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A potent mix of heat, haze, alcohol and corruption

RUSSIA’S ability to deal with its legendarily severe winters is a source of national pride. But now Russia’s survival skills have been tested by the hottest summer since records began, 130 years ago. In the country’s central region temperatures have not dropped below 30°C since mid-June; in recent days the mercury has risen as high as 37°C.

A haze from forest and peat-bog fires around Moscow has enveloped the city, turning the multicoloured domes of St Basil’s Cathedral into ghostly apparitions. Moscow’s air is polluted at the best of times, but this smog, heavy with carbon monoxide, makes breathing difficult. Outside the city a swathe of farmland the size of Portugal has been destroyed. ...

Nationalists to the left of him, markets to the right, Spain’s prime minister is in a tricky spot

HE WAS once considered a political magician, with a sleight of hand that distracted from his country’s problems. But now the circus skill needed by Spain’s Socialist prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, is that of a tightrope walker.

Summer holidays, Spain’s World Cup victory and positive-ish bank stress-test results have granted a lull in the storm that engulfed the country when bond markets turned their gaze from Greece to Iberia. But now Mr Zapatero must pull off a delicate balancing act if he is to stay in power until his second term formally ends in 2012. For the economy to survive, he must please the investors that lend Spain money. And for the government to survive, he must satisfy the Catalan and Basque nationalists who prop up his minority administration. ...

First the burqa, now the bullfight. What will Catalonia outlaw next?

ON JULY 28th Catalonia’s regional parliament outlawed bullfighting. It is a bit like a German state banning wurst or a French region condemning those pesky berets.

As is the way in fiercely independent Catalonia, the debate over bullfighting became caught up in regional politics. Many Catalans are concerned less about animal welfare than they are about rejecting the bull as a symbol of Spain and distancing Catalonia from Spaniards’ habit of referring to the corrida as the “national fiesta”. ...

The fallout from a surprisingly pro-Kosovo legal decision

HOW wrong can you be? Almost everyone had expected the International Court of Justice to give an ambiguous opinion on the legality of Kosovo’s declaration of independence. When, on July 22nd, a summary of the opinion was read, most strained to understand the legal jargon. But one line was clear. The declaration did not, said ten of the 14 judges, violate international law.

Serbs, Albanians and just about everyone else were stunned. In October 2008 Serbia had, via the UN General Assembly, asked the ICJ to give its opinion on the independence declaration of eight months earlier, and was confident of a favourable answer. After all, Kosovo was a former Serbian province (although it had been under UN rule since the end of the war in 1999). In the wake of the opinion the Serbs complained that the ICJ did not examine Kosovo’s right to secede. This is because the Serbs did not ask it to; their question was simply whether the declaration was legal. ...

The allies reach out to the Kremlin, and start to think about the unthinkable

IN THE heart of NATO’s military headquarters, SHAPE, near the Belgian city of Mons, an unspoken revolution is taking place: planners are thinking about how to defend eastern European members from Russian attack. For years after the cold war, the orthodoxy was that Russia did not pose a threat, so NATO did not need to draw up contingency plans to protect newer members, such as the Baltic states.

That has now changed, NATO officials say, though nobody wants to speak about it publicly. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s secretary-general, puts it obliquely. “We have all necessary plans in place to defend and protect all allies. I think the Russians would be surprised if we didn’t. That’s the core purpose of the alliance.” ...