Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist.

I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

A growing body of evidence suggests the world's most unstable and violent countries are those

where women are mistreated most, from mere exclusion to out-and-out subjugation.

We travel to places where the trend is most painfully clear.

And there's something funny going on with hummingbirds.

Females of the species often look like the males,

but some of them change their plumage over time.

We examine some new experiments aimed at explaining the fleetingly fancy feathers.

But first... Tomorrow marked the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks in New York City.

All of Manhattan is covered, downtown Manhattan is covered with thick white ash and building

material.

Both 110 story towers of the World Trade Center had been destroyed, and many of the nearly

3,000 dead hadn't yet been found.

As exhausted firefighters sorted through rubble, still wreathed in smoke, New York's future looked bleak.

Two months later, a 16-acre pit was still burning.

Even now, there is a sense of awesome, gruesome power.

Only the hoses continue to try to damp the continuous fires beneath.

It took more than eight months to clean up, but the attacks spurred the transformation

not just of Lower Manhattan, but all of New York City. In some ways, the country is worse off

than it was two decades ago. It sparked a 20-year war in Afghanistan and another one in Iraq.

...