Economist.com

The threat to human health from mobile phones, if any, is much disputed. A shame, then, that a massive multinational study on the question has ended in chaos

“LONG-TERM mobile-phone use increases risk of benign tumours!” “Clean bill of health for the mobile!” “Mobile phone-cancer link not proven!” Those who have followed the saga of whether or not mobile phones are damaging people’s brains are used to contradictory headlines. A decade of coverage has left readers and viewers more confused than enlightened, with news reports alternating between alarming claims and soothing reassurances. Yet even by the standards of modern news, it is unusual to see such contradictory headlines about the same piece of research. Which is why a study, called Interphone, provides a cautionary tale.

Interphone began in 2000, ended in 2006, cost $30m and involved around 50 scientists working in 13 countries on 14,000 people. It has, however, still to come to a settled conclusion. A draft of its supposed findings was circulated in June, and Elisabeth Cardis of the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology in Barcelona, who led it, thought until recently that a final paper would be submitted this month. Now, though, it looks as if that will not even happen this year. ...

Sham radiation can cause real pain

WHETHER mobile phones can cause cancer remains moot (see article). But they are also accused by some of causing pain. A growing number of people around the world claim to be “electrosensitive”, in other words physically responsive to the electromagnetic fields that surround phones and the other electronic devices that clutter the modern world. Indeed, at least one country, Sweden, has recognised such sensitivity as a disability, and will pay for the dwellings of sufferers to be screened from the world’s electronic smog.

The problem is that, time and again, studies of those claiming to be electrosensitive show their ability to determine whether they are being exposed to a real electric field or a sham one is no better than chance. So, unless they are lying about their symptoms, the cause of those symptoms needs to be sought elsewhere. ...

Frank Mundus, shark fisherman, died on September 10th, aged 82

HIS boat was called Cricket II, not the Orca. But when you climbed on board, mentally noting the lumpy cushions, the rods trailing wires at the stern and the swivel fish-fighting chair bolted to the deck, you knew you were in the same place. His fishing methods were different: he used aluminium beer barrels as floats because wooden ones would break up in a minute, and rather than harpoons, with their stainless-steel darts that folded back and slipped right out of the fish, he preferred hand-held gaffs with a three-inch hook that went in and stayed there. But as you watched him work, dipping the ladle into a garbage pail of bloody chum and spreading a slick of it into the sea, or listened to him snapping at his customers to tighten the drag and hit the brake, you knew this was the same man. Frank Mundus was convinced he was Captain Quint, the fisher of monster sharks from Peter Benchley’s “Jaws”. And if Benchley denied it, as he always did, Mr Mundus was still determined to make a splash of his own.

The stories surrounding him were legion. That he had danced on the floating carcass of a dead whale while blue sharks, in a frenzy, foamed round it. (“I was the first one to stand on the whale and see if you could…get the sharks to take the bait; that whale was fresh, blood was still coming out of its mouth.”) That he had grabbed a thresher by the tail and pulled it into his boat. (“That tail is all muscle, and it knows how to use it. It can give you a bruise that looks as though you’ve been run over by a truck.”) That he had fed live kittens to sharks. (“No kittens. We tried ’em with a dead cat that we found on the road, but they didn’t want it.”) It was true, however, that he once grabbled a shark by the dorsal as it swam past the boat, and that another crashed up over the side and snapped its jaws three feet from his head. He was close enough to see the serrated edges on every three-inch tooth. ...

Two books give very different views of Sir Richard Branson, Britain’s best-known businessman

HE HAS just said that he would like to buy London’s Gatwick Airport when it comes on the market next year, and by the end of October he aims to break the transatlantic monohull sailing record. There is no escaping Sir Richard Branson, the chairman of Virgin Group, who goes to extraordinary lengths to put himself on the front pages. Not even a near-disastrous abseil down a building in Las Vegas last year could deter him. His brand is not just Virgin—it is also Branson. His ambition is boundless: lately he has been holding meetings on his private Caribbean island with a group of experts, to work out how to save the world from global warming and its people from disease.

The name Branson means two things to British people. To most he is the country’s best-known businessman, hoist to stardom by his derring-do ballooning stunts and photo-ops with busty blondes, an anti-establishment “cheeky chappy” whose plucky airline has battled the mighty “monopoly” of British Airways (BA) and whose Virgin brand has spawned a business empire. The other, lesser-known Branson is a ruthless, wily entrepreneur who is always trying to get one over his rivals. The former thinks he walks on water; the latter skates on thin ice. ...

Violent crime and political turmoil are adding to South Africa’s brain drain

FIRST he thought it was a mouse, then a rat—and then the rat shot him in the face. That is how Andre Brink, one of South Africa’s most famous novelists, described the recent killing of his nephew Adri, at home at 3am in the morning. The young man was left to die on the floor, in front of his wife and daughter, while his killers ransacked the house.

Such murders are common in South Africa. According to Mr Brink’s account, published later in the Sunday Independent, 16 armed attacks had already taken place in a single month within a kilometre of the young couple’s plot north of Pretoria, South Africa’s capital. Soon afterwards—this is more unusual—the police arrested a gang of six. They recovered a laptop and two mobile phones. That was the haul for which Adri paid with his life. ...

Electronic snooping by the state may safeguard liberty—and also threaten it

IF A Muslim chemistry graduate takes an ill-paid job at a farm-supplies store what does it signify? Is he just earning extra cash, or getting close to a supply of potassium nitrate (used in fertiliser, and explosives)? What if apparent strangers with Arabic names have wired him money? What if he has taken air flights with one of those men, with separate reservations and different seats, paid in cash? What if his credit-card records show purchases of gadgets such as timing devices?

If the authorities can and do collect such bits of data, piecing them together offers the tantalising prospect of foiling terrorist conspiracies. It also raises the spectre of criminalising or constraining innocent people’s eccentric but legal behaviour. ...

What Wall Street’s woes reveal about European and American views of markets

THE world needs to rebuild financial capitalism, and that means more regulation, says France’s Nicolas Sarkozy. It is time to make capitalism “moral” by directing it to its proper function: serving economic development and the forces of “production”, not “speculation”. Mr Sarkozy’s rebuke was mild by some standards. Immense power, amounting to a “despotic economic dictatorship” has fallen into “the hands of a few”, thundered another leader. He added that the over-mighty few are often not “owners” of assets “but only the trustees and managing directors of invested funds.” A fallacy had spread: that the market does not need any “public authority” to restrain it, because “self-direction” will do the job better.

There is no faulting Europeans for consistency when it comes to distrusting financiers, liking businesses that make things you can touch and looking to regulators to keep markets in good moral order. Mr Sarkozy was speaking on September 23rd at the United Nations. The second leader cited was Pope Pius XI, speaking after the Wall Street crash of 1929. The quotes come from a 1931 encyclical calling for economic governance by guild-like “corporations” of industrialists, workers and the like, overseen by a “special magistracy” of high-minded officials. ...

As South Africa’s president steps down amid a bitter power struggle, we look at his achievements, the doubts about his successor and the souring mood of the country

THABO MBEKI, South Africa’s president (above right), has had a spectacularly bad year. First came a humiliating defeat in December, when the ruling African National Congress (ANC) elected Jacob Zuma (above left), the country’s former deputy president, to replace him as the party’s head. Mr Mbeki had sacked Mr Zuma in 2005. Then, on September 20th, the ANC decided he should step down “in the interest of making the country move forward”. This cut short his term as president; Mr Mbeki was supposed to stay until the general election, expected in April. Instead, he unprotestingly bowed out.

ANC leaders, desperate to calm things down, talked of continuity and stability and asked cabinet members to stay. Instead, two days after Mr Mbeki announced that he was going, the deputy president and ten ministers followed, shocking the ANC to the core. The ministers included Trevor Manuel, in charge of finance and responsible for South Africa’s impressive economic performance. The rand and the stockmarket swayed for a while, until Mr Manuel—and some of the others—said they were willing to be reappointed under the new president. The dipping of the rand betrayed the increasingly febrile atmosphere in South African politics, and the worries, both at home and abroad, that the present turmoil in the ANC may yet undermine the economic progress that South Africa has made over the past decade. ...

The Large Hadron Collider springs a leak

IN RETROSPECT, perhaps, it was all going rather too well. On September 10th, to the world’s acclaim, the physicists and engineers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a sub-atomic-particle smasher just outside Geneva, sent the first beams of protons around their new toy. It worked perfectly. The press corps duly filed their stories and went home not expecting to write about the machine again until it was operating routinely and generating results. Unfortunately, on September 19th it started leaking helium and had to be switched off. The helium came from one of the cooling units that keep the LHC’s superconducting magnets at 1.8°C above absolute zero. Fixing the leak means warming the broken part up, doing the repair, and then cooling it down again. That will take around two months, by which time the LHC is due for its Christmas break (it is scheduled to close down each winter to save the electricity bill). No Higgs boson this year, then.

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How to use your laptop to locate an earthquake

IF YOU drop your laptop computer, a chip built into it will sense the acceleration and protect the delicate moving parts of its hard disk before it hits the ground. A group of researchers led by Jesse Lawrence of Stanford University are putting the same accelerometer chip to an intriguing new use: detecting earthquakes. They plan to create a network of volunteer laptops that can map out future quakes in far greater detail than traditional seismometers manage.

Seismometers are large, expensive beasts, costing $10,000 or more apiece. They are designed to be exquisitely sensitive to the sort of vibrations an earthquake produces, which means they can pick up tremors that began halfway around the world. By contrast, the accelerometer chips in laptops, which have evolved from those used to detect when a car is in a collision and thus trigger the release of the airbags, are rather crude devices. They are, however, ubiquitous. Almost all modern laptops have them and they are even finding their way into mobile phones. The iPhone, for example, uses such a chip to detect its orientation so that it can rotate its display and thus make it easily readable. ...

America’s government unveiled a plan to end the credit crunch by spending up to $700 billion buying troubled assets from financial institutions. Hank Paulson, the treasury secretary, and Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, argued that swift and forceful action was needed to stem growing panic about the soundness of the financial system. But many members of Congress, which must approve the plan, complained variously that the government was seizing too much power, letting reckless bankers off too lightly and failing to help struggling homeowners. See article

The Federal Reserve gave America’s last two big investment banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, permission to change their status to bank holding firms. They will be subject to stiffer regulation, but allowed to take deposits. Goldman Sachs raised $5 billion to shore up its capital by selling shares to Berkshire Hathaway, the firm run by Warren Buffett, a celebrated investor. The next day, it raised $5 billion more from a share offering. Mitsubishi-UFJ, Japan’s largest bank, agreed to buy up to 20% of Morgan Stanley for $8.4 billion. See article ...

South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, was forced to resign by the leadership of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). This followed a bitter legal and constitutional struggle with Jacob Zuma, who ousted him as party leader last year. Kgalema Motlanthe, an ANC ally of Mr Zuma, will serve as caretaker president until an election in which Mr Zuma is expected to win the post. Mr Mbeki’s deputy and ten ministers also resigned, of whom six said they would not serve in a new government. See article ...

Hong Kong stays in top place in ratings of economic freedom compiled by the Fraser Institute. Singapore takes second place and New Zealand comes third. Zimbabwe gets the lowest score. The Canadian think-tank’s index is based on how countries perform in five main areas: size of government, security of property rights, sound money, free trade, and regulation. The lower government spending is, for example, the better a country will fare in the first component of the index. Similarly, low and stable inflation will favour a country’s rating for sound money. The scores extend back to 1980 for 102 countries. Of these, 89 have got better over that period whereas 13 have got worse.

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The outlook for Asian economies is darkening. New forecasts from the Asian Development Bank for GDP growth in 2009 are generally lower than the ones it made in April. Next year’s growth projection for China has merely been shaved, from 9.8% to 9.5%, but forecasts for some countries have been shorn. Vietnam is now expected to grow by 6.0% rather than 8.1%; India by 7.0% compared with 8.5%. The bank says that emerging Asia is being hit by lower demand for its exports in developed economies and by tighter and more costly access to global capital markets as a result of the financial crisis. Growth prospects are also dimming because of steps taken in the region to tighten monetary policy so as to contain inflation.

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Financial markets gyrated as political in-fighting over the American government’s $700 billion bail-out plan for banks jarred traders’ nerves. Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, told legislators on September 23rd that global markets remained “under extraordinary stress”.

After the original euphoria on Friday September 19th, when shares rallied sharply, stockmarkets sagged. ...