The Economist Latin America August 24, 2019

Politics Giuseppe Conte, Italy’s prime minister, resigned after Matteo Salvini, the leader of the Northern League party, withdrew his support for the coalition government. The coalition’s other party, the Five Star Movement, must now try to form a new government. If that fails, Italy may face a general election. An Italian prosecutor ordered a ship carrying around 80 illegal migrants to dock after some of the passengers jumped into the sea. The ship, operated by a Spanish charity, had been held off the Italian coast for three weeks because Mr Salvini, who is also Italy’s interior minister, refused it entry to a port. International radiation monitors confirmed they had detected a recent accident near the Russian port of Arkhangelsk, believed to involve a nuclear-powered cruise missile. Separately, and despite worries about safety, Russia…

Politics Giuseppe Conte, Italy’s prime minister, resigned after Matteo Salvini, the leader of the Northern League party, withdrew his support for the coalition government. The coalition’s other party, the Five Star Movement, must now try to form a new government. If that fails, Italy may face a general election. An Italian prosecutor ordered a ship carrying around 80 illegal migrants to dock after some of the passengers jumped into the sea. The ship, operated by a Spanish charity, had been held off the Italian coast for three weeks because Mr Salvini, who is also Italy’s interior minister, refused it entry to a port. International radiation monitors confirmed they had detected a recent accident near the Russian port of Arkhangelsk, believed to involve a nuclear-powered cruise missile. Separately, and despite worries…

ACROSS THE West, capitalism is not working as well as it should. Jobs are plentiful, but growth is sluggish, inequality is too high and the environment is suffering. You might hope that governments would enact reforms to deal with this, but politics in many places is gridlocked or unstable. Who, then, is going to ride to the rescue? A growing number of people think the answer is to call on big business to help fix economic and social problems. Even America’s famously ruthless bosses agree. This week more than 180 of them, including the chiefs of Walmart and JPMorgan Chase, overturned three decades of orthodoxy to pledge that their firms’ purpose was no longer to serve their owners alone, but customers, staff, suppliers and communities, too. The CEOs’ motives are…

ACROSS THE West, capitalism is not working as well as it should. Jobs are plentiful, but growth is sluggish, inequality is too high and the environment is suffering. You might hope that governments would enact reforms to deal with this, but politics in many places is gridlocked or unstable. Who, then, is going to ride to the rescue? A growing number of people think the answer is to call on big business to help fix economic and social problems. Even America’s famously ruthless bosses agree. This week more than 180 of them, including the chiefs of Walmart and JPMorgan Chase, overturned three decades of orthodoxy to pledge that their firms’ purpose was no longer to serve their owners alone, but customers, staff, suppliers and communities, too. The CEOs’ motives are partly…

IN THE DENSE gloom about climate change, news of coal’s decline seems like a pinprick of hope. President Donald Trump may adore “beautiful, clean coal”, but even he cannot save it. A growing number of countries want to phase out coal entirely, a transition eased by cheap natural gas and the plunging cost of wind and solar power. That is good news. Coal has been the largest engine of climate change to date, accounting for nearly a third of the rise in average temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. Any pressure on it therefore counts as progress. However, last year coal-fired electricity emitted more than ten gigatonnes of carbon dioxide for the first time, 30% of the world’s total. It may be in decline in the West, but many Asian governments…

IN THE DENSE gloom about climate change, news of coal’s decline seems like a pinprick of hope. President Donald Trump may adore “beautiful, clean coal”, but even he cannot save it. A growing number of countries want to phase out coal entirely, a transition eased by cheap natural gas and the plunging cost of wind and solar power. That is good news. Coal has been the largest engine of climate change to date, accounting for nearly a third of the rise in average temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. Any pressure on it therefore counts as progress. However, last year coal-fired electricity emitted more than ten gigatonnes of carbon dioxide for the first time, 30% of the world’s total. It may be in decline in the West, but many Asian governments continue to…