The ubiquity of MSG 
Target sighted, captain! 
SHEDDING kilos is harder than putting them on, which is why the weight-loss industry is so big. Its latest manifestation is online weight-management sites: social networks for the plump in which participants can set a target weight and monitor their progress towards it.As with other social networks, they can also get help from friends—either real-life ones who sign up to the same site, or else digital ones whom they have befriended on the internet. Those friendships are likely to be important. Other studies of weight-loss programmes have suggested that having the support (or chivvying) of friends helps people stick to their diets and exercise regimes.Those studies, however, have all been done with groups of people who knew each other in the real world. A team of researchers led by Julia Poncela-Casanovas of Northwestern University, in Illinois, decided to check if the same was true of groups in cyberspace. Their results, just published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, suggest that it is.Dr Poncela-Casanovas and her colleagues studied records from 47,026 visitors to an unnamed weight-management website. Such sites, it seems, are much like gyms in the real world, in that 40% of these people—around 19,000—visited once and never came back. Only 22,419 lasted long enough to weigh themselves at least twice. Of these, a mere 5,409 stayed the...
ON JANUARY 22nd KFC announced that its Japanese stores faced a shortage of potatoes. McDonald’s, too, rationed fries in Japan in December, despite an “emergency” airlift of nearly 1,000 tonnes of spuds. The cause in both cases: massive delays at America’s West Coast ports.Cargo is piling up inside the terminals. Exporters and importers are bleeding cash. The North American Meat Institute says delays are costing meat and poultry producers $30m a week. Chelan Fresh Marketing, a Washington fruit supplier, has laid off a fifth of its workforce. It is “a huge mess,” says Jon Wyss, Chelan’s head of government affairs.The Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), which represents port operators, is battling the International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union (ILWU). The two groups have worked without a contract since July. The PMA says the union is co-ordinating a slowdown. By limiting the availability of skilled workers such as crane operators, the union has quietly created a bottleneck. “It’s like putting a football team of 11 guys out on the field, but not one of them is a quarterback,” says a spokesman for the PMA. The union denies it, arguing that the bottleneck is caused by larger ships and a near-record volume of goods.If workers formally go on strike, they lose their wages. An informal go-slow imposes no such hardship. Hence its appeal, especially at a time when unions are losing...
War, minus the angst 
The six-million-dollar-man 
Playmate, actress, epidemiologist 
HOW American sanctions might bite on Russian banks is a matter of great interest to the Kremlin. So Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, asked one of its undercover agents in New York to find out, prosecutors claim. Evgeny Buryakov was outwardly an executive at Vnesheconombank, a Russian state-owned financial agency. But in real life he was allegedly “Zhenya”—working with two Russian intelligence officers who doubled as diplomats, also in New York. Mr Buryakov’s mission involved collecting economic intelligence and spotting potential sources. It has ended in disaster. On January 26th news broke of his arrest by the FBI. He faces trial and, if found guilty, up to 15 years in prison. His alleged colleagues have left America. What gave the FBI its first clue? Was it good surveillance, a cryptographic breakthrough, success in penetrating the Russian spy service or sloppy tradecraft by Vladimir Putin’s spooks? The FBI’s evidence suggests a lengthy period of observation. The three men communicated with brief phone messages, consisting of unremarkable exchanges about “tickets” and other everyday items, and handed over secret material with “brush contacts”—spy jargon for exchanging bags, folded newspapers and the like during fleeting encounters.It is not clear whether Mr Buryakov’s alleged colleagues were told to go by the authorities, or fled when they realised that...
“THE best answer to terrorist groups and gangs is to confront them,” believes Rudolph Giuliani, a former mayor of New York city. The man who brought the broken-window theory—that tolerance of small crimes would encourage bigger ones—to the United States’ biggest city unsurprisingly rejects the idea of negotiating with gangsters. Now a group of right-wing businessmen in El Salvador have hired Mr Giuliani to propose tough-guy solutions to crime in one of the world’s most gang-ridden countries. He dispatched a fact-finding mission in January.
Hoping to lay down arms FEW Argentines doubt that the country’s intelligence services needed a shakeup. But the way it happened satisfied almost nobody. On January 26th the president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, wheelchair-bound from an ankle injury, appeared on television to announce that she would propose a law to scrap the main intelligence agency, the Intelligence Secretariat (SI), and replace it with a new body whose directors would be named by her and approved by the Senate.This happened while the SI is at the centre of a furore set off by the death from a gunshot of Alberto Nisman, a prosecutor who had accused Ms Fernández and other senior officials of trying to thwart his investigation into the 1994 bombing of a Jewish centre in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s worst terrorist attack. The president, who denies the allegations, quickly pronounced his death a suicide, then hinted that he was murdered by rogue intelligence agents. She suggested the 300-page document detailing Mr Nisman’s allegations had been the product of false information fed to him by the SI. Hence the need for a reform.But Argentines, some of whom took to the streets after Mr Nisman’s death, do not see her as a credible reformer. They are as confused as ever about what really happened. Their suspicions that the government was somehow involved have not been allayed. Some Jewish groups boycotted the official commemoration of...
EUROPE has a chequered history when it comes to taxing financial transactions. Britain has a centuries-old stamp duty on share purchases but wants to protect the City from further fiscal burdens. Sweden tried a tax in the 1980s and dropped it when share-trading emigrated. France and Italy have recently imposed different sorts of financial-transaction taxes (FTTs). But at the year’s first meeting of European finance ministers, France, along with ten other like-minded members of the European Union, dusted off a moribund plan to introduce a harmonised FTT.Countries like Britain and Luxembourg, which lives off its asset-management industry, have long thwarted attempts to introduce an EU-wide FTT. In response, in 2014, a coalition of more enthusiastic EU members announced its intention to start taxing something financial in 2016. Since then the 11—Austria, Belgium, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain—have squabbled over what and how.Should a wide range of financial instruments including derivatives be taxed, as Austria and Germany favoured? France, though as keen as the next country to humble the moneymen, wanted to exclude most derivatives: its banks have at least a quarter of the European market in equity-based ones. Should the location of the company issuing the security determine whether a transaction was taxable and what country...
Gestures speak louder than words TIMES are tough in Africa. Ebola, in addition to claiming many lives, has also damaged economies. Tourism is suffering as frightened foreigners stay away. Falling commodity prices are also taking a toll. Investors are pulling money out of riskier spots, prompted by the prospect of rising interest rates in America. The IMF is cutting its growth forecasts. So is the unfolding public-debt crisis in the Gambia, which has suffered from all these trends, a harbinger of things to come?In mid-January the IMF announced that it is considering a bail-out for the Gambia. In part, the problems of the tiny west African country of 2m stem from a 60% fall in tourism, the source of 30% of its export earnings. (Although it has not suffered a single case of Ebola, it is close to Guinea, one of the most affected countries.) Falling commodity prices mean that exports of wood and nuts will also bring in less. No wonder the local currency, the dalasi, fell by 12% against the dollar last year.A weak currency is a worry, since Gambians rely heavily on imported food. Two-thirds of the public debt is denominated in foreign currency. To prop up the dalasi the central bank has raised interest rates from 12% to 22% over the past two years.But it is mismanagement of the government’s finances that has pushed the Gambia over the edge. From 2009 to 2014 its debt-to-GDP ratio increased by 18 percentage...
Soon it will all be electronic 
