Politics this week

Iran’s street protests in the wake of a disputed presidential election spread from Tehran, the capital, to a string of big cities across the country, but then seemed to subside after the authorities cracked down, leaving at least 20 people dead. A young woman, Neda Agha Soltan, became a symbol of the protests after her dying moments were posted on the internet. Discord within the upper ranks of the clerical establishment ensured that the crisis was by no means over. See article

With American troops due to withdraw from all Iraqi towns at the end of the month, insurgents carried out a campaign of bombings. On June 20th at least 70 people were killed by a truck bomb in Taza, a Turkmen town just south of the disputed city of Kirkuk. Two days later at least seven bombs went off in and around Baghdad, killing over 30 people. Two days after that another bomb attack, in a Shia part of the city, killed more than 70 people. See article

Somalia’s fragile government called in vain on its neighbours, Ethiopia and Kenya, to send troops to help it resist a growing jihadist insurgency bolstered by al-Qaeda-linked fighters from Pakistan and Afghanistan. But it was reported that the United States had secretly begun to resupply the Somali government. See article

Farm hands

Democrats working on America’s climate-change legislation in the House struck a deal that gives the Department of Agriculture the authority to supervise efforts to reduce carbon emissions by farmers. With little Republican backing, Democratic leaders had to secure the support of colleagues from rural districts.

Mark Sanford, the Republican governor of South Carolina, caused a stir when he disappeared for five days. His staff said he had gone hiking in the Appalachians. In fact, Mr Sanford had been in Argentina. On his return he admitted to an extramarital affair with a woman there.

Antonio Villaraigosa ruled himself out of the running for governor of California. The mayor of Los Angeles had been tipped to enter the field of candidates seeking to succeed Arnold Schwarzenegger.

AP

Two Metro trains collided in Washington, DC, killing nine people, the worst-ever accident on the city’s network.

Battle ready

At least 80 people were killed in an attack by an unmanned American aircraft in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The attack was in South Waziristan, the stronghold of Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban, and came as the Pakistani army prepared a new offensive in the area.

America reached an agreement with Kyrgyzstan that will allow American armed forces to continue using the Manas air base, their only base in Central Asia, to support operations in Afghanistan. In February the government had insisted the base must close.

An American journalist from the New York Times and an Afghan colleague were reported to have escaped after seven months as prisoners of the Taliban, who took them hostage in Afghanistan. Their driver is still being held. They regained their freedom in North Waziristan, in Pakistan.

Formal charges were announced against Liu Xiaobo, one of China’s most prominent dissidents, who was detained last December after the publication of a charter calling for political reform.

An American navy ship continued to track a North Korean vessel believed to be carrying weapons to Myanmar in breach of UN sanctions. North Korea boasted of being a “proud nuclear power” and was believed to be poised to anger the outside world further with a new missile test. See article

A conservation group reported that 30% of the world’s species of sharks are under threat of extinction because of overfishing. Shark meat and liver oil are becoming more popular, and demand remains high in Asia for shark fins.

Drugs run

The UN’s annual report on illicit drugs found significant reductions in the production of cocaine, opium and cannabis, but an increase in the output of synthetic substances, such as ecstasy and methamphetamine. Cocaine cultivation fell by 18% in Colombia, the world’s biggest producer of the drug. See article

A battle between FARC rebels and security forces in Colombia’s Cauca province killed at least 25 rebels and seven police officers. Authorities said that a local FARC commander known as El Enano (the Midget) was among the dead.

The United States and Venezuela decided to reinstate their ambassadors. Venezuela’s envoy was expelled by America last September after it alleged that America was plotting to overthrow Evo Morales, the Bolivian president. Venezuela then threw out America’s man.

Clothing maketh the man

In a rare address to both houses of France’s parliament, President Nicolas Sarkozy lent weight to a possible ban on the Islamic burqa, saying that such garments were “not welcome on French territory”. See article

Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, the president of Ingushetia, a Russian republic in the north Caucasus, was almost killed in an assassination attack by a suicide-bomber. Ingushetia, next to Chechnya, has recently become the most violent place in the north Caucasus.

Russia’s Supreme Court ordered a retrial of three men acquitted of being accomplices in the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a crusading journalist whom Vladimir Putin described as a “marginal” figure. None of the men are accused of the actual killing.

A former prime minister of Kosovo, Agim Ceku, was arrested in Bulgaria. He is wanted by Serbia on war-crimes charges.

Adam Roberts

Sex scandals continued to swirl around Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. Magistrates are investigating a possible call-girl ring, some members of which allegedly visited Mr Berlusconi in Rome. See article

Two tonnes of rare whale meat were distributed in Greenland as part of celebrations to mark the start of an era of self-government. After nearly three centuries of rule by Denmark, Greenland’s 56,000 people will gradually take control of most domestic affairs, although defence and foreign policy remain in Danish hands. Greenlandic is now the official language.

Germany's inscrutable chancellor

The mystery of Mrs Merkel

Europe’s canniest politician needs to be bolder about reform if she is to be seen as an historic chancellor

SHE is the first female leader of Germany and the first since the war to hail from the east. She has had the job for three-and-a-half years and looks likely to keep it after the federal election in September. Yet as Angela Merkel prepared to meet Barack Obama in Washington this week, a certain mystery still hung over her. Who is she and where might she take her country?

Mrs Merkel’s character is best summed up by what she is not. Unlike other European leaders, she is neither charismatic, nor flashily intellectual, nor domineering. Yet nobody could deny that she is a highly effective politician. She has swatted aside all challengers inside her Christian Democratic Union (CDU), despite coming from outside the party’s traditional base. She has grabbed any credit going for her “grand coalition” with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), leaving her SPD rival for the chancellorship floundering. She won kudos for her presidencies of the European Union and the G8 club of rich countries in 2007. Were she to express interest in the job of EU president that will be created if the EU’s Lisbon treaty is ratified this autumn, it would be given to her on a plate.

Above all, Mrs Merkel has stayed popular—more consistently so than any chancellor since Konrad Adenauer. And she has accomplished this in the teeth of Germany’s worst recession since the war. GDP shrank by 7% in the year to the first quarter. Industrial production has fallen by over a fifth. Unemployment has been masked by job subsidies and make-work schemes, but it is likely to climb back above 4m next year. That Mrs Merkel is still favourite to win re-election as chancellor, whether in another grand coalition or with the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), is a tribute to her political skill.

But is she a reformer?

The question is not whether Mrs Merkel will keep power, but whether she is ready to use it. She has an unusual background for a CDU leader: daughter of a Protestant pastor, raised in communist East Germany, she was a physicist before turning to politics (see article). That ought to bode well in a party that is fonder of consensus than of radical change. She seems intellectually to accept the case for greater liberalisation, smaller government and freer markets. But she has shrunk from more substantial reform, for four reasons.

First, she is cautious by temperament. The opposite of France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, she is more of a methodical scientist than a mercurial revolutionary. Those who once hoped that she might be a Thatcherite reformer, a Maggie from Mecklenburg, were always going to be disappointed. Moreover, her instinctive caution was reinforced by a second factor: her experience in the 2005 election campaign. When her then economic adviser started talking of big tax cuts and radical welfare reforms, her support dropped sharply—and even after she dumped him and tacked back to the centre, she almost lost.

That led to the third and most obvious reason why Mrs Merkel has been unable to be radical: her narrow victory forced her into a grand coalition. Such an alliance operates by the lowest common denominator. Mrs Merkel has held it together, but at the cost of putting off serious talk of most further reforms to the labour market, the welfare state, health-care financing and a hugely complex tax system. The only substantive measure her government has adopted is a rise in the retirement age. Her SPD partners have even managed to roll back some of the Agenda 2010 reforms they made when they were previously in coalition with the Greens in 2003-04.

That also reflects a fourth explanation for Mrs Merkel’s lack of reformist zeal, which is the mood of her country. Germany is a place built on consensus—in the workplace, in society and in politics. It is also successful. It is still (just) the world’s biggest exporter; thanks to impressive discipline over wages, its companies have regained competitiveness; and its public finances are in better shape than most. The angst of a decade ago, when it seemed that Germany might be the new sick man of Europe, has largely gone. Instead, the global economic crash is seen in Germany as something that came entirely from outside because of Anglo-Saxon free-market zealots—and that has not made Germans any keener on further liberalisation.

Yet all this betrays a dangerous complacency. Even if the economic crisis was not made in Germany, it has changed the world: Germany will suffer unless it responds. The old reliance on manufacturing exports looks broken. Consumers, chary of spending, are hobbling domestic demand. Services, the backbone of all modern economies, are underdeveloped. Germany suffers from deeper weakness too. The demographic outlook is grim, threatening Germany’s public finances. Education, once the envy of the world, is now mediocre—especially when it comes to universities, where the government is only just starting on reform (see article).

Admittedly, many other European countries have even bigger immediate problems than Germany. But the truth is that all of Europe needs reform: to shift away from high taxes, generous and wasteful welfare states, and, most of all, overly regulated and inflexible product and labour markets. If Mrs Merkel’s Germany were to lead the way, it would be not just Europe’s biggest economy but also its intellectual leader.

Smarter than Nicolas (let alone Silvio); but not Konrad

By that exalted measure, the CDU programme that Mrs Merkel will launch this weekend is likely to be disappointing. It will offer little more than promises of continuity, bolstered by the appeal of Mrs Merkel herself. That may be enough to win her re-election—Germans seem content with someone to reassure rather than inspire them. Yet Mrs Merkel ought to think about why she wants to be chancellor at all. If she does not set out plans for health-care reform, for more liberalisation of labour and product markets, for privatisation and for tax and spending cuts, she will have little chance of getting these through in office, whatever the make-up of her coalition.

Mrs Merkel will go down in history as Germany’s first female leader—no mean feat. But if she wants to measure up to Adenauer or Helmut Kohl, she must persuade Germans of the case for change. And for that she needs to be far bolder.

Michael Jackson

Death of a showman

Michael Jackson made great pop records, lurid headlines and lots of money

FOR a life so extraordinary the manner of Michael Jackson’s passing on Thursday June 25th was utterly banal: a middle-aged man succumbing to an apparent heart-attack. (There was speculation that an alleged dependency on prescription painkillers may have been a contributing factor.) During his progress from child prodigy to the self-styled “King of Pop” and, more recently, an eccentric semi-recluse, no part of Mr Jackson’s private life had given any other hint of normality. But behind the mask that plastic surgeons had made of his face was a keen brain for wringing cash out of pop music—and for spending it.

Mr Jackson first performed on stage at the age of six, accompanying his four older brothers. The Jackson Five, under the strict stewardship of their manager and father, signed to Motown Records in the late 1960s and began producing a string of hit records—a sequence of success that Mr Jackson continued in a 30-year solo recording career. It is reckoned that his final tally of album sales is around 750m—the most that any artist has sold. And one of those, “Thriller”, released in 1982, became the most successful yet seen, shifting 65m units. This record may well remain unchallenged: sales of albums have suffered as pop fans these days prefer downloading individual tracks from the internet.

The length of Mr Jackson’s career ensured that he experienced, popularised and even pioneered many of the techniques that help artists to profit from their musical talents. At the beginning of his career, touring was a vital component of performers' incomes, though a shift to earning money from selling records was well under way. By its peak, in the 1980s, touring had come to be seen by the music industry as a loss-making promotional tool to shift albums.

Mr Jackson did not invent the pop promotional video, as he is sometimes credited with doing. But he took this art form to new heights with the lavishly expensive video he made in 1983 for the title track of the “Thriller” album. He brought in one of Hollywood's top directors, John Landis (best known for “The Blues Brothers”), and spent an unprecedented $500,000 on the 14-minute miniature epic. But it was money well spent: the launch of MTV, two years earlier, whose format was being copied by other broadcasters, meant that videos had rapidly become one of the most valuable tools for marketing recorded music, and more cost-effective than concert tours. The “Thriller” video was broadcast incessantly all around the world, pumping up the album's sales.

At the height of his success Mr Jackson and his team of managers made the shrewd calculation that the value of pop music was wrapped up in the publishing rights to songs just as much as in record sales. In 1985 he paid $47.5m for ATV Music, which owned the copyrights to most of the Beatles' songs. Ten years later he sold half his interest for $150m to Sony. The value of his stake was probably around $500m when he died. This was roughly equal to the upper estimates of the debts he was struggling to refinance, which he had amassed funding his increasingly bizarre style of living.

Despite his vast earnings Mr Jackson was forced to borrow huge sums against his stake in ATV and his future earnings (recently reckoned to be about $19m a year) to pay for his huge shopping sprees and the upkeep of “Neverland”, his ranch in California. Last year he announced plans for a long series of concerts in London to boost his income and pay off his creditors. Playing live has re-emerged as the way to make money from pop as falling sales, rampant piracy and digital distribution have slashed revenues from recorded music.

Despite having built himself an extravagant fun palace, with its own zoo, fairground and elaborate topiary, Mr Jackson cut an increasingly lost and lonely figure in his later years. Though twice married and with three children, his closest relationships appeared to be with a chimpanzee and a succession of young boys. The questions raised by these unusual friendships continued to hang in the air until his death. He was acquitted in a Californian court in 2005 on charges of molesting one 13-year-old boy but reportedly paid $20m out of court in 1994 to head off other allegations of child abuse.

His status as a pop genius may well always be tainted by the strangeness of the life he chose to lead. Elvis Presley, still the unchallenged King of Rock’n’Roll, is increasingly remembered for his music, as memories fade of his own unusual private life. Mr Jackson would doubtless have craved to be held in the same public awe and affection (his dynastic ambitions even stretched to a brief marriage with Lisa Marie, Presley’s only child). But, sadly, for now he will be remembered by many as “Wacko Jacko” rather than the King of Pop.