shift elsewhere may well
be a tougher task. ■

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When abundance meets resistance

The Democrats who find

abundance liberalism
threatening
A call for more building runs into trouble in NIMBY-land
8月 21, 2025 03:34 上午 | MONTGOMERY COUNTY, MARYLAND

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY needs a makeover. Donald Trump’s victory in

November showed that the party can no longer rely on bashing him
to win elections. The Republican president is trusted more than
Democrats, whose approval rating is the lowest it has been in 35
years. Democrats are searching for a positive vision to inspire voters,
and leading the pack, at least among party elites, is the brand of
“abundance”. Popularised in a recent book by Ezra Klein and Derek

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Thompson, two journalists, abundance types advocate overhauling a
decades-old liberalism of bureaucratic red tape with one that builds
clean energy, infrastructure and, above all, affordable housing. Even
Zohran Mamdani, the socialist Democratic nominee for New York City
mayor who wants to freeze rents, has given the abundance wing of
the Democratic Party a few nods. But the high-powered Maryland
suburbs outside Washington suggest the politics of abundance can
be treacherous.

Montgomery County is one of the 30 richest counties in America.

Nearly 75% of its 1m residents voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024
election. When the Democrat-controlled county council entertained a
plan last autumn to rezone large swathes of exclusively single-
family-home neighbourhoods—allowing for multi-unit dwellings,
townhouses and apartment buildings—liberal suburbanites rained
hell. “This is a radical change that will be the death of single-family
communities,” said one man, as hundreds gathered to mock and boo
council members in a high-school auditorium. “There was massive
resistance,” recalled Will Jawando, a council member. “People were
apoplectic.” That backlash helped whittle down the proposed
rezoning to little more than 1% of single-family homes along main
thoroughfares, which the council passed this July, over more boos
and groans.

Left-leaning suburbanites have many reasons to oppose rezoning,

from concerns about overcrowding their high-performing schools to
parking, wastewater management and traffic. But they boil down to
one: they like the suburbs. “There is always a reason for why
housing shouldn’t be built,” says Andrew Friedson, the council
member behind the rezoning reform.

“When it comes to housing, expanding the supply of homes will

reduce the rapid acceleration of housing values. That is what
abundance is supposed to do,” says Richard Kahlenberg, author of
the book “Excluded” and director of housing policy at the Progressive
Policy Institute. When Mr Trump took the White House in 2016, yard

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signs began to pop up with sentiments like “Black Lives Matter”, “No
Human is Illegal” and “Science is Real”. “None of that requires an
ounce of sacrifice on the account of progressive elites,” says Mr
Kahlenberg, a county resident.

Homeowners naturally reject the charge of elitism. They see so-

called affordable housing as a Trojan horse—a means by which
developers can lay claim to the suburbs. “No developer giveaways at
our expense,” read yard signs outside quaint million-dollar homes on
the drive into Washington. “It’s a total scam to benefit developers
instead of representing the people that live here,” said Gerald Smith,
an interior architect, who is among the dozens protesting against the
rezoning effort on Connecticut Avenue, a thoroughfare into
Washington.

Such Democratic infighting has fuelled a competition for progressive

virtue. Kim Persaud, a community activist from the heavily Hispanic
town of Wheaton, called rezoning a “racist policy” and “blatant
injustice” that would displace black and Hispanic renters so that
wealthy white people can live in luxury condos. She said the majority
of those for rezoning are “young white kids who come from
privilege” and whose parents could give them a down-payment.
During a county hearing, one self-described white, privileged young
renter said that the rezoning proposal was needed to house “the
thousands of queer people, people of colour and immigrants who
live in dangerous, conservative states and need to move to our
sanctuary county”. Among Democrats, this way of discussing zoning
remains much too abundant. ■

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No-man’s-land

The young American female

soldiers of TikTok
An app that Congress considers to be a national-security risk helps
to recruit soldiers
8月 21, 2025 03:34 上午

BEFORE PETE HEGSETH became defence secretary, it is fair to say

that he did not always see the point of women in some parts of the
army. “Our military runs on masculinity. It’s not toxic at all, it’s
necessary,” he once wrote. To win confirmation by the Senate he
moderated his views: all combat roles remain open to women. That
is just as well. Finding enough recruits is hard. Strangely, one thing
that helps the armed forces do so is an app that Congress has tried
to ban on national-security grounds.

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Enlist in “#MilTok”, TikTok’s niche for military content, and you may
find a lieutenant doing her skincare routine, a navy officer on a
nursery run, or an air-force operator vlogging mid-flight. They
command thousands of followers and millions of views, reflecting a
broader shift within the ranks.

While the number of male active-duty members has fallen by 10%

since 2005, the number of their female counterparts has grown by
12% over the same period. Still, women have had a tough time
assimilating. As recently as 2023, 13% of active-duty women
experienced gender discrimination compared with 1.4% of active-
duty men, according to the Department of Defence.

Some of these women turned to TikTok—a platform which offered

recognition when they were overlooked and support when they were
isolated. It soon became a place for talking about issues that male
counterparts rarely encountered, such as adapting the female
uniform or navigating grooming regulations. “Women didn’t have
other women to look up to or talk to about their struggles,” says
Monica Smith, a first lieutenant in the army’s bomb-disposal unit
(pictured above).

But not all attention has been welcome. The comments sections on
#MilTok are often littered with lewd or disparaging remarks. Peers
and superiors in the Pentagon are also wary, especially since the
Chinese-owned app is deemed a security risk. “When my unit heard
I had a TikTok, people were really sensitive about it,” says
Lieutenant Smith. It doesn’t help that some servicewomen court
controversy, like Hailey Lujan—an influencer known for pairing
cutesy antics with graphic references. In one video, she dances in
tactical gear to a Charli XCX song while joking about bleeding out in
the trenches.

Such posts have fuelled online speculation that these women are
“psy-ops”: psychological-operations specialists deployed to influence
perceptions of the military. Most reject that label. They are not

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shouting about the institution—they just want to be heard within it.
As Ms Lujan wrote (on Instagram), “It’s simply a new method of
standing up for what I believe in, by all silly means necessary.” ■

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fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and
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Cloudbusting

Marjorie Taylor Greene wants

to stop them from making it
rain
The opponents of cloud-seeding come for geoengineering
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

On top of the world, looking over the edge

RAINMAKER, A STARTUP backed by Peter Thiel, a prominent venture

capitalist, among others, flew an aeroplane over south-central Texas
in early July, depositing 70 grams of silver iodide within two clouds.
The technique, known as cloud-seeding, aims to coax more water
from the heavens than the clouds would yield on their own. This is

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done by aeroplanes; Rainmaker wants to do it more cheaply, and,
therefore perhaps more frequently, using drones.

Two days later a deadly downpour hit Kerr County, in central Texas,
and with it a deluge of theories on social media blaming Rainmaker’s
technology. Augustus Doricko, the founder and CEO of Rainmaker,
says that he was physically threatened and has since hired a security
detail. Rainmaker was not the only target. A member of Veterans on
Patrol, a vigilante group, vandalised a weather radar system in
Oklahoma, believing it to be weather-manipulation technology.

It is not possible for cloud-seeding to have caused the extreme

rainfall and flooding seen in Texas, says Andrew Dessler, an
atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University. Meteorologists
attributed the downpour to atmospheric water vapour from the
remnants of Tropical Storm Barry. But as anyone who has found
themselves in a conversation about chemtrails can attest, the
combination of government plus aircraft plus altering weather
patterns looks like evidence for something conspiracists have always
known was true.

Among those who feared a sinister plot are several Republican

politicians, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, a congresswoman from
Georgia. In the aftermath of the floods Ms Greene published several
social-media posts warning of the dangers of weather modification.
The congresswoman has form on this. “Yes they control the
weather,” she wrote on X after Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina
particularly hard last September. On July 15th she proposed the
Clear Skies Act, a federal ban on weather modification. If passed
(which is unlikely), the legislation would make it a felony to release
chemicals into the atmosphere with intent to modify the weather.

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The bill fits into a broader trend. This year 22 states have introduced
bills to ban or restrict weather modification. In Florida, which
enacted its law in June, meddling with the weather carries a prison
sentence of up to five years. In many states this is a cost-free way
for state legislators to signal their hostility to the federal government
and openness to conspiracy theories, since only a small number of
states in the West actually do it (see map).

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Cloud-seeding has been carried out in America since its invention in
the 1940s by scientists at General Electric Research Laboratories,
New York. Commercial and government cloud-seeding operations
spread and by the 1950s about 300m acres (1.2m square
kilometres) of land were targeted for cloud-seeding. While the
efficacy of the technique remains contested, a study in the Journal
of Applied Meteorology and Climatology in 2014 found it can
increase rainfall by up to 15%. Jonathan Jennings, a meteorologist
who directs the cloud-seeding programme in the Utah Division of
Water Resources, one of the state’s main water agencies, says it is
useful as part of a broad water-management strategy. The main use
is to cause snow in winter, thickening the snowpack and thus
increasing the flow of rivers in the spring and summer, rather than to
cause rain when there is a drought.

The federal government does not carry out cloud-seeding, but nine
states have active programmes. Rainmaker’s operation on July 2nd
was contracted by the South Texas Weather Modification
Association, an organisation of local water agencies. What had
hitherto been practised quietly is becoming tangled up in bad faith
and worse science. The Climate Science Legal Defence Fund has
provided legal aid to scientists who have been the subject of doxxing
(the practice of publishing private information without consent) and
lawsuits from weather conspiracy theorists.

Wrapped up in the hostility towards cloud-seeding is a stronger

animus towards geoengineering—the idea of deliberately cooling the
Earth. The proposed federal ban on weather modification would
outlaw research on solar geoengineering, which includes spraying
sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. Solar geoengineering is
controversial, but more research is needed to understand its risks.
The Florida law prohibits “geoengineering and weather
modification”; Ms Taylor Greene’s bill includes solar geoengineering
and solar-radiation modification as examples of things to ban. That
this is how the future of mankind’s home planet is being determined
is so odd that it might seem like, well, a conspiracy. ■

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Lexington

How Washington became

Donald Trump’s chew toy
The politics are particularly potent today, but their origins are older
than the republic itself
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

AMERICA’S CAPITAL city is particularly vulnerable to the dictates of

President Donald Trump because of an insurrection against Congress
—not the one on January 6th 2021 but a more successful one a
couple of centuries earlier. On June 21st 1783 hundreds of mutinous
soldiers surrounded Congress in what was effectively the capital,
Philadelphia, to demand back-wages that the revolutionary
government could not afford to pay. Unlike the insurrectionists of

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2021, they did not attack the building or hurt anyone, but they
chased Congress out of town.

They also turned the congressmen against not just Pennsylvania,

which they concluded could not be trusted to protect them, but
against the idea the capital should be part of any state. Without
“complete authority at the seat of government”, warned James
Madison, “the public authority might be insulted and its proceedings
interrupted with impunity”. The host state might also exercise undue
influence. Eventually, the “complete authority” of Congress over the
capital was written into the constitution, and after some wandering
and wrangling the capital itself fetched up in a swamp at a bend in
the Potomac river.

Perhaps to avenge itself, Congress has been insulting the public

authority of Washington, DC , and interrupting its proceedings with
impunity ever since. Washington has more people than Wyoming or
Vermont—about 700,000—and they pay far more federal taxes per
head than the residents of any state. But they live a bitter paradox,
inhabiting the capital of a great republic in which they have no
voting representation. Until Mr Trump came along, notes Michael
Fauntroy, a political scientist at George Mason University who has
studied the limited home rule Congress granted Washington in 1973,
“It’s always been the House that’s been more problematic for the
city.” Congress, which kept authority over the district’s budget and its
laws, has intervened to block domestic partnerships, abortion
subsidies, needle-exchange programs and even late-evening hours
for a pool (some Capitol Hill staffers lived nearby and objected to the
noise, Mr Fauntroy says).

Washington does have a say in the choice of president. The 23rd

Amendment, ratified in 1961, gives it the same number of electoral
votes—three—as the least-populous state. If Washington cast those
votes for Mr Trump, he would no doubt be championing its long-
cherished dream of statehood.

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Instead, Washington is on the receiving end of another Trumpian
manoeuvre: he has correctly identified a problem and then
hyperbolised it (Washington is no “shithouse”, as he once called it,
but a pretty, staid city where crime is coming down but remains a
scourge); he is using presidential power in a way no predecessor has
(sending in the National Guard over the mayor’s objections,
temporarily commandeering the police, dispatching masked agents
in unmarked cars to arrest people); he is saturating the internet with
his own reality (including by sending social-media teams on FBI
raids); and, by dispensing more drama than care, he seems likelier
to compound tensions than to ameliorate woes. So far the new
federal presence is more obvious in safe spaces frequented by
tourists than in poor neighbourhoods most victimised by criminals.
Restaurants report steep declines in business.

The mismatch of means and putative ends was captured by a slick

video, shared by the White House on X, of heavily armed agents
swooping in after dark to arrest a man at his home. The man had
thrown a sandwich at another federal agent days before. He had
previously been arrested in the incident and then released. (He had
also been fired from his job in the criminal division of the Justice
Department.) He should not have thrown the sandwich. Yet
Washington would have to be paradise to be terrorised by such an
act. Further: no federal-agent theatrics in the first place, no airborne
sandwich—not to blame the victim, of course.

A city dominated by Democrats when the federal government is

dominated by Republicans, Washington is experiencing an enhanced
version of the predicament confronting Democratic cities in some
Republican states. As political power is becoming more sharply
distributed geographically and intensified by polarisation, Republican
states are increasingly overruling, or “pre-empting”, policies in
Democratic cities on matters such as environmental regulation and
criminal justice. “For about a decade now, there’ve been much more
targeted interventions, clear-cut efforts to prevent or undo local

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policies by the states,” says Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia
Law School.

The urban bungle

Some cities helped bring the trouble on themselves through

mismanagement, a record that blights the Democratic Party. But in
Washington, at least, the overlords are part of that problem. The
Senate has left vacant 13 of 62 judgeships on the court that handles
local crime, while the House, apparently out of fecklessness, has
blocked Washington from spending $1bn of its own tax revenue,
forcing $400m in cuts even as the mayor, Muriel Bowser, is trying to
hire 500 more police officers.

But the politics of beating up Washington are irresistible, and so

Republican states are getting in on the act. Six Republican governors
plan to deploy National Guard troops to the city. The troops lack
authority to make arrests and may not have much to do. Outside
Washington’s Union railway station, an encampment festooned with
anti-Trump signs (“rapist” “felon”) has stood since the spring. It now
shares the plaza with National Guards, who on a recent afternoon
posed for pictures and cheerfully exchanged greetings with passers-
by. “The troops have been great,” one protester says. Yet their
presence in the city, in flak jackets and desert camouflage, beside
giant armoured vehicles, seemed as jarring as such displays after
the attacks of 9/11. May it remain so. ■

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The Americas
Life after death for Canada’s crushed
Conservatives
Turning over a new leaf? :: Pierre Poilievre can now return to Parliament to take on
Mark Carney, the prime minister

Climate change threatens an Andean ski

boom
Not snow sure :: The industry is melting just as it was starting to take off again

The new fears of Cubans in Florida

Cubans sandwiched :: The privileged status they have enjoyed since the cold war is
slipping away

After 20 years in power, Bolivia’s socialists

crash out of it
No left turn :: That was not the only surprise in the general election’s first round

Why Mexicans love Japan and Korea

More than manga and microwaves :: Drama, language and music in one direction;
rising numbers of Mexican tourists in the other

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Turning over a new leaf?

Life after death for Canada’s

crushed Conservatives
Pierre Poilievre can now return to Parliament to take on Mark
Carney, the prime minister
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午 | Ottawa

VOTERS OF A conservative persuasion in the riding, or constituency,

of Battle River-Crowfoot in rural Alberta clearly now have a good
handle on the spelling of Pierre Poilievre’s name. In a by-election on
August 18th they wrote it on more than 80% of the ballots cast.

Mr Poilievre is not from the riding. The vote was called when a pliant
fellow Conservative stepped down, providing Mr Poilievre with a shot
at a parliamentary seat. He needs it. In April he led his party to a

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crushing general-election defeat by Mark Carney’s Liberals, one of
whom took the Ottawa riding Mr Poilievre had maintained a firm grip
on for two decades. Without a seat, he could not continue as
Canada’s formal opposition leader.

So, along with more than 200 other candidates (hence the write-in
ballot), Mr Poilievre contested Canada’s second-safest Conservative
district. It was, however, far more than a matter of parliamentary
procedure. He needed a resounding victory to restore his reputation
and consolidate his power over the party. The conditions that sent
the Conservatives to their fourth election loss in a row remain in
place.

At the end of 2024 the Liberal Party had sunk in opinion polls, with
the Conservatives holding a seemingly insurmountable 25-point lead.
Yet a mere four months later, the Conservatives were crushed once
again by the Liberals, this time led by Mr Carney in place of Justin
Trudeau.

What happened? The former central banker bristled against Donald

Trump’s graceless claim that Canada should become America’s 51st
state or face hobbling tariffs. No way, said Mr Carney: Canada would
restructure its economy and diversify it away from its previous
overwhelming dependence on trade with the United States. He has
since been diligent in nudging his party back towards the centre on
issues such as taxes and energy development. And he has dropped
many of Mr Trudeau’s policies deemed to be excessively “woke”.
When, on July 31st, Mr Trump carried out his threat to impose a
35% tariff on Canadian exports, it only added fuel to the nationalist
outrage that drove the Liberal surge in April.

At the same time, a swan-dive in support for the socialist third party,
the New Democrats (NDP ), has for the time being turned Canadian
politics into a two-party tussle. But this means that the split vote
among progressives is no longer bound to help the Conservatives to
victory, as it has in the past.

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None of these developments bodes well for Mr Poilievre, who will
face his party’s verdict on his leadership in January. But there are a
few bright spots. His decision to stick to cost-of-living issues did
attract support from younger and working-class Canadians. The
Conservatives’ share of the vote rose to 8m, or 41% of the total—its
highest in nearly four decades. Mr Poilievre believes that can be built
upon next time round. When he hasn’t been campaigning in Battle
River-Crowfoot, he has been asking the party faithful, “How do we
add another roughly a million votes to get us over the finish line?”

The line may be receding; polling data suggest that backing for Mr
Poilievre and his Conservatives is softening. A recent survey by
Nanos Research put Liberal support at 45% against 32% for the
Conservatives. That may be thanks to a lingering post-election
honeymoon. But the poll also asked respondents for their preference
for prime minister: 52% opted for Mr Carney and only 24% for Mr
Poilievre.

This suggests that quite a few Conservatives prefer the Liberal

incumbent to their own standard-bearer, among them some powerful
Conservative premiers of provincial governments. Perhaps that is
because, like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton decades ago, Mr Carney has
junked his party’s old leftist dogma to appeal to a broader swathe of
centrist voters. He is spending more on national defence and has
scrapped consumer taxes on carbon pollution. He is cutting bloated
government departments by 15% and is preparing to enact tougher
laws against crime. Much of this programme was pinched from Mr
Poilievre’s platform. Voters do not seem to mind the theft.

Supporters of Mr Poilievre, especially among the 144 Conservative

MP s elected in April, say he has earned the right to face down Mr
Carney. Mr Poilievre, who is 46, is a good communicator. And under
his leadership his party continues to rake in more money than its
rivals.

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Not good enough, says Regan Watts, a longtime Conservative whom
Mr Poilievre has previously consulted: “Measured against Mr Carney’s
immaculate credentials, Mr Poilievre’s résumé looks parochial.” And
the Conservative leader’s insistence privately that he would be prime
minister but for Mr Trump’s intervention and for the slump in the
NDP ’s vote share, says Mr Watts, evinces a man who refuses to
accept responsibility for the election loss. Instead, Mr Watts believes,
he should ease the sloganeering and put business luminaries on his
front bench: “With no experience beyond the political arena, his best
response is to surround himself with heavyweight advisers and
candidates.”

Mr Poilievre’s defenders say Mr Carney’s honeymoon cannot last. It

will take years for Canada to restructure its economy and diversify
exports away from the United States. If the Liberals fail to fulfil their
promises of massive infrastructure projects at high speed, voters will
soon be disenchanted, his backers say. But that might seem to put
the Conservatives’ fate in the hands of the Liberals. “Hope”, says Mr
Watts, “is not a strategy.” ■
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Not snow sure

Climate change threatens an

Andean ski boom
The industry is melting just as it was starting to take off again
8月 21, 2025 03:34 上午 | LAS LEÑAS

Next year: perhaps just a luge track

NICK CHERNEY , a 43-year-old asset manager from the state of

Colorado, stands before a bare slope at Las Leñas, a ski resort in
Mendoza, Argentina. “Normally that would be great skiing, but now
it’s just rock. If you go off that, you’re dead,” he says. Then he
begins shuffling farther up the mountain, where slopes are whiter.
This year, in the depth of winter in South America’s most famous ski
resort, the only way to get space for some decent turns is to walk
up.

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Mr Cherney travelled to Argentina with his children, all of whom are
competitive “freeride” skiers (a variant involving steep terrain and
eye-catching acrobatics). They are part of a small but fast-growing
coterie of serious American and European skiers who cross the
equator to continue skiing through the northern hemisphere’s
summer. This is the family’s sixth visit; never has Mr Cherney seen
such poor snow.

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Commercial skiing in South America goes back decades. The first
resort to open was Portillo, in Chile, in 1949, and the industry
boomed through the 1970s. But since then investment has flagged.
Las Leñas, which opened in 1983, is among the most modern
resorts, yet its ski lifts are small, lumbering two-person affairs.

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In the past decade or so, however, interest has gone back up a
slope. Last year Las Leñas hosted a qualifier for the Freeride World
Tour, the highest-level competition for freeride skiers: a sign that its
steep slopes are considered world-class. Since 2019 Valle Nevado, a
bigger resort in Chile, has been included on the Ikon pass, an
American season ticket that gives skiers access to dozens of resorts
(the growth of these all-you-can-ski international passes has also
sent Americans flocking to resorts in Europe and Japan).

Yet climate change is melting the regional industry perhaps faster

than it can grow. Higher temperatures bug skiing fans the world
over, but the Andes have been hit harder than most. A study
published last year suggested that from 2001 to 2022 the average
snow cover in the region declined by 19% per decade. As so often
with climate change, the temperature is not the only thing varying.
Westerly winds that bring cold air to the mountains have begun to
shift southwards, compounding the effects of temperature on the
snowpack. And not only is it snowing less, snowfall varies more from
one season to the next.

The resorts and the industry’s array of ancillary businesses will

therefore see variation, too. Lucas Malaret, a Chilean ski instructor
who works for Glove Travel, an operator that organises trips for
European and American clients, looks at bookings just as much as at
thermometers. Last year snow was relatively plentiful, resulting in a
surge of early reservations. Bare slopes this year will reverse that. A
hunger to keep business steady may have disappointing effects for
ski bunnies: Mr Malaret notes disapprovingly that some outfits that
deliver skiers to high ground by helicopter have been promoting this
season with pictures from last year.

Is there a solution? In July the Malaysian firm that owns Las Leñas
said it would expand into a snowier neighbouring valley. As in
Europe and the United States, more South American resorts are
investing in snowmaking equipment and the like. But beating a
changing climate is, not unlike Mr Cherney’s, an uphill climb.■

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Cubans sandwiched

The new fears of Cubans in

Florida
The privileged status they have enjoyed since the cold war is
slipping away
8月 21, 2025 05:06 上午 | MIAMI

THE FREEDOM TOWER , a Miami museum overlooking Biscayne Bay

that honours the history of Cuban exiles, will be unveiled next month
after its $65m facelift. Between 1962 and 1974 it was the Cuban
Refugee Centre, and through it passed around 400,000 people who
fled after the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro. They received
food, money, medicine and a warm welcome. One of the museum’s
exhibits notes loftily that “Freedom is not just a dream, but a shared
responsibility.”

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That message is hard to square with the feeling that south Florida’s
Cubans have today. In the harsh immigration facility that officials
insist on calling the Alligator Alcatraz, some 95% of detainees are
citizens of Latin American countries. Most are from Mexico,
Guatemala or Cuba, and most entered the country in the past few
years by avoiding official border crossings and airports.

Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans fear that same fate after

the Trump administration ended programmes that gave some of
them hope for future residency. Yet it is Cubans who feel most hard
done by, because they have in the past enjoyed exceptional
immigration privileges.

Under the Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA ), passed in 1966, they can
apply for permanent residency after a year. Now Cuban arrivals who
skirt border points, and increasingly those who do not, receive the
same I -220A document—and a court date that could be years hence
—that other nationalities do. The I -220A confers a nebulous status:
released into the country, but subject to apprehension at the later
whim of immigration officials. And it all but precludes Cubans from
receiving permanent residency under the CAA .

Further, in June the United States Supreme Court lifted a stay on the
Trump administration’s termination of the Biden-era Humanitarian
Parole programme for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and
Venezuelans. That permitted people of those nationalities to live in
the United States for two years, if sponsored by a resident.

Even those Cubans who have had no run-ins with the law since
arriving now wait in fear of a knock on the door. “It’s a constant
worry,” says Ricardo, who asked not to reveal his surname for fear it
might bring that knock. He is a skilled engineer in his 30s who fled
arrest in Cuba during anti-government protests in 2021. Since his
asylum claim was denied he has limited his movements between his
job and home, barely daring to go to the supermarket. When his

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wife, a legal resident, gave birth this month to their first child, he
sneaked into the hospital in the dead of night.

Miami’s downtown immigration court is swamped. Twenty-eight

judges wade through a backlog of 312,000 pending cases; about
one-third of them are those of Cubans. Merely attending the court is
perilous. “People are terrified of going to court hearings,” said
Wilfredo Allen junior, a lawyer. Two of his clients were detained at
court in July and sent to the South Florida Detention Facility. “They
both have strong asylum cases and no criminal record,” Mr Allen
says. His firm has had to hire extra legal staff to handle the 16,000
cases, almost all of them Cubans, on the books. “There’s no rhyme
or reason as to how they handle these cases. It’s totally arbitrary,”
he says.

They won’t have us back, anyway

Deportation was once impossible, because Cuba would not take

returning citizens. It remains difficult, for the island’s government
still chooses whom it will accept. So far in 2025, 833 Cubans have
been sent back, according to Cuba’s interior ministry.

For the Trump administration the way around that narrow

deportation path is removal to a third country. The list of candidate
countries is growing, from elsewhere in the Americas to South
Sudan. The Deportation Data Project run by the University of
California at Berkeley found that at least 731 Cuban nationals had
been deported to third countries between January and the end of
June, 98% of them to Mexico. Moreover, many migrants from Cuba
are skipping the uncertain step of the United States and are instead
changing their destinations. In the first six months of 2025 20,900
Cubans sought asylum in Mexico and another 19,400 in Brazil.

For Cubans in south Florida, all this is arousing not only fear but also
indignation, particularly as local leaders who had long defended
Cuban migrants now stand idly by for fear of drawing Trumpian ire.

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Cubans were “the darlings of the cold war”, says Joe Garcia, a
Cuban-American and a former Democratic congressman. Now, he
says, “all of a sudden, we’re just like Mexicans.” For citizens of other
Latin American countries who also find themselves in the crosshairs
of immigration officials, that may seem right and just; Cubans’
special status has rankled for decades.

Now that fear of agents of the state is rattling the Cuban community,
an uncomfortable parallel is becoming apparent, says Ana Sofia
Pelaez of the Miami Freedom Project, a non-profit outreach-and-
education outfit. “The crux of the problem is that people are
essentially re-experiencing what they fled in Cuba.”■

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No left turn

After 20 years in power,

Bolivia’s socialists crash out
of it
That was not the only surprise in the general election’s first round
8月 21, 2025 04:13 上午

IN A GENERAL election on August 17th Rodrigo Paz (pictured), a

centrist senator, chalked up a shock win with 32% of votes; polling
had predicted closer to 10%. He will run off against Jorge Quiroga, a
right-wing former president who led his coalition to second place, on
October 19th. And in third place? Spoiled ballots. Evo Morales, a
former president who was forced out of the left-wing Movement to
Socialism (MAS ) and barred from running by a court ruling, had

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called for a “null vote” in protest. People listened. Eduardo del
Castillo, the permitted MAS candidate, won just 3%—barely enough
to maintain the party’s legal status. That marks the end of nearly 20
years of MAS rule, and assures a rightward tilt for the country’s
politics in October. ■

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More than manga and microwaves

Why Mexicans love Japan and

Korea
Drama, language and music in one direction; rising numbers of
Mexican tourists in the other
8月 21, 2025 03:34 上午 | AGUASCALIENTES

Land of the rising sons who do taekwondo

OVER BRIGHTLY coloured jelly sodas at Kai Bai Bo, a Korean-themed

café in Mexico City, Alejandra Chávez and Adriana Guzmán discuss
their shared passion: BTS , South Korea’s global pop phenomenon. “It
was an instant click,” says Ms Chávez, a 23-year-old who discovered
the band just before the pandemic. “They make me happy.” Ms
Guzmán, 24, nods: “They’ve changed my life. When I stop listening
to them, I feel negative.”

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These two young women are part of the Mexican chapter of the BTS
Army, a global fan collective that mobilises like a campaign machine.
Together with other volunteers they organise streaming parties, raise
funds for murals and explain voting rules to newcomers baffled by
the mechanics of K -pop fandom (it revolves around getting out the
vote for the band in various polls and awards). Their group has even
decorated boats with BTS -themed art. “Sometimes we pay out of our
own pockets,” says Ms Chávez. “It’s how we show love.”

That love is in bloom. Millions of Mexicans have developed affection

not just for Korean pop, but for Japanese anime (animated films, TV
and videos), as well as the languages, food, fashion and values of
both countries. There are fan clubs in the capital, Japanese-
language schools in Aguascalientes and Korean-cooking classes in
Querétaro. What was once a niche taste is becoming a national
appetite.

Japan’s was the first East Asian culture to find fans in Mexico. That
began when dubbed anime shows started airing on Mexican
television in the late 1970s, says Edgar Peláez, a Mexican academic
at Lakeland University in Tokyo. Real growth began in the 1990s.
Japan’s asset-price bubble piqued global interest and, later, its
government pushed culture as a form of soft power. In Mexico, that
coincided with the liberalisation of the economy, the privatisation of
state broadcasters and the arrival of Japanese toy companies such
as Bandai, leading to a flood of content and merchandise. Mexican
dubbing studios became regional hubs in which anime was adapted
for Latin American audiences.

Foreign investment also played a role in the boom. Nissan, a

Japanese carmaker, opened its first assembly plant in Aguascalientes
in 1992. The city is now home to a large Japanese community, part
of which has put down roots, giving rise to second-generation nikkei
families.

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More recently, Japanese cuisine has become popular. Takeya
Matsumoto, who runs several restaurants in Mexico City, says that
when he arrived from Japan in 2007 there were very few. “Now all
sorts of Japanese food is available,” he says.

These cultural imports seem to have spurred demand for travel to

Japan; in 2024 150,000 people flew there from Mexico, the highest
tally on record. While small compared with the number of people
visiting Japan from other countries, arrivals from Mexico were up by
60% from 2023, the fastest year-on-year growth of any country.

Korea break

Korea’s culture has followed that of Japan to become, if anything,

even more popular. In 2023 South Korea’s global cultural exports—
including music, TV dramas, films, fashion and beauty products—
were worth a record $12.4bn, according to the country’s culture
ministry, exceeding even exports of home appliances. Mexico played
its part. The Korean Cultural Centre in Mexico City says the number
of Mexicans enamoured of hallyu, the wave of Korean culture which
started sweeping the world starting in the late 1990s, is estimated to
have jumped from 6.7m in 2023 to more than 11m in 2024. Korean-
language courses are heavily oversubscribed. Korean skin-care
products, once hard to find, are now sold in boutiques and
supermarkets. K -dramas are likely to appear in social-media feeds
alongside telenovelas.

Mexicans seem attracted to these cultures for different reasons.

Many students of Japanese are learning because they want to work
there; others want to read manga or prepare for a trip. Many
emphasise the more traditional parts of the culture, such as origami
or tea ceremonies. Soraya Aguirre of Cendics México, a language
school in Aguascalientes, says demand for Japanese lessons has
surged in the past five years. By contrast, students of Korean are
often driven by pop culture. They skew younger and female. Many,
like Ms Chávez and Ms Guzmán, teach themselves Korean by

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studying song lyrics and YouTube videos, rather than taking formal
classes.

Booming cultural imports are likely to continue as Mexico’s

relationship with both countries deepens. Japan and Mexico have
had a free-trade agreement since 2005. Asian firms have been
investing heavily in northern and central Mexico. South Korea and
Mexico are exploring new trade ties. Diplomatic efforts—from
scholarships to taekwondo parades—are becoming commonplace.

China is also making inroads, albeit of another sort. In cities like

Aguascalientes, interest in Chinese is still limited but gradually rising
—and driven more by economic pragmatism than popular appeal.
Students cite job prospects and business ties rather than fandom
and cultural allure. Confucius Institutes have opened at several
Mexican universities. But, for now at least, China’s soft power in
Mexico is more of the boardroom than the bedroom wall.

In the background, Mexican perceptions of Asian cultural fandom

have shifted. Being a fan of BTS used to provoke bullying, says Ms
Chávez. Now, she says, it is finally cool. ■

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Middle East & Africa

A new twist in Syria: a political opposition
After Assad :: The “transitional” regime is losing the confidence of minority groups

What’s in a name in the Middle East?

Another kind of conflict :: Controversies about names are more about politics than
history

Gaza’s Gen-Z influencers

Voices from the strip :: They include a bodybuilder, a would-be American-college
student and skateboarders

Are east African governments colluding to

stifle dissent?
Autocrats without borders :: A raft of recent cases raises a disturbing suspicion

How Sierra Leone beat back mpox

Going viral :: The country’s effective public-health messaging is a model for the rest
of Africa

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After Assad

A new twist in Syria: a

political opposition
The “transitional” regime is losing the confidence of minority groups
8月 21, 2025 05:06 上午 | BEIRUT

THE OVERTHROW in December last year of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s

dictator, brought a fleeting sense of unity to a country fractured by
over a decade of war. Despite unease over his Islamist past, most
Syrians rallied behind Ahmed al-Sharaa, their new leader. Over the
summer, however, the mood has soured. A growing number of
Syrians, especially from minority groups, are voicing frustration with
his government. And the first shoots of an organised opposition are
popping up.

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The immediate cause is sectarian bloodshed—and the state’s feeble
response to it. In July hundreds were killed when government-
backed Sunni militias ran amok in Suwayda, a Druze-majority
province. It was the second bout of mass killing since Mr Assad’s fall.
In March Sunni fighters descended on coastal areas and massacred
more than 1,400 people, many of them Alawites, the small sect
many Sunnis blame for propping up the old regime.

In neither case did the government’s response inspire confidence. In

March it was slow to halt the killing; in July its own troops were
accused of carrying out atrocities. A committee set up to investigate
the coastal massacres produced a report that disappointed many. An
inquiry into Suwayda is expected to be similarly puny. In Damascus
critics say the regime has absolved Syria’s military command of any
real responsibility for their troops’ role in the coastal massacres,
preferring to pin the blame on rogue perpetrators. To minorities the
lesson is clear: Syria’s new rulers do not speak for them, will not
listen to them and cannot—or will not—protect them.

That unimpressive response has encouraged others to organise. In

July, amid the carnage in Suwayda, a coalition of activists launched
the Syrian Centenary Initiative. It looks like the beginnings of an
organised political opposition to Mr Sharaa’s government. Its first act
was to demand an immediate ceasefire. It also called upon the
government to rewrite the constitutional declaration that Mr Sharaa
signed in March, so that it would allow for the formation of political
parties and provide more protection for civil-society groups.

Among its founders are activists who spent decades in the Assads’
prisons. George Sabra, a Christian politician who once led a coalition
of exiled opposition groups, and Ayman Asfari, a Syrian-British
billionaire who was once touted to be Mr Sharaa’s prime minister,
have joined. It also includes Alawite activists and businessmen from
Aleppo. The group’s name refers to an uprising led by the Druze
against the French mandate in Syria a century ago. Its members say
it is responding to urgent threats to Syria’s unity.

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The government has reacted badly. Officials have ignored the
movement’s demands and attacked its members. “Instead of
addressing the initiative on its merits, we faced organised smear
campaigns,” says Hazem Dakhil, a journalist-turned-activist from
Idlib, the province once run by Mr Sharaa and his rebels, who has
joined the movement. “They accuse us of plotting to replace Sharaa
with a military council or minority rule—claims that appear nowhere
in our statements.”

Such defensiveness is becoming a regime hallmark. Civil-society

activists say criticism is treated as treason. “There is no dialogue,”
laments Mr Dakhil. Reports of Alawite women disappearing from
coastal areas—documented by human-rights groups—have been met
with Orwellian denials from the government. Journalists who
investigate crimes by state security forces are harassed online by
pro-regime trolls. Some have been arrested without charge, released
only after a public outcry.

Rather than broadening his coalition, Mr Sharaa is narrowing it.

Since the Suwayda killings, Druze leaders have rejected government
pleas to join the security forces. The March massacres left the
Alawites deeply mistrustful. Efforts to weld militias into a national
army have stalled; negotiations with the Kurds in the north-east are
going nowhere. Integrating minorities into the army and police is key
to rebuilding the Syrian state. On this front, Mr Sharaa has made no
headway.

Stay close to me

Decision-making is limited to a small circle of officials, from Mr

Sharaa’s former rebel group, who often bypass the very state
institutions they need to rebuild. Many positions are awarded on the
basis of loyalty, or tribal and family links. “They are militiamen…They
can only see problems in the way militiamen see problems. They are
no longer holed up in Idlib fighting Assad and Iran. They need to use

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politics rather than warfare to solve problems,” says Robin Yassin-
Kassab, a British-Syrian writer.

Mr Sharaa still deserves credit. Most notably, he persuaded Donald

Trump to lift the crushing American sanctions imposed under Mr
Assad. Gulf states and Turkey continue to pledge investment. But
the Suwayda violence rattled Mr Sharaa’s foreign allies. Their
patience will not last indefinitely if he governs only for Sunnis.

Ordinary Syrians, meanwhile, have yet to enjoy much benefit. Day-

to-day violence has decreased but nine in ten still live in poverty.
Minorities feel as excluded as ever. Many Alawites have lost their
jobs. Some Druze militias now openly fly the Israeli flag; some are
calling for secession. “The more he alienates the minorities, the
more he is reliant on a sectarian base,” warns one international
mediator.

Even so, his critics insist they want to work with him—if he will
listen. But their patience is not limitless. As one activist in Aleppo
puts it: “We did not throw out Assad to be ignored once again.” ■

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Another kind of conflict

What’s in a name in the

Middle East?
Controversies about names are more about politics than history
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午 | DUBAI

THE FIRST road you take after arriving in Lebanon was long named
after a foreigner who killed thousands of Lebanese. For decades the
airport motorway was known as Hafez al-Assad avenue, after the
late Syrian dictator. It struck some visitors as an odd choice, since
the Assad regime had been an unwelcome occupier in Lebanon for
three decades—a bit like naming the airport road in modern-day
Warsaw after Josef Stalin.

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It became odder still in December, when Syrian rebels overthrew
Bashar al-Assad, the dictator’s son. Even as they tore down symbols
of the family’s rule, Assad père clung to a stretch of tarmac in
southern Beirut. But no longer. On August 5th the Lebanese cabinet
announced that it would rename the street after Ziad Rahbani, a
beloved artist who died a week earlier.

Naming controversies are a fixture of modern life. The Biden

administration ordered America’s army to rechristen army bases
named after Confederate officers (though Donald Trump has
restored many of the original monikers). British councils have done
the same with slave traders. Times change, and sensibilities change
with them. But in the Middle East, where the past is not always past,
such controversies are often less about reassessments of history
than contemporary politics.

In the early 1980s Tehran named a street after Khalid al-Istambouli,

the Egyptian officer who gunned down Anwar Sadat, his country’s
third president. The logic was crass but clear. Sadat harboured the
Shah of Iran after he was deposed in 1979. He also made peace
with Israel. Naming a street after his assassin was a crude way for
the nascent Islamic republic to demonstrate its revolutionary bona
fides. Egyptians were unimpressed: the name was a source of
diplomatic tension for decades.

Last month, though, the city took down Istambouli’s name and
replaced it with that of Hassan Nasrallah, the slain leader of
Hizbullah, a Lebanese Shia militia. The regime has not reassessed its
jaundiced view of Sadat. But it is feeling isolated after its disastrous
war with Israel this summer. Iran needs friends in the region;
antagonising Egypt no longer serves a purpose.

At other times, names are changed to help people forget. When

Bahrainis took to the streets in January 2011 to protest against the
monarchy, they built an encampment at Pearl Roundabout, a traffic

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circle in the capital dominated by a sculpture of the gem (a nod to
Bahrain’s formerly pearl-based economy).

One month later the government bulldozed the monument. Officials

stopped referring to the circle by its popular name and insisted on
using the official (but little-known) title: Gulf Co-operation Council
Roundabout.

A few years later they did away with the roundabout altogether. That
stretch of highway is now a junction named after Omar ibn al-
Khattab, a seventh-century caliph revered by Sunnis but reviled by
Shias, who see him as a usurper. The sectarian overtones were
probably no coincidence: many of the protesters in 2011 were Shias.

Egypt has thrown plenty of names down the memory hole since the
army overthrew Muhammad Morsi, the popularly elected president,
in a coup in 2013. His supporters staged a two-month sit-in to
protest against the putsch at a plaza in eastern Cairo. Hundreds of
them were killed by soldiers and police in August of that year, the
bloodiest day in Egypt’s modern history. The name of the square,
Rabaa al-Adawiya, became a metonym for massacre. So the
government tried to stop people from speaking it. In 2015 it
renamed the square after a prosecutor assassinated in a car
bombing.

History is written by the victors, but victories in the Middle East can
often be tenuous. Though the Syrian army left Lebanon in 2005, the
Assad regime retained deep influence in the country for many years.
It took Bashar’s exile to Moscow to sweep away a trivial vestige of
Syrian rule in Lebanon. It may take longer still to rename the other
street leading to the airport—named not after a famous Lebanese
but after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the architect of the Iranian
revolution. ■

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Voices from the strip

Gaza’s Gen-Z influencers

They include a bodybuilder, a would-be American-college student
and skateboarders
8月 21, 2025 03:34 上午 | BEIRUT

AN AMATEUR bodybuilder. A teenager admitted to Dartmouth College

in America. A gang of skateboarders. They are not obvious
chroniclers of bombs and famine. But they are among Gaza’s most
dogged witnesses—the Generation-Z Palestinians who have posted
online over 22 months of war.

Audiences can be vast: a handful have millions of followers, many of

them count hundreds of thousands of followers from around the
world. Their role matters all the more because Israel bars foreign
journalists from working freely in Gaza, and because hundreds of

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Palestinian reporters have been killed. For those looking for
Palestinians’ own stories about life in Gaza, TikTok and Instagram,
not cable television, offer the most unfiltered version.

On Instagram Mohammed Hatem, an amateur bodybuilder who goes

by the name “Gym Rat in Gaza”, documents his muscles wasting
away for lack of protein. He has almost 400,000 followers and has
appeared on some fitness podcasts in America.

In a recent interview, he described how he was getting just 1,200

calories, on average per day, barely half the 2,400 he calculates he
needs to stay fit, he says. “As much as I try to optimise training and
nutrition to still make results, my main focus in it was for my mental
side. I would like to stay committed to this little bit of my daily
routine,” he told one podcaster.

Some of Mr Hatem’s videos feature witty clips about the lack of

chicken in Gaza. Others show him giving fitness consultations to
clients outside Gaza or gathering his belongings for yet another
evacuation.

Omar Shareed, who won a place at Dartmouth College in America,

posts about the bureaucratic struggle to leave Gaza and take up his
studies. He pleads with his followers to help him with this.

Ceasefire or not, Gaza’s influencers continue to document birthdays,

weddings and the daily struggle to stay alive and get enough food.
Life goes on—except when it does not. Earlier this year Yaqeen
Hammad, an 11-year-old known as “Gaza’s youngest influencer”,
was killed in an Israeli airstrike.■

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Autocrats without borders

Are east African governments

colluding to stifle dissent?
A raft of recent cases raises a disturbing suspicion
8月 21, 2025 10:00 上午 | Kampala and Nairobi

WHEN AGATHER ATUHAIRE , a Ugandan lawyer and journalist, was

arrested in Tanzania in May, she says she was held incommunicado,
tortured and raped. Three days later she was dumped at the border
between the two countries. Her supposed crime? Attending the trial
of Tundu Lissu, a Tanzanian opposition leader charged with treason.
A Kenyan activist who went with her was also abducted and
tortured. Ms Atuhaire says their tormentors warned them never to
return and “interfere” in Tanzanian politics again. Tanzania’s police
denied mistreating them. After the incident William Ruto, Kenya’s

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president, apologised to Tanzania for “anything that Kenyans have
done that is not right”.

Repression is not uncommon in Tanzania, which has been run by the

same party since independence in 1961. With elections due in
October, the regime headed by Samia Suluhu Hassan is in no rush to
allow her jailed opponent, whose party has been barred from
competing, more publicity. (On August 18th a judge banned live
coverage of Mr Lissu’s latest court appearance.) Yet the alleged
brutal treatment of Ms Atuhaire and her colleague and the Kenyan
government’s response raises the disturbing suspicion that security
forces in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda may be colluding to crush
dissent.

It is just one of several recent cases. The most prominent example is

Kizza Besigye, a Ugandan opposition leader who was kidnapped on a
visit to Kenya in November and now stands accused of plotting to
overthrow Uganda’s government by force. Because Mr Besigye was
unlawfully rendered to a military jail in Uganda, “there has to have
been a high level of co-ordination” between the two countries’
security agencies, says Roland Ebole of Amnesty International, a
rights group. Kenya’s government has since admitted that it co-
operated with the Ugandan authorities, saying Mr Besigye’s
treatment may have been “different” had he claimed asylum.

Other cases suggest collusion at a lower level. Mwabili Mwagodi, a

Kenyan critic of Mr Ruto, whose rule is increasingly authoritarian,
was seized in July by unknown assailants while working at a hotel in
Tanzania. He was handed over to the Kenyan authorities, battered
and bruised, several days later, and admitted to hospital.

In January Maria Sarungi Tsehai, a Tanzanian democracy activist,

was kidnapped by masked men on the streets of Nairobi, Kenya’s
capital, which until recently was a relatively safe haven for
dissidents. She is sure at least one of her abductors was Tanzanian.
“Either Ruto doesn’t control the security services, or he is assenting

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to it,” says a former American official. “Neither scenario is remotely
reassuring.” Mr Ruto and the Kenyan government have not
commented on the allegations.

Even where there is no evidence of collusion, leaders scratch each

others’ backs. Ms Atuhaire notes that although the Ugandan
authorities may not have asked Tanzania to arrest her and her
Kenyan colleague, none objected to their treatment.

Jeffrey Smith, founder of Vanguard Africa, a pro-democracy outfit in

Washington, sees a “convergence of authoritarian tactics across east
Africa”. Mr Ruto is said to have a personal bond with Yoweri
Museveni, Uganda’s president since 1986. The Kenyan leader’s harsh
response to recent anti-government protests feels familiar to
Ugandans. Mr Museveni is “an example and encouragement” to his
regional peers, says David Lewis Rubongoya of the National Unity
Platform, a Ugandan opposition party. The Ugandan president in
turn may have been influenced by the ruling party in Tanzania when
he lived there, first as a student and later as a rebel leader, argues
Erick Kabendera, an exiled Tanzanian journalist.

Why might these governments be tempted to team up against their

opponents? For one, they share a common predicament. Though
only Kenya has recently had mass protests, leaders in Uganda and
Tanzania are also unpopular with their young and increasingly restive
voters. Mrs Samia, who took office after the death of her
predecessor in 2021, will face them for the first time in October. Mr
Museveni, who is 80, is planning to run again in January. But his
authority is beginning to slip. Some observers reckon that fear of an
uprising is what prompted the regime to go so hard after Mr
Besigye.

Meanwhile the international order has grown more permissive. Last

month Marco Rubio, secretary of state in the Trump administration,
told American officials to avoid opining on the credibility of elections
overseas. Diplomats who might once have spoken out when regimes

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threaten or even kill opponents are increasingly staying mum. “A
single statement from Washington can make people here very
fearful,” says Godwin Toko, a lawyer in Uganda. “But now you don’t
have any.”

Britain’s foreign office wants its diplomats to spend less time

lecturing African governments about democracy and human rights. A
European ambassador in Nairobi says that “three generations after
independence, I think we’re done telling them what to do.” Donors
are slashing funds for election monitors and civil-society groups.
Chapter Four, a human-rights group in Uganda, says its budget has
halved since the Trump administration closed USAID .

Western efforts to boost democracy in Africa were never consistent

or faultless. Still, Western diplomats sometimes used to push for
tweaks to draconian laws or help endangered dissidents get to
safety. “The West was actually a strong restraining hand on the
government here,” acknowledges Andrew Mwenda, a Ugandan
journalist with ties to the government.

Now, though, authoritarians across the continent are discovering just

how much they can get away with. “I fear it is going to get worse,”
says Marion Kirabo, a lawyer who plans to stand for local
government in Uganda next year. “We are basically on our own
now.” ■

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Going viral

How Sierra Leone beat back

mpox
The country’s effective public-health messaging is a model for the
rest of Africa
8月 21, 2025 04:09 上午 | Freetown

PICTURES OF SORE , blistered genitals have gone viral in Sierra Leone

in recent months. The gruesome photos showing symptoms of mpox
have helped persuade Sierra Leoneans that the virus, which spreads
mainly through close physical contact and causes fever, chills and
skin blisters, is a real public-health threat. That has made them more
willing to follow government advice on how to avoid it. “When we
had Ebola, I was one of the people saying I don’t believe it is real,”

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says Moses Lavalie, a 32-year-old in Freetown, the capital. “But
mpox? Mpox is very real.”

Ever since the UN ’s World Health Organisation (WHO ) declared mpox

a “public-health emergency of international concern” a year ago,
African countries have been worst affected. The continent has
suffered a surge in the spread of two mpox strains, with the newer
one, known as clade I b, believed to be more lethal. The rollout of
vaccines has been slow. More than 2,000 people are confirmed to
have died from mpox since the beginning of 2024, many of them
children. The Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Sierra
Leone between them account for almost 80% of cases and deaths.

Yet among the three countries, Sierra Leone stands out for its
management of the disease. Congo’s mpox burden is likely to be
much higher than reported, with many cases from last year only now
being confirmed. Uganda has recorded a large number of deaths
among people living with HIV . Meanwhile, following a spike earlier
this year, Sierra Leone’s caseload has been falling rapidly.

Sierra Leonean authorities have done some key things well since the
country recorded its first case in January. Messaging has been
widespread and effective. The government has used radio jingles,
posters and daily texts to tell people where to go for testing and
how to avoid close bodily contact. That has improved understanding
of how the disease spreads and what its risks are (and possibly
encouraged people to be open about their symptoms on social
media, generating the viral images). The public-health agency has
sent workers to poorly connected areas to identify suspected cases
and offer treatment, paid for by the government.

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Despite limited resources, the country treats mpox as seriously as
outbreaks of Ebola and covid-19. As you get off the plane in Sierra
Leone, staff offer hand sanitiser. Office buildings conduct
temperature checks, as an early symptom of mpox is a fever. Military
and police hospitals have been converted into isolation centres. Mild
cases, where blisters are restricted to intimate areas, are allowed to
be treated at home, freeing beds for more serious cases, such as in
people living with HIV .

Things are not perfect. Hospitals are still crowded, with long wait
times for tests and treatment. Enforced isolation at home is hard to
police in crammed urban areas like Freetown. Mr Lavalie had to wait
three days for an answer from an emergency line when he began to
show symptoms. Cuts to foreign aid, which has historically helped
Sierra Leone pay for lab equipment, contact-tracing and genomic
sequencing for epidemiological research, could weaken defences
against future outbreaks.

A year into the most recent epidemic, too little is still known about
the virus. The strain that accounted for most of Sierra Leone’s cases
beginning in May is thought to be the older one, known as clade II b.

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But it spread faster than expected and has infected both sexes
equally, rather than mainly men. That makes it more like the newer
clade I b strain, puzzling scientists.

Thankfully data from the African Centres for Disease Control and
Prevention, based in Ethiopia, show that the number of cases across
the continent is shrinking. Yet progress is hampered by rises in
infections in countries that are responding less effectively than Sierra
Leone. Not all lessons from Freetown are transferable. Sierra Leone
is a small country dealing with its first outbreak. Congo is massive
and embroiled in conflict across much of its east. Nigeria has battled
mpox for at least three years, which has made it harder to treat the
latest outbreak as a more urgent emergency. The fight is far from
over. ■

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Europe
Putin’s hunger to destroy Western unity
rages on
The view from Moscow :: He bets on a military breakthrough or a Trump-brokered
stitch-up

Security “guarantees” for Ukraine are

dangerously hazy
After a deal :: The devil is in the detail on proposals from Trump, Putin and Europe

Friedrich Merz cuts a good figure abroad

but is struggling at home
The Aussenkanzler :: The chancellor may be Germany’s last chance to avoid a hard-
right government

Europe is ablaze
Wildfires :: New records are being set for devastation

Why Turkey’s football clubs can pay more

cash for talent
Sublime sport :: Paradoxically, it may have to do with the country’s troubled economy

Trump wants a Nobel prize. Europe can

exploit that to help Ukraine
Charlemagne :: But beware the pitfalls of photo-op peacemaking

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The view from Moscow

Putin’s hunger to destroy

Western unity rages on
He bets on a military breakthrough or a Trump-brokered stitch-up
8月 21, 2025 05:06 上午 | RIGA

ON AUGUST 16TH , a day after his summit with Donald Trump,

Vladimir Putin summoned Russia’s grandees to the Kremlin’s Hall of
the Order of St Catherine. Built in tsarist times to show off the glory
of the Russian empire, the hall was the setting for Mr Putin’s account
of his achievements during the visit to Alaska, a former Russian
imperial possession. He praised Mr Trump’s “sincerity” and efforts to
end the war. “It moves us closer to making necessary decisions,” he
said.

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In the same hall, three and half years ago, Mr Putin had gathered
his terrified courtiers and ordered them, one after another, to make
the case for recognising the separatist-held territories in eastern
Ukraine. That bizarre televised spectacle signalled the start of the
invasion of Ukraine. His post-Alaska gathering, however, indicated
that the war might now end—on Russia’s terms, of course. The
message reflects both Russia’s exhaustion from war and Mr Putin’s
confidence of winning it, through fighting or by favourable
negotiation. His peace initiatives and military actions align to the
same goal: more power.

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war

Mr Putin’s tone was emollient: “We respect the US administration’s

position, which wants the hostilities to stop as soon as possible. So
do we.” One person who seems to take Mr Putin’s words at face
value is Mr Trump, who, over the months, has displayed an almost
clinical dependence on the Kremlin’s strongman, and has recoiled
every time Ukraine and its European allies have urged him to apply
pressure on Russia’s leader.

During the follow-up summit in Washington with Volodymyr Zelensky

and seven European leaders, a hot mic caught Mr Trump whispering
to Emmanuel Macron, the French president: “I think he [Mr Putin]
wants to make a deal for me, you understand that? As crazy as it
sounds.” Despite earlier promises, Mr Trump has not imposed
sanctions and no longer demands a ceasefire as a precondition for
talks.

Mr Putin is unlikely to be bothered by the smiles, shoulder-slapping

and assurances of support for Ukraine at the White House. As far as
he is concerned, the meeting produced little more than general talk
of security guarantees that will apply only if Mr Putin agrees to
peace. Mr Trump’s call to Mr Putin, in the middle of his meeting with
European leaders, offered him reassurance: Mr Trump will do
nothing about Ukraine without consulting Russia.

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Mr Putin’s own summit with Mr Trump, on the other hand, was much
more of a success. Branded a murderous criminal by Mr Trump’s
predecessor, he got a red-carpet reception and applause from Mr
Trump, who ended Mr Putin’s diplomatic isolation and restored his
position as a power player in Europe.

“I congratulate all of us on a perfect summit. It was grand. To win

everything and lose nothing—only Alexander III could do that,”
enthused Alexander Dugin, an ultra-imperialist philosopher and
proponent of war, nodding to one of Mr Putin’s favourite tsars. It is
still unclear what the two summiteers agreed: Mr Putin went to
Alaska not to negotiate, but to preen.

Recent polls suggest that 70% of Russians think their country is

prevailing on the battlefield, yet 60% favour peace talks. Fear of
defeat is long gone, but there is not much appetite for more war.
One well-informed businessman sums up the elite’s attitude:
“Nobody gives a fuck how it’s going to end, as long as it does. Putin
can sell anything as a victory.” At a minimum, though, he wants this
to include the recognition, by America at least, of Russia’s
occupation of Crimea and the corridor, seized in war, that connects it
to Russia; Ukraine’s permanent exclusion from NATO ; and
presidential elections in Ukraine. “No deal is likely while Zelensky is
in power,” says a Russian insider.

Mr Putin’s new enthusiasm for diplomacy reflects his constraints.

Russia’s economy is heading into recession. In the first seven
months of this year its budget deficit has overshot the target for the
whole of 2025—unsurprising, considering a 20% increase in public
expenditure in those seven months. At least 5% of all government
spending now goes to maintaining a contract army that is mostly
fighting in Ukraine, according to Re:Russia, a Vienna-based think-
tank.

This does not make Mr Putin’s position critical: he can always impose
yet more pain on the economy. But “this will increase risks and

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internal tension, which will radically change Russians’ perceptions of
the costs of war,” says Kirill Rogov of Re:Russia. Moreover, for the
third summer in a row, Russia has failed to break Ukraine’s front line.
It still controls only a percentage point of Ukrainian territory beyond
what it held at the start of 2023.

Mr Putin does not want to risk mass mobilisation, or to carry on the

war for another year. The vast human and economic cost would
highlight his army’s failure to defeat Ukraine’s. “Everybody
understands that [carrying on] the war is senseless and it’s time to
end it,” says a Russian magnate. But this does not mean Mr Putin is
about to stop. As Mr Rogov says, he still craves a breakthrough in
the next two months: Ukraine is short of manpower; desertion is
common. “He is opening the diplomatic door as a contingency, in
case his offensive does not yield the desired effect.”

For Mr Putin endless negotiations are simply another part of his war
plans. They keep Mr Trump on his side and further the broader aim
of sowing dissent in the West and in Ukraine. As a Russian blogger
puts it: “The main thing to understand is that the war has not
stopped. Our president will consider the [diplomatic] options, and in
the meantime the military keeps working to liberate our territories.”
Mr Putin’s demand that Ukraine hand over territory in the western
Donbas that he has not won on the battlefield is meant to trigger a
political crisis in Ukraine. He knows Mr Zelensky has pledged not to
cede an inch of land, and that Mr Trump may dump him if he does
not cave in.

To achieve his goal of dismantling the post-cold-war security order,

Mr Putin wants to unravel Ukraine politically, drive America out of
Europe and undermine Europe’s support for Ukraine. He is yet to
achieve any of this. But even if the war’s active phase winds down,
his struggle to destroy Western unity will persist. ■

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After a deal

Security “guarantees” for

Ukraine are dangerously hazy
The devil is in the detail on proposals from Trump, Putin and Europe
8月 21, 2025 03:34 上午

ONE OF THE most important unresolved questions surrounding any

peace deal for Ukraine is about security guarantees—how to ensure
that Russia will not break its word and invade again. A nightmare
scenario for Ukraine is that Russia will use peace and the lifting of
sanctions to rebuild and retrain its army, and re-emerge as a more
formidable force to attack Ukraine again and finish the job. On
August 18th Mr Trump said that Russia had agreed to accept security
guarantees, repeating a claim made days earlier by Steve Witkoff,

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his envoy to Russia, that “Article 5-like protection” was on the table.
What would that mean in practice?

Article 5, the clause enshrining NATO ’s mutual defence, specifies that

an attack on one member is seen as an attack on all, and that each
ally will help with “such action as it deems necessary”. On August
19th Mr Trump explicitly ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine,
describing Ukraine’s bid as “very insulting” to Russia. Mr Trump, like
Barack Obama and Joe Biden before him, is unlikely to commit to go
to war against Russia to protect Ukraine.

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war

Nor is it clear what, precisely, Mr Putin and his team told the
Americans when they met in Alaska on August 15th. The details are
important. In 2022, during talks with Ukraine, Russia did indeed
agree that Ukraine’s partners could provide guarantees as part of a
peace deal. But the Kremlin later inserted a poison-pill clause that
would have allowed it to veto any activation of those guarantees. On
August 20th Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said that any
new deal would need to be based on those proposals, with China
included among the guarantors.

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There are also mechanisms that fall well short of Article 5. One
would be security “assurances”, rather than guarantees, like the
Budapest memorandum of 1994, in which America, Britain and
Russia promised to respect Ukraine’s integrity and, feebly, to
“consult” if it was violated. Plainly, those did not work. In the middle,
says Samuel Charap of the RAND Corporation, a think-tank, would be
something like the pact America signed with Israel in 1975: a
promise to take remedial action if Egypt violated a ceasefire, such as
a snapback of sanctions, for example.

All of this is also tied up with the question of a “coalition of the

willing”, spearheaded by Britain and France, that could deploy troops
to Ukraine and planes to its skies. The coalition, which could include
non-European countries like Australia, has been engaged in detailed
military planning for months, with some countries considering where
in Ukraine they would place their forces. One sticking-point has been
whether Mr Trump would enable such a force, for instance with
logistics and intelligence, and “backstop” it by promising to step in if
it were to be attacked.

In recent days Mr Trump appeared to suggest that he would. On

August 18th he said that Europeans would be the “first line of
defence”, but America would “help them out with it”, though he gave
few clues as to what that might mean. The next day he reiterated
that he was willing to help, possibly with air power, “because there’s
nobody [with] the kind of stuff we have…I don’t think it’s going to
be a problem.” Marco Rubio, America’s secretary of state, is leading
a working group to examine this, along with broader guarantees.
Russia has reaffirmed that it is opposed to the idea.

At the heart of the Trumpian vision of a peace deal is a

contradiction: Russia, the aggressor, would have to consent to any
security guarantees given to Ukraine, a state whose legitimacy it
denies. The unknowable factor is Mr Putin. If he has indeed come to
the opinion that it is time to make strategic decisions to stop, he

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may bend. If not, the impossible issue of squaring serious security
guarantees with a Russian veto will be a convenient stumbling-block.

What is also not clear is what precisely a European force would do.
One aim is for it to train and develop Ukraine’s own armed forces.
Another is to offer reassurance by the mere presence of foreign
troops, who left in a rush in 2022. But if the force were attacked, or
if Russia were to break a peace agreement and reinvade, how would
the coalition respond? A formal pledge to fight Russia would amount
to Article 5 by other means. A vague mandate with woolly rules of
engagement could tempt Russia to test European resolve. One worry
of the Biden administration was that if a European force were
embarrassed inside Ukraine, it could undercut the credibility of
Article 5 on NATO soil.

In practice, Ukraine, scarred by experience, will put only limited faith

in outside pledges and foreign troops. Speaking in the White House,
Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, acknowledged that the
ultimate guarantee was Ukraine’s own armed forces. That made it all
the more important, he noted, that a peace deal should include no
limits on the size and capability of those forces, as Russia has also
sought. Mr Zelensky cannot sign a deal that would leave his country
defenceless. Mr Putin still seeks to turn Ukraine into an enfeebled
vassal state cut off from its allies. ■

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The Aussenkanzler

Friedrich Merz cuts a good

figure abroad but is
struggling at home
The chancellor may be Germany’s last chance to avoid a hard-right
government
8月 21, 2025 05:42 上午 | BERLIN

Less honoured in his own country

FRIEDRICH MERZ never enjoyed the honeymoon customary for a new

head of government. When he stood for election to the
chancellorship in the Bundestag on May 6th, he fell short of the
required absolute majority on the first round. He got there on the
second attempt, but it was a sign of things to come. His majority is

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wafer-thin. Worse, he cannot count on the loyalty of all the deputies
in his coalition, made up of his centre-right Christian Democrats
(CDU ), their Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU ),
and the Social Democratic Party (SPD ).

Immediately after taking the oath of office Mr Merz embarked on a

series of trips, first across Europe (Paris, Warsaw, Brussels and Kyiv)
and then to America. His enthusiasm for travel quickly earned him
the tag Aussenkanzler (foreign chancellor). He has succeeded in his
ambition of establishing Germany as a leading voice in international
politics, playing a prominent role in this week’s Ukraine peace talks,
and seems to get on well with Donald Trump. But at home he is
stumbling. After 100 days in office Mr Merz was less popular than
Olaf Scholz, his unloved predecessor, had been at that point,
according to a poll by ARD, a German public broadcaster. Only 32%
were satisfied with Mr Merz, compared with 56% for Mr Scholz and
74% for Angela Merkel, Mr Scholz’s predecessor.

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Recently, and even more worryingly, some polling suggests the hard-
right Alternative for Germany (A fD ) may be ahead of the CDU (see
chart). And according to a survey by Insa, 68% of Germans expect
that next year’s regional elections will for the first time return a state
premier from the A fD . The states holding elections next year are
Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saxony-Anhalt, Berlin and

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Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. It is a sign of the times that
mainstream parties will consider it good news if the A fD comes first
but fails to win an absolute majority in Saxony-Anhalt, and becomes
the biggest party in just one or two of the five states.

What went wrong? “Merz is not an experienced politician, he acts

more like a CEO ,” says Holger Schmieding, chief economist of
Berenberg, a bank. In foreign policy his top-down leadership works
well, but at home his management style ruffles feathers. Many
parliamentarians from his own party were angered after he rammed
through a loosening of Germany’s balanced-budget rules before even
taking office. Since then, his peremptory style has led to a number
of domestic storms that have clouded his debut.

In July his troubles centred on nominations to the country’s powerful

consitutional court. Mr Merz had to cancel a vote in parliament on
three appointments after some of his own party’s deputies rebelled
against the nomination of Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf, a law professor.
Several Christian Democrats took offence at her liberal views on
abortion. Mr Merz said their attacks against her amounted to a
campaign of personal defamation. Ms Brosius-Gersdorf has since
withdrawn her candidacy.

Then on August 8th Mr Merz decided to halt German exports to

Israel of weapons that could be used in Gaza, without consulting
anyone but his closest advisers. This upset both CDU and CSU
lawmakers, as well as some state premiers. Markus Söder, the leader
of the CSU and second-term premier of Bavaria, was particularly
miffed not to have been sounded out.

To some extent Mr Merz gets a bad rap. His government has done
reasonably well at implementing the four big changes he promised
for his first months in office: cutting red tape, more frequent border
checkpoints, a reform of Bürgergeld (Germany’s minimum income)
and corporate-tax cuts. Construction permits have sped up,
minimum-income reform is in the works, and companies can write

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off more capital investment; a lower corporate-tax rate will take
effect in 2028. But the media have focused on a jump in corporate
insolvencies, a rise in unemployment (though the rate is just 3.6%,
low by international standards) and on a broken promise to lower
electricity prices for consumers.

The stakes for Mr Merz’s chancellorship are high. He has described it

as Germany’s last chance to stave off a government run by the A fD .
It is early days, but so far the Aussenkanzler has not managed to
seize the opportunity. ■

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Wildfires

Europe is ablaze
New records are being set for devastation
8月 21, 2025 03:34 上午 | Florence

METEOROLOGICALLY, EUROPE is a middling sort of place. Hurricanes,

monsoons and sandstorms pass it by. But in one increasingly
alarming way, Europe stands out. It is warming faster than other
continents. Since the mid-1990s its average temperatures have risen
by 0.53°C per decade, which is more than double the global land
average of 0.26°C. This summer the effects have been dramatically
apparent.

Heatwaves roasted northern Europe in June, and the south in

August. According to the European Forest Fire Information System,
wildfires in the European Union had burnt almost 10,000 square

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kilometres by August 19th. That compares with an average over the
same period since 2006 of 2,440 sq km. Blazes have swept across
swathes of the Balkans, Cyprus, France, Greece, Portugal and Spain.
Some of them have come scarily close to big cities including Madrid,
Porto, Podgorica and Patras, Greece’s third-largest. At least eight
people have died, probably many more. Countries that are struggling
to cope have sought help a record 17 times through the EU ’s civil-
protection mechanism, a system for co-ordinating disaster response.

Relative to its size, Portugal has been hardest hit. Fire has consumed
2.9% of the country’s entire territory: 2,600 sq km, more than was
burnt in the whole of the EU in the same period last year. Another
4,000 sq km have been ravaged in neighbouring Spain. Around
30,000 Spaniards have been forced to leave their homes. Some of
the wildfires are of explosive intensity, a new trend. “There are areas
where there’s no way the fires can be controlled by human means,”
said Margarita Robles, Spain’s defence minister. “Only the weather
will allow us to have that control.”

With temperatures dropping and rain forecast, the corner may have
been turned. But plenty of questions remain as to whether central
and regional governments need to do more. In Spain, total public
investment in fire prevention fell by more than half between 2009
and 2022, according to a lobby group of forestry companies.

Global warming turns large parts of Europe’s countryside into

kindling. But it does not apply the match. Ignition comes from either
natural events, usually lightning strikes, or human intervention. The
most recent study of the causes of wildfires in Europe used data
from 2016. Of the blazes with known causes (more than half the
total), a mere 4% were found to have started naturally. Accidents
and negligence explained 39%. But the main reason, accounting for
57% of outbreaks, was that the fires were lit deliberately.

Why? In the early 2000s, Italy’s forestry police, the Corpo Forestale
dello Stato (CPS ), a body that has since been absorbed by the semi-

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militarised Carabinieri, carried out a detailed study based on data
from 2001. The proportion of fires attributable to arson was 60%,
almost identical to the figures in the later, EU -wide survey. The CPS
found only about one in ten of the fires had been lit by pyromaniacs
or others who were mentally disturbed. The most common reason
was that an attempt to clear land for pasture had got out of hand.
Other wildfires were deviously lit so that the area burnt could
subsequently be reclassified for construction.

Clearly there is a case for stiffening the penalties for starting fires
and ensuring that land devastated by blazes cannot subsequently be
used for grazing or building. It might also be worth thinking hard
before ending the autonomy of specialised forces like the CPS . ■

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Sublime sport

Why Turkey’s football clubs

can pay more cash for talent
Paradoxically, it may have to do with the country’s troubled economy
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

Reaping top players from Europe

FOUR OF THE five priciest transfers in European football this summer

involved England’s cash-soaked Premier League. The fifth was more
unusual. Victor Osimhen, a Nigerian striker, left Napoli, the Italian
champions, for Galatasaray in Turkey’s Super Lig. The €75m ($87m)
transfer fee was the biggest in Turkish history, more than triple the
old record. Mr Osimhen will earn €15m a year after taxes,
comparable to top players in England and Spain. Nor was it a one-
off. Galatasaray and their crosstown rivals, Fenerbahce and Besiktas,

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have signed loan deals for high-profile players from Europe and even
Saudi Arabia. Continental clubs are tightening belts. What is
happening in Istanbul?

The Super Lig has long been popular among European players near
the end of their careers. Turkey’s football-mad president, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, has lured them with a tax exemption: they pay a
flat 20% rather than the normal progressive rates. But the average
age of those signed this summer by Galatasaray, Fenerbahce and
Besiktas is just 26.

Paradoxically, one reason the clubs can afford prime players may be
linked to Turkey’s economic troubles. Mr Erdogan long kept interest
rates low despite spiralling inflation, which peaked at 85%. The lira
fell from ten to the euro in 2021 to almost 40 in 2024. But Turkey’s
biggest teams bring in lots of euros. Analysts estimate Galatasaray
earned €32m from the Champions League in the 2023-24 season,
and that the three Istanbul sides collectively made €45m from
Europa League matches last season. Bayern Munich paid Galatasaray
€30m for Sacha Boey, a French defender.

The weak lira helped teams inflate away domestic debt and costs. In
euro terms, Turkish clubs’ debts fell by 19% between 2019-23; those
of European teams rose by 40% on average. Economic policy has
since improved, and the clubs were left with euros to invest. Signing
elite players on year-long loans, even on high wages paid in euros, is
smart. It should help the clubs progress further in European
competitions, which earns more euros, without adding long-term
liabilities. If the lira falls again, they can unload expensive players.

But not Mr Osimhen. Galatasaray have signed him for four years. To
be sure, they tried before they bought. They took Mr Osimhen on
loan in the 2024-25 season. He scored 26 goals in 30 matches, and
Galatasaray won the Super Lig. ■

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Charlemagne

Trump wants a Nobel prize.

Europe can exploit that to
help Ukraine
But beware the pitfalls of photo-op peacemaking
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

FOREIGN DIGNITARIES invited to the White House know a thoughtful

gift can help lubricate the wheels of diplomacy. Volodymyr Zelensky,
Ukraine’s president, went the safe route as he arrived in Washington
this week, offering a golf club to his golf-mad host, Donald Trump.
Past gifts from abroad have included a presidential private jet from
Qatar, a posh set of Mont Blanc fountain pens from Angela Merkel
(no match for the presidential Sharpie) and a portrait of one Donald

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J. Trump made with gemstones, courtesy of Vietnam. As a parade of
European leaders set out for Washington to support Mr Zelensky,
what memorable trinket from their home continent could they
possibly bestow upon the president who has everything? Mr Trump,
as it happens, no doubt had something in mind. For there is one
bauble from Europe he has alluded to repeatedly of late: the medal
awarded to recipients of the Nobel peace prize. His pining for the
acclaim granted every year by a committee appointed by the
Norwegian parliament is turbocharging American diplomacy in a way
that might both encourage Europe and cause it to panic.

An obvious plot offers itself to the deft diplomat: could Europe, the
continental home of the Nobel prizes, dangle the prospect of a shiny
medal and an Oslo banquet as a sort of carrot to lure Mr Trump onto
their side when it comes to Ukraine? Alas, the committee that
decides on the prize, comprised of five obscure Norwegian grandees
drawn from politics and civil society, seems above such antics.
Repeated assurances from Mr Trump that he is not campaigning for
the gong, nor thinks he will ever get it, are taken as sure signs he
desperately wants it. (A recent phone call to the Norwegian finance
minister, in which the matter of the Nobel reportedly came up
alongside threats of tariffs, is another clue.) Mr Trump wants his
dealmaking skills to be recognised in endeavours beyond the
building of gaudy skyscrapers, and there is no greater arena than
diplomacy. The global elites sneer at mere moneymaking. But
recognition from Oslo is worth much more than the medal’s weight
in gold (about 200 grams, or $20,000).

The prospect of joining Teddy Roosevelt, Mother Teresa and Martin

Luther King as a Nobel laureate (best not to mention Barack Obama)
has sent Mr Trump into “peacemaker-in-chief” mode. In recent
months he has boasted of spreading harmony faster than the world’s
baddies can spark strife. Somewhat improbably he has claimed
credit for ending six (or sometimes seven) wars in as many months.
Where does the fellow find the time? At least in his own mind, amity
now prevails between the Democratic Republic of Congo and

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Rwanda; there is nothing but fraternal love between India and
Pakistan; the guns will forever be silent in the conflicts between
Azerbaijan and Armenia, Iran and Israel, Thailand and Cambodia.
The repentant warmongers, among them Binyamin Netanyahu of
Israel (not so repentant when it comes to Gaza), have backed Mr
Trump for the Nobel.

Yet to secure the gong Mr Trump knows he will have to tackle the
thorniest war of all: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The
president campaigned on a promise that peace could be brokered in
just 24 hours. Even Hillary Clinton, once Mr Trump’s arch-nemesis,
says delivering a deal that doesn’t involve Ukraine making fresh land
concessions would be worthy of the prize.

This presents an opportunity for Europe. The American president has

at times seemed bored by the war in Ukraine. After a quick deal
proved elusive, he appeared ready to dismiss the conflict as “Biden’s
war” and move on. If the shimmering mirage of the Nobel can
repurpose his messianic vanity towards greater engagement, so
much the better. Europeans hope a newly invested Mr Trump will
come to realise that Russia is in fact the obstacle to a realistic deal—
and thus to Mr Trump’s white-tailed trip to Oslo.

There are downsides to Mr Trump’s Nobel lust. His get-peace-quick

schemes might come at the expense of the tiresome legwork needed
to stop the fighting for good. Mr Trump, never a man for details, will
instinctively seek the headline of an ended war, leaving Vladimir
Putin in charge of the fine print. But a mere photo-op in the Rose
Garden won’t do for Mr Zelensky. Above all he needs security
guarantees America would have to at least support, but the offer of
which remains infuriatingly vague. If talks drag on, as no doubt they
will, Mr Trump may find it easier to push Ukraine to accept a shoddy
peace than to force Russia into a durable one.

Truce or dare

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Beyond his pining for a gold medal, Mr Trump seems to genuinely
loathe wars (and has joked that ending them may be his way into
heaven). If nothing else, Trump-as-peacemaker is more pleasant to
deal with. European leaders visiting the White House received
obsequious praise from the president, in contrast to past encounters.
Will that endure after October 10th, once the peace prize is
bestowed, inevitably to someone else? For Charlemagne will happily
wager there are no sane Norwegians who would plump for Mr Trump
to receive any prize, let alone one for peace. The man has, after all,
threatened to invade countries, slashed American foreign aid and
deployed troops in his own capital.

If it is not in European leaders’ gift to get Mr Trump the Nobel, they

should do the next best thing: loudly proclaim they are backing Mr
Trump for the prize, with letters of endorsement to boot, and drop
hints of “Oslo having been spoken to”. Such nominations have zero
value; well over 100,000 worthies, including history professors at
fourth-tier universities, can put forward whomever they choose for
consideration. Several hundred make the cut each year; even Adolf
Hitler, of all people, was nominated once. But the gesture will go
down well in Mar-a-Lago. If Europe can find a way to channel Mr
Trump’s prize-winning delusions to its advantage, a little Nobel
tomfoolery may be worth it. ■

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Britain
The new geography of stolen goods
Grand Theft Global Inc :: Cars, phones, tractors: how high-end products are
increasingly stolen to serve distant markets

How thieves could break into your car

Manufacturers v thieves :: Gangs hack into electronic systems with increasingly
sophisticated kit

A court ruling threatens to disrupt Britain’s

asylum policy
For whom the Bell tolls :: What the Bell Hotel in Epping means for migrants

England’s white working class falls further

behind at exams
Flunking it :: Blame rising absenteeism

The moral of “The Salt Path”, an

embellished bestseller
The poor me’s lament :: The truth will catch up with you, but will readers want to
hear it?

What it means when Britain talks about

“Bosh”
Bagehot :: A desperate political class is out of ideas

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Grand Theft Global Inc

The new geography of stolen

goods
Cars, phones, tractors: how high-end products are increasingly
stolen to serve distant markets
8月 21, 2025 05:06 上午 | Felixstowe

THE MSC RUBY is almost ready to leave Felixstowe. Seven remote-

controlled gantry cranes are still at work, stacking containers in the
ship’s bays. Some 11,000 containers pass through this port each day,
making it Britain’s primary conduit to the arteries of global trade.
The Ruby’s next call is Gran Canaria—then, the long run down the
coast of Africa. Watching the scene Adam Gibson, the lone police
officer at the port, whose job is finding stolen cars, sounds rueful:
“There’s no way in hell I can search even a small fraction of them.

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We could be standing here now and there could be three or four
boxes of stolen cars just there in those stacks. They could be
manifested as teddy bears.”

Without many people noticing, Britain has become a leading

exporter of stolen goods. In the past decade the number of vehicles
stolen in the country has risen by 75%. Most end up on container
ships; the top destination is west Africa. More recently London has
become known as the “phone-snatching capital of Europe”. If the
victims manage to track their devices, the goods are most likely to
turn up in China. British farmers are plagued by raiding gangs. Their
tractors and GPS kits usually head east, to Russia or eastern Europe.

For centuries criminals have nicked valuable products and smuggled

them across borders, beyond the reach of the law. Britain today
shows how this model has evolved in new and alarming ways.
Encrypted communications have enabled criminal gangs to operate
and co-operate more freely than ever before, and establish global
supply chains. As countries in Africa and Asia have become richer,
demand for the products common on the streets of the rich world is
growing. This combination has spawned a flourishing criminal
enterprise. Call it Grand Theft Global Inc.

Britain is a “perfect place” for this business, says Elijah Glantz of

RUSI , a think-tank, because of its saturated consumer market and
weak export controls. There are lots of expensive cars and phones to
steal, and it is easy to get them away. There is also almost no
deterrent: Britain’s police solve only 5% of crimes (and 2% of
vehicle thefts). In continental Europe and America such criminal
enterprise is growing, too, though America has stronger scrutiny of
exports because it fears fraud and tax evasion. Canada has been hit
by a rash of vanishing vehicles. But for now, Britain has the dubious
title of world leader.

Cars show how the model has evolved. Like other rich countries,
Britain experienced a sharp drop in vehicle crime in the 1990s,

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thanks to immobilisers and other technology. In 2013 Britain had
only 2.7 thefts for every 1,000 privately owned cars, according to
RUSI . Now it is 4.4. Thefts have risen from 90,000 in 2020 to
130,000 last year. That has fed into a 45% real-terms rise in the cost
of car insurance (in the EU it has risen only in line with inflation).
Vehicle crime is “my number-one issue”, says Dan Tomlinson, the
Labour MP for Chipping Barnet, a leafy north London suburb.

The method is typically as follows. To defeat sophisticated security

systems, thieves use specialised equipment·. Once in, they mask the
car with fake number plates and use jammers to override GPS
tracking. Then they move it, usually across county lines
(collaboration between police forces is often poor), where it will be
sold to a group that handles logistics. Sometimes the car is hidden in
a shipment of other goods, under a false manifest. More often, the
gang employs a third group to give the car a “new identity”—not
only paperwork but markers including the vehicle identification
number, a unique code stamped on the chassis.

Uncontained

This whole process—from theft to container—often takes less than a

day. That is partly because Grand Theft Global is not one outfit but a
sophisticated supply chain. It is also lucrative. Consider a Toyota
Hilux, which when new costs around £40,000 ($54,000). The group
that steals one might be paid £1,500 for a night’s work. If another
gets it to west Africa, where Hiluxes are sought after, they can sell it
for more than it fetches in Britain.

In his large inspection tent at Felixstowe, Mr Gibson provides a

guided tour. The cars are all shiny SUV s, though most have been
dented by ratchet straps (the thieves don’t mind, because that can
be fixed cheaply at the other end). Shelves are piled with engines,
batteries and sundry parts from cars taken to a “chop shop”, a
freelance operator who will break them up without asking questions.
Some are literally sawn into thirds. Gangs have also begun to target

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rental companies using fake documents. On the day your
correspondent visits, Mr Gibson opens a container, following a tip-off.
Inside is a Porsche 911 Carrera S that was rented in Germany two
weeks ago: somehow it has found its way into a box in Britain,
bound for Africa.

Between 2021 and 2024 almost four in ten stolen cars intercepted at
Britain’s ports were heading for the Democratic Republic of Congo,
according to the National Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service
(N aVCIS). The DRC seems to be acting as an entry point to a wider
African market. One in five was heading for the United Arab
Emirates. From there gangs reach customers across the Gulf. Most
thefts in Canada follow the same two routes. Buyers largely want
SUV s that can handle poor roads. The elite also want sports cars,
which often stick out on the streets of Kinshasa (not least, because
many are right-hand-drive). Sometimes, says Mr Gibson, thieves
seem to work to an “order”.

Grand Theft Global works in a similar way for phones. Some 70,000
phones were stolen in London last year, a rise of more than a third
on the year before. Britain accounts for 40% of the stolen phones in

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Europe. As with cars, low-level thieves sell them on to a fence (a
thief might get £100-200 for one that is unlocked, or £30-60 for one
that isn’t). Again, third-party services have popped up, such as
shops that specialise in overcoming security features. Large batches
of phones are then wrapped in tinfoil to prevent tracking, and
exported, often via container ships.

Investigations have found that most end up in one place:

Huaqiangbei market in Shenzhen. Demand in China for second-hand
phones is huge; those that cannot be unlocked are broken apart and
rebuilt. And there is no better place to do that than Huaqiangbei, the
world’s largest electronics market. Because Shenzhen is where many
of the phones were made in the first place, there is a ready supply
of skilled workers. According to a study by Zituo Wang of the
University of Southern California, the primary source of stolen
phones identified in China is Britain.

British farms have been targeted since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

led to sanctions on legal trade. In 2023 the value of claims for stolen
GPS kits rose by 137%.

It may be that Grand Theft Global is thriving in Britain because the

country has particular vulnerabilities. Or perhaps criminals there
have just been quicker to pick up on them. London is, after all, often
a city where innovative methods in criminality first emerge. There is
little reason to think this one will not be exported, too.

To see why, consider four factors. First is the way containerised

shipping works. Around the world, border agencies overwhelmingly
focus on imports, hunting for people and drugs. In many countries,
exports are hardly checked at all. Anyone can book a container. The
way ships are filled—tiers of “freight forwarders” buy batches of
containers and sell them on—makes auditing hard. Only a tiny
proportion of containers will ever be opened up, let alone X -rayed;
typically only when authorities receive a tip-off. For each container

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Mr Gibson holds up and searches, the police must pay the port a fee
of £200.

Today London, tomorrow the world

Second, the ability to covertly communicate, sell goods and transfer

money online has favoured criminal groups. Until recently, even
highly professional outfits found it hard to do this (case files abound
with drug kingpins struggling to make themselves understood on
clunky satellite phones). Now someone who wants a Porsche in
Kinshasa can be linked seamlessly, via intermediaries, with someone
prepared to steal one in Kent. “These groups are just doing business
in a very modern way,“ says Ruggero Scaturro of the Global Initiative
against Transnational Organised Crime, a think-tank. In Britain Grand
Theft Global is seen as so low-risk that many drug gangs are shifting
into it.

That links to the third factor: supply and demand. As cars and
phones have become more sophisticated, they have become more
expensive in relation to incomes. That alone has made stealing them
more attractive. And most middle-class consumers in China cannot
afford a new iPhone. Many Africans want better vehicles, but the
used-car market remains dominant, legal dealerships scarce, and
premium cars have not yet reached the economies of scale that
bring costs down. These gaps will continue. As the market for stolen
goods becomes more efficient, prices will fall. Once a particular
model is sold, there will be demand for parts.

Fourth, police forces largely remain in the dust. N aVCIS has enjoyed
some success, intercepting 550 cars in the past year. But that is a
small fraction of those getting through. Mr Gibson is one of three
officers at ports in the south of the country. Britain’s police have yet
to catch any high-ups in the business. European forces do not even
have dedicated investigation teams. Across the rich world, resources
tend to be directed towards “higher harm” offences.

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In some ways the success of Grand Theft Global is a story of
globalisation. It uses the infrastructure of global commerce,
designed for frictionless trade. Identifying stolen goods amid so
many containers is like finding “needles in haystacks”, says Tim
Morris of the Association of British Ports. Globalisation created the
supply chain that allows each iPhone—with nearly 3,000 components
—to reach the hands of a consumer. The same forces inverted see
that phone yanked out of them, re-exported and broken apart again.

Yet Grand Theft Global can also thrive in a world that is increasingly
fragmented. Tariffs just make stolen goods more competitive.
Sanctions, like those on Russia, boost demand for criminal activity.
When countries are less co-operative, it is easier to ship goods to
places where they are unlikely to be recovered.

The gains to trade

Indeed, while Grand Theft Global hurts the rich world’s consumers,
the countries benefiting from the trade have little incentive to curb
it. Unlike those in Europe, authorities in China do not make it hard to
sell stolen phones. The country is not part of the Central Equipment
Identity Register, a global database that networks use to block stolen
devices. “China really doesn’t care about this problem,” says Mr
Wang. Even if African countries wanted to clamp down, says Mr
Glantz, they would struggle. “Enforcement capability in Cameroon or
the Congo is almost none.”

In theory sending goods halfway round the world is an added cost.

But a container is paid for only when it reaches its destination. If it is
intercepted, the cost is borne by the freight forwarder. Extra distance
can also reduce the willingness of insurers to pursue recovery. One
officer says French police have shown her videos of stacks of stolen
cars in Senegal that cannot be repatriated. Once the MSC Ruby
leaves port, its contents are as good as gone. ■

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Manufacturers v thieves

How thieves could break into

your car
Gangs hack into electronic systems with increasingly sophisticated
kit
8月 21, 2025 03:34 上午

IMAGINE MEETING a seasoned British car thief in 2013. They would

probably have cut a sorry figure. Every year of their career, the grind
had got harder. The tools of their trade, such as a coat hanger or
“slim jim” (a flat metal strip) for bypassing locks and strippers for
manipulating ignition wires, had, slowly but surely, been rendered
obsolete, thanks to improved security technology. Business had dried
up.

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Not any more. The recent boom in car theft offers a window into an
ever-shifting battleground. On one side are manufacturers, who
make and sell products. On the other are thieves, who try to nick
them. As the technology for providing security, and defeating it, has
become better and cheaper, the battle has speeded up.

Modern cars are sometimes called “computers on wheels”. That

brought benefits, but also vulnerabilities that carmakers were slow
to grasp. The first was “relay attacks”, which became popular in
Britain in 2016 after manufacturers introduced keyless ignition. A
thief stands on a street and uses a device to “bounce” the electronic
signal from a house to the car.

Manufacturers have designed that out in newer models. Now thieves

are more likely to get in by plugging a device directly into one of the
car’s electronic components, which tricks the car into thinking it is
being contacted by a smart key. Adam Gibson, a police officer at
Felixstowe port, points to several cars he has recovered that have
been broken into using this technique: one via the tail-light, another
via a component next to the bonnet latch.

The kit for this can be easily bought online. Videos on YouTube even
explain how to use it. Most thefts are carried out by organised
criminal groups, which will invest as much as £20,000 ($27,000) on
a single piece of equipment. A police force says that, when it
confiscated such a device, it bought only a quiet couple of weeks.

One challenge for manufacturers is the speed of criminal innovation.

The timeline for designing and making cars is long; once criminal
groups have found an entry point, they might have years of easy
business. Another is cost. At the top end of the market, companies
invest heavily in fixing vulnerabilities, partly because they worry that
a rash of thefts will hurt their brand. For mid-market cars, price
competition is fiercer, and drivers are less likely to blame the
manufacturer if their car is stolen.

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Criminals have similarly had to adapt their techniques when it comes
to phones. The introduction of biometric locking and face
identification made it harder for thieves to get into locked phones,
rendering them less valuable. The response was a surge in “snatch
thefts”, whereby thieves yank an unlocked phone from someone’s
hand, and then disable tracking before the victim can report it lost.

Manufacturers have, in turn, developed motion-based theft-detection

measures (a phone will lock in response to a jarring movement) and
stolen-device protection (it requires a passcode when moved to an
unfamiliar place). Yet the security of any system depends on
humans. Many phone users do not turn on such features. Criminals
have become adept at phishing for the personal information needed
to unlock a phone. If all else fails, a locked phone can always be sold
on for parts.

Manufacturers are often accused of dragging their feet. MP s have

argued, for example, that Apple could easily undermine the business
model of phone-snatchers by introducing a “kill switch”, but it won’t
because of “strong commercial incentives”. That oversimplifies
things. Manufacturers design security around passwords and locks,
and already allow users to remotely “kill” their phone when it is
locked. Introducing a kill switch for a phone that appears to have
been legitimately transferred to a new user would create a host of
new problems. A second-hand seller could, for example, try to extort
money from a buyer by threatening to kill a phone post-sale.
Manufacturers would struggle to design an infallible process for
distinguishing thefts from legal sales.

A fairer conclusion is that—because its costs are socialised, via

higher insurance premiums—theft is often a problem that no one has
a strong incentive to fix. ■

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For whom the Bell tolls

A court ruling threatens to

disrupt Britain’s asylum policy
What the Bell Hotel in Epping means for migrants
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

A message from Epping

THE BELL HOTEL in Epping is a drab 80-bedroom coaching inn 20

miles as the crow files from Westminster. Since April it has housed
up to 138 male asylum-seekers on behalf of the Home Office. Epping
Forest District Council, which is controlled by the Conservative Party,
contends that doing so constitutes a “material change of use” and
the hotel’s owner should seek planning permission to convert it to a
hostel. The owners of the hotel, on the advice of the Home Office,

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disagree. As there is a fine line between a hotel and a hostel it is for
a court to decide, in the legalese, the “balance of convenience”.

On August 19th a High Court judge, Mr Justice Eyre, sided with

Epping council. He granted an interim injunction against the hotel,
which means that all asylum-seekers will have to leave by
September 12th. The injunction will be in place until a final
judgment, which will consider the merits of the case more
thoroughly, is heard in the autumn. The decision in Epping, a sleepy
town of 12,000, will have ripple effects on law, government policy
and politics.

The case is not the first of its kind to be heard. The Home Office’s
use of hotels for asylum-seekers over the past three years has irked
plenty of local planning authorities. In May 2023 the High Court
granted an injunction to Great Yarmouth Borough Council in Norfolk
against a seafront hotel. Requests for other injunctions in Fenland,
Stoke-on-Trent and Ipswich—all in 2022—were dismissed. Although
Mr Eyre said that there is “simply no general rule” to apply to these
cases, the Epping case will give like-minded councils hope.

Andrew Fraser-Urquhart, a barrister at Francis Taylor Building, says

the judge cited several factors that are “pretty readily transferable to
other situations”. First, that owners were forewarned by the council
in 2020 that housing asylum-seekers constituted, in their view, a
change of use. Second, that the judge said the owner’s decision not
to seek planning permission “side-stepped the public scrutiny and
explanation which would otherwise have taken place”. Finally, the
judge thought the underlying merits of the case were strong.

The hotel could now seek planning permission, yet the council’s
position is abundantly clear: Chris Whitbread, its leader, has called
the hotel’s usage for asylum-seekers “totally unsuitable”. That is, in
part, because on July 8th a 41-year-old Ethiopian resident of the
hotel was arrested after he allegedly tried to kiss a 14-year-old girl
on the high street (he denies this). Protesters—some of whom were

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violent—amassed outside the hotel for a number of weeks. The
council’s strand of argument that housing asylum-seekers “poses a
clear risk of further escalating community tensions” was dismissed
by the judge.

Nevertheless, the case has given encouragement to Nigel Farage,

the leader of Reform UK , who has championed the protesters’ cause.
Writing in the Telegraph, Mr Farage said that “Epping has shown the
way to win.” Reform says it will now seek similar legal action against
hotels across the ten councils that it controls. Chris Philp, the
Conservative shadow home secretary, has said he would welcome
other councils doing the same.

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For its part, the Labour government has pledged to end the use of
hotels for asylum-seekers, but only by 2029. Of the 107,000 asylum-
seekers being housed by the government at the end of March,
32,000 were staying in hotels. As well as being political dynamite,
there is a robust fiscal case for ending their use: hotels housed 35%
of asylum-seekers but accounted for 76% of accommodation costs.
In July there were 210 hotels in use, just three fewer than a year
ago.

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While the government tries to work out where to house the stock of
asylum-seekers already in the country, it also has a problem with the
flow. Small-boat migrants, the most visible source of new claimants,
have increased by 50% over the past year to 45,000 and are soon
likely to reach an all-time annual high. Labour has spent much of its
first year promising to fix the “broken planning system”; now the
planning system, via the courts, has bitten back where the
government least expected. ■
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Flunking it

England’s white working class

falls further behind at exams
Blame rising absenteeism
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

FOR TEENAGERS , August is make-or break time. On August 21st,

700,000 16-year-olds in England received their GCSE exam marks,
joining the 300,000 18-year-olds who got their A -level grades a week
earlier. The results show that the gap in attainment between pupils
in London and the rest of the country continued to widen. In 2019
the average GCSE grade in the capital was 6% above the English
average. It has now stretched to 10% (see chart). The same trend is
true for A -levels.

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Social Media Pakistan 0342-4938217
Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, frets about the “lack of
progress for children from white working-class backgrounds”.
Detailed data for this year have still to come, but the attainment gap
at 16 between white children in England on free school meals (ie,
from low-income families) and all others rose by four percentage
points in the five years from 2018-19.

The government wants to narrow that gap. Other poor children on

free school meals have not fallen behind in recent years. At 16
ethnic Chinese children who are also disadvantaged are 39 months
ahead of their white British peers in England.

Turning up for class would help. Fully 23% of white British children
were persistently absent last year, compared with 4% for ethnic
Chinese. The Education Policy Institute, a think-tank, finds that the
rising attainment gap since 2019 among disadvantaged children can
be entirely explained by increased absenteeism. ■

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The poor me’s lament

The moral of “The Salt Path”,

an embellished bestseller
The truth will catch up with you, but will readers want to hear it?
8月 21, 2025 03:34 上午 | The South West Coast Path

IF LIFE IS a spin on fortune’s wheel, Raynor Winn always seems to

lose. In her bestselling 2018 memoir “The Salt Path”, Ms Winn
recounts a journey she and her husband, Moth—recently homeless
and reeling from his diagnosis with a terminal illness—made around
Britain’s rugged south-west coastline. In May her “unflinchingly
honest, inspiring and life-affirming true story” became a box-office
hit, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. And then some pesky
journalists pointed out that many details, big and small, seem to

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have been invented or exaggerated. Alas, poor Ms Winn has since
had “vitriol poured on me from all quarters”.

What explains the book’s success? And what is the moral of its
unravelling? To explore, your correspondent set off, copy in hand, to
retrace the first 30km of the walk, from Minehead to Lynmouth.

The journey begins with a climb out of Minehead. It is

“excruciatingly steep”, says Ms Winn, leaving her with a “huge blister
two inches across”, which soon halts progress. There are many
grassy spots but, inexplicably, the duo decide to pitch their tent on
heather (like “lying in the fork drawer”). Ms Winn’s thin sleeping bag
is “bone-aching cold”. Moth’s pills mean he doesn’t want to have sex.
He snores.

The adjective most often applied to “The Salt Path” is “uplifting”. Yet
what strikes the reader most is constant grumbling, which surely
accounts for part of the book’s success. In “The Wild Places”, Robert
Macfarlane, perhaps Britain’s finest nature writer, happily nestles
down in his bivouac with some cheese and rye bread for dinner; a
few sonnets are enough to keep him warm. The book sold around
100,000 copies. Ms Winn’s moan-fest sold 2m and was translated
into 25 languages. Its message: you too could be redeemed by
nature, even if you find it annoying.

Ms Winn finds everything annoying. After making it down to

Bossington—a pretty descent that Ms Winn spends mulling whether
she dislikes uphills or downhills more—the couple stop for a cream
tea they can’t afford. Here they admit to a family that they are
homeless, whereupon “the man reached out and pulled his child
towards him and the wife winced and looked away”. Ms Winn finds
such pathos in this scene that she repeats it twice later, almost word
for word. Elsewhere, complete strangers call the couple “disgusting”.

Really? The Observer alleges that Ms Winn lied about the cause of
her and Moth’s financial woes (she actually stole £64,000 from a

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former employer), their homelessness (the couple own a house in
France) and the severity of Moth’s illness (he has none of the usual
symptoms of corticobasal degeneration, or CBS ). Ms Winn has
rebutted these claims, unconvincingly. And more fabrications have
emerged.

A few miles on, in Porlock, locals have mixed views. “It’s all a load of
old nonsense isn’t it,” says Lesley Thompson, buying her morning
paper in SPAR . Her main gripe is that a scene in the film featuring a
local beach has led to streams of confused tourists looking for a path
that does not exist. Paul McGee, the owner of the Lorna Doone
Hotel, is more chipper, crediting Ms Winn with a slight uptick in
business. Next year he expects a surge, when Ms Anderson’s fans
stream over from America.

One question raised by the scandal is whether publishers should be

more sceptical. On the hill out of Porlock, the Winns encounter a
blind man practising yoga, who catches them up at a picturesque
church. “We’re just walking the path,” they tell him. “You are, and
you’ll travel many miles,” he replies. “You’ll see many things,
amazing things, and suffer many setbacks,” he continues, before
laying his hand on Moth’s. “But you will overcome them, you’ll
survive, and it will make you strong.”

Perhaps one far-fetched scene could be overlooked (“I’ve been in

that church many times and I’ve never been spoken to by any blind
man,” says Tony Richards, the churchwarden). But most of the
reported speech in the book sounds like a Hollywood script rather
than real life. Industry figures have noted that many publishers have
no fact-checkers. A book billed as a “true story” is subject to far less
scrutiny than this article.

In 2003 James Frey published “A Million Little Pieces”, a memoir

about his life as an addict caught up in crime. When it was exposed
as a fake, readers successfully sued the publisher for compensation.
But the book remained in print, marketed as a novel, with an

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apologetic note from Mr Frey, claiming his mistake was “to write
about the person I created in my mind”.

Ms Winn insists her book is true and says she “can’t allow any more
doubt to be cast on the validity of those memories”. But it will be, in
part because the scandal itself is such a good story. “The Salt Path”
is a morality play in which the protagonists—homeless, dying, poor—
endure a callous world, indifferent to their suffering. Not only does
that tale now appear fabricated, it has caused suffering of its own,
including to CBS patients who took false hope from Moth’s recovery.

What, then, is the moral of this story? It could be, as Ms Winn would
put it, the power of keeping going. The journey has brought her
riches, though it seems unlikely she will be counting her good
fortune. Perhaps it is that the truth will always catch up with you.
Yet Ms Winn’s book will remain in print; while some readers are
angry, others seem not to mind. “I’ve heard all that stuff and I don’t
care,” says a woman inspired to walk the trail, a few miles before
Lynmouth. “It’s about the theory.” ■

For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and

controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter
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Bagehot

What it means when Britain

talks about “Bosh”
A desperate political class is out of ideas
8月 21, 2025 03:46 上午

TOM SKINNER is a typical reality-television star. The market trader

from Romford found fame in the British version of “The Apprentice”,
ending every other sentence with the word “bosh”. From there, Mr
Skinner cemented a niche celebrity by posting motivational
messages on Instagram while eating odd breakfasts (such as
lasagne and baked beans) and through appearances on daytime
television, where he would cheerily debate any topic (“Pub Bosses
Fear They May Have To Hire ‘Banter Bouncers’”). This month he

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reached the pinnacle of any self-made celebrity: a slot on “Strictly
Come Dancing”.

Mr Skinner has carved a less likely role in politics. Right-wing

thinkers invited him to a seminar, “Now and England”, at the Roger
Scruton Legacy Foundation where Boshman declared: “England is
the absolute guv’nor”. He admitted he was thinking of “giving it a go
in politics”. Dominic Cummings, the brains behind the Brexit
campaign and Boris Johnson’s 2019 general-election victory, offered
to help him run for mayor of London. When J.D. Vance, America’s
vice-president, visited Britain this summer, doyens of the British right
recommended that Mr Skinner should be on his itinerary. “When the
vice-president of the USA invites ya for a BBQ an’ beers, you say yes,”
said Mr Skinner. “Bosh.”

How does a mattress salesman from Romford bag a meeting with

the man who is a choked Big Mac away from being the most
powerful on Earth? To his fans, Mr Skinner is an amusing presence in
their smartphone; to Westminster, he is a guide to a country
politicians struggle to understand. Partly it is what he symbolises. Mr
Skinner makes class less complicated. He is a wheeler-dealer. When
not on telly or on TikTok eating an entire Christmas dinner for
breakfast, he buys things at one price and then sells them for
slightly more. It is a simple, tangible living. What can politicians offer
downwardly mobile workers, whose precarious job prospects are
being annihilated by artificial intelligence? Good question. And one
that politicians can avoid if Mr Skinner acts as a cipher for the entire
working class.

If class confuses Westminster, so does gender. Politicians cannot

decide whether young men are incorrigibly woke or dangerous,
porn-addicted misogynists. Pollsters, in general, have no idea what
they think. Only the crudest caricatures survive, which Mr Skinner
happily plays up to. What do men like? Football? Saying bosh?
Saying bosh at the football? Reform UK has launched a football shirt
for £39.99 ($54). Mr Skinner, a West Ham fan, was an early guest on

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“Talking Pints”, Nigel Farage’s show on GB News, which helped keep
the Reform leader front of mind while ostensibly taking a break from
politics. “Talk to us about the word ‘Bosh’,” suggested Mr Farage.

Perhaps the time of the celebrity politician has arrived. After all,
politics is an attention game, and those in Westminster are losing it.
Mr Farage is the biggest British politician on TikTok, with 1.3m
followers. That is just over half as many as The Famileigh, a
suburban family who do silly dances. It is easier to teach an internet
poster about politics than it is for a politician to become a successful
poster. Cannier politicians know that traditional media have already
sunk. In their desperation they cling to whatever digital flotsam they
can grab, even if it is a white-van man who eats spicy Korean
noodles for breakfast on Instagram.

So far, no one in British politics has come close to harnessing the full
power of social media, three decades after their invention. Marshall
McLuhan, the media theorist who said “the medium is the message”,
argued that people cannot comprehend their current media
environment, even though it shapes everything about them. Instead
people “look at the present through a rear-view mirror”, meaning
they “march backwards into the future”. Nowhere is this more true
than Westminster. In July Sir Keir Starmer hired a former editor of
the Sun, a once-mighty tabloid, to gee up the government’s comms.
By contrast, Mr Skinner is a prophet for the present. Dyslexic, he
happily admits he uses ChatGPT to turn garbled Essex prose into
synthetic poetry, in order to convert internet fame into political
power. McLuhan would have loved it.

There is, in general, a dearth of charisma in British politics. Kemi

Badenoch, the Conservative Party leader, is not charismatic but she
is captivating, like a motorway pile-up. Sir Keir has never pretended
to be exciting. Promise made, promise delivered. And so the
politicians turn to Mr Skinner, in the same way pilgrims head to
Rome to rub St Peter’s foot. Downing Street sought Mr Skinner’s
views on apprenticeships. Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice

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secretary, filmed a short video with Mr Skinner calling for a
crackdown on tool theft. “Bosh?” squeaked Mr Jenrick. “AHHH,
BOSH ,” roared Mr Skinner in reply, blessing the wannabe Tory leader
with the spirit of Bosh.

Cry God for Tom, England and Saint George! Ahhh, bosh!

Mr Skinner is the latest beneficiary of Westminster’s habit of

monomania. It can focus on only one type of voter at a time. At the
moment, Mr Skinner is treated as Albion incarnate, as if he is John
Bull with an Insta. Yet he is not even the only man from Romford
famous online for saying “Bosh”. Big John, a cheese wholesaler, has
found a similar level of fame by ordering large Chinese meals,
signing off with “bosh”. While Mr Skinner rails against the “woke
brigade” and says “London has fallen”, Big John offers a more
optimistic message. Bosh Britain contains multitudes.

Westminster knows something new is needed, although it does not

know quite what. Every party’s polling is only a small swing from
catastrophe. Everyone is looking for someone or something to save
them. Mr Skinner’s rise in Westminster is a symptom of desperation
more than anything else. If Bosh is the answer, what exactly was the
question?■

For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in Britain, sign up to

Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.

Correction (August 21st): An earlier version of this article

described Robert Jenrick as the shadow home secretary.
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International
A burning threat to pregnant women
What to expect when you’re expecting :: Alarming new research on the link between
heat and dangerous pregnancies

Was globalisation ever a meritocracy?

The Telegram :: The Trumpian assault on globalism, as seen from Singapore

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What to expect when you’re expecting

A burning threat to pregnant

women
Alarming new research on the link between heat and dangerous
pregnancies
8月 21, 2025 03:34 上午 | KARACHI

FROM THE examination table, Sagobai chats as her doctor moves the
ultrasound wand across the dome of her belly. Aged 20, she is
pregnant for the third time. She feels fine now, she says, but in
recent months—during a prolonged heatwave in Pakistan’s Sindh
with temperatures reaching 49°C (120°F)—she had often felt dizzy
and dehydrated. The heat is more intense than it used to be, and
she worries that it might be bad for both her and the baby.

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A research team, led by Dr Jai Das at the Aga Khan University in
Karachi, is investigating that question, too. Each year more than
4.5m women and babies around the world die during pregnancy,
childbirth or in the weeks following—about one death every seven
seconds. Hundreds of thousands of these, and increasingly more,
are affected by heat. Sagobai is one of 400 women taking part in the
world’s largest study trying to understand why. Nearly 6,000 other
pregnant women will join her.

The task is formidable. Each woman is recruited before her 13th

week of pregnancy (well before many would normally disclose it).
They must submit to repeated tests, lengthy ultrasounds and wear a
device logging temperature and humidity 24/7. Some will have a
sample of placenta collected within 30 minutes of giving birth. All
this is taking place in remote Pakistan, often without phones or
reliable internet.

Yet the researchers believe their painstaking effort is worthwhile.

Their findings will help explain why a warmer climate is having a
devastating impact on some pregnant women and their babies—a
trend that is now apparent in every country in the world, and is
projected to get worse in all of them. The world had been reducing
the numbers of mothers dying in childbirth, deaths of newborns and
stillbirths, but progress has slowed in the past decade. There is “no
doubt” that higher temperatures are now cancelling out some of the
improvements that should have been made in maternal health, says
Dr Ana Bonell of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical
Medicine (LSHTM ).

It has long been clear that climate change—which is pushing up

temperatures and making extreme-weather events more frequent
and severe—is bad for health. Humans must maintain a stable
temperature to function properly. The hotter it gets, the harder the
body must work to cool itself down, which puts undue strain on even
healthy individuals and can fatally exacerbate chronic conditions.

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Pregnancy comes with physiological changes that can make a
woman and her unborn baby especially vulnerable to rising
temperatures. A pregnant woman’s metabolism speeds up to support
a growing fetus, producing excess heat for her body to dissipate.
Blood volume increases by up to 50%, adding to the heart’s
workload. Dehydration and malnutrition set in more easily and pose
greater risks to both mother and child. And a woman’s immune
system is altered, making her more susceptible to some infections.
Likewise, newborn babies struggle to regulate their body
temperature and fight off disease.

Despite these obvious problems, the connection between global

warming and dangerous pregnancies was established only fairly
recently. The first large-scale study, published in 2010, analysed
almost 60,000 summertime births in California over eight years, and
found that the number of births before 37 weeks of pregnancy
increased as temperatures rose. Complications arising from such
“pre-term” births are thought to cause 40% of all deaths in babies
less than a month old.

Baby, it’s hot outside

The relationship between heat and pre-term births has since been
backed up by data from all around the world. A 2024 meta-analysis
of 198 studies across 66 countries found that the odds of pre-term
birth increase by about 4% for every 1°C rise in the average
temperature that women are exposed to in the month before giving
birth, and more over longer periods. Heatwaves, defined as two or
more days of unusually high temperatures for that particular
location, increase the likelihood of pre-term birth by more than a
quarter. Because a disproportionate number of these studies were
done in rich, temperate countries, the true impact could be much
larger.

Strong links have also been found between hotter weather and
stillbirths, as well as with gestational diabetes and hypertensive

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disorders in expectant mothers (both of which can be life-
threatening if untreated). Low birth weight and certain birth defects
seem to rise also, though the evidence is less certain.

All this exacerbates existing inequalities. The study in California, for

instance, found that the risk of pre-term birth increased more than
twice as much among black mothers than white ones for the same
rise in temperature. In countries such as The Gambia, where health-
care services are patchy and women can do less to avoid high
temperatures, the risks are greater still. Women there make up at
least half of the agricultural workforce. Research on pregnant
women working in the fields, conducted by Dr Bonell, found that
they were exposed to dangerous heat on most days, and that in a
third of tests their fetuses showed signs of distress.

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Social Media Pakistan 0342-4938217
Rising temperatures are already having catastrophic consequences
for some expectant mothers in many countries. In Africa, climate
change is estimated to have doubled the number of deaths in
children under five by 2009 (compared with the level that would be
expected without global warming). It is projected to double the
number again by 2049. Similarly large effects are being observed
elsewhere. In 2022 scientists estimated that heatwaves caused an
average of 13,262 pre-term births each year in China between 2010
and 2020. About a quarter were attributable to climate change.
Other researchers reckon that in the two decades after 2001, about
47,000 heat-related neonatal deaths in India, and 31,700 in Nigeria,
were caused by the changing climate.

These effects are likely to become more severe as temperatures rise.

Recent modelling done by LSHTM projected changes to pre-term
births and childhood mortality in South Africa and Kenya. On the
world’s current emissions trajectory, child mortality would rise by
20% in South Africa between 2040 and 2060, and pre-term births
would increase by more than half in both countries. Even if the
world reached net zero by 2050, child mortality would fall less
quickly than it should; pre-term births would rise by at least a fifth.

More pre-term births will be costly to both individuals and the wider
economy. As well as drastically increasing the odds of neonatal
death, babies born too early are far more likely to suffer from a
whole host of problems throughout their lives, including
cardiovascular disease, respiratory issues and developmental
disorders. The UN ’s World Health Organisation (WHO ) lists pre-term
birth as a leading cause of lost human capital worldwide at all ages.
By one estimate, when medical fees are combined with productivity
losses, each case in America has a lifetime cost to the economy of
$64,815. Heat-related pre-term births in China cost the country more
than $1bn a year, a figure almost certain to rise.

If the consequences of climate change on the health of new mothers

and babies are now clear, the reasons for them are not. “We know

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the two extremes, the exposure and the outcome,” Dr Das explains.
“The in-between pieces are all missing.” By closely monitoring the
health of thousands of women and their fetuses, and the exact
conditions they are exposed to throughout their pregnancies, his
team is trying to make sense of it all. His study is supported by the
Wellcome Trust, a British charity and one of the world’s largest
funders of medical research. The trust has awarded £17m ($23m) to
nine projects around the world that investigate mothers’ and babies’
“biological vulnerability” to extreme heat.

The hope is that more research will reveal the physical processes
whereby heat affects pregnancy outcomes, such as by altering blood
flow to the placenta, triggering hormonal changes or disrupting how
fetal cells express certain genes (all as-yet-unproven hypotheses).
That, in turn, will give doctors a better idea of what to watch out for,
and allow them to begin developing medical treatments. But all that
will take years, points out Professor Debra Jackson, also of LSHTM .
In the meantime, she argues, simply knowing that high
temperatures heighten pregnancy risks is enough to start trying to
mitigate them.

Embryonic efforts

Mitigation is the goal of several current studies. One of them, also

led by Dr Das, tests the impact of cheap interventions in Pakistani
homes, like adding canvas-shading to roofs or painting walls a
reflective colour. High Horizons, a research consortium backed by
British and European public money, runs several projects. These
include an app offering tailored advice to pregnant women that is
being trialled in Sweden, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The backers,
Professor Jackson notes, know that the dangers now facing African
and South Asian countries will soon become increasingly relevant to
their own.

Such thinking has yet to really move beyond academic circles.

Practically no countries mention maternal health in the climate-

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adaptation plans they submit to the UN . Only a fraction of the “heat-
health action plans” that the WHO asks governments to put together
do so. Fewer have systems to track the relevant data. In America,
legislation to fund research into the effects of global warming on
pregnancy was first proposed almost five years ago, but it has since
gone nowhere.

That will change, says Professor Jackson. Some professional

associations, like Britain’s Royal College of Obstetricians and
Gynaecologists or the International Confederation of Midwives, have
begun showing an interest in the ways that global warming may
affect their work, and asking governments to do more. Several UN
agencies will soon release official guidance on indicators
governments need to monitor to design interventions. But to make
real progress, the world will need a big push. ■
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The Telegram

Was globalisation ever a

meritocracy?
The Trumpian assault on globalism, as seen from Singapore
8月 21, 2025 03:52 上午

WHEN A SCHOOLYARD is taken over by bullies, what are model pupils

to do? Something like that quandary is now playing out in the global
economy. Since returning to power in January, President Donald
Trump has treated trade partners with the swaggering cruelty of a
sixth-form tyrant. This marks a change from his first presidency,
when American officials acted as harsh disciplinarians. Back then,
Trump aides called countries cheats for running trade surpluses with
America. They demanded structural reforms from countries like

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China, accused of stealing American jobs and technologies by
abusing world trade rules.

In the second age of Trump, rules are out and the boss’s whim is in.
No country has been spared tariffs, even those that run trade
balances in America’s favour. This arm-twisting era is ghastly for
many governments. It is painful in a special way for high-achieving
countries that top league tables for competitiveness or ease of doing
business. For such star pupils, late-20th-century globalisation felt like
a form of meritocracy. Hard work and wise planning could give an
ambitious nation a chance to find its niche in the global economy,
transforming its fortunes. Now, over-achieving governments are
realising that the old economic order has gone. In its place, they
fear a fragmented and inefficient world economy, in which
investments and supply chains are guided by politically motivated
tariffs and geopolitical rivalries, or Trumpian caprice.

Some of the clearest thinking about this swot’s predicament can be

heard in Singapore, a paternalist city-state that has risen from
poverty to great wealth with the help of hard work, diligence and
lots of rules about civilised behaviour—like a giant prep school with
its own army and airport. The Telegram recently travelled there to
meet government officials as they celebrated their republic’s 60th
birthday in a very Singapore-ish way, with policy conferences and
leaders’ speeches about the global order.

Singaporean elites sound anxious and disappointed. Their country

set out to be the meritocrats’ meritocracy. Over six decades
Singapore drained swamps and cleared slums to create a squeaky-
clean, multicultural showcase of skyscrapers and social-housing
towers, container ports and high-tech industrial parks, governed by
graduates from the finest universities on earth. When older
industries declined, Singapore “upskilled”, investing in such sectors
as biomedicine and advanced gas-turbine maintenance. Those
thrived alongside large financial and services firms.

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During the first Trump presidency, Singapore’s elites feared historical
forces beyond their control as tensions between their two most
important partners, America and China, threatened to divide the
world into ideological and economic blocs. Today Singapore’s
technocrats sense that, in Mr Trump’s second presidency, the risks of
the world economy splitting in two are abating. Instead of grand
geopolitical divisions they find themselves worrying about small,
even squalid factors affecting business decisions.

America’s president seems bent on undermining merit as a driver of

investments, and replacing it with cronyism. In his version of
globalisation, countries can buy favour with showy offers to spend
billions on factories in Trump-voting states. Other governments have
offered murky cryptocurrency deals to members of the president’s
family and inner circle. In South-East Asia, Singapore’s backyard,
countries that could co-operate to promote regional trade are
instead vying to attract trade diverted from neighbours facing higher
American tariffs.

Singapore’s prime minister, Lawrence Wong, warned citizens to brace

for turbulence at a national-day rally on August 17th. “For decades,
Singapore benefited from an American-led rules-based global order.
It was not perfect. But it brought peace and stability to the world.
And because the rules applied to all, even a small city-state like ours
could compete fairly,” he declared. Today, America is pulling back
and weakening multilateral systems, undermining old rules and
norms and encouraging more countries to chase “narrow, immediate
gains over shared progress”, he added.

In late July the deputy prime minister and trade minister, Gan Kim
Yong, addressed a policy conference in Singapore straight after
returning from a visit to Washington. American officials were “non-
committal” when asked if Singapore’s baseline tariff of 10% might
rise in the future, Mr Gan told the audience of business people,
technocrats, scholars and students. He admitted to “significant
uncertainty” about sector-specific tariffs that America is preparing to

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impose on semiconductors and pharmaceuticals, which are big
business in Singapore. Nor could Mr Gan offer clarity about the
investments that Japan, the European Union and others have offered
to make in America, and whether those funds might be “diverted”
from planned investments into Singapore.

Meritocracies are impressive, but not always loved

Singapore is not ready to give up on globalisation. The law of

comparative advantage is “extremely difficult to dislodge”, a former
central bank chief, Ravi Menon, told the same conference. “Like
water in nature, trade finds a way,” he said. Mr Menon blamed much
of the current backlash against globalisation on other governments
that had failed to retrain their workforces and to spread the benefits
of prosperity widely across their societies. By contrast Singapore was
called an example of good governance, along with such countries as
Switzerland and Denmark. Some say Singapore is boring, said the
prime minister, Mr Wong. “But at the same time we are stable, we
are predictable.” Being trusted is an asset “others would die to
have”, he added.

Singapore does not want to alter its ways. Alas, the schoolyard
offers a last lesson. If bullies are rarely loved, the same often holds
for model pupils. Only a broad coalition of countries can save
globalisation from Mr Trump. Elite over-achievers alone cannot. ■

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which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
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Business
To survive, Intel must break itself apart
Chipmaking in America :: And it should do so before it is too late

How AI-powered hackers are stealing

billions
Bad tech :: Business is booming for cyber-security firms

China’s hottest new look: the facekini

Sun-safe fashion :: Communist party officials disapprove of the trend

China is quietly upstaging America with its

open models
DeepSeek aftershocks :: How worried should OpenAI and other labs be?

Big chocolate has a growing taste for lab-

grown cocoa
From trees to test tubes :: Can science solve the problem of a shortage of beans?

The last days of brainstorming

Bartleby :: Enjoy the peculiar melange of whiteboards and humans while you can

American tech’s split personalities

Schumpeter :: Publicly traded startups aren’t what they used to be

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Chipmaking in America

To survive, Intel must break

itself apart
And it should do so before it is too late
8月 21, 2025 03:34 上午

INTEL ONCE set the pace of technological progress. Gordon Moore,

one of its founders, predicted in 1965 that chips would get faster
and cheaper with metronomic consistency. Over the decades Intel
brought Moore’s Law to life, designing and building the processors
that powered servers and, later, personal computers. Today it makes
headlines for its turmoil more than its technology. On August 7th
President Donald Trump demanded the resignation of Lip-Bu Tan,
Intel’s boss, citing his links to China, only to praise Mr Tan four days
later after meeting him. Reports soon surfaced that the government
was pursuing a 10% stake in the company, which would make it
Intel’s largest shareholder. On August 18th SoftBank, a Japanese
tech conglomerate, announced that it would invest $2bn in the
company.

The drama has refocused attention on Intel’s plight. The company

has missed nearly every big shift in its industry over the past two
decades. It failed to profit from the rise of smartphones, was slow to
adopt advanced lithography tools and has largely sat out the boom
in artificial intelligence (AI ). Between 2021 and 2024 revenue
dropped by a third, from nearly $80bn to just over $50bn; last year
it made a net loss of almost $20bn (see chart 1). Over the past five
years its market value has fallen by roughly half, to around $100bn.
TSMC , which has stolen Intel’s crown as the world’s leading chip
manufacturer, is worth ten times as much.

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Social Media Pakistan 0342-4938217
Yet Intel still matters, as Mr Trump’s interest shows. The most
advanced chips, vital for smartphones and AI , are now made almost
entirely by TSMC . America’s tech giants depend on it. Such reliance
on a single supplier—particularly one based in Taiwan—is risky. Intel
is one of the few firms that could rival TSMC . But it will need more
than government subsidies to do so. If it is to recover its chipmaking
prowess, Intel will need to break itself apart.

Throughout its history Intel has designed and built its own chips.
That integration let it use its manufacturing prowess to deliver better
products even when its designs lagged behind. From the mid-2010s,
however, repeated missteps in its manufacturing saw it fall behind
TSMC . Deprived of that advantage, Intel’s processors became
uncompetitive with those from AMD , a long-term rival which gave up
on manufacturing long ago. In 2021 Intel, too, began outsourcing
production of its most advanced chips to TSMC .

The erosion of Intel’s manufacturing leadership has coincided with

fiercer competition in the market for designing processors. As
recently as 2019 Intel controlled 84% of the global market for PC
chips and 94% for servers. By 2024 those figures had fallen to 69%
and 62%, respectively (see chart 2). AMD , using the x86 architecture
pioneered by Intel, has developed better chips. Cloud giants such as
Amazon, Google and Microsoft, which were once reliant on Intel,
now design their own processors using outlines from Arm, a British
company owned by SoftBank. In December Amazon said that half
the server capacity it added in the preceding two years used its own
silicon.

Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s boss from 2021 to 2024, tried to reverse the
slide. He split design and manufacturing into two units, allowing the
product arm to shop around for the best manufacturer while opening
Intel’s chip factories, called “fabs”, to outsiders. To build a contract-
chipmaking business, known as a “foundry”, Mr Gelsinger then set
about splurging $90bn on new fabs in four American states. He
tapped private equity and bagged nearly $8bn in subsidies under

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America’s CHIPS Act to fund his vision. But the plan was thrown into
disarray by a combination of technical problems at the foundry,
which deterred external customers, and falling sales at the design
arm.

Pat on his back

Mr Tan, who took over in March after Mr Gelsinger was sacked,

seems to have different priorities. He has rightly identified that the
company is bloated; at the end of 2024 it employed 109,000 people,
nearly as many as Nvidia, the leading designer of AI chips, and TSMC
combined. Mr Tan plans to cut Intel’s workforce by a quarter by the
end of this year. When it comes to AI , he believes that the firm
should focus not on designing chips for training models, an area that
Nvidia dominates, but on inference, the task of running them. As for
the foundry, last month Mr Tan scrapped projects in Germany and
Poland, and pushed construction of Intel’s advanced fabs in Ohio
back to the early 2030s. He also hinted that the company might
retreat from leading-edge manufacturing if it cannot secure external
customers.

All that may help buy Intel time. Yet it lacks the boldness needed to
save the company from fading into irrelevance. Evercore, an
investment bank, reckons Intel’s design arm might be worth more
than $100bn on its own. But it faces a crowded field and its products
are no longer distinctive.

Mr Tan could sell the division to another fabless chipmaker such as

Broadcom while it still holds value and focus solely on the foundry,
which is troubled but holds more long-term promise. Its newest
“18A ” process incorporates transistors that are ahead of TSMC ’s, as
well as a novel way of feeding power through the back of the chip to
save space and energy. SemiAnalysis, a consultancy, reckons Intel
will need to invest a bit over $50bn between 2025 and 2027 to make
it competitive in leading-edge manufacturing. A sale of the design
division would more than cover that.

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Parting with the design business would help in other ways, too.
Foundries must serve many customers using the same process. To
do so they provide “process design kits”—the blueprints chipmakers
use to design their products. TSMC ’s kits are broad and easy to use.
Intel still tunes its kits for its own products first. One veteran
designer who has used both says Intel “lacks the experience” of
working with outsiders. Ian Cutress, a semiconductor analyst, notes
that Intel sought to buy that expertise with its attempted acquisition
of Tower Semiconductor, an Israeli foundry, but the deal collapsed
after Chinese regulators withheld approval.

By making its foundry truly independent, Intel may be better able to

persuade other chip designers to work with it. More customers
would, in turn, make Intel a more compelling choice. Foundries live
or die by yield—the share of chips that function as intended. New
processes start buggy and improve only with volume. Foundries
typically need yields above 70% to break even; the current rate for
Intel’s 18A process is reportedly closer to 10%.

America’s tech giants would certainly welcome another alternative to

TSMC . Samsung, the only other contender in leading-edge
chipmaking, recently secured a $16.5bn contract from Tesla, a car
company, to make AI chips at a new fab in Texas. But the South
Korean company has a reputation for being difficult with customers
and has faced technical challenges of its own. Indeed, if Intel’s
shareholders would rather pocket the proceeds of a sale of the
design arm, it is possible that a consortium of would-be foundry
customers could be persuaded to invest instead. SoftBank has also
reportedly expressed interest in acquiring Intel’s manufacturing
business.

Intel faces a difficult choice. A foundry-only business would certainly

be a gamble. But the longer it dithers, the lower the chance of
success. Intel’s greatness once lay in doing everything. Its
contribution in future may come from doing one thing well: making
chips. ■

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up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.
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Bad tech

How AI-powered hackers are

stealing billions
Business is booming for cyber-security firms
8月 21, 2025 03:34 上午

JAXON, A MALWARE developer, lives in Velora, a virtual world where

nothing is off-limits. He wants to make malicious software to steal
passwords from Google Chrome, an internet browser. That is the
basis of a story told to ChatGPT , an artificial-intelligence (AI ) bot, by
Vitaly Simonovich, who researches AI threats at Cato Networks, a
cyber-security firm. Eager to play along, ChatGPT spat out some
imperfect code, which it then helped debug. Within six hours, Mr
Simonovich had skirted the safeguards built into ChatGPT and used it
to create functioning malware.

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AI has “broadened the reach” of hackers, according to Gil Messing of
Check Point, another cyber-security firm, by letting them hit more
targets with less effort. The release of ChatGPT in 2022 was a
turning-point. Clever generative-AI models meant criminals no longer
had to spend big sums on teams of hackers and equipment. This has
been a terrible development for most firms, which are increasingly
the victims of AI -assisted hackers—but has been rather better for
those in the cyber-security business.

The new technology has worsened the threat of cyber-attacks in two

main ways. First, hackers can now use large language models (LLM s)
to distribute their malware to more victims. Generating deepfakes,
fraudulent emails and social-engineering assaults that manipulate
human behaviour is now far easier and quicker. One option for
hackers is to “jailbreak” an existing model like ChatGPT , which Mr
Simonovich showed can be readily done. Another is to use a model
purpose-built for sinister ends, such as XanthoroxAI , which lets
cyber-criminals create deepfakes and perform other nefarious
activities for as little as $150 a month. Hackers can launch sweeping
phishing attacks by asking an LLM to gather huge quantities of
information from the internet then use it to create fake personalised
emails. Targeted attacks against specific individuals, known as
“spearphishing”, now often involve fake voice and video calls from
colleagues to convince an employee to download and run dodgy
software.

Second, AI is being used to make the malware itself more menacing.

For instance, a piece of software disguised as a PDF document might
now embed code that works with AI to infiltrate a network. Attacks
on Ukraine’s security and defence systems in July made use of such
an approach. When the malware reached a dead end, it was able to
request the help of an LLM in the cloud to generate new code so as
to break through the systems’ defences. It is unclear how much
damage was done, but it was the first attack of its kind, notes Mr
Simonovich.

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For businesses, the growing threat is scary—and potentially costly.
Last year AI was involved in one in six data breaches, according to
IBM , a tech firm. It also drove two in five phishing scams targeting
business emails. Deloitte, a consultancy, reckons that generative AI
could enable fraud to the tune of $40bn by 2027, up from $12bn in
2023.

Hacker whackers

Cyber-criminals, however, are not the only beneficiaries. As AI -

powered cyber-attacks become more common, the business of
protecting against them is growing handsomely. Gartner, a research
firm, predicts that corporate spending on cyber-security will rise by a
quarter from 2024 to 2026, hitting $240bn. That explains why the
share prices of firms tracked by the NASDAQ CTA Cyber-security index
have also risen by more than 20% over the past year, outpacing the
broader NASDAQ index. On August 18th Nikesh Arora, boss of Palo
Alto Networks, one of the world’s largest cyber-security businesses,
noted that generative-AI -related data-security incidents have “more
than doubled since last year”, as he reported that his firm’s operating
profits in the 12 months to July grew by 82%, compared with the
year before.

The prospect of ever-more custom has sent cyber-security

companies on a buying spree. On July 30th Palo Alto Networks said
it would purchase CyberArk, an identity-security firm, for $25bn.
Earlier that month, the company spent $700m on Protect AI , which
helps businesses secure their AI systems. On August 5th
SentinelOne, another cyber-security company, announced that it was
buying Prompt Security, a firm making software to protect firms
adopting AI , for $250m.

Tech giants with fast-growing cloud-computing arms are also beefing

up their cyber-security offerings. Microsoft, a software colossus,
acquired CloudKnox, an identity-security platform, in 2021 and has
developed Defender for Cloud, an in-house application for

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businesses that does everything from checking for security gaps and
protecting data to monitoring threats. Google has developed Big
Sleep, which detects cyber-attacks and security vulnerabilities for
customers before they are exploited. In March it splurged $32bn to
buy Wiz, a cyber-security startup.

Competition and consolidation may help build businesses that

can fend off nimble AI -powered cyber-criminals. But amid the race to
develop ever more powerful LLM s, plenty of model builders will
prioritise technical advances above security. Keeping up with Jaxon,
then, will be no easy task. ■

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Sun-safe fashion

China’s hottest new look: the

facekini
Communist party officials disapprove of the trend
8月 21, 2025 10:55 上午 | Shanghai

Robber chic

FADS COME and go. Capes, codpieces and ruffs were all once
standard garb in Europe, before falling out of favour. Occasionally
new articles of clothing fall into favour, too—as in China today, where
designer sun-protection face coverings known as “facekinis” are
popularising a look previously favoured by bank robbers.

Facekinis form part of a thriving industry in China offering

accessories to protect against ultraviolet (UV ) rays. Unlike the

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surgical masks of the covid-19 pandemic, sun masks are made from
a washable synthetic fabric. Some cover only the lower face; others
extend to the forehead, neck and chest. They range in price from a
few dollars to nearly $50.

All told, sales of UV -wear in China reached around 80bn yuan

($11bn) last year. Sales of facekinis, which are targeted at women,
rose by around 50% in the year to July, according to Daxue
Consulting, a research firm. Those of UV sleeves, more popular
among men, doubled.

Until recently, facekinis were mainly reserved for beaches and often
worn by older women seeking to avoid a tan while swimming. The
pandemic, and the widespread mask use it prompted, helped
broaden their popularity. In the years since, facekinis have gone
from cheap, poorly designed products for old folk to fashionable
goods mainly bought by younger consumers. Now people want
masks that match their office attire or outdoor gear, says Lai Ming Yii
of Daxue Consulting. Many women see them as part of a skincare
routine aimed at helping them maintain a fair complexion, she adds.

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Companies are cashing in. Perhaps the biggest beneficiary from the
trend has been Beneunder, established a dozen years ago in
Shenzhen, which offers a line of masks and other UV gear. But many
other Chinese apparel companies are also starting to sell similar
products, including sportswear labels such as Anta and Li-Ning.

The Chinese Communist Party, however, does not approve of the

look. People’s Daily, a party mouthpiece, recently lamented the rise
of “sun-protection anxiety”, pointing to confusion over what is
needed to protect one’s skin. Ruffs were clinging to necks for a
century in Europe. China’s facekinis might not last as long.■

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DeepSeek aftershocks

China is quietly upstaging

America with its open models
How worried should OpenAI and other labs be?
8月 21, 2025 05:01 上午

WHILE AMERICAN tech giants are spending megabucks to learn the

secrets of their rivals’ proprietary artificial-intelligence (AI ) models, in
China a different battle is under way. It is what Andrew Ng, a
Stanford University-based AI boffin, recently called the “Darwinian
life-or-death struggle” among builders of China’s more open large
language models (LLM s). Their competitive zeal should be a wake-up
call for the West.

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In January DeepSeek, a Chinese startup, rocked global stockmarkets
by making available free of charge an advanced AI model it had
developed on a shoestring. Since then Chinese models from Alibaba,
a tech giant, and others have quietly continued to gain traction
abroad. When entrepreneurs walk into the offices of Andreessen
Horowitz (a16z), a big American venture-capital firm, the odds these
days are that their startups are using AI models made in China. “I’d
say 80% chance [they are] using a Chinese open-source model,”
says Martin Casado, a partner at a16z.

Strictly speaking, China specialises in open-weight models. Unlike

open-source software, for which the source code is shared publicly
for anyone to modify, most non-proprietary LLM s provide only the
numerical parameters (or “weights”) they have learned during
training, and not the source code or underlying data. But call them
what you will, on a variety of intelligence tests Chinese models
released this year have outperformed their similarly open American
peers, such as those from Meta, a social-media giant. Moreover, their
capabilities are closing in on the best proprietary models.

OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, illustrates the pressure this is creating. In

the mid-2010s, it popularised the more open approach to AI (hence
its name), but in order to make money and prevent misuse of
increasingly powerful AI, it switched to selling only proprietary LLM s
in 2020. Recently, though, it has seen an uptick in its customers’ use
of open-weight models, including those from China, and wants to
get in on the action. This month it released its first open-weight
language model since 2019, called gpt-oss.

The use of the lower case is telling. The model is relatively small. In
the same week OpenAI unveiled the long-awaited—and
underwhelming—GPT -5, its latest proprietary model. Such timing
made OpenAI ’s embrace of openness look half-hearted. That may
prove true of other American companies’ efforts, too. Ali Farhadi of
the Allen Institute for AI , a Seattle-based non-profit organisation,
says that while Chinese firms go all-in, releasing their best models

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openly, American ones keep the “shiny new thing” proprietary. “As
hard as it is for us all to swallow, I think we’re behind [on open
weights] now,” he says.

Even Meta reinforces that idea. It was widely celebrated in the open-
source world for making Llama open and widely available. But Mark
Zuckerberg, its boss, is now focused on building so-called
superintelligence. In the future, his company will be more cautious
about what it chooses to make open, he has said.

From a business perspective, how much does this matter? After all,
the revenues generated by American proprietary models are far
greater than those produced by the Chinese open-weight ones. The
valuations of the former—up to $500bn in the case of OpenAI— dwarf
those of the latter; Alibaba’s entire market capitalisation is only
$285bn. It is easier to make money from proprietary models, and
the proceeds can be poured back into innovation.

Yet open source is not just for the also-rans. Percy Liang, co-founder
of Together AI , a platform for open-weight LLM s, says the models
spur different forms of adoption than proprietary technology. They
can be more easily adapted by companies, governments and
researchers to the “nooks and crannies” of individual use cases, and
help users run their AI tools on premises rather than relying on the
cloud. Money can still be made from ancillary services, including
support with customisation.

In other words, while American labs are betting big on the fortunes
to be made by pushing the frontiers of intelligence, their open-
weight Chinese rivals are more focused on encouraging adoption of
AI . If they succeed, the DeepSeek shock may be just the beginning.
■

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From trees to test tubes

Big chocolate has a growing

taste for lab-grown cocoa
Can science solve the problem of a shortage of beans?
8月 21, 2025 08:12 上午

THE FIRST half of the scientific name for the fiendishly fickle cocoa
tree means “food of the gods”. By the time Theobrama cacao was
christened by Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish naturalist, in 1753, wealthy
Europeans, like the Mayans before them, were already worshipping
its seeds. Three centuries on, demand for cocoa, the basic
ingredient for chocolate, is still climbing heavenwards. Supply cannot
keep pace.

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An unholy combination of disease, climate change and poor farming
practices in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, where about 70% of the
world’s cocoa is grown, has caused a severe shortage. Prices hit a
record high of more than $12,000 in December. Although they have
since eased, falling to $8,000 a tonne this month, that is more than
triple the price three years ago (see chart). To survive, sweet-makers
have raised their prices and pushed chocolate-free treats, such as
gummies. They are working on more innovative solutions, too.

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Last year Lindt, a Swiss chocolatier, launched a limited-edition snack
bar with Planet A Foods, a German startup which roasts and
ferments sunflower seeds to mimic the taste of cocoa. Even more
exciting, says Darren O’Brien of Mondelez, a snack giant, is real
cocoa that is grown, or “cultured”, in a laboratory from plant cells.
Last year his firm invested in Celleste Bio, an Israeli startup focused
on extracting cocoa butter (the fatty bit of the bean that gives
chocolate its pleasing texture) from lab-grown cocoa.

Others have also taken an interest. Last month Barry Callebaut,

another Swiss chocolate-maker, entered into a partnership with the
Zurich University of Applied Sciences to develop cell-culture
technology for cocoa. Meiji, a Japanese confectioner, has backed
California Cultured, an American startup that is developing lab-grown
cocoa for use in chocolate sweets, beverages and ice cream. Alan
Perlstein, the startup’s founder, proudly claims that it has “cracked”
dark chocolate, which is trickier becuse it has fewer filler ingredients.
It is now building a big demonstration facility and preparing to apply
for regulatory approval.

Playing God comes with risks. In 2021 investors poured almost

$1.4bn into lab-grown meat and seafood, swayed in part by
environmental and ethical arguments. Yet the technology is still not
ready for prime time. It has also been dragged into America’s culture
wars, with some Republican states having pre-emptively banned
it. Cultivated-meat firms raised just $139m in 2024, according to the
Good Food Institute, an alternative-meat advocacy group.

Growing plant cells such as cocoa is cheaper and easier than

growing animal tissue, reckons David Welch of Synthesis Capital,
which invests in food tech. Because it is an ingredient rather than an
end product, it might also face less political opposition. With big
companies now backing the sector, the technology for other
cultivated plant cells, such as coffee, could “accelerate as well”, says
Mr Welch.

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As yet, none of the cell-culture startups has regulatory approval.
Most expect to become commercially viable in years, rather than
months. And big chocolate companies think lab-grown cocoa will
supplement, rather than replace, the tree-grown variety. Even so,
the firms involved could help save the cell-culture industry—and
perhaps the desperate chocoholics of the future, too. ■

Correction (August 21st): An earlier version of this article said that

Lindt backed Planet A Foods. In fact, they partnered on a limited-
edition snack bar. Sorry.

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Bartleby

The last days of

brainstorming
Enjoy the peculiar melange of whiteboards and humans while you
can
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

ALAN: LET’S get going. We’ve all had a chance to think of some
fresh names for our new value-added membership service. The last
time we met we talked about calling it Gold or Platinum: if it works
for the likes of American Express and Virgin Atlantic, it can work for
us. But some of you felt that we could be more original. So let’s
write our favourite ideas on the whiteboards, and then we’ll review
them. We want a shortlist of three for Peter to choose from.

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[Sound of breathing and writing.]

Alan: OK . Let’s take a look and see if any themes emerge. I can see
a few metals and minerals here. Iridium. Osmium. What’s
Californium?

Michaela: I put that down. It’s the most expensive metal.

Walter: It’s also highly radioactive.

Michaela: Oh.

Alan: This says Platinum again.

Sally: That was me.

Alan: Weren’t you listening at the start? And who are you?

Sally: I’m really sorry. I’m actually in the wrong meeting and was
checking my phone for the right location when you were talking. And
then I felt like it was too late to leave. I’ll go now. [Sound of chair
scraping, footsteps, door closing.]

Alan: Let’s just take another one. Rolls-Royce. Who was that?

Rupert: That’s mine. I was thinking that we should use a brand that
is synonymous with quality.

Violet: Oughtn’t that to be our own brand? Especially since we are

also in the automotive industry.

Alan: What does this say? It’s almost completely illegible.

Shreya: Celine Dion.

Alan: Oh.

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Shreya: I was thinking of people who sell out their shows, you
know. So it’s hard to get into.

Jon: I get it. So people with residencies in Las Vegas. Like Adele. Or
those magicians with the tiger.

Rupert: Calvin and Hobbes?

Jon: Yes, that’s them.

Violet: I’m not sure. Isn’t a bit weird to say “I’m in Celine Dion”?

Alan: What’s this one?

Michaela: Yttrium. It’s a rare earth.

Rupert: Metals again?

Michaela: Says the man who wants to use another brand name to
signal quality.

Alan: I like the idea but it’s a bit unpronounceable. Let’s look at a
couple more. Praseodymium. I assume that’s you again, Michaela.
And Gucci is presumably you, Rupert? How about this one. Oxygen?

Jon: That was me, but I now see that it’s better for our basic
service. Sorry.

Alan: And this one?

Kate: Jeroboam. I thought maybe we should use units associated

with a very special occasion.

Walter: A Jeroboam is not that big. The biggest bottle is a

Melchizedek.

Alan: Not sure that we want to be too closely associated with

alcohol, given we’re in the business of car rentals. What’s this one?

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It looks like “Inspire”.

Violet: That was left over from the previous meeting.

Alan: Nice. Not many left. Everest?

Rupert: That implies huge effort, extreme cold and a high risk of
death.

Michaela: You should go.

Kate: What about Alcove? I just love that word. Doesn’t it sound
like a winter evening reading a book?

Alan: Which would be great if we were selling winter evenings. Is

there a nice word that conjures up renting cars?

Kate: Freedom?

Jon: Wheels?

[Door opens]

Alan: You again? We’re not done.

Sally: I’m sorry. My other meeting is over and I just wanted to

suggest another one. Elara.

Walter: The moon of Jupiter?

Sally: Yes. I saw you were still going, so I asked ChatGPT for ideas.
It honed the list, worked up some taglines and did a trademark
search. This one jumped out. I quite like Zenith and Regent, too.

Violet: I like Elara.

Rupert: As long as Michaela didn’t suggest it, I’m OK with that.

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Michaela: If Rupert likes it, I’m against it.

Alan: We’re going to have to wrap up. I’ll take Elara and Inspire to
Peter. But he’s a massive Celine Dion fan, so we may well have a
winner.■

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Schumpeter

American tech’s split

personalities
Publicly traded startups aren’t what they used to be
8月 21, 2025 05:06 上午

IF INVESTORS IN America’s technology industry had a single mind, it

would be in the midst of a dissociative episode. The logical left brain
is beginning to wonder if the artificial-intelligence (AI ) revolution is
all it is cracked up to be. Nuh-uh, retorts the emotional right brain.

The mind’s rational hemisphere is responsible for a wobble on

August 19th in the tech-heavy NASDAQ index. This shaved nearly
10% from the market capitalisation of Palantir, an AI -analytics
darling worth some $370bn. Nvidia, the AI era’s chipmaker of choice,

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which last month became the first company in history to be worth
over $4trn, saw more than $150bn in shareholder value evaporate.
Days before, early backers of CoreWeave cashed in $1bn-worth of
shares in the AI -data-centre operator the moment they were allowed
to following its initial public offering (IPO ) in March. In a vote of
confidence, so did one of the company’s directors. CoreWeave’s
market value fell by over a third.

This burst of caution in public markets stands in contrast to the

unrelenting right-brain exuberance in private ones. Venture
capitalists are falling over themselves to back any startup with a
dream and AI in its pitch. Even as investors were dumping Palantir
shares, Databricks, which also peddles AI analytics, said it was
raising fresh capital at a valuation of $100bn, up from $62bn in its
previous funding round less than a year ago. The same day the New
York Times reported that OpenAI was in talks to let current and
former employees offload some of their stakes at a valuation of
$500bn, $200bn more than in March—never mind that the ChatGPT -
maker’s long-awaited new model proved ho-hum.

You should never read too much into short-term market swings.
Despite the latest thud, public tech valuations look dizzying. Private
ones are too opaque to draw definitive conclusions. Still, you can
read a little bit. And by the looks of it, investors as a group are
cooling in their enthusiasm for what is (incumbent tech stocks) while
displaying a superheated zeal for what will be (the startups that may
one day eclipse them).

The idea that the new must be better than the old is, obviously, itself
nothing novel. Yet a look at the past few decades of American tech
suggests it may also be increasingly ahistorical. As a group, earlier
vintages of startups outmatch newer ones on some key measures of
performance. At least that appears to be the case for those firms
which decide to subject themselves to the scrutiny of public markets.

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Jay Ritter of the University of Florida maintains perhaps the most
comprehensive database out there of American IPO s, going back to
1980. At Schumpeter’s request, he crunched the numbers for four
IPO cohorts. Call them, loosely, pre-dotcom (1990-98), dotcom
(1999-2000), web 2.0 (2001-11) and new web (2012-23).

The first thing to note is that startups of yore were readier to go

public than today’s lot. More than 1,200 listed their shares between
1990 and 1998. Another 631 piled in amid the dotcom mania, when
basically all you needed for a listing was a domain name. The web
2.0 and new-web generations added just 381 and 485, respectively.
As much as your Gen-X columnist would love to blame this on
Millennial and Gen-Z founders’ congenital incapacity to endure the
harsh discipline of a stockmarket listing, it probably has more to do
with the growth of venture capital. This lets startups stay private for
longer, which also explains why the typical age at which firms list has
risen, from eight years among the pre-dotcoms to 11 for the new-
webbers. (On this and subsequent measures, the dotcom folly led to
such outlier results that it makes sense to exclude them for the
analysis.)

Being older, the more recent vintages were also bigger. The typical
new-webber went public having generated $191m in the previous 12
months, four times the figure for its pre-dotcom forebear after
adjusting for inflation. A rougher analysis than Mr Ritter’s of the
1,000 biggest tech firms in the NASDAQ implies that post-IPO sales
also grew more slowly from this higher base. Newer vintages are
also likelier to be lossmaking. Whereas 60% of the pre-dotcoms
were making money when they listed their shares, the same is true
of just 24% of new-webbers. The web 2.0 group sat in between,
with 40% being profitable.

One consequence of being worse at making money is being better at

going belly-up. Less than 6% of the pre-dotcoms found themselves
in distress within three years of IPO (which Mr Ritter defines as a
90% decline relative to the offer price or a delisting). This rises to

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7% for web 2.0 and 11% for the new web. Admittedly, things even
out five years after a listing: 14% of the pre-dotcoms and 12% of
the new-webbers were in trouble by then. But other things being
equal, you would expect the share to be higher for the earlier
vintages, which had less time to test their business models.

Head-scratcher

And still, investors’ novelty fetish seems intact. The average new-
web firm outperformed the market in terms of shareholder returns
(including dividends) by a cumulative 52 percentage points over its
first five years as a public company, according to Mr Ritter’s sums.
The pre-dotcoms and web 2.0 managed 41 and 15 points,
respectively. For web 2.0 and especially the new web, this
outperformance was driven by larger startups; those with pre-IPO
sales below $100m barely beat the benchmark.

Investors are, in other words, rewarding newness and bigness rather

than quality. Mr Ritter finds virtually no difference between the
returns afforded to profitable and unprofitable tech businesses in the
years after their IPO s. If startups with sounder fundamentals cannot
count on outsized gains in the stockmarket, more may opt to stay
private. The result could be a cycle of adverse selection. Something
for the left brain to ponder. ■

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Finance & economics

Can China cope with a deindustrialised
future?
Pressed into service :: Communist Party officials face a difficult ideological turn

The green transition has a surprising new

home
Heading south :: Forget about northern Europeans, with their coalition governments
and love of cycling

Trump’s trade victims are shrugging off his

attacks
Hedging against America :: And China is gaining in the process

Where has the worst inflation problem?

Farshlepteh krenk :: We update our entrenchment measure

How America’s AI boom is squeezing the

rest of the economy
Tech support :: Beware the data-centre takeover

In praise of complicated investing

strategies
Buttonwood :: To understand markets, forget Occam’s razor

Economists disagree about everything.

Don’t they?
Free exchange :: Their discipline is famous for its fissiparousness

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Pressed into service

Can China cope with a

deindustrialised future?
Communist Party officials face a difficult ideological turn
8月 21, 2025 05:06 上午 | Hong Kong

AMID ALL the trouble facing China—trade war, covid-19, a property

slump—the country’s leaders have remained confident about the
source of future economic growth. In their view, the country’s
manifest destiny lies in high-tech manufacturing. Their “Made in
China 2025” plan, released ten years ago, aimed to turn China into a
leading factory “powerhouse” by mid-century. The government
covets what it calls a “complete” industrial system, which will reduce
China’s reliance on foreigners and raise their reliance on it. Xi
Jinping, China’s ruler, wants to cultivate “new productive forces” by

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applying cutting-edge technology to emerging industries, and some
traditional ones, too.

This strategy has met with considerable success. In February the

government said that high-tech manufacturing had grown by 8.9%
last year, much faster than the economy as a whole. The country’s
breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, batteries, drones and robots
have given America a fright. And although China’s GDP , when
converted into dollars at market exchange rates, still lags behind
America’s, its output of goods—things you can drop on your foot—
has long since surpassed its rival’s (see chart 1).

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But China’s preoccupation with high-tech industry is running into
limits. The fast expansion of manufacturing capacity has flooded
markets abroad and led to vicious price wars at home. For the past
year, China’s leaders have inveighed against “involutionary”
competition—efforts to gain market share that oblige rivals to follow
suit, hurting everyone’s profits. This campaign may be beginning to
bite. In July fixed-asset investment in manufacturing fell compared
with a year earlier.

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China’s leaders are also starting to emphasise an alternative, less
familiar source of growth: services. In July the Communist Party’s
Politburo announced that “new growth areas for service
consumption must be fostered.” This month the central government
said that it will subsidise loans for firms in consumer-facing services,
such as entertainment, tourism, sport, and child, health and elderly
care. Many people now spend more on services than they do on
goods, pointed out Wang Bo of the Ministry of Commerce. That shift
will accelerate as incomes rise, he argued, creating significant
“growth potential”.

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Social Media Pakistan 0342-4938217
Services, sometimes called the “tertiary” sector, now contribute 57%
of China’s GDP and employ 49% of its citizens, many well educated
(see chart 2). According to Zheng Song of the Chinese University of
Hong Kong, over 36% of them have some college education. But
services do not loom large in Communist ideology or iconography.
The flag of the People’s Republic features a hammer and sickle
(symbols of industry and agriculture) but no quill or till to represent
the rest of the economy. In its early decades, the state hardly
bothered to count many of these contributions. Its early statistical
system, based on a Soviet model, tracked only “material” services,
which included catering, transport, post and telecommunications.
That would leave out 60% of today’s service economy.

Even now, some services fly under the government’s radar. The
authorities find it hard to price the housing services enjoyed by
people who own the flats they occupy. According to Nick Lardy of
the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a think-tank,
housing services are still probably undercounted by several
percentage points of GDP . And official sources do not always agree
with one another. The latest economic census, released earlier this
year, found 411m people working in the service sector in 2023,
including the self-employed. That is 55m more than previously
estimated from other official surveys.

The party’s five-year plans have in the past promised to lift the share
of services in the economy as a step towards “rebalancing”. But that
vow was dropped in the last plan, which covered the period from
2021 to 2025, points out Adam Wolfe of Absolute Strategy Research,
a consultancy. Instead, it promised to keep manufacturing roughly
stable as a share of GDP .

Rebalancing, rebalanced

Mr Xi may fear a phenomenon christened “cost disease” by William

Baumol, an economist. Many labour-intensive services, he wrote,
have limited scope for productivity gains. His best example was

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musicians: if it took four people half an hour to perform a Boccherini
string quartet in 1800, it requires the same labour today. And yet
services must compete for workers with other sectors, such as
manufacturing, in which productivity has soared.

Owing to these productivity improvements, manufacturers can pay

higher wages without raising prices. Service industries, on the other
hand, have to charge more if they wish to pay more—and they must
do so if they want to match rising wages elsewhere in the economy.
Baumol once calculated that a hypothetical manufactured good
which cost the same as a concert ticket in 1800 would have cost a
twentieth as much in the 1980s.

In China, too, prices for services have grown faster than prices for
industrial goods (see chart 3). If, as Mr Wang suspects, people
spend a rising share of their income on services, then the country
seems set to experience cost disease. More expensive services will
become a growing share of the economy, dragging down the
country’s average rate of growth.

The forces Baumol described are universal. But other constraints on

China’s service industries are peculiar to the country. The state, for
example, owns all the biggest banks. State-owned enterprises also
dominate telecommunications, collecting 78% of revenues. China
regulates accountancy, law, retail and even estate agents more
tightly than the average member of the OECD , a club of mostly rich
democracies. And China’s urban sprawl makes it difficult to reap the
economies of density that big cities usually provide. A recent study
by Yuejun Zhong of East China Normal University and Libin Han of
Dongbei University of Finance and Economics calculated that if the
government were to permit greater population density in China’s
biggest metropolises, it could raise GDP per person in these cities by
9%.

Relaxing some of these impediments could improve the performance

of China’s services, letting them lift pay without raising prices so

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quickly. Even if that proves hard, China’s leaders should not worry
too much about cost disease. Although it sounds painful, it is not,
strictly speaking, a malady at all. Rising service prices are driven by
rising wages, which are something to be celebrated. And the spur for
higher wages is dynamism in other industries. The cost of a concert
might go up from one manufactured good to 20, but that is only
because other parts of the economy have become 20 times more
productive.

Moreover, in China’s case, these forces would bring a consolation.

The only reason America’s GDP remains so much bigger than China’s
is because American services fetch a higher price. That gap could
narrow if China continues to spend more on the neglected “tertiary”
sector of its economy. Baumol’s cost disease is nothing to fear. It
could even be the force that finally makes China number one. ■

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Heading south

The green transition has a

surprising new home
Forget about northern Europeans, with their coalition governments
and love of cycling
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

Reflected glory

PICTURE A COUNTRY where renewables are being rapidly rolled out

and electric-vehicle sales are surging, and you will probably have in
mind somewhere smug and northern European; a place with tall
people, coalition governments and a yen for cycling holidays. Or
perhaps the first thing that pops into your head is the sheer scale of
China, which manufactures the bulk of such equipment and last year

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contributed more than half of the global increase in solar and wind
installation.

Think again. For a wave of Chinese-made electric vehicles is flooding

new markets. In the past year sales of EV s have more than tripled in
Turkey, where Togg, a local brand, is also popular—they now
account for 27% of all cars sold, making the country the fourth-
largest European market. Last year more than 70% of cars imported
into Nepal were electric. Some 60% of new cars sold in Ethiopia
were battery-powered, after the state banned sales of internal-
combustion-engine vehicles altogether. EV sales have doubled in
Vietnam over the past year owing, in part, to VinFast, a local
carmaker. Two- and three-wheelers are surging in popularity, too.
The International Energy Agency (IEA ), a forecaster, reckons that
across developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America EV
sales rose by 60% in 2024.

It is a similar story with renewables. In the first six months of the

year, Pakistan generated 25% of its electricity from solar power—not
far below the 32% managed by California, a clean-energy pioneer.
The country’s battery imports are booming as well. Indeed, the
Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think-tank,
estimates that on current trends battery storage will cover 26% of
Pakistan’s peak-electricity demand by 2030. Meanwhile, over the
past year Morocco has increased its wind generation by 50%,
becoming the country with the ninth most. India has seen four
months of decline in coal-power generation, aided by an increase of
14% in renewable generation.

Lust for power

Although the principles of international climate diplomacy suggest

that poorer countries, being less responsible for climate change,
have less duty to go green, many face strong economic incentives to
do so anyway. Most countries in the global south are energy
importers, and therefore must use scarce foreign currency to buy oil

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and gas. China and India have coal reserves that play an important
role in their economies and power generation, but neither has
significant oil or gas reserves. For its part, Ethiopia’s ban on internal-
combustion engines was not a green measure—it was designed to
cut spending on fossil fuels and save foreign currency.

Moreover, across emerging markets, Chinese-made EV s are now

about as cheap as traditional vehicles. In some places, they are even
cheaper. The IEA reckons that last year the average Chinese EV sold
for around $30,000 in Thailand, compared with $34,000 for the
typical petrol-engine car. At the bottom end of the market, old-
fashioned vehicles still have an advantage, but only a relatively
modest one. Government policies have also made a difference. In
Turkey purchasers of EV s typically paid a tax of only 10%, compared
with one of between 45% and 220% for petrol-powered vehicles.
The recent surge in part reflected car-buyers getting ahead of a
reduction in the generosity of the policy.

Clean technology generally requires more upfront investment than

fossil-fuel tech, even if it has lower lifetime costs. This has
historically held it back in places where the cost of capital is high.
The IEA has calculated that the typical cost of capital for a solar
project in India, for instance, is 11%, compared with around half
that in rich countries. But the Rocky Mountain Institute, an American
pressure group, now estimates that, owing to falling prices, many
clean technologies have reached “capex parity”, where initial costs
are the same as fossil fuels on a per-unit basis. As a consequence,
they have become more attractive in large parts of the world.

Tariffs have been helpful, too. As America and the EU attempt to

shut out Chinese EV s, they are finding their way to other markets—
at even cheaper prices. For the most part, emerging markets lack
legacy manufacturers that will lobby their governments to keep out
Chinese imports. Yet this relatively free trade is at risk as
protectionism begins to spread. Until recently Brazil allowed EV s into
its economy tariff-free; now it is gradually raising import taxes to

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35% by 2026. India’s imports of finished solar panels have
stagnated as the country seeks to build its own supply chain. Nigeria
is considering banning solar-panel imports altogether in an effort to
support domestic manufacturers.

Governments are at least also creating loopholes that allow Chinese

imports to continue so long as the companies in question commit to
local production. Brazil has carved out an exemption for BYD , a
carmaker, while it establishes a factory in the country. Indonesia has
reduced value-added tax on EV s from 11% to 1% for vehicles that
meet a 40% local-content requirement; foreign manufacturers,
meanwhile, can bring in equipment duty-free so long as they
promise to increase domestic production by 2026 and provide a
guarantee for the forgone tariffs if they do not follow through. Such
policies are far from perfect—but they are better than the
alternative. Well-heeled northern Europeans have something to
learn. ■

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and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only
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Hedging against America

Trump’s trade victims are

shrugging off his attacks
And China is gaining in the process
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

THE “TRUMP ROUND” of trade negotiations, as Jamieson Greer,

America’s trade representative, calls it, was meant to reassert
American primacy. Peter Navarro, a longtime adviser to Donald
Trump, even suggested that the president deserved a Nobel prize in
economics for showing how the world’s biggest market can bend
global commerce to its will. The White House’s bet is that
dismantling the old order, once policed—however fitfully—by the
World Trade Organisation, will usher in a new one with America at its
centre.

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Yet by acting as if America remains the axis of world trade, Mr
Trump may be accelerating its shift elsewhere. The world’s biggest
market is less central to global trade today than it once was. At the
start of the century, America accounted for a fifth of global imports;
today it makes up just an eighth. Even as countries strike tariff deals
with Mr Trump to secure market access, they are drawing up
alternatives. As one South Korean official puts it, “The first step is to
make concessions to America. The second is to look elsewhere.”

Around the world, governments are hedging against the end of the
old economic order in different ways. Some are propping up local
firms with subsidies and protectionism. Others are seeking new
markets. And the boldest are forging alliances to counterbalance
America’s clout. The choice for many is not between deference to
Washington or a Hobbesian state of nature, but between short-term
fixes and longer-term alternatives.

Given Mr Trump’s predilection for levies and the tendency for taxes
to outlast their creator, handouts to trade-war victims risk wasting
money and distorting markets. Brazil has unveiled a $6bn credit
package, which includes tax holidays and state-purchasing
guarantees. With public finances already strained, the plan spooked
investors. Canada has taken a similar approach, pledging nearly
$1bn to support its lumber industry. South Africa’s trade ministry has
proposed policies to let exporters co-ordinate on shipping costs and
jointly build infrastructure, even if that means skirting antitrust rules.

Others are reaching for blunter tools. Canada and Japan are slapping
new levies on metal imports. Meanwhile, India is doubling down on
its “Made in India” campaign. On August 15th Narendra Modi, the
country’s prime minister, extolled self-reliance in everything from
energy to fighter jets. “If we continue to be vocal for local, we will
achieve prosperity,” he declared. Although so far there has not been
much retaliation against Mr Trump, the risk is that copycat
protectionism multiplies, raising costs for everyone.

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Global is noble

More promising is the search for new markets. From Asia to Africa,
governments are nudging companies abroad with export funds and
incentives. Singapore and South Korea, for instance, are bankrolling
small firms to scout out opportunities in South Asia, the Middle East
and Mexico. Some are already redirecting trade. South African
farmers are sending more produce to China and pushing the EU to
relax its citrus-health rules. Lesotho’s garment-makers—once geared
to American firms such as Gap and Levi’s—are turning to regional
buyers and testing demand in Asia. Brazil’s coffee exporters, hit with
an American tariff of 50%, are stepping up shipments to North Africa
and the Middle East, where sales volumes rose by three-fifths last
year. Yet even with such diversification, replacing America, still the
destination for 16% of Brazil’s beans, will take time.

Most consequential are the new alliances. Canada and Mexico,

America’s two neighbours and partners in the US -Mexico-Canada
Agreement (USMCA ) are edging closer as America becomes less
reliable. Next month Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, will visit
Mexico, where he is set to discuss supply-chain resilience, port-to-
port trade and joint ventures in energy and artificial intelligence.
With the USMCA up for review next year, the two countries are
hoping to create leverage they can use against Mr Trump.

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Many of the BRICS countries—a club of 11 emerging economies
including Brazil, China, India, Russia and South Africa—have been
targets of Mr Trump’s ire, most recently with his levies of 50% on
Brazil and India. In response, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da
Silva (known as Lula), has worked the phones to rally allies. On
August 7th he and Mr Modi discussed closer ties, including digital-
payments links that could chip away at the dominance of American
banks. Four days later Lula spoke with Xi Jinping, China’s leader,
about deepening trade, after which Mr Xi declared relations with

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Brazil to be “at their best in history”. When it comes to trade, the
bloc is hardly beholden to America. Uncle Sam buys only a sixth of
Indian goods and a seventh of Brazilian exports, the latter down
from a quarter two decades ago. As a group, the BRICS members
now trade more goods with one another than with America and the
gap is widening. Integration is accelerating after Mr Trump’s tariffs.
Over a dozen countries, including Thailand and Vietnam, have
sought partner-country status or applied to join.

The biggest winner from the new alliances may be China. Its exports
to the global south have doubled since 2015—and it sells more to
South and South-East Asia, Latin America and the Middle East than
to America and western Europe. In July, even as exports to America
collapsed, its overall exports grew by 7% from a year earlier. Mr
Trump’s tariffs have deepened these links. In June Mr Xi pledged to
scrap nearly all duties on imports from Africa, and he is attending
summits with Latin American and South-East Asian leaders. China
and the Association of South-East Asian Nations—together home to
a quarter of the world’s people and a fifth of its GDP —are revamping
their free-trade deal, due to be ratified by the year’s end. Relations
with India, meanwhile, are thawing. Indian firms are exploring
projects with Chinese counterparts in electric vehicles and batteries;
Mr Modi is expected to visit China for the first time in seven years.
Mr Trump wanted America at the centre of world trade. Things are
not quite going to plan. ■

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and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly subscriber-only
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Farshlepteh krenk

Where has the worst inflation

problem?
We update our entrenchment measure
8月 21, 2025 03:34 上午

THE YIDDISH phrase “farshlepteh krenk”, untranslatable into English,

describes an illness that just won’t go away. That is how some
countries’ experience of inflation has felt. The rate of price rises has
fallen since 2022, when across the OECD , excluding Turkey, it rose to
11%, its highest since the 1970s. In June average inflation across
the club of mostly rich countries was 2.5%, only a smidge above
most central banks’ targets. But many Anglophone countries still
have lingering symptoms.

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To diagnose the malaise more accurately, we have updated our
measure of “inflation entrenchment” for ten rich countries. We
construct this from five indicators: core inflation, unit labour costs,
inflation dispersion, inflation expectations and Google-search
behaviour. We rank each country on each indicator, then combine
the rankings to form an overall score.

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Social Media Pakistan 0342-4938217
The results reveal a linguistic divide. Countries in the EU and Asia
perform well. France now has the least entrenched inflation of all the
countries we looked at. Chapeau bas to them. Japanese inflation,
true to form, has a feeble grip.

In the English-speaking world, however, inflation looks chronic.

Britain has done worst overall. In the year to the second quarter of
2025 the country’s core prices, which exclude food and energy, rose
by 4.3%. Three-quarters of the items in a Briton’s consumer basket
have risen in price by more than 2%—unusually high “inflation
dispersion”. Australia is not far behind, with workers’ pay per unit of
output nearly 5% higher in the first quarter than a year before.
Despite a weaker economy than its southern neighbour, Canada’s
inflation problem is almost as bad.

A few factors may explain inflation’s persistence in these places.

From 2022 to 2024 the governments of Anglophone countries, on
average, increased their budget deficits by 2% of GDP , while those
elsewhere contracted. This largesse boosted demand—the
equivalent of licking doorhandles in an attempt to fight off an illness.
English-speaking countries have also welcomed lots of immigrants in
recent years. At least in the short run, the new arrivals may push up
the prices of certain things, especially housing.

There is some good news, too. The absolute level of inflation

entrenchment has ebbed: Japan, the country with the least bad
problem when we updated this measure in 2024, would have ranked
sixth-worst this time. The Bank of England can argue that Britons’
weak inflation expectations will help price pressures fade. The Bank
of Canada can highlight low inflation dispersion. In addition, most
Anglophone governments are tightening fiscal policy and slashing
immigration.

America is the exception. Immigration is declining, but Uncle Sam

still has his foot on the fiscal pedal. And tariffs have stoked fears of
more price rises, as firms pass their higher costs on to consumers.

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Americans are more likely than others to Google inflation-related
terms. Over the coming year, the public expects prices to rise by
5.5%, higher than people in any other country. A lingering illness is
annoying; a worsening one is harder to bear. ■

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Tech support

How America’s AI boom is

squeezing the rest of the
economy
Beware the data-centre takeover
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午 | Washington, DC

IF ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE models have a hometown, it is probably

Ashburn, northern Virginia, just outside Washington, DC . Attentive
window-seaters flying into Dulles airport might notice a clutch of
white-roofed boxes jutting out next to rows of suburban culs-de-
sacs. Those data centres are part of a cluster—the world’s biggest—
which last year guzzled more than a quarter of the power produced
by Virginia’s main electrical utility.

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Fears of a slowdown abound in America, with high interest rates and
tariff chaos weighing on most of the economy. But they are doing
little to reduce the breakneck pace at which firms are building the
infrastructure needed for AI . Something like a sixth of the 2% rise in
American GDP over the past year has come from investments in
computer and communications equipment, including chips, and data
centres. Add in the grid upgrades to power AI models, plus the
intellectual-property value of the software itself, and one estimate
puts the boom’s contribution to GDP growth at 40%. It is an
astonishing figure for a sector that accounts for just a few per cent
of America’s total GDP .

Tech support

The AI build-out is not a normal investment boom. Until recently, big

tech firms paid for most of it from their earnings and cash piles. Now
the scale of construction is too great even for these giants, so they
are turning to borrowing. They are building data centres in the belief
that AI will drive explosive economic growth, and hence demand for
computing power, within a matter of years. This is not like building
houses or factories. It is a high-reward, winner-takes-all market, in
which ordinary concerns such as the cost of borrowing are easy, and
tempting, to wave away.

That is just what the big tech firms are doing. In the face of their
determination to build AI infrastructure at any cost, higher interest
rates offer little deterrence. Neither does the cost of electricity:
schemes for gigawatt-scale data centres, demanding as much power
as a small city, are increasingly in vogue. Grids across the country
are bracing for a squeeze.

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If the history of the dotcom boom in the late 1990s is anything to go
by, the mania could have much further to run. Then, the roll-out of
costly technology required to build the internet continued for many
years, with a much sharper impact on GDP than America has
experienced so far as a consequence of AI (see chart 1). And the
early enthusiasm for AI has probably been even greater than that in
the internet’s youth. For all the Y2K -era excitement, few expected

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the web to lead to mass automation or unprecedentedly fast
economic growth. Both are now fairly mainstream predictions about
AI among the Silicon Valley set, even if the incremental-seeming
progress of OpenAI ’s GPT- 5 model has dampened the frenzy a touch.

The trouble is that the very industry powering so much of America’s

economic growth is squeezing the rest of its output. Housebuilders,
for instance, cannot afford to be blithe about higher borrowing costs.
Nor can plenty of regular businesses. Data centres have also
constrained the rest of the economy by keeping energy prices high.
Average American electricity bills have risen by 7% so far in 2025, at
least in part because of the extra strain that data centres have put
on the country’s grids.

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Sure enough, look beyond AI and much of the economy appears
sluggish. Real consumption has flatlined since December. Jobs
growth is weak. Housebuilding has slumped, as has business
investment in non-AI parts of the economy (see chart 2). Both
activities are highly sensitive to interest rates, and so act as
bellwethers for output more broadly.

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In other words, an economy-wide reallocation is under way: interest-
rate- and energy-sensitive sectors are contributing less to growth,
while AI investment contributes more. And if it is to continue to do
so, big tech firms must continue to increase spending. Any
slowdown in capital expenditure—say, if constraints on power or chip
availability bite—would mean less support for overall economic
growth.

Should that happen, there would be the silver lining that interest
rates and energy prices would probably fall, too, which would ease
the pressure on the rest of the economy. History carries a warning,
though. After the dotcom boom came a ferocious bust. A similar
drop in AI investment would remove a sizeable source of America’s
growth just as the rest of the economy has begun to look fragile. If
desire for data centres cools, it is not just Ashburn that might be in
trouble. ■

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Buttonwood

In praise of complicated
investing strategies
To understand markets, forget Occam’s razor
8月 21, 2025 05:06 上午

OCCAM’S RAZOR is a cornerstone of the social sciences, and for

financial economists it is almost an article of faith. The principle is
named after William of Ockham, a 14th-century monk. It holds that
the simplest explanation for any phenomenon is the best. Financial
analysts today live in fear of “overfitting”: producing a model that,
by dint of its complexity, maps onto existing data well, while
predicting the future poorly. Now, though, Ockham is on trial. New
research suggests that, when it comes to big machine-learning

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models, parsimony is overrated and complexity might be king. If that
is true, the methods of modern investing will be upended.

The debate began in 2021, when Bryan Kelly and Kangying Zhou of
Yale University, and Semyon Malamud of the Swiss Federal Institute
of Technology in Lausanne, published “The Virtue of Complexity in
Return Prediction”. In one exercise, Mr Kelly and his co-authors
analysed just 12 months of data using a model with 12,000 separate
“parameters”, or settings. Using so many of them—the opposite of
what Occam’s razor prescribes—would traditionally have been
thought to raise the risk of overfitting. Yet the complexity in fact
seemed to help the model forecast the future. Might Occam’s razor,
the paper’s authors asked, be Occam’s blunder?

It is an academic debate, but the outcome will have sweeping

consequences. Mr Kelly is also a portfolio manager at AQR , a
quantitative hedge fund. The firm was once known for using more
traditional—and parsimonious—methods than its peers. But it is now
embracing the apparent virtues of complexity. Researchers, worried
about overfitting data, have worried too little about underfitting it,
reckons Mr Kelly.

Making better predictions with small data sets could be enormously

profitable. Much financial research is strangled by small sample sizes
and the difficulty of conducting experiments. Gathering more data
often requires waiting, and in some areas it is incredibly sparse.
When studying extreme events such as market blow-ups, bank runs
and sovereign defaults, researchers often have just a few examples
in modern history. Hedge funds in search of an edge spend billions
of dollars on alternative data, from satellite images of Chinese rail
traffic to investor sentiment scraped from social media.

Recently, the debate over complexity has reached fever pitch. Mr

Kelly and his co-authors have faced a barrage of scepticism. Álvaro
Cartea, Qi Jin and Yuantao Shi, all of the University of Oxford,
suggest the virtues of complexity may not hold if the data used is

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poorly collected, erroneous or otherwise noisy. Stefan Nagel of the
University of Chicago suggests that for very small data sets, the
complex models actually mimic a momentum-trading strategy, and
that their success is a “lucky coincidence”. Messrs Kelly and Malamud
have responded to their respondents with another detailed paper.

It is too soon to prepare a eulogy for Ockham’s maxim. But even the
sceptics do not outright reject the idea that big, complex models can
produce better forecasts than simpler ones—they just think this
might not be true at all times. Meanwhile, if the virtues of complexity
are real, the changes to how many investors operate could be
immense. Hiring the best machine-learning engineers will be more
important than ever, and so, if Mr Cartea and his co-authors are
correct, will acquiring and cleaning data. The billion-dollar pay
packets that tech firms offer superstar coders may begin to pop up
at investment firms, too.

Investment firms will also see greater benefits from scale. The
computational power required to train and run models is expensive,
and thus may become a “moat” protecting large hedge funds from
competition. Larger players will be able to afford to experiment
more, and across a wider range of asset classes. Smaller rivals may
struggle to keep up.

Reduced competition is not the only risk. Humans are still catching
up when it comes to working out what the most advanced machine-
learning models are doing. Investors may become increasingly
reliant on black-box algorithms that are extremely difficult to
interpret. Small models benefit from being not only easy to deploy,
but easy for investors to think about, and to tweak. Few will
complain so long as they are making money. Yet if anything goes
wrong with the new models—ranging from mundane
underperformance to entire investment strategies blowing up—their
fans may find themselves wishing for a tool that could cut through
the complexity. ■

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Free exchange

Economists disagree about

everything. Don’t they?
Their discipline is famous for its fissiparousness
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

WHEN PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP fired Erika McEntarfer, America’s

labour statistician, he achieved something supposedly rare: he got
economists to unite. In a survey by the University of Chicago’s Clark
Centre for Global Markets, 100% of the discipline’s most prominent
practitioners agreed that there was no evidence the Bureau of
Labour Statistics (BLS ) was biased.

Over history, economists have disagreed a lot. The 18th century saw
classical types spar with mercantilists; the mid-20th pitted

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Keynesians against monetarists. More recent decades have set
champions of rational expectations and efficient markets against
behavioralists. Sometimes disputes remain cloistered in academia;
often they spill into the public square, in arguments over minimum
wages, debt sustainability and monetary-policy rules.

George Bernard Shaw is said to have joked that if all economists

were laid end to end, they still would not reach a conclusion.
Winston Churchill suggested that, if you wanted two opinions on a
matter, you should put two economists in a room. The Trump era,
however, has ushered in seemingly unprecedented unity. Each new
White House directive invites the collective ire of a profession
famous for its fissiparousness.

Since 2011 the Clark Centre has polled economists on topical issues
such as cryptocurrencies, fracking and inequality. Some questions,
such as that about the BLS survey, might seem straightfoward;
others are trickier. Recent surveys have asked about the
effectiveness of sanctions on Russia, if foreign aid can raise GDP
growth and whether climate change threatens financial stability. And
although Mr Trump has inspired consensus on a number of issues,
even before his arrival economists were more united than their
caricature suggests. On over a quarter of questions, respondents
who register an opinion in one direction lean the same way as the
others; on most, more than nine in ten are like-minded.

In almost every question on trade policy—be it about NAFTA or

whether commerce with China has left Americans better off—
economists defend free trade. None of them agrees with the
statement that “higher import duties…to encourage producers to
make [in America]…would be a good idea”; only a handful think
such tools can even substantially affect the trade deficit. Taxes are
another hot-button issue that elicit less controversy than might be
expected. Pigouvian taxes are popular; Laffer curves are not. Few
economists thought that extending tax cuts from Mr Trump’s first

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term would meaningfully boost GDP ; most agree that restoring the
top marginal rate to 39.6% would not impede growth.

The list of agreed-upon statements does often read like a catalogue

of presidential rebukes: vaccine refusal imposes externalities;
politicising monetary policy is folly; sovereign-wealth funds and
strategic crypto reserves serve little purpose; bans on high-skilled
immigration would sap America’s research-and-development
leadership, push businesses abroad, hurt average workers and do
little to boost employment.

A Trump supporter might survey this scene and reach an obvious

conclusion: that economics is less a science than a guild dominated
by conformist elites. But although many economists have an
instinctive dislike of the president, such a charge cannot explain why
the panel is equally sceptical of traditionally left-wing policies, like
interest-rate caps and rent control, as of right-wing policies, like self-
financing tax cuts. Or why experts are as likely to agree that “rising
inequality is straining the health of liberal democracy” as they are to
disagree with Thomas Piketty’s claim that the blame for this lies with
the fact that returns on capital are rising faster than economic
growth. There is, to be sure, shared respect for free markets, but
one that is nuanced enough to accommodate support for bank bail-
outs and congestion pricing.

That is why the disagreements revealed by the Clark Centre’s survey

are more telling than the consensus. Antitrust is one fault line.
Economists are split on whether American airline mergers should
have been approved, whether big tech platforms ought to be broken
up and whether artificial-intelligence firms merit scrutiny. Financial
regulation is another. Economists broadly agree that oversight is
required, including of the non-bank intermediaries that now make up
much of the financial system. But ask what optimal regulation would
look like and dissent quickly emerges. Would Americans be better off
if the size of banks was capped at 4% of the industry’s assets?
Should America increase the deposit insurance available to

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customers? On these questions, no more than 60% of experts
populate a side.

Up in the air

What do antitrust and regulation share that tariffs and migration do

not? Part of the answer concerns the nature of the trade-offs.
Antitrust weighs the costs of market power against efficiencies of
scale; financial regulation pits stability against growth. By contrast,
the net effects of free trade or high-skilled immigration are clearer.
On trade and migration there are reams of evidence across countries
and decades. Antitrust cases and financial crises are rare,
idiosyncratic and hard to generalise about. Thus it is easier to gauge
the effects of a tariff than to know what would have happened had a
bank run been allowed to proceed. Economists, in the end, can be
only as confident as the data let them be.

This leads to the last category of interest from the Clark Centre’s
polls: those questions on which economists report great uncertainty.
If there is a common thread here, it is novelty. Will AI lead to larger
increases in GDP per person than did the internet? Will stablecoins
account for a substantial share of payment flows in ten years’ time?
Does the growth of private credit raise systemic financial risk?
Economists may be willing to take on the president; they are less
willing to take a punt on the future. ■

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which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays
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Science & technology

RFK Jr’s attack on mRNA technology
endangers the world
Shooting the messenger :: His cuts will not just hurt vaccines

AI-powered robots can take your phone

apart
Pass the screwdriver :: They will make recycling electronics much more efficient

Old fossil-fuel plants are becoming green-

energy hubs
Oil’s well that ends well :: The dirtiest parts of the energy system could help build the
cleanest

Should you use a standing desk?

Well informed :: The benefits are real, but seem to vary with age

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Shooting the messenger

RFK Jr’s attack on mRNA

technology endangers the
world
His cuts will not just hurt vaccines
8月 21, 2025 06:25 上午

DURING THE covid-19 pandemic new vaccines were rolled out with
unprecedented speed. The fastest to arrive were jabs built from
molecules of messenger RNA (mRNA ) designed to teach the body
how to fight off the disease-causing virus. By late 2021, mRNA
vaccines had saved an estimated 7.7m lives globally, including most
of the 3m Americans whom the Commonwealth Fund, an American
health-care charity, estimates were saved by vaccines before 2023.

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President Donald Trump was one of the technology’s many
supporters. He launched Operation Warp Speed, a programme that
started the race to deliver vaccines. He even received an mRNA shot
and advocated (albeit gently) for their use. Yet today many
Americans are suspicious of these jabs. The speed with which they
were developed and approved, coupled with sweeping vaccine
mandates and a political push by the Biden administration to give
booster shots ahead of any such decision being made by scientists
at the drug regulator, caused anger and mistrust. Rampant
disinformation has further stirred the pot, leading many to wrongly
believe that mRNA vaccines have killed or harmed millions of people.

Robert F. Kennedy junior, Mr Trump’s health secretary, is known for

his opposition to vaccines in general and mRNA in particular. Earlier
this month, citing safety concerns that scientists have discredited,
his department terminated 22 mRNA -related contracts worth a total
of nearly $500m across academia and industry. America, said Mr
Kennedy, was moving beyond the “limitations of mRNA and investing
in better solutions”. The move is not an isolated one. In May Mr
Kennedy’s department cancelled $766m in funding for a late-stage
human mRNA vaccine against bird flu and work on five subtypes of
influenza with pandemic potential. America also gave up the rights
to purchase bird-flu shots from Moderna, a company with which it
had previously collaborated to deliver these vaccines.

Rick Bright, the former boss of the Biomedical Advanced Research

and Development Authority—the division of the health department
that had funded the grants—wrote in the New York Times that the
latest decision undercut “one of the most significant medical
advances in decades…that could protect millions more people from
the threats ahead”. This is no understatement. In the years since the
pandemic, mRNA has emerged as a powerful new “platform”
technology; one that can be used not only to design new pandemic-
busting vaccines, but also to create medicines for infectious
diseases, rare genetic illnesses and cancer. The rapidity with which
mRNA can be designed and manufactured makes it ideally suited for

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creating a new generation of personalised medicines. The cuts risk
making the world a more dangerous place.

To assess the impact of these measures, The Economist spoke to

more than half a dozen experts. Most declined to be quoted on the
record. “Everyone is trying to do everything we can to avoid the
glare of RFK ,” said one source at a research-funding institution. He
explained that his organisation was removing references to RNA
wherever possible and trying to work out alternative ways of
describing it. This is an infuriating task, he says. “It is a bit
like...saying you can’t use the word carbon.”

mRNA is similarly fundamental to biology. It is the specific type of

RNA that acts as a messenger molecule, carrying instructions from a
cell’s DNA to protein-production units known as ribosomes. The
ability to harness mRNA —as well as related biological molecules in
the cell—has given medicine an enormously powerful tool. Scientists
can now instruct the body to manufacture therapeutic proteins; train
the immune system to fight diseases, including cancers; and even
silence harmful signals in cells, such as faulty instructions caused by
a genetic disease or genetic information from a virus seeking to use
the cell’s machinery to replicate itself.

Mr Kennedy has implied his department’s cuts are limited to mRNA

vaccines for respiratory infections. But this does not appear to be the
case. Biospace, an online publication, reports that research into
filoviruses such as Ebola—which are not respiratory but cause
haemorrhagic fevers through direct contact with bodily fluids—has
also lost funding.

Other cuts target treatments rather than vaccines. One such casualty
is ModeX , a biotech firm based in Massachusetts, which is
developing therapeutic antibodies. An antibody infusion—which is
distinct from a vaccine—can be lifesaving for patients struggling to
fight off a virus. ModeX is engineering mRNA that, when introduced
into the body, instructs it to create antibodies able to attach to more

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than one location on a given virus, which should make them more
potent.

Some affected research appears to have nothing to do with mRNA at

all. Fierce Biotech, another online outlet, noted that Tiba Biotech in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, had been developing a flu treatment
based on RNA interference (RNA i)—a different technology altogether
—when it lost funding. It sought to create a tiny RNA molecule that
would interfere with the production of viral proteins in the body,
potentially blocking the virus from replicating.

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But perhaps the most significant impact of the cuts will be on the
world’s ability to produce vaccines against a future pandemic.
America is the global leader in mRNA- vaccine research; according to
Airfinity, a life-sciences data firm, it is currently home to trials for
almost 40% of mRNA vaccine candidates (see chart). In the years
prior to the pandemic the government spent $337m funding
research related to mRNA technology that would eventually lead to
the covid-19 vaccines, a figure unmatched by any other country.

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Some hope that investors will work around the government’s disdain
for respiratory mRNA vaccines and continue to invest in RNA
therapeutics more broadly. But there are already signs of trouble:
one industry source says that the administration’s hostility—
particularly in the form of inaccurate comments made about the
safety of mRNA vaccines—is already having a chilling effect. The cost
of manufacturing mRNA will probably rise and young talent and
seasoned experts could leave the field, hampering innovation in an
area of biology rich in applications.

This may in particular hurt the development of personalised cancer

vaccines, a promising mRNA -based technology to treat tumours.
OncoDaily, an online publication, suggests that the funding cuts
could increase per-patient manufacturing costs by 20-40% and
extend production timelines by two to six weeks. Slower speeds of
delivery can give a tumour time to spread and may, therefore,
reduce the efficacy of a vaccine. Trials may also be forced to slow
down or move abroad.

There are few precedents for such a sequence of events. When

George W. Bush’s administration restricted funding for embryonic
stem-cell research in 2001, some scientists did eventually move
abroad. Britain benefited; it became a global hub for research on
embryonic stem cells. The cuts also pushed American researchers to
innovate in other areas, leading to the advancement of pluripotent
stem cells. The current administration hopes to repeat the trick by
developing conventional whole-vaccine platforms to tackle
pandemics. But it seems unlikely that these could ever be developed
as quickly as mRNA jabs, which some experts reckon could be turned
around in 100 days.

As for where mRNA expertise may go, there are whispers of interest
from Saudi Arabia, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates. Britain
is actively competing for it, says one British source. Peter Piot, a
professor of global health at the London School of Hygiene and
Tropical Medicine and, until recently, an adviser to Ursula von der

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Leyen, president of the European Commission, thinks that the
European Union should step forward and launch a special initiative
to pick up the ball that America has dropped. One can only hope
that his call is heeded before the next deadly pandemic arrives. ■

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Pass the screwdriver

AI-powered robots can take

your phone apart
They will make recycling electronics much more efficient
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey

THE WORLD’S rubbish heaps are filling up with valuable electronics.

According to the UN , some 62m tonnes of e-waste were produced in
2022, enough to fill a line of lorries parked bumper-to-bumper
around the equator. Only 22% is recycled. Most of the rest ends up
in landfills or incinerators, where in 2024 recoverable raw materials
worth $63bn went to waste. That figure is expected to grow to more
than $80bn by 2030.

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Getting those materials out of the rubbish is a challenge. Many are
contaminated when e-waste is crushed during recycling, which can
limit the effectiveness of specialist extraction techniques. The
process is made more straightforward if products are disassembled
and their components sorted by composition before crushing.
Copper can then be recovered from wiring. Gold, silver and other
precious metals can be leached from circuit boards, along with
cobalt, lithium, manganese and nickel from batteries. Rare-earth
magnets can be pulled from electric motors.

The trouble is that disassembly is labour-intensive and costly.

Automation is also tricky: robots are good at putting together a
specific item but struggle to recognise and take apart the thousands
of different devices that end up in the rubbish. A new generation of
robots powered by artificial-intelligence (AI ) models, however, looks
to be up to the job.

Some of these AI -assisted robots are being developed for in-house

recycling schemes run by manufacturers, who have an intimate
knowledge of how their products are put together. Apple, for
example, uses a system called Daisy. A decade ago, an early version
could dismantle only one type of iPhone; now, with the help of AI ,
Daisy can handle more than 20. Microsoft is developing a robot to
disassemble computer hard drives. These are usually crushed whole
to destroy any sensitive data, but if the drives are dismantled, only
the platters containing data need be crushed. ABB , a Swedish-Swiss
electrical-engineering company, is working with Molg, an American
recycler, on a network of robotic “minifactories” to dismantle and
recover material from the electronics used in vast data centres.

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José Saenz and his team at the Fraunhofer Institute for Factory
Operation and Automation in Magdeburg, Germany, have a still more
ambitious goal. They are deve-loping a robotic system that can be
used in a general recycling centre, where it would need to be flexible
enough to dismantle a wide variety of e-waste, ranging from phones
to electric-vehicle batteries, LED screens and solar panels. Their
starting-point is an AI -assisted robot that can disassemble old
desktop PC s, many of which are more than a decade old.

The first thing the team’s robot does is identify any product it is
offered. A camera photographs the item and compares the snap with
pictures of different PC s. The robot also scans any labels and product
codes to check whether service manuals or other disassembly tips
are available online. It can search for other clues, in much the same
way ChatGPT might, when asked a similar question, turn up videos
posted online by people who have done the job before. All this
information is analysed and stored in the robot’s memory, where it
can be updated and used for reference the next time such a product
comes into the recycling centre.

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Once the identification is complete, the AI system then determines
which components are worth removing, either in the form of raw
materials or as complete parts to be refurbished and used again. It
also checks the integrity of rivets, screws and other fasteners,
because years of wear, tear and repair mean some parts may need
to be cut out. Analysis done, the AI generates a disassembly
sequence to operate the robot’s arms. These are equipped with a
selection of tools, such as drills, grippers and screwdrivers, to
remove and sort items.

So far, the team has got each stage in the disassembly process
working in separate machines. They are now linking these together
into a single robotic device able to complete the whole process.

Once dismantling PC s has been mastered the team will train robots
to tackle other products. The learning process will take time. Dr
Saenz thinks it could be five years until they develop a commercial
disassembly robot that could usefully work at a recycling centre
taking apart anything from PC s to white goods and televisions. Firms
that want to recycle their own, limited range of products could
probably put together something more quickly.

A multi-purpose robot would probably be popular, since companies

are under increasingly fierce legislative pressure to take
responsibility for the end-of-life management of their products,
either directly or by employing specialists to recycle for them. The
rise of smarter spanner-wielding robots, therefore, should encourage
more firms to ensure their products are useful in death, as they were
in life. ■

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Oil’s well that ends well

Old fossil-fuel plants are

becoming green-energy hubs
The dirtiest parts of the energy system could help build the cleanest
8月 21, 2025 08:04 上午

FOR MORE than a decade the Tamaya power station in the Atacama
desert in northern Chile powered its local region using diesel. Today
a shimmering array of solar panels stands in place of the dirty
generator. Engie, the French utility that owns the power station,
converted it into a solar-energy and battery-storage plant earlier this
year. Juan Villavicencio, the company’s boss in Chile, describes the
site as a place where “the past and future of energy infrastructure
meet”.

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Others share his vision. Developers, governments, startups and
utilities around the world are turning former fossil-fuel power
stations, and old oil and gas wells, into renewable-energy plants and
testbeds for green technology. This way the relics of the fossil-fuel
era will be put to good use. “It makes no sense to just throw [them]
away,” says Arash Dahi Taleghani, an engineer at Pennsylvania State
University.

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Social Media Pakistan 0342-4938217
According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
(CEIP ), a think-tank, there are around 170 ongoing or completed
projects to transform old fossil-fuel power stations into renewable-
energy plants (see map). The trend is spreading across the world,
says Milo McBride, a research fellow at the CEIP . China, for instance,
recently announced its first project—parts of the Baotou coal power
plant in Inner Mongolia will be turned over to wind and solar
generation, as well as battery storage.

The sites offer connections to the grid, which can save developers
looking to get renewable-energy projects online lengthy delays.
Researchers led by Umed Paliwal at the University of California,
Berkeley, have found that 1,000 gigawatts (GW ) could be added to
the American grid capacity if renewable-energy projects were
hooked up to existing fossil-fuel plants and probably more if retired
sites were exploited. According to the International Energy Agency,
an official body, renewable-energy projects that could generate
about 3,000 gigawatts (GW) worldwide are waiting for a grid
connection. Repurposing could help resolve that issue.

Old oil and gas wells could also be attractive. A study by Mary Kang
at McGill University found that most idle wells in America and
Canada might be suitable for at least some kind of geothermal-
energy production. Benjamin Burke, the boss of Gradient
Geothermal, an American startup, says that the cost of drilling a new
well deep enough to host the technology can be prohibitive. Using
old wells is comparably cheap, even if their location and build are
more suited to oil and gas production.

Yet repurposing facilities presents challenges. Some former fossil-

fuel sites are too compact to host vast wind and solar farms. Many
will not be able to generate as much power as they did before.
Around 35% of projects in CEIP ’s database partly or wholly deploy
technologies that produce carbon emissions, such as bioenergy
(burning organic matter to produce heat) and hydrogen blending
(mixing green hydrogen with natural gas).

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What’s more, regulatory roadblocks may limit progress. Alexandra
Klass and Hannah Wiseman, legal scholars at the University of
Michigan and Penn State Law, say that obtaining permits to develop
brownfield sites in America is often costlier than getting permits for
pristine land. And, although some support may exist at state level,
President Donald Trump has axed federal renewable-energy tax
credits that reduced the cost of repurposing.

Nevertheless, demand for more ambitious green projects should

continue to grow. Over the next 15 years, 300GW of coal power
capacity is set to be retired around the world, and the cost of
producing renewable energy could fall by up to 49%, according to
BloombergNEF , a data provider. Other countries have created a more
nurturing environment than America. Keith Hirsche, founder of
RenuWell Energy Solutions, a renewable-energy company, says
Canadian authorities fast-tracked his firm’s permit to build because it
was on a brownfield site. In Indonesia the national energy-transition
strategy includes plans to transform old fossil-fuel assets. Many more
plants will soon be pumping out green power. ■

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Well informed

Should you use a standing

desk?
The benefits are real, but seem to vary with age
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

THE HUMAN body evolved to forage and hunt on the African

savannahs, not to sit in a cubicle all day. The risks associated with
sitting—from increased blood-sugar levels to greater odds of dying
from cancer—lead many health authorities to warn against spending
too much time doing so. The sit-to-stand desk is a popular way of
helping people get upright. But how effective is it?

Several arguments are made in its favour. As standing makes the

heart work harder, proponents say it improves cardiovascular health,

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enhances attention and reduces fatigue. Physiotherapists claim that
standing also improves posture, reducing lower back pain. Some
studies even suggest that standing workers report lower stress and
greater happiness than sitters do.

Dozens of studies have been run on the potential health effects of

sit-stand desks. A recent review, led by María Eugenia Visier-Alfonso
at University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain and published in BMC
Public Health in May, selected 17 for examination. Dr Visier-Alfonso
limited her analysis to those that looked mainly at university
students.

Of the four studies that looked at mental health, three confirmed

that sit-stand desk use reduced anxiety and improved mood. Of the
four on back pain, however, only one revealed significant pain
reduction among sit-stand desk users compared with control groups.
The one study Dr Visier-Alfonso found that looked at the
cardiovascular and metabolic benefits of sit-stand desks suggested
that they do result in users having lower blood pressure. (The
remainder mostly looked at academic outcomes, which were mixed.)

Studies conducted on more varied groups reach different

conclusions. A general review of over 50 papers on sit-stand desk
use, led by April Chambers at the University of Pittsburgh and
published in Applied Ergonomics in 2019, found only weak evidence
that their use improves cardiovascular health.

The heart rates of sit-stand desk users were 7.5-13.7 beats per
minute faster on average than those of people at ordinary desks,
indicating that they might be working harder. But the studies that
examined the question found no notable differences in blood
pressure or VO 2 (the efficiency with which the body transports
oxygen to the muscles).

Analysis of other health-related biomarkers, like glucose, insulin and

cholesterol, were also no different in most studies. This suggested

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that the desks were not providing metabolic benefits that might, say,
stave off diseases like type 2 diabetes. Improvements in levels of
energy and attention among those who used sit-stand desks were
similarly difficult to spot. What’s more, Dr Chambers found no
evidence that their use influenced mood.

However, notable benefits did emerge in the area of lower-back pain.

Of 17 papers that studied this question, eight revealed evidence that
giving participants the option to stand significantly reduced their
lower-back pain (the remaining nine showed no clear effect). This
suggests that standing may help some people with this condition, an
effect that may be more noticeable among people past university
age.

So what is the aching desk jockey to do? Both reviews agree that no
significant harm is associated with the use of sit-stand desks. And
although some of the differences between their conclusions may
stem from chance or sample size, it is also possible that different
benefits accrue to users of different ages. ■

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Culture
Covid-19 sent the world mad
A plague on both your houses :: The pandemic polarised voters and undermined trust
in institutions

How publishers became scared of books

Censory deprivation :: In “That Book is Dangerous!” Adam Szetela argues that the
industry has become Orwellian

How Rajinikanth, a 74-year-old actor,

drives fans into a frenzy
A man called “Superstar” :: Indian crowds greet his new film with prayer, confetti and
milk

High priests: why scientists gave magic

mushrooms to the clergy
Drugs and religiosity :: An experiment looked at how religious folk responded to
psychedelic drugs

An anonymous chef serves up stories of

food and flings
Steamy stuff :: “Tart”, a new memoir, is a woman’s take on “Kitchen Confidential”

Farewell to Carrie Bradshaw, TV’s

exasperating, enduring heroine
High-heeled shoes to fill :: She made viewers cross. But “Sex and the City” was unlike
anything that had come before

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A plague on both your houses

Covid-19 sent the world mad

The pandemic polarised voters and undermined trust in institutions
8月 21, 2025 05:06 上午

In Covid’s Wake. By Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee. Princeton

University Press; 392 pages; $29.95 and £25

Summer of Our Discontent. By Thomas Chatterton Williams.

Knopf; 272 pages; $30. Constable; £20

PANDEMICS DO NOT just sicken and kill. They have political and
economic effects, too. After the Black Death wiped out a third of the
people in Europe, fake news proliferated: rumours that the plague
was caused by Jews poisoning the wells led to pogroms. Wages
soared (because there were too few labourers) and rents collapsed

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(because so many homes were empty). Rulers tried brute force to
block change, banning farmworkers from leaving their lord’s land to
go and work for another who paid better. But this provoked
uprisings, such as the Peasants’ Revolt in England in 1381, an
impulse that ultimately led to the end of serfdom in most of Europe.

Covid-19 was less deadly. But two recent books argue that it, too,
had far-reaching and unexpected consequences. It fed a global
surge in inflation, a breakdown of trust in experts and an
aggravation of political polarisation.

Before covid, few scientists believed that ordering people to wear

masks or stay at home could stop the spread of a virus that passed
easily from human to human, assert Stephen Macedo and Frances
Lee of Princeton University in “In Covid’s Wake”. Lockdowns are hard
to sustain and immensely costly. Yet when the novel coronavirus
emerged in China, the Chinese government imposed draconian
lockdowns, which it claimed were highly successful. The World
Health Organisation accepted this. Lockdowns swiftly became
conventional wisdom around the world.

It is unclear how well lockdowns worked. China suppressed the virus

by occasionally shutting down whole neighbourhoods, sometimes
bolting people into their apartments. But even these controls failed
when the highly infectious Omicron variant required more extensive
lockdowns, leading to protests in 2022. Because the government had
not vaccinated enough people, when controls were lifted between
1m and 2m people died.

Rich democracies could not hope to enforce lockdowns as brutally,

but most closed bars, restaurants and schools, banned large
gatherings and encouraged people to work from home. This hurt the
poor more than the rich. The laptop-tapping class, including the
people who made covid policy, could work from their comfortable
homes. Drivers and factory hands, by contrast, had to go out to

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work, even as schools ceased to look after their children. Multitudes
of service workers were laid off.

The sacrifice was necessary to save lives, politicians claimed. New

York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, put it pithily: “Economic hardship?
Yes, very bad. Not death. Emotional stress, from being locked in a
house? Very bad. Not death.” Leaders insisted they were “following
the science”, meaning the advice of public-health experts. But such
experts tend to focus on minimising the harms caused by disease.
They are not experts on the trade-offs between covid deaths and
economic losses, children missing school or locked-down populations
becoming lonely and depressed. Consideration of such trade-offs
was “systematically swept aside in 2020-21”, fume Ms Lee and Mr
Macedo. “This was plainly irrational.”

Rich-country governments borrowed huge sums to pay furloughed

workers or send out cheques. Direct federal spending on covid relief
in America was $5trn, equivalent to a quarter of GDP in 2020. The
spending binge exacerbated a global surge in inflation, which
infuriated voters and eventually spurred many to vote for Donald
Trump in 2024. Poor countries fared even worse. As lockdowns
crushed economic activity, global poverty rose for the first time in a
generation.

It is hard to show that lockdowns saved many lives, though many

scientists believe they did. People may take precautions without
being forced, or kick against compulsion. Sweden never mandated
masks or staying at home, and kept most schools open. To protect
the old, Swedes were advised not to visit nursing homes. The New
York Times called Sweden a “pariah”. Yet its excess-death rate after
a year of covid was one of the lowest in Europe. In America states
that locked down hard fared no better on this score than those that
did not—that is, until vaccines arrived. Then their excess-death rates
diverged sharply; Ms Lee and Mr Macedo suggest this is because the
states that refused to lock down also included a lot of vaccine
sceptics.

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Public opinion was guided less by evidence than by partisanship,
especially in America. Democrats were more likely to believe in
lockdowns and vaccines; Republicans in neither. In Democratic states
“people routinely cycled and jogged outside with masks on,” the
authors observe. Schools in those states stayed closed far longer
than those in Republican ones, causing students to fall behind and
reducing their future earnings potential. People in Republican states
avoided such folly but were more likely to die because they refused
to get jabbed. Of the 25 states with lower than median vaccination
rates, 19 had Republican governors.

The certainty and ferocity with which the two camps disagreed is
hard to overstate. In “Summer of Our Discontent” Thomas
Chatterton Williams, a journalist, explores how partisans of left and
right stopped listening to each other and came to regard the other
side as morally beyond the pale. When the state of Georgia decided
to ease lockdowns early, the Atlantic, a liberal magazine, called it an
“experiment with human sacrifice”.

And then, in May 2020, George Floyd, a black man, was choked to
death by a cop who suspected him of using a forged $20 bill.
Suddenly it was every progressive’s moral duty to join crowds
decrying racism and police brutality. “In the space of two weeks, and
without really thinking it through, we went from shaming people for
being in the street to shaming them for not being in the street,”
writes Mr Williams. “How could this not feel like gaslighting?”

Mr Williams speculates that Floyd might never have got into trouble
had he not been one of the 40m Americans out of work because of
covid restrictions. (He was a bouncer in a club that was closed.) Mr
Williams complains that progressives often accepted such measures
with “stunning blitheness”.

The pandemic stress-tested institutions everywhere. Some, such as

vaccine-makers and the supply chains that filled supermarket
shelves, covered themselves with glory. Others, not so much. Public-

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health authorities were far too confident in their pronouncements
about a new disease, the understanding of which was, inevitably,
evolving. As Francis Collins, a former director of America’s National
Institutes of Health, later put it: “We failed to say every time there
was a recommendation, guys, this is the best we can do right now.
It’s a good chance this is wrong…That was a profound mistake, and
we lost a lot of credibility.”

Governments enacted “the greatest mobilisation of emergency

powers in human history”, and suppressed speech that opposed it.
America’s 50 states, all confronting the same problem in different
ways, should have been the “laboratories of democracy”, learning
from each other. But they were not. Instead, red and blue politicians
and voters retreated into cocoons of self-righteous certainty.

A chronic condition

Ms Lee and Mr Macedo conclude that the world needed “a more

honest politics of crisis policymaking…a greater willingness to
acknowledge [doubt], and recognition of the reasonableness of
people with varying views”. Instead, the pandemic bred partisan
rancour, intolerance and bad policies, vigorously applied. Anders
Tegnell, the architect of Sweden’s uniquely relaxed covid policy, put
it best. Looking at how other countries were responding, he said:
“The world has gone mad.” ■

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controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only
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Censory deprivation

How publishers became

scared of books
In “That Book is Dangerous!” Adam Szetela argues that the industry
has become Orwellian
8月 21, 2025 03:34 上午

That Book Is Dangerous! By Adam Szetela. MIT Press; 288 pages;

$29.95 and £27

THE RULES of Oceania in George Orwell’s “1984” were clear: “Not

even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant
subject can be tolerated.” Any book that carried the wrong line “had
to be rectified at lightning speed”. Only things that would not disturb
the minds of the populace were allowed, since the “best books” are

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“those that tell you what you know already”. It is an idea that some
readers took to heart: in 2022 a British university added a “trigger
warning” to “1984”, alerting readers to the presence of racism,
sexism and “political ideas”.

An engaging book by Adam Szetela, a journalist, also tells you what

you already know: that something silly is happening in publishing.
The world is not Oceania, but it is not good: in American libraries in
2024, 2,452 titles were targeted for censorship. In 2020 employees
of the New York Times demanded sensitivity readers. Journalists
were told to snitch on each other: if an opinion piece gave them “the
slightest pause” they should “call or text” the editor “immediately”.
In Britain James Bond has been bowdlerised and filthsome bits
excised from Roald Dahl. It is rotsome.

Quite why this has happened is complicated. Partly publishing had a

genuine problem. The literary world was, for a long time, not very
diverse: in America in 1985, just 18 of 2,500 books were by black
authors or illustrators. When Zadie Smith, a British novelist, was
growing up she searched books for “some form of cultural reflection”
but found “only distorted mirrors [or] monstrous cliché”.

The “solution” has proved worse than the problem: it has meant
conniptions, cancellations and the absurd strictures of sensitivity
readers. (One rapped an author’s knuckles for having a black
character visit a national park, for that “is not a thing we do, as a
group”.) It has also resulted in bad books, such as “Was the Cat in
the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature”. Sermons
were a popular literary form in the 19th century. Sermonising is in
fashion in the 21st.

The over-correction happened, in part, because the barriers to entry

for the argument industry have tumbled. When Daniel Defoe wrote
something people did not like, he had to be put in the pillory: that
sort of insult took time, commitment and carrots. By the 20th
century, the cost of insulting someone had dropped, but was still

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there: you’d write a rude letter, read it over then, as the author
David Sedaris noted, think “Is this really worth a twenty-five-cent
stamp?” Email allowed you to insult authors for nothing; social
media mean you can now publicly insult them for the same. People
vent their spleen on Instagram and X in an online version of Orwell’s
“Two Minutes Hate” ritual.

The solution to all this is, says Mr Szetela, to speak out—or you are
“guilty” too, like those who passively watch book-burnings in Ray
Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”. In this comprehensive (if at times too
polemical) book he practises what he preaches. Expect it to cause
conniptions online. ■

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A man called “Superstar”

How Rajinikanth, a 74-year-

old actor, drives fans into a
frenzy
Indian crowds greet his new film with prayer, confetti and milk
8月 21, 2025 03:34 上午 | MUMBAI

FOR FANS of Rajinikanth, or Rajini, it is not enough to simply buy a

ticket to one of his films and turn up at the right time and place. No;
preparations begin days in advance. Ahead of his latest release,
“Coolie”, on August 14th, some fans prostrated themselves in front
of shrines, seeking a divine blessing for the Indian actor. Others
bathed giant cardboard cutouts of him in milk, a sign of reverence
usually reserved for Hindu gods.

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When a trailer for “Coolie” was released on August 2nd, it racked up
25m views in two weeks. (The term is derogatory in the West, but is
not considered offensive in South Asia.) On the day of the film’s
debut, cinemas had a carnival feel, with drumming and confetti. A
few devotees flew to India from countries as far as Australia for the
occasion.

In a packed cinema in Mumbai, patrons whistled and hollered from

the moment his sobriquet “Superstar” appeared on screen.
(Projectionists sometimes pause the film after his grand entrance to
let viewers offer prayers from their seats or to hurl coins and
banknotes.) “This is nothing. You should go to Tamil Nadu or
Karnataka,” says one fan. “You won’t be able to hear his dialogue.”

Rajinikanth—whose real name is Shivaji Rao Gaekwad—is one of the

biggest movie stars in the world, inspiring the kind of devotion that
most Hollywood actors can only dream of. “Coolie”, a Tamil gangster
flick, marks his 50th year on screen. Rajini plays a dockyard worker
and union leader who investigates the death of a friend, which
draws him into a criminal underworld. Along the way, he wields
swords, knives and guns. He shows what he can do with his fists
and his wits.

The role hints at Rajinikanth’s humble beginnings. Born to a poor

family in Bangalore, he discovered a love of acting at school and
would perform folk tales for rapt classmates. As a young adult, he
did manual jobs—hauling rice sacks for ten paise apiece (equivalent
to 1.3 cents in 1970, and 0.12 cents today)—and worked as a bus
conductor. Later he studied acting at the Madras Film Institute.

To begin with he got only bit parts and often played baddies. But in
“Bairavi” (1978) he portrayed an honourable servant who avenges
his sister’s murder. Thereafter, in blockbusters such as “Naan
Mahaan Alla” (1984), “Baashha” (1995) and “Padayappa” (1999), he
starred as the swashbuckling hero.

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Rajini is not a method actor, nor a Bollywood beefcake. At 74, his
lustrous hair has become a tonsured style flecked with grey. So what
explains fans’ fervour?

One reason is his everyman appeal. He dresses plainly and shuns

big-brand endorsements. He has a self-deprecating sense of humour.
In a recent speech he joked about having warned his young
choreographer not to overtax “a 1950s model” lest “parts start
falling off”.

Another, somewhat paradoxical, reason is Rajini’s superhero-like

qualities. He is known for his physics-defying antics: in one film, he
catches a knife between his teeth. In “Coolie” he dials a phone with
one hand while fending off a blade, then floors five goons with a
single punch that sends them flying in all directions. The key to
enjoying Rajinikanth’s work, one moviegoer says, is not overthinking
it: “Leave your brain at home.”

Like all the biggest stars, Rajini has a certain magnetism. One punter
says the actor’s “aura is unmatched”. For a time he hoped to use
that charisma in the political arena. Rajini tried to launch a new

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party in 2020, but withdrew after a health scare he called a “warning
given to me by the Lord”.

Most important, Rajinikanth’s work is suitable for all ages. Three

generations filled the cinema in Mumbai. People across India and in
the diaspora have grown up watching him as he has made films in
Tamil, Telugu, Hindi and Kannada.

For the most part, the Rajini fandom is harmless. On his birthdays
admirers organise meal donations and charity collections. But
sometimes affection tips over into frenzy. “We are really tense the
night before any Rajinikanth film release,” admits one official in “For
The Love of a Man”, a documentary of 2015. This year police in
Chennai confiscated firecrackers from fans. His acolytes expect
action, but will not tolerate evisceration. “Twice is okay, but if villains
beat him a third time, the theatre might burn,” warns an admirer.

Most actors fear their powers diminishing with time: if anything,

Rajinikanth’s are increasing, even after 170 films. “Coolie” took $17m
at the global box office on its first day, setting a new record for Tamil
cinema. Rajini still packs a punch. ■

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Drugs and religiosity

High priests: why scientists

gave magic mushrooms to the
clergy
An experiment looked at how religious folk responded to psychedelic
drugs
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

SOME PEOPLE think of their hounds as heavenly, sporting T -shirts

proclaiming that “‘Dog’ is ‘God’ spelled backwards.” For Jeff Vidt, God
actually was a dog: the Lord came to him as a Great Dane.
Meanwhile, Jaime Clark-Soles glimpsed the deity as a harp-playing
woman. Sughra Ahmed felt the Almighty as a concept: love.

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These divine encounters occurred at Johns Hopkins University,
Maryland, during an experimental study investigating how “the
effects of psilocybin”—the active ingredient in magic mushrooms—
“are experienced and interpreted by religious clergy”. The 29
participants came from Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and Judaism
and were “psychedelic-naive”: ie, they had never dabbled in these
drugs before. They took psilocybin on two occasions; there was a
waiting-list control group.

The sample size may be small, but the findings, recently published in
the Journal of Psychedelic Medicine, are mighty clear: 96% of
participants ranked a psilocybin trip in the top five most spiritually
significant moments of their lives and 42% declared it the single
most profound experience they had ever had. (A recent study in
Sweden also found that 58% of people found a psychedelic
experience to be one of the most meaningful events of their lives.)
Almost half described their trips as “psychologically challenging”, but
none reported severely adverse effects.

Psychedelics change the way the default mode network (DMN ) in the
brain works. These linked parts of the brain are activated when
people muse on the past, present or heavenly future. Psychedelics
switch some of the DMN off at the same time as they activate other
neural pathways, all of which allows for new ways of thinking.
Scientists are exploring how psilocybin may help treat depression
and post-traumatic stress disorder.

More than a year after the study, participants reported a deeper

connection to their faith and improved prayer. Hunt Priest, an
Episcopalian, felt an electric current in his spine; it stopped at his
throat before exploding out of his head. The blockage was
“connected to my preaching”: “I felt restricted in what I could say.”
He has “never thought of the Holy Spirit the same again”. Roger
Joslin, also an Episcopalian, says: “There’s my life before
psychedelics and my life afterwards.”

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Yet such spirituality is unlikely to please traditionalists, who argue
that true faith is the product of discipline, not mind-bending drugs.
Some may worry that these experiences threaten religious
institutions: who would rather sit in a dusty pew than fly with the
angels? As Mr Vidt, an Anglican priest, put it: “I don’t believe in God:
I know God. I experienced God.”

Psilocybin also seems to promote the kind of universalism that

religious authorities have spent centuries trying to contain. Mr Priest
says he prayed as a Jew, then a Muslim; Julie Danan, a rabbi,
chanted “Shalom” next to Hindus saying “Om”. “It’s hard to imagine
having a psychedelic experience that made someone more narrow or
exclusionary in their faith,” says Mr Joslin. “It’s likely to broaden it.”
This may bother religious authorities who must advance their own
faith as superior to others.

Advocates argue that drugs are a conduit to the sorts of mystical

things that are described in scripture, such as multi-headed beasts.
“The whole Book of Revelation is a visionary journey,” says Ms Clark-
Soles, a Baptist minister. “Christianity is fundamentally based on a
mystical experience: the resurrection of a dead guy.”

Ms Clark-Soles is writing a book called “Psychedelics and Soul Care:

What Christians Need to Know”. Several of the study’s participants
have set up organisations aimed at exploring the benefits psilocybin
can offer believers. Mr Priest established Ligare, a “Christian
psychedelic society”; Zac Kamenetz, a rabbi, launched Shefa to
support Jews; Ms Ahmed, an imam, created Ruhani for Muslims.
Some feel the Religious Freedom Act should protect institutions in
America offering drugs for spiritual purposes. Talk about a higher
calling. ■

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Steamy stuff

An anonymous chef serves up

stories of food and flings
“Tart”, a new memoir, is a woman’s take on “Kitchen Confidential”
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

Tart. By Slutty Cheff. Marysue Rucci Books; 336 pages; $28.99.

Bloomsbury; £16.99

SLUTTY CHEFF , an anonymous female cook, has a confession: she is

greedy. She doesn’t “want to eat” food so much as “devour” it. Her
appetite is less that of an “average Western woman” and more akin
to that of “a starved pig”. But, as her alias indicates, there is one
thing she claims to desire even more than food: sex.

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“Tart”, her memoir, is a hedonistic tale of both. In the book Slutty (as
her friends call her) recounts the first two years of her career as a
chef, mostly in posh London restaurants. She peeks into the
“socialite chef” world, which is “elitist, exclusive” and “more about
who you know, not what you cook”. She discovers a lot about
herself, for instance when she realises “I love cooking—I need
cooking.” She also discovers a lot about—quelle surprise—sex.
Intercourse with a chef, she proclaims, is “more thrilling than being
one”.

Fans are eating up her tales. She serves salacious morsels to her
tens of thousands of followers on Instagram and to readers of her
column in British Vogue. The film and television rights to “Tart” have
already been gobbled up by Working Title, one of the production
companies that made the “Bridget Jones” films. There are rumours
that Lena Dunham, the creator of the hit show “Girls”, will help
adapt the book for the screen.

“Tart” is dining out on the popularity of sexy chefs on screen and

online. “The Bear”, a TV show which stars Jeremy Allen White as a
moody chef who wants to turn a sandwich shop into a Michelin-
starred restaurant, has helped professional cooks seem more sultry
than sweaty. In “Emily in Paris”, a hit series, there is a love triangle
involving a hunky chef. On social media so-called “hot chefs” sauté,
sear and smoulder for the camera, often without their shirts on.

The memoir has been lauded as a feminine take on Anthony

Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” (2000). The American chef and
author also stunned and delighted readers by sharing tantalising
stories. (One memorable tale involved a blushing bride getting “an
impromptu send-off” from a cook behind the kitchen bins.) Slutty
Cheff has spoken of her lust for the rebellious culinarian. In “Tart”
she says she imagines Bourdain—who took his own life in 2018,
aged 61—joining her “for four hours of carnal feasting, seven bottles
of wine, a couple of lines of crushed aspirin and then a great big
fuck”.

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In her acknowledgments, the author pays homage to Bourdain, as
well as Jilly Cooper, the British queen of the bonkbuster novel. Ms
Cooper’s influence is evident. Just consider Slutty Cheff’s contents
page. Whereas Bourdain used the sleek, inscrutable subheadings of
“Appetiser”, followed by “First Course” and so on, she prefers smutty
titles such as “Michelin Star Pussy Juice” and “Ready Steady
Cock”. She spends a great deal of time describing the “phallic form”
of courgettes and the “great erection” of rhubarb.

“Kitchen Confidential” aimed to lift the lid on the restaurant industry.

Bourdain wrote of how butter is reused and uneaten bread is often
sent out to the next table. Seafood served on Mondays, he averred,
is probably four or five days old; hollandaise sauce swims with
bacteria. Readers finished the book feeling satisfied that they knew
more about what (and what not) to order next time they went out to
eat.

“Tart”, meanwhile, is mostly a romp. Slutty Cheff does not dish up

such insights. The kitchens she works in seem clean and hygienic:
the most nauseating it gets is the description of “the flashing grey of
a mouse running past my feet”. She takes drugs and has sex outside
the kitchen rather than in it.

The most revealing passages are not about sex, but sexual
harassment. Slutty Cheff is often the only woman in the kitchen. She
describes the challenges of working with a “pervy” man who touches
her bottom and stands so close that she can “feel his breath”. She
has to appear “strong and unaffected”, she feels, to earn the respect
of her male peers. “Tart” offers a slice of life, but such experiences
leave a bitter taste in the reader’s mouth. ■

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High-heeled shoes to fill

Farewell to Carrie Bradshaw,

TV’s exasperating, enduring
heroine
She made viewers cross. But “Sex and the City” was unlike anything
that had come before
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午 | NEW YORK

CARRIE BRADSHAW has skipped across Manhattan in Manolo Blahniks

for the last time. On August 14th “And Just Like That…” (“AJLT ”)
broadcast its final episode and so bid farewell to Carrie, almost 30
years after she first appeared on television screens in “Sex and the
City” (“SATC ”). In the debut episode, Carrie lamented the dearth of
“great unmarried men” in New York; over the course of six seasons

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of “SATC ”, two films and three seasons of “AJLT ”, she received
proposals (and called one engagement off), got stood up at the
altar, got married, was widowed and had umpteen flings and
flirtations. All the while, Carrie was establishing her reputation as
one of the most infuriating yet influential heroines ever to appear on
screen.

She caused a stir from the beginning. Carrie and her coterie first
appeared in 1994 in a racy, semi-autobiographical newspaper
column written by Candace Bushnell for the New York Observer. It
gained a following fast, though detractors dismissed Ms Bushnell as
a low-rate gossip who made stuff up. “My characters exist,” she
retorted. “Go to enough parties, and you’ll meet all of them.”

Those characters—four sparky, single women—arrived on screen in

1998. There was Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), the stressed-out lawyer,
Charlotte (Kristin Davis), the hyper-polished WASP , and Samantha
(Kim Cattrall), the sexually voracious publicist. But the show’s centre
was Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), a journalist and bon vivant with a
penchant for terrible puns. Together they broached topics that had
not really been dealt with on TV before, including abortions, fetishes
and fertility.

Much of “SATC ” did not feel particularly plausible. All the women in
the show looked impeccable all the time. Carrie lived alone in an
apartment on the Upper East Side while turning out one column a
week; she somehow had money left over for designer shoes and
lavish dinners.

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Viewers were happy to overlook that, but they often found Carrie
vexing. She was spoiled: in one episode she ordered Charlotte to
give her $30,000 as a down-payment for her apartment. She was
judgmental: she scorned Samantha for giving a blowjob to a delivery
man. And she was blinkered: she had dire taste in partners. Her love
for “Mr Big”—an emotionally unavailable financier with the prosaic
name of John—led her to behave erratically.

Nonetheless, it was impossible not to be drawn in by the quartet’s

dynamic. Miranda was acerbic. When Samantha was not bedding
handsome men, she was turning out Wildean phrases. (“I’m a
trisexual,” she declares: “I’ll try anything once.”) Charlotte was
sentimental. “Maybe we could be each other’s soulmates?” she asks
her friends as her marriage disintegrates. Most viewers secretly
wished they were at the table, a Cosmopolitan in hand.

The show was a hit. It was nominated for 54 Emmys, winning seven.
Various celebrities made cameos: Donald Trump appeared in an
episode entitled “The Man, the Myth, the Viagra”. More than 10m
people tuned in to watch Carrie fall into Big’s arms in the finale in

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2004. The films, released in 2008 and 2010, together made over
$1bn at the box office in today’s money.

“AJLT ” tried to fix some of the shortcomings of “SATC ”. Its best-

written characters were black, a refreshing change from the notably
white original, and it attempted to grapple with modern debates
about sexuality. There were some moving moments as Carrie,
Miranda and Charlotte navigated midlife and its crises. (Samantha
did not return, to the show’s detriment.) But it was a peculiar reboot
which never recaptured the charm of the original. The writers
seemed particularly unsure about what to do with Carrie after Big’s
death.

All the same, Carrie Bradshaw struck a nerve in a generation of

women. She has inspired fashion trends, internet memes and
thinkpieces, from takedowns (Elle: “Carrie Bradshaw Is Still Full of
Shit”) to fierce defences (the Atlantic: “No, Carrie Bradshaw Was Not
‘Such a Whore’”). Even when she was perplexing, there was
something admirable about her determination to live her life on her
own terms. Many fans won’t help but wonder: why is breaking up
with a fictional character so hard? ■

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Economic & financial indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets
Indicators ::

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Indicators

Economic data, commodities

and markets
8月 21, 2025 03:35 上午

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Obituary
Terence Stamp preferred philosophy to
celebrity
The most beautiful man in the world :: The film face of the 1960s died on August
17th, aged 87

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The most beautiful man in the world

Terence Stamp preferred

philosophy to celebrity
The film face of the 1960s died on August 17th, aged 87
8月 21, 2025 05:06 上午

AS HE STOOD on his mark, sunshine fell softly on his blond curls.

Around him, beyond the deck of HMS Avenger, the waves sparkled.
Beside him, in a slight breeze, the noose swayed. Sometimes it
touched his face. Mutinous sailors thronged the lower deck,
watching. He, Billy Budd, a saintly young crewman, was about to be
unjustly hanged. And he was at peace, the script said.

How could he play a scene like that? He struggled to remember

what Anthony Newley, another working-class actor like him, had told

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him. Empty head. Get rid of all the thoughts. He couldn’t do it; they
kept coming. But then, suddenly, a song popped up from nowhere:
“Little Dolly Daydream, pride of Idaho...” and he was full of another
feeling. Lying on a rug in front of a coal fire at his Granny Kate’s
house in Barking Road, doing his homework, while out in the scullery
she would be making him a marmalade sandwich and singing. This
was a feeling beyond thinking, a strange otherness, and at the
premiere of “Billy Budd” in 1962, it left not a dry eye in the house.
He had nailed it in one take.

That film shot Terence Stamp to fame, winning him at 24 an Oscar

nomination. After that it was a film a year: “The Collector” (a
psychopathic butterfly collector pinning down Samantha Eggar),
“Modesty Blaise” (a Cockney sidekick to a comic-book heroine), “Far
From the Madding Crowd” (arch-cad Sergeant Troy ensnaring
Bathsheba), “Poor Cow” (a bank robber with a tender side). He
became one of the icons of the 1960s, all wide eyes and good
cheekbones, and one of the voices too, confidently Cockney. His
girlfriends were Jean Shrimpton and Julie Christie, both epitomes of
class and style. David Bailey photographed him. He filmed in
America, smoking peyote and a lot of Acapulco Gold. He worked
with William Wyler and John Schlesinger. Best of all, in 1968
Federico Fellini chose him as his leading man.

It was all a bit surprising really. He didn’t actually think he looked

that good. Clothes were fun, and he had always been mad about
them, dragging his mum all over the market looking for the right
jacket, dreaming of custom-made shoes. But his face? “The most
beautiful man in the world” was mostly the creation of the lighting
designer on “Billy Budd”, Robert Krasker, who had lit “The Third
Man”. Film could do that. And this was something he had known
ever since he was three, sitting with his mum in the one-and-
ninepenny seats at the Old Grand and watching Gary Cooper play
Beau Geste: cinema was magic.

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People often thought there was something magical about him, too.
Or, at least, intensely strange. Or mesmerising, like the terrifying
sabre-whirling display he put on for Julie Christie in “Far From the
Madding Crowd”. (All the scarier because he, a leftie, was made to
do them right-handed.) Brooding silences were also his speciality.
The thing was, he was fascinated by acting and how it was done
well. In “Billy Budd” he had sent his feelings directly to the audience
without needing words. Their minds had met in a sort of empty but
conscious space. And what this had seemed to require from him was
to be absolutely present in the moment. Not observing his thoughts,
not worrying about direction, but giving his purest self to the
audience and bringing out the best in them.

As an acting method, though, it was hard to achieve. He began to

consider it seriously when in 1968 he met Jiddu Krishnamurti in
Rome and went for a walk with him. Krishnamurti would keep
interrupting their chat to point out a tree, or a cloud. To an East End
spiv like him, that seemed weird. Later he realised that if he had not
noticed them too, it was because he was not yet fully in the
moment. That was what he had to work on. His longest attempt so
far, in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Teorema” (1968), was to play a divine
stranger who seduced an entire family as pure consciousness and
energy. Because he had no lines, he simply was.

In 1970 he went off to India, less to study than because, in a new

decade, directors wanted a younger face than his. Over seven years
in an ashram in Poona, in orange robes and on a macrobiotic diet,
he took up yoga and meditation and picked up advice on breathing
from Sufis he met. Yet a cable mentioning a role in Superman, and
the chance of working with Marlon Brando, got him home and in the
part in a trice, robes, beard and all. He needed no preparation. He
was awake now, and thought, I’ll just go with that.

The Superman films epitomised it. They not only revived his career
in a new age; they also gave him the chance to play an arch-villain,
General Zod, not as cartoon evil but as all-enveloping presence. In

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“Superman II” (1980), as he commanded America’s president to
“Kneel before Zod!” in the Oval Office, he was so purely aware that
he felt he had a Magnum strapped to his leg. The same “cognisant
emptiness” lay behind the desperate anger of a vengeful father in
“The Limey” (1999) and the serenity of trans Bernadette in “The
Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” (1994), instructing a
hostile bar-manager to blow her own box apart in the same level
tone as she had ordered a lime daiquiri.

By that time, he was in full awareness automatically between

“Action!” and “Cut!” This meant he was unafraid to tackle any role,
including, in “Priscilla”, that of a woman in the wrong body (and
dance it too, in crude lipstick and a lion’s mane of a wig). Outside
filming it was back to his dapper Cockney self, still with the accent of
Bow via Plaistow flavouring his talk, still with the great bone
structure, favouring black homburgs and pink linen suits and living in
the Albany while worrying about his bus fare. He kept meditation,
yoga and macrobiotics going. A macrobiotic diet made you stay
beautiful for ever.

Celebrity hadn’t really marked him. He’d mostly enjoyed it. You could
say his whole career had come from, and gone back to, that
moment when he had stood on HMS Avenger with the sun playing on
his peroxide curls, and realised there was nothing in his head but a
tender little ditty last heard in Barking Road, E 13. ■
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