Bad news from Africa: the situation in Mali is awful. The military coup in March that opened the way for Tuareg tribalists and Islamist extremists to seize the northern half of the country isn’t really over. The ignorant and brutal young officers who made the coup are blocking the arrival of 3,000 African Union troops, Mali’s only hope of ever regaining control in the north, because it would undermine their own power.

News about Africa that you don’t know whether to cheer or deplore: the major foreign aid donors have finally got fed up with Rwanda’s endless military meddling in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The United States has announced a cut in military aid, and Britain, Germany and the Netherlands are delaying payment of civilian aid, until Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, stops backing a rebel Tutsi militia in his country’s Congolese neighbour.

Everybody sympathises with Kagame’s attempt to rebuild peace and prosperity in Rwanda after the genocide that killed about half of the country’s Tutsi citizens. Everybody understands why he worries about Hutu militias in the eastern Congo. But he has to stop backing murderous Tutsi militias there, and using them to loot Congo’s mineral wealth. (On the other hand, don’t destabilise Kagame’s rule too much or the genocide might resume.)

Too many names, too many places, too much news. Even Africans cannot keep up with the news about their own continent. Is Africa going forwards, sideways, or nowhere at all? Indeed, is Africa any more than a geographical term?

The surfeit of news is inevitable in a continent that contains half a hundred countries. The sense of chronic crisis and chaos is due to the fact that in such a news-rich environment, the bad news will always jostle the good news aside. And yes, there really is an Africa about which you can usefully make large generalisations.

First, the entire continent is finally growing economically. Many African economies stagnated or even went backwards in the first three or four decades after decolonisation, but now there is real growth. Local disaster areas remain, of course, but over the past decade the gross domestic product of those 50 countries has grown at an average rate of five per cent.

Manufacturing production in Africa has doubled in the past 10 years. Seven of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies are in Africa. The growth is starting from a desperately low base, in many cases, but the magic of compound interest means that a five per cent growth rate will double the size of the economy every 14 years.

So there really is hope that most Africans can escape from poverty in the next generation — but on one condition. The birth rate is declining in most countries, but it must fall faster. The 2008 UN projections saw Africa doubling its population to two billion by mid-century, even assuming that the current gradual decline in African birth rates continues. That means an average population growth over this entire period of almost two per cent a year.

If the economy is growing at five per cent and the population is growing at two per cent annually, that only leaves room for a three per cent growth in average income. That means a doubling time of about 23 years for African average incomes, so let’s assume that they triple by 2050. That’s not enough.

African average incomes now are so low that tripling them would still not create the degree of prosperity and security that people in other continents are coming to expect. Worse, it would not give African governments the resources to cope with the huge damage that climate change will do to the continent.

The impact of global warming is worst in the tropics and subtropics: huge floods and semi-permanent droughts will become almost routine in these areas. Africa will suffer more than anywhere else, because it is the only continent that is almost entirely in the tropics and subtropics. Feeding the population will become a major problem.

There is enough potential cropland in Africa to feed twice the current population in the present climate, but it’s far from clear that this will remain true in a two-degree-warmer world.

Nowadays the legal manipulations used to avoid taxation are less dramatic, but they are spectacularly effective. James Henry, former chief economist at business consultancy McKinsey and a member of the board of directors of Tax Justice Network, has just published a report, ‘The Price of Offshore Revisited’, that estimates the amount of wealth hidden in tax havens by the super-rich at a minimum of $21tn.

It might be as much as $32 trillion, he adds, but greater precision is impossible when the whole point of holding money overseas is to keep it secret. Henry came up with this range of numbers by sifting through data from the Bank for International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and private sector analysts — and it does not even include yachts, mansions, art works and other forms of wealth held overseas.

It doesn’t matter. The point is that it’s a very large amount of money: equal to the annual Gross Domestic Product of both the United States and Japan. Some of it is the laundered proceeds of crime, and much of it is money stolen from national budgets by corrupt national elites (an estimated $306bn from Nigeria, $798bn from Russia, $1,189bn from China), but most is deposited by the respectable super-rich of the West.

Henry’s report, published in The Observer last weekend, calculates that almost half of the minimum estimate of $21tn is owned by just 92,000 people, some of whom pay no tax at all. A number of very small places (Liechtenstein, Cayman Islands, Jersey) and a few larger countries like Switzerland make a good living by providing these secret tax shelters, and work very hard to protect their clients from exposure.

Back home, the ‘high net-worth individuals’ also enjoy the services of “a highly paid, industrious bevy of professional enablers in the private banking, legal, accounting, and investment industries,” said Henry. We always sort of knew about it; now we know the scale.

Information of this sort is dangerous. It annoys those who merely work for a salary or an hourly wage, and whose taxes have to fill the gap created by the defection of the super-rich. It might even destabilise the established social order. But the British government, at least, knows how to deal with that sort of thing.

Less than 48 hours after Henry’s revelations, British politician David Gauke, one of the Treasury ministers, went public with the assertion that the lower orders cheat on their taxes just as much as the rich. “Getting a discount with your plumber by paying cash in hand is something that is a big cost to the Revenue and means others must pay more in tax,” he said.

Well, yes. Paying cash to a tradesman to get a discount (knowing that he will then not report this income to the tax authorities) is something that many people may have done.

Vice-Marshal Ri Yong-ho, the chief of the North Korean army until late last week, was not disloyal to the new boss. On the contrary, Ri’s support was vital in ensuring a smooth transition after the death of Kim Jong-il, the old boss, and he gave it unstintingly. But in the end the vice-marshal didn’t owe everything to Kim Jong-un, so he had to go.

In his place, Kim Jong-un has promoted a man nobody had ever heard of before. His name is Hyon Yong-chol, but you don’t have to remember it unless you really want to. The point is that Hyon will have annoyed a lot of other generals in the army because he has been promoted over their heads, and so he is absolutely dependent on the goodwill of the young master.

Meanwhile, the propaganda that is intended to promote Kim Jong-un to the rank of god-king pours forth. When he visited an air-force training unit, the North Korean news agency reported, he “guided the flight training of pilots”. At a concert, he “gave precious teachings for the performing activities of the Korean People’s Army Military Band”. It turns out that he is an expert in pretty well everything.

And just to be sure, Kim Jong-un had himself promoted to marshal this week, so now he outranks everybody else in the armed forces. At least he hasn’t had all his brothers and half-brothers killed in order to rule out any challenges from within the family, like the Ottoman sultans used to do after they ascended the throne. So there is progress, you see.

Things are done very differently in South Korea. There the presidents are chosen by the free vote of all the people (or at least all the ones who bother to vote). But the candidate most likely to win the presidential elections this December is the daughter of the dictator who ruled the country with an iron hand for two decades, until he was finally assassinated in 1979.

There are, to be sure, some striking differences between Ms Park Geun-hye, who will probably be South Korea’s first female president, and the callow youth who is scrambling to put his stamp on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea up north.

Park has earned her candidacy by a lifetime of public service, including a decade at the head of Yeungnam University and 14 years in politics, during which she earned the nickname ‘Queen of Elections’ for her skill in delivering the vote to her party even in the most adverse circumstances. At 60, she is more than twice Kim Jong-un’s age, and she has seen and done a lot.

On the other hand, it is very unlikely that she would have had this stellar career if she had grown up as the daughter of an army sergeant on a succession of bleak army posts. Growing up in the presidential palace, and serving as South Korea’s first lady for five years while still in her early 20s, after her mother was assassinated in 1974, was bound to produce a different outcome. It also helps with the name-recognition that every politician needs.

If elected, Park Geun-hye may be a very successful president. She may have the determination and the clout to take on the big industries that dominate South Korean society and deliver more security and social justice to those at the bottom. She may even manage to create an opening with North Korea if she finds a willing partner in Pyongyang.

Kim Jong-un is a completely closed book. Nobody beyond his own family has the slightest idea what he thinks and intends, and maybe even they don’t. Maybe he doesn’t even know himself yet.

Silvio Berlusconi is making a comeback bid. Only eight months after the disgraced politician left the prime minister’s office by the back entrance to avoid the jeers of hostile crowds (they sang “Hallelujah” instead when they heard he was gone), he is talking about a return to politics before the elections next spring. And he could actually win.

Even six weeks ago this seemed preposterous. “Berlusconi is so dead he doesn’t even wear his makeup any more,” said comedian Beppo Grillo, and the various trials that Berlusconi faced for bribery, fraud, tax evasion, and paying for sex with a 17-year-old girl were taking up most of his time. But if he is a political zombie, he is one with lots of luck and plenty of money.

In February the bribery case, in which Berlusconi was accused of paying British lawyer David Mills to lie under oath in corruption trials in 1997 and 1998, ran out of time under the statute of limitations. (Mills was convicted of accepting the bribe and sentenced to four and a half years in jail, but his sentence was cancelled on final appeal because of the same statute of limitations.)

Indeed, some people argue that Berlusconi first went into politics in 1994 to avoid conviction in various criminal cases. He changed the law on accountancy to escape conviction for false accounting, and so far his changes to the statute of limitations have let him escape from six separate prosecutions for corruption, embezzlement and tax fraud. His most recent escape was last week, when a judge dismissed more tax-fraud charges against him because of the same statute of limitations.

That left only one set of charges relating to financial matters and the case alleging that he paid for sex with a minor at one of his famed “bunga bunga” parties. But she denies it happened, and also denies that his gifts to her of jewellery and money worth $300,000 had anything to do with that denial. So the 75-year-old billionaire is confident that his legal problems are under control.

He would be even safer, however, if he were back in office and able to rewrite the laws whenever necessary, and besides he obviously misses the limelight. So he has started talking about a political comeback — and the circumstances are looking quite promising for him.

He was forced out of office last November because other European leaders were fed up with his embarrassing antics, and because the financial markets had lost all confidence in his government.

In Britain, it was incredibly wet. Almost six centimetres of rain fell on Saturday in parts of southern England, and there were over 20 flood warnings and 100 flood alerts in effect. The wettest April ever was followed by the wettest June (more than double average rainfall), and July has started the same way.

Russia had its hottest summer ever in 2010, with peat wildfires raging out of control — over 5,000 excess deaths in Moscow in July alone — but this summer it’s wet in Russia too. Very recently, an astonishing 28 cm of rain fell overnight in the Krasnodar region in southern Russia, and flash floods killed 155 people. Krasnodar governor Alexander Tkachev said: “No one can remember such floods in our history. There was nothing of the kind for the last 70 years.”

There are very unusual events happening in winter too: last January only 14.7 per cent of the United States was covered by snow, compared to 61.7 per cent at the same time in 2011. At least 300 people died in a cold wave in northern India in the previous January.

One could go on, enumerating comparably extreme weather events in the southern hemisphere in the past couple of years. But that would just be more impressionistic evidence, and no more convincing statistically. The events are too few, and the time period is too

short. But it does feel like something is going on, doesn’t it?

The most recent opinion polls indicate that a majority even of Americans now accept that climate change is happening (although, being American, many of them still cling to the belief that it is a purely ‘natural’ event that has nothing to do with human greenhouse gas emissions). Can we really say that something serious is happening, and that it is evidence that the climate is changing now?

No, we can’t. It’s a statistical long-shot, but it is possible that this is just a random collection of extreme events signifying nothing in particular. Occasionally a tossed coin comes up heads six times in a row. But usually it doesn’t.

The best way to approach the question is to ask what we would actually see if global warming had crossed some threshold and triggered big changes in weather patterns. The actual change in the average global temperature would be almost imperceptible: only 1°C or 2°C, or the difference in an average day’s temperature between 9 am and 10.30. What we would notice is that the weather is getting wild.

We never really experience the climate; what we feel is the daily weather that it produces. A climate that is changing will produce unfamiliar weather — and if it is getting warmer, it will be more energetic weather. Wilder weather, if you like.

The timetable for Nato’s withdrawal is now graven in stone: all western troops will be withdrawn from actual combat by the end of 2013, and they will all be out of the country by the end of 2014 (except the French, who will all leave by December of this year). This timetable will be adhered to no matter how the situation on the ground develops — or more likely, degrades — in the next two years. After that, it’s entirely in the Afghans’ hands.

There was some pretty rhetoric to soften this harsh fact: “As Afghans stand up, they will not stand alone,” declared President Barack Obama. But alone is exactly where they will be, although Nato is promising to send the Afghan government $4bn a year to enable its army to stand up to the Taliban. The western alliance has finally accepted that if the foreign troops cannot defeat the Taliban in 11 years, they are most unlikely to do so in 13 or 15 years.

The Russians could have told them that. “Our soldiers are not to blame,” Gen Sergei Akhromeyev told the Soviet Politburo in 1986. “They’ve fought incredibly bravely in adverse conditions. But to occupy towns and villages temporarily has little value in such a vast land where the insurgents can just disappear into the hills.”

So if Nato is now conceding that the Taliban cannot be crushed by military force, then why is it going to keep its troops in Afghanistan for another two-and-a-half years before acting on that conclusion? Some of them will die as a result of that decision, and quite a few Afghans will be killed because of it, too. Apart from temporarily saving the face of various western governments, what purpose will their deaths serve?

Nato’s argument is that another two years will leave the Afghan army in a better position to defend the US-installed government of Hamid Karzai after western troops leave, but there is absolutely no evidence that it is true. Indeed, of the 150-odd western troops killed in Afghanistan so far this year, twenty were killed by the Afghan troops that Nato is supposed to be training for this role.

The ‘Afghan National Army’ is not fit for purpose, and the outcome after Nato troops leave will probably be the same whether they all go home this year or stay until 2014. So what is that probable outcome?

Karzai may not fall immediately: the $4bn a year that Nato is promising to pay for the maintenance of his army will probably preserve the status quo for two or three years. But no more: it is most unlikely that the subsidy will be extended when it comes up for review in 2018.

It is destined “in the next and succeeding centuries to be more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age”. It was a bold prediction, for at that time there were only about 13 million English-speakers in the world, almost all of them living in Britain or on the eastern seaboard of North America. They were barely one per cent of the world’s population, and almost nobody except the Welsh and the Irish bothered to learn English as a second language. So how is Adams’s prediction doing now?

Well, it took a little longer than he thought, but last week one of the most respected universities in Italy, the Politecnico di Milano, announced that from 2014 all of its courses would be taught in English.

There was a predictable wave of outrage all across the country, but the university’s rector, Giovanni Azzoni, simply replied: “We strongly believe our classes should be international classes, and the only way to have that is to use the English language.” The university is not doing this to attract foreign students but mainly for its own students who must make their living in a global economy where the players come from everywhere — and they all speak English as a lingua franca.

Many other European universities, especially in Germany, the Low Countries and Scandinavia, have taken the same decision, and the phenomenon is now spreading to Asia. It is extremely rare to meet a scientific researcher or businessperson who cannot speak fluent English. How else would Peruvians communicate with Chinese?

But wait a minute. Peruvians speak Spanish, the world’s second-biggest language, and the Chinese have the largest number of native speakers of any language. Why don’t they just learn each other’s languages? The choice has fallen on English because it is already more widespread than any other language.

Mandarin Chinese has been the biggest language by number of speakers for at least the last 1,000 years, and is now used by close to a billion people, but it has never spread beyond China in any significant way. Spanish, like English, has grown explosively in the past two centuries: each now has over 400 million speakers. But Spanish remains essentially confined to Central and South America and Spain, while English is everywhere.

There is a major power that uses English in every continent except South America: the US in North America, the UK in Europe, South Africa in Africa, India in Asia, and of course Australia where the entire continent speaks it. All of that is due to the British empire, which once ruled one-quarter of the world’s people. For the same reason, there are several dozen other countries where English is an official language.

English had become the first worldwide lingua franca. Never before has any language had more people learning it in a given year than it has native speakers; English has probably now broken that record as well. The amount of effort that is being invested in learning English is so great that it virtually guarantees that this reality will persist for generations to come. However, Italians, Chinese and Arabs are not going to stop speaking their language to one another. But they will all speak English to foreigners.

New Democracy and PASOK, the centre-right and centre-left parties that have alternated in power since democracy returned to Greece in 1974, were abandoned by voters in revolt against the savage austerity measures that those parties had accepted in order to keep the country in the euro. The beneficiaries were radical parties of the extreme right and left.

Most shocking was the rise of the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party. Its shaven-headed street-fighters give the Nazi salute and systematically attack immigrants on the streets — and it got seven per cent of the vote. Golden Dawn, together with two other ultra-nationalist parties that are equally hostile to immigrants, the euro and indeed the European Union itself, got the votes of one Greek in five.

Even more Greeks backed the hard-left parties which also reject the deal with the EU and the International Monetary Fund that gave Athens enough money (174bn euros — $225bn) to go on paying its immense debts. The price was brutal cuts in domestic spending in Greece, and the voters revolted against it.

Greek incomes have fallen sharply and one-quarter of the workforce is unemployed. It’s not a recession in Greece, it’s a full-blown depression, and Greek voters don’t want to hear about how massive foreign borrowing and corruption at home got them into this mess. They just want it to stop.

The main target for their ire is the deal that forced this austerity on Greece, and the chief victims have been the two traditionally dominant centrist parties that signed it. Between them, three years ago, they got almost 80 per cent of the vote. This time they got just over 30 per cent. The missing 50 per cent mostly went to parties of the extreme right or radical left that reject the deal.

Those parties are too far apart on other issues to form a government in Athens with majority support in parliament, so there will probably be another election in June. If no coalition that will abide by the deal comes out of that election, then the EU will halt its financial aid to Greece — and when the next big payment on the country’s debt falls due at the end of June, Greece will default.

This raises two questions. What will happen to Greece if it defaults on its debts and crashes out of the euro? More importantly, what will then happen to the common currency, and to the European Union itself?

Countries that default on their debts have a very hard time. When Argentina defaulted in 2001, there was a 60 per cent fall in domestic consumption. Bank accounts were frozen, supermarkets emptied, and imported goods disappeared from the market. Inflation soared, jobs disappeared, and by 2003 more than half the population was living below the poverty line.

On the other hand, Greece is experiencing a good deal of this misery already. Unemployment is as bad as Argentina’s was at its worst. But in a few years, freed from its burden of debt, Argentina’s economy took off. Foreign banks started lending to it again, and for nine years now its GDP has grown at around eight per cent a year.

Many Greek voters think they can renegotiate the deal with the EU and stay in the euro. That is almost certainly untrue. But in the end default may turn out to be better for them than staying in the euro and suffering endless austerity while trying to pay off an impossible load of debt.

The bigger question is: what happens to the euro if Greece leaves? The common currency was conceived as a vehicle for achieving the ‘ever closer union’ that most EU politicians used to orate about, but that was putting the cart before the horse. Without a single authority that can enforce the necessary fiscal and budgetary disciplines, such a currency is bound to fail.

Last Monday, Jacques Attali, the former adviser to the late French president, François Mitterand, said that the euro will not last five more years “unless there is a single European state”. He’s probably right, but there is obviously not going to be a single European state in five years’ time.

Therefore, by Attali’s own logic, the euro as we know it is doomed. But Angela Merkel is probably wrong: that is unlikely to spell the end of the European Union itself. The EU survived perfectly well for 40 years without a single currency.

To what do I owe this honour?

I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the letters that the American forces seized when they raided Bin Laden’s house in northern Pakistan a year ago, but according to the CTC’s translation the plan was to send these carefully selected and named journalists a site address and password “at the right time” so that we could download his “special material”.

That never happened, because Bin Laden was killed before the anniversary rolled round, but it does raise an interesting question. None of the people he named (me, Robert Fisk, Seymour Hersh and Eric Margolis, for example) has actually written in favour of Al Qaeda and its goals — so what did he think he would gain by sending us the stuff?

The answer, I suspect, is that he had been reduced to grasping at straws. He had been on the run for 10 years, and trapped in that rather bare house in Abbottabad (now bulldozed) for six. He had no real-time communication with anybody in the rest of the world, because if he used telephones, the internet, indeed anything electronic except the TV and Playstation, it would almost

certainly lead the Americans to his lair within weeks.

He tried to go on directing Al Qaeda by sending numerous letters, but they would have taken weeks to reach their destinations, and in any case by last year the organisation was in an advanced state of disintegration. As an ideology and a franchise it lives on, but even in that attenuated form its ability to attract recruits and popular support has been gravely damaged by the events of the “Arab Spring”.

In other words, Osama bin Laden no longer had much relevance in the world, and he had a lot of time on his hands. But he certainly went on reading his clippings. Terrorists always read their clippings.

The point of terrorism isn’t just to frighten people, but to stampede them (or rather their governments) into some ill-considered action that will actually benefit the terrorists’ strategy. In the post-colonial context, the violence is usually meant to make the target government behave very badly, “cracking down” in ways that will drive people — maybe its own citizens, maybe a different group entirely — into the arms of the revolutionaries.

In the case of Al Qaeda, the goal of 9/11 was to terrorise and enrage the American people, but not so that they would overthrow their own government. They obviously weren’t going to do that. However, their outrage would probably make the US government send massive military forces into the Arab world to “stamp out” the terrorism. That, in turn,
would outrage the Arabs — who were the real object of Bin Laden’s revolutionary ambitions.

Well, it worked, in the sense that the West has not been so unpopular in the Arab world since the time of the Crusades. But the revolutions, when they finally started happening in Arab countries in 2010, rejected the leadership of jihadis like Bin Laden and sought democracy instead. He probably died a deeply disappointed man.

No other leader of a major power would dare say such a thing. If Hollande, who could be France’s first Socialist president in 17 years, simply defies “the markets”, they will certainly punish him and France severely. However, it remains to be seen how he plays his hand.

Hollande still has one hurdle to cross before he is officially president-elect, but he beat the incumbent president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in the first round of voting last week, when 10 candidates were running. In the run-off vote on May 6, the polls predict that he will trounce Sarkozy by a margin of 14-16 per cent.

Hollande is a shoo-in because in the second round his centre-left party will collect almost all the votes of parties to the left of the Socialists, and also most of the votes of the centrist candidates. Sarkozy leads a centre-right party, but he will have to pretend to be much harder right than he is for much the same reasons as Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney does in the United States.

If Sarkozy does not spout anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric, he will not even win over the 18 per cent of French voters who backed the far-right National Front a week ago. If he does talk like that, he will lose the swing voters in the centre — and he may still not get the endorsement of National Front leader Marine Le Pen, who reckons that if Sarkozy loses the presidency his party will disintegrate, making her own party the dominant force on the right.

So it will be president Hollande, who recently said that “if the markets are worried (by my policies), I will tell them here and now that I will leave them with no space to act.” Tough words, but what does “no space to act” actually mean? Does it mean anything at all? The markets don’t think so, which is why they did not go into meltdown as soon as Hollande’s election became a certainty.

Hollande is certainly tougher and smarter than the ‘Mr Normal’ who he claims to be. His calm, modest manner presents a striking contrast to the hyperactivity, bad temper and sheer bling of Nicolas Sarkozy, but he graduated from France’s most respected post-graduate school for high flyers, the École Nationale d’Administration, and he has been in politics for more than thirty years.

For over a decade he was the leader of the famously fractious Socialist Party, and was nicknamed ‘Meccano-builder’ for his ability to bridge the endless personal and ideological disputes, a process he once likened to picking up dog turds. And he has not promised French voters the moon.

What Hollande has actually promised is slightly less austerity than Sarkozy. He will balance the French budget by 2017, rather than 2016. For symbolism’s sake he will introduce a new 75 per cent income tax band for people who earn more than a million euros, but he understands that bringing the budget deficit under control must be accomplished mainly by cutting spending, not raising taxes.

The markets will not have it any other way, and they have France in a corner. In order to cover the interest on its existing debt plus this year’s budget deficit, France must borrow almost one-fifth of its entire GDP this year, and the same again next year.

Most of that enormous sum must be borrowed from foreign lenders, so Hollande cannot afford to frighten them by radically changing the austerity policy he inherits from Sarkozy.

He says what he must to get elected, but in office Mr Normal is likely to conduct business as usual — or at least, that is what the markets think. It may be too simplistic a view.

Hollande doesn’t agree with the current European orthodoxy, because it has put the eurozone (the 17 out of 27 European Union members that use the euro ‘single currency’) into an economic death-spiral.