For better and for worse IN JULY THE Bank of England announced that its new £50 note would carry a picture of Alan Turing, a British mathematician widely regarded as the intellectual father of computer science. Along with excerpts from a seminal paper in 1936 and a binary representation of his date of birth, the new …
Gay activists ponder how to respond to an event which aims to outrage them “IT’S HARDER to come out as conservative than gay,” complains David Elkins, a pensioner whose T-shirt reads “It’s OK to be white, straight, and male”. Luckily he found acceptance at Boston’s first straight-pride parade. Behind him a clown with a rainbow wig and green face-paint …
A former guerrilla leader has taken up arms again IT WAS A throwback to the bad old days. In a 32-minute video released on August 29th Iván Márquez, once the number-two commander of the FARC, a guerrilla group that waged war against the Colombian state for 52 years, announced that he was taking up arms again. Appearing …
The church is growing fast there, but it is difficult terrain for a liberal pontiff A YEAR AGO President Filipe Nyusi of Mozambique went to the Vatican and announced triumphantly that he had persuaded the pope to visit his country. Pope Francis retorted that he would make the trip in 2019—if he was still alive. This week …
The Communist Party hopes that the threat of violence will be enough to empty the streets AT THE PEAK of Kublai Khan’s empire-building career, his reputation for ferocity was such that Mongol armies conquered some cities with handwritten notes, wrapped around arrows and fired over the walls. A typical letter urged inhabitants to submit at once …
An indicative vote in Argentina’s presidential election suggested that the opposition, led by Alberto Fernández with the country’s previous president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (no relation), as his running-mate, would handily win the actual election in October. The Argentine peso shed a quarter of its value against the dollar and its main stockmarket fell by 37%. …
Turmoil at the city’s airport may have made China’s leaders even twitchier A TEN-WEEK-OLD political crisis in Hong Kong has taken a lurch for the worse. Flash-mob protests across the territory have led to a sharp increase in violence, with hardball tactics employed both by anti-government demonstrators and police. In an unprecedented move for Asia’s pre-eminent financial …
A mixed picture SUHEYLA REMEMBERS the day clearly. She had invited her children for dinner and was preparing her youngest son’s favourite stew. He never showed up. Neither did her four daughters. When none of them picked up the phone, she and her husband Lutfu understood what was happening. They rushed to a police station to …
In his second term, India’s prime minister is showing his statist side IN MAY CHAMPAGNE corks popped as Mumbai’s bankers, investors and industrialists feted the re-election of Narendra Modi as India’s prime minister. His Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s defeats in regional elections last autumn raised the possibility of a return to power of the left-leaning …
There is a simple reason for that THE TWO mass shootings within 24 hours of each other last weekend, one in El Paso, Texas, the other in Dayton, Ohio, were horrifying. Yet at the same time they were not surprising—at least in a purely statistical sense. So far this year America has averaged one shooting in …
After shootings in El Paso and Dayton, calls for change are unlikely to yield results THEY LOOKED like something out of Donald Trump’s fever dream: a bunch of burly, bearded, tattooed Latinos massed outside a blood bank wielding metal objects. But the objects were spoons and spatulas, and the men were Christians on a mission. Soon …
The harsh new measure will allow the United States to move against any company, or person, trading with the authoritarian regime AFTER THE axis of evil comes the “exclusive club of rogue nations”. That at least is how John Bolton, Donald Trump’s national security adviser, described Venezuela’s place in the world when he spoke on the …