February 10: Russia, India, Lata, China

Festive but fraying India’s democracy is not as healthy as this month’s elections make it seem It is not just sectarianism that is ailing the body politic . Three different sorts of communists are competing: Marxist, Marxist-Leninist and the garden variety. ....... Uttar Pradesh may be as poor as Mali, and deeply divided by caste and religion, but it is also a genuine democracy. Its voters have a meaningful choice, and often confound the pundits. ......... A shocking 43% of those who won seats in the national parliament at the most recent general election, in 2019, had been charged with crimes of some sort. For 29% the charges involved grave offences such as rape or murder. ......... Fewer and fewer bills are debated in committee; many are approved by voice votes. .......... Campaign finance is another worry. The bjp has introduced what it calls electoral bonds, which allow individuals and businesses to donate unlimited sums to political parties in secret, in effect. The bjp hoovers up three-quarters of the money donated in this way, but other parties are also happy to accept the scraps. It is impossible to allay suspicions that India’s industrialists are buying favours from the government, since no one knows who is making donations, much less whether there might be any quid pro quo involved. .......... In a world where authoritarian China seems to grow stronger by the day, it has never been more important for India not just to hold elections, but to repair the underpinnings of its democracy, too.

The next crisis What would happen if financial markets crashed? Look to history for a guide, but know that next time will be different . Having soared in 2021, shares on Wall Street had their worst January since 2009, falling by 5.3%. The prices of assets favoured by retail investors, like tech stocks, cryptocurrencies and shares in electric-car makers, have plunged. The once-giddy mood on r/wallstreetbets, a forum for digital day-traders, is now mournful. .......... Asset prices are high: the last time shares were so pricey relative to long-run profits was before the slumps of 1929 and 2001 ...........

the reinvention of finance has not eliminated hubris

......... the total borrowings and deposit-like liabilities of hedge funds, property trusts and money market funds have risen to 43% of gdp, from 32% a decade ago. ......... The second danger is that, although the new system is more decentralised, it still relies on transactions being channelled through a few nodes that could be overwhelmed by volatility. etfs, with $10trn of assets, rely on a few small market-making firms to ensure that the price of funds accurately tracks the under lying assets they own. Trillions of dollars of derivatives contracts are routed through five American clearing houses. Many transactions are executed by a new breed of middle men, such as Citadel Securities. The Treasury market now depends on automated high-frequency trading firms to function. .............

The market-based financial system is hyper active most of the time; in times of stress whole areas of trading activity can dry up. That can fuel panic.

............... Fully 53% of American households own shares (up from 37% in 1992), and there are over 100m online brokerage accounts .......... The financial system is in better shape than in 2008 when the reckless gamblers at Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers brought the world to a standstill. Make no mistake, though: it faces a stern test.

India’s nightingale Lata Mangeshkar was the soundtrack of newly independent India The most celebrated of all playback singers died on February 6th, aged 92 . The young woman in “Mahal” (The Palace), made in 1949, was the great actress Madhubala, then still a teenager. But she was not the one singing. In trademark Bollywood fashion she lip-synched the words to a song recorded by a short, slightly dumpy, barefoot girl in a sweltering studio with the fans turned off, because they made too much noise. For “Aayega Aanewala” she crept towards the microphone from 20 feet away, mimicking the echoes of the song. The combination of her passionate voice with the elegant beauty of Madhubala was a peak of Bollywood’s art. ....... She came from Indore in central India, the daughter of a touring theatre producer. ....... over seven decades of playback singing, her fame grew exponentially. She performed for every Indian prime minister, sang for actresses from Madhubala to Kajol, did duets with all the famous actors and built a catalogue of more than 5,000 songs, half of them solos. Directors fought to have her in their films, and she sang in more than a thousand. Inevitably, her voice also became the soundtrack of newly independent India. Through pa systems in malls and factories, from radios in chai stalls and barbers’ stands, out of the windows of idling, hooting cars, at funerals and weddings, her songs wove India together. She seemed to be always there ............ She could never have imagined fame on such a scale. It meant that she could support her mother and her siblings and, later, get a second-hand Mercedes, indulge her love of Test cricket, buy diamonds and take holidays in Las Vegas, where she played the slots all night. ............ and she, at 13, took up acting to support the family, she could not bear to be in front of the camera. It did not love her, with her plumpness and her eyebrows, which one director told her were “too broad”. Nor could she bear to be directed what to say. By contrast to be an unseen playback singer, freely adding high emotions to the drama, felt exactly right. ........... Not that it was always easy. Her voice at first struck many as too high and thin, when the vogue was for a gutsier sound. With practice she made it fuller, improved the vital coloratura and developed her own honeyed way of singing, which others quickly copied. .........

Practise, practise, was her mantra; and then get tough.

She fought doggedly for playback singers to share in the royalties given to composers, as well as for higher fees for herself. There were frosty spells in that dispute when she refused to work with Mohammed Rafi, the playback partner with whom she sang 450 duets, and the director Raj Kapoor, whom she usually counted as a friend. .............. and in 1999 she was appointed to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of parliament. She did not go much and did not take any mp’s perks, which included a free phone and cooking-gas connection. What did she know about politics? Her world was music, and it was wide enough to contain Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, the Beatles and Nat King Cole. Music was her god and her husband too, for she never married. ..........

When she died, of covid, people wept in the streets.

Jupiter the peacemaker Emmanuel Macron’s Ukraine mission buys time, but works no miracles He is treading a perilous path between his own friends’ suspicions and Vladimir Putin’s belligerence .

A question the size of an army What are Vladimir Putin’s military intentions in Ukraine? Only he can say

Daily chart A new low for global democracy More pandemic restrictions damaged democratic freedoms in 2021

Climate change Targeting methane “ultra-emitters” could cheaply slow climate change Patching up leaky oil-and-gas works across the world would be a good place to start

Daily chart America’s covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich But the country was ill-prepared to do better

China’s other dreams To understand China, says Megan Walsh, turn to its literature “The Subplot” is a pacy tour of contemporary Chinese literature . Some sensitive subjects, such as the Tiananmen crackdown of 1989, have always been off-limits for Chinese authors. But between the 1980s and early 2010s, Chinese novelists such as Mo Yan and Yan Lianke were able to portray the enormities of Maoism as experienced by ordinary people. That freedom has shrivelled since Xi Jinping took power in 2012: amid intensifying authoritarianism, Megan Walsh notes in “The Subplot”, the number of cultural figures imprisoned for “subverting state power” or “picking quarrels” is “the highest in the world”.

Films | Tackling bias in tech When computers are racist How to stop building racial bias into the digital future

January 28: N95, Pegasus

We Syrians Are Not Surprised by This Betrayal . In June, the World Health Organization appointed Syria to its executive board. Interpol readmitted Syria to its network in October. Algeria and Egypt have pushed to reinvite Syria to Arab League membership, and other Arab nations have gestured toward a rapprochement with Mr. al-Assad. And throughout, Mr. al-Assad’s relationships with Iran and Russia appear to have deepened. .......... the Rohingya in Myanmar and the Uighurs in Xinjiang. ......... I was 13 when protests erupted in our eastern Damascus neighborhood of Al-Qaboun, back in 2011. I remember feeling hopeful watching Syrians call for a country free of the al-Assad family, which had ruled us for 40 years. When the regime violently cracked down on protesters, countries severed ties with Mr. al-Assad and froze his regime’s assets abroad. The Arab League suspended Syria from its membership. .......... Back then, I felt betrayed by the al-Assad family, who we’d long been told was Syria’s protector. Now, nine years after fleeing my home, I feel betrayed by an international community that is inviting Mr. al-Assad back into its fold. ......... what has happened in Syria exposes the deep contradictions and flaws within the international human rights system. .......... A regime that has been known to bomb hospitals cannot be a member of the Executive Board of the World Health Organization. A regime that tortures and tracks its dissidents at home and abroad through intelligence services must not regain access to Interpol’s databases. ......... Syria is not a nuclear power or the regional power it once was. Nor is it a major energy supplier. Standing firm against his rehabilitation does not cost much. .

Five Action Movies to Stream Now . .

Kamau Bell: Bill Cosby Is Key to Understanding America The comic and commentator discusses his new documentary, “We Need to Talk About Cosby,” and what Cosby’s story reveals about the “two runaway forces of oppression in America.” ........ Cosby was freed from prison in June 2021 after an appeals court ruled that his due process rights had been violated. .......... Cosby continues to deny all allegations against him. ...... There are two runaway forces of oppression in America: One, how we treat nonwhite people. The other is how we have treated women through the history of this country........ [Cosby is] one of the key figures for Black America and America in the 20th century. And one of the greatest standup comedians of all time. And the creator of one of the best sitcoms of all time. And, throughout a lot of his career, an advocate for Black excellence. ....... No matter what you think about Bill Cosby’s story, it is critical that we create a society that treats survivors of sexual assault better. .

Searching for America, South of the Mason-Dixon . The conviction of this book is that race and racism are fundamental values of the South, that “the creation of racial slavery in the colonies was a gateway to habits and dispositions that ultimately became the commonplace ways of doing things in this country.” In other words, the South is America, and its history and influence cannot be dismissed as an embarrassing relative at the nation’s holiday dinner table. ....... “the major metropolis of the South doesn’t have a sufficient mass transit system or a polyglot culture....” .

How Long Can I Keep Wearing the Same Respirator Mask? With the right care, your high-performance mask can last for multiple uses. ........ (The Biden administration has announced it’s giving away 400 million nonsurgical N95 masks at community health centers and retail pharmacies across the United States, with a limit of three per person.) ........... 40 hours of use per mask .......... Never try to clean your high-performance mask. ...... and keep it in a clean, dry place when you’re not wearing it. ........ an N95 is designed to handle 200 milligrams of particles, which would be equivalent to wearing it nonstop for 200 days in very polluted air such as in Shanghai. ......... Over time — several hours — the virus will die off, so we probably don’t need to worry about accumulating more than one day’s worth of infectious virus on the material. ........ the virus decays to nearly undetectable levels in 30 minutes. ........ Consider it ruined if it has gone through the wash or otherwise gotten soaked. .

The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon A Times investigation reveals how Israel reaped diplomatic gains around the world from NSO’s Pegasus spyware — a tool America itself purchased but is now trying to ban. ......... For nearly a decade, the Israeli firm had been selling its surveillance software on a subscription basis to law-enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world, promising that it could do what no one else — not a private company, not even a state intelligence service — could do: consistently and reliably crack the encrypted communications of any iPhone or Android smartphone. .......... it had helped Mexican authorities capture Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug lord known as El Chapo. European investigators have quietly used Pegasus to thwart terrorist plots, fight organized crime and, in one case, take down a global child-abuse ring, identifying dozens of suspects in more than 40 countries .......... criminals and terrorists had better technology for encrypting their communications than investigators had to decrypt them. The criminal world had gone dark even as it was increasingly going global. .......... Mexico deployed the software not just against gangsters but also against journalists and political dissidents. The United Arab Emirates used the software to hack the phone of a civil rights activist whom the government threw in jail. Saudi Arabia used it against women’s rights activists and, according to a lawsuit filed by a Saudi dissident, to spy on communications with Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post, whom Saudi operatives killed and dismembered in Istanbul in 2018. ............

What they could see, minutes later, was every piece of data stored on the phone as it unspooled onto the large monitors of the Pegasus computers: every email, every photo, every text thread, every personal contact. They could also see the phone’s location and even take control of its camera and microphone.

........ F.B.I. agents using Pegasus could, in theory, almost instantly transform phones around the world into powerful surveillance tools ......... Phantom allows American law enforcement and spy agencies to get intelligence “by extracting and monitoring crucial data from mobile devices.” It is an “independent solution” that requires no cooperation from AT&T, Verizon, Apple or Google. The system, it says, will “turn your target’s smartphone into an intelligence gold mine.” ........... sales of Pegasus played an unseen but critical role in securing the support of Arab nations in Israel’s campaign against Iran and even in negotiating the Abraham Accords, the 2020 diplomatic agreements that normalized relations between Israel and some of its longtime Arab adversaries. .......... The current showdown between the United States and Israel over NSO demonstrates how governments increasingly view powerful cyberweapons the same way they have long viewed military hardware like fighter jets and centrifuges: not only as pivotal to national defense but also as a currency with which to buy influence around the world. ........... Foreign-service officers posted in American Embassies abroad have served for years as pitchmen for defense firms hoping to sell arms to their client states, as the thousands of diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks in 2010 showed ..........

when American defense secretaries meet with their counterparts in allied capitals, the end result is often the announcement of an arms deal that pads the profits of Lockheed Martin or Raytheon.

.......... Cyberweapons have changed international relations more profoundly than any advance since the advent of the atomic bomb. In some ways, they are even more profoundly destabilizing — they are comparatively cheap, easily distributed and can be deployed without consequences to the attacker. Dealing with their proliferation is radically changing the nature of state relations, as Israel long ago discovered and the rest of the world is now also beginning to understand. .............. By the mid-1980s, Israel had firmly established itself as one of the world’s top arms exporters, with an estimated one in 10 of the nation’s workers employed by the industry in some way. .......... Recruitment was the essential ingredient of their business plan. The company would eventually employ more than 700 people in offices around the world and a sprawling headquarters in Herzliya, where individual labs for Apple and Android operating systems are filled with racks of smartphones undergoing constant testing by the firm’s hackers as they seek and exploit new vulnerabilities. .............. There was a particular concern about Israeli companies that were staffed by former top intelligence officials; potential customers feared that their spyware might be contaminated with even deeper spyware, allowing the Mossad access to their internal systems. .......... They fed the mobile phone number of a person connected to Joaquín Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel into the system, and the BlackBerry was successfully attacked. Investigators could see the content of the messages, as well as the locations of different BlackBerry devices. “Suddenly we started to see and hear anew,” says a former CISEN leader. “It was like magic.” In his view, the new system had revitalized their entire operation — “Everyone felt like maybe for the first time we could win.” It was also a win for Israel. Mexico is a dominant power in Latin America, a region where Israel for years has waged a kind of diplomatic trench warfare against anti-Israeli groups supported by the country’s adversaries in the Middle East. .......... “its guardianship of the capital of the world — Jerusalem.” ....... “NSO was providing the means for states to spy on their own people,” he says. “From my point of view it’s straightforward. This issue is not about Israel’s security. It’s about something that got out of control.”

How a Syrian War Criminal Was Brought to Justice — in Germany When refugees won historic convictions against the Syrian torture regime, they also opened a new front in the global fight for human rights.