The World Today

Issue: October & November 2016

In this issue:

Lead articles

Daniel T Rodgers charts the rise of the angry right and an anti-politics politician

Despite Obama’s two terms, the United States is still torn by racial division, writes Bernd Debusmann

Figurines of the leader of the Five Star Movement Beppe Grillo and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi in Naples

For the next 12 months in Europe, the voters will be in charge. A turbulent period lies ahead during which traditional parties of the centre-right and centre-left will be fighting for their lives against resurgent right-wing, populist, Eurosceptic and anti-Muslim movements.

Jillian Stirk and Bessma Momani look at how Canada’s multicultural past is letting it buck the angry populist trend

David Lewis on Russia and China’s tug of war over the states along the Silk Road

Brexit must not distract the EU and Nato from region’s rumbling crises, warns Stephen Blank

The US election has been full of bizarre events. It is tempting to see the rise of Donald Trump as an accident – in normal times backstage negotiations would have prevented him getting a majority in the Republican primary. But as the historian Daniel Rodgers explains, the US political system is so fractured that the rise of a new type of abrasive candidate is now normal.

Articles

Attention in the US election is focused on the President, but his or her power is constrained in many ways, as the drafters of the Constitution intended

Egyptian civilians in streets bombed during the 1956 Suez Crisis

Anthony Eden and Tony Blair made disastrous foreign policy decisions in Suez in 1956 and Iraq in 2003. Roger Hardy questions why the West seems never to learn

Despite a thriving vaccine industry, India has failed to immunize its young, writes Jemima Hodkinson

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei addresses military personnel and family in Tehran, Iran

Neither side has won the gains it sought, writes Sara Bazoobandi

Child labourers collect mica at a scrap mine in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand

Slave-trade children are dying mining mica, writes Monique Villa

Libya’s fractured political and military balance shifted again on September 11, as the self-styled Libyan National Army of General Khalifa Haftar seized control of the Oil Crescent from a local militia that had blockaded the area. Days later, the National Oil Corporation (NOC) said that exports from the ports would resume immediately. On September 21, a tanker left the port of Ras Lanuf for the first time in two years.

Also in this issue

Catherine Fieschi on summer schools designed to make us better citizens

One of the most important number crunchers at CERN is responsible for pensions rather than colliding protons

A pilgrim looks at the holy Islamic city of Mecca from the top of Noor mountain

Jonathan Wright enjoys a Saudi woman writer’s literary inventiveness

Nick Clegg emerges rather well from his mea culpa, writes Agnes Frimston

J Henry Fair has spent 15 years taking aerial pictures of the environmental damage caused by heavy industry and coal-fired power stations around the world.