THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE

An example of raucous is a party at college with lots of drinking. Finally, students at the Stockholm University host a less formal but more raucous after-party for the laureates and their guests. P. 84, The Economist Ed. March 23rd-29th 2013

POMP:impressive and colourful ceremonies, especially traditional ceremonies on public occasions. POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE: formal ceremonies. The Swedish-style pomp and circumstance will come on June 25th, when the queen will host the winners at Buckingham palace. P. 84, The Economist Ed. March 23rd-29th 2013

def.conversation that is funny and not serious. "SportsCenter features some of America's sparkiest sports commentators, whose banter is as irreverent as an English football chant, minus the swearing." P. 70, The Economist Ed. March 30th-April 5th 2013

def. a shameful act or the disgrace of a shameful act. Together they might share the opprobrium that will inevitably result from the measures needed to do a deal with the IMF and get the economy working. P. 18, The Economist Ed. March 30th-April 5th 2013

1-Literary perilous; dangerous; risky. 2-Archaic dangerously clever; cunning, mischievous, shrewd, etc. India has also wisely kept generals out of politics (a lesson ignored elsewhere in Asia, no least like by Pakistan, with usually parlous results). P. 13, The Economist Ed. March 30th-April 5th 2013

def. Done secretly, without anyone seeing or knowing. Since the nuclear deal with America in 2005, it has shifted towards the west–it tends to vote America's way in the UN, it has cut its purchases of Iranian oil, it collaborates with NATO in Afghanistan and co-ordinates with the West in dealing with regional problems such as repression in Sri Lanka and transition in Myanmar–but has done so surreptitiously. P. 13, The Economist Ed. March 30th-April 5th 2013

def. to control or limit something that is not wanted. This comes at a politically difficult time for Rahm Emanuel, Chicago's mayor, who is also struggling to curb a wave of murders in the city. P. 33, The Economist Ed. March 30th-April 5th 2013

def. To contravene is to go against or contradict. v. 1-An example of contravene is for a soldier to go against the commands of his officer. 2-An example of contravene is for a lawyer to give facts that disprove earlier statements. Most dramatic would be a ruling that all state bans in gay marriage contravene the equal-protection clause of the 14th amendment to the constitution. P. 31, The Economist Ed. March 30th-April 5th 2013

def. The definition of a bridle is a device used to control an animal, such as the headgear used to control a horse. e.g. When you control your anger, this is an example of a time when you bridle your anger. Now that they are in power, the region's far-left populists to bridle at any criticism, domestic or foreign, of their self-proclaimed revolutions. P. 38, The Economist Ed. March 30th-April 5th 2013

def. Travail is defined as very hard work, especially painful work or work that requires a lot of labor. Journalist-haters in his mould might not care about the travails of America's news firms, but many Americans do. P. 33, The Economist Ed. March 30th-April 5th 2013

def. to hit someone or something repeatedly, especially with your fists (= closed hands). Pummeled by a growing barrage of ridicule, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood–dominated government has gone on the offensive. P. 57, The Economist Ed. April 6th-12th 2013

def. The definition of barrage is a large volume of something, or a huge amount of things happening all at once. 1-An example of a barrage is when 100 reporters all shoot questions at the president at the same time. 2-An example of barrage is a large amount of gunfire with the purpose of keeping the enemy forces from moving forward. Pummeled by a growing barrage of ridicule, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood–dominated government has gone on the offensive. P. 57, The Economist Ed. April 6th-12th 201

def. the organizer, manager, or director of an opera or ballet company, concert series, etc. “Googoosha” (her father’s pet name for her) is a 40-year-old pop diva, fashion designer, charity impresario, entrepreneur and diplomat. P. 50, The Economist Ed. April 6th-12th 2013

def.To bring someone who is dying back to life, wake someone who is unconscious, to bring something back into use or existence: François Hollande can still resuscitate his presidency—but he must tell the French the truth. p. 16 The Econmoist Ed. April 6th-12th 2013

Teeter is defined as to wobble in a shaky way, or to change back and forth between two sides of an opinion. e.g. France's economy is teetering on the brink of yet another recession. p. 16 The Economist Ed. April 6th-12th 2013

to weaken someone or to destroy their spirit, energy or power, especially when done slowly over time. An example of sap is a teen who is rebellious and continually drains the energy of her parents. The Cahuzac scandal may not be the only one to sap the president's authority. p. 60 The Economist Ed. April 6th-12th 2013

The definition of chagrin is a feeling of embarrassment caused by failure or disappointment. To physicists’ chagrin, attempts to conjure neutralinos from the LHC have failed. p. 91 The Economist Ed. April 6th-12th 2013

The definition of a lookout is an alert, or a place for keeping watch. It is these high-energy electrons and positrons that AMS is on the lookout for. p. 91 The Economist Ed. April 6th-12th 2013

The definition of a plummet is something that weighs something else down. Plummet is defined as to fall down quickly and suddenly. Beyond that peak, the fraction should plummet, because few high-energy positrons from other sources would be expected to exist, whereas energetic electrons are abundant. p. 91 The Economist Ed. April 6th-12th 2013

The definition of esoteric is something only understood by a chosen group. These included 6.4m electrons and 400,000 positrons that had energies ranging from 0.5 to 350 giga-electron-volts (GeV), measured in the esoteric units particle physicists like to use. p. 92 The Economist Ed. April 6th-12th 2013

to give or grant something as a favor. But the theory of supersymmetry does not vouchsafe exactly what a neutralino’s mass should be, so it might not. p. 92 The Economist Ed. April 6th-12th 2013

1-To spend time being friendly with someone who is important or famous. 2-be on close terms (with someone); associate in a familiar way. 3-NOW RARE to drink together "In Britain the government hobnobbed with trade unions (“beer and sandwiches in Number 10”), handed out subsidies to failing nationalised industries and primed the pump through Keynesian demand management." p. 13 The Economist Ed. April 13th-19th 2013

The definition of sundry refers to a collection of miscellaneous things. More than half of his score of official advisers have abandoned him, along with his vice-president, his minister of justice and numerous sundry bureaucrats. P. 52, The Economist Ed. May 4th-10th 2013 Most shareholders now see that television networks, newspapers, film studios, music labels and other sundry assets add little value by sharing a parent. P. 65, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

On April 23rd Fuad Gadallah, his most senior legal adviser, angrily resigned, issuing a public letter that cited a lack of vision; failure to achieve revolutionary goals or to empower the Egyptian youth; failure to accommodate or even consult political opponents; and the overweening influence of Mr Morsi’s fellow Muslim Brothers in devising policy. P. 52, The Economist Ed. May 4th-10th 2013

Across the Atlantic, European politicians saw this as the timely comeuppance of American capitalism. P. 11, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, blamed her peers in Washington for not having regulated banks and hedge funds more rigorously. P. 11, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

The share of the investment-banking market held by European banks has slumped by a fifth since the crisis (see our special report), with many of the gains going to Wall Street’s surviving behemoths. P. 11, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

Employment has plunged, with London alone shedding 100,000 jobs. P. 11, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

The stellar returns earned by banks before the crisis and the massive rewards paid to their employees are unlikely to recur soon, if at all. P. 11, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

European banks, in contrast, are continuing to shrink their balance-sheets and limp along with insufficient capital. P. 11, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

Its targets were believed to be weapons en route from Iran to Hizbullah, Lebanon’s Shia party-cum-militia, and chemical stockpiles held by Mr Assad. P. 7, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

As a child he listened to the stories of his great-aunt Mariannina, who had witnessed the annexation of the papal states by the new nation of Italy: an event middle-class Roman families like hers still regarded as an unmitigated catastrophe. P. 102, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

Afterwards, he would be greeted at the door of the church by a throng of beggars to whom he gave money. P. 102, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

He knew them all by name. In his office in parliament he kept a sort of pantry, hidden behind a curtain, stacked with food for the neediest. P. 102, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

Along with his piety, though, went ferocity. P. 102, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

As an altar server, he once stabbed out his lit taper in the eye of a boy who was mocking him. P. 102, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

Ambrosoli’s death evoked one of his most chilling quips: “se l’andava cercando”, he had it coming. P. 102, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

In a country where everyone gesticulated, he would sit with his hands laced in front of him in the style of the pre-war popes. P. 102, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

His reprimands were equally restrained. “Excuse me, Paolo,” he once inquired of a political lieutenant. “Are you by any chance insinuating that I’m a shit?” P. 102, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

His reprimands were equally restrained. “Excuse me, Paolo,” he once inquired of a political lieutenant. “Are you by any chance insinuating that I’m a shit?” P. 102, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

Using a mix of computerised tomography and mundane measurements with callipers, they assessed the lengths, widths, thicknesses, densities and bending potential of the bones of the modern animals and compared them with those gleaned from Anurognathus fossils. P. 86, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

They were the size of swifts and until now it had been thought that, like swifts, they chased around the sky after insects—a technique known as hawking. P. 86, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

OF ALL the transitions brought about on the Earth’s surface by temperature change, the melting of ice into water is the starkest. It is binary. And for the land beneath, the air above and the life around, it changes everything. P. 84, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

The waxing and waning of the ice provides an unambiguous signal of what is going on—and it is a signal which can be read in rocks a billion years old almost as easily as it can be observed today. P. 84, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

Until recently studies of the Third Pole were piecemeal—not surprising, given its remoteness, the altitude, the harsh weather and the fact that little love is lost between the countries among which it is divided. P. 84, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

Another is to show how precarious and piecemeal data about the area are. Its role as the source of so many rivers means that absence of data matters. P. 84, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

And that observational pebble, gathering speed as it rolled downhill, produced an avalanche which swept away classical physics and cleared the field for Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity—one of which, the general theory, encapsulates the modern description of gravity. P. 86, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

And on the way there, for those of a practical bent, it may help in the search for submarine oilfields. P. 86, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013 The two young black men who allegedly carried out the murder appeared bent on maximum dramatic effect. P. 57, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

These are cooled to within a gnat’s whisker of absolute zero, a temperature at which their vibration vanishes and the wavelike side of their nature is able to assert itself. P. 86, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

So first they have to prove the interferometer’s bona fides. P. 86, The Economist Ed. May 11th-17th 2013

He battled a clique of scholars who hogged the manuscripts for decades—the “academic scandal of the century”, he called it. P. 98, The Economist Ed. May 18th-24th 2013

But Mr Vermes’s real fame came from his contention that the historical Jesus, whatever his followers came to believe later, was first and foremost a Jewish holy man, one of many such itinerant preachers and wonder-workers. P. 98, The Economist Ed. May 18th-24th 2013

Jewish scholarship and piety shunned the Christian scriptures: what could be gained by studying a self-proclaimed messiah and his mistaken followers? P. 98, The Economist Ed. May 18th-24th 2013

That was his watchword. He disliked certainties masquerading as scholarship in organised religion, whether it was the Catholic hierarchy’s disregard for academic study of the Bible, or for its blaming Jews for Christ’s death (those both changed in the 1960s), or Pope Benedict’s book on Jesus: “mountains of pious and largely familiar musings”, he wrote in a scalding review. P. 98, The Economist Ed. May 18th-24th 2013

Mr Obama is still beset by scandals. P. 13, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

Republicans berate his administration for a “cover-up” after terrorists murdered diplomats in Benghazi; for snooping on journalists; and for letting the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) hound conservatives. P. 13, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

Republicans berate his administration for a “cover-up” after terrorists murdered diplomats in Benghazi; for snooping on journalists; and for letting the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) hound conservatives. P. 13, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

Republicans berate his administration for a “cover-up” after terrorists murdered diplomats in Benghazi; for snooping on journalists; and for letting the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) hound conservatives. P. 13, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013 He allowed foreigners working for advocacy groups promoting human rights and democracy to be hounded, prosecuted and convicted (most of them in absentia) on patently false charges. P. 11, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

The danger is that Mr Obama will achieve little in his second term. Congress remains gridlocked. P. 13, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

Democrats and Republicans could spend the next four years squabbling and issuing subpoenas. P. 13, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

Otherwise as Americans age the cost of pensions and health care will eventually crowd out other public services and imperil the nation’s fiscal health. P. 13, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

Letting in dynamic immigrants, revamping the tax code and reforming entitlements would make the Great Society safe for another generation. Not enough to get Mr Obama’s face carved on Mount Rushmore, but not bad. P. 13, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013 The smartphone-maker has revamped its range with touchscreen devices, but the 6.8m phones it shipped in the three months to June was below the 7.45m that had been forecast. P. 10, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

Someone call a somnambulance, quick P. 14, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

The euro zone may not be about to collapse, but the calm in Brussels is not so much a sign of convalescence as of decay. P. 14, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

But, as the pressure has eased, the union has become ensnared in technicalities and a fundamental argument about how much historic bank debt, if any, should be dumped on it—how much, in other words, Germans, Finns and Dutch should bear the burden of other people’s mistakes. P. 14, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

America has recovered before Europe not just because it has been less austere, but also because it rapidly sorted out its banks so that they could lend again (see Charlemagne). P. 14, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

This hiatus is partly caused by elections due in September in Germany, the prime mover in almost any European policy these days. P. 14, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

Italy is mired in recession, yet it cannot seem to muster a coherent political platform for change. P. 14, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

Dozens from Miss Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, once persecuted, now sit in a parliament that people thought would be a poodle but which has shown real bite. P. 16, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

Both deserve credit. So, too, does American diplomacy, for using calibrated concessions to draw the rulers out of their seclusion, culminating in Mr Thein Sein’s visit to Washington this week. P. 16, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

The rankings irk countries that do not do well—notably China, which comes 91st. P. 18, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

The other is that it gets to the heart of the cronyism and high-level abuse that plague India more widely. P. 18, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

They are often the same people. In recent years politicians have flocked to join the Indian cricket board, which claims a monopoly on the game in India, and earns about $200m a year. P. 18, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

Brief incursions by both armies are routine, but this one, exceptionally, lasted for three weeks. P. 39, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

On his India trip Mr Li visited an especially successful one, Tata Consultancy Services, in Mumbai. Yet exasperation abounds. In April India’s embassy in Beijing reported on growing numbers of its firms targeted in trade disputes in China. P. 39, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013 Yet exceptions abound. Mostly middling earners in Chile supported Augusto Pinochet’s coup in 1973. P. 56, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

AN ACT of terrorism does not have to result in large-scale death and maiming to be profoundly shocking and therefore to achieve its aims. P. 57, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

In 2008 Parviz Khan was jailed for 14 years after trying to lure a British Muslim soldier with the promise of drugs; he had planned to film his beheading. P. 57, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

About 100 supporters of the English Defence League, some wearing masks, gathered near the scene of the crime and scuffled with the police. P. 57, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

Since 2010 these hackers have hidden malware in documents that purport to contain Indian government secrets, presumably hoping to infect systems run by Pakistani military or intelligence services. P. 61, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

Though trivial in itself, that file had slipped through Apple’s normally sturdy defences. P. 61, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

On May 20th the Washington Post said that Chinese cyber-spies who attacked Google in 2009 may have rummaged around the firm’s servers for a year. P. 61, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

Sharia law forbids meat such as pork and birds of prey, plus blood and carrion. P. 62, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

It is not just manufactured products. Services such as halal holidays are booming, too. Crescent Tours, a London-based travel agent, books clients into hotels in Turkey that have separate swimming pools for men and women, no-alcohol policies and halal restaurants, and rents out private holiday villas with high walls. P. 62, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

Verb: Gratify or indulge (an immoral or distasteful desire, need, or habit or a person with such a desire, etc.). This reduces the danger of being seen to pander to Muslim tastes, which has caused problems elsewhere. P. 62, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013 German politicians in general, and Mrs Merkel in particular, have pandered to Germans’ small-country mentality and their belief that responsibility for fixing the euro lies elsewhere. P.06, The Economist Ed. June 15th-21st 2013 (SPECIA

The Quick hamburger chain in France drew flak when in 2010 it considered removing pork from its menu. P. 62, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

Dubai is trying to become the hub for Islamic trade in the Middle East. P. 62, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

Muslim consumers, especially the more liberal-minded ones, can wince at, or enjoy, the uncertainty of what is permitted by Islamic law—just as the companies seeking to woo them do. P. 62, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

Muslim consumers, especially the more liberal-minded ones, can wince at, or enjoy, the uncertainty of what is permitted by Islamic law—just as the companies seeking to woo them do. P. 62, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013 A second path is to focus on business customers first and then woo consumers. P. 77, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

Once caricatured as short-sighted, he is now remembered as a seer. James Gillray, a contemporary British satirist, drew him with spectacles, a big nose and a cross. P. 86, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

He stood for a rotten borough and he took on a sinecure in government himself. P. 86, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

For an Anglo-Saxon readership, his material on the early years is particularly valuable: how in the early 1960s the European Court of Justice established the supremacy of European law; the story of de Gaulle, the veto and the so-called Luxembourg compromise; and, in the early 1970s, the arrival of the European Council of heads of government with, as a quid pro quo, direct elections to the European Parliament. P. 86, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

He hankers for a bigger role for national parliaments, but it is hard to see how this might emerge from today's institutional set-up. P. 87, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

The critical test will be whether, after three years of austerity and 18 months of recession, Europe finds a way to reinvigorate economic growth. Without that, a happy ending seems unlikely. P. 87, The Economist Ed. May 25th-31st 2013

Glenn Beck, an incendiary talk-show host, sees an attempt to indoctrinate the young with “extreme leftist ideology”. He provides no evidence that makes sense. P. 30, The Economist Ed. June 15th-21st 2013

Complaints from the left are equally varied. Some progressives oppose any kind of testing. Some fret that schools and teachers will be held more accountable for results. P. 30, The Economist Ed. June 15th-21st 2013

Youth unemployment, a scourge throughout much of the rest of the continent, is at a 20-year low in Germany. P.03, The Economist Ed. June 15th-21st 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

It is the largest creditor country in the euro zone, and as chief paymaster it has the biggest clout in determining the single currency’s future. P.03, The Economist Ed. June 15th-21st 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT) This newspaper has argued many times for doing so on humanitarian grounds; but Iran’s growing clout is another reason to intervene, for it is not in the West’s interest that a state that sponsors terrorism and rejects Israel’s right to exist should become the regional hegemon. P. 11, The Econ

The Franco-German tandem at the core of post-war European integration has become lopsided. P.03, The Economist Ed. June 15th-21st 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

The Franco-German tandem at the core of post-war European integration has become lopsided. P.03, The Economist Ed. June 15th-21st 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

France’s economy is stagnant, statist and uncompetitive and urgently needs reform. P.03, The Economist Ed. June 15th-21st 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT) The greater danger now is that constitutional reform will distract attention from the urgent need to revive Italy’s distressingly stagnant economy. P.46, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

The German world for leader is Führer, the title adopted by Adolf Hitler. Mention the word “hegemon”, and German politicians flinch. Mrs Merkel recently described the concept as “totally foreign to me”. P.04, The Economist Ed. June 15th-21st 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

If there are differences between the Merkel government and other mainstream politicians, they are about the pace of moving towards a banking union and the balance between “adjustment” in southern Europe and “solidarity” from Germany and other creditors. P.07, The Economist Ed. June 15th-21st 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

But putting all the onus on Europe’s debtors does not make sense. P.08, The Economist Ed. June 15th-21st 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

Only a year ago Mr Assad’s throne seemed to be wobbling. While suffering dramatic military losses to the rebels, his political response was cack-handed. P. 47, The Economist Ed. June 15th-21st 2013 In many American eyes, Europeans are already wobbly, tiresome free-riders who do not police their Islamist extremists properly, breach sanctions, flirt with dictatorships and leak secrets to the Russians and Chinese. P. 12, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

In such circumstances a peace conference in Geneva mooted for next month looks increasingly unlikely to take place on time. P. 47, The Economist Ed. June 15th-21st 2013 Since the regime will find it hard to regain lost territory in the east and north, the dissolution of Syria into several fiefs, even mini-states, as happened in neighbouring Lebanon during its civil war of 1975-90, has been mooted. P. 48, The Economist Ed. June 15th-21st 2013

Many Syrians originally sympathetic to the rebels have been horrified by events such as the reported execution on June 9th of a 14-year-old boy by jihadists in Aleppo, allegedly for insulting the Prophet Muhammad. Downtrodden Sunnis who six months ago were the mainstay of the opposition may be thinking again. P. 47, The Economist Ed. June 15th-21st 2013

def. Grind on: to drag on endlessly; continue for a long time in a wearying or tedious way So a war of attrition, fought partly by proxies, looks set to grind on, with horrendous consequences. P. 48, The Economist Ed. June 15th-21st 2013

Mosques in the capital brim with those from the suburbs whose houses have been destroyed. Few Syrians now see a better future. P. 48, The Economist Ed. June 15th-21st 2013

As an example, take the human mind. The time-honoured idea that the mind is essentially a little man, or homunculus, who sits in the brain doing clever things soon becomes problematic: who does all the clever things in the little man’s brain? P. 81, The Economist Ed. June 15th-21st 2013

This pump, which Mr Dennett calls a “cascade of homunculi”, was inspired by the field of artificial intelligence (AI). P. 81, The Economist Ed. June 15th-21st 2013

IN 2009 Iran was on the verge of electing a reformer as president. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, subverted the vote and crushed the ensuing protests. P. 11, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

IN 2009 Iran was on the verge of electing a reformer as president. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, subverted the vote and crushed the ensuing protests. P. 11, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

The smiling Mr Rohani’s public pronouncements encourage optimism, for he sounds like a different sort of president from the comedy-villain, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who precedes him. P. 11, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

The 64-year-old cleric has been a loyal servant of the Islamic Republic from its inception. P. 11, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

This analysis may be too gloomy. It is possible that Mr Rohani’s arrival heralds a more pragmatic and less aggressive position. P. 11, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

The West should reciprocate, making it clear that it has no intention of impeding Iran’s peaceful development. P. 11, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

But it must do so warily. Any deal offered to Iran should include restraints draconian enough, and inspection intrusive enough, to prevent it from building a weapon surreptitiously, otherwise it would be worse than not doing a deal at all. And such a deal would very likely be unacceptable to Iran. P. 11, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

Intended as a prelude to a more far-reaching deal, the offer represented a slight softening of the six powers’ position, by allowing Iran to keep a small amount of uranium enriched to 20% (for use in a reactor to make medical isotopes) and calling only for the suspension of enrichment at Fordow, a plant buried deep within a mountain, rather than its closure. P. 25, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

After being warned unmistakably by Mr Obama that he could not count on any such thing and that America would not be “complicit” in such an attack, Mr Netanyahu came perilously close to trying to influence the presidential election in favour of his friend, the more hawkish Mitt Romney. P. 28, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

The idea that there will be plenty of time between Iran making the decision to build nuclear weapons and actually getting them is a comforting conceit that Western intelligence agencies have clung to. P. 28, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

America could live with an arsenal reduced by up to a third, Mr Obama suggested. That would leave each country with just over 1,000 such weapons, if Mr Putin reciprocated. P. 33, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

Mr Obama vowed to seek support for American ratification of the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (a long shot) and called for a global treaty banning the production of nuclear bomb-making materials (a hopeless task). P. 33, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

Legally, Mr Obama could agree cuts with Mr Putin, bypassing the Senate. P. 33, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

Three days before the poll the reformist camp, all but eviscerated in 2009, persuaded its most outspoken candidate, Muhammad Reza Aref, to drop out of the race to let reform-minded voters rally behind the less abrasive Mr Rohani. P. 51, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

Three days before the poll the reformist camp, all but eviscerated in 2009, persuaded its most outspoken candidate, Muhammad Reza Aref, to drop out of the race to let reform-minded voters rally behind the less abrasive Mr Rohani. P. 51, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

But he has been quick to call for a rapprochement with the United States, Britain and Saudi Arabia. “Relations between Iran and America are a complicated and difficult issue,” he said. “After all, there is an old scar. P. 51, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

“After all, there is an old scar. We must act prudently to heal it.” America, he added, must forgo “unilateral and bullying policies toward Iran.” P. 51, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

idiom: to the hilt To the limit; completely: played the role to the hilt. It is also generally assumed that he will back Syria’s embattled president, Bashar Assad, to the hilt, as his predecessor and the ruling establishment have done. P. 52, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

CRITICS accuse Barack Obama of dithering in response to the spreading civil war in Syria. P. 52, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013 Yet these stopgaps allowed Mr Morsi’s government to dither, over enacting economic reforms needed to unlock still bigger flows of aid and investment, such as a long-proffered $4.8 billion IMF loan. P. 22, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

Mr Obama believes that for all its horrors and rising death tolls, the fight between rebels and Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, is a stalemate: neither side can vanquish the other militarily. P. 52, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

American officials have given scant detail, but it is thought that the CIA will co-ordinate the supply of light arms to the rebels. P. 52, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

In an interview with PBS television on June 17th, Mr Obama derided the idea that heavier weapons, such as anti-tank or anti-helicopter rockets and missiles, could swiftly tip the balance of power away from the Assad regime. P. 52, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

America’s programme, likely to be based in Jordan, on Syria’s southern border, may in effect amount to a beefing up of a Saudi operation there, which already involves the CIA in training vetted rebels. P. 52, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

In addition, advocates of arming the opposition have long argued that America may gain leverage by sending its own weaponry down supply-lines already filled with aid from Gulf Arab countries and Turkey. P. 52, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

Rebel commanders hope that America’s shift includes a green light for Saudi Arabia to provide them with man-portable air-defence systems (MANPADs)—hitherto vetoed by America. That may be a forlorn hope. Mr Obama noted this month that some of the most effective opposition fighters are no friends of America, so that arming them “willy-nilly” is hardly in America’s long-term interests. P. 52, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

Setting up humanitarian corridors raises equally thorny questions, Mr Obama told PBS. Would America be obliged to stop not just attacks by aircraft but also missile strikes, he asked? P. 53, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

Despite such caution, press reports suggest that American military commanders have proposed creating something akin to a no-fly zone over a sliver of Jordanian territory abutting Syria, shielding rebel training sites from cross-border attacks with the help of American F-16 fighters and Patriot missile batteries that were this month left in place in Jordan after joint military exercises. P. 53, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

An increase in the flow of small arms to the rebels is unlikely to tilt the military balance in the short run. P. 53, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013 But as public fury spread, the Kurds tilted towards the protesters. P. 49, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

Syrians keen to deepen American involvement are banking on the same mission creep that wary members of Mr Obama’s administration want to avoid. P. 53, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

Paris metro and bus workers, for instance, may still retire at the age of 50, rising to 52 only in 2017. Yet a radical overhaul looks increasingly unlikely. P. 56, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013 And Italy will have few better opportunities to overhaul its national decision-making than with a government uniting the left and right with Mario Monti’s centrists. P.46, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

With only hours left before Mr Erdogan’s rally in Istanbul hordes of riot police ripped out their tents, tore down their banners and doused them with tear gas. P. 56, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

With only hours left before Mr Erdogan’s rally in Istanbul hordes of riot police ripped out their tents, tore down their banners and doused them with tear gas. P. 56, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

Meanwhile, a witch hunt for so-called provocateurs has begun. Hundreds of demonstrators have been detained. P. 56, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

Its anti-immigrant rhetoric, swastika-like party emblem and torch-lit parades led by young men in black T-shirts horrify many Greeks. P. 57, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

Golden Dawn supporters are blamed for an upsurge in racist violence. P. 57, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

New Democracy says the existing anti-racism law needs tweaking, not rewriting. P. 57, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

News Corp is not the only sprawling media conglomerate that is streamlining its businesses. P. 65, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013 A few media firms are still bucking the trend and adding a bit of sprawl. P. 66, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

The authors argue that emerging-market companies are advancing along eight paths to brand success. All are strewn with obstacles but each offers a possible route to the global heights. P. 70, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

The most obvious is the path previously trodden by Japanese firms such as Toyota and Sony, and then South Koreans such as Samsung and Hyundai: first, establish a beachhead in the West by selling a good-enough product cheaply; then relentlessly raise your price and quality. P. 70, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

The most obvious is the path previously trodden by Japanese firms such as Toyota and Sony, and then South Koreans such as Samsung and Hyundai: first, establish a beachhead in the West by selling a good-enough product cheaply; then relentlessly raise your price and quality. P. 70, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

One is to latch on to some aspect of the national culture that sounds nice: Havaianas, a Brazilian flip-flops maker, taps into the local beach life. P. 70, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

A habit of pilfering foreigners’ ideas can discourage them from developing distinctive products and brand identities. P. 70, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

The summit also produced promises to promote transparency regarding the ownership of hitherto anonymous shell companies. P. 73, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

The third “T” was tax. Publicity over the low taxes paid on foreign profits by American multinationals such as Apple, Google and Starbucks has propelled tackling tax avoidance up the political agenda in the G8, including in Britain, the summit’s host. P. 73, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

On June 19th Swiss lawmakers voted down a bill that would have enabled Swiss banks to co-operate with US authorities in their pursuit of American tax dodgers. P. 73, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

Yet in “Through a Latte, Darkly”, a new study of how Starbucks has largely avoided paying tax in Britain, Edward Kleinbard of the University of Southern California shows that current tax rules make it easy for all sorts of firms to generate what he calls “stateless income”: profit subject to tax in a jurisdiction that is neither the location of the factors of production that generate the income nor where the parent firm is domiciled. P. 74, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

The devastation that the Japanese invasion would wreak was indeed shocking. P. 83, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

It was the anvil on which the new nation was forged. P. 83, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

As Japan modernised, it became a model for Chinese reformers and a refuge for Chinese revolutionaries who opposed their own government’s insularity. P. 83, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

Mr Mitter does not skimp in narrating the atrocities; the stench of war infuses his narrative. P. 83, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

Mr Mitter does not skimp in narrating the atrocities; the stench of war infuses his narrative. P. 83, The Economist Ed. June 22ND-28TH 2013

They tend to be ordinary, middle-class people, not lobbies with lists of demands. Their mix of revelry and rage condemns the corruption, inefficiency and arrogance of the folk in charge. P. 11, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

The 40m Brazilians who clambered out of poverty in the past eight years are able for the first time to scrutinise the society that their taxes finance. P. 11, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

Higher education is in the vanguard. Barely a year from its launch, Coursera, one of the pioneers in offering “massive open online courses”, now boasts more than 3.9m students worldwide, taking courses supplied by 83 partner institutions. P. 13, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

This is a mistake. Enlargement has been the EU’s most successful policy bar none. The hope of membership was crucial in fostering and smoothing the transition to democracy, first in Greece, Spain and Portugal and later across large parts of eastern Europe. P. 15, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

For all that, formidable barriers still exist to getting education technology into America’s schools. These range from the prosaic to the ideological. P. 26, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

America’s 13,000 school districts still upgrade their texts and equipment on slow, unsynchronised cycles and follow a bewildering range of procurement processes. P. 26, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

Unions have filed lawsuits to close down online charter schools, including what looks like a deliberately obtuse proposal to limit enrolment at such virtual schools to those who live in their districts. P. 26, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

The promise in all this for teachers is less drudgery, since some of their duller tasks can be automated, and interesting new challenges as they work out how to reorganise their classes. P. 26, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

Upon the appearance of a slight man in a white Gandhi cap, phones glowed like fireflies in the dark as men craned to snap his picture. “Now I have lived, I’ve seen him!” trilled one. P. 37, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

It was led by an ascetic Gandhi lookalike, Anna Hazare, who fasted to demand the creation of a l okpal (powerful ombudsman) to combat graft. P. 37, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

He calls Arab spring protesters in Egypt an inspiration for their use of social media, and has become adept at campaigning, using technology in the absence of Mr Hazare to draw crowds. P. 37, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

The trouble is that dirty politics are often more successful. Delhi’s police make rickshaw drivers remove Aam Aadmi posters from their vehicles. P. 38, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

Voters may oppose venality, but at elections they accept politicians’ handouts. P. 38, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

THE tide of street demonstrations that rose across Brazil earlier this month, following what began as a small protest about São Paulo bus fares, seems to have ebbed. P. 34, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

Among many others in Egypt, the head of al-Azhar, Sunni Islam’s leading theological institution, issued a sharp rebuke to Salafists spewing sectarian bile. P. 45, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

Shia leaders such as Iraq’s Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who fret that their community could again become pariahs in the region, have in the past also sought to calm Sunni-Shia ire. P. 45, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

IT IS an odd thing when a nation of 84m people lumbers towards a precise appointment with a wholly unknown destiny. P. 46, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

Worried citizens are stockpiling necessities, with a panicked run on petrol causing mile-long queues and snarled traffic. P. 46, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013 Queues for petrol have lengthened. Farmers are often not being paid for their wheat. Crime has soared—the murder rate has tripled since the revolution. P. 11, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

These include stalwarts of the “deep state”, the opaque, Mubarak-era civil service and security apparatus that spent decades oppressing Islamists. P. 46, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

def. primly out of date. Powerful businessmen who profited under Mr Mubarak also bear grudges, relentlessly reflected in the privately owned media that far outshine the Islamists’ dowdy efforts at propaganda. P. 46, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

Another def. overcome or coerce as if by using a heavy club The 66-year-old prayer leader and three of his followers were bludgeoned to death. P. 45, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013 Sadly, the old man and his thugs will probably try to bludgeon their way to a bogus victory. P.10, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

THE protests that have convulsed Turkey since May 31st are prompting many questions about the future of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. P. 49, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

Most critically, what effect has the turmoil had on his bold efforts to solve the country’s long-festering Kurdish problem? P. 49, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

Mr Demirtas even parroted the government’s view that coup-plotters and ultranationalists were responsible for them. P. 49, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

Murat Karayilan, a PKK commander in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, went so far as to suggest he might end a three-month truce because Turkey was “preparing for war”. P. 49, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

Europe was impotent to stop the bloodshed, despite the vainglorious claim by Jacques Poos, Luxembourg’s then foreign minister, that “the hour of Europe has dawned”. P. 51, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

Membership cannot mend everything. The process has not overcome the bitterness of Vukovar’s people. Nor is it certain to fix the Balkans’s many troubles. P. 51, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

Journalists have camped at Moscow airport for days, but caught no sight of their quarry. P. 55, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

In America outrage over the leaking of secrets and fear at what may come next is tinged with concerns about the oversight and reach of the NSA. P. 55, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

An amorphous digital crowd can find it hard to agree on demands, accept compromises, or discipline provocateurs. Online voting and other clever e-democracy tools may solve this problem. P. 56, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

Protesters in Turkey and Brazil say their mobile internet access was throttled, though congestion, not censorship, may be the real culprit. P. 56, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

Protesters in Turkey and Brazil say their mobile internet access was throttled, though congestion, not censorship, may be the real culprit. P. 56, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013 The main culprit is bigger-than-expected cuts in public spending that were necessary to keep the bail-out on track. P.47, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

Since 2011 cops in Brazil have tried head-mounted face-detection cameras, which authorities claim can capture up to 400 faces a second. Hoisting them on cheap drones would offer an even better view. P. 56, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

And they are more skilled at seeking redress through courts and complaints, says Daniel Treisman, of the University of California, Los Angeles. P. 56, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

TRAVELLERS on Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s state-owned railway, are used to being addressed in a peculiar language peppered with ponderous English words and phrases, such as Neue Snackbox für Kids. But rail bosses have decided that this creeping use of Denglisch has gone too far. P. 62, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

Advertising in Germany is particularly prone to Anglicisms. P. 62, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

Most English slogans used in Germany fall flat because they are so garbled, says Bernd Samland of Endmark, a brand consultancy. P. 62, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

A ruling elite defined by caste, but also by gender, education and income, has an utter lack of interest—verging on contempt—in improving matters for the rest. P. 75, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

The difficulty for the citizen and taxpayer is to decide: are people being too paranoid, or too complacent? P. 75, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

He is one of Britain’s leading authorities on, and sceptics about, cyber-warfare. His provocatively titled book attacks the hype and mystique about sabotage, espionage, subversion and other mischief on the internet. P. 75, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

He criticises the American air force for using a “lobbying gimmick” with talk of “cyber” as a fifth domain of warfare, after land, sea, air and space. P. 75, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

def. highly attractive and able to arouse hope or desire In this beguiling book he describes how, like Kipling, he came back to Horace, and to himself. P. 77, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

Later, as Mr Eyres began to ponder the questions of existence, the excesses of a superficial society, the problem of how to live well and the inevitability of death, he came to realise that even after 2,000 years, Horace, his old nemesis, can provide some answers. P. 77, The Economist Ed. June 29TH-July 5TH 2013

The impact on federal law of the Supreme Court’s recent decision on gay marriage was made clear with an announcement that green cards would be issued to foreign spouses in legally recognised same-sex nuptials. P. 7, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

The “troika” of international lenders gave Greece an ultimatum to show it can honour its austerity promises before a further €8.1 billion ($10.6 billion) in aid can be unlocked. P. 7, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

Officials sought to dampen fears of what would happen if Greece did not receive aid payments in time. P. 7, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

In India the government passed a law to provide cheap food rations to two-thirds of Indians. It did so by ordinance without getting Parliament’s approval. P. 7, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

The titular king of Manipur state, in India’s north-east, ended his hunger strike. P. 7, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

In a second vote the European Parliament decided to delay issuing more industrial permits to emit carbon. P. 10, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013 Gas vehicles emit less carbon dioxide than equivalent petrol-powered ones. P.12, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

That is why we regard the events of the past few days with trepidation. P. 11, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

The army, which is in part responsible for the situation, must start Egypt on the path towards new elections as swiftly as possible, or the prospects for the country will be bleak. P. 11, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

The Egyptian pound and foreign exchange reserves have both dwindled, inflation is rising and unemployment among those under 24 is more than 40%. P. 11, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

He made false, inept or cowardly choices at every turn, finagling constitutional issues, pushing fellow Brothers into key appointments and feeding the secularists’ fears that his brethren were determined, by hook or by crook, to Islamise every aspect of society. P. 11, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

A petulant European response to the spy row risks speeding the pull-out. P. 12, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

The hounding from power of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood leaves the most populous and influential Arab country in a dangerous state of flux, and it will have sweeping implications for politics across the Muslim world—Egypt has always been a bellwether for its region. P. 21, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

On July 1st the army issued an ultimatum calling on Mr Morsi to “meet the demands of the people” baying for his departure. P. 21, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

General al-Sisi was flanked by some of the religious and political leaders including the Coptic pope, who had been consulted on the army’s plan. Nearly all political parties, including Salafist former allies of the Brotherhood, have endorsed the road map. P. 21, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

Troops moved to surround a sit-in of angry and forlorn Brotherhood supporters near Cairo university. P. 21, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

The period of army rule between the fall of Mr Mubarak and Mr Morsi’s election was marked by ham-fisted mismanagement, maladroit politics and vicious human-rights abuses. P. 22, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

These people tilted in the Brotherhood’s direction in the 2012 elections because they thought they were untainted and competent. P. 22, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

Repressed by Mr Mubarak—though he let them stay viable enough to serve as a bogeyman to the regime’s Western supporters—the group soldiered on with gritty determination. P. 22, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

Repressed by Mr Mubarak—though he let them stay viable enough to serve as a bogeyman to the regime’s Western supporters—the group soldiered on with gritty determination. P. 22, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

Yet these stopgaps allowed Mr Morsi’s government to dither, over enacting economic reforms needed to unlock still bigger flows of aid and investment, such as a long-proffered $4.8 billion IMF loan. P. 22, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

Wang Huiyao of the China Western Returned Scholars Association, which celebrates its centenary this year, observes that sea turtles have returned in five waves. P. 41, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

Labour and land costs are rising, the theft of intellectual property is still rampant and corruption is widespread. P. 42, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

Few top-tier scientists have returned. Mr Wang and Mr Zweig’s paper explains why: “If China wants to bring back the best, it needs a fundamental reform of its academic and scientific institutions” to break the power of politicised administrators over hiring and funding. P. 42, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

A deeper controversy surrounds the NSA’s ability to harness its abundant processing power to trawl huge amounts of data for clues about crime and terrorism. P. 55, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

On July 2nd, at a summit in Moscow, Bolivia’s president Evo Morales joked that he might help Mr Snowden, who is in limbo at an airport there, seeking asylum from American justice. P. 56, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

But the risk that one of the biggest trade deals in decades could be derailed by mistrust or bickering has been underlined. P. 66, The Economist Ed. July 6TH-12TH 2013

Some of the more go-ahead Arab monarchies, for example in Morocco, Jordan and Kuwait, are groping towards constitutional systems that give their subjects a bigger say. P. 11, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

Muhammad Morsi, the Muslim Brother evicted earlier this month by the generals at the apparent behest of many millions of Egyptians in the street, was democratically elected, yet did his best to flout the norms of democracy during his short stint as president. P. 11, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

The Senate, for example, is sure to squelch the House’s 20-week limit on abortions. P. 28, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

Overpriced homes are like the extravagant plumage of a peacock, an eye-catching encumbrance that only the most resourceful males can put on display. P. 39, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

Overpriced homes are like the extravagant plumage of a peacock, an eye-catching encumbrance that only the most resourceful males can put on display. P. 39, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

The interim president, Adly Mansour, called for an inquiry without suggesting its terms, leaving the whiff of a would-be cover-up. P. 41, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

Keen to bring back stability and to persuade people that he sincerely wants to cede power as soon as possible, General Sisi moved fast to prod Mr Mansour into setting a rapid return to democracy. P. 41, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

“But they may not be able to rein in young members.” P. 42, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

So Saudi Arabia, which detests the Brothers, reacted with glee. P. 42, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

Al Arabiya, a Saudi-owned satellite television channel, called the coup a “second revolution” and screened copious footage of the protests against Mr Morsi. P. 42, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

Qatar’s news agency reported that the new emir, Sheikh Tamim, had sent a cable of congratulations to Mr Mansour. P. 42, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

The army tried to enforce a night-time curfew. P. 42, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

Most of the gunmen are Bedouin who have long-standing grievances against the central government in Cairo. P. 42, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

They say they are barred from joining the army or police; they find it hard to get jobs in tourism; and they complain that many of their lands have been taken from them. P. 42, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

“The Salafist armed groups were putting their trust in the ballot box,” says Mr Goda. “Now that they see our democracy is a sham, they will trust in bullets again—and drag the Brothers in, too.” P. 43, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

But foreigners working for the government will be twitchy, as Emiratisation speeds up. P. 43, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

Saudi Arabia has also long pursued “Saudi-isation”, whereby firms are made to replace foreigners with Saudi workers. Under the current law, known as nitaqat (“categories”), companies are classified by green, yellow and red labels that denote the extent to which they have complied with employment quotas. P. 43, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

Across the region, a further cull of jobs for foreigners looks likely. P. 43, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 Foreign sales provide an external test of their progress, allowing the state to “cull losers”, even if it cannot pick winners. P.72, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

Translating religious ideals into practical policies is tough when Islamists themselves are far from agreed over what those ideals should be, and tougher still when resistance to Islamist aims, whether from entrenched bureaucracies or from secular-minded elites, proves stiff and unrelenting. P.03, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

When the police in the tiny island kingdom of Bahrain failed to stamp out a raucous pro-democracy mutiny, the ruling family panicked. P.03, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

When the police in the tiny island kingdom of Bahrain failed to stamp out a raucous pro-democracy mutiny, the ruling family panicked. P.03, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

These, ominously, include extreme jihadist factions, among them al-Qaeda, whose ambitions extend far beyond imposing harsh religious laws. P.04, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

The 1,400-year-old great fitna (schism) between Islam’s main branches, given to periodic eruptions, rumbles ominously again. P.04, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

def. To stifle is to cut off, hold back, or smother. You may stifle your cough if you don't want to interrupt a lecture or you may stifle the competition if you fear losing. Debate on such crucial issues as the relationship between state and religion, central authority and local demands, and individual and collective rights could not be indefinitely stifled. P.04, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

Yet the embers of revolution smouldered on. Within a generation of 1848 the whole of Europe had been radically transformed. P.04, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

Some rulers were benign and well loved, others venal or cruel, but common rituals and touchstones, such as memories of anti-colonial struggles, served to suggest a shared legitimacy. P.05, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

Windfall oil revenues in the 1970s encouraged Arab oil exporters to indulge their people with mammoth infrastructure projects and cradle-to-grave welfare benefits. P.06, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

The managerial classes in places such as Egypt and Syria, perfunctorily educated in the factory-like schools built to accommodate rapidly expanding cohorts of children, fell ever further behind their peers elsewhere. P.06, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

Many of them blamed the murder on Syria, which had long meddled in its neighbour’s affairs. P.06, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

He had joined a vigil outside the Iranian embassy to protest against Iran’s support for the Syrian regime. P.07, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT) At a rain-spattered vigil in Tampa a weeping woman holding a guttering candle complained that America deems black lives worthless. P.27, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

Burly men wearing yellow armbands attacked the small crowd with clubs and pistols. P.07, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

These killings barely nudged the daily toll from Syria’s civil war, a war that has warped into bloody attrition between the majority Sunni and better-armed Shia Muslims. P.07, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

But more recently a combination of factors has pushed the two sects apart, ranging from a waning sense of a shared struggle against the West to the oil-greased rise in the influence of Sunni Saudi Arabia (whose Wahhabist state ideology vilifies Shias as heretics) and the empowerment of historically marginalised Shias in other countries. P.07, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

The fall in 2003 of the country’s brutal despot, Saddam Hussein, gave vent to the burning resentment of the Shia underclass he had long persecuted, raising fears among Sunnis who had ruled the territory since Ottoman times. P.07, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

The country remains divided, the disgruntled, impoverished and violent Sunni part now contrasting with a relatively quiet and prospering Kurdish north and Shia south. P.07, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

Many bore a grudge against the 12% minority of Alawites, an esoteric offshoot of Shiism to which the ruling Assad clan and much of the officer class belong. P.08, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

Mysterious attacks against Christians and other minorities followed, prompting some to form pro-government vigilante gangs. P.08, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

Radical jihadist groups can be counted on to burnish his image by committing atrocious acts of vengeance. P.08, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

Two years later, in dusty Shia villages just minutes from the sleek waterfront of Bahrain’s capital, Manama, black religious banners and stencilled images of martyrs proclaim sullen resistance. P.08, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

Two years later, in dusty Shia villages just minutes from the sleek waterfront of Bahrain’s capital, Manama, black religious banners and stencilled images of martyrs proclaim sullen resistance. P.08, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

Two years later, in dusty Shia villages just minutes from the sleek waterfront of Bahrain’s capital, Manama, black religious banners and stencilled images of martyrs proclaim sullen resistance. P.08, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

The abrupt implosion of Iraq and Syria, which had been highly centralised and repressive states, helps explain their rapid descent into mayhem. P.08, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

The abrupt implosion of Iraq and Syria, which had been highly centralised and repressive states, helps explain their rapid descent into mayhem. P.08, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

“More often than not, the intricacies of faith and theology are about as relevant in Iraqi sectarian dynamics as Christianity is in the rhetoric of European far-right groups,” writes Fanar Haddad, an Iraqi scholar at the National University of Singapore. P.08, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

Hizbullah’s recent dispatch of fighters into Syria has provoked a torrent of Sunni abuse. P.08, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

Mosque sermons recalled distant historical episodes of supposed Shia perfidy. P.08, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

This increasingly ugly tone bodes ill for sectarian relations across Islam. P.08, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

As they have now found, running the place is a lot more difficult than carping from the sidelines. P.09, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

Mr Morsi has shielded the army and police from scrutiny of repressive tactics that left perhaps a thousand Egyptians dead in repeated bouts of unrest. P.09, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

Following their convincing win in parliamentary elections at the end of 2011, ten months after Egypt’s revolution, they fared progressively worse at the polls. Mr Morsi won the presidency by a whisker in June 2012, but after peaking at 80% in September last year, by last month his popularity had plunged to 30%, according to polls. P.09, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

Even before the latest mass uprising, described by one commentator as a “popular impeachment”, and the army coup, the Muslim Brothers had been heavily defeated in elections for university student councils and professional syndicates, bodies they had long dominated. P.09, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

Even before the latest mass uprising, described by one commentator as a “popular impeachment”, and the army coup, the Muslim Brothers had been heavily defeated in elections for university student councils and professional syndicates, bodies they had long dominated. P.09, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

Egypt has experienced a surge in poverty and childhood stunting, a result of poor nutrition. P.09, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013 (SPECIAL REPORT)

A political street-fighter and activist since student days, he was an unlikely hermit. P.46, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

When he closed the store and opened one on the posh Kurfürstendamm, thieves promptly broke in there and made off with historic watches that are almost priceless. P.47, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

True, like other local politicians, mayors employ armies of public-relations flacks to big up their contribution to local business growth, but increasingly there is substance behind the hype. P.60, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

True, like other local politicians, mayors employ armies of public-relations flacks to big up their contribution to local business growth, but increasingly there is substance behind the hype. P.60, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

The final secret of Asian success, Mr Studwell argues, was a cowed financial system. P.72, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

This is punctuated by travelogues, describing Asia’s landscape of economic triumph and tribulation, from the kitsch houses of rice farmers in Japan’s Niigata prefecture, who have great agricultural know-how but little architectural taste, to the unfinished towers of Jakarta’s Bank Alley, their growth stunted by the Asian financial crisis. P.72, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

This is punctuated by travelogues, describing Asia’s landscape of economic triumph and tribulation, from the kitsch houses of rice farmers in Japan’s Niigata prefecture, who have great agricultural know-how but little architectural taste, to the unfinished towers of Jakarta’s Bank Alley, their growth stunted by the Asian financial crisis. P.72, The Economist Ed. July 13TH-19TH 2013

Compared with the scale of the problem, the funds on offer are puny. P.11, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

Stealing a car for a joyride used to be a “gateway crime”, which would lead teenagers on to other crimes; now such escalation is restricted to Grand Theft Auto games (which, at least one study suggests, may themselves be reducing crime by keeping feisty young men occupied). P.24, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

The predictions can be eerily good, according to Mark Johnson, a police analyst: “In the first box I visited we found a carving knife just lying in the road.” P.24, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

And while data-crunching may make it easier to identify high-risk offenders—about half of American states use some form of statistical analysis to decide when to parole prisoners—there is little that it can do to change their motivation. P.26, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

Identifying true villains among the oddballs and loudmouths found by social-media searches is tricky. Most police efforts are embryonic. P.26, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

An online petition backing the idea, sponsored by the NAACP, has already garnered 1m signatures. P.27, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

On the stump in Yamagata prefecture, a farming heartland in the north of Japan’s main island, he goes into excruciating detail about companies’ summer bonuses and boasts of Japan’s strong growth in the first three months of the year (an annualised 4.1%)—all to wild applause. P.37, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

Mr Abe’s dearest wish is to secure the two-thirds majority, including allies, that he already enjoys in the lower house. It would allow him radically to revise the meek constitution imposed by America after Japan’s wartime defeat. P.37, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

A gap is opening between urban voters and rural ones living far from the luxury-car salesrooms and stockbrokers’ bars where the atmosphere is most buoyant. P.37, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

Equal parts “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Sex and the City” (minus the sex) it has resonated with the “me” generation aspiring to the lives of its protagonists, who totter around campus in expensive stilettos and buy each other fancy designer gifts. P.42, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

Equal parts “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Sex and the City” (minus the sex) it has resonated with the “me” generation aspiring to the lives of its protagonists, who totter around campus in expensive stilettos and buy each other fancy designer gifts. P.42, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

It also carries out public works, mending roads and providing food, in contrast to other groups, whose predations upset the locals. P.45, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

Yet for Mr Letta the pivotal event of recent months was that 8m Italian voters turned their backs on traditional parties in February’s general election and supported Beppe Grillo’s maverick Five Star Movement (M5S). P.46, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

Already, Mr Letta’s government, which yokes his Democratic Party (PD) to Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Freedom (PdL), has cut ministers’ salaries and approved a bill to phase out direct subsidies of parties (the hope is that they can instead get a mix of taxes earmarked by individual taxpayers and tax-deductible donations). P.46, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

The second was the tabling by the M5S and the radical Left, Ecology and Freedom party of a no-confidence motion in Mr Berlusconi’s protégé, the interior minister, Angelino Alfano. At issue is Mr Alfano’s responsibility for, or knowledge of, the recent expulsion to Kazakhstan of Alma Shalabayeva and her six-year-old daughter. P.47, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

Britain, too, warned the European Commission that security matters were outside its remit. P.49, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

Two months before Germany’s election, the chancellor is accused of prevaricating, amid allegations of German collusion with American spies. Now she, too, wants “very strict” data-privacy rules. P.49, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden hope to water down the proposed law because they think it is too onerous, particularly for small and medium-sized firms, and could stifle innovation. P.49, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which authorises America to eavesdrop on international telephone calls and online data, Europeans do not enjoy the same protection and judicial means of redress as Americans. P.49, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

But this will not resolve the question of spying either: the rules governing spooks in European countries are often far laxer than those in America. P.49, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

Multinationals that have put local Chinese managers in charge of their operations in the country are often the most vulnerable to jiggery-pokery. P.56, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

Unless iPads had been replaced by gold bars, it seemed that some exporters were colluding with banks and shipping firms to inflate invoices. P.57, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

Mr Miralda is the victim of a bungled, overambitious renewables programme. P.57, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

If the policies are wrong, the benefits are wasted, the jobs disappear, the costs remain—and business investors bear the brunt. P.57, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

The changes have infuriated everyone. They are retroactive—affecting current operations as well as new ones—so there will be a deluge of lawsuits challenging their legality. P.57, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

And this is what encourages investors to take a punt on business ideas that, at first sight, look half-crazy. P.60, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

BEFORE the global financial crisis, emerging economies like China aspired to “decouple” themselves from the rich world, hoping that local demand and regional trade would sustain them even if Western markets faltered. P.64, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

After the crisis, rich economies aspired to couple themselves with China, one of the few sources of growth in a moribund world. P.64, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

Exposure to China does not always endear a firm to investors, as GlaxoSmithKline, a British pharmaceutical giant embroiled in a corruption scandal in the country, is now discovering. P.64, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

Exposure to China does not always endear a firm to investors, as GlaxoSmithKline, a British pharmaceutical giant embroiled in a corruption scandal in the country, is now discovering. P.64, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

As a rough gauge of multinational exposure to China, The Economist in 2010 introduced the Sinodependency index, a stockmarket index that weights American multinationals according to their China revenues. P.64, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

At home she is cautious, sceptical of government’s ability to change things, solicitous of allies and quick to cut down challengers. P.73, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

From its start in Greece in early 2010, Mrs Merkel has been reluctant to lead, careful of committing taxpayers’ money and insistent on punishing the profligate. P.74, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

Spain forbade such trade, but Rezanov (pictured here as the Japanese saw him) was not cowed by rules. P.74, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

His wooing (passionate but pragmatic) of Conchita, the 15-year-old daughter of the fort’s commander, brought both a deal and a betrothal. P.74, The Economist Ed. July 20TH-26TH 2013

Kenyan police confiscated a large cache of explosives on a bus. P.6, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

Alexei Navalny, a Russian blogger and vocal critic of President Vladimir Putin, was freed on bail after being found guilty of embezzlement and sentenced to five years in jail. P.6, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

Other states and cities should pay heed, not because they might end up like Detroit next year, but because the city is a flashing warning light on America’s fiscal dashboard. P.9, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

The earlier you grapple with the problem, the easier it will be to fix. Nebraska, which stopped offering final-salary pensions to new hires in 1967, is sitting pretty. P.9, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

But they should help pensioners left stranded through no fault of their own. P.9, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

But the truth is that America’s whole public sector still operates in a financial never-never land. Uncle Sam offers an array of “entitlements” that there is no real plan to pay for. P.9, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

For the past few years, with China surging, Wall Street crunched, Washington in gridlock and the euro zone committing suicide, the old liberal verities have been questioned: state capitalism and authoritarian modernisation have been in vogue. P.10, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

Last time, in 2008, the MDC won the parliamentary poll and Mr Tsvangirai comfortably defeated Mr Mugabe in the first round of the presidential race, though hamstrung by chicanery and violence. P.13, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

Last time, in 2008, the MDC won the parliamentary poll and Mr Tsvangirai comfortably defeated Mr Mugabe in the first round of the presidential race, though hamstrung by chicanery and violence. P.13, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

That catching up was somewhat lackadaisical: the gap closed at just 1.5% a year. P.20, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

Prices surged, generating a bonanza for the emerging world’s commodity producers and contributing to a broad-based boom, to the great benefit both of fellow-BRICs Russia and Brazil and of smaller economies, including many in Africa. P.21, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

This reserve accumulation contributed to a global savings glut, and the resulting low interest rates encouraged heavy public and private borrowing in the rich world. P.21, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

Other countries have impressive growth potential. Goldman Sachs touts a list of the “Next 11” which includes Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria and Turkey. P.22, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

Many countries will find that commodities no longer provide a crutch. P.22, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

Another country where Buddhism is becoming conflated with a growing ethnic and nationalist identity is Sri Lanka. P.35, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

On the Muslim side, argues Ahmad Suaedy of Jakarta’s Abdurrahman Wahid Centre for interfaith dialogue, some jihadist groups, reared on the fundamentalist doctrines of the Arab world, would regard the Rohingyas’ brand of Islam as unduly syncretic, even unIslamic, and thus unworthy of support. P.36, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

Videos posted online show bystanders ignoring his mother’s pleas for help....Such grisly incidents are in fact rare. P.37, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

Commentators blame the perceived callousness on China’s growth-at-all-costs mentality which, they claim, has created a moral vacuum. The China Daily said the case of Yue Yue symbolised “our moral decline”. P.37, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

Worse, some say, those who come to the aid of others lack legal protection from a grasping and increasingly litigious society. P.37, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

Cases of extortion, though also rare, are widely reported. Yunxiang Yan, an anthropologist at the University of California, wrote in an essay on the subject that they constitute “a heavy blow to social trust, compassion, and the principle of moral reciprocity”. P.37, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

Shiny steel taps with plastic stools for ablutions clutter a once-verdant garden filled with ancient sculptures. P.45, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

Shiny steel taps with plastic stools for ablutions clutter a once-verdant garden filled with ancient sculptures. P.45, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

Its reasoning was daft: the bank felt its notes would not “command respect and legitimacy” unless one of them featured a woman, apparently forgetting that the queen appears on all notes. P.48, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

In these final years, from 1916 to 1924, Kafka receives letters from quizzical bank managers asking him to explain his stories (“Sir, You have made me unhappy. I bought your ‘Metamorphosis’ as a present for my cousin, but she doesn’t know what to make of the story”). P.67, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

He is also wryly aware of the academic cottage industry that has sprung up around Kafka’s work, hints of which had already emerged in his lifetime. P.67, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

He is also wryly aware of the academic cottage industry that has sprung up around Kafka’s work, hints of which had already emerged in his lifetime. P.67, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

When writing to his first fiancée, he refers to himself in the third person and struggles to evoke intimacy. P.67, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

The armistice on July 27th 1953 neither restored peace (no treaty was signed) nor reunified the newly divided peninsula. P.68, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

His first year in office was marked by the ignominious Bay of Pigs, his failed effort to eject Fidel Castro from Cuba. P.68, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

The book’s core argument—that Kennedy came into his own during his final 100 days—is not entirely persuasive. P.69, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

Far from being a pacifist, Jesus for Mr Aslan was the leader of a nationalist revolt against Rome who was punished for sedition, not blasphemy. P.70, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

Once Jewish resistance to Rome was more or less quashed, followers of Jesus consciously or unconsciously refashioned their faith into one that meekly accepted imperial authority and could spread easily through a multinational empire. P.70, The Economist Ed. July 27TH-August 2ND 2013

Protesters against the move ransacked Congress offices in one district of AP. P.8, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

It was legal casuistry to redefine the torture of prisoners with waterboarding and stress positions as “enhanced interrogation”. P.9, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

America’s spying agencies cannot function if their employees squawk—and, when “mass leaking” has become politically fashionable and technically feasible, deterrents are needed. P.9, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

But both men also show how America still leans too far towards security over liberty. P.9, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

That argument is looking ever more rickety: in fact, the NSA lives under a simulacrum of judicial and legislative oversight. P.9, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

The linchpin of the system is the secret court, which interprets government powers under the law as well as issuing routine warrants. P.9, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

But Americans do not know about its rulings, and so cannot challenge them. In theory if Congress disputes the court’s judgments or the NSA’s behaviour, it can amend the law. P.9, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

Jim Sensenbrenner, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin and one of the authors of the Patriot Act, has said that the NSA’s dragnet was not what the act intended. P.9, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

Every intelligence service will impinge on individual liberties—and America’s has succeeded in its main job: to prevent attacks. P.9, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

But it would be foolish to extrapolate from the rich world’s past to booming Asia’s future. P.12, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

But over the weekend, when Egypt’s generals set about killing scores of protesters, the West responded with furrowed brows and pleas for all sides to refrain from violence. P.13, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

The market for remittances has been a hothouse for start-ups in Britain, partly because it was lightly regulated. P.14, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

Bad feeling continues to this day, long after the hostages have become fodder for history books and Hollywood films. P.14, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

But unlike his predecessor, a straightforward wolf in wolf’s clothing when it came to foreign relations, Mr Rohani comes with fewer lupine features. P.14, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

In BP’s case the big numbers are more calamitous—it may end up paying out $90 billion in fines and compensation stemming from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. P.20, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

In March China introduced stringent fuel standards of 6.9 litres per 100km (34 miles per gallon) by 2015 and 5l/100km (47 mpg) by 2020. P.21, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

Although officials claimed at the time that the leaks put lives at risk, they seem mostly to have caused embarrassment, revealing that America’s soldiers are sometimes trigger-happy and its diplomats occasionally duplicitous. P.24, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

The Lamp Community, a non-profit working for the mentally ill in Los Angeles, says the desperate cycle of emergency-room visits and stints in jail can exceed $100,000 a year for each homeless person. P.24, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

Her mother believes Melissa needs to be somewhere secure, so much so that she refused to bail out her daughter from jail because she was not taking her tablets. P.25, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

Millions died in a few short years, as Chinese villages were encouraged to mete out their own punishment with the aim of creating a blessed “New China”. P.35, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

Mao’s death in 1976 brought to an end the last spasm of violence in his name, the Cultural Revolution. P.35, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

For Mrs Merkel, this seasonal torpor is fortuitous, for it coincides with a controversy that nobody could have foreseen a year ago. P.45, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

But in the Middle East, which now accounts for almost a third of worldwide sales, the target market is the teetotal majority. In 2012 Iranians quaffed nearly four times as much as in 2007. P.57, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

Birell has a more blokey image: an ad features a bunch of football-watching men having their heads turned by a passing blonde (ogling women is apparently less sinful than swigging alcohol). P.57, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

THE United States has of late been in a slough of despond. P.58, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

There are good reasons for this. The political system really is “even worse than it looks”, as another doom-laden book puts it. Middle-class living standards have stagnated. P.58, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

His stubbornness was, though, his most important quality. Investors and friends scoffed, but he spent two decades poking holes in the land around Fort Worth. P.58, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

Two of the most advanced neuromorphic programmes are being conducted under the auspices of the Human Brain Project (HBP), an ambitious attempt by a confederation of European scientific institutions to build a simulacrum of the brain by 2023. P.67, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

The other machine, Spikey, is being built by Dr Meier’s group. Spikey harks back to an earlier age of computing. Several of the first computers were analogue machines. P.67, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

A cross-bar is a dense grid of wires, each of which is connected to a neuron at the periphery of the grid. The synapses are at the junctions where wires cross. P.69, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

A cross-bar is a dense grid of wires, each of which is connected to a neuron at the periphery of the grid. The synapses are at the junctions where wires cross. P.69, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

And, also like those in a real brain, the neurons remember their recent activities (which synapses they triggered) and use that knowledge to prune some connections and enhance others during the process of rewiring. P.69, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

Mao had bequeathed a vast new “shovel-ready” construction site for Deng’s own “‘great enterprise’ of reform and opening up”. P.70, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

Generations of Conservatives from the 1930s to today have feted him as a reforming Tory who improved the lot of the poor. P.71, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

He wrote more novels about plutocrats than paupers, after all. P.71, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

He wrote more novels about plutocrats than paupers, after all. P.71, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013

He continued to revel, despite the threat of debtors’ prison. (“I trust there is no danger of my being nabbed,” he once said while approaching a Buckinghamshire dinner, “as this would be a fatal contretemps.”) P.71, The Economist Ed. August 3RD-9TH 2013