An article in the issue dated October 18th (“Treatment on a plate”) described a nutritional approach to the treatment of drug addiction. Part of the article was reported from a conference, one of whose organisers is a nutritionist with a commercial interest in the relationship between diet and brain function. It has been drawn to our attention that the author of the article is also the co-author of a book with this organiser. Had we known this at the time, we would not have commissioned the piece from him. It has also been suggested that some of the studies alluded to were too small to support the conclusions drawn from them. The article made clear that these studies (which had been published independently of the conference) were preliminary and that further investigation would be needed to substantiate this approach. However, it may not have been clear that the experiments were conducted using nutrients found in the foodstuffs mentioned, rather than using the foods themselves.

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Russia is not the Soviet Union, but what is it? A recovering world power—or a corrupt oligopoly with a market economy of sorts? Arkady Ostrovsky (interviewed here) explains why it is both

ON DECEMBER 25th 1991 the Soviet flag above the Kremlin was lowered for the last time and the last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, made his resignation speech. “The totalitarian system has been eliminated…free elections…free press, freedom of worship, representative legislatures and a multi-party system have all become reality.”

A few hours later, America’s then president, George Bush senior, declared victory in the cold war. “For over 40 years the United States led the West in the struggle against communism and the threat it posed to our most precious values…That confrontation is now over. The United States recognises and welcomes the emergence of a free, independent and democratic Russia.” ...

Lee Scott is stepping down having revived Wal-Mart’s share price—and its reputation

ONLY last year it seemed increasingly likely that Lee Scott’s reign as chief executive of Wal-Mart would end soon, in disappointment and against his will. The world’s largest retailer was suffering from slowing sales and falling profits in its core American market. Its share price had fallen by nearly one-third from its high in 1999, and a class-action suit filed by female workers, alleging systematic discrimination, had reinforced Wal-Mart’s reputation as the firm sensitive Americans loved to hate. Mr Scott was floundering, his attempt to rebrand Wal-Mart as an eco-crusader widely dismissed as mere “greenwashing”.

Yet such has been the transformation of Wal-Mart’s fortunes since then that the announcement, on November 21st, that Mr Scott would step down as chief executive at the end of January was greeted with surprise. Nobody doubted that the decision to go, at the relatively tender age of 59, was entirely his own. Whereas most other bosses, especially of retailers, are struggling in what is shaping up to be the harshest recession for decades, Mr Scott is leaving on a high. Sales are expected to rise by some 8% in this financial year. The firm’s share price, although down since September, is still about 20% higher than at the start of 2008. ...

Russia’s legal system is deeply flawed

DESPITE Mr Putin’s promise to establish a “dictatorship of the law”, the judiciary in Russia is far from just. At least that is the view of Sergei Pashin, a former judge and now a law professor. He should know: in 2000 he was dismissed after supporting a young man who had political objections to serving in the army. Mr Pashin was later restored to office, but the young man he helped to free died in mysterious circumstances.

The trouble starts with the selection of judges, says Mr Pashin. The process looks reasonable on paper, but it leaves scope for interference. Judges are appointed either directly by the president or on his recommendation by the upper chamber of parliament. But most of them are first screened by a Kremlin commission which includes the deputy heads of the security services and the interior ministry. And although judges are appointed for life, their careers (and perks) are in the hands of the chairman of their particular court, who is appointed for a six-year term, renewable once. To get that second term he has to prove his loyalty, Mr Pashin explains. ...

Bribery and corruption have become endemic

RUSSIA may not have democratic elections or the rule of law, but it does have one long-standing institution that works: corruption. This has penetrated the political, economic, judicial and social systems so thoroughly that is has ceased to be a deviation from the norm and become the norm itself. A corruption index compiled by Transparency International gives Russia 2.1 points out of ten, its worst performance for eight years and on a par with Kenya and Bangladesh. Ordinary Russians are well aware of this, with three-quarters of them describing the level of corruption in their country as “high” or “very high”.

The size of the corruption market is estimated to be close to $300 billion, equivalent to 20% of Russia’s GDP. INDEM, a think-tank that monitors and analyses corruption, says 80% of all Russian businesses pay bribes. In the past eight years the size of the average business bribe has gone up from $10,000 to $130,000, which is enough to buy a small flat in Moscow. ...

A dangerous new front-line in the global war against terrorism

TERROR has stalked Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, all too many times before. In 1993 more than 250 people died in a series of bomb attacks, seen as reprisals for the demolition by Hindu fanatics of the mosque at Ayodhya. In 2003, more than 50 people were killed by two car bombs, including one just outside the Taj Mahal hotel, next to the monumental tourist attraction, the “Gateway of India”. And in 2006 over 180 people were killed in seven separate explosions at railway stations and on commuter trains. But the latest atrocity—or rather co-ordinated series of atrocities (see article)—is something new to the city. It has alarming implications not just for India, but for the entire international fight against terrorism.

It differs from most previous attacks in two important ways: in the sophistication of the operation’s planning and the terrorist manpower that must have been involved; and in selecting foreigners as targets: hostage-takers seem to have sought out American, British and Israeli victims. As The Economist went to press, the crisis in Mumbai was still unfolding. Hostages were still held, fires still smouldering at the Taj Mahal hotel and occasional gunfire and explosions still to be heard. It was uncertain who was responsible, though a previously unknown group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen had contacted television stations to claim credit. ...

A cornered Russia could pose greater risks

THE magic word during Vladimir Putin’s eight years as president was “stability”. The social contract between the Kremlin and the people was based on rising incomes and private freedoms. Most people happily signed up to this. According to Boris Dubin, a leading sociologist, three-quarters of the Russian people feel they have no influence on political and economic life in their country, and the vast majority of them show little interest in politics anyway.

It was this contract, backed by high oil prices and cheap credits, that kept Mr Putin’s ratings up and allowed him to hold on to power as prime minister after his protege, Dmitry Medvedev, was installed as president in March this year. When a foreign journalist asked Mr Putin shortly before the election why Mr Medvedev was not campaigning, the answer was candid: “Salaries in Russia are growing by 16% a year…people want this trend to continue and they see Dmitry Medvedev as a guarantor of this trend.” ...

Big banks eye the retail deposits of France’s accident-prone mutuals

OVERALL, French banks have had a good credit crunch. No French institution has had to be rescued by the state. There has been one big bail-out, of Dexia, a Franco-Belgian lender, but France’s finance minister, Christine Lagarde, was quick to assert that the bank was in fact Belgian by capital and supervision. France has set aside €40 billion ($52 billion) to boost capital, but only a quarter of that has been requested by banks, a fraction of the sums pumped into American, British and German lenders. And BNP Paribas has emerged as one of the main winners from the crisis. In October it snapped up the Belgian assets of Fortis, a Belgo-Dutch bank, for a bargain price, and became the biggest bank by deposits in the euro zone.

Its listed rival, Societe Generale, has had some bruising experiences, such as losing €4.9 billion in a rogue-trading incident in January. But unexpectedly, France’s mutuals, traditionally conservative institutions who normally lend small sums, have come out the worst from the crisis. In recent years the mutuals aggressively sought to increase their presence in investment banking. In 2004, for instance, Credit Agricole hired Marc Litzler, a star from Societe Generale, to turn Calyon, its investment bank, into a global player. In 2007 Calyon suffered a €250m hit from rogue trades in its New York office. During 2007-08 Credit Agricole took pre-tax write-downs and provisions of €6.4 billion relating to America’s subprime crisis, more than any other French bank. The losses nearly cost the job of the bank’s chief executive. ...

A Spanish boss for the BIS

As accolades rain down on the Bank of Spain for its deft touch in the run-up to the credit crisis, Jaime Caruana, a former governor of the central bank, has been named as the next general manager of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). He will take over the Basel-based central bankers’ club in April, after leaving his current post at the IMF. Central bankers in many countries may be in disrepute, but the Bank of Spain has won praise for bolstering banks’ capital through counter-cyclical loan-loss provisioning. The BIS also stands out for issuing clear warnings of global financial excess in recent years. Mr Caruana should fit in well.

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Deploying the drugs used to treat AIDS may be the way to limit its spread

IT HAS become a cliche among doctors who deal with AIDS that the only way to stop the epidemic is to develop a vaccine against HIV, the virus that causes it. Unfortunately, there is no sign of such a thing becoming available soon. The best hope was withdrawn from trials just over a year ago amid fears that it might actually be making things worse. As a result, vaccine researchers have mostly gone back to the drawing board of basic research. Meanwhile, the virus marches on. Last year, according to UNAIDS, the international body charged with combating it, 2.7m people were infected, bringing the estimated total to 33m.

Reuben Granich and his colleagues at the World Health Organisation (WHO), though, have been exploring an alternative approach. Instead of a vaccine, they wonder, as they write in the Lancet, whether the job might be done with drugs. ...

Do drug firms suppress unfavourable information about new products?

RICHARD FEYNMAN, a Nobel-prize-winning physicist, declared in a speech in 1974 that science requires “a kind of utter honesty”. He insisted that researchers must publicise all the outcomes of their work, and “not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another”. To judge by the mounting evidence of publication bias involving studies on new drugs, his words have not yet reached the pharmaceuticals industry.

A study published this week in PLoS Medicine, an online journal, confirms what many have suspected and what previous studies have hinted at: drug companies try to spin the results of clinical trials. If this were done merely in marketing materials, it might be tolerable. What Lisa Bero of the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues found, however, was troubling evidence of suppression and manipulation of data in studies published in (or often withheld from) peer-reviewed medical journals. ...

Anger that the catch will still be too big

ACCORDING to conservationists it is a disaster for the bluefin tuna, but as far as the European Commission is concerned it is a landmark decision to try to conserve their stocks. These are the opposing views of the outcome of a meeting this week in Morocco to set the allowable annual catch of the species, the population of which has tumbled because of overfishing, mainly by European fleets.

The organisation responsible for looking after tuna in the north-east Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), agreed to reduce the total allowable catch of bluefin in these areas from 28,500 this year to 22,000 tonnes next and to 19,950 tonnes in 2010, to give a total cut over two years of 30%. But this was considerably short of what many scientists—including some experts appointed by ICCAT—say is necessary. They wanted the catch to be limited to 15,000 tonnes. Some countries, including Spain, had wanted the fishery suspended altogether. ...

Flapping flags may shed light on how fish school and birds flock

OFTEN it pays not to be leader of the pack—just ask a racing cyclist or a Formula One driver. Conserving energy by following the leader, a trick known as slipstreaming, can give a rider or driver that extra bit of juice to pull ahead at the very last moment. In the natural world, however, bodies are more likely to be flexible, like a fish’s, rather than rigid, like a car’s. In these systems, as a recent paper in Physical Review Letters reports, it is the leader that enjoys a significant dynamic advantage over the followers.

Jun Zhang of New York University came to this conclusion obliquely, by examining one of life’s burning questions: why is it that flags flutter in a breeze? Flags are good analogues of birds and fish because all three change their shape as they move through a fluid. In 2000 Dr Zhang did some experiments to study the motion of thin silk filaments (standing in for flags) in flowing films of liquid dishwashing soap (standing in for the breeze). ...

Boris Fyodorov, a Russian economic reformer, died on November 20th, aged 50

MOST of Russia’s super-rich spend their summer holidays on yachts in the sunny Mediterranean. Boris Fyodorov preferred visiting English country churches, the older, the better. The buildings, and especially the gravestones, fascinated him. He saw in them symbols of an historical continuity that Russia had lost under communism. Born in poverty as a factory caretaker’s son, he delighted in making discoveries among his aristocratic roots: trinkets unearthed at his family’s ruined estate, a (Polish) coat of arms. His dacha outside Moscow was notable not for pet wolves or other fashionable extravagances, but for his valiant attempts to create a weedless, stripy English lawn in a hostile climate. He flew a Russian flag there too, scandalising the neighbours, who insisted he needed a permit.

Visitors to his office sometimes wished the chairs had seat belts. Conversation would ricochet from Russia’s recent economic history to the tragedy of the aborted reforms brought in by his hero, Pyotr Stolypin, one of Tsar Nicholas II’s prime ministers. It would touch on the lamentable failure of the Kremlin under Vladimir Putin to promote proper corporate behaviour in the boardrooms of Russia’s big companies, bounce to the hypocrisy of Western bankers who failed to pay their taxes, and come to rest with a robust inquiry into the virtues of cylinder mowers compared with the rotary kind. ...

America’s Federal Reserve and Treasury Department announced that they would make $800 billion available to distressed credit markets in the latest effort to revive the financial system. A new $200 billion facility will extend loans to holders of highly rated securities related to consumer-debt. The Fed will use up to $500 billion to buy mortgage-backed securities guaranteed by government-sponsored enterprises (including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) and another $100 billion to buy GSE debt. This brought about an immediate, sharp fall in mortgage rates and helped underpin a stockmarket rally. See article

Share prices also rose in response to Citigroup’s bail-out by the American government. After the recent collapse of the giant bank’s share price, federal officials offered to back $306 billion of Citi’s toxic assets, mostly connected to property loans. Timothy Geithner, Barack Obama’s choice as treasury secretary, was involved in an important stage of the rescue negotiations in his current role as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. See article ...

In co-ordinated attacks in Mumbai, India’s business capital, terrorists armed with machineguns and grenades killed scores of civilians and took a number of hostages. Luxury hotels and other sites favoured by Westerners were singled out for attack. See article

Anti-government protesters in Thailand occupied Bangkok’s main airport, stranding thousands of passengers. Amid mounting street violence, the army chief, General Anupong Paochinda, urged the government to call fresh elections, and the protesters to go home. Neither side heeded his call and the protesters forced the closure of a second airport that services domestic flights. See article ...

The notional amounts of over-the-counter derivatives continued to expand in the first half of 2008, according to data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). They reached $684 trillion at the end of June, 15% higher than in December 2007. Interest-rate contracts, which account for the lion’s share of the market, expanded by 17%. But credit-default swaps (CDSs) declined slightly over the same period, to $57.3 trillion, the first fall since figures for CDSs started to be published in December 2004. Gross market values, which measure the cost of replacing all existing contracts, went up by 29% to $20.4 trillion at the end of June. The BIS says these are a better gauge of market risk than notional amounts.

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There were more signs of economic weakness in America in October. Orders for durable goods fell by 6.2%, the biggest monthly drop in two years. Consumer spending fell by 1% despite a modest rise in personal income. And sales of new single-family homes fell by 5.3% to an annual pace of 433,000, the lowest since January 1991. Interest rates on mortgages fell this week after the announcement that the Federal Reserve would purchase mortgage-backed securities guaranteed by government-sponsored enterprises and GSE debt.

The People’s Bank of China cut its main policy interest rate by 1.08 percentage points, to 5.58%. The reduction was the central bank’s biggest for 11 years. ...

Output will decline in most OECD countries next year, according to gloomy forecasts released by the intergovernmental think-tank on November 25th. America’s GDP will fall by 0.9% in 2009. Although the OECD thinks it will then grow by 1.6% in 2010, helped by aggressive loosening in monetary policy, it gives warning that the recovery may be imperilled in a prolonged credit crunch. The euro area’s GDP will decline by 0.6 % in 2009 and climb by 1.2% in 2010. A brief growth spurt is expected in Japan in early 2009 thanks to a fiscal stimulus, but output is set to stagnate over the second half of the year. The number of unemployed people in OECD countries could rise by as much as 8m over the next two years.

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A scheme to encourage cheap transport on two wheels

PEDAL power has never really taken off in Africa. Cycling enthusiasts blame the sweltering heat, potholes, and the dumping of Chinese bikes unsuitable for glutinous dirt roads for the ascendancy of belching minivans, even over short distances. Still, bike-crazy pockets of the continent show what is possible. Smugglers on the Kenya-Uganda border popularised the boda-boda taxi (originally, border-border) in the 1970s: boda-bodas still ply village-to-market routes across Africa’s Great Lakes region, carrying passengers or sacks of maize on their often funereal velveteen back seats.

Groups of concerned cyclists in Europe and America have long shipped containers of used bikes to Africa but this bike aid has yet to roll into a movement with critical mass. Indeed, Africans tend to turn their back on bikes as soon as they can afford anything with an engine. The bike has suffered from the indifference of car-driving rulers. There are hardly any bike paths; few people campaign for pedalling. Cyclists rarely contribute to their own safety. Helmets and reflectors or lights at night are rare. Maintenance is invariably slapdash. Yet, with low purchase and running costs, the humble bike could be a key to mobilising rural Africans and unclogging the cities. ...

Despite its new constitution, the Swazi monarchy still looks absolute

WHILE Zimbabwe is roundly condemned by all and sundry, the nearby tiny kingdom of Swaziland, tucked between South Africa and Mozambique, has largely escaped scrutiny. After elections in September that few considered free or fair, the government has branded several organisations as terrorist and has put the opposition leader, Mario Masuku of the People’s United Democratic Movement (Pudemo), behind bars. Yet Swaziland chairs the body dealing with peace and security for the Southern African Development Community (SADC), a regional club of 15 countries that has been mandated to bring democracy to Zimbabwe.

The adoption of a constitution in 2005, supposed to guarantee basic freedoms, was widely deemed a good step. But King Mswati III retains executive power and remains above the law. He appoints ministers and judges, and can veto bills. Political parties have been banned since 1973, so aspiring members of parliament have to run as independents and be vetted by local chiefs. The High Court is mulling over a constitutional challenge, arguing that the electoral commission, which is meant to be independent, is in fact under the king’s thumb. The ruling will indicate how far the king’s powers still go. ...

The country considered one of Africa’s biggest recent successes is going to the polls. The handling of the election matters for the whole continent

LAST year oil was found off the coast of Ghana. There was rejoicing, of course. But the mood was tempered by the knowledge of how oil has polluted the nearby Niger Delta and corrupted Nigeria. More than anything, Ghanaians were seized by a determination to avoid the “resource curse” of Nigeria.

Now, with a general election on December 7th, it is the curse of the ballot box that Ghanaians want to avoid. After electoral disasters in Nigeria, Kenya and Zimbabwe in the past 18 months, everyone is hoping, and many are praying, that Ghana will avoid the bloodshed, chicanery and political warring of its African peers. ...