Newsbook

MAN is that rare animal that makes bargains, Adam Smith once observed. This is especially true during a recession. Americans redeemed 3.2 billion coupons last year, up 23% on the previous year, according to Valassis, a big coupon-services company. The distribution and use of promotional coupons has continued to climb through 2010, with the value of redemptions in the first three quarters up nearly 8% year-on-year to $2.8 billion. A big finish for the fourth quarter is a given: ‘tis the season for coupons.

A coupon renaissance is perhaps to be expected at a time when nearly eight in ten workers say they are living from one pay-cheque to the next and nearly 10% remain unemployed. But, surprisingly, it is the better-off who are making most use of them: in 2009 households with an income of at least $100,000 redeemed the most coupons, according to Nielsen, a market-research firm.

Market-watchers have concluded that there must be something to claims that the recent recession had a lasting effect on American consumers. There is said to be a new culture of frugality (some call it “austerity chic”), in which saving and bargain-hunting are in, and brand loyalty is out. According to a report by Booz & Company, a consultancy, more than three-quarters of consumers now say they read circulars and clip coupons before shopping. If this behaviour lingers as the economy continues to recover, as is expected, coupons will have consolidated their role as one of the strongest weapons in the marketing business’s armoury.

Online coupon firms like Groupon and its digital dealmaking ilk may be the media darlings of the moment, but so far the main beneficiaries of this consumer penny-pinching have been good old-fashioned paper coupons. Over 85% of them are distributed by being slipped into periodicals, especially Sunday newspapers, as loose inserts or booklets.

This has been a rare bit of good news for the newspaper business, which is doing its best to hang on to such a lucrative sideline. The Newspaper National Network (NNN), a consortium of 25 newspaper companies, recently published a study that finds that clip-out coupons printed on newspapers’ own pages (as opposed to loose ones that fall out when you turn the page) are the most effective at getting users to switch brands, trade up or try something new. “A lot of marketers are under-using the medium,” says Jason Klein, the head of the NNN.

Perhaps so. But the future of coupons is clearly digital. Though internet coupons still make up less than 2% of the market, they accounted for around 12% of redemptions in 2010, according to Booz & Company. Online aggregators of coupons are proliferating, and print-coupon providers have set up internet outlets. Digital users are more likely to be male, affluent and open to new products. Deals delivered either by smart-phone or on-site kiosks are especially effective: marketing that reaches a shopper just as he is reaching for his wallet is the most influential of all. Digital coupons make it easier to track spending patterns, especially when stores use an increasingly popular technique of letting shoppers download them on to their loyalty cards.

Newspapers will no doubt be nervous about seeing another vital source of commercial revenue disappearing online, as their classified ads did. But for coupon junkies, it is good news: the quantity and variety of promotional offers looks set to keep on growing.

Read on: Groupon and other digital start-ups are looking a bit overvalued

IRVING PICARD, the court-appointed trustee overseeing the Madoff estate’s bankruptcy (pictured), has earned his year-end break. December 11th, the second anniversary of Bernie Madoff’s arrest for perpetrating the largest financial fraud in history, was also the deadline for lawsuits to help recoup investors’ losses. Mr Picard has been furiously busy, firing off dozens of lawsuits seeking a total of around $50 billion for investors who lost money in Mr Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

Mr Picard’s deep-pocketed targets include some of Wall Street’s top brass, among them JPMorgan Chase, UBS, HSBC, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch (now part of Bank of America). The lawsuits charge them with either failing to spot the fraud or, in some cases, knowingly facilitating it. One $9 billion lawsuit asserts that HSBC twice hired KPMG, an accounting firm, to probe Mr Madoff’s firm, but that the bank failed to act when concerns were raised. Another suit takes aim at Medici Bank, an Austrian bank run by Sonja Kohn, whom Mr Picard describes as Mr Madoff’s “criminal soul mate”. The banks and Ms Kohn deny any wrongdoing but investors’ losses could still fall substantially if banks choose to settle. Mr Picard has already recovered around $2.5 billion, including some $470m from Union Bancaire Privée, a Swiss bank which funnelled clients’ money in Mr Madoff’s direction.

Investigators are still trying to work out who else at Mr Madoff’s firm may have had a hand in the fraud. Mr Madoff, who was sentenced in 2009 to 150 years in prison, has adamantly maintained he acted alone. That has not spared others from suspicion. On December 11th one of his two sons, Mark, committed suicide after two years of investigations into his knowledge of the fraud (which he denied) and more of Mr Picard’s lawsuits, the latest of which targeted his children.

Even as they wait to recover their money, the victims also run the risk of settling too soon. Some distressed-debt firms are offering to buy claims from them at a reduced rate. Cash-strapped investors may find this offer appealing, but could regret it if Mr Picard recovers lots of assets later. Nobody wants to be swindled twice.

FOR a moment, they almost had us fooled. It looked very much like a press release from Koch Industries, announcing that the big American conglomerate would stop funding various lobby groups that question the scientific consensus on global warming or oppose laws to curb emissions. Earlier this year Greenpeace issued a report detailing Koch’s aid to such groups, calling it “a financial kingpin of climate-science denial”. The New Yorker followed up with a profile of the company and its owners, the brothers David and Charles Koch, detailing their generous, if discreet, support for these and other right-wing courses. If all this adverse publicity had indeed induced a bout of “climate conscience” in the brothers, it would be quite some story.

But it was a spoof. A well-executed one, mind. The release appeared on Friday on www.koch-inc.com, which one might easily have assumed to be the American conglomerate’s official website. Someone had gone to the trouble of registering and creating this site in the hope that it would convince journalists “checking” the story that it was authentic. By Monday it seemed to have been taken down or blocked, and Google was redirecting searchers to the company’s real homepage.

As far as we know, no news organisation fell for the hoax: the New York Times’s environment blog and a few other websites ran stories noting it as a spoof. But the pranksters could all too easily have scored a hit, as BBC Radio demonstrated last week. It broadcast an interview with a construction worker posing as Mike Crockart, a junior member of Britain’s coalition government, saying he was preparing to resign over the increase in university fees. (In an example of life imitating art, three days later the real Mr Crockart did resign over this issue.)

As the NYT’s blogger notes, the Koch spoof bore the hallmarks of the Yes Men, a group of pranksters whose stated aim is “identity correction”—shaming public figures and corporations by putting out fake press releases in which they own up to their alleged misdeeds and promise to change. Back in 2004 a member of the group was interviewed by BBC World Television, posing as a spokesman for Dow Chemical and promising $12 billion in compensation to the victims of the Bhopal disaster. Several other news organisations wrote up the interview, believing it to be real. The group has set up a hoaxers’ training college, called Yes Lab, to “help progressive groups carry out Yes-Men-style projects on their own”, so it is possible that the Koch Industries spoof was the handiwork of one of their pupils. Other recent targets of the Yes Men’s brand of sarcasm include Apple and Chevron.

It's not easy to be spoof-proof
Although these big companies no doubt have various legal means to curb the activities of impostors once they have revealed themselves, it is difficult and expensive for them to do much to prevent hoaxes in the first place. Buying up all the plausible alternative addresses for your company’s official website would be expensive. A quick check on Network Solutions revealed that www.kochindustries.info, www.kochindustry.net, www.koch-inc.biz and all sorts of other variations are still available to be bought. As we recently reported in a piece about internet governance, the number of website suffixes, and therefore the number of permutations that companies would need to register to defend their brands online, has been multiplying.

And that’s before we get on to social media. BPGlobalPR, a bogus Twitter feed that mocks BP’s public-relations response to its Gulf of Mexico spill, has gained over 180,000 followers, about ten times as many as the company’s real Twitter account for America. Surely the real Steve Jobs of Apple cannot be behind this Twitter account (despite its massive 333,000 followers) or this Facebook page. The possibilities for spoofing seem endless.

So far most online corporate hoaxers seem relatively harmless. They are doing nothing worse than satirising companies or just having a bit of fun. But it is not hard to imagine more malign motives: creating a false rumour to profit from manipulating a firm’s share price, for example. So, added to the emerging risk of having their corporate secrets WikiLeaked (or indeed having their websites attacked by hackers in retaliation for cutting their links with WikiLeaks), firms must also now be constantly on the lookout for online impostors. Even if the pranksters’ motives are not malign, they can do companies and their brands a great deal of damage, in no time at all. Now that we’re on internet time, a hoax can travel around the world before the truth has got its boots on. And there’s no guarantee that all those who read or heard about a fake announcement will get to hear that it was in fact a hoax.

Read on: Companies must adapt to a WikiLeaks world where no secret is safe

Our weekly round-up of things to watch out for in the next seven days

Monday 13th

The United States and China begin their annual talks on trade and economics in Washington.

Tuesday 14th

Silvio Bersulsconi faces two awkward no-confidence votes in Italy’s lower house.

Wednesday 15th

Unions in Europe have pencilled in a day of strikes against austerity plans.

Thursday 16th

America's Commodity Futures Trading Commission unveils its plan to limit speculative positions held by commodities traders.

Friday 17th

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao begins a state visit to visit Pakistan.

Sunday 19th

Belarus holds a presidential election. Hats will be eaten if Alexander Lukashenko, the incumbent since 1994, is not re-elected.

Correspondent's diary, day two: a deal that makes slowing deforestation easier is a prize worth fighting for at Cancún

AS THE last day of the Cancún climate talks dawns, there is some cautious hope in the air. With a much better atmosphere than Copenhagen, and some hard but productive negotiating sessions, there’s a sense that, while hurdles remain, there is a real chance of leaving with a result. And the result most on people’s minds, from the president of Mexico on down, is a deal on forests.

Within the negotiations the possibility of creating a new “Climate fund” is also seen as both a fairly big step forward and one that might actually be achieved. And different nations have all sorts of different specific requirements, the balancing of which will doubtless take the meeting well past its official closing time of six o’clock this evening. But as far as the world outside is concerned a deal to reduce deforestation and associated ills, known as REDD+, stands the best chance of generating headlines and happiness, as long as the proceedings do not break down decisively over some other issue. “What would stop it?” asks Brazil’s environment minister Izabella Teixeira rhetorically. “I hope, nothing.”

A REDD deal would be a good thing both for the world and the UN climate process, which sorely needs an achievement. Deforestation, which continues at the rate of a football field a second, according to almost everyone who speaks on the subject, is a huge source of greenhouse gases. Plausible reductions in emissions from avoiding deforestation are far larger than the sort of reductions which can easily be made by slowing the industrial production of carbon dioxide in the short run. And reducing deforestation removes a threat to the livelihoods and cultures of indigenous people, as well as preserving a lot of doubtless delightful wildlife. A deal which helped secure and accelerate recent advances on the issue would be worth some trumpeting.

But deals are only the beginning. Norway, which thanks to its moral seriousness, dedicated diplomacy and stacks of petrokroner has been playing something of a blinder on forest conservation in recent years, has entered a number of bilateral agreements whereby it pays for forest conservation in a REDD-like manner. One of the beneficiaries of this spending is Guyana, which has committed to forgo a certain amount of deforestation. But as Bharrat Jagdeo, Guyana’s president, complained quite heatedly when sharing a stage with Norway’s prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, at a side event at Cancun, despite having signed up for the first tranche of the forest-abnegation a year ago, Guyana still hasn’t seen any of the promised money.

The complaint wasn’t aimed at Mr Stoltenberg, with whom, Mr Jagdeo is keen to stress, he enjoys a very good relationship. Norway paid the money in question to the World Bank a year ago for onwards transmission. His irritation wasn’t even really aimed, Mr Jagdeo later said, at Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, who was sitting in the front row of the audience, though it seems that much of the delay he objects to is due to passing the money through the careful checks and oversights of the World Bank system. The president wanted to communicate his frustration to the audience in general, which contained a lot of business people, politicians, policy makers and non-government types.

What Mr Jagdeo wanted to stress was that for a recipient country REDD is not a simple matter of getting some cash and some invitations to speak to the great and the good. It involves spending political capital to get all sorts of interest groups on board. And anything that goes wrong and diminishes the charms of the project—such as the money to buy a host of promised solar panels for people's roofs, which he says will be one of Guyana's first investments—hurts the process.

Mr Stoltenberg, like many in the north, has developed a great devotion to “results-based” development assistance, in which the donors see what they are getting. Mr Jagdeo wants some results based responses from the Bank. Both politicians know results are needed to keep the good work up, though they themselves may see little direct reward from their success: Mr Stoltenberg said that Norway’s extremely high levels of development assistance (more than 1% of GDP) are not domestically popular, and that both main opposition parties would cut them; Mr Jagdeo, term limited, is meant to have left the presidency by this time next year.

Their message was that even when it seems simple, with all the money coming from a willing donor, halting deforestation is still a taxing political process. With its complex blend of emissions targets, counterfactual scenarios against which to measure them, attention to the livelihoods of those affected, conflation with other environmental goals, need for international financial flows and negotiated requirements for the monitoring and verification of the good that is done, the REDD process is, in a way, a microcosm of all the broader problems facing climate diplomacy.

Getting a REDD deal in Cancun should help the fight against deforestation in many places, as long as the deal is sensibly and sensitively fleshed out over the coming months and years. Some areas are as yet vague, and others, including perhaps the details of how things should be financed, may be vagued up yet further in order to get through the conference’s final plenary session. This is probably to the good; easier to get the details right, including important ones on the vexed question of how to stop demand for wood from simply being displaced from protected  places to unprotected ones, away from the pressure of deadlined negotiations.

But though such a deal would be good, it would be a recipe for action, not action itself. And everything will grind to a halt pretty quickly if the subsequent action doesn’t yield real results. For many observers of climate negotiation, political will is needed at the beginning of the process, invoked simplistically as something which might take negotiations from where they are to where people want them to be. Mr Jagdeo sees things differently. For him political will comes before negotiations. And it fades if not fed with results.

Read on: Day one of the diary

The climate talks in Cancún are all about not repeating the shortcomings of the Copenhagen round of talks. This may be their downfall

ON DECEMBER 7th the high-level section of the UN climate talks in Cancún begins. Negotiators will make way for ministers, some of whom will in time make way for heads of government (more than 30 are expected, according to the UN) later in the week. They will take the texts that the negotiators have prepared for them and decide which of the various options in those texts they can endorse, which reject, which compromise over. 

The watchword for the conference is balance: nothing flashy, but at least a modicum of progress on every issue. While not unfractious, the first week’s sessions provided progress, or at least movement, on many of the themes under discussion: finance, forestry, technology, adaptation and so on. In some of these areas a genuine agreement seems within the conference’s grasp. 

It is all much less dramatic, less heated and less pressured than the ill-tempered snowy confusion of Copenhagen. Which is exactly what the Mexicans, as hosts of the conference, have been aiming for and what most of the assembled countries want. The idea is to show that progress within the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is still possible. 

The problem is that it may not be. Copenhagen, judged a failure in many ways, was a success in its fudging of a particularly thorny issue: the future of the Kyoto protocol, which commits most developed countries to specific reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions.

Months before the Copenhagen talks began in 2009 it was clear that the goal the UNFCCC had taken on, that of a legally binding agreement that would limit emissions enough to bring global warming to a halt, was not going to be met. The Copenhagen accord, a political agreement drafted by a subset of the countries present, was the best that could be achieved.

Despite its difficult birth, in subsequent months a large number of countries associated themselves with the accord directly, pledging specific actions on the climate in the process. Some of the WikiLeaks cables seem to show that a certain amount of diplomatic and financial pressure was applied to those seen as laggardly in the matter, which somewhat belies the idea that America doesn’t care about climate change (though its critics don’t quite see it like that).

For many nations, including America and those of the EU, a major objective of the Cancún meeting is to get those pledges recognised within the UNFCCC process in some way. This matters to developed countries because no UNFCCC negotiations have yet led to any commitments on emissions from developing countries. The pledges, though, come from rich and poor alike. Getting such pledges recognised at all is seen as a way of doing something to change the UNFCCC’s us-and-them, rich-and-poor dynamics. 

The Copenhagen accord covered a lot of the same issues facing climate negotiators in Cancún. But because it was outside the UNFCCC process it didn’t have to face Kyoto head on. The Kyoto protocol only limits the emissions of some developed countries, covering some 25% of the world’s total emissions. It is thus not a global solution, nor can it become one; it exempts developing countries from limits, and America never ratified it and never will. And its scope is limited in time as well: the limits it imposes on emissions elapse at the end of 2012, unless new limits for a second “commitment period” are agreed before that.

For richer, for poorer

Japan was unhappy with Kyoto well before Copenhagen. Being bound by its limits when the world’s largest emitters, China and America, were not seemed both damaging and futile. This attitude was well known; but in its first statement at the Cancun meeting Japan reiterated its long held position in a particularly forthright way. In particular, made it clear that as far as it was concerned there would be no second commitment period at all, and that any future limits should apply to all major emitters—meaning at least some of the so called BASIC group, Brazil, India, China and South Africa. Canada and Russia see things in much the same way. Given this stance, and the fact that UN negotiations require consensus to move forward, there seems no way that a second commitment period could ever come into force. 

So what does the BASIC group say? At a press conference on Monday its representatives came together to reassert their settled view that the need for a second commitment period topped their three-point list of non-negotiable requirements. The developing world values Kyoto very highly, because it is the only instrument around that imposes genuine requirements on the developed countries. The BASIC countries, set apart from much of the developing world by their size, growth rates and large emissions, stand “shoulder to shoulder” with the rest of the South on this. 

There are other potentially irresolvable arguments: America wants its pledges to be written down in the same language as those made by China, while China wants America to make commitments that are more binding than its own. But most of these arguments could be kicked down the road a bit. An agreement on making commitments binding in the future, in ways as yet to be fully resolved, might serve as offering a sufficient sense of progress. But the battle lines on Kyoto seem sufficiently stark to make such an approach very hard on this particular disagreement.

The Mexican foreign minister, Patricia Espinosa, who is president of the conference, has asked Brazil’s environment minister, Izabella Teixeira, and Britain’s secretary of state for energy and climate change, Chris Huhne, to talk to the various major players and look for a solution. They will have their work cut out for them. Disagreements about Kyoto are, after all, one of the main reasons that Copenhagen was forced down the out-of-the-conference-chamber path it was. But this time there is no cadre of world leaders here desperate to find a face saving way of coming to a conclusion regardless.

Continue reading: The hottest years on record

ALL that glisters is not gold, as the old saying rightly affirms—because at the moment, copper is shining too. Last week the price of gold surged past $1,400 an ounce, but for pure performance copper is the clear recent winner. Since the middle of the year the price of gold has risen by a decent 13%; copper, on the other hand, has soared by 35%. Stocks of copper at the London Metal Exchange (LME) are down to 8 days of global consumption; add in holdings at Shanghai’s exchange and producer stocks and it creeps up to close to a fortnight.

On December 3rd rumours circulated that JPMorgan bought up warrants for more than 50% of the LME’s copper stocks, probably in readiness to launch a physically backed exchange-traded fund (ETF), a popular investment vehicle for gold that is now set to spread to a wide variety of base metals. The race to launch copper ETFs is swiftest because it is the metal in shortest supply. China’s mammoth demand for copper—it sucks up 40% of world supplies—has not been matched by fresh supplies. New copper deposits are thin on the ground. As older mines get deeper and the choicest parts of deposits become exhausted, ore grades have declined. In all, there has been very little net growth in supplies for several years.

Plumbers are steadily switching from copper pipes to plastic ones; and the Chinese have found a way of substituting the metal with cheaper aluminium in air-conditioning units. Despite this, demand for other uses is still set to outstrip supply, and prices to rise, in the next couple of years or so. This makes copper alluring to the investor—hence the slew of ETFs backed by physical copper that are set to be launched. BlackRock, Deutsche Bank and ETF Securities hope to join JPMorgan in offering investors exposure to physical copper. This too is sure to push prices higher as the funds take copper off the market at a time of tight supply. If regulators can be persuaded to set aside their objections and allow these ETFs to trade, copper, currently trading at over $8,750 a tonne could be pushed up beyond $10,000 according to RBS, a bank.

Other are not so sure. Investors, who can already invest in copper through the futures market, may not want the reassurance of holding physical supplies. Unlike gold it is far too bulky to be of use for slipping a couple of bars into a case and making a dash for the border. Its bulkiness means it costs more to store. But even if investors aren’t keen on copper ETFs the laws of supply and demand are set to push prices higher anyway. For now, that is. Those same laws have started to prompt investment in developing new copper mines and expanding existing ones. From 2012, as this extra supply comes on to the market, the metal may begin to lose its lustre.

Read on: Dr Evil, or drivel? The charge-sheet against commodity speculators is flimsy

A correspondent reports from the climate change talks, day one

THIS column, emblematically, comes to you from a bus. In the annals of UN climate diplomacy, the Cancún meeting—the 16th conference of the parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is also the 6th meeting of the parties to the Kyoto protocol—will be remembered, more succinctly, as the conference of the buses. To all but a few, they are the inescapable essence of the Cancún experience.

This particular bus is headed from the Moon Palace to the Cancún Messe, a journey of about 20 minutes. The Moon Palace, a vast resort on the Gulf coast some way to the south of both Cancún proper and its separate hotel zone, is hosting the negotiations. It is large enough that it itself requires internal shuttle buses to connect its various parts, such as the halls where negotiations are taking place with those in which the journalists would be sequestered. Would be, because journalists want to be where the action is. The isolated press centre is largely deserted; the few in the press room are as likely as not filing pieces about how empty it is, or indeed interviewing each other on the subject. 

The Moon Palace also contains the offices for the delegations to the conference, and many of the delegates themselves in some 2000 suites. It has a multiplicity of swimming pools and other attractions, lawns, palms and lazy iguanas. It probably looks a lot less like a car park with set dressing by someone who couldn’t get a job at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas when these various attractions are being enjoyed by a throng of happy honeymooners, as they are intended to be. At the moment they are mostly empty. Whether the same is true of the jacuzzis provided in every suite, who can say. Those in suites your correspondent has visited on business are being treated as embarrassments, but the press is not always present. (Full disclosure: some journalists, including this one, have simply through the nature of the accommodation Cancún has to offer been forced to accept jacuzzis of our own.)

The Messe, at which this bus is now arriving, is more honestly industrial. Sitting in the middle of nowhere on a busy highway, it consists of two large warehouse/sheds functioning as an exhibition centre. In them you will find stands from a bewildering number of international bodies, NGOs, trade associations and so on who think they have something to offer, and meeting rooms for side events, twenty or so of them a day. 

The Messe is also the central bus station. The only way into the Moon Palace, unless you are the most VI of VIPs, is on a bus that leaves from within the security cordon at the Messe; the only way out is on a bus back to the Messe. So everyone has to pass back and forth through the Messe’s cavernous halls. Buses by the dozen pull in and out in a not terribly steady stream connecting the Messe to the hotels, both those on the 20km long spit of sand that embraces Cancún’s lagoon and those on the mainland, some of which lie in the opposite direction. They can take over an hour to bring delegates in in the morning, depending on the particular hotel and the traffic, and rarely take much less than half an hour. The daily Cancún commute, hotel to Moon Palace and back, is thus at a minimum two hours, and could well be longer. If you have it in mind to visit the Moon Palace, then go to one of the hotels—in which yet more side events are taking place—and then get back to the negotiations you will be bus-bound half the day. 

The absurd environmental wastefulness of all this has not gone unremarked. But it is accepted, more or less, as an unavoidable side effect of the choice of venue. The Moon Palace is huge and easily secured, but not so huge that it can take the whole circus and all its side shows. Once it became the venue, the decentralised nature of the rest of the meeting followed more or less logically. And those who follow, let alone partake in, these negotiations, endlessly locked in an attempt to produce climate agreements which command assent, or at least acquiescence, from every single country here, are used to dealing with absurdities which follow more or less logically. Nor is the idea of an endless journey back and forth between different positions, none of which engender great enthusiasm, entirely alien.  

And the buses (having passed through the Messe your correspondent is now headed hotelwards) may prove themselves to be the key networking sites for the convention. It’s not that there is enforced propinquity. It is very rare that a bus doesn’t have free double seats to spare for those who don’t want company; indeed it’s not uncommon for buses to have a single passenger. But every day one journey or another will bring a chance encounter with some friend or acquaintance willing to share news, gossip or opinions, or just to swap anecdotage about endless bus journeys. One can almost imagine negotiating breakthroughs based on such moments of in-transitory fellow feeling. 

Except that the negotiators see little of the buses, confined as they are, for most of the time, to the compound of the Moon Palace. The jacuzzis, one assumes, are less fruitful sites for random meetings, if only because there are just too many of them.

And so to disembark.

THE northernmost province of Yemen, Sa’ada, has been at the centre of the government’s war with Shia Houthi rebels for six years. Thousands of people have died, but the violence–and the Yemeni government–prevents journalists from getting there to cover the conflict. Instead I am on my way to Haradh, a sweaty town in the neighbouring Hajjah province that is home to 120,000 internally displaced people who have fled airstrikes and intermittent skirmishes.

After landing in the port city of Hodeidah, we plan to cruise up the coast to Haradh, but the light is fading over the Red Sea and bandits make driving at night perilous. Yemeni men wearing the long sarong-like maoiz look out towards Djibouti from the rocks wondering, they say, if life is better across the water. Any investment left Hodeidah when North and South Yemen unified in 1990 and the government moved most business to the port of Aden. The setting sun casts a thick orange haze over the crumbling shipyard as children climb on collapsed concrete beach shelters built for Hodeidah’s long-gone tourists.

Yemenis fleeing the war are not the only ones who want to get to Haradh. On the road the next day, we pass Ethiopians trudging north, most unburdened by any belongings. They have come across the Red Sea’s Bab al-Mandeb (Gate of Tears), on wooden boats packed to sinking point, thrown overboard by their traffickers to swim to the Yemeni shore. From there the journey to Haradh can take over a week, before these economic migrants and refugees try to cross the Saudi border five miles north. On the way, some will die on the road of exposure, our driver says.

Shabby hotels and loitering migrants line the single road that cuts Haradh in half. No one stays here long. Drugs, booze and people are smuggled into Saudi Arabia. Migrants from Africa pay $300 to get across the border illegally. The town’s police chief tells me the traffickers kidnap the women on arrival and beat them until their male relatives pay the smugglers’ fee. In the dirty streets of Haradh, there are no African women to be seen.

In the refugee camps outside the town, children meander through long, orderly rows of tents. Deep in the city of canvas homes, I find a man looking battered and depressed. Muhammad Abdullah left for the camps 14 months ago after the Houthis used his house as a temporary barracks. A tall man, withered by stress, he says the Houthis used his family as human shields.

It didn’t work. Tanks shelled the house and jets struck from the air. “I’m a farmer. How can I farm when there are unexploded bombs on my land?” he said in his spacious, but empty, tent. After a night of heavy fighting, the old man said he woke up to find a 6-foot dud missile had pierced through the water tank next to his house. “Boom!” Muhammad shouts suddenly, laughing hysterically at our shock before the smile drifts off his face and his gaze turns to his youngest son and then to the floor. 

A sand storm brews as we leave. The arid desert lowlands and the camps are unfamiliar to these people. Their homes stand on the green, fertile mountains of Sa’ada but with the fighting getting worse, it seems unlikely they will be able to return there any time soon.

NEW WORLD RESOURCES (NWR) has ambitions to be a “regional consolidator” in the minerals business in central Europe. But on November 29th its bid to take over LW Bogdanka, a Polish coal mining company, was rebuffed by the target’s shareholders. NWR said that it would not raise its bid above 100.75 zlotys ($3.08) a share, insisting that it has its eye on other mining targets in Poland. But the market had seemed to expect otherwise, keeping Bogdanka’s shares close to the offer price.

NWR has been playing a long game. The company, with Czech origins, is registered in Amsterdam and listed on the stock exchanges of London, Prague and Warsaw. It owns coal mines in the Czech Republic and Poland, and wants to expand into Belarus and Ukraine. LW Bogdanka, which operates a thermal-coal mine in eastern Poland, would have complemented NWR’s other strength, which is mainly in industrial coking coal.

But Bogdanka’s management insists it has its own plans to expand in the region. It was privatised in 2009 through an initial public offering on the Warsaw exchange. Around 40% of its shares are held by four Polish pension funds. Managers at two of the funds said publicly that they would not support NWR’s €857m ($1,113m) bid because it undervalued the company.

Regional consolidation will certainly come, but NWR may not be the best vehicle. Though it is a listed company it is dominated by a controlling 63% shareholder, BXR Mining, which in turn is controlled by RPG Partners, a Cyprus-based company. Behind that company is Zdenek Bakala, a Czech billionaire, listed by Forbes magazine as the world’s 828th richest man.

Mr Bakala has interests that stretch from media to property, transport and natural resources. He began his career in the Prague office of Credit Suisse First Boston, an investment bank, then founded Patria, a Czech finance boutique which prospered during the privatisations of the 1990s. Mr Bakala sold Patria in 2000 and diversified into media and mining. He is well-connected and a former business associate of Karel Schwarzenberg, the foreign minister. He recently bought a building in Prague to house the library of Vaclav Havel, the first democratically elected president of the former Czechoslovakia.

That record may impress Polish investors. But they are probably more interested in how their shares perform. Bogdanka’s profit margins have ranged between 28% and 34% over the past five years, compared with NWR’s more volatile 16% to 38%. Moreover, if they swapped their shares for those in NWR they might see trading migrate from Warsaw to London and Prague, where most of the trading in NWR shares is done. That will be even more likely if NWR reincorporates in London as planned, so that it qualifies for the FTSE indices.

What is NWR’s next move in Poland? Either it makes a higher bid for Bogdanka, or it waits until another candidate, JSW, which operates mines near the Czech border, undergoes a mooted privatisation some time next year. It will be disappointed by the failure of this bid, but not deterred.

BACK in 2006, Arab jokesters found an easy target when they learned that Egypt was sending officials to join international monitors of that year’s Palestinian elections. So skilled were Egyptians at rigging votes, they warned, that Palestinians risked waking up to find they had elected Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, as their own.

The first round of voting in Egypt’s parliamentary elections, on November 28th, suggested that this reputation for electoral sleight-of-hand remains well deserved. The poll appears to have produced a universally predicted resounding victory for the National Democratic Party (NDP), which has ruled Egypt since its creation in 1978 by Mr Mubarak’s predecessor, Anwar Sadat, as a vehicle for state patronage and control. Lacking, however, was any sort of finesse in the rigging of the vote. 

Observers catalogued misdemeanors ranging from removing the names of opposition candidates from ballots, to blocking their representatives from monitoring the polls, to shutting polling stations in the face of would-be-voters, to simple stuffing of ballot boxes. Many of these infractions were captured on film, and spread in real time on the internet. Not surprisingly, civil rights groups reckon that only 10-20% of voting-age Egyptians bothered to turn out to vote.

Still, the government was undeterred by images of such things as thugs intimidating voters with clubs and machetes, and election officials patiently filling in piles of blank ballots. Its “independent” electoral commission pronounced the vote clean, with partial results indicating an embarrassingly large increase in the NDP’s majority. In the outgoing parliament, the main opposition force, the Muslim Brotherhood, held nearly a fifth of the parliament’s 454 seats, and other opposition parties a handful more. Although the results in many districts remain to be determined in run-off voting next week, fewer than a dozen of the Brotherhood’s candidates look likely to claim seats in the incoming legislature.

To some, this might look like overkill. After all, the Brotherhood, which is technically outlawed but runs candidates as independents, only fielded some 130 of them. In fact, all the opposition parties together, including Islamists, liberals, leftists and nationalists, could not muster enough candidates to challenge all of this year’s 508 contested seats (the parliament has been expanded by the addition of 64 seats reserved for women; a further ten are appointed by the president). By contrast, the NDP ran more than 800 candidates, reflecting the party leadership’s inability to instill discipline among too many aspiring parliamentarians within its ranks. In some districts, three or more NDP candidates fought against each other, causing some of the ugliest incidents of election-day violence.

Yet it may not be so odd that Mr Mubarak’s government seems willing to risk damage to its legitimacy, as well as to its international reputation, from staging an election so clearly flawed even by Egypt’s own dismal standards. Egypt’s rulers believe the country is at a crucial juncture. Mr Mubarak, now 82, must soon decide whether to run for a sixth six-year presidential term next September, or cede power to a new pharaoh. For the smoothest possible transition, he needs the tamest possible parliament. 

WITH parliamentary elections due on Sunday November 28th, Egypt's campaign season is coming to a close. It has been marked by accusations of foul play. As the country gets ready to vote, the Egyptian press has been discussing some of the latest developments: American calls for international monitoring; the participation of Egypt's Coptic Christians; the newly instituted women’s quota in parliament; and the continued arrests of Muslim Brotherhood supporters.

The campaign trail has been tough for Muslim Brotherhood candidates. They must run as independents because the group is officially banned as a political party. Thirteen hundred supporters, including some candidates, are said to have been arrested, prompting some within the group to call for a boycott.

After violent clashes erupted in Alexandria earlier this month between police and Brotherhood supporters, Wael Qandeel, managing editor of Al-Shorouk, an independent daily newspaper, called for action to be taken to avoid further disruption:

The situation is perilous...As a prominent adviser told me yesterday, the current situation needs Hosni Mubarak himself to intervene to restore the judicial rulings and the Supreme Electoral Commission's resolutions, before we lose control and the whole country descends to violence and chaos.

Nasser Iraq attributes the latest crackdown to presidential ambitions, in an independent weekly, Al-Youm al-Sabaa: 

What's behind all this tyranny and fraud in the People's Assembly elections, this time carried out in such a crude manner? It's because this assembly will decide the outcome of the presidential elections next year. The regime will name one of two candidates, it will either be Mr Mubarak or his son, Gamal Mubarak. The regime cannot afford to have any serious opposition within the upcoming parliament which could hinder the process of extending Hosni Mubarak's presidency or the inheritance of power.

The government has controversially refused American calls for international monitoring of the elections on the grounds that it would compromise Egyptian sovereignty, a claim hotly debated by columnists.

Writing in Rose Al-Yusuf, a pro-governmental magazine, Mahmoud Al-Tahamy argues that:

...international monitoring of Egyptian elections...would lead to the presence of a non-Egyptian authority interfering in matters of sovereignty. This is usually only the case for countries with sovereignty issues that are in the process of attaining independence, for example.

In Al-Youm Al-Sabaa Mahmoud Al-Hadari makes the case there should be monitors but they should be local, not international, ones:  

I believe that we already have, within our country, the required experience to be able to do objective and impartial monitoring.

Amr al-Shobaki accuses the government of being selective in its stands for sovereignty in the popular independent Al-Masry Al-Youm:

Oddly enough, the same officials who rise in defense of Egypt’s sovereignty when it comes to human-rights abuses had nothing to say when Israeli interrogators questioned a Palestinian reporter, Sabreen Diab, at Cairo Airport, a clear violation of Egypt’s national integrity.

Also in Al-Masry Al-Youm, Wael Nawara opposes monitoring on the grounds that it could make the elections look falsely legitimate:

At this point, I am personally against the international monitoring of these elections because it would give a false sense of legitimacy and seriousness to an absurd parody of elections. In fact, I would ask the president to cancel the elections all together, please, and suspend the parliament's work for as long as he, or the people, deems necessary until we are ready to start a true political process based on pluralism and fair competition, so we don't waste the country's resources on these theatrics, and so that we keep calling a spade a spade.

With Christian leaders praising a report by America's state department condemning religious discrimination in Egypt and rare Christian protests erupting over stymied church building efforts, Christian support for the regime is also in question.

Michael Mounir, an expatriate Copt leader, launched a campaign against Mr Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP), arguing that Copts should not vote for the NDP:

Never in the history of politics has a party exploited a single segment of society in the way that the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) has done with Copts of Egypt, with little returns. The NDP's manipulation and blackmail of the Copts manifests itself in various ways and election season is the time when the NDP most blatantly sucks the blood of Copts, and then leaves them on the street to bleed with nothing gained. When the elections were monitored by judges, Coptic votes were valuable and the party made all kinds of promises to the Church and the people, especially in the last presidential elections. After the NDP won, with Copts rallying behind the party, it offered them nothing in return.

Meanwhile Karima Kamal, a frequent commenter on Coptic affairs, writes in Al-Masry Al-Youm that the Copts’ real mistake is voting as a block:

Religious Copts now represent the voice of the Copts. Their secular voice has disappeared and their political affiliation has been unified and responsibility for it given to the church. As a result the Copts' voices are now dependent on the deal between the political regime and the party on one side, and the church on the other.

This year’s elections are the first since a controversial quota of parliamentary seats for women—ensuring that at least 64 seats go to them in the upcoming parliament—was passed in 2009. Tahani El-Gebaly, Egypt’s first female judge, is quoted expressing scepticism about the value of the quota in al-Shorouk:

The quota could get us 64 women in the People's Assembly, but they could very well be worthless; those women might just keep silent or join the applauding masses […] How can women play any role in a parliament that has no vision when it comes to critical issues like democracy or social matters that affect both men and women?

Despite all the discussion about the election, apathy and cynicism abound. Imad Eddin Hussein, in a column urging voters to participate in the political process, writes:

Ask any citizen these days: Will you go to the electoral commission and vote next Sunday? Most will answer that they don't have voting cards, others will give you the typical Egyptian answer: "As if my vote is going to change things when they are already rigged?”

To read full translations and for further commentary, please go to meedan.net