Newsweek’s ‘The Imperfect Storm’, found the economy had caught the chill. “I see all the signs of a boom-bust cycle,” says Robbert van Batenburg, head of research at the New York-based firm Louis Capital Markets in the article. Chief among those threats, he says, “are China’s huge trade imbalance and soaring inflation.”

Elsewhere, the news is a little more reassuring. In spite of last week’s suicide bombings, Time finds that President Bush’s deployment of 30,000 additional US troops in Iraq, beginning last January, has decreased the violence. In “The Surge At Year One” Michael Duffy and Mark Kuki say that, “One year and 937 US fatalities later, the surge is a fragile and limited success. (It) has helped stabilize the capital and its surroundings but has yet to spark the political gains that could set the stage for a larger American withdrawal.” The article congratulates American military strategy which, ironically, took a tip or two from Saddam Hussein!

The Economist wonders ‘Has Iran won?’ following National Intelligence Estimate’s report that said Iran had stopped clandestine development of nuclear warheads five years ago. Although “(The) headline was enough to pull the rug from under the diplomacy”. The danger, says The Economist, is that “the weaponisation work the NIE thinks was halted is easy to restart and easy to hide”.

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday at the American primaries. In ‘The greatest show on earth’ The Economist, says so far the Republicans have sprung the biggest surprise: “A few months ago the party looked set to tear itself apart, with no fewer than five front-runners, each representing a different strand of conservatism, vying for supremacy.” Now it’s a clear choice between McCain and Romney. For the Democrats this is still, “Mrs Clinton’s race to lose...Mrs Clinton goes into Super Tuesday having so far failed to convince plenty of broadly sympathetic people, including this newspaper, that she should be the automatic Democratic choice.”

Late January, Romano Prodi’s government fell, and The New Yorker carries the story of an Italy that is driven more by political corruption than political instability. In ‘Bebe’s Inferno’, Tom Mueller, profiles popular comedian Beppe Grillo’s war on dirty politics. Grillo “is a distinctly Italian combination of Michael Moore and Stephen Colbert: an activist and vulgarian with a deft ear for political satire.” He got “two million people in two hundred and twenty cities (to celebrate) V-Day, an unofficial new national holiday, the “V” signifying victory, vendetta, and, especially, “Vaffanculo” (“F*** off”).” Time we found a Grillo too?