Bankers have been blaming themselves for their troubles in public. <u>Behind the scenes, they have been taking aim at someone else: the accounting standard-setters.</u> Their rules, <mark>moan</mark> the banks, have forced them to report <mark>enormous</mark> losses, and it’s just not fair. These rules say they must value some assets at the price a third party would pay, not the price managers and <mark>regulator</mark>s would like them to fetch.

In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell argues that “social epidemics” are driven in large part by the actions of a tiny <mark>minority</mark> of special individuals, often called influentials, who are unusually informed, <mark>persuasive</mark>, or well connected. The idea is <mark>intuitively</mark> <mark>compelling</mark>, but it doesn’t explain how ideas actually spread.

Over the past decade, thousands of patents have been <mark>grant</mark>ed for what are called business methods. Amazon.com received one for its “one-click” online payment system. Merrill Lynch got legal protection for an asset allocation strategy. One inventor patented a technique for lifting a box.

Of all the changes that have taken place in English-language newspapers during the past quarter-century, perhaps the most far-reaching has been the <mark>inexorable</mark> decline in the scope and seriousness of their arts coverage.

From the early days of <mark>broadband</mark>, <mark>advocates</mark> for consumers and web-based companies worried that the cable and phone companies selling broadband connections had the power and <mark>incentive</mark> to <mark>favor</mark> <mark>affiliated</mark> websites over their <mark>rivals</mark>. That’s why there has been such a strong demand for rules that would prevent broadband providers from picking winners and losers online, preserving the freedom and innovation that have been the lifeblood of the internet.

As a historian who’s always searching for the text or the image that makes us re-evaluate the past, I’ve become preoccupied with looking for photographs that show our Victorian ancestors smiling (what better way to shatter the image of 19th-century prudery?). I’ve found quite a few, and- since I started posting them on Twitter-they have been causing quite stir. People have been surprised to see evidence that Victorians had fun and could, and did, laugh. They are noting that the Victorians suddenly seem to become more human as the hundred-or-so years that separate us fade away through our common experience of laughter.

Last year marked the third year in a row of that Indonesia’s <mark>bleak</mark> rate of deforestation has slowed in pace. One reason for the turnaround may be the country’s antipoverty program.

How can the train operators possibly justify yet another increase to rail passenger fares? It has become a <mark>grimly</mark> reliable annual <mark>ritual</mark>: every January the cost of travelling by train rises, <mark>imposing</mark> a significant extra <mark>burden</mark> on those who have no option but to use the rail network to get to work or otherwise. This year’s rise, an average of 2.7 per cent, may be a <mark>fraction</mark> lower than last year’s, but it is still well above the official Consumer Price Index (CPI) measure of <mark>inflation</mark>.