Новости за 09.08.2018

That’s the way the Monet goes

A TEENAGER, headphones pinned to his ears, heaves a stuffed backpack across the station hall. A team of adult supervisors, eyes darting back and forth, guides boisterous children in fluorescent yellow jackets through the ticket barrier, on their way to a colonie de vacances, French subsidised summer camp. A tall, lean father in well-pressed shorts marches three small matching boys towards the platform. Fit-looking grandparents climb into a train carriage, shepherding grandchildren to their seats. Читать дальше...

THERESA MAY and several of her cabinet ministers have been on a charm offensive around Europe, trying to sell her Chequers plan for Brexit to doubtful European Union governments. Most recently the prime minister bearded Emmanuel Macron in the French president’s Fort Brégançon holiday retreat in the south of France. Like most EU leaders, Mr Macron is sceptical about the Chequers plan. He is also unwilling to sidestep the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, who has already rejected several of its central elements. Читать дальше...

FEW Britons have heard of Anguilla. Yet the tiny Caribbean island, home to around 14,000 people, is proud to be a British overseas territory. In the 1960s its islanders successfully staged a bloodless rebellion to stop Britain granting them independence as part of St Kitts & Nevis, around 60 miles to the south. Today they style themselves as the only place to have “fought Britain to remain British” and loudly trumpet their links to London. But like other far-flung relics of empire, Anguillans often complain that they are overlooked. Читать дальше...

WHEN Ewa began looking for jobs, she did not plan to leave the country. She now works as a modern-language teacher at a private school in Dubai, earning three times what she did in London. Perks include free flights home, accommodation, private health insurance and even a furniture allowance. Five years after qualifying as a teacher she is head of her year. Would she return? Her “heart beats for London” but living there “on a teacher salary can be really difficult”, so not soon.

IF AN opposition MP were asked to come up with an ideal backdrop for the parliamentary recess, he would surely set out the month just endured by Theresa May. Two senior cabinet ministers resigned. Support for the prime minister’s Brexit plans dropped like a stone. Grassroots Tories started baying for her head. A tired government looked close to exhaustion.

THE fire took hold at around midnight. It was so fierce and sudden in the wooden house in Himbi, outside Goma, in eastern Congo, that Luc Nkulula could not get through the lounge to the main door. Nor could he climb out of his bedroom window, which was barred against thieves. He managed to stuff his laptop and some papers through, the most important things. Then the blazing curtain fell on his back, and he could not fight it off.

UNTIL February, when the first of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy lifters was launched, the world’s most powerful rocket was the Delta IV Heavy. On August 11th, if all goes according to plan, one of these will take off from Cape Canaveral carrying a craft called the Parker Solar Probe.

VISION is useless in murky water. To deal with that deficiency dolphins have evolved sonar. They emit clicks and interpret the echoes to find their prey. But not all marine mammals are so equipped. Seals, for instance, have no sonar, yet that does not stop them finding distant meals as effectively as dolphins can. This puzzled researchers for years, until they discovered that the secret lies in the animals’ whiskers—which they are now trying to copy, to develop novel underwater sensors.

Good news for lemurs. Bad for millipedes

MANY animals are herbalists. Pregnant elephants eat particular leaves to induce the births of their calves. Birds keep bloodsucking bugs at bay by weaving insect-repelling plants into their nests. Fruit flies lay their eggs on fermenting matter that is rich in ethanol, which drives away parasitic wasps. There is, in other words, a whole pharmacopoeia of botanical products out there. Examples of animals employing the products of other animals for medical purposes are, by contrast, rare. Читать дальше...

WILL a Democrat win America’s next presidential election? Will Tesla file for bankruptcy by the end of 2019? Punters now have a new option for such bets: Augur, an online prediction market. Whether it takes off will be a gauge of the viability not only of such markets but of decentralised applications built on blockchains, the databases underlying crypto-currencies.

COMPARED with equity investing, bond investing can seem stuck in the dark ages. As hedge funds and asset managers use whizzy algorithms to trade shares automatically, bond-fund managers still often call traders by phone. So when new investing strategies do arise, they make an even bigger splash. “Factor” investing is the latest example.

LAST month Nick Rowe had a bad dream. It was five minutes before the first class of the autumn term at Carleton University in Ottawa, where he has long taught macroeconomics. But he could not find the classroom. Then he woke up and remembered with relief that he had just retired.

“I WISH we could be private with Tesla.” So said an exasperated and exhausted Elon Musk to Rolling Stone last November. Tesla’s rise has been remarkable. In 15 years it has taken on established carmakers to become the world’s leading manufacturer of electric cars. But the journey has been bumpy. Of late Mr Musk says his company has been in “production hell” trying to increase output of the Model 3, a whizzy mass-market saloon. While on its quest to change the world, Tesla has frequently missed... Читать дальше...

IN MOST countries the priority with the public finances is how to stop debt spiralling. But some places have the opposite difficulty: how to manage piles of savings. China and Saudi Arabia are examples. Globally, governments have over $20trn stashed in state-run investment vehicles. That sum is three times the size of BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager. Managing it is fraught and becoming more so owing to protectionism. Governments with spare funds should study Singapore, which, as in many aspects of administration... Читать дальше...

AMERICAN companies spent $91bn on staff training last year, almost a third as much again as they did in 2016. That equated to more than $1,000 for every staff member being taught, according to a survey by Training magazine.

THE summer holidays have just begun, but it is a busy morning at Cadoxton Primary School, in Barry, an industrial town in Wales. It runs a summer programme for hard-up children, providing meals and activities over the holidays. As youngsters run laughing and screaming into the school cafeteria for breakfast, their parents saunter out, some visibly relieved. Just three days into the six-week school holidays one beleaguered mother says her nine-year-old daughter has already asked five times to go bowling. Читать дальше...

Back to earth in September

IN A classroom at Imperial College London, students sit hunched over laptops, typing lines of code. Just nine years old, they are attending Firetech, a British technology summer camp for children. Courses include “Junior Augmented Reality” and “Creating for YouTube”. Such programmes are proliferating in many countries. They pander to two common demands from well-off parents: to entertain children over the long summer holidays and to give them a leg-up over their peers. Читать дальше...

Not the Gili beach party some imagined

ON AUGUST 6th the Indonesian island of Lombok was shaken for the second time in ten days. A 6.9-magnitude earthquake struck the tourist haven, razing buildings, shattering roads and cutting off electricity. A government-issued tsunami warning added to the panic, sending people running for higher ground, though the ensuing wave proved small. Thousands of people have been evacuated. Crowds gathered on the beaches of the Gili Islands, off Lombok’s north-west coast, to be shipped to safety. Читать дальше...

“LOOK at the lanes!” exclaimed an astonished bystander from a bridge above one of Dhaka’s main roads. For a week a miraculous transformation settled upon the motorised anarchy for which the Bangladeshi capital is notorious. The streets were still gridlocked with vehicles, from battered buses and little tuk-tuks to the four-wheel-drives of the elite. Yet beneath the bridge and elsewhere, the traffic crawled in neat, well-behaved lanes. Darting between them, students in high-school uniforms, acting as self-appointed traffic police... Читать дальше...

TWO years ago Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, argued that Americans “are no better off today than they were before the war on poverty began in 1964”. The poverty rate, he explained, stood at 15%—the same as in the mid-1960s. Last month the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) reached a completely different conclusion. The war on poverty, it proclaimed, was “largely over and a success”, with only 3% of Americans now poor. Clearly, both cannot be right. In fact, neither is. Читать дальше...

Trust but verify

IN 1965 President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. Among other things, this required places with a history of discriminating against non-white voters to obtain federal approval before changing the way they conducted elections. In the ensuing decades it narrowed, and in some cases reversed, racial gaps in voting. Congress repeatedly reauthorised the Act, most recently in 2006 for 25 years.

But in 2013 the Supreme Court gutted the pre-clearance provision. Читать дальше...

RIDE-HAILING companies like Uber and Lyft are loved by city dwellers but may be jamming roads. In midtown and lower Manhattan, cars have slowed from an average speed of 9.1mph (14.6kph) in 2010 to 7.1mph in 2017. Concerned about both traffic jams and falling wages for ordinary taxi drivers, New York’s city council passed a bill on August 8th imposing a one-year moratorium on new licences for hired vehicles.

FOR the third consecutive year, Seattle has the most cranes in operation of any city in America—three times as many as New York. Long a placid, drizzly company town, the place is booming. Since 2010 Seattle has grown more quickly than any other large American city, thanks in part to the success of Amazon and Microsoft, two local technology firms. Entrepreneurs are flocking there, repelled by the obscene costs of San Francisco.