Diamond ring, iron fist

Stately pleasure domes, by decree

CHECHNYA and Dagestan are both nominally inside Russia, but the road between the two features a checkpoint as elaborate as a border crossing. On the Chechen side, the roads get better and the drivers more nervous. Under Ramzan Kadyrov, its strongman president, Chechnya has become visibly richer and less free than Dagestan. It also feels distinctly separate from the rest of Russia.

Chechnya’s capital of Grozny, once a bombed-out ruin, today boasts not only the largest mosque in Europe but Dubai-style skyscrapers and a five-star hotel (rarely more than a quarter full). The main drag, Putin Prospect, is lined with glitzy restaurants frequented by Grozny’s golden youth. Behind the facades lies a republic steeped in fear, corruption and poverty. Chechnya has become a mini-totalitarian state, in many ways a caricature of today’s Russia.

Mr Kadyrov, who spends millions of dollars sponsoring appearances by Western pop singers and celebrities, has developed a personality cult inside Chechnya and celebrity status outside it. (His Instagram account has a wide following.) Always...

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The end of fudge

ANDREAS PAPANDREOU, a proud Greek socialist who stood up to his country’s coup-mongering generals in the 1960s, won an election in October 1981 by fulminating against the European Economic Community (as it was then known) and vowing to lead Greece out of NATO. But in office he executed a graceful kolotoumba (somersault), discovering a taste for European subsidies that could be used to expand his crony state and turning himself into an engaged, if awkward, NATO partner. Greece’s interests, Papandreou determined, were best served by exploiting the rules of the clubs it belonged to, not by tearing them up.

The ties that bind Europe’s political elites have often turned out to be extraordinarily strong. Sometimes they oblige weak leaders to jettison election pledges. Take François Hollande, who took office in 2012 promising to end European austerity but instead finds himself battling to please Germany by reforming France’s sclerotic economy. When referendums go the “wrong” way, as with Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon treaty in 2009, leaders tweak the text and ask citizens to vote again. The serial bail-outs of the past five...

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Dutch Quixote

DURING its 17th-century golden age, the Netherlands was the world’s most enthusiastic exploiter of wind technology. Over 10,000 windmills dotted the landscape; the city walls of Amsterdam were crowned with a row of them. Today many Dutch find the stereotype of their country as the land of windmills irritating—and inaccurate. Wind turbines supplied just 5.2% of the Netherlands’ electricity in 2014, far behind Germany, Spain or Denmark. Renewable sources as a whole make up 4.2% of the country’s energy mix, putting the Netherlands 26th in the European Union, ahead only of Malta and Luxembourg.

That leaves the government in a fix. It has five years to meet an EU-wide mandate to generate 14% of energy from renewable sources. Among other things, it plans to build a lot of new wind turbines. This, however, runs up against the reason why the Netherlands has so few of them: a severe case of not-in-my-backyard syndrome. Almost everywhere new turbines are mooted, locals howl that they will be ugly and noisy. One proposed wind park prompted a group calling itself the Don Quixote Foundation to block a drawbridge on the 32km dike connecting North...

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Caucasian jihad

IN OCTOBER 1832 Russian soldiers besieged the village of Gimry (pictured) in the mountains of Dagestan in an effort to capture Gazi-Muhammad, the first imam of the Caucasus Imamate, who had defied their rule. He was killed, but his follower, Imam Shamil, jumped over the line of Russian bayonets and escaped. Ever since then, Gimry has been a symbol of defiance and a stronghold of Islamic rule.

In the autumn of 2014 Russian soldiers again besieged the village. They were trying to capture Magomed Suleimanov, a native of Gimry who had been proclaimed emir of the Emirate Caucasus, an al-Qaeda-linked insurgency launched in 2007. The soldiers sacked a neighbouring settlement, forced out its population of 1,000 and looted their houses. Mr Suleimanov escaped, but Gimry remains surrounded by Russian soldiers; only residents are allowed in.

Yet the Russian army, it seems, is fighting yesterday’s war. While it is still trying to catch Mr Suleimanov, his insurgency seems to be on its way out. “The Emirate Caucasus is dead,” says Abdurakhim Magomedov, an aged leader of the puritanical Salafi movement from the village of Novosasitli. “It has not...

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On home soil

Horror close to home

HE STRANGLED his employer in the back of a van, hacked off his head with a kitchen knife and attached it to the gates of the chemicals factory where he worked, next to two Islamic banners. Yassin Salhi, a French citizen, confessed this week to a grisly murder on June 26th, at Saint-Quentin-Fallavier near Lyon, that shook France. Four days later, the public prosecutor concluded that Mr Salhi had acted with a “terrorist motive”.

The French have become grimly accustomed to news of beheadings by jihadists in far-flung places. Last year a French mountain guide was decapitated in Algeria by a group linked to Islamic State (IS). But such a horror on French soil was a far greater shock. After displaying the severed head, Mr Salhi rammed his van, loaded with gas canisters, into the chemical plant, in what appeared to be a failed attempt at a suicide attack.

Although no group has claimed responsibility, the public prosecutor said that the aim was clearly to terrorise with “maximum publicity”. Mr Salhi sent two photos of the severed head, one of them a selfie, to a French convert in Syria,...

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Los indignados in power

Colau: begone, housing shortage

AIDA DEL VALLE lives in a block of new flats owned by Spain’s “bad” bank, Sareb, with big windows overlooking a small Barcelona square. The 34-year-old former schoolteacher, who receives unemployment benefits of €300 ($331) a month, pays no rent or utility bills. She owes her tenancy to a housing-activism group that broke into the unfinished building and took it over. One of the group’s founders is Ada Colau, who on June 13th became Barcelona’s mayor.

Ms Colau is one of a number of candidates who have infused the Spanish left with fresh vigour. Her rainbow coalition of activists and parties, including the insurgent party Podemos, narrowly beat the incumbent Catalan nationalist Convergence and Union coalition (CiU). Podemos-backed candidates also took control of Madrid and other major cities. Ms Colau’s first moves included slashing her salary by three-quarters to €2,200 per month and dropping prosecution of student activists accused of vandalism. Her counterpart in Madrid, the 71-year-old Manuela Carmena, met the heads of Spain’s mighty Santander and BBVA banks to discuss the...

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Coalition of one

THE anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party (DPP) has been in the vanguard of Europe’s populist right for a decade and a half. It scored huge gains in elections on June 18th, coming second with 21% of the vote. But the DPP will not be joining the centre-right government announced last week by Lars Lokke Rasmussen of the Liberal Party. Indeed, no other parties will. Unable to form a coalition due to policy divisions, Mr Rasmussen will lead a single-party minority government, with tacit parliamentary backing from the DPP and two other right-leaning parties. Together they have a fragile one-vote majority in Denmark’s 179-seat parliament. And with 37 seats to the Liberals’ 34, the DPP is already starting to show its power.

Mr Rasmussen’s defeat of Helle Thorning-Schmidt’s Social Democrat-led administration was far from definitive. The Social Democrats remain the largest party in parliament with 47 seats. While no left-leaning coalition was possible, the so-called “blue bloc” is deeply split too. The Liberals and the DPP disagree on taxes, social spending and the European Union, leading the DPP to turn down Mr Rasmussen’s offer of cabinet seats.

Denmark’s multiparty political system frequently produces minority governments, but this one seems unusually tricky. The surge in support for the DPP has it brimming with confidence and determined to drive hard...

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There will be blood

WALL STREET loves a good scrap almost as much as the wildcatters who drill for oil do. No wonder that the fight over the finances of America’s shale-oil industry has turned nasty. In one corner are shortsellers, including David Einhorn, a hedge-fund manager whose scalps include Lehman Brothers. They argue that “fracking”—the business of blasting oil out of rocks using water, sand and chemicals—is a bottomless pit into which too much cash has been thrown.

In the other corner are America’s oil pioneers, who say that shale can thrive even though the benchmark American oil price has dropped from over $100 a barrel last year to $57 today. The oilmen are backed by plenty of other investors who are still pumping money into shale firms: some $35 billion of equity and bonds has been raised since December.

Both sides have a point. It makes sense to be cheery about the long-term prospects for shale energy—and to be queasy about today’s bunch of fracking firms (see article).

...

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Now get on with it

FOR over 40 years British politicians have squabbled about where to build runways in south-east England. They have commissioned reports, ordered public inquiries and submitted to judicial reviews. For as long as the paperwork has helped them avoid local protesters, not a shovel has bitten into the ground. No full-length runway has been built to serve Britain’s economic powerhouse since the second world war.

In 2012 David Cameron, Britain’s prime minister, dodged the issue again, asking a commission under Sir Howard Davies, an economist, to look into airport expansion. On July 1st Sir Howard published his final report, backing a new runway at Heathrow, Britain’s busiest airport (see article). There are worrying signs that Mr Cameron will be tempted to join the long line of paper-pushers.

Jet-lagged

Britain’s delays have been costly. While Sir Howard and his pals have been pondering where to put a strip of concrete just 3.5km (2.2 miles) long, China has built...

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Lost, but now found

“FEARLESS” is how Barack Obama now describes his mood. A series of triumphs has suddenly given him a second wind. On June 29th he at last won “fast-track” authority to negotiate foreign-trade deals, paving the way for deeper economic engagement with Asia and Europe. On June 25th the Supreme Court rejected a conservative attempt to disembowel the Affordable Care Act, Mr Obama’s flagship health-care law. A day later the justices declared gay marriage a fundamental right in all 50 states, and the White House spent the next night bathed in rainbow lights (see article).

Mr Obama cannot claim all the credit. The Supreme Court is not part of his administration, though he nominated two of its nine justices. And his free-trade victory owed much to Republicans in Congress, who beat back a revolt by populist Democrats intent on blocking the Democrat in the White House. But a win is a win, and the president now has momentum to deal with another cause close to his heart: racial justice.

After a racist...

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Strike out

CHECKING an airliner’s wings and fuselage for damage after it has been hit by lightning or suffered a bird strike is more than just a time-consuming nuisance. In the cut-throat world of commercial aviation, time is money, and a plane in a hangar is a plane not earning its keep. At the moment, conducting such an inspection means employing engineers to stand on elevated mobile platforms so that they can pore over an affected aeroplane’s surface seeking out dents, holes or high-voltage skin burns which might be in need of repair. For an average plane, this takes about ten hours.

But that may soon change. In recent tests at Luton Airport, near London, a drone called Riser—the brainchild of Blue Bear Research Systems, a drone-builder based near the airport, and Createc, a sensing-and-imaging company in Cockermouth, in the north of England—completed equivalent surveys of an Airbus A320 belonging to EasyJet, a budget airline, in a mere 20 minutes.

Using a drone to look into a plane’s nooks and crannies makes sense, but there is a wrinkle. For obvious reasons, the authorities do not like robot aircraft flying around airports. Drones can therefore operate only inside hangars, and only when the doors are shut. Most drones, though, rely on the satellites of the Global Positioning System to know where they are, and GPS does not work well indoors.

Riser gets...

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Rapid unplanned disassembly

FEW things are as spectacular as a successful rocket launch, but a failed one comes close. On June 28th SpaceX, an upstart rocketry firm founded by Elon Musk, an adventurous technology billionaire (see article), began what was to be its seventh uncrewed cargo flight to the International Space Station (ISS). The success of the first such flight, in May 2012, was big news. It was a vindication of NASA’s decision to rely on the ingenuity of the private sector and the discipline of fixed-price contracts to provide cheap access to orbit. As subsequent lift-offs passed without a hitch, press interest faded, and what had been extraordinary quickly became routine.

All again seemed well as the Falcon 9 rocket roared away from its launch pad this week. But two minutes and 19 seconds into the flight one of its oxygen tanks sprang a leak. The rocket powered on for a few more seconds before disintegrating into a shower of glowing debris (see picture). It is unclear, yet, exactly what went wrong. Mr Musk would...

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The Cambrian explosion

Modern lobopodians are rarely seen forest dwellers called velvet worms. Their ancient relatives, though, were pioneers of the Cambrian explosion, a time when Earth experienced an unprecedented surge in biodiversity. As they report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Zhang Xiguang of Yunnan University, in China, and his colleagues have found a previously unknown species (pictured), some 520m years old, in rocks from Yunnan province. Collinsium ciliosum, as they dub it, could grow to be more than 8cm long, was eyeless and had frontal appendages that were developed into sieving baskets, to filter food from the ocean floor. A tasty morsel, then, for the numerous predators which the Cambrian explosion generated. As a consequence the creature was, in Dr Zhang’s phrase, “superarmoured”, with five spines of varying length protecting each of the 14 rear segments of its hardened exterior.

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Sounds bad

CLINICAL depression is, simply put, a dreadful disease. Diagnosing it is anything but simple, however. Its symptoms vary, can shift with the ups and downs of everyday life, and sometimes overlap with those of other diseases. For these reasons, it is common for depression to go unidentified for months, or even to be missed altogether.

Stefan Scherer of the University of Southern California and Louis-Philippe Morency of Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, hope to change this. They are trying to develop a reliable way of diagnosing depression by using a computer to record and analyse aspects of a putative sufferer’s behaviour. They are, they think, 85% of the way there.

Their latest research, just published in IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, is an analysis of depressed people’s speech. It follows up on analyses of facial expressions and eye movements carried out by tracking cameras while the subject of a diagnosis is having a conversation. These used things like the length (or, rather, shortness) of people’s smiles and the frequency with which they looked at the ground in order to develop an algorithm that was 75% effective in diagnosing depression.

The extra 10% of reliability has come from quantifying what was previously a qualitative observation, which is that depressed people tend to run their vowels...

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Knowing the drill

A future fossil?

ANIMALS and plants are not the only things that form fossils. Tsunamis—the huge waves created by some submarine earthquakes—do so, too. A tsunami generated in January 1700, off the Pacific coast of North America, for example, has left abundant traces in local rocks, as well as in the art of Japan (it was the inspiration for Katsushika Hokusai’s woodcut, “The Great Wave of Kanagawa”). That should give pause to coastal dwellers in what is now Oregon, Washington state and British Columbia. They might reasonably wonder when the next big wave will arrive—as might residents of other earthquake-prone coastlines around the world.

Harvey Kelsey, of Humboldt State University, in California, has done more than wonder. He and his team have been looking at the Indian Ocean coast of Aceh province, in northern Sumatra. This was the origin, in December 2004, of a powerful submarine earthquake and subsequent tsunami that killed around 230,000 people. The quake in question, as is commonly the case for quakes of this magnitude, was caused by one of the Earth’s crustal plates sliding under another. Plate movement at...

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Ravenous for reform

SOME of India’s rulers have strong views on food. The home minister, Rajnath Singh, has called for a nationwide ban on slaughtering cows, which as a Hindu he considers holy. At least 20 Indian states and territories (out of 36) ban cow-killing. Since March it has been illegal to possess beef in Maharashtra, and lawmakers in Haryana say those who slaughter cows should be punished as severely as murderers. The education ministry suggests that vegetarian and non-vegetarian students should be segregated in some college canteens; another minister says beef-eaters should move to Pakistan.

Since India is roughly 80% Hindu, it is not surprising that Indian politicians pay respect to Hindu beliefs (many of which they passionately share). But if they care about people as well as sacred animals, they should worry about adding to the national menu, as well as cutting it back.

India has more malnourished people than any other country. Around 30% of children under five are underweight, according to the Rapid Survey on Children (RSOC), which was carried out in 2013 and 2014 by the UN and the Indian government. That is a welcome improvement from an...

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Europe’s future in Greece’s hands

THE European Union has never seen the like of the past eight days in Greece: barred banks, capital controls, the first IMF default by a developed country, the collapse of a multi-billion-euro bail-out, plans for a referendum that may hasten Greece’s ejection from the single currency, and the beggary of the people. Were the stakes not so high, all those emergency summits and last-minute demands would count as farce.

Instead it is a tragedy, where an outcome that all sides say they do not want—Greece’s exit from the euro—seems increasingly likely. The chaos is evidence that leaving the euro would be disastrous for Greece, not least because modest gains from default and devaluation would be overwhelmed by political and economic instability. For the rest of Europe, too, “Grexit” has well-rehearsed risks, notably that of a failing state on the continent’s south-eastern flank. But as the drama has become more desperate, so Europeans seem less worried. They take comfort from the fact that Greece is uniquely dysfunctional. Game-playing and repeated miscalculation have poisoned the negotiations (see...

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Better together?

REFORM of American health care was always expected to have an enormous impact on the sector. Sure enough, one of the more immediate effects was a frenzy of hospital mergers, as providers sought to raise their efficiency in response to measures in the Affordable Care Act of 2010, alias Obamacare, designed to curb their cost increases.

A similar consolidation among health insurers was also predicted. But since the new insurance exchanges set up under Obamacare only went into operation last year, it has taken until now for it to be clear how big the merger wave may be. The largest insurer, UnitedHealth, has approached the number three, Aetna. The second-largest, Anthem, is trying to buy the number five, Cigna—which on June 21st rejected Anthem’s $47.5 billion bid. And the number four, Humana, has been looking at selling itself to either Aetna or Cigna.

The frantic takeover activity seems to rest on the assumption that, should the Supreme Court reject, in the next few days, a case brought by opponents of Obamacare, the firms must be ready to move. The case claims that the subsidies 6.4m people are receiving, to help them...

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The great gambler

HE WAS one of the great dealmaker capitalists of the past century. He bought and sold the MGM studios three times. He did more than anyone else to create the neon-lit fantasy land that is Las Vegas. He tried to buy Chrysler, and at one point was a big shareholder in Ford and General Motors. Kirk Kerkorian accumulated all the accoutrements of the mogul lifestyle: a lavish estate in Beverly Hills, friendships with Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant, three wives and a legendary divorce battle. (The third Mrs Kerkorian, who only stuck around for a month, tried to sue him for $320,000 a month in alimony and child support until it turned out that the child was the product of a liaison with a rival tycoon, Steve Bing.) Yet Mr Kerkorian was a very private man: he shunned the Hollywood social scene, and only saw the films he financed when they reached the cinema. After he hit 50, he focused obsessively on his tennis.

He was as self-made as you can get: the son of an Armenian immigrant farmer, he moved home at least 20 times as a child, started bringing in income at the age of nine, got sent to reform school for punching a teacher’s son and made a living as a boxer...

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Young blood

IN ARIZONA, Independence Day will come a day early this year. On July 3rd a new law will allow anyone to order a laboratory test, with no need to see a doctor. Tests for sexually transmitted diseases, pre-diabetes, vitamin levels and fertility will be on the menu. A cholesterol test can be had for $2.99. The company that lobbied for the legal change, and hopes to benefit most from it, is Theranos, a young and ambitious blood-analytics company from Palo Alto in Silicon Valley.

Theranos is already providing cheap, quick and easy tests—some with a three-hour turnaround—at clinics it is opening inside branches of Walgreens, a big pharmacy chain. The first clinics are in Phoenix, Arizona and in its Californian home town. Many tests can be done on just a spot of blood from a finger prick. The rest use only a tiny paediatric needle and, again, require only a small amount of blood. Theranos, led by Elizabeth Holmes, a charismatic young university drop-out (see article), believes its technology can...

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