Новости за 09.08.2018

WITH a large group of white nationalists coming to Washington, DC—an overwhelmingly liberal, minority-white city—this weekend, one of the thorniest issues for the city has been how to prevent violent clashes on its public-transport system. And one proposed solution generated such an outcry that it had to be quickly scrapped.

See the interactive in the browser Explore ourhouse-price indices Global cities American cities Global A WORLDWIDE downturn in house prices once seemed unthinkable. The Great Recession of 2008-09 proved that property can lose value precipitously, just like any other asset.

See the interactive in the browser Explore ourhouse-price indices Global cities American cities Global A DECADE after causing a financial crisis that brought the world economy to its knees, housing in the United States appears to be back on top.

See the interactive in the browser Explore ourhouse-price indices Global cities American cities Global FINANCIAL media focus most of their attention on stocks and bonds, but the world’s biggest asset class is actually residential property.

“THERE was just wall-to-wall amplifiers, and a space for the door—and that was it,” recalled John Paul Jones, Led Zeppelin’s bass guitarist, many decades later.

Between a rock and a better place

THE food industry is going nowhere. Pretty pictures on food packets mislead. Big companies have disconnected people from their sustenance. Consumers, especially millennials, are sceptics about industrial-scale food production. Even sellers of healthy products, such as mineral water, spread harm—just look at billions of their plastic bottles that choke the oceans.

Such views are commonly heard among food activists, radical bloggers or anti-capitalists. Читать дальше...

WHEN members of America’s Congress passed the Magnitsky Act in 2012 to pursue Kremlin officials responsible for the death of a Russian whistleblower, and even when they extended it to include foreigners involved in corruption and human-rights violations, few of them imagined the law would ever be used against the government of a NATO ally.

Wagenknecht wants her voters back

SITTING down with The Economist in her office in Berlin, Sahra Wagenknecht is restless: “Do we think that anyone can just migrate to Germany and have a claim to social welfare?” asks the doyenne of the Left (Die Linke), a socialist party. “Or do we say that labour migration is more of a problem?” The party’s leader in the Bundestag worries about its direction. “If you concentrate more on hip, urban sorts of voters—on identity and lifestyle debates—you don’t speak to the poorest in society. Читать дальше...

Flame wars

DONALD TRUMP credits the tariffs he has imposed on steel and aluminium imports, and on a range of Chinese products, with almost magical potency. Either they will force other countries to drop trade barriers and crown him as dealmaker-in-chief, or they will pay down government debt while saving favoured industries. “Plants are opening all over the US, Steelworkers are working again, and big dollars are flowing into our Treasury,” he tweeted on August 4th. How do those claims stack up? Читать дальше...

WHEN Donald Trump tweeted on August 5th that tariffs were working “big time”, American media sprang into action to test the claim (see article). In China, editors were more circumspect. No major Chinese-language newspaper reported his tweets. One of his claims—that China’s stockmarket has fallen 27% in the past four months—was an exaggeration. But why would any self-respecting propagandist in Beijing dwell on that? Chinese stocks have indeed fallen sharply (see chart), which officials do not wish to emphasise. Читать дальше...

BY HIS own account Christopher Hitchens, an author who died in 2011, was a poor student. He left Oxford with a third-class degree. This was not for want of ability. Hitchens would become a prolific essayist and fearsome debater. Rather, it was a choice. His tutors warned him about neglecting his studies. But he preferred to divide his time between his social life, political protests, books (other than the prescribed ones) and lively debates with other thinkers.

THE oil industry has much to fear from the Paris climate deal of 2015, which aims to limit temperature rises to less than 2°C above the pre-industrial era. To curb carbon emissions, demand for fossil fuels will have to drop in coming decades. That is likely to push down oil prices and the value of investments that firms have made based upon them.

IF YOU want to study how the legal title to assets worth many billions of dollars changes hands in China, then peer carefully at page 116 of Alibaba’s new annual report. The text is dense and you may have to put a cold towel on your head and read it several times. The gist is that the Chinese internet giant is reforming its legal structure, which uses a fragile and ingenious device known as a variable interest entity (VIE). Alibaba’s attempt to make its VIEs safer is to be welcomed and will be... Читать дальше...

BUYER’S remorse is often experienced in Silicon Valley by investors who plough money into risky startups only to see them fail. Some technology entrepreneurs are now suffering from seller’s remorse. They are those whose young companies have grown big in part thanks to Chinese financial backing, but now feel under scrutiny because of an escalating fight between the two tech superpowers.

PepsiCo said this week that Indra Nooyi will step down in October after 12 years as chief executive. During her tenure revenues rose by 80% to over $63bn, though rival Coca Cola delivered bigger gains in market capitalisation. Ms Nooyi presciently invested in healthier offerings, offsetting weakness in sales of sugary products. She fended off activist investors who demanded a break-up. She was one of the first Asian Americans to run an American giant, helping to shatter a “bamboo ceiling”. When she took the top job... Читать дальше...

The man, the meme, the Indian dream

FEW national leaders are as careful of their image as Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister. He is said to change clothes as often as four times a day, keeping harmony with the occasion. His favoured style is to wear a mandarin-collared jerkin over a short-sleeved kurta, or long shirt. The jerkin was long known as a Nehru jacket, after Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, for whom it was a sartorial staple. But so iconic has it become on... Читать дальше...

JAPAN has made a lot of noise in recent years about demolishing the traditional view that women should stay at home while men go out to work. So it was shocking when, on August 7th, Tokyo Medical University, a prestigious medical school, confessed to marking down the test scores of female applicants to keep the ratio of women in each class below 30%. This systematic manipulation, university officials admitted, had gone on since 2006.

NEW ZEALAND’S deputy prime minister, Winston Peters, knows how to stir the pot. In the midst of a diplomatic tiff with his country’s biggest and usually chummiest neighbour, he suggested that Australia was in need of a new flag. Its current one, he complained, too closely “copied” New Zealand’s. Since the two ensigns are so similar, Australia’s should be the one to change. (Australia’s flag was designed first, but was formally adopted a year later than New Zealand’s, in 1903.) Mr Peters, who recently... Читать дальше...

QUEBEC’S proudly Francophone separatists may want to learn some Arabic. On August 5th, as Canadians enjoyed a long weekend, Saudi Arabia abruptly expelled their ambassador and froze bilateral trade and investment. Its state-run funds have reportedly been ordered to dump their Canadian assets, no matter how much it costs to do so. The kingdom is angry about tweets from Canada’s foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, criticising the arrests of Saudi human-rights activists. For Saudi Arabia, this was unacceptable “foreign interference”. Читать дальше...

Between a rock and a holy place

EVER since the Roman army tried to topple it in the 1st century, knocking a few slabs from the top, the Western Wall in Jerusalem has remained largely intact. A relic of the second Jewish temple, most of which the Romans did destroy, the wall attracts thousands of Jewish worshippers each day. One called Daniella Goldberg was standing in front of it when a big slab of the wall came crashing down next to her on July 23rd.

Ms Goldberg was unharmed... Читать дальше...

Who ordered this?

IN THE early hours of August 5th four men broke into a house in eastern Zimbabwe known to be home to activists for the MDC Alliance, the country’s main opposition bloc. They dragged the husband and wife outside before beating them with sticks on their back and buttocks. Two of the assailants took turns raping the wife; the other two raped the husband. All the while the children of the couple watched.

After holding peaceful elections on July 30th Zimbabwe has again descended into violence. Читать дальше...

A GUST of wind struck the Plaza Bolívar in Bogotá while Iván Duque was sworn in as Colombia’s president on August 7th. During his inauguration speech, delivered on a massive stage thronged with Latin American presidents and other dignitaries, a man struggled to shield him from a light rain with an umbrella. Seeking to banish the bitterness of a polarised election campaign, Mr Duque promised to “govern Colombia with a spirit of construction, never destruction”.

IF BRAZILIAN politics were a telenovela, the general election in October would make for a riveting finale. A motley cast of suitors is vying for the hand of a disappointed electorate. They include an old flame, who is pressing his suit from a jail cell, a swain who has all the attributes brides normally want but is a bit of a bore, and a rascal who promises excitement and danger. Unlike the plots of past political dramas, this one is building up to an ending that is impossible to guess.

Like a bandit

IN 1970s films like “Duel” and “Smokey and the Bandit”, truckers are outlaws. If that was ever close to the truth, it is now a highway’s length from it. Consider a requirement, enforced since April, that lorries must be fitted with an electronic logging device (ELD) to track speed, location and driving times. Drivers who are just a few dozen miles from home must now often pull over and wait, sometimes for ten hours, before continuing.

Or consider the video cameras that some logging devices aim at drivers. Читать дальше...