The persistence of history

“SPOILS of war,” snaps Dabiq, the English-language journal of Islamic State (IS). The reference is to thousands of Yazidi women the group forced into sex slavery after taking their mountain, Sinjar, in August last year. Far from being a perversion, it claims that forced concubinage is a religious practice sanctified by the Koran. In a chapter called “Women”, the Koran sanctions the marriage of up to four wives, or “those that your right hands possess”.

Literalists, like those behind the Dabiq article, have interpreted these words as meaning “captured in battle”. Its purported female author, Umm Sumayyah, celebrated the revival of Islam’s slave-markets and even proffered the hope that Michelle Obama, the wife of America’s president, might soon be sold there. “I and those with me at home prostrated to Allah in gratitude on the day the first slave-girl entered our home,” she wrote. Sympathisers have done the same, most notably the allied Nigerian militant group, Boko Haram, which last year kidnapped an entire girls’ school in Chibok (pictured above).

Religious preachers have responded with...

from The Economist: International http://ift.tt/1J7M5fo

Journalist wanted

Journalist wanted: The Economist is looking for a journalist to write about global public policy, based in London but travelling everywhere. First-rate analytical and writing skills essential; sense of humour a plus. Salary negotiable. Applicants should send a CV and an original 600-word article on any subject, written in the style of The Economist, to econjob@economist.com by September 4th. For more details, see http://ift.tt/1NsKdAT

from The Economist: International http://ift.tt/1Jt3DYO

Stone by stone

WHEN the young St Francis knelt in prayer in the filthy, derelict church of San Damiano in Assisi, around 1206, the wide-eyed figure of Christ on the cross asked him to restore it. When Padre Pietro Lavini, already a Capuchin friar walking in Francis’s footsteps, came for the first time to the ruined church of San Leonardo high in the Apennines, his experience was almost the same. The stones seemed to say: “Why don’t you rebuild us?” Pushed by some mysterious force, he found himself answering: “Why not?”

It seemed impossible. What had been a beacon and a refuge on a busy pilgrim and herding route, along the high valleys of the Tiber and the Tenna between the Adriatic and Rome, was now a jumble of masonry overgrown by brambles. Only one half-fallen Romanesque arch gave a clue to its history. The Benedictines had built a monastery on a nearby mountain, surrendering the little church to another order. But after 40 years of privation those monks, too, had abandoned it. The only standing part had been used for centuries as a sheep pen, and a metre of compacted dung now formed the church floor.

Yet Padre Pietro seemed already to smell...

from The Economist: Obituary http://ift.tt/1JkzKne

Angela regina

ON AUGUST 19th, hours before jetting off to Brazil for more of the statesmanship the world associates with her, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, sat waiting in the Bundestag. Germany’s parliament had to approve a third bail-out of Greece since 2010. As usual she ostentatiously fiddled with her mobile phone whenever the opposition attacked her, while putting on an inscrutable expression. But she was probably pondering two numbers.

One was the size of the rebellion among MPs in her party. When the Bundestag first approved a rescue of the euro in 2010, only four members of Mrs Merkel’s conservative bloc dissented. But with each successive bail-out the level of resistance has grown in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), collectively known as the Union. Later that day, even after unusually heavy bullying by Mrs Merkel’s whip, Volker Kauder, dissent reached new heights, with 63 naysayers and three abstentions.

The rescue plan still passed comfortably, with support from the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), Mrs Merkel’s coalition partner, and the opposition...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1NnMIaK

Spelling it out

THESE days it seems as if there is almost no area of technology that Google can resist dipping its toes into. Among other things it is working on driverless cars, delivery drones, insulin-detecting contact lenses for diabetics, devices for the “smart home” and research into extending human lifespans. The corporate reorganisation it announced this week is an acknowledgment of what Google has become: a sprawling conglomerate, albeit with one predominant, profit-generating division in the form of its original internet business.

Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, will serve as chief executive and president, respectively, of a new holding company, called Alphabet. Google’s internet-search and advertising business, including its YouTube online-video service, Chrome web browser and Android operating system, will be a subsidiary of Alphabet. So will its other, newer ventures, which will henceforth be run more independently from the main business. In creating this new set-up, Messrs...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1JeTpeB

From alpha to omega

FEW management fashions have waxed and waned quite as dramatically as that for conglomerates. From the 1960s to the 1980s business gurus praised conglomerates such as ITT of America and Hanson Trust of Britain as the highest form of capitalism. Today they routinely dismiss them as bloated anachronisms. Companies should stick to their knitting; investors should minimise risk by investing in a portfolio of companies rather than backing corporate megalomaniacs. Peter Lynch, an investment guru, talks about “diworsification”. Stockmarkets routinely apply a sizeable “conglomerate discount” to diversified companies.

To judge by this week’s events, the mood has shifted again. Warren Buffett has been steadily and almost single-handedly restoring the popular appeal of conglomerates. And the positive reception given to the latest deal by his investment vehicle, Berkshire Hathaway, shows how he has succeeded. On August 10th the group said it would buy Precision Castparts, a maker of aerospace components, for $37 billion, in the biggest deal in Berkshire’s 50-year history. Mr Buffett boasts of running a sprawling conglomerate that is “constantly trying to sprawl...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1IKt2tC

All my bags are packed

WHEN President Barack Obama said last September that he would get tough on companies that avoid tax through “inversions”—merging with or buying foreign firms so as to shift their domicile abroad—some wondered if this would end a wave of corporate emigration. Some high-profile deals were called off, but other companies have continued to tiptoe out of America to places where the taxman is kinder and has shorter arms. On August 6th CF Industries, a fertiliser manufacturer, and Coca-Cola Enterprises, a drinks bottler, both said they would move their domiciles to Britain after mergers with non-American firms. Five days later Terex, which makes cranes, announced a merger in which it will move to Finland.

For many firms, staying in America is just too costly. Take Burger King, a fast-food chain, which last year shifted domicile to Canada after merging with Tim Horton’s, a coffee-shop operator there. Before the move, it would have had to pay up to 39% tax on foreign earnings when it brought them into America. Now that it is Canadian, it pays 39% only on profits earned in America, about 26% on Canadian profits and the (often lower) local rate...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1IKt0ll

All you can eat, Buffett?

He’s still got a healthy appetite

THE $37 billion (including debt) takeover of Precision Castparts, a supplier to the aerospace and oil industries, is the biggest deal in Berkshire Hathaway’s 50-year history. The acquisition, announced on August 10th, fits the formula that has made Warren Buffett’s conglomerate such a success: the target is a well-run, easy-to-understand business with a strong market position. The deal got a good reception from investors. However, it may be getting harder for Mr Buffett to find suitable candidates for purchase.

Precision Castparts shares some similarities with another firm Mr Buffett bought recently, Detlev Louis, a German maker of motorcyclists’ clothing, for which it paid €400m ($454m) in February. Sales of motorbikes are growing briskly, just as orders for passenger jets are strong. Detlev Louis has a strong protective “moat” against competitors, in the form of its brand; in Precision Castparts’ case the moat consists of its technology and the large amount of capital it has invested in its plants.

With his latest deal, timing is vital too. Mr Buffett is betting that low...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1JeTpez

Turning sour

LITTLE over a year ago, New Zealanders were still talking about a “white-gold rush”. Strong prices for milk were prompting sheep and cattle farmers to convert to dairy, and Chinese firms were coming in to buy up agricultural land and milk processors. Inevitably, influx has led to glut. Prices have fallen to their lowest in more than ten years (see chart). Farmers in France, Britain and Belgium have recently been staging protests against low milk prices, but few places are as badly affected as New Zealand, whose dairy industry produces a quarter of its export earnings.

On August 7th Fonterra, a co-operative owned by New Zealand farmers which is the world’s largest dairy-export firm, said it expected to pay its members NZ$3.85 ($2.55) per kilogram of milk solids in the current season, ending in May 2016. That is less than half the record price of NZ$8.40 it was paying two years ago, and well below breakeven for many...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1IKt051

Clicks to bricks

“IN FIVE years, we will sell one trillion dollars.” That is the bet that Jack Ma, the chairman of Alibaba, made with American businessmen on a recent trip to Chicago. The Chinese firm is already the world’s biggest e-commerce outfit. But now Mr Ma thinks he can more than double the volume of sales on his firm’s online-sales platforms by 2020.

First, he must win over investors. The firm’s shares have fallen sharply from their peak of $119 late last year, though at around $74 they remain above the $68 price at which they (or rather, shares in a “variable interest entity” linked to Alibaba, and registered in the Cayman Islands) were floated last September. On August 12th Alibaba unveiled its latest results. Its quarterly revenues grew by 28% year on year to 20.2 billion yuan ($3.3 billion), and profits rose by 23% to 10.6 billion yuan. Yet investors were still disappointed. The firm now plans to spend up to $4 billion on buy-backs to bolster its share price.

Part of the reason that profit growth was not stronger is that Alibaba is investing heavily in such growth areas as the mobile internet. Promisingly, its quarterly...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1JeTrD1

A whole Lotte drama

The Shins atone for their sins

THE recent performance of the Lotte Giants, one of a dozen baseball teams belonging to South Korea’s chaebol, its family-owned conglomerates, has been uninspiring. But when the team’s chief executive resigned this week, it was to distance himself from the “disgrace” of another turf war: a jostle for succession at the team’s parent group between his two cousins, the sons of the Lotte chaebol’s nonagenarian founder and chairman, Shin Kyuk-ho.

His business empire has operations in South Korea (where it is the fifth-biggest conglomerate) and Japan, and combined assets of $96 billion—and it is the last of the chaebol to be managed by its founder. Mr Shin began Lotte as a chewing-gum business in post-war Japan. In 1967 he took the business home, where Park Chung-hee, South Korea’s then dictator, was offering tax breaks and perks for foreign investors. From its base in Seoul, Lotte Korea moved into fast food, hotels, amusement parks, department stores and cinemas.

The group’s controlling companies, however,...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1JeTpex

The man who told us so

THE intellectual history of the West in the 20th century was dominated by arguments over totalitarianism: its causes, effects—and possible justification. Even after flag-waving supporters of the Soviet Union had dwindled to irrelevance, the conviction that communism was a good idea poorly executed persisted in certain quarters. Others still thought the communist threat overstated, or drew equivalences between crimes committed in the name of socialism and those of Western anti-communism. The position that communism was a monstrously evil system responsible for unprecedented atrocities was held by only a minority of scholars. Robert Conquest, who died on August 3rd, was one of the most eloquent and implacable members of that camp. To the chagrin of his opponents, he turned out to be right.

He did not start out as a scourge of the left. He emerged from a brainy ancient British school as an ardent socialist and a crack shot, and fought for the Republican side in the Spanish civil war (albeit for one day, firing a single round). While at Oxford he joined the Communist Party. But he soon left, disgusted by a party hack who claimed that Britain’s bourgeois...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1Wm0PjL

The bonfire of the vans of cheese

Russian raclette

SOVIET news programmes were often recently filled with cheerful reports of ever-greater harvests, even as store shelves remained stubbornly empty. Modern Russia’s shops are full, but its news broadcasts recently have been dominated by ugly images of the destruction of food smuggled into Russia from behind the lines of “the enemy”—Europe, America and their allies.

Stone-faced presenters report victories on many fronts: hundreds of tonnes of peaches and tomatoes pulped by bulldozers, meat burned at supermarket doors, cheeses incinerated in a “Russian fondue”. A young reporter cheerfully chucks a head of cheese under the chains of a tractor. On August 6th, a Russian news agency reported, the country burned 300 tonnes of food.

All of this is being done with the blessing of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Last year the government banned imports of food from countries which had imposed sanctions on Russia. Now food that slips through the embargo is being destroyed in the name of Russian sovereignty.

In a country which suffered famine in the 1930s, where hundreds of thousands starved to...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1Wm0M7M

The Kremlin’s new show trials

THE latest episode in Russia’s long history of judicial travesties played out this week in a stuffy courtroom in Rostov-on-Don, a provincial city near the Ukrainian border. As two defendants sat in a cage behind their lawyers, a prosecutor in dark glasses described them as bloodthirsty Ukrainian radicals who ran a terrorist cell in Crimea in early 2014. They had allegedly plotted to blow up a statue of Lenin.

The lead defendant is Oleg Sentsov (pictured), a Ukrainian film director, and the supposed terrorist plot is every bit as fictional as his screenplays. Mr Sentsov’s real offence was to oppose Russia’s annexation of his native Crimea, helping deliver food to Ukrainian soldiers trapped on their bases after the Russian invasion. After his arrest, Mr Sentsov says, he was tortured by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). (The prosecution claims his injuries came from sadomasochistic sex.) Mr Sentsov faces a potential life sentence. Dmitry Dinze, his lawyer, estimates his chance of acquittal at “none”.

Mr Sentsov is only the tip of the iceberg. The Ukrainian government says that at least ten of its citizens are political prisoners...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1TxxPkS

Bombs away

OZGUR TEKE had high hopes after Turkey’s elections in June sent the moderate, pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) to parliament for the first time. Mr Teke, who owns a small window-blind factory in the largely Kurdish city of Diyarbakir in Turkey’s east, had watched talks between the government and the HDP over a Turkish-Kurdish peace deal make hesitant progress over the course of two years. The militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was observing a ceasefire. Negotiators reached a roadmap to an agreement. Then, last month, the war between the Turkish government and the PKK suddenly reignited. “Just when a solution was appearing, it’s like someone pressed a button,” says Mr Teke.

Since late July, the sound of warplanes taking off to strike PKK bases has resounded daily over Diyarbakir. The PKK has struck back with attacks across Turkey’s south-east. At least 20 Turkish security personnel have been killed, and the violence is spreading. On August 10th in Istanbul, a policeman died in a bomb attack by Kurdish fighters, and two leftist terrorists opened fire on the American consulate.

In Diyarbakir the reigning response is dismay. “We voted for peace; instead we got war,” says one disillusioned resident. Anger has redounded on the governing Justice and Development (AK) party, which many accuse of relaunching the war in order to drum up Turkish...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1TxxOO0

Not so forza any more

AT A dinner just before Italy’s parliament took its summer recess, Silvio Berlusconi, a former prime minister, told a group of deputies from his Forza Italia party that he wanted “to die as the number one of this movement”. Lately it has started to look like Forza Italia could die before its founder. Next month Mr Berlusconi will turn 79, yet he has not named a successor. On the contrary, the leadership of his party has become ever more personalised. At the centre is Mr Berlusconi; around him is a circle of courtiers, including his 30-year-old girlfriend, a former showgirl.

Forza Italia was once the dominant party of the Italian centre-right, leading an alliance that won 47% of the vote at the 2008 general election. It now polls less than 12%. Voters have fled in droves, some because of Mr Berlusconi’s inept handling of the euro crisis, some in disgust at his private life, and others still in protest at his decision last year to make a pact with the centre-left prime minister, Matteo Renzi, on constitutional reforms. Italians see Mr Berlusconi as someone who belongs to their country’s past, not its future.

Rather than go down with the...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1TxxOxu

Arabesque

WITH a bright “Wesh meuf!” a French teenager hails a friend in slang that would appal linguistic purists. It is the sort of counter-cultural vernacular usually heard on the concrete estates of the outer-city banlieues, where French youngsters of Arab and African descent have long devised an alternative lexicon. But this greeting comes from a white middle-class girl in a posh high school near Paris. Is mainstream French, whose guardians have traditionally fought contamination, embracing more playful disruption than the purists like to think?

The word wesh, from Wach rak? (How are you?) in an Algerian dialect of Arabic, has crossed into mainstream youth culture in all but the snootiest corners of urban France. Meuf is a common word in verlan, the French backwards slang that spread in the banlieues in the 1970s and 1980s and which inverts syllables: it upends femme, French for woman. Plenty of other banlieue terms based on Arabic have edged towards the mainstream...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1TxxMFK

Taskmaster

My Life with Wagner. By Christian Thielemann. Translated by Anthea Bell. Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 267 pages; £25.

CHRISTIAN THIELEMANN has risen fast through the ranks of orchestral conductors, although not quite as quickly as he might have wished. He wanted to be the first German artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra since Wilhelm Furtwängler 61 years ago, but the Berlin musicians chose Kirill Petrenko, a Russian rival, instead. He has, however, received an agreeable consolation prize. He is to become only the second music director of the Bayreuth festival drawn from outside the Wagner family. (Furtwängler was the first in 1930, but he lasted only a year.)

Mr Thielemann will be happy in Bayreuth, where Richard Wagner—“The Master”—is beyond criticism. His book is an act of homage, part revealing autobiography (“Wagner confronted me with myself…not always [an] undiluted pleasure”) and part informative guide to the Wagner oeuvre, describing the plots and performances of all the operas, with discography thrown in. His favourites are “Tristan und Isolde” and “Die Meistersinger...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1Wm0PjX

A man for all seasons

Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita. By Robert Roper.Bloomsbury; 354 pages; $28 and £20.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV never doubted his own talent: “By the age of 14 or 15 I had read or reread all Tolstoy in Russian, all Shakespeare in English and all Flaubert in French—besides hundreds of other books.” From that foundation came a stream of literary criticism, translations, short stories, poetry and fiction—including, of course, “Lolita”, one of the most controversial novels of the 20th century.

Did other authors match this talent? Nabokov mostly thought not: Proust and Pushkin were to be admired, but certainly not Hemingway, Faulkner or Boris Pasternak (whose “Dr Zhivago” was, in Nabokov’s opinion, a Soviet plot to earn foreign exchange). In the end, Nabokov even scorned Edmund Wilson, an American critic and author who had been his friend and literary and social ally for almost all his time in America, from his flight with his Jewish wife from the Nazis in Europe in 1940 to his tax-efficient departure for Switzerland two decades later.

Robert Roper, for whom Nabokov is “the great python of art” with his “bulging repasts” of Russian, French and English literature, balances Nabokov’s arrogance with his sense of fun and eccentricity (no other great writer has been a serious lepidopterist, travelling more than 200,000 miles...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1TxxRcC

Magical realism

Silent night

MOST playwrights are afraid of silence. Much of life’s drama lurks in the gaps between words, but few know how to dramatise this for the stage. To handle silence properly, a writer must have a keen ear for the way people actually talk, with all the stammers, stumbles and speed bumps. It is only when these rhythms are understood that a playwright can convincingly convey what is left unsaid.

 Annie Baker, a rising young writer for the theatre, is well attuned to the “ums” and “whatevers” of real speech. On the face of it, her plays seem uneventful. They feature ordinary people talking about ordinary things, often at great length and to no great purpose. “The Flick”, which won the Pulitzer prize in 2014 and is now being restaged at the Barrow Street Theatre in New York, consists of more than three hours of patter and griping among workers at a cinema as they clean between screenings. But the power of Ms Baker’s work—and what makes it stand apart—is the way every moment and hesitation feels acutely observed and quietly meaningful.  

This attention to detail has earned her a...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1TxxSNy