EVEN in Ukraine, elections can end. After two rounds of voting and weeks of legal rumbles, Viktor Yanukovich was inaugurated on Thursday February 25th as Ukraine’s fourth democratically elected president. In November 2004 he tried and failed to steal the crown. Now he has played (mostly) by the rules—and won. Although Yulia Tymoshenko, his charismatic rival (and Ukraine’s prime minister), refuses to recognise Mr Yanukovich’s victory, she withdrew her legal appeals this week. Ukraine’s highest office has thus moved from an incumbent to an opposition leader: a rare achievement in an ex-Soviet republic.

Mr Yanukovich’s legitimacy is now accepted by the world’s leaders, and not just by Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, who rashly congratulated him on his rigged victory in 2004. This time Moscow made no such crude statements. Instead, it asserted its feelings of fraternity towards Kiev by dispatching Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, to bless Mr Yanukovich before his inauguration. This says as much about Mr Yanukovich’s piety as about Moscow’s tactic of using the church to extend its influence. Rarely have the Russians used soft power so well. Yet Mr Yanukovich, conscious of his pro-Russian image, tried to downplay the patriarch’s visit, and is planning his first foreign visit to Brussels, not Moscow. …

WHERE would they be without their past, the ex-captive nations? (Or “ex-communist countries”, “former Soviet satellite states”, “the old Eastern block”: so much history even in the category). The region between the Baltic and the Black Sea is so shaped by history that at first sight the question seems absurd. Trianon, Yalta, Molotov-Ribbentrop, Munich—the gloomy echoes of past betrayals and atrocities are inescapable.

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THE smoking of a fat cigar is a sign that things are going well for Americans and shifts in cigar consumption are an accurate barometer of the national mood. Puffing on a stogie went into sharp decline after the Wall Street crash. President Kennedy signed the Cuban trade embargo in 1962 but not before sending a lackey to purchase 1,200 fine Cuban cigars on his behalf. At the time, American males smoked around 150 large cigars every year, three times more than at present. But smoking went into decline after the first surgeon-general’s report on the dangers of tobacco in 1964. With the onset of the credit crunch cigar smoking took another dive. But with talk of Barack Obama lifting the world’s longest-standing trade embargo, imports of fine Cuban smokes might give cigars another boost.

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ITALIAN courts may be slow. But no one could claim that they were arbitrary. Defendants get the right to a trial (sometimes after a pre-trial), and then up to two appeals: one on the merits of the case, and another on points of law. Often, the result is that a case will be timed out by a statute of limitations before it can run that long course.

On Thursday February 25th, Italy’s highest appeal court decided that that is what had happened in the politically explosive trial of David Mills, a British lawyer who once advised Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, on offshore finance. Mr Mills had been convicted by a lower court of having taken a $600,000 bribe, allegedly supplied by Mr Berlusconi, for holding back evidence at two trials involving the prime minister in the 1990s. …

IT IS tempting to dismiss the bipartisan health-reform summit convened by Barack Obama on Thursday February 25th as a colossal waste of time. After all, the gabfest involving senior Congressional leaders from both parties lasted well over six hours, with no tangible results. Neither side moved one jot on any issue of substance and not one vote is likely to have changed on either side as a result of the summit.

And yet, the televised gathering was not pointless. For one thing, the sight of America’s leading politicians sitting together amiably for an entire day to discuss a matter as inflammatory as health reform (think “death panels”) was itself heartening. Surprisingly, given the bitter partisan wrangling of late, they did so in a manner that was mostly civil and substantive. Towards the end of the long day, Joe Barton, a House Republican from Texas, even declared that he had never seen “so many members of the House and Senate behave so well for so long before so many television cameras.” …

The American economy and Wall Street bonuses may be growing again, but many of America’s commercial banks are still fragile. According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which is on the hook for the money people have in failed banks, 140 banks went under last year, more than four times as many as collapsed in the entire eight-year period from 2000-2007. Forty-five banks failed in the last quarter of 2009 alone. The agency reckons that another 702 banks, with total assets worth $402.8 billion, are in trouble but have not failed. The number of these “problem institutions” is more than nine times as great as in 2007; the total assets held by such troubled banks is more than 18 times as great.

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WITH an apocalyptic sense of humour, Angelinos quip they have four seasons—wildfires, downpours, mudslides and earthquakes. The first three usually occur during autumn and winter; the last whenever the fractured rocks beneath the Los Angeles basin decide it’s time to release some megatons of pent-up energy.

Actually, because the region is bounded by a frigid ocean on one side and a baking desert on the other, while the sky above is cloudless for over 300 days a year, the temperature varies more dramatically than is generally appreciated. So much so, indeed, that once every month or two your correspondent has to reprogram his home’s heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC) system to adjust for the change in temperature and humidity. …