Новости за 01.11.2018

Frank v Gaos concerns an $8.5m settlement in an internet-privacy complaint against Google

“DEPORT FAKE refugees”, read the signs held up by protesters in central Seoul in late October. The object of their ire was a group of 500-odd Yemenis who had arrived over the summer on Jeju island, an agreeable resort 500km to the south, to seek asylum from their country’s civil war. “We don’t want them here, and the government is just trying to shut us up,” one protester told a local news agency. On the other side of the square, a group of counter-protesters brandished “refugees welcome” posters. Читать дальше...

The woof and the smooth

AFEW LAPS of the pool can help prevent diseases in later life, stave off obesity and maintain ageing joints—for dogs as well as humans, claims Wanwan (“Woof-woof”) Fitness, a sports club for pooches west of Tokyo. Dogs can take swimming classes, but for those that don’t like getting wet, there is the option of a 30-minute session on the balance ball for 4,000 yen ($36). If Rover needs to “relieve tension” over a lost bone or a cat that got away, Wanwan has a balm for that too... Читать дальше...

MICHEL ROCARD, a former French prime minister, once described the peace deal he brokered in New Caledonia in 1988 as a “bet on intelligence”. A referendum on November 4th will reveal whether the gamble has paid off. The small Pacific territory’s long-term residents will vote on the question: “Do you want New Caledonia to accede to full sovereignty and become independent?”

AS IN POST-SOVIET Russia or opioid-ravaged parts of America, stalling growth in life expectancy is often a sign of a sickly society. Diagnosing the sickness, however, can be difficult. Researchers seeking to explain why Britons have recently stopped living longer have been hampered by a lack of data. Information is often out of date and tends to cover broad swathes of the country, making it hard to spot underlying trends. In the absence of a better explanation, some experts have argued that the... Читать дальше...

IN BELFAST, THE past is constantly passed. Protestants heading to the shops might walk by a mural of “King Billy”, as they call William of Orange, who helped ensure English domination of Ireland in the 17th century. In a Catholic area the subject might be Bobby Sands, a republican who died on hunger strike in 1981. But even without such clues, it is not hard to get your bearings, for there is more vacant land on one side of the sectarian divide than on the other. “You can tell a Protestant part... Читать дальше...

LOCOMOTIVES HAVE plied the Dawlish railway seawall, which hugs Devon’s beaches between Exeter and Newton Abbot, since 1846. Passengers are treated to magnificent views of the English Channel—and occasionally to a frisson, when rough seas break on the concrete groynes and envelop oncoming trains in sea spray. If, that is, the trains are running, which increasingly they are not. Service was suspended for a day in mid-October after storm Callum wrecked a culvert. In 2014 the line closed for two months to repair storm damage. Читать дальше...

The pity of war

AMERICA IS FINALLY losing patience with the war in Yemen. For more than three years it has backed the Saudi-led coalition fighting Houthi rebels, swatting away concerns about human rights and civilian casualties. But on October 30th the secretary of defence, James Mattis, unexpectedly asked the Saudis to accept a truce. “Thirty days from now, we want to see everybody around a peace table, based on a ceasefire,” he said at a Washington think-tank. Hours later the secretary of state... Читать дальше...

IRAQIS ARE desperate to reboot their creaking democracy. Nearly every government since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 has proven corrupt, incompetent or dysfunctional. Their new prime minister, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, hardly seems like a change. The 76-year-old former finance and oil minister belongs to the old elite, whose fathers were ministers when Iraq was a pro-British monarchy, and who owe their restoration to America.

IN THE IMPERIAL-ERA splendour of Middlesex Guildhall, near Britain’s Parliament, five judges sitting as the judicial committee of Her Majesty’s Privy Council will hear a case this month involving a traffic accident in Antigua in 2011. Antigua & Barbuda is one of eight Caribbean countries that still use the Privy Council as their highest court of appeal, as do overseas territories like the Cayman Islands, crown dependencies such as Jersey and the ecclesiastical Arches Court of Canterbury.

IN 2002 VICENTE FOX, then president of Mexico, ended a honeymoon with foreign investors by giving in to machete-wielding peasants and dropping plans to build an airport near Mexico City. On October 29th history repeated itself when President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador said he would halt construction of an airport after it was rejected in a vote involving barely 1% of the electorate. The move battered Mexico’s peso, which fell to its lowest level in four months, as well as its stockmarket and its bonds. Читать дальше...

IN 1988 A group of centre-left politicians and academics who had opposed the military dictatorship that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985 set up a new political organisation, the Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB). Its members were reformers, not populists, statists or pork-barrel conservatives. As one of its leaders, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, later wrote: “We advocated a blend of free-market reform and social responsibility” like that espoused by Felipe González in Spain, Bill Clinton in the United States and Tony Blair in Britain.

INVENTORS OF FINANCIAL terminology have little love for language. “Leveraged loans” are at first sight a tautology: in fact they are loans, usually arranged by banks among a syndicate of lenders, to highly indebted companies. “Collateralised loan obligations” (CLOS) are another mouthful. These are not abstract nouns but legal entities, run by asset managers, private-equity firms, hedge funds or others, that own more than half of American leveraged loans. CLO managers chop the loans into slices... Читать дальше...

THE CENTRAL SPORTHOTEL in Davos usually plays host to skiers intent on picturesque descents. But during the World Economic Forum in January it celebrated an eye-catching ascent. One side wall was bedecked with a poster of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister. Its caption boasted that India had climbed 30 places in the previous year’s World Bank ranking of the easiest places to do business.

Striking fashion

MUMBAI, INDIA’S financial capital, is famous for its appalling traffic. But since October 22nd its roads have been miraculously clear. The reason is that drivers for Uber and Ola, India’s two biggest ride-hailing firms, have been on strike. Local newspapers estimated that 90% of the roughly 35,000 drivers in the city have stopped working. Mumbai’s middle classes have been forced back onto trains, buses and rickshaws to get around, complaining vociferously.

Protests... Читать дальше...

IN THE SMALL village of Lasanayah, Mamadou Kalissa looks out over his ancestral home. Last year it was farmland but now bauxite mining has turned it into a Martian landscape that extends as far as the eye can see. Guinea’s red gold is the main ore used to make aluminium. The Boké region in western Guinea has some of the world’s richest reserves. A mining lorry rolls past, kicking up dust and causing Mr Kalissa to cough and spit saliva with a reddish tinge.

IN THE HARDSCRABBLE Ireland in which Michael D. Higgins grew up it was not considered wise to “have notions” about yourself—to aspire to greater things, intellectually or culturally. But Mr Higgins, who was re-elected for a second term as president of Ireland on October 26th, had notions from an early age.

AMID THE many crosses in the cemetery of the northern Italian mountain town of Bardonecchia is a freshly dug grave with an unadorned headstone. Below it is a quotation from the Koran: “We belong to God and to Him we shall return.” The grave was dug for 28-year-old Mohamed Fofana from Guinea, who died of hypothermia in May after he and a companion were turned back by police as they tried to reach France near the Col de l’Échelle pass, 1,762 metres up in the Alps.

Not much of a new life

“THE CONDITIONS here are not the worst part,” says Zabiullah, an affable middle-aged Afghan, sipping sweet tea in a rat-infested tent. The stench of sewage hangs in the air. No, he continues, the worst part of life in Moria, a camp for asylum-seekers on the Greek island of Lesbos, is the waiting. Residents can spend up to 12 hours a day in queues for food. Each day, they also await news on whether they will be granted asylum. Many, like Zabiullah, have been doing... Читать дальше...

EVERYONE AGREES that the European Union is not democratic enough, but they disagree on what to do about it. In 2016, shocked by the Brexit referendum, a group of young Europeans who had studied in Britain decided that one solution might be a pan-European political party. Their brainchild, Volt, now has thousands of members across 30 countries (the EU28 plus Albania and Switzerland), and will run in the European Parliament elections next year. On October 27th about 450 delegates met in Amsterdam to approve the party’s programme... Читать дальше...

Bibi shakes his Qaboos

TWO UNUSUAL photographs have been making the rounds on Arab social media. The first (pictured) is of Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, being received by Sultan Qaboos of Oman at his palace in Muscat on October 26th. The second, taken three days later, is of Israel’s culture and sports minister, Miri Regev, with Emirati officials at the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi. Responses to the photographs ranged from positive surprise to angry bemusement. Читать дальше...

Poached for a placebo

“IT’S GOOD news for my patients,” says Zhu Meng, a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine in Beijing. Ms Zhu is cheering a government directive, which took effect on October 29th, allowing the medical use of tiger bone and rhinoceros horn after a 25-year ban. Although evidence of their curative properties is sorely lacking, Ms Zhu insists that tiger bone mixed with alcohol can cure arthritis and that rhino-horn powder can help in the treatment of cerebrovascular disease, among other things. Читать дальше...

AMID AN ESCALATING trade war with America, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has tried to reassure a nervous public by insisting that his country can go it alone in its pursuit of tech supremacy. The Chinese people must “cast aside illusions and rely on ourselves”, he said in April soon after the first shots were fired. But in one technological realm, China appears less eager to surpass America: the development of genetically modified (GM) food crops. China was once a world leader in the field, but... Читать дальше...

SINCE ITS emperors first wrangled with distant barbarians, China has practised unsentimental diplomacy. Not much has changed, to go by its dealings with Brazil and Venezuela as the two Latin American countries struggle with political crises.

FIRST TO GO was the navy honour guard, in crisp uniforms with brass buttons. Then the maintenance staff departed, followed by the cooks and gardeners and cleaners. The next day no drivers showed up, marooning a fleet of fancy cars in the compound’s garage. By the third day all but a token ten out of a normal complement of 1,008 dedicated security personnel—round-the-clock shifts of police, watchmen, bodyguards and the like—had abandoned Temple Trees, the stately official residence of the prime minister of Sri Lanka. Читать дальше...