The Intelligence from The Economist

After last year’s vote was marred by fraud allegations, the electorate is split ahead of Sunday’s poll: will the country return the socialist MAS party of exiled leader Evo Morales to power? A private tutor to the rich and anxious reveals the costs—to students and tutors—of heightened academic pressure. And a new book yields a cat’s-eye view of 18th-century London.

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Angry protests following an alleged police killing continue, even after a hated police unit was shuttered. That exposes far-deeper discontent. Banks’ earnings this week show that belt-tightening earlier in the year has held them in good stead. What to do with the growing cash-pile? And misguided infrastructure plans have many Egyptians in a roads rage.

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Rhetoric and sabre-rattling from mainland China are rapidly ramping up; we examine the risk of an invasion that would have global consequences. A decision by World Rugby to ban trans women from the women’s game stokes a notoriously ill-tempered debate. And listening to an album built entirely from the songs of endangered British birds.

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The country yet again faces widespread starvation as a civil war grinds on, and both sides are to blame for the misery visited upon civilians. With the stroke of a pen, Argentina recently doubled in size—setting a precedent with big diplomatic and resource-extraction implications. And remembering the man who set hundreds of thousands of Indians free from indentured servitude.

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By the numbers to date, Sweden's light-touch covid-19 measures may not seem successful. But its pragmatism takes an instructively long view of the pandemic. China’s high-level party machinery brooks no political dissent; among street-level functionaries, stories of disobedience and tolerance are far more nuanced. And a devilishly clever way to stem the poaching of endangered turtles’ eggs.

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That a housefly could steal the show at America’s only vice-presidential debate is telling, but a discussion with more substance than bombast was a welcome respite. Cuba is experiencing its worst food crisis in decades, and that at last may spur changes to its confused and market-distorting dual-currency system. And geopolitics sticks its beak into an enormous annual bird migration.

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Britain’s prime minister will outline big wind-energy plans at his party’s annual conference, even as the pandemic and Brexit blow his government off course. The sombre tone at a thanksgiving festival in Ethiopia reveals how the country’s largest ethnic group is not getting the reforms it was promised. And a carcinogenic nut that remains wildly popular in China.

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Amid a flurry of conflicting information over the weekend, details of Donald Trump’s progress and prognosis remain worryingly unclear. How will this brush with the virus change the campaign, or the president? Asia’s migrant workers had difficult, precarious lives that the pandemic made even worse; only now are matters improving. And the perplexing preponderance of Albanian pop stars. 

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