Economist Covers

Politics last week

President Lech Kaczynski of Poland, his wife, and dozens of the country's military and political elite were killed when an aeroplane transporting them to a ceremony to commemorate a second world war massacre crashed in bad weather in western Russia.

Ahead of the first ever televised campaign debate between the leaders of Britain's political parties, the Conservative Party, Labour and the Liberal Democrats all launched their election manifestos. The Conservatives continued to maintain a lead in opinion polls.

Barack Obama hosted a summit on nuclear security. The leaders of 46 countries attended, including China's president, Hu Jintao (Israel's Binyamin Netanyahu declined the invitation). There were assurances from most nations, such as Ukraine, to do more to tighten controls over nuclear material, but no binding agreements.

Business last week

Countries in the euro zone cobbled together a 30 billion euro ($41 billion) loan package for Greece, should it need it. The IMF is expected to add 15 billion euros. This came in response to market jitters about the lack of detail in previous commitments and a jump in spreads on Greek government debt.

Twitter unveiled an advertising scheme for its business. It is the biggest change since its creation three years ago for the micro-blogging site, which will place ads at the top of search results for some topics, such as films or sport. Twitter's growth has hitherto been enabled by huge dollops of venture capital and it only recently began to reap revenue from its service by striking deals with web-search firms.

Apple pushed back the date for the launch of the iPad outside America by one month, to the end of May, because demand for the tablet computer was stronger than expected in the United States. Apple shifted 500,000 iPads in the first week of sales there.