The Economist Latin America September 28, 2019

Politics Donald Trump asked the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to “do us a favour” and investigate the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son in Ukraine, according to the rough transcript of a phone conversation they had in July. The White House released the transcript after it emerged that Mr Trump’s attempt to lean on a foreign power to discredit the frontrunner among Democratic presidential candidates had formed the basis of a whistle-blower’s complaint to the intelligence services. After months of warning her party about the unintended consequences of trying to impeach Mr Trump, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker, announced that the House would start an impeachment inquiry. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that the world’s oceans and frozen regions have been “taking the heat” from climate change, and that the…

AMERICA ALMOST didn’t have a president. The men who arrived at the constitutional convention in 1787 brought with them a horror of monarchy. Absent a figure of George Washington’s stature, the young country might have adopted a parliamentary system of government. Yet having created the office, the founders had to devise a way to remove presidents who abuse their positions—not all people are Washingtons. They defined the mechanism: an impeachment vote in the House, followed by a trial in the Senate. The question of what exactly a president should be impeached for—“treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanours”—was deliberately left to Congress. Hence, though impeachment is a constitutional provision, it is also a political campaign. That campaign began in earnest this week when Nancy Pelosi directed her Democratic colleagues in…

Politics Donald Trump asked the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to “do us a favour” and investigate the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son in Ukraine, according to the rough transcript of a phone conversation they had in July. The White House released the transcript after it emerged that Mr Trump’s attempt to lean on a foreign power to discredit the frontrunner among Democratic presidential candidates had formed the basis of a whistle-blower’s complaint to the intelligence services. After months of warning her party about the unintended consequences of trying to impeach Mr Trump, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker, announced that the House would start an impeachment inquiry. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that the world’s oceans and frozen regions have been “taking the heat” from climate change, and…

NO BRITISH INSTITUTION is any longer immune to the Brexit virus. On September 24th the Supreme Court ruled that the queen herself had been led to act unlawfully when her prime minister, Boris Johnson, advised her to suspend Parliament in the run-up to Britain’s departure from the European Union (see Britain section). Unanimous, the judges ruled that the government had not provided “any reason—let alone a good reason” for this intrusion on “the fundamentals of democracy”. The very next day MPs returned to work triumphant. This was the worst week in Mr Johnson’s extraordinarily bad two months in office. The unelected prime minister has lost every vote he has faced, squandered his majority and fired a score of MPs from his Conservative Party. Following the court’s ruling, he was dragged back…

AMERICA ALMOST didn’t have a president. The men who arrived at the constitutional convention in 1787 brought with them a horror of monarchy. Absent a figure of George Washington’s stature, the young country might have adopted a parliamentary system of government. Yet having created the office, the founders had to devise a way to remove presidents who abuse their positions—not all people are Washingtons. They defined the mechanism: an impeachment vote in the House, followed by a trial in the Senate. The question of what exactly a president should be impeached for—“treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanours”—was deliberately left to Congress. Hence, though impeachment is a constitutional provision, it is also a political campaign. That campaign began in earnest this week when Nancy Pelosi directed her Democratic colleagues…

“NATURE ISN’T classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature you’d better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly, it’s a wonderful problem because it doesn’t look easy.” With those words, in 1981, Richard Feynman, an American physicist, introduced the idea that, by harnessing quantum mechanics, it might be possible to build a new kind of computer, capable of tackling problems that would cause a run-of-the-mill machine to choke. Feynman was right: it has not been easy. Over the past four decades quantum computers have slowly evolved from squiggles on theoreticians’ blackboards to small machines in university laboratories to research projects run by some of the world’s biggest companies. Now one of those machines, built by researchers at Google, has at last shown what all the fuss…