Новости за 22.11.2018

NO ONE HASever before accused APEC of holding a drama-filled summit. An Australian foreign minister once described the body’s full name, Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation, as “four adjectives in search of a noun”; others have called it “A Perfect Excuse to Chat”. The final communiqué put out by the 21 member economies is intended as a pistil of platitudes. So the failure to agree on a statement this year, in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, was significant.

Hell, no, we won’t go

FOR THE Rohingya refugees in camps in southern Bangladesh, it was a frightening moment. On November 15th a line of buses pulled up outside camp 22, in Unchiprang. The Bangladeshi army was there to take the first batch of them back to Myanmar, from where some 700,000 have fled since August last year. But hundreds of the Rohingyas staged protests (some are pictured). They demanded guarantees of citizenship and security before they return. At the end of the day, the buses drove off empty. Читать дальше...

A FEW MILESwest of Ahmedabad, in the state of Gujarat, a smiling patriarch named Shivaji still farms the land around the small redbrick home where he was born. But the city is creeping towards him. Mr Shivaji has already sold about a quarter of his land to a speculator (he hid the money in a hole before India suddenly cancelled most banknotes two years ago, forcing him to come up with a better plan). Slicing through his farm is a wide, straight strip of grass on which the municipal government will eventually build a road. Читать дальше...

THE TESTERS zip past boxes of desiccants, packing crates and mounds of small rubber wheels, wearing helmets and pads on their knees and elbows. They drive the latest batch of electric kick-scooters past the assembly lines and into a pen surrounded by protective nets and multicoloured bunting, over speed bumps and cobblestones, down steps and up ramps. One rider tests around 450 e-scooters a day.

A menthol health problem

THE FIGHT against smoking is, by his own admission, deeply personal for Scott Gottlieb, head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), an American regulatory agency. Having worked as a doctor and survived cancer, he has seen its effects up close and is determined to get Americans to quit tobacco. On November 15th he announced widely expected measures to restrict the sale of flavoured vaping products. More surprising was a proposed ban on menthol cigarettes. Читать дальше...

AMERICANS CELEBRATE Thanksgiving on November 22nd, and having gorged on turkey and cranberry sauce, will take the next day off as well to do some Christmas shopping. That represents a rare break in what, by global standards, is a Stakhanovite regime. In a typical year the average American works 100 more hours than a Briton, 300 more than a French employee and 400 more hours than a German.

“BIG TOBACCO” is what the bosses of several large technology firms have started calling Facebook in private and in public. The company has spent the past year fending off critics who claim it is addictive, bad for democracy and overdue for a regulatory reckoning. Being compared to the tobacco giants is one of the business world’s more toxic insults, but it is not the only unflattering analogy circulating. A lower blow is the suggestion that Facebook may become like Yahoo, the once high-flying internet firm that plunged. Читать дальше...

FEW CHIEF executives experience as hard a fall as Carlos Ghosn just has. On November 16th he was the long-standing chairman of Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi Motors, three car firms, and famed for his Napoleonic manner. By November 20th he was in police custody in Japan, having been accused by Nissan of under-reporting his pay to regulators by around $45m over five years. At least Mr Ghosn can console himself with a different set of figures about how much he is worth. After the news broke the... Читать дальше...

FOR 35 YEARS Sandra Ramírez was a member of the FARC, Colombia’s largest guerrilla group. Of peasant origin, she was the lover of Manuel Marulanda, the FARC’s founding leader, and worked as a radio operator. Now she serves, under the name of Criselda Lobo, as a senator in Colombia’s congress, one of ten FARC parliamentarians designated under a peace agreement that in 2016 ended half a century of conflict. She is getting used to a radically different life, and some in congress are getting used to her. Читать дальше...

MEXICO DOES not exactly rush to get a new president into power after an election. Andrés Manuel López Obrador won in a landslide on July 1st, yet he takes office only on December 1st. The five-month transition has left ample time for fretting about the prospects for the relationship between Mexico and the United States when a right-wing nationalist is in charge north of the border and a left-wing populist leads in the south. A lot is at stake. The border is nearly 2,000 miles (3,200km) long; 1m people cross it each day. Читать дальше...

Not too shabby

THROUGHOUT ITS 900-year history, Moscow has been called many things. “Stench, stones, luxury, poverty,” was Tolstoy’s assessment in 1881. Travellers and residents alike have long remarked on the city’s blend of glamour and gore, the sacred and the profane. In the Soviet era, it was seen as massive, grey and forbidding; amid the oil boom of the 2000s, as gaudy and unlivable. Yet in recent years, some unexpected descriptions have joined the list: pleasant and functional. Читать дальше...

SELDOM HAS the morale of Italians fallen as low as in 2012 when the Costa Concordia, a cruise ship, was wrecked near the Tuscan coast and abandoned by its Italian captain. Thirty-two passengers and crew died. The giant capsized hulk seemed to symbolise the failure of a country that months earlier had almost sunk the euro. But one man preserved Italy’s self-respect. Recordings surfaced of a coast-guard officer, Gregorio De Falco, furiously rebuking the skipper. His (unheeded) order to Captain Francesco Schettino to “Get on board... Читать дальше...

TWENTY YEARS ago Lisbon’s Casal Ventoso neighbourhood was the biggest open-air drug market in Europe. But since 2001, when Portugal decriminalised most drug use, the number of addicts has plummeted, and these days one has to know where to find them. One recent evening, three outreach workers from CRESCER, a charity that helps drug users, trudged up a hillside carrying bags of clean syringes, saline solution and pastries. In a grove of cane plants, half-a-dozen people were smoking crack or injecting heroin. Читать дальше...

“TRULY A GREAT achievement…real triumph!” Thus did Olaf Scholz, Germany’s finance minister, this week hailed the imminent dip in his country’s public debt to below 60% of GDP, the limit set by euro-zone rules. Mr Scholz was unveiling his budget for 2019, the sixth consecutive year in which Germany will meet its “black zero” preference of no net borrowing. Building strong fiscal buffers, he boasted, prepares Germany for financial storms that may be brewing elsewhere.

ON DECEMBER 11TH 1975 an Icelandic coastguard vessel came across a group of British ships sheltering from a storm in a fjord and ordered them to leave. The minesweeper collided with one of the British boats. Shots were fired; first blanks, then live ammunition. London sent in a frigate force. Reykjavik took the incident to the UN. And all because of fish. The incident, more evocative of 18th-century gunboat diplomacy than modern relations between liberal democracies, played out at the height of the “cod wars” over fishing rights. Читать дальше...

CHRIS DAY’S first Twitter post was fairly standard. “It feels good to tweet,” he wrote. He got two likes. A week later he posted a second time, about a legal challenge to protect junior doctors’ whistleblowing rights. Hundreds of people retweeted it. Soon, he marshalled an “army” of 3,000-odd backers, who chipped in more than £200,000 ($256,000) to his cause. In 2016 the government wrote the right into junior doctors’ contracts. It really did feel good to tweet.

Why Aldershot? Because it’s there

“LITTLE KATHMANDU” is how some locals refer to Aldershot, south-west of London. A walk down the high street shows why. Some road signs have been translated into Nepalese. Shopfronts bear notices in the same language, including Namaste Travel and Tours, which advertises cheap shipping to the Himalayas. The quiet Hampshire town and its surroundings are home to more than 6,000 Nepalese, mostly the families of former Gurkhas, recruited from Nepal by the British army. Читать дальше...

IN 2002 BRETT WIGDORTZ,a young consultant, left McKinsey to set up Teach First. The idea was simple: to lure high-flyers, often from elite universities, to tough schools with the promise of networking, quick training and good career opportunities for those who left after a few years. Since then the charity has worked with the government to train around 10,000 teachers, many of whom have gone on to big jobs in the education system.

HEADLINES ON NEWS-STANDS up and down England make for grisly reading. On November 16th a man was stabbed on the seafront of Weymouth, a quiet town on the south coast. Two days later a 16-year-old boy was knifed at a house in Birmingham. On the same day in London a gang of ten men stabbed four others sitting in a car on a residential street; one of the victims had been shot at less than 24 hours earlier.

Harmonising

IN 2013 THE residents of sleepy Highland villages noticed something odd. Armed police had started popping up on their streets. Cops with guns were spotted at a bakery in Brora, a fishing village, sparking alarm. Others queuing in a supermarket caused a stir down the road in Inverness. Police vans clad in anti-riot gear cruised through remote moorlands.

That year, Scotland’s eight regional police forces became a single national squad. Merging was intended to save money by ending the duplication of HR departments... Читать дальше...

Foster, steadfast in Belfast

AS IF REVOLT on both wings of her own Conservatives were not enough, Theresa May faces rebellion from the Northern Irish party that props up her government. Because the prime minister lost her majority in the election she unwisely called in June 2017, she was forced into a “confidence and supply” agreement with the Democratic Unionist Party. The DUP’s ten MPs promised to vote with the government on confidence matters, Brexit and the budget in exchange for... Читать дальше...

THE ONLY rule of British politics for the coming weeks is that nobody knows anything. The prime minister doesn’t know who will resign next. The factions don’t know their relative strengths. Nobody knows what is bluff and what is in deadly earnest.

GOING TO UNIVERSITY is supposed to be a mind-broadening experience. That assertion is presumably made in contradistinction to training for work straight after school, which might not be so stimulating. But is it actually true? Jessika Golle of the University of Tübingen, in Germany, thought she would try to find out. Her result, however, is not quite what might be expected. As she reports in Psychological Science this week, she found that those who have been to university do indeed seem to leave... Читать дальше...

JET PACKS for satellites. According to Daniel Campbell, the boss of Effective Space, the British and Israeli firm which is building them, that is the way to think of the robotic spacecraft his company plans to start launching in 2020. The purpose of Effective Space’s devices, which it calls SPACE DRONEs, is to prolong the lives of communications satellites (com-sats) that would otherwise be decommissioned for lack of fuel for station-keeping—in other words, for maintaining their proper orbits.

ALL BEING well, November 26th will see the touchdown of the latest mission to Mars. InSight, an American craft, is intended to examine the planet’s interior. Once it has landed it will use a robotic arm to deploy a seismometer and a probe designed to measure the heat beneath Mars’s surface.