Barack Obama bounces back; When poll donation hardly pays; Brits and the taste for invasion; Generation of 'supercentenarians'; White skin and Pakistan

1 Barack Obama bounces back (BBC) US President Barack Obama has been re-elected to a second term, defeating Republican challenger Mitt Romney. With results in from most states, America's first black president has secured the 270 votes in the electoral college needed to win the race. Mr Obama prevailed despite lingering dissatisfaction with the economy and a well-funded challenge by Mr Romney. With swing states Virginia, Florida and Colorado still too close to call, Mr Obama has won 281 electoral votes to Mr Romney's 203.

Under the US constitution, each state is given a number of electoral votes in rough proportion to its population. The candidate who wins 270 electoral votes - by prevailing in the mostly winner-take-all state contests - becomes president. The popular vote, which is symbolically and politically important but not decisive in the race, remains too close to call.

On Tuesday, the president held the White House by assembling solid Democratic states and a number of important swing states such as Iowa, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. His narrow victory in Ohio, a critical Mid-Western swing state, sealed the victory. Mr Romney won North Carolina and Indiana, two states Mr Obama won in 2008, as well as the solid Republican states. But he was unable to win in Ohio or other states needed to breach the 270 threshold.

2 When poll donation hardly pays (Eduardo Porter in The New York Times) The most expensive election campaign in American history is over. Executives across America can now begin to assess what their companies will get in return for the roughly $2 billion spent by business interests. Regardless of the outcome, the conclusion is likely to be not very much. From the point of view of shareholders, corporate contributions will probably turn out to be, at best, a waste of money. At worst, they could undermine their companies’ performance for a long time.

As Wall Street knows well, the pitfalls of political spending start with picking the wrong horse: the financiers who broke so decisively for Barack Obama in 2008 changed their minds after the president started labeling them fat cats and supported a financial reform law they hate. This time they put $20 million in the campaign of Mitt Romney, more than three times what they contributed to President Obama’s re-election. 

A study published last summer by scholars at Rice University and Long Island University looked at nearly 1,000 firms in the Standard & Poor’s 1,500-stock composite index between 1998 and 2008 and found that most companies that spent on politics — including lobbying and campaign donations — had lower stock market returns.

3 London jobs fall to lowest in 20 years (Simon Bowers in The Guardian) City job numbers are expected to fall to their lowest level in two decades next year as banks and investment houses continue to make deep cuts to ailing operations, according to a study. The number of people employed in the financial sector in London, excluding most accountants and lawyers, has already sunk below 250,000 this year, 11% down from last year. It was more than 350,000 before the financial crisis struck.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) suggests the City is being forced to shed jobs against a backdrop of depressed trading in currencies, gilts and equities, as well as a sustained drought in corporate mergers and acquisitions. The thinktank predicts the tally will fall again next year, to 237,036, before stabilising. The last time the City employed that few financial workers was 1993. Last month PwC's joint survey of the finance industry, in conjunction with the CBI, found 60% of banks reporting lower headcount for the three months to the end of September.

Last week UBS announced up to 3,000 posts would go at its London offices, part of a wider cull of 10,000 staff. Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank have also announced job cuts, while Barclays and Societe Generale have indicated they are looking at shrinking their respective investment banking operations.

4 Brits and the taste for invasion (Richard Seymour in The Guardian) The other countries must feel so left out. New research shows that practically everyone has been invaded by British troops at one point or another. A “staggering 90% of the world’s nations” have been overrun by the turbulent Brits – Sweden, Mongolia and the Vatican City are among the 22 to have been tragically overlooked.

If you think this is a facetious tone to adopt, it is nothing compared with the knockabout, what-a-larf tone of some of the coverage that has been lavished on this new book. In a way, this is what the book set out to accomplish. As its author says, it is lighthearted fun, and it claims not to take a moral stance on Britain's empire.

The research certainly has some pedagogical value. For one thing, it shows the scope of empire's activities to extend well beyond the formal boundaries of the colonial sphere. It takes into account the activities of pirates and privateers acting on behalf of the crown just as much as invading armies. This does not just disclose the sheer scale of the enterprise of empire, shocking as it may be. It indicates that there may be much more to empires than the establishment of formal colonies, and that the time of empire may sprawl well beyond its previously delimited boundaries.

5 Generation of ‘supercentenarians’ (Rupert Jones in The Guardian) Britain's oldest man, Reg Dean, celebrated his 110th birthday on Sunday. But it may not be long before he is overtaken in the age stakes by a new breed of "supercentenarians". The boss of one of Britain's main financial bodies has revealed that several insurers are currently modelling pension products on the basis that their customers could reach the age of 120 or even 125.

Speaking to hundreds of actuaries at a conference, Otto Thoresen, director general of the Association of British Insurers, added that within our lifetime it will be "the norm" for people to live to 100 or more. But this, he said, threw up huge challenges in terms of getting people to save more for what may end up being a very long retirement. Life expectancy has been growing steadily for decades, and the government has already predicted that 27% of today's under-16s will reach 100 – a total of 3.3 million people.

Legal & General on Tuesday quoted Office for National Statistics data showing that the number of UK people aged 100 or more has increased five-fold – from 2,500 in 1980 to 12,640 in 2010 – and said that projections suggest the number of centenarians in the UK will exceed 160,000 by mid-2040.

6 White skin and Pakistan (Rafia Zakaria in Dawn) White skin, many claim, means a connection to an Aryan heritage, a direct relation to the conquering hordes who came thousands of years ago. It also means distance from the native Dravidian race — the small, dark people who inhabited the subcontinent and toiled for centuries along its rivers and mountains. Those dark people, it is assumed, are all on the other side of the border; being Pakistani means descent from Alexander and the Aryans.

If heroines and heroes are always white, villains are always dark. The ruling calculation of skin colour hence tabulated that what is dark is poor and dirty and what is white is pure and good; Pakistan is the land of the pure, and so we must all be white. In the past century, the racial creation of whiteness is located most recently in the ethic propagated by the Nazi regime in Hitler’s Germany. In the run-up to the Second World War, everyone in Germany wanted to look Aryan; it meant they were safe and belonged to the ruling race. They never came to the subcontinent to swell their ranks.

Recent American overtures have served to re-entrench Pakistan’s post-colonial ghosts: roads being used to supply foreign armies as they were before, borders deemed negligible when they come in the way of the geo-strategic ruminations of fair-skinned superpowers. But none of these impositions, all courtesy of the mostly white world, seem to have dulled the Pakistani obsession with fair skin. The reasons for this contradiction — a hatred of white people coupled with a reckless, limitless obsession to look like them — can only be speculated upon.

As Pakistani men search for their fair brides, and Pakistani children dream of fair princes and princesses, frowning confusedly at their own brown skin, they plant afresh the myth that to be good and strong they must also be white. As Pakistani girls bleach their skin, rubbing steroids and acids on their faces to strip them of pigment, they enact again the preoccupation of a nation unsure of its origins and its future. Without the creams and peels and ointments, the coloured skin will always grow back brown and resolute, begging to be loved and acknowledged but failing again and again.