Classical Mag

Indeed, Why Mark Zuckerberg’s social network is paying such a whopping sum for a messaging startup WhatsApp’s success in many ways mirrors that of Facebook itself, which came from nowhere to dominate social networking. Recently, however, Facebook has been losing some of its cool, especially among younger users. That may explain why the famously paranoid Mr Zuckerberg is willing to pay a king’s ransom for a company that might ultimately eclipse his own creation. He has spent lavishly before, paying around $1 billion for Instagram, a photo-sharing app, in 2012. THE rivalries among the tech industry’s giants have often resembled a “Game of Thrones”, in which companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple constantly try to invade one another’s online kingdoms. On February 19th Facebook took a dramatic step to defend its turf, saying it would pay $19 billion for WhatsApp, a messaging service that had also attracted the attention of Google and almost certainly

Downbeat surveys of economic activity in China and parts of Europe highlighted the fragility of the global recovery and raised concerns about the withdrawal of monetary stimulus. A contraction in Chinese manufacturing set the gloomy tone, which was reinforced by data showing an unexpected stall in activity across the euro zone. The preliminary China purchasing managers' index from HSBC/Markit for February came in at a seven-month low, falling deeper into contraction territory. The gauge slid to 48.3 from 49.5 in January. In Europe, the factory gauge for the region unexpectedly slipped to 53 from 54 in January, while the services measure rose less than estimated to 51.7 from 51.6, Markit Economics said yesterday. A composite gauge fell to 52.7 from 52.9. But the US data provided a surprise as the Markit Economics preliminary index of US manufacturing increased to 56.7 in February from a final reading of 53.7 last mon

The West must take a tough stand with the government of Ukraine—and with Russia’s leader   CIVIL strife often follows a grimly predictable pattern. What at first seems a soluble dispute hardens into conflict, as goals become more radical, bitterness accumulates and the chance to broker a compromise is lost. Such has been the awful trajectory of Ukraine, where protests that began peacefully in November have combusted in grotesque violence. The centre of Kiev, one of Europe’s great capital cities, this week became a choking war zone. Buildings and barricades were incinerated and dozens of Ukrainians were killed. Despite talk of a truce between some of the participants, the horror could yet get much worse. The bloodshed will deepen the rifts in what has always been a fragile, complex country. Outright civil war remains a realistic prospect. Immediate responsibility for this mayhem lies with Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s thuggish president. But its ultimate archit

Why America has such a high rate of payment-card fraud AMERICA leads the world in many categories: shale-gas production, defence spending, incarceration rates and, alas, payment-card fraud. In December Target, an American retailer, said that hackers had breached its network and stolen payment-card details of about 40m of its customers. A few months before the Target breach, roughly 152m customers had their information stolen in a hack of Adobe Systems. Last month Neiman-Marcus, a department store, reported a similar breach. For crooks, there are rich pickings in such data. Total global payment-card fraud losses were $11.3 billion in 2012, up nearly 15% from the prior year. The United States—the only country in which counterfeit-card fraud is consistently growing—accounted for 47% of that amount, according to the Nilson Report: card issuers lost $3.4 billion and merchants another $1.9 billion. A survey released in 2012 by the Aite Group and ACI Worldwid

The frigid weather and frequent snowstorms this winter have left economic data so tainted that even Federal Reserve officials will have trouble reading the economy, veteran trader Art Cashin told CNBC on Wednesday. "Not only are we flying blind, but the Fed is flying blind as well," Cashin said on " Squawk on the Street ." ( Read more : Winter weather freezing corporate profit growth) As Wall Street approaches the tail end of earnings season—which Cashin called both "satisfactory" and "unspectacular"—the markets have been preoccupied with the economy rather than corporate revenue growth, he said. Cashin, the director of floor operations at the NYSE for UBS, said the economy shows signs of weakness, and some traders now want to know whether the Fed plans to "taper the tapering." The most recent weather-affected economic indicator came out Wednesday morning, when housing starts from January posted the biggest decl

A parched southern summer may cause an electricity crisis PRAYING to St Peter is not much of an energy policy. Yet that is what Brazil’s government seems to be doing by counting on rain—which, according to folklore, São Pedro dispenses at the pearly gates—to sort out a looming electricity crisis. Hydropower generates 80% of Brazil’s electricity. Typically, reservoirs fill up in the rainy season, from December to March, and are depleted in the dry southern winter. This year St Peter has skimped. Brazil experienced the second-driest January in 80 years. On February 10th the water levels in the south-east and centre-west, home to 70% of the country’s reservoirs and half its people, dipped below 37% of capacity, the lowest since 2001. With no rain in sight, they are set to drop further. In this section Meanwhile consumption has soared. In January Brazilians used 10% more energy than in the same period in 2013. Peak demand reached an all-time

Lessons from a bellwether congressional race in Florida LATE last year Florida’s 13th congressional district—a sprawl of mobile-home parks, retirement villages and strip malls, fringed by Gulf coast beaches—lost its congressman, Bill Young. The Republican’s death, after 42 years of service, left a void. But in truth, the district had been in a form of mourning since 2010: a year that saw a ban on the “earmarks” that enabled Mr Young to channel hundreds of millions of dollars to his district and state. Dry numbers cannot convey the Babylonian scope of his works. Military bases and weapons factories rose from Florida’s swamps at his command. After storms, he had the Army Corps of Engineers “renourish” beaches with the finest white sand. He widened highways, expanded hospitals for children and ex-servicemen and poured taxpayers’ cash into such causes as the University of South Florida (USF) and national bone-marrow registries. A grateful Florida placed his name on a mari

America’s labour market has suffered permanent harm T TOOK barely a month for the bubble of optimism that formed over the American economy at the start of the year to deflate. Job growth slowed sharply in December, and stayed weak in January, suggesting more than bad weather was to blame. The unemployment rate, though, tells a much cheerier story: it dropped to 6.6% in January from 7% in November. Indeed, it could soon hit the Federal Reserve’s 6.5% threshold at which it may consider raising interest rates. In this section The jobless number has been sending a strangely upbeat message about America’s recovery for some years now. Yet the Fed and other researchers have downplayed its significance, linking the rate less to buoyant demand for labour than to stagnant supply, as discouraged workers stop hunting for jobs. On February 11th Janet Yellen, in her inaugural appearance before Congress as chairman of the Fed, called the recovery in the labour

In this section THREE brotherhoods are struggling for control of Apatzingán, a dusty town in the south-western Mexican state of Michoacán. One is deadly: the Knights Templar drug gang. One espouses vigilantism: the armed “self-defence” militias who on February 8th helped drive the Templars out of their stronghold. The third is the most powerful: a young and preppy group of federal-government employees sent in by President Enrique Peña Nieto to retake control of Michoacán after tension between Knights Templars and vigilantes threatened to spin out of control. Many of this third group served under Mr Peña when he was governor of the state of Mexico in 2005-11. They have known each other for years and banter like friends at a tennis club. Their insertion into Michoacán reflects a wider trend in Mexican politics: the resurrection of an old but effective style of presidential rule. After 12 years of an increasingly chaotic decentralisation of power

IT WAS while David Lammy was recalling his time in the Boy’s Brigade, at the Miller Memorial Methodist church in Tottenham, that Bagehot and he came across the memorial to a killing. A wilted bouquet wrapped in cellophane, it was taped to a lamppost, across the road from the small brick church where the 41-year-old Labour MP had once worshipped and played. “Knife crime,” he said softly. A hard line separates Mr Lammy’s childhood in Tottenham, as the son of hard-up immigrants from Guyana, from that of many other youths in London’s poorest and most unsettled constituency. His upbringing was marred by race riots in 1985—including the murder of a policeman on the tough Broadwater Farm housing estate where Mr Lammy spent much of his childhood—and an absent father. Yet his mother grafted and scraped. Mr Lammy went to a boarding school on a choral scholarship, then to the University of London and Harvard law school. “It was a typical immigrant story,” he says. It was also a be

I walked blindly into the narrow passageway carved between the crumbling wall of an abandoned latrine and the remains of a chicken coop, its mud floor lined with the feathers of molting birds. In my heart I feared the sorrow which I knew was waiting in its appointed corner, hooded eyes slowly piercing through the composure I wear like the day’s fragrance. Ahead of me, a field of green whispered softly, incongruous amidst the grayness of squalor. I saw the men before I heard the women, and I knew I had found the home where the death of a young girl I had known was being mourned. Embracing her grieving mother, I let myself grieve for the girl’s death, for the death of young women who never know life, for the death of young children whose mothers wish they had gone before them. In my beloved country, while Sultans build flyovers and underpasses, while their henchmen demolish the homes of those already living on the edge, while heritage and histor

Goldilocks and the bears Investors have been forced to reassess their rosy view EQUITY markets started 2014 in a buoyant mood, after 30% gains for American shares in the previous year. Investors seemed to believe that the worst of the financial crisis was at last over and that the global economy was returning to “Goldilocks” mode, with growth neither so strong as to cause inflation nor so weak as to squeeze profits, but “just right”. However, markets have been hit by a classic one-two punch in the opening weeks of the year. First, emerging-market currencies came under pressure, with the Argentine peso and Turkish lira, among others, falling sharply and several countries opting to increase interest rates. To add to the concern, Chinese economic data showed signs of weakness, with the purchasing managers’ index for manufacturing dropping to 50.5 in January, its lowest level in six months. In this section The second sandbagging came from America, w

With two days to go before the Winter Olympics open in the Russian city of Sochi, more than half of Americans think a terrorist attack on the Games is likely, a poll shows. The results of the CNN/ORC poll come a day after U.S. officials said they had specific reasons to worry about security in Russia. Meanwhile, Russian state media reported Wednesday that the suspected mastermind of twin bomb attacks in the city of Volgograd was killed in a police operation in the restive North Caucasus republic of Dagestan. The man died in a shootout at a house in the town of Izberbash, the official Itar-Tass news agency said. The attacks on Volgograd's public transit system in late December left 34 people dead and about 100 injured -- and sparked wide concern about security in Russia. Reporters share Sochi hotel nightmares Sochi skier smiles through the pain Are Sochi officials poisoning stray dogs? Of those surveyed for the CNN/ORC poll, 57% said a terrorist att

KABUL: Afghanistan's presidential candidates held rallies in Kabul on Sunday at the start of a campaign to elect Hamid Karzai's successor , as the killing of a frontrunner's aides highlighted the security threat to the poll. Gunmen shot dead two members of former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah's team in the western city of Herat on Saturday, dealing an early blow to hopes of a peaceful campaign as the country prepares for its first democratic transfer of power. The April 5 election is seen as a key test of the effectiveness of the 350,000-strong Afghan security forces as foreign troops prepare to exit the country, while the future of US troops in the country beyond 2014 is set to dominate the agenda. Earlier in the day, thousands of people, mostly men, gathered in giant wedding halls where candidates delivered speeches and called on war-weary Afghans to vote for them. The elder brother of President Hamid Karzai , Qayum Karzai started his campaign in t

BEIJING: China has issued a high alert and banned sale of poultry in several parts of the country in order to curb the alarming rise in the number of people infected with the H7N9 strain of bird flu. The move, which comes ahead of the Chinese New Year festivities, covers large parts of eastern and southern China. So far this year, the virus has killed 20 people in China out of 96 known infections, according to the official Xinhua News Agency . The virus remains hard to catch and most cases have been linked to contact with poultry. The World Health Organization has warned of "further sporadic human cases" because of increased production and trade of poultry during the Lunar New Year. Poultry markets are being closed in Hangzhou, Ningbo and Jinhua cities in eastern Zhejiang Province , which saw 49 human H7N9 infections including 12 deaths this month. "It deserves high attention when the infection cases increase by dozens or hundreds of times. But public

BEIJING: Motivated by wildlife protection campaigns and Buddha's teachings , more than 50 million Chinese defied deep-rooted tradition of meat eating and turned vegetarians, making the Communist nation one of the fast emerging countries with vegan population. Although there are no official statistics about China's vegetarian population, Public Radio International, an independent non-profit multi-media organisation, reported in July that China's vegan population has reached more than 50 million, state-run Xinhua news agency reported today. According to the world vegetarian outfits, India where the vegetarianism was rooted in the religion and culture estimated to have over 500 million vegetarians, who shun meat in their meal, the Xinhua reported. For the Chinese vegetarians, their traditional New Year currently being celebrated all over the country is perhaps the toughest time to maintain their eating habits when faced with the country's deep-rooted