The Economist Latin America September 21, 2019

Politics Donald Trump said he would impose fresh sanctions on Iran following an audacious missile and drone attack on two oil facilities in Saudi Arabia: the Abqaiq crude-processing plant, the biggest of its kind in the world, and the Khurais oilfield. Claims by Houthi rebels in Yemen that they staged the attack were dismissed by American and Saudi officials. The Houthis are backed by Iran in a proxy war fighting a Saudi-led coalition. Iran insists it was not responsible for the strike. Israel’s general election, the second this year, produced no clear result. Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud coalition lost seats, so he will struggle to remain prime minister. The centrist Blue and White party, led by Benny Gantz, a former general, is now the largest in the Knesset but will need the support…

FROM ONE year to the next, you cannot feel the difference. As the decades stack up, though, the story becomes clear. The stripes on our cover represent the world’s average temperature in every year since the mid-19th century. Dark blue years are cooler and red ones warmer than the average in 1971-2000. The cumulative change jumps out. The world is about 1o C hotter than when this newspaper was young. To represent this span of human history as a set of simple stripes may seem reductive. These are years which saw world wars, technological innovation, trade on an unprecedented scale and a staggering creation of wealth. But those complex histories and the simplifying stripes share a common cause. The changing climate of the planet and the remarkable growth in human numbers…

TO REDUCE ITS climate risks, the world needs to curtail its production of oil. But there was nothing risk-reducing about the strike on Saudi Arabian oil facilities on September 14th. The drones and missiles that pummelled Abqaiq and Khurais cut the kingdom’s output by 5.7m barrels a day (see Middle East & Africa section). It was a bigger loss to world markets than that brought about by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991. That aggression led to a march on Baghdad by 35 countries. The strike last weekend was not an invasion; but an attack that reduces global oil supply by 6% is everybody’s business. Even if Saudi Arabia fulfils its pledge to restore output by the end of September, supplies from the world’s largest oil exporter are now…

Politics Donald Trump said he would impose fresh sanctions on Iran following an audacious missile and drone attack on two oil facilities in Saudi Arabia: the Abqaiq crude-processing plant, the biggest of its kind in the world, and the Khurais oilfield. Claims by Houthi rebels in Yemen that they staged the attack were dismissed by American and Saudi officials. The Houthis are backed by Iran in a proxy war fighting a Saudi-led coalition. Iran insists it was not responsible for the strike. Israel’s general election, the second this year, produced no clear result. Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud coalition lost seats, so he will struggle to remain prime minister. The centrist Blue and White party, led by Benny Gantz, a former general, is now the largest in the Knesset but will need…

HIS DEVOTEES call him King Bibi, but the crown is slipping. Twice this year Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has gone to the country to ask voters for a clear majority. Twice they have denied him one. With almost all the votes counted from the ballot on September 17th, Mr Netanyahu’s Likud party was two seats behind Blue and White, a centrist alliance led by Benny Gantz, a former military chief. Mr Netanyahu’s coalition of right-wing and religious parties fell six short of a majority, a larger shortfall than at the previous election in April. Mr Netanyahu (pictured, left) still hopes to cling to power as Mr Gantz (right), too, has no clear path to a governing coalition. Yet the era of King Bibi is surely coming to a close. Having…

THE OVER-REGULATION of homebuilding in and around thriving cities is one of the great economic-policy failures of recent times. In London the median full-time employee renting the median two-bedroom flat works nearly half the year just to pay the landlord. In San Francisco rent is so high that a four-person household with an income of $129,000 might still qualify for federal handouts. Housing shortages like these have helped suck wealth away from young renters, fuelling tension between the generations. Supply restrictions have a high economic cost—by one estimate, curbs in just three successful cities lower overall GDP in the United States by almost 4%. As more and more voters find themselves on the losing end of property markets, they have also generated a political backlash. In America and Europe politicians…