Turkey was just one judge’s vote away from a constitutional coup. But after three days of secret deliberations, Turkey’s constitutional court voted six to five not to ban the country’s ruling party and exclude its top leaders from power. Seven votes were required to shut the party down on charges of allegedly plotting to introduce Islamic law to secular Turkey – a judgment which would certainly have plunged Turkey into a full-blown political crisis. Instead the court’s members – hardline secularists all – nevertheless decided to pull back from the brink and impose a simple penalty of cutting the party off from State funding – effectively a slap on the wrist for the AKP, but at the same time a face-saving solution for the judges.

Chief prosecutor, Aburrahman Yalcinkaya had demanded that Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country's president, Abdullah Gul, and 69 other AKP figures be banned from politics for five years. Their crime, according to the lengthy indictment, was that they had allowed the party to become a focal point of “anti-secular activity". In particular, the prosecutor was incensed by the AKP’s lifting of a two decades-old ban on female students wearing Islamic headscarves at university.

A seemingly trivial pretext, perhaps, for banning a democratically elected government – and one which is the most popular in modern Turkish history. But the court case is just the latest and most dramatic episode in a decades-old confrontation between political Islam and the secular establishment, which has sworn to keep religion out of public life in accordance with the radical secularism of Turkey’s founder, Kemal Ataturk. In 1999, just three years before his party swept to power, Erdogan himself was imprisoned for sedition after reciting a religious poem at a rally. And just last year, Turkey’s politically powerful military tried - unsuccessfully - to prevent Gul's election to the presidency, also because of his strong religious beliefs and his headscarf-wearing wife. The AKP called the military’s bluff by immediately calling an early general election, which it won in a landslide, and then successfully re-nominating Gul. The secularists’ response to that defeat was to draft the indictment which was knocked down by the court today.

Nevertheless, the AKP must tread carefully to avoid more time-wasting battles which have distracted the ruling party from much needed reforms and spooked markets. "I hope the party in question will evaluate this outcome very well and get the message it should get,” warned chief justice Hasim Kilic in his ruling. "The verdict on cutting treasury aid has been given because of members who decided that the party was the hub of anti-secular activities but not seriously enough [to close the party].” The subtext was clear: the court had decided to spare the party – and spare the country months of political turmoil – but now expected the AKP to steer clear of more provocative moves such as the headscarf law.

The ruling is good news for Turkey’s path to the European Union. EU enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn said that "despite everything, this is a good day for Turkey and for Europe … There is a vast majority among the Turkish people who are in favour of European values. I'm sure this played a role, as stated by the president of the Turkish constitutional court."

It should also allow the AKP to take up a long delayed reform program on free speech and democratization. “Today’s decision by the Constitutional Court not to close down the ruling Justice and Development Party has averted a political crisis in Turkey,” says Emma Sinclair-Webb, Turkey researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The ruling party should honor its election promises now and revive the long-stalled reform of human rights in Turkey.”

Brazil today boasts 1,100 privately owned helicopters (half of them in São Paulo), the world's third largest fleet and growing at the clip of 15 percent a year. For those below, condemned to battling one of the worst rush hours on the planet (on a bad day, traffic pileups can run to 160 kilometers or more), the view isn't so inspiring. But like the crowded skies, the clotted streets are emblems of the remarkable new moment in a nation that has hoisted itself from the ranks of chronic underachiever to emerging market upstart. (Read this week's magazine story, Weathering the Storm.)

The new bullishness has taken many by surprise. For half a century Brazil has been flirting with greatness, aiming for the clouds and then flaming out. At its loftiest the country has charmed a host of believers, but their convictions have wavered. Fleeing Europe to Brazil ahead of World War II, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig famously declared his adoptive country “the land of the future” but then lost hope in the world and downed a lethal dose of vironal in 1942, in the middle of carnival, at that. The future would have to wait.  Charles DeGaulle looked down his spacious nose at much of the world, but the Brazilians always took personally his generic snub that  "Brazil is not a serious country."

It's poetic justice of sorts that the Brazilians are looking down on much of the serious world today. In the quarter century or so I've been keeping an eye on this country, this is the first time I can recall that the dark talk of "crisis" refers not to some domestic debacle but to the mess beyond national borders. "Hey, Bush, we've been waiting 20 years to grow," scolded president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in an impromptu speech the other day, referring to the global spillover from the U.S. subprime credit crunch. "Get your act together."

Except for on the football pitch or the catwalks, such hubris is new for this chronically underperforming country. Maybe it's the currency. When I first arrived in Rio, in the early 80s, with inflation topping three digits, the greenback was almighty. Converted into wads of pink and green cruzeiros or cruzados or new cruzeiros (pick your perishable banknote), a hundred U.S. dollars could buy you a week on the town. Now and then the officials in Brasília tried to do something about it, lopping three zeros off the currency and decreeing drastic price freezes, so bringing only a flicker of stability. It wasn't as bad as Bolivia, where I once saw them weighing money instead of counting it in the Chapare district, but it left the continent's biggest country dysfunctional, all the same.

I keep a box in my drawer stuffed with inflation memorabilia from those days. Lost in the rubble of half a dozen versions of soiled bank notes and a kilo or so of useless coins, there's a small paper chit with the number 2147 stamped on it. It's the waitlist number I drew for the São Paulo-Rio de Janeiro air shuttle, which thanks to the price freeze during the so called Cruzado Plan, of 1986, cost $38, about half the current bus fare. When prices are kept steady, goods tend to disappear, and the Cruzado Plan was no different; Brazil's airports became flop houses as stranded passengers waited hours for an available seat.

It's not always easy to pinpoint a nation's turning point, but 1994 has to be a modern Brazilian watershed. That was the year of the Plano Real, a radical new stabilization plan named for the eponymous currency, backed this time by fiscal discipline, not a price freeze or any of the other "heterodox" hocus pocus of former plans. Brazilians were skeptical and who could blame them, after a quarter century of band-aid reforms and Monopoly money?

Today, with foreign investors tripping over themselves to pour money into Brazil, the real has outgunned the world's top 16 currencies, from Euro to Yen, gaining 13 percent against the dollar this year alone, and nearly 60 percent since 2004. To my knowledge Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen never actually turned down work for U.S. dollars, but when the rumor that she had went viral in Brazil I knew the earth had shifted in this part of the hemisphere. Now it's outbound Brazilians changing their reals into wads of greenbacks and having the time of their lives in Paris or Disney World.

You don't have to go that far to watch them frolic. The boom that has seen Brazil's economy soar has also deepened pockets. The country now boasts 20 billionaires on the Forbes list (up from just four in 2003) and 140 millionaires, a 19 percent rise year to year, against a 6 percent rise for the rest of the world. Boutique banks and private asset managers have decorated the skylines with their logos and heli-pads.

The bonanza is not just for those commuting in choppers. Climbing wages (overall payroll is up 16 percent year to year), a flood of consumer credit (growing by 30 percent yearly) and plenty of new jobs (1 million this year, 7.3 million since 2004), have hoisted countless poor into the consuming classes. Much is made of how China's surging economy has lifted tens of millions out of poverty. In fact, Dragonomics has increased the wealth gap, while Brazil has managed to reduce inequality at the same it booms. Brazil's poorest ten percent have seen their wages grow by 57 percent in real terms between 2002 and 2006, against a nine percent rise for the richest tenth, says economist and poverty scholar Marcelo Neri of the Fundação Getúlio Vargas, a business school.

And while the middle class in the developed world moans about slipping downmarket, Brazil's just keeps on rising. Some 20 million Brazilians have moved up to the middle class in the last decade, and are now putting 800 new cars a day on the road in São Paulo alone. Sound exaggerated? Check out rush hour.

After 14 months, the cloud of suspicion over Kate and Gerry McCann has lifted. The British couple are no longer officially considered suspects in the disappearance of their four-year-old daughter Maddy from a holiday complex in Portugal. The police inquiry is shelved. According to a statement from the country's attorney-general there is no evidence linking the parents to any crime.  That may come as little suprise to the British media, which throughout the affair never hesitated to dress up speculation as proof. This was the story that was simply too good to drop: a missing child, good-looking parents and a mystery that defied solution. Basic reporting standards were forgotten in pursuit of attention-grabbing headlines. Is the media now ready to mend its ways?

By Jonathan Kent

Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim is again under arrest on charges of sexual misconduct that appear to be politically motivated. Police detained him today in Kuala Lumpur before he was to appear voluntarily to face questioning over new charges that he violated Malaysia’s anti-sodomy law with a political aide. Days before his latest arrest, Anwar told Newsweek that the new charges against him were “disgusting” and said elements of the current government had framed him.

Refugees International researchers were surprised when they showed up in Taghi Naghi, an area in northwestern Afghanistan in June to assess one of the country’s 11 “land allocation schemes” for returning refugees. What they found differed sharply from the government’s plans for the hundreds of thousands of people returning from exile in Pakistan and Iran. Despite UN objections, the shelters had been built in the desert, an hour’s trip to the nearest city of Herat. A water pump was hooked up to a dry well, but an NGO trucking in water said their contract was going to run out soon after the visit. Only 12 families were occupying the more than 200 shelters that had been built, none of whom had any means of finding employment. According to one man living at Taghi Naghi, he might be forced to move his family to Herat despite being unable to pay its high city rents, since it was becoming increasingly difficult to feed his children.

The floundering Taghi Naghi project, one of 55 planned across Afghanistan, cost $2 million, and is just one example of how the refugee situation in Afghanistan is bad and growing worse, according to a Refugees International (RI) report published July 10. Since things started looking up for Afghanistan in 2002, the largest-ever refugee homecoming brought more than 5 million Afghan refugees back into the country, some of whom had been living in exile for three decades as their country weathered war with the Soviets, Taliban rule, and the NATO invasion. But over 3 million people are still stranded in exile, RI says, while many of those who have returned are ill-equipped to deal with Afghanistan’s harsh land and security crises. Deteriorating conditions in recent months due to a food crisis and an insurgency again on the rise have further complicated matters, while an impending Pakistani threat to bulldoze camps in their country by the end of 2009 has contributed an added time pressure to deal with the problems.

“The situation in Afghanistan is worsening, and we’re running the risk of losing the gains we’ve made in the past few years,” said RI advocate Patrick Duplat, who produced the report after traveling with a colleague for a month to meet with refugees in Pakistan and returnees in Afghanistan. “Of course, the situation in general in Afghanistan is quite dire. From 40 to 60 percent of the country is inaccessible, so all Afghans are vulnerable. But that being said, a large percentage of the population--5 million people--are particularly vulnerable.”
 
The report blames a lack of planning and coordination on the part of both Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government and its international backers, who provide over 90 percent of the country’s budget. While billions of dollars have been invested in reconstruction projects in Afghanistan since 2001, too few have made their way to real development projects, RI contends; large-scale infrastructure and counter-insurgency efforts have sapped most of the funds.

As a result, RI is calling on donors to coordinate and fund their efforts in Afghanistan at a joint UN and Afghan conference in Kabul in November. “What we’d like to see is the returnees being integrated into the mainstream national programs,” said Duplat, cautioning that a failure to act could lead refugees to either try their luck at returning to Pakistan or swell the ranks of Afghanistan’s urban poor. A lack of resources is not the problem, he says; the international community just needs to put its money where its mouth is to integrate refugees without forcibly displacing them, whether they want to come back to Afghanistan or stay in Pakistan permanently.

A competing jumble of climate change negotiations have turned the forum itself into a debate topic as polarizing as the carbon markets and global targets being proposed. Not one, but two extra groups have joined the G8 at Hokkaido, each with the potential to reach its own set of conclusions. The G8 + 5 group brings major developing emitters like China and India into the fold, and the Major Economies Meeting (MEM), George  W. Bush’s brainchild, adds three other big carbon emitters—Indonesia, Australia and South Korea—into the mix. Together, the groups account for 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Washington would prefer to settle the major points at the MEM before tackling the unwieldy 200-country United Nations gatherings, which are coming up against their deadline for a post-Kyoto treaty to be approved in Copenhagen in December of 2009. Coming out of Hokkaido empty-handed will make pre-Copenhagen talks this fall just that much messier.

Still, while none of the three groupings at Hokkaido will likely produce a major consensus on emissions caps, they are producing a lively diplomatic chess match. E.U. members, who want the group to commit to steep cuts in carbon emissions by 2050, are butting heads with Bush over his unwillingness to commit to numerical targets. Meanwhile, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda is trying to broker a compromise. With a more green-friendly Obama or McCain administration only months away, Fukuda apparently believes that a tussle with Bush is counterproductive. Instead, he’s pushing for agreements on less-polarizing issues, such as encouraging carbon capture and storage technology for coal power plants, promoting nuclear energy and lowering tariffs on clean technology.