Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Thursday, July 03, 2014

This week our cover looks at the tragedy of the Arabs. A thousand years ago, the great cities of Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo took turns to race ahead of the Western world. Back then, Islam and innovation were twins. Now the Arabs are in a wretched state, a civilisation in ruins—and the only people who can rebuild it are the Arabs themselves. John Micklethwait, Editor-in-Chief

BNP Paribas, genocide and lousy justice The French bank deserved a clobbering, but America's legal system looks like an extortion racket READ MORE » Revenge porn: a global plague The online publication of explicit images without their subjects’ consent READ MORE » The right man for Indonesia Jokowi may be a political naif but he is better than a Suharto-era soldier READ MORE » Politics this week The Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), which conquered swathes of northern and western Iraq in the past few weeks, declared a caliphate over the wider region (and eventually the world) and changed its name simply to the Islamic State. The armed forces defending the government in Baghdad sought to take back or secure key towns just to the north of the capital, including Tikrit SEE ARTICLE » MORE FROM: POLITICS THIS WEEK » Business this week General Motors recalled another 8.2m cars because of malfunctioning ignition switches. The models in this recall may be linked to crashes that caused three deaths, bringing the total fatalities that GM acknowledges may be connected to the fault to 16. The company knew about the problem as far back as 2001 SEE ARTICLE » MORE FROM: BUSINESS THIS WEEK »