Новости за 21.11.2019

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Seventeen McDonald's workers are suing the company, alleging that the fast-food chain has failed to address violence in the workplace.

SOON AFTER Hurricane Sandy battered Manhattan in 2012, Emilie Mazzacurati founded a firm in California to analyse the risks posed by climate change to business. She called it Four Twenty Seven, after the state’s target of lowering annual greenhouse-gas emissions to the equivalent of 427m tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2020. That reference quickly became outdated. The target was adjusted for technical reasons two years later, and rendered moot in 2018 by the announcement of a net-zero goal. Ms Mazzacurati is still happy with the name, though. Читать дальше...

TRADE WARS; talk of impeachment; the spread of populist politicians and hung parliaments across Europe. It is hardly surprising that an index from Policy Uncertainty, a geopolitical think-tank, puts global economic uncertainty at its highest since the gauge was created in 1997. By contrast, implied euro-dollar volatility is trading at its lowest since the single currency was born in 1999 (see chart).

ACCORDING TO AN analogy popular in Brussels, the euro zone is a house that needs fixing. Everyone frets about its ability to withstand a gale. But the builders are nowhere in sight. The owners cannot agree on the repairs that are needed, much less on how to do them. When Olaf Scholz, Germany’s finance minister, cautiously accepted the idea of a common deposit-insurance scheme on November 5th, that removed one point of contention. But as one row is resolved, another—on the regulatory treatment... Читать дальше...

AFTER A WEEK of resignations and exclusions, the Vatican faces the very real risk of being reduced once more to the status of an international financial pariah. In the coming days its officials are due to answer a detailed questionnaire for Moneyval, Europe’s anti-money-laundering and anti-terrorist-financing watchdog. The picture they will have to paint could scarcely be less reassuring.

AMERICAN DIGNITARIES like to talk about their country’s “ironclad” commitment to its alliance with South Korea and Japan, which has long been the main building block of the security architecture of north-east Asia. But when General Mark Milley, America’s representative on the trio’s joint military council, last reaffirmed that commitment on November 15th, his two fellow soldiers had plenty of reasons to be sceptical. Donald Trump, America’s president, has long complained of the costs of military alliances... Читать дальше...

THIS WEEK Shinzo Abe became the longest-serving prime minister in Japan’s history, with 2,886 days in office. He pipped Taro Katsura, who served three times in the early 20th century, a remote age. But to win the record for the longest uninterrupted spell in office, Mr Abe—who had a brief time as prime minister in 2006-7, dogged by ill health, before returning to power in 2012—will have to stay on until August 24th. Many remember the man he has to beat, not least Mr Abe: Eisaku Sato was his great-uncle. Читать дальше...

EVEN AFTER the verdict of Thailand’s constitutional court on November 20th, supporters of the Future Forward party, gathered outside, kept signing a portrait. It showed a beaming Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, leader of the party. His actual face was far more grave as he sat in the courtroom, listening as the judges retroactively disqualified him from the election in March at which he became an MP. The decision marks the start of what will probably prove a prolonged period of difficulty for Mr Thanathorn and his party. Читать дальше...

ON A WINDSWEPT beach on Honjima, a small island in the Seto Inland Sea in southern Japan, three stylised ships’ hulls sway in the breeze. They are suspended on poles and fixed to the sand with four rusty anchors each. Oval mirrors underneath reflect the tangled red netting from which the hulls are made and the lead-coloured sky above the deserted beach. The ships are the work of the Russian artist Alexander Ponomarev. They form one of many sea-themed artworks displayed on Honjima during the Setouchi Triennale... Читать дальше...

THE SYMBOLISM of the venue clanged as clear as a temple bell. For his inauguration on November 18th Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the newly elected president of Sri Lanka, chose a sacred shrine in the ancient capital of Anuradhapura. The massive stupa houses relics of the Buddha. More pointedly, in a country often troubled by sectarian rifts, it commemorates the defeat in 140 BC of Elara, a Tamil Hindu king, and the reunification of Sri Lanka under his Sinhalese Buddhist rival, King Dutugemunu.

CORRUPTION, INCOMPETENCE and sanctions have devastated Venezuela’s oil industry, the country’s main source of hard currency. But Venezuela’s economic crisis has encouraged the growth of another: the “farming” of virtual gold in the artificial worlds created by video games. Venezuelans spend hours on end playing massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGS) to extract gold coins (the currency in RuneScape) or crystal ones (Tibia). They sell these for real money, via intermediary websites... Читать дальше...

IN 2014 MICHELLE BACHELET, a Socialist, swept into Chile’s presidency for a second time on a programme of radical reform of tax, education and pensions. She also aspired to enact a new constitution that would guarantee “more balance between the state, the private sector and society”, as she told your columnist over tea at the Moneda presidential palace. She argued that her “struggle against inequality” was a last chance to deal with discontents that, if neglected, could push Chile towards populism. Читать дальше...

COUNTING RATS in a city may be impossible. But with plump specimens scurrying about during the day on State Street, the main shopping drag in Santa Barbara, a tourist destination in California, it appears that the beach town’s rodents are numerous. In fact, rats seem to be thriving statewide. Louis Rico, of American Rat Control, says Los Angeles’s rat population has probably grown by 50% in five years, bringing public-health problems. His Los Angeles County firm is “busy as heck”. Los Angeles... Читать дальше...

A THEORY of elections in America has taken root among pundits, especially on the left. It holds that partisan polarisation has pushed voters so far to their ideological sides that swing voters play little role in elections. In this view, winning is all about turning out the base. The New Republic, a left-leaning publication, has gone so far as to advise Democrats to nominate more progressive candidates that can stoke turnout among the progressives in their party. Such advice is wrong-headed.... Читать дальше...

AMERICANS USED TO recoil at secret diplomacy as an affront to democracy. Back-channel intrigues thwarted accountability, concentrated power in the presidency and bred mistrust. In 1918 Woodrow Wilson piously announced that he sought “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at”. Yet Wilson himself found it expedient to use a close political adviser, Edward House, as a back channel to foreign leaders. “Colonel House”, as his Texan factotum was known, was given quarters in the White House and became... Читать дальше...

LOUISIANA’S GOVERNOR John Bel Edwards, the only Democrat in the deeply Republican Deep South to hold his state’s top office, won a second term on November 16th, a result that was startling from nearly every angle. Mr Edwards hung on for a 51-49% victory over Eddie Rispone, a businessman, despite furious efforts by President Donald Trump to turn the race into a referendum on impeachment. The result has been misread in some corners as a repudiation of Mr Trump or as evidence of a turn towards the... Читать дальше...

AFTER ALMOST two decades of visiting and living in India, it was only after your columnist had his first child there that he glimpsed the soul of the place. Everyone loves a baby, but Indians seem to love them more. Housewives and security guards would trip over themselves to greet Lexington’s newborn on his morning promenades through Delhi. On domestic flights, suited executives would unbuckle and demand to walk it shushingly up and down the aisle. With a baby to hand, Indian social constraints melt away. Читать дальше...

MANY KENYANS still resent the British colonists who once ruled them, an attitude their schools encourage. The colonists bilked the natives of choice land and ruthlessly suppressed the Mau Mau rebellion, a land-related insurgency waged against them in the 1950s.

WHEN BRIGITTE BARDOT was on the set of “The Legend of Frenchie King”, with a crowd of photographers snapping her, Terry O’Neill was waiting. Not, like the others, for the moment she would turn her gorgeous self towards them and strike a stunning pose with her leather trousers and cigar. Instead he was praying for the wind to blow her long hair over her face, just once more. When it did, he had that frame. He called it his picture in a million.

In the Dream House. By Carmen Maria Machado.Graywolf Press; 272 pages; $26. To be published in Britain by Serpent’s Tail in January; £14.99.

The Eighth Life (For Brilka). By Nino Haratischvili. Translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin.Scribe; 944 pages; £20. To be published in America in April; $40.

Good Economics for Hard Times. By Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. PublicAffairs; 432 pages; $30. Allen Lane; £25.

THE WHOLE history of fiction shows that alternative realities are an attractive and profitable idea. So back in the 1990s, when electronics had arrived at a point where people could build headsets that blocked off actual reality and replaced it with a virtual version created inside a computer, it looked as if something world-changing might have arrived. Games companies were particularly excited, and Nintendo, Sega and Virtuality duly piled in.

AT A SUMMIT in Paris in 2015, 188 countries pledged to curb their greenhouse-gas emissions. Collectively, these pledges, known as “nationally determined contributions” or NDCs, fall well short of what is needed to achieve another part of the Paris agreement, which is to avoid more than 2°C of warming above pre-industrial temperature levels. A report by the United Nations Environment Programme finds, however, that even these unambitious targets will probably be missed. Researchers studied policy... Читать дальше...