Let them get on with it

The Libyans must control their own destiny, albeit with some help from their friends

So far, barely a week after the opposition captured the bulk of Tripoli, things have gone astonishingly well. For sure, as Colonel Muammar Qaddafi's men fled before the rebel onrush, they perpetrated a string of atrocities, murdering scores, perhaps even hundreds, of prisoners. But looting by the rebels, bar an excess of exuberance after they stormed the colonel's ludicrously lavish palace, has been limited. Supporters of the emerging government, under the aegis of the National Transitional Council, have generally heeded calls to refrain from reprisals. Local committees have kept a modicum of law and order on the streets, while a heartening number of the police who previously served under the colonel's regime have begun to return to their old duties. Checkpoints in the liberated capital are on the whole being decently manned. No less vitally, oil is expected to start flowing again soon, along with cash from accounts held by the previous regime that had been frozen by edict of the United Nations.

Terrorism in Nigeria at a dangerous level

A suicide-bombing on August 26th at the headquarters of the UN in Abuja, Nigeria's capital, which left at least 23 people dead, has sharply raised the stakes in the conflict between the government and its terrorist opponents. It was the first suicide-bombing in Nigeria to target an international body. It has rattled foreign residents. And it has made people question whether President Goodluck Jonathan's administration has a convincing plan to stop such attacks.

The prime suspect is Boko Haram, an extremist Muslim group whose name means "Western education is sinful". One of its spokesmen told foreign journalists that the action had been carried out to avenge the humiliating treatment of its members by Nigeria's army and police. Although reluctant to admit to an embarrassing failure of security, Nigerian officials have blamed the sect. The attack marks a big leap in Boko Haram's ambitions and suggests it may now be colluding with other more established groups, including al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which made a similar attack on UN offices in Algeria four years ago. The Nigerian secret police say that a member of Boko Haram recently came back from Somalia to oversee the attack.

Barack Obama's new economist Can Krueger crack it?

When Barack Obama took office his priority was to keep the economy from collapsing. Fittingly, the first chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, was a macroeconomist who had investigated such matters as the Depression of the 1930s. Now approaching the final year of his first term, Obama's ambitions and room for of manoeuvre have shrunk. When he addresses Congress on September 8th he is less likely to call for a big new stimulus than for a laundry list of lesser initiatives. Appropriately, the man he nominated on August 29th to head the CEA, Alan Krueger, is a microeconomist at Princeton University who has studied, for example, how the minimum wage affects New Jersey restaurant workers. The economy is certainly weak enough to warrant a call for lots more stimulus. The problem is that the Republicans who control the House of Representatives would simply ignore it. Obama stands a better chance with smaller, cheaper ideas: extending the payroll-tax cut and unemployment benefits now scheduled to expire in December; offering aid to small businesses; reauthorising and perhaps expanding transport funding; easier mortgage refinancing; and passing stalled free-trade agreements and patent reform, all while somehow cutting the deficit.

Krueger previously served in Obama's Treasury Department, overseeing such things as the HIRE Act, which gave employers a break on their Social Security taxes for hiring someone who had been out of work for at least 60 days. Were he to remain at Princeton, he might well be studying that law's impact. Now he is more likely to advise on a new version: Obama has suggested extending the payroll-tax cut to employers who hire new workers.