The News from
Economist.Com

The Conservatives’ plans to change Britain’s deeply flawed education system may be the most interesting idea in this election

THE general election due in Britain on May 6th is not the one David Cameron was chosen to fight. The opposition Conservatives made him their leader in 2005 after a barnstorming speech delivered without notes to their annual conference. His pitch: that he could persuade the electorate to trust him with public services and offer tax cuts too, by “sharing the proceeds of growth”. It was a formula worthy of an earlier young, centrist, opposition politician: Tony Blair, who in 1997 led Labour to victory after 18 years of Conservative rule.

Now there is nothing to share: taxes will have to rise and public spending fall. But still Mr Cameron is reprising Mr Blair. In 1997 Mr Blair memorably said that his priorities were “education, education, education”. In the run-up to this election, education reform is the main, perhaps the only, broad and deeply thought-out proposal from his self-styled heir. ...

A cloud of ash from an Icelandic volcano shut European airspace for several days. Our first article examines the science of volcanic emissions. Our second looks at the past week's disruption of travel

SOME natural disasters, like the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, strike out of the blue. Only with hindsight do they come to look like the sort of thing people should have been prepared for. Other events get dress rehearsals. The eruption of Eyjafjallajokull in the south of Iceland was one of these. In February 2008 officials from air-traffic-control services across Europe, as well as representatives of weather services and airlines, ran an exercise that simulated a strikingly similar eruption. The volcano they chose was not Eyjafjallajokull, but its neighbour, Katla; the weather conditions were not quite the same. But the procedures were.

Given the details of the hypothetical eruption, the Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre, London—one of nine regional centres that between them provide such services for more or less the whole world—set its computer models running. Representations of the volcanic plume were introduced to the weather-forecasting models used by Britain's Met Office, VAAC London's home base, and the modellers foresaw hypothetical ash sweeping down the North Sea into the Benelux countries and eastern England by the end of the day. They passed their findings on to the air-traffic controllers, who started looking at the practicalities of getting warnings out, rerouting hundreds of flights and cancelling a thousand more. The exercise differed from the real thing in some crucial ways: it ran for only a day, and it hardly affected anyone who wasn't an air-traffic controller. Eyjafjallajokull's eruption, in contrast, caused British airspace and that over much of the rest of Europe to be closed on April 15th, and to remain shut for five days of mounting chaos (see article). ...

The ban on flights caused anger among airlines and chaos for travellers

BY THE early hours of April 15th, Britain’s air-traffic controllers feared the worst. They had hoped the wind would carry the ash from Eyjafjallajokull south-east of the country, but the wind had changed. Guided by computer models used by volcanic-ash watchers at the Met Office, the air-traffic agency said it was withdrawing service. British airspace was closed.

As the ash cloud spread eastwards, northern Europe’s airports shut down one by one, stranding millions of passengers, many of them attempting to return from Easter holidays, all over the world. On April 17th nearly 17,000 flights to and from Europe were cancelled out of about 22,000 on a normal day. With weather forecasts suggesting that the cloud might not budge for five days and talk of months of disruption, desperate travellers began trying to get home by any means possible. ...

A muddle over “indigenisation” looks set to slow down an economic recovery

FOR a moment it seemed as though a mortal threat to businesses in Zimbabwe had been lifted. Now the usual lack of clarity has been restored. Would-be foreign investors and local businessmen alike do not know what to do next, except to hold their breath.

Two months ago Zanu-PF, the party of Robert Mugabe, who marked 30 years in power on April 18th, unilaterally announced regulations to put into effect an “Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act”. The law, passed two years ago but not previously enforced, required all firms worth more than $500,000 to be majority-owned by “indigenous Zimbabweans”—and to show plans within six weeks for compliance within five years. ...

The president has in effect stepped down, but almost no one knows how he is

IN RECENT months, Nigerian protesters have repeatedly taken to the streets with placards asking: “Umaru, where are you?” They say they want to see—actually see—Umaru Yar’Adua. The president of Africa’s most populous country has been completely out of sight of his 150m compatriots for the past five months.

Mr Yar’Adua abruptly left Nigeria in November for a clinic in Saudi Arabia. Since returning under cover of darkness in February, he has—as far as anyone can tell—been holed up in the presidential villa in Abuja, the capital. Some say an intensive care unit has been installed. ...

Fears about the demise of Arabic are misplaced

THE Arabic language is dying. Its disloyal children are ditching their mother tongue for English and French. It is stagnating in classrooms, mosques and the dusty corridors of government. Even such leaders as the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, and Jordan’s foreign-educated King Abdullah struggle with its complicated grammar. Worse still, no one cares. Arabic no longer has any cachet. Among supposedly sophisticated Arabs, being bad at Arabic has become fashionable.

That, at least, is an opinion prominently aired in the National, an English-language newspaper in Abu Dhabi. It reflects a perennial worry in the Arab world about the state of the language. Classical Arabic, the language of the Koran, and its modern version, Modern Standard Arabic, known in academia as MSA, are a world apart from the dialects that people use every day. Spoken and written in the media and on stuffy occasions, this kind of Arabic is no one’s mother tongue. It is painfully acquired through hours of poring over grammar textbooks and memorising the Koran. Could it one day become obsolete? ...

A prominent Israeli politician, Ehud Olmert, is accused of dishonesty

THE distinctiveness of Israel’s latest corruption scandal is that it almost literally hits you in the eye. Many Jerusalemites feel affronted each time they look up at the Holyland Project, a string of four high-rise buildings tearing through the skyline on the western hilltops edging the city. Five more towers are to rise up under plans inexplicably approved by the municipal and district authorities.

Inexplicably, that is, unless the wheels were illicitly oiled by the developers. A state’s witness says bribes were indeed paid, to the tune of millions of shekels. He claims that the two mayors who preceded the present incumbent were both on the take: Uri Lupolianski (2003-08) and before him Ehud Olmert (1993-2003), who has also been accused of continuing to help the developers when he moved on to become minister of commerce. Both men fiercely deny any wrongdoing. ...

Will Yemen’s magical island manage to stay aloof?

MAROONED in pirate-infested waters off the Horn of Africa but tied to unruly Yemen 400km (250 miles) away, the archipelago of Socotra has a forbidding look. Scorching summer winds strand ships. So fierce is the constant gale that it has whipped beachfuls of blinding white sand into dunes hundreds of metres high that ride up the cliffs. Even in winter it is blisteringly hot. Rats, the sole occupants of one rocky islet, are so ravenous that seasonal fishermen sleep in their skiffs, afraid to languish ashore.

Yet Socotra, whose main island is the size of Majorca or Long Island, is one of the world’s last enchanted places. The 50,000 native Socotris, speaking four dialects of a singsong ancient language unintelligible to other Yemenis, subsist on fish, goats and not much else. But they inhabit a wildly varied landscape of surreal beauty. The sea teems with giant lobsters, turtles and leaping dolphins. A unique breed of civet cat roams the limestone plateaus that are seamed with gorges carved by rushing streams, and spiked by finger-like granite towers rising to 1,500 metres. The cats are just one among 700 native species of plants and animals found nowhere else on earth. ...

Can Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, survive against such odds?

THERE is good reason to admire the craftiness of Yemen’s embattled president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. He has ruled northern Yemen since 1978 and its union with the once-independent south since 1990. Its 24m people are scattered over deserts and craggy mountains in 150,000 settlements. Its resources are limited, its tribes fiercely independent and well-armed, its plagues of poverty, illiteracy and malnutrition persistent. It is famously hard to govern. Yet even if the power of Mr Saleh’s state has seldom extended beyond Yemen’s main towns, roads and oilfields, it is remarkable that he has maintained even a semblance of control (see book review). These days, however, even the agile Mr Saleh is finding it increasingly hard to keep the peace and secure his grip.

Qat, the mildly euphoria-inducing leaf that most Yemeni men while away their afternoons chewing, is one powerful pacifier. But Mr Saleh has skilfully played off tribes, parties and religious factions against each other or bribed their leaders into acquiescence. To get foreign aid he has also milked Yemen’s perennial vulnerability, its tradition of outspoken pluralism if not real democracy, and its stunning landscapes. Meanwhile he has concentrated ever more power and wealth in the hands of his own extended family and clan. ...

In October last year the IMF put the scale of write-downs on loans or securities that banks worldwide would have to make between 2007 and 2010 at $2.8 trillion. It has now revised this estimate down to $2.3 trillion. The fund reckons that around two-thirds ($1.5 trillion) of this had been realised by the end of last year. The IMF reduced its estimate of loan write-downs by American banks, many of whose loans went bad when housing prices crashed, by $66 billion to $588 billion. Economic growth and stabilising house prices have helped, though the IMF cautions that mortgage delinquencies continue to rise and almost a quarter of American borrowers owe more on their mortgages than their houses are now worth.

...

The euro area went from having a trade deficit of €9 billion ($12.8 billion) with the rest of the world in January to having a surplus of €2.6 billion in February. Exports in February were 2.7% higher than in January on a seasonally-adjusted basis, while imports increased by 1.5%.

Greece’s current-account deficit was €3.25 billion in February, more than two-and-a-half times last February’s figure of €1.24 billion. The unemployment rate rose to 11.3% in January from 10.2% in December. ...

The global recession sent the economies of rich countries into a tailspin, but merely caused the emerging economies to slow down a bit. Developing countries are now recovering faster in what the IMF calls a “multi-speed recovery”. This has affected the sources of global growth. Measured on a purchasing-power basis, virtually all of world GDP growth last year came from developing countries. In 2010 advanced economies outside America will be a drag on global growth. The IMF reckons that even in 2015, almost three-quarters of global growth will come from China and other developing countries. During the 1990s the contribution of the emerging economies averaged 40%, rising to 58% for the years between 2000 and 2007.

...

Wall Street was stunned as civil-fraud charges were brought against Goldman Sachs. The Securities and Exchange Commission alleges that the bank deceived investors in a synthetic collateralised-debt obligation built on mortgage assets, by not disclosing that Paulson, a hedge fund that had some say in choosing which securities went into the product, would profit if the CDO performed poorly. Goldman vigorously denied the allegations. See article

Goldman found comfort in announcing a $3.5 billion quarterly profit. Staff compensation costs rose to $5.5 billion, but as a share of net revenue this fell to 43%, from 50% in the same quarter last year. ...

Aircraft returned to the skies over Europe after the cancellation of almost 100,000 flights and the biggest-ever disruption to Europe’s commercial airspace, caused by a volcanic eruption in Iceland. Some carriers criticised the almost week-long shutdown, which had effects worldwide, arguing that safety concerns may have been overdone. The International Air Transport Association, an industry body, said that the flying ban cost airlines around $1.7 billion in revenue. See article

A strong performance by Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, in Britain’s first ever televised prime ministerial election debate on April 15th led to an extraordinary surge in support for the party. Yet questions remained over the Lib Dems' ability to transform their bounce into votes. The prospect of a hung parliament loomed larger. See article ...

Wilma Mankiller, first woman chief of the Cherokee Nation, died on April 6th, aged 64

ALL through her life, white people tried to help Wilma Mankiller. As she walked to school, two miles down the hilly, narrow lanes of north-eastern Oklahoma, women in big cars would stop and offer her a ride. She didn’t want one. The same women would appear sometimes at the wood-frame house, where her family of 11 lived in three rooms, burning coal-oil and hauling water from the spring, and offer them second-hand clothes. She would run away. If they caught her, they would pat her on her black-haired, Indian head. “Bless your little heart,” they murmured.

In 1956, when she was ten, white people suggested her family should move from their farm at Mankiller Flats to San Francisco. The government, having forced her ancestors in 1838 along the Trail of Tears from eastern Tennessee to Indian Territory, now promised them a better life even farther west. They caught the passenger train from Stilwell; she wept Cherokee tears all the way to California. No one had forced them out this time. But they ended up in a drab, violent housing project where her father found back-breaking work in a rope-factory and she was mocked at school for her stupid name. She knew it meant “guardian of the settlement”; but that all seemed far away and irrelevant now. ...