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AT THE END of a long row of benches where young mothers wearily try to soothe their squirming babies is a clue to both the enormous challenge involved in reducing infant mortality in Africa and the huge potential for doing so. Perched on the edge of an examination table in the only clinic offering care in a community north of Nairobi is a small silver-coloured horn that looks a bit like a trumpet. Known as a Pinard horn, it is used to check the heartbeat of a baby in the womb. In the rich world the device, invented in 1895, was long ago replaced by doppler ultrasound machines, which do a much better job. Yet in many parts of Africa it remains in widespread use because it is cheap and does not need electrical power.

It is partly for want of better equipment that some of the world’s highest rates of infant mortality are found in African countries. The continent accounts for about two-thirds of all deaths relating to pregnancy and childbirth around the globe, even though it makes up only one-sixth...

Collared

FOR EACH OF the past three years South Africa has lost more than 1,000 rhinos to poachers, despite intensive efforts to protect them using armed rangers, drones and specially trained tracker dogs. Guarding rhinos is particularly difficult because they roam across vast areas of veld where poachers can hide easily. But two novel approaches using artificial intelligence may help rangers catch their hunters. The first was developed by a group of computer scientists who had previously used artificial intelligence to detect roadside bombers in Iraq and insurgents in Afghanistan. In South Africa they used machine learning to predict where rhinos were most likely to be feeding the following day. The computers also crunched historical data on poaching incidents to identify areas where they were likely to happen. Rangers and drones could then be sent to patrol in areas most likely to have both poachers and rhinos, says V.S. Subrahmanian, who worked on the project at the...

Rolet: who knows?

ACTIVIST hedge funds like Elliott Management, Cevian Capital or The Children’s Investment Fund (TCI) are famed for pushing for change at the companies they buy into. A favoured tactic is to install a new chief executive at a floundering firm. So it is odd to find a fund lobbying for an existing boss to stay on, as TCI has done in a spat with the London Stock Exchange (LSE).

In over eight years at the LSE, Xavier Rolet has transformed it from a share-trading venue to a clearing and data-services powerhouse, through acquisitions such as Russell, an index-maker, and a majority stake in LCH, a clearing-house. His hope of merging with the LSE’s big German rival, Deutsche Börse, fell through, largely because of Britain’s vote to leave the EU. But Mr Rolet remains widely respected. So eyebrows were raised when the LSE’s announcement on October 19th that Mr Rolet would leave in 2018 gave no reason.

In a fiery letter penned on...

“I’M GONNA make a $hit t$n of money on August 2nd on the Stox.com ICO.” Written in July on Instagram, these words made Floyd Mayweather, a boxer, the first big celebrity to endorse an “initial coin offering”, a form of crowdfunding that issues cryptographic coins, or “tokens”. Stox, an online prediction market, went on to raise more than $30m, some of which seems to have gone directly into Mr Mayweather’s pocket. Other VIPs, including Paris Hilton, a socialite, followed suit and endorsed ICOs. But this source of easy cash may now be drying up: on November 1st America’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) warned that such promotions may be unlawful, if celebrities fail to disclose what they receive in return.

The endorsements and the SEC’s attempt to rein them in are the latest episodes of token mania. Virtually unknown a year ago, ICOs are now more celebrated than initial public offerings (IPOs), the conventional way of floating a firm. Over the past 12 months $3.3bn has been...

GERMANY’S third-biggest retail bank has no branches. It is also Dutch. And it is highly profitable. ING-DiBa, an online bank owned by ING, the Netherlands’ biggest lender, looks after €133bn ($154bn) of deposits for over 8m customers. In a fragmented market—most Germans entrust their savings to small, local banks—that means a share of around 6%. ING-DiBa’s lack of branches keeps costs down, allowing it to resist charging for current accounts and offer savers a tad more than rivals, despite a recent cut; and it has won a name for good service in a country not renowned for it. While other banks struggle after years of ultra-low interest rates, ING-DiBa thrives. Its return on equity exceeds 20%.

ING as a whole is in fair shape, too. On November 2nd it reported net third-quarter earnings of €1.4bn, slightly more than a year earlier. The group’s return on equity was a healthy 11%, nearly two percentage points up. Since 2014 the number of “primary” customers (with an active current account and another product) has climbed by 25%, to...

IN THE 1980s Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were both proud of their efforts to expand home ownership. In Britain, Thatcher presided over a fire sale of state-owned homes to tenants. In America, Reagan deregulated financial markets and expanded mortgage lending. At the time both countries provided generous mortgage-related tax breaks, making it easier to flog homes to the masses.

Britain’s 1980s housing boom turned to bust; the mortgage subsidies that helped to fuel it were abolished. America still subsidises mortgages to the tune of $64bn a year, by allowing homeowners to deduct interest costs from their tax liabilities. But a tax plan unveiled by Republicans on November 2nd proposes to limit the subsidy.

Twelve European Union countries also include some form of mortgage-interest deduction (MID) in their tax code. The average European subsidy, however, is around a tenth of America’s—about 0.05% of GDP. The Netherlands is much the most generous, at 2% of GDP.

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THIS week was uncomfortable for a host of well-heeled figures. In the frame were U2’s Bono, America’s commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, and Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, as well as some of the world’s most valuable companies, including Apple and Nike. All these, and many more, feature in the “Paradise Papers”, a trove of more than 13m documents, many of them stolen from Appleby, a leading offshore law firm. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and its 95 press partners, including the BBC and the New York Times, began publishing stories based on the papers on November 5th. Dozens appeared this week, with more to follow after The Economist went to press.

The ICIJ’s last big splash, the Panama Papers in April 2016, shed light on some of the darkest corners of offshore finance. In contrast, many of the activities highlighted by this leak are legal. But they would be widely seen as flouting the spirit of national tax laws by exploiting the gaps that open up...

EVERY investor would like to find the perfect measurement tool to tell them when to get into, and out of, the stockmarket. The cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio (CAPE), as calculated by Robert Shiller of Yale University, averages profits over ten years and is used by many as an important valuation indicator. Currently it shows that American shares have hitherto been more highly valued only in 1929 and the late 1990s, periods that were followed by big crashes.

That seems ominous. But as a paper by Dylan Grice and Gregor Obrecht of Calibrium, a Zurich-based private-investment office, makes clear, it is far from conclusive. The CAPE is not much use as a short-term indicator; it has been well above its long-term average for several years now, as it was in the late 1990s.

The main argument for the CAPE is a long-term one. If you divide all past CAPE values into quintiles, the annual returns earned over the subsequent decade by investing in equities when the CAPE was in...

Maduro has a cunning plan. Maybe

INVESTORS have long seen a default on Venezuelan sovereign debt as a question of when, not if. Its bonds have been priced at levels implying imminent bankruptcy, but somehow the cash-strapped oil exporter has stayed afloat. Until now. On November 2nd Nicolás Maduro, the country’s authoritarian president, announced that he would order a “refinancing and restructuring” of foreign debt worth about $105bn. The prices of government bonds fell by up to half. Markets braced themselves for one of history’s most complex sovereign-debt renegotiations.

Mr Maduro’s brief statement was cryptic as to the concrete steps he will take. He invited “everyone involved in foreign debt” to talks in Caracas, the capital, on November 13th. Many creditors want a neutral venue. Moreover, Mr Maduro appears to have pre-emptively dashed any hope of a voluntary agreement by naming his vice-president, Tareck El Aissami, as head of his debt-restructuring committee. America’s Treasury department...

IN 1955 Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister of India, embarked on a 16-day tour of the Soviet Union. He was like a “kid in a candy store”, according to one editor of his letters. Besides the Bolshoi ballet and the embalmed corpse of Stalin, he visited a Stalingrad tractor works, a machinery-maker in Yekaterinburg and an iron-and-steel plant in Magnitogorsk. In a letter, he wondered if the Soviet Union’s economic approach, “shorn of violence and coercion”, could help the world achieve peace and prosperity.

The answer, of course, was “no”. But Nehru concluded otherwise, incorporating Soviet ideas into India’s five-year plans and welcoming Soviet aid, equipment and expertise. In the year of his visit, the Russians set up a steel factory in what is now the Indian state of Chhattisgarh. It became India’s main supplier of rails.

Nehru was not alone. The Soviet model impressed many leaders in the poorer parts of the world. Even today, according to Charles Robertson of...

French and Italian opposition torpedoed an E.U. vote to reauthorize the world’s most popular herbicide, while Little Rock moved to restrict an alternative.

The dissident Russian band’s release deals with state surveillance and police brutality, with a cameo by Chloë Sevigny.

Many Chinese say they are relieved to see a leader who seems to care more about making deals than idealism.

Amazingly, the House bill would increase taxes, on net, for families that have a child and make less than $100,000.

Thursday: How the legislation could impact the state, more Hollywood fallout for Kevin Spacey, and a push to make the Playboy Mansion a historic monument.

Here’s what you need to know to start your day.

I was just as unprepared to hear my doctor say “lung cancer” as I had been to hear my husband say “I’m gay.”

We talk with President Trump’s former chief strategist, and look at why a mass shooting could make Texas friendlier to guns.

Thursday: Frigid weather, release of the fishes, and a plea to not feed the animals.

China’s sprawling chemical industry is weakly regulated and riddled with illicit activity. Ending its role in the U.S. drug epidemic will be difficult.