Nigeria’s government wants to gag the press
IF NIGERIAN JOURNALISTS have misgivings about the government’s plan to grab more power to fine them and close media houses, it is with good reason. Many remember how in President Muhammadu Buhari’s first days in office as a military dictator in 1984, he passed Decree 4, which allowed him to close down newspaper houses and…
What Ebrahim Raisi’s election means for Iran and the nuclear deal
Jun 24th 2021EBRAHIM RAISI will not meet Joe Biden. Nor will he negotiate over Iran’s missile programme. And he’s certainly not going to stop supporting the militias that project Iranian influence in the region. Soon Mr Raisi will be president of Iran. At his first press conference since winning office the hardline cleric and former…
Central banks face up to the daunting task of quitting QE
Jul 4th 2021THE DEBATE over the effect on markets and the global economy of quantitative easing (QE), the purchase of bonds with newly created money, is almost akin to a culture war. To its critics unrestrained QE during the pandemic has covertly financed governments while inflating asset prices and boosting inequality. To its fans QE…
Economics needs to evolve
Jun 24th 2021NOT FOR the first time this century, the global economy is rebounding from crisis. The new normal will differ from the old one. The pandemic shifted resources around, destroyed firms, and subtly adjusted habits. The economy has evolved, in other words. Strangely, most economic models do not treat the economy as an evolving…
A political memoir has South Koreans asking whom politicians serve
Jun 24th 2021“IT IS LIKE dipping my pen in my family’s blood,” writes Cho Kuk in the opening lines of “Cho Kuk’s Time”. Mr Cho was forced to resign as South Korea’s justice minister in the autumn of 2019 after just 35 days in office, felled by a scandal that shook the government. In the…
One in nine Indonesian women marries before the age of 18
WHEN RASMINAH was 13 her parents forced her to abandon her education and get married to a man who was then 27. “I was heartbroken,” she says. “I would watch my friends leave for school every morning wishing that was my life.” When the marriage failed she was married again, aged 15, to a 40-year-old…
The promise of the African genome project
WHEN THE Mutambaras’ first son was a about 18 months old they began to worry about his hearing. The toddler did not respond when asked to “come to Mama”. He was soon diagnosed as deaf, though no doctor could tell the Zimbabwean couple the cause. Several years later their second son was also born deaf.Listen…
The long legacy of France’s nuclear tests in Algeria
Jun 24th 2021ABDELKRIM TOUHAMI was still a teenager when, on May 1st 1962, French officials in Algeria told him and his neighbours to leave their homes in the southern city of Tamanrasset. It was just a precaution. France was about to detonate an atom bomb, known as Beryl, in the desert some 150km away. The…