The Economist explains

“FIFTEEN years ago, I swore an oath to defend my country and Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. On December 19th, I will do it again.” Thus ended an op-ed in the New York Times at the beginning of December by Christopher Suprun, a Republican paramedic from Texas, who is one of the 538 members of the electoral college that will do its work on December 19th. Mr Suprun says he has the legal right and the constitutional duty to vote following his conscience. This is why he decided to become a “faithless elector”, as some have called him, by refusing to cast his electoral college vote in accordance with the results in his state.

JUMP onto the back of a motorcycle taxi almost anywhere between Nigeria and Kenya and the odds are that your driver will be wearing a high-visibility vest carrying the logo of a mobile telephone company. The phones themselves are even more ubiquitous. By the end of this year there will probably be close to 1bn active subscriptions for mobile phones across the continent, almost one for each of 1.2bn people living in Africa.

IT HAS been called “the most dangerous piece of legislation ever passed”, “as destructive to personal and individual liberties as the Fugitive Slave Act” and a killer of women, children and old people. According to Republican lawmakers, the sources of each of these quotes, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare, is a terrible thing. Since it was passed by a Democratic Congress in 2009, it has been the bête noire of the Republicans. The party has pushed more than 60 unsuccessful Congressional votes to defeat it, while the Supreme Court has been forced to debate it four times in the act’s short history.

CONVENTIONAL wisdom says that recounts are a waste of time and money. They rarely overturn election results and can cost several million dollars. This seems to be especially true for the recount efforts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, launched by Jill Stein, the Green Party’s candidate for the presidency. The margin of victory for Donald Trump in these three states was slim, especially in Michigan, but not slim enough to make it likely that the outcome will change. The result in all three states would need to be overturned for Hillary Clinton to overtake Mr Trump in electoral-college votes. So why is Ms Stein persisting with the recounts?

IN NOVEMBER American officials cleared the sale of 106 Airbus jets to Iran, the latest such licence allowing business with the Islamic Republic following last year’s nuclear deal. The news came as the country’s economy is finally taking off: boosted by sanctions relief, GDP is set to grow about 4.5% this year, up from 0.4% in 2015. Yet few ordinary Iranians have felt the benefits. Unemployment actually went up in the first half of this year, from 10.7% to 12.2%. Underemployment is also rife, at about 9.5%. Why is Iran's rebound failing to create jobs?

External factors loom large.

THE Austrian mentality, wrote Thomas Bernhard, is like a Punschkrapfen (a punch-soaked pastry with colourful icing): red on the outside, brown on the inside and always a bit drunk. The republic’s post-war history illustrates his point. Since 1970 it has been run by (red) social democrats for all but seven years. But never far from the surface, and sometimes above it, there has been a thick seam of (brown) far-right politics.

HEDGE-FUND managers, commodities traders, ex-spooks and hacks all converge on Vienna on November 30th for the annual jamboree of OPEC, the oil producer’s cartel. Such attention may seem a little misplaced. During a year of schisms and mistrust, OPEC has repeatedly wrong-footed the markets and its credibility is in tatters. But the meeting promises to be a spectacle of brinkmanship that has oil markets on tenterhooks. At stake is not only the future of OPEC. The influence of Saudi Arabia, its biggest producer, is in play too.