THE HOTEL chain Marriott recently announced that it will cease selling "adult content"i.e., pornographyin its newer hotels. Anyone who knows a bit about the hotel business might find this move a bit confusing. After all, porn is still a moneymaker for chains like Marriott, which by some estimates was earning $175 per room, per year in smut peddling alone. But there does seem to be a method to Marriott's madness. Politico's Ben Smith explains that Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and a presumptive candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, recently left the Marriott board. The chain's owners are "longtime Romney supporters," Smith notes. And social conservatives, apparently, hit Mr Romney hard on the porn "issue" during the ex-governor's 2008 campaign for the GOP nomination. (One critic called Mr Romney a "major pornographer.") So in some sense, Mr Smith argues, Marriott appears to be doing Mr R...

IT IS only a paragraph long, but the leaders of the European Union fought over it for hours. The words in the conclusions (PDF) of the European summit on February 4th hide the deep cracks that have been re-opened within the EU over how to restore the euro zone after the year-long sovereign-debt crisis Building on the new economic governance framework, heads of state or government will take further steps to achieve a new quality of economic policy coordination in the euro area to improve competitiveness, thereby leading to a higher degree of convergence, without undermining the single market. Non-euro members will be invited to participate in the coordination. This is a long-winded reference to the competitiveness pact that France and Germany had wanted to unveil at the summit. The idea is for leaders of the euro zone to agree to co-ordinate and align their economic policies more deeply in sensitive areas like wages, pensions and taxation. The declared aim is to encourage "con...

CATHERINE Ashton has been given a difficult mission: go to Egypt to tell Hosni Mubaraks regime to begin political reforms immediately. Events in Cairo continue to push Baroness Ashton into the limelight. If ever there was a moment to raise her game as the EUs foreign-policy chief, as I suggested she should do in my column this week, this is it. She got a roasting in the European parliament on Wednesday for being too invisible, too late and too timid. Vous tes une rsistante de la vingt-cinquime heure, said the leader of the European greens, Daniel Cohn-Bendit. (You are a resister of the 25th hour", in other words, a Johnny-come-lately in supporting the protesters). To be fair, Baroness Ashton has stopped issuing communiqus and has started speaking more frequently in person, including to TV cameras. By her own admission, though, she will not step an inch beyond the agreed line. Im not somebody who can go out and give my personal view, she told MEPs, I speak for the European...

MICE are coming to an airport near you. An Israeli start-up company, BioExplorers, has harnessed the rodents' olfactory abilities to develop an explosive-detecting system that could have applications in the aviation industry. The New Scientist explains how the machine would work: Along one side of an archway [in a device similar to a full-body scanner], a detection unit contains three concealed cartridges, each of which houses eight mice. During their 4-hour shifts in the detector, the mice mill about in a common area in each cartridge as air is passed over people paused in the archway and through the cartridge. When the mice sniff traces of any of eight key explosives in the air, they are conditioned to avoid the scent and flee to a side chamber, triggering an alarm. To avoid false positives, more than one mouse must enter the room at the same time. Mice are even better than dogs at this, apparently, thanks to a greater quantity of "olfactory receptor genes". BioExplore...

HERE'S something I hadn't known: first, that some people consider the use of anyways to mark an ill-educated boob (I'd have just thought it casual). Second, according to Gabe at Motivated Grammar , that anyways is an "adverbial genitive", and so in this form is grammatically equivalent to sometimes and always. I'd never thought about how that s got there, but now I see that that genitive s is just a grammatical sibling of the possessive 's in Mary's house. Why did always become mandatory, sometimes become two-way ("sometime" for the adjective, as in "a sometime grammar pundit", and "sometimes" for the adverb, as in "I pontificate on grammar sometimes"), and anyway become a prescriptivist shibboleth? Gabe doesn't know, and I don't either, but there are the facts. The linguistic fact is that there's nothing wrong with anyways, but the sociological suggestion is that you should use anyways only in the co...

A RELIABLE filler-item for newspapers the world over is the sponsored survey. You know the sort of thing: articles headed "Children who eat breakfast cereal do better in school", which reveal in the final paragraph that the "new research" was paid for by a cereal-maker. These stories are annoying not just because they are lazy journalism, but because so often they muddle up cause and effect. I am perfectly willing to believe that children do better at school, on average, if they begin their day with a proper breakfast sitting at a table with a spoon, bowl and glass of milk, compared to some desperate child who has to hunt for a packet of Monster Munch in the cupboard to start the day, because the rest of the family is still asleep. But what you are picking up there is not, I suspect, primarily a story of the nutritional superiority of cornflakes over crisps. By the same token, I am sure that you could conduct surveys that show better school performance for children ...

THE World Trade Organisation (WTO) has decided that Boeing received illegal subsidies from the American government to help with its development of the 787 Dreamliner. Two correspondents discuss the disputes that are keeping the WTO, Boeing and Airbus busy, and many trial lawyers happy.

FOR many commentators, Wednesday's prime minister's question time brought final proof that the government is in trouble over its proposal to privatise England's state-owned woods and forests. Many detected a whiff of panic, if not an imminent about-turn, when David Cameron said he was "listening to all the arguments in this case." They further opined that the government's agonies were rooted in the unusual importance of trees and woods to the British psyche. An editorial in the Times this morning declared: In Britain's conception of itself, as Tory image-makers so recently knew, the myth of the wooded island looms large. William Shakespeare put his fairies in the forests. It was forestry that sheltered Robin Hood from tyranny. Oaks built our navies, which sailed the globe. I respectfully disagree, twice. I knew the government was in real trouble on Tuesday, when the Daily Telegraph's revered "Matt" drew a front page pocket cartoon of Winnie ...

DANIEL BELL, who died on January 25th, aged 91 (my column this week looks back on his life and works ), was always sensitive to being called a neocon. He cut his intellectual teeth with future neocons at "Alcove No. 1", at City College . He was a close friend of Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism, and even founded the Public Interest with him. But he always remained, as he described himself, "a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture". Here is a letter he sent to us when we bracketed him a little too closely with Kristol. SIR - Your obituary of Irving Kristol (September 26th) aligned me with his effort to transform conservatism from a dour to a modern outlook. I was never part of such an effort. I co-founded the Public Interest with Kristol. In our opening statement of intent there was not a word about conservatism; instead we focused on our effort to discuss public policy and to make whatever knowledge we have, p...

JUDGING from the votes they have cast with their bottoms, China's business travellers need little persuading of the merits of high-speed rail. Since the high-speed link between Wuhan and Guangzhou opened in December 2009, for instance, over 20m have chosen the zippier trains, while the number of competing daily flights between Guangzhou and Changsha (on the route to Wuhan) has dropped from over 11 to three. Yet whether plans to double high-speed coverage by 2020 are an unmitigated good thing for China, which already has more high-speed rail than any other country, is a different question. It is one that decision-makers have largely sidestepped thanks to the peculiarities of China's political system. But of late debate has spilled over into the public realm. Detractors complain that high-speed rail is too expensive for the Zhang in the street. Migrant labourers, 230m of whom are expected to make the journey home during Spring Festival, are not in enough of a hurry to pay a premi...

WE ARE all rightly fixated on the politics of what is going on in Egypt at the moment. But it is worth sparing a thought for the economics, too. If Russians in 1917 wanted "peace, bread and land" and ended up with totalitarianism, gulags and collective farms, Egyptians, particularly young Egyptians, want jobs. Egypt's youth-unemployment rate is currently about 25%. That is clearly a depressing number, but even more depressing is that it is not out of line with rates across the region, and beyond. Lebanon's youth-unemployment rate is 21%, Tunisia's is 30% and, outside the Arab world, Britain's is 20% and Spain's is 40%. Policymakers would be well advised to think about how we're going to promote job-intensive growth, even as they try to calculate the gigantic geopolitical consequences of the Egyptian eathquake.

LIKE many people, I have been glued to Al Jazeera for the past few days. It's breathless and biased, to be sure, with a tendency to inflate numbers and play down risks, but it is much better than the alternatives. With the notable exception of Fareed Zakaria's programme, CNN is a shadow of its former self, and the BBC, which justifies its poll tax, in part, on the grounds that it provides superlative news coverage, is more interested in what Egypt means for British holidaymakers, bless them, than for geopolitics. Given that Egypt is likely to produce a cascade of troubles in the Middle East, Al Jazeera has now become essential viewing. Pity the competition is so bad.

YOU leave Britain for just three days and what happens? Turn on the TV and you find that Britain is going to be part of an " Islamic caliphate ". This is on the US's "most-watched cable news network". There is no mention of this at home butperhaps my wife is trying not to worry me. I am surprised the FTSE 100 and sterling haven't taken more of a hit. Mind you, it's not the strangest theory I've ever heard.Once I had aletter from a reader warning me of an international Swedish conspiracy to control the world (sounds like a good idea; the world would be a much nicer place). But those were innocent days when people who wrote letters in green ink don't get to host TV shows.

WE HAVE read plenty about Greece's dismal public finances and risible public book-keeping. But if the country is to have any chance of recovering in the long-term it needs to rethink its approach to entrepreneurialism, which is one of the most hostile in the world. A New York Times article makes this point forcefully by telling the story of one entrepreneur's brave attempt to establish a soft-drinks business in his home country: DEMETRI POLITOPOULOS says he has suffered countless indignities in his 12-year battle to build a microbrewery and wrest a sliver of the Greek beer market from the Dutch colossus, Heineken. His tires have been slashed and his products vandalized by unknown parties, he says, and his brewery has received threatening phone calls. And he says he has had to endure regular tauntsyou left Manhattan to start up a beer factory in northern Greece?not to mention the pain of losing 5.3 million euros. Bad as all that has been, nothing prepared him for this realit...

A PRESS RELEASE I saw today suggested that 74% of 1,000 business travellers polled consider children the most annoying thing about business-class travel. The idea that, having paid top dollar for better seating and food, their comfort should be compromised by fidgeting, chatting and even crying youngsters is enough to make some flyers blanche. Is this a problem that needs a solution? If so, one answer is adults-only services; another is adults-only sections of regular services. Carriers operating Boeing 747s could, for instance, easily reserve the upper-floor business-class seats for adults, keeping the mewlers and the pukers downstairs with hoi polloi. But while all travellers would agree with the appeal of a quiet flight, it's a big step to ban certain passengers from certain parts of a plane. I'd rather sit next to a well-behaved five-year-old than an adult with bad body odour, but I don't think smelly people should be herded to the back of the plane. Easier, I think, f...

A COMFORTABLE airport lounge can be a godsend for anyone stuck in transit, especially those delayed by the snowstorms that have been sweeping across the top of North America lately. As David Lytle of Frommers.com told USA Today, "For frequent fliers, lounges offer sanity and some semblance of the comforts of home." Unfortunately, most travellers in North America don't come across a great one very often, according to a top-ten ranking from Frommer's . Many travellers spend upward of $400 a year for access to a club lounge, but the only Canadian destinations on the Frommer's listthe two Porter Airlines lounges at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airportare notable because they allow passengers in for free. That's right: free. Passengers can also access free Wi-Fi, iMac computers, food and drink. Such amenities let "the little guy feel a bit more important," says Jason Clampet, Frommer's senior online editor. (Gulliver's not sure passengers will be too...

I COULDN'T quite believe it when I heard about this tweet , via al-Jazeera television: Farrah3m Protest signs in #tahrir in Arabic, English, French and EVEN hebrew #jan25 #egypt And a search on Twitter revealed another : iyad_elbaghdadi Joke of the day: Egypt state TV says that "demonstrators are shouting slogans in English and Hebrew". #Egypt #Jan25 #Tahrir #Spin Really? Stranded Israeli tourists joining the protests? Egyptian government provocateurs trying to undermine the demonstrations? Neither, it emerges. An al-Jazeera journalist, Gregg Carlstrom, had taken this picture of a young Egyptian protester,of which he tweeted : glcarlstrom One guy in Tahrir had a "get out Mubarak" sign in Hebrew. "A message for Netanyahu," he said. It's actually Arabic, "azouk Mubarak", written in Hebrew characters.Now that's what I call killing two birds with one stone.

THERE have been some odd things going on in the markets over the last two weeks. The euro has staged a remarkable recovery, hitting $1.3760 as I write. presumably because fears about the sovereign debt crisis are receding. That looks very premature. Could it be a dollar decline, rather than euro strength? After all, even the pound has hit $1.60, despite all Britain's economic problems. But that explanation looks unlikely given the recent weakness of gold, which has usually moved in the opposite direction to the dollar; many people see it as an alternative currency. Perhaps the answer is that traders are simply unwinding their early 2011 positions, when they came into the year short the euro and long gold. Another puzzle is why risky assets aren't taking more fright that Brent crude is at $100 a barrel, a factor that has been bad news for the economy and markets in the past. Meanwhile, the wind outside my NY hotel room makes it sound like King Lear and my plans to investigate ...

INCENTIVES, economists tend to say at the drop of a hat, are everything. Well, clearly the officials at Homeland Security don't hang out with economists much. If they did they might have learnt an easy lesson about incentives from a beagle I met on a recent trip through Newark airport. My luggage was delayed, ostensibly by a stuck door on a truck that was to have ferried it from the plane to the arrivals hall. What would have been a tiresome 30 minutes turned into a fascinating lesson in incentives in action. The beagle, a wise seven-year-old with a long nose, had the job of sniffing out contraband for his handler, a customs official, as the two roamed the luggage-collection area. The beagle would sit next to a suspicious-smelling bag, wag his tail, look excited and then look to his handler for praise. She would mark the bag for inspection by officials at the exit, give him a treat from a bag on her belt, and then move on. You can figure out where this lesson is going. With the dog...

AFTER more than two weeks of drawn-out debate and all-night sittings in the House of Lords, all of which looked to the outside eye like a most un-Lordly filibuster, the coalition government has come to a compromise deal with the Labour opposition, paving the way for a referendum on a new voting system for Britain. This referendum, which is now on course to be held on May 5th at the same time as local elections, will be paired with a shrinking of the House of Commons from 650 to 600 members, and the redrawing of constituency boundaries to make them more equal in terms of voter numbers. To buy off the Labour rebels, the government has offered a speeded-up form of public appeal process for boundary changes and an agreement to review whether 600 MPs is the right number. The Conservative leader in the House of Lords, Lord Strathclyde, says the government is determined to avoid any drawn-out enquiries that would delay the boundary changes after October 2013, so that the new seats can be use...

AIR TRAVEL can be a succession of annoyances. Some are inherent to the business. Unless you fly in your own jet or in first class, economics dictates that you will be squashed into a seat that is a few inches too narrow and too close to the one in front to be anything resembling comfortable after three hours. Some of the annoyances can be understood, even if only at a stretch of the credulity. Having one's "junk" felt probably fits into that category: it is not impossible to imagine someone trying to sneak a weapon or bomb onto a plane, and to imagine such a person being caught by or, more likely, deterred by the prospect of being groped by a large person wearing blue gloves. Let's call these the plausible annoyances. Then there are the rules that are more annoying because the bar at which one has to suspend disbelief is raised even higher. One such might be the requirement to stash your earphones and switch off your iPod on take-off and landing. The logic is that you...

MY COLLEAGUE Babbage grapples with some truly enormous numbers in a recent post about changes to the Internet's addressing system, which is running short of unique identifiers to assign to the billions of devices that are now connected. The new system expands the list of possible internet addresses enormously, to 2128 (or about 1038 in slightly more familiar notation). Adjectives are utterly inadequate for conveying the scale of this number, but Babbage has a go nevertheless: Two raised to the 128th power is an astronomical number. In decimal terms, it is roughly 340 billion billion billion billionor, as Martin Levy of Hurricane Electric likes to say, more than four quadrillion addresses for every star in the observable universe. Astronomy has long been humanity's go-to subject when it comes to contemplating the truly enormous. But actually, if 2128 is so much more vast than the number of stars in the observable universe (1015 times more vast*, or 4,000,000,000,000,000 in long...

THE CRISIS in Egypt is keeping British newspapers busy this morning, with several tabloids sending reporters to Cairo to report the drama from the ground. This is how the main stories from Britain's best-selling dailies begin. Keen-eyed media studies graduates may detect a pattern: The Daily Mail: "British tourists..." The Sun: "Thirty thousand Brits..." The Mirror: "Britons were urged to flee..." The Daily Express: "Up to 30,000 Britons..." It is not just the opening lines. The Daily Mail's 28 paragraph story devotes 18 paragraphs to the "terrifying ordeal" endured by British tourists (not one of whom has been harmed to date), including the "mayhem" some had witnessed at Cairo airport, and an interview with a man whose flight was delayed for seven hours. Encouragingly, most of the front page of the Daily Star is devoted to a huge story headlined "Jordan 999 Dash Mystery". Alas, on closer inspection, it does ...

EGYPT is in open revolt against the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak. Tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets this week, and many people have been hurt and killed in clashes between protesters and security forces. The end-game seems to be approaching rapidly, and multiple governments have announced travel advisories or promised to evacuate their citizens from Egypt. CNN reports that America and Turkey are planning to fly their citizens out , while the Washington Post has a fascinating story on Iraq'syes, Iraq's offer to return its citizens to the safety of Baghdad. (That's a weird sentence to write.) The UK foreign office, meanwhile, has advised British citizens not to travel to Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor, or Suez. But they're also asking the estimated 30,000 British citizens already in Egypt to "stay put." So what should you do if you're already in country? The Atlantic's Jeff Goldberg has a suggestion : It is understandable that Americ...

MONDAY's suicide bombing attack on Domodedovo International Airport , outside Moscow, killed 35 people and injured more than 100. Aren't airports supposed to be safe from suicide bombers? Isn't that the point of invasive airport security? Unfortunately for the victims of the Domodedovo attack, airports aren't nearly as secure as many people believe. On the day of the attack,Wired's Spencer Ackerman explored what may have happened : [T]he terrorist[s?] who carried out the Domodedovo attack have demonstrated that its not necessary to get an explosive on board an airplane to kill and injure lots of people and throw air travel into turmoil. Thats important to consider as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security installs expensive and privacy-infringing "naked scanners" at airport security gates and keeps traveler liquids off of flights. Later, Mr Ackerman added this update: Reader PV, a frequent traveler through Moscows airports, writes: I have traveled quite ...

HOSNI MUBARAK has given a strangely defiant speech in which he asserted that Egypt's uprising would not have happened if he hadn't given the people so much freedom of expression, among other things. On a rhetorical level, I think I'd caution him against blaming too much freedom right about now. But this being the language blog, I noticed something slightly more technical: Mr Mubarak avoided Zine el-Abidine ben Ali of Tunisia's gambit of giving his speech in dialectal Arabic . (It should be noted briefly that nobody speaks the modern standard Arabic as a native language. Each region has a distinct dialect, really a modern language descended from Arabic roughly like Spanish from Latin. But the modern standard is still almost always the choice for formal occasions like political speeches.) That was the first time Mr ben Ali had done so. He was clearly reaching for a Tunisian nationalism and fellow-feeling in speaking like the people do in their homes and on the streets. It...

THOUGH it is not uncommon to find a small country with more than one official language, Singapore is still an unusual case. Among four official languages, Malay is the symbolic national language, English the working language, and Mandarin the language representing the islands ethnic Chinese, even though it is not the "mother tongue" for most. Clear? Add Tamil as the fourth official language, a range of Chinese languages and Singlish, the distinctive creole that blends elements of official languages along with a number of other tongues, and you have the recipe for a tasty linguistic soup. All the more interesting for existing in a country of fewer than 5m people once derided by a Taiwanese deputy foreign minister as "only as big as a piece of snot". As with many things Singaporean, language is an area that has been subject to tight government control. At the recent launch of his latest book, "Hard Truths To Keep Singapore Going", Lee Kuan Yew, Singapores fi...

ALL the analysis of stockmarket prospects for 2011 focused on earnings, rate hikes, Republican control of the House, the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, the sustainability of the Chinese boom, high commodity prices etc etc I don't recall anyone (including your blogger) predicting that the market might be vulnerable to riots in Egypt. Yet that's why the market seems to be falling today, as investors fret that the Middle East might get embroiled in war again. Egypt was a reliable US ally and a non-threatening presence on Israel's border, but its government has long suppressed dissent. It would be nice to think that a democratic tide is sweeping the region but instead of several post-1989 Polands, we could get a few post-1979 Irans. Anyway, it's a timely reminder of the impossibility of stockmarket forecasting. My view tends to be that you look at long-term measures (like the cyclically-adjusted ratio or the dividend yield) and figure out that when valuations are high, fu...

A PIECE in this week's Economist looks at recent changes in the budget-airline market and the efforts carriers are making to pep up slowing growth rates. Ryanair, for example, is trying to make greater use of primary airports in order to "concentrate less on increasing traffic and more on extracting larger amounts of money from each passenger". And Air Berlin is also taking ideas from traditional airlines. Air Berlin now arranges its timetables to encourage transfers at its Berlin Tegel, Dsseldorf and Palma hubs, like a traditional network carrier. It also has a frequent-flyer programme. Through its Niki associate in Austria, the airline even offers a direct flight from Berlin to Dubai three times a week. It is discussing a co-operation deal with Emirates, so that passengers from the Gulf carrier can connect in Vienna to fly to other European cities. Air Berlin is also joining the oneworld alliance based around British Airways and American Airlines. Read the whole articl...

ALMOST exactly a year ago, I found myself reporting the fuss in Brussels about the failure of the Lisbon Strategy, the European Union's 10-year plan to make Europe "the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion, and respect for the environment by 2010". All around me, Euro-pundits, Eurocrats and European parliamentarians chorused, as one, that the roots of the problem lay in process: national governments had ducked reform because the EU lacked the legal tools to make them reform. To use a technical term from political science, this seemed to me to be cobblers. The single biggest reason that Europe was not the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world, I argued, was that lots of Europeans (perhaps most) did not want to live in such a competitive place. For sure, they want to stay rich and comfortable, and they know that globalisat...

MANY years ago, when I was starting out in journalism, I used to know a much older, amiable hack, who after a drink or two in the pub at night had a bad habit of jabbing my chest, reaching into his breast pocket, and then thrusting a sheaf of crumpled, yellowing press cuttings under my nose to show that he was the first to have written this, diclosed that, etc, etc. He was, frankly, a bit of a bore, though a harmless one. Reader, I cannot help it. After so many years watching the Middle East, and watching the gripping drama unfolding in the Arab world now, I have at last become that man. It is too early to say whether the overthrow of Tunisia's strongman and the riots now sweeping through Egypt and numerous other Arab countries will amount to broad political change. But wouldn't it be nice, indeed thrilling, if America's secretary of state went to the University of Cairo, say, and made some simple statement like this: For 60 years my country, the United States, pursued stab...

IN BETWEEN thinking about the crisis of the euro and the fate of Belgium (this week's column ), I was asked by the European Union's Institute for Security Studies to offer some thoughts on one of my former obsessions: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These appear in the current issue of the institute's quarterly newsletter . I paste the piece below. For decades now, the diplomatic game in the Middle East has been summed up as: America plays, Europe pays. Now that President Barack Obama has given up on direct peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian leadership, largely because of Israels obsession with covering the ancient biblical landscape of the West Bank in concrete, might this be Europes moment to act? This was certainly the hope of 26 former European leaders and senior officials when they wrote a letter on 2 December 2010 calling on the EU to take a more active role in resolving the conflict and put its stated position into effect. Addressed to Herman Van Romp...