You might think that measuring the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would be a priority. If you did think that, though, you would be wrong

IN NEGOTIATIONS on nuclear weapons the preferred stance is “Trust but verify”. In negotiations on climate change there seems little opportunity for either. Trust, as anyone who attended last year’s summit in Copenhagen can attest, is in the shortest of supplies. So, too, is verification.

Barack Obama was asked when he was in Copenhagen whether a provision by which countries could peek into each others’ assessment processes was strong enough to be sure there was no cheating. He answered reassuringly that “we can actually monitor a lot of what takes place through satellite imagery”. That statement conjured up thoughts of the sort of cold-war satellite system that America used to identify and count Russian missiles. But the president was being a bit previous; at the moment, no such system exists, because America’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), a satellite that would have fulfilled the role, was lost on launch this time last year. The purpose of OCO was to work out the fate of carbon dioxide that is emitted by industrial processes but does not then stay in the atmosphere—about 60% of the total. ...

Some scent compromise; more fear a looming showdown

IN THAILAND politics has long been about compromise rather than conviction. Political parties run on expediency, not ideology, which makes it possible to cobble together all manner of oddball coalitions. But in recent years pragmatism has given way to more rigid loyalties. Rival camps rally their base with fiery talk of an all-out struggle for the nation’s soul, all the while tugging relentlessly at its seams.

Might compromise yet make a comeback? Some scented a whiff of detente on February 26th, when the Supreme Court ruled on the family fortune of the former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. But that still seems wishful thinking. The nine judges found Mr Thaksin guilty of abusing his powers while in office to favour Shin Corp, his family-owned telecoms group, which was sold in January 2006 to Temasek, a Singaporean sovereign-wealth fund. The court decided to seize $1.4 billion of the $2.3 billion in proceeds from that sale, which had been frozen after the army deposed Mr Thaksin in September 2006. ...

Italy’s biggest telecoms firm faces an uncertain future

THERE could not be a better warning of the risks of getting involved with Italy’s national phone company: in late February Telecom Italia said an investigation into alleged large-scale tax fraud and money-laundering involving Sparkle, its wholesale voice and broadband unit, and a rival broadband firm, Fastweb, had forced it to delay the announcement of its 2009 results by a month. The pair are thought to have become embroiled in a scam orchestrated by the Calabrian mafia. Meanwhile, discussions about Telecom Italia’s future are coming to a head, with Telefonica, Spain’s leading operator, expected to play a crucial role.

In 2007, in the aftermath of two leveraged buy-outs which left Telecom Italia with a massive burden of debt, the government arranged for the Benetton family, Telefonica and a group of local financial institutions—Mediobanca, Intesa Sanpaolo and Generali—to take control of the operator. Telecom Italia’s controlling shareholder at the time, Pirelli, had been in serious talks about selling to America’s AT&T and Mexico’s America Movil, but the government had wanted to keep Telecom Italia in national hands. ...

Under pressure, GM is now putting up half the money needed to rescue Opel

THE mood at this week’s Geneva motor show, if not exactly upbeat, was in contrast to the fear that gripped the event last year. Europe’s car market is expected to shrink in volume terms by around 10% in 2010 as the scrappage schemes that helped underpin demand for smaller cars last year are withdrawn. But slowly reviving sales of larger, more profitable vehicles should underpin revenues. Moreover, the actions that carmakers have taken to strengthen their balance-sheets are working: most are expecting to generate cash this year. The big exception is Opel/Vauxhall, the European unit of General Motors.

On the first day of the show, GM sprang a surprise with the news that it was tripling to €1.9 billion ($2.6 billion) in loans and equity the contribution it was prepared to make to its original €3.3 billion plan for restructuring Opel. It was an admission both of how fragile Opel remains and how cross the German government still is with GM. ...

The corporation will become smaller, but no less potent

ON MARCH 2nd the BBC did something unprecedented: it volunteered to cut itself down to size. The broadcaster wants to abolish two digital radio stations, shrink its website and spend less on imported shows and sport. Mark Thompson, the director-general, says he will abandon the goal of churning out more and more programmes to suit every taste. Commercial media firms, which have been complaining for years about the BBC’s heft, did not know what to make of it. Is the world’s first, and mightiest, national public broadcaster turning modest?

Not a bit of it. The report signals an important retreat from the policy of all-out expansion that has guided the BBC in recent years. But it is a pragmatic, limited retreat that will allow the corporation to marshal its forces elsewhere, in products and places where it can be more effective. “Every organisation goes through phases of expansion and consolidation,” says Claire Enders, a media analyst. “This is the consolidation phase.” ...

Italy’s prime minister becomes an unlikely crusader against corruption

LAUGH or cry? On March 1st Silvio Berlusconi’s cabinet approved an anti-corruption bill just two days after the resumption of the prime minister’s trial for allegedly bribing a court witness.

David Mills, the British lawyer who was the witness, had already been convicted of accepting a $600,000 bribe. Mr Mills took the money for withholding evidence at two trials in the 1990s in which his client was a defendant. But on February 25th his offence was extinguished by Italy’s highest appeal court. The judges decided it had been committed three months earlier than previously reckoned and was thus covered by a statute of limitations. The time limit had been shortened by Mr Berlusconi’s previous government, one of several measures pushed through that make it exceptionally hard to secure a conclusive conviction for any white-collar crime in Italy. ...

Adverts that know where you are could be lucrative—not to mention controversial

THE initiative was designed to draw attention to a serious issue and it achieved its goal. Pleaserobme.com is a simple website that publishes a live feed of posts that appear on Twitter, a microblogging service, showing that the authors are somewhere other than their home. Many of the tweets come from users of Foursquare, a service that lets people publicise their location so their friends can see where they are—and businesses can aim advertising at them. Pleaserobme.com’s creators, who also alert the potential victims, say they simply wanted to highlight the fact that users of so-called location-based services often give away information a burglar would love to have.

Although the site is a salutary reminder of the perils of “oversharing”, it is unlikely to deter people from signing up to location-tracking sites. These are still dwarfed by the likes of Twitter and Facebook, but networks such as Foursquare, which has 500,000 users, and Loopt, which boasts over 3m, have been growing fast. They have also attracted cash from venture capitalists who reckon they could become money-spinners. A recent forecast by Juniper Research predicts that global revenues from location-based services could soar to $12.7 billion by 2014, up from $3 billion last year. ...

Worries about renewed overheating

DURING Tet, the lunar new year holiday, money is everywhere in Vietnam. It is dished out to children, gambled in roadside card-games, and splurged on gifts, feasts, and trips to home villages. This leads to an annual bump in inflation. And this year’s spike in the consumer-price index, which rose by 2% in February, seemed bearable at a time of rapid growth. GDP grew by 5.3% last year. It came, however, among some more worrying signs.

On February 10th, just before Tet, the central bank devalued the currency, the dong, by 3.4%, following a devaluation of 5.4% in November. The aim was to entice holders of dollars to buy dong. A dollar shortage has been starving Vietnam’s exporters of the currency they need to purchase imported parts and materials. ...

Politicians vie for poor-Muslim votes

FIFTEEN years after he migrated with his family to the bright lights of Delhi, Muhammad Naushad has little to show for it. An illiterate 20-year-old weaver, he earns 2,000 rupees ($43) a month, half of which he sends to his mother in the poor state of Bihar. Amid the evening babble of Nizamuddin, a fly-blown Muslim quarter in the heart of India’s capital, Mr Naushad says his only ambition is to get a better job. It is hard to guess what that might be.

He is all too typical of India’s 160m Muslims. Found mostly in its northern and eastern states, poor giants such as Uttar Pradesh (UP), Bihar and West Bengal, they are among the country’s poorest and least educated people. According to a 2006 government-commissioned report, Muslims are almost as badly off as dalits, Hinduism’s former “untouchables”—a finding made tragic by the dashed hopes it represents: many Indian Muslims once converted from Hinduism to escape that reviled low-caste status. ...

The defining battle of Lee Myung-bak’s presidency nears its climax

ODDLY for a politician, South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, has never hidden his loathing of politics. During his successful presidential-election campaign he vowed to “take politics out of Youido”, a reference to the island on the Han river that houses the National Assembly in Seoul. Mr Lee’s hero is the dictator Park Chung-hee, architect of South Korea’s rise from basket-case to industrial powerhouse. Much like him, Mr Lee believes politicians are impediments to his country’s progress. Unlike Park, however, Mr Lee has to operate in a robust democracy. He is making rather a hash of it.

In a bitter twist of fate, his nemesis is Park’s daughter, Park Geun-hye. She was the rival Mr Lee defeated in 2007 to become the presidential candidate of the Grand National Party (GNP). The two have never been reconciled. Mr Lee believes his election entitled him to rule without opposition within the GNP. But Miss Park has never accepted her defeat and still commands a group of as many as 40 loyalists in parliament. ...