Новости за 09.01.2020

THIS WEEK Boris Johnson urged his cabinet to slaughter “sacred cows”—big, expensive projects inherited from previous governments. By far the fattest of those legacy projects is HS2. The high-speed railway planned by Labour just over a decade ago between London and the north is behind schedule and way over budget. Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s chief adviser, has called it a disaster zone. HS2 was slated to cost £50bn ($63bn); now the firm running the project puts its cost at £88bn.

IF YOU LIVE in a desert, maintaining a supply of fresh water is a challenge. One answer is desalination, but that needs a source of brine from which to remove the salt—which in turn requires that your desert be near the sea. Even in inland deserts, though, moisture is often present in the air as water vapour. The problem is extracting this vapour effectively and cheaply. And that is what two groups of researchers—one at the University of Connecticut, the other at the University of California, Berkeley—hope they have managed to do. Читать дальше...

LATE LAST year Jeremy Grantham, an investor routinely described as “legendary”, spoke about ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing at a conference in London. His presentation was slick; his accent floated somewhere in the mid-Atlantic (Mr Grantham is English but has lived in America for ages). “I love S and G,” he began. “But E is about survival.”

ECONOMISTS, WHO extol the virtues of healthy labour markets, like to think that they practise what they preach. Not so. At this year’s conference of the American Economic Association (AEA) in San Diego, the profession’s lack of diversity was high on the agenda. In a session titled “How Can Economics Solve its Race Problem?” Janet Yellen, now the AEA’s president, summarised the situation as wasting talent and “deeply unfair”.

FOR BULGARIAN bosses, recruitment is becoming a bit of a nightmare. Finding a lathe operator—competent or otherwise— takes more than six months, and may require forking out cash to a recruitment agency. Older, savvier machine operators are retiring, complains Julian Stephanov, who runs a manufacturing firm near Sofia, and too few young people have the right skills. One problem is a lack of training. Another is that Bulgaria’s workforce has shrunk by 6% since 2008. Continued high emigration and... Читать дальше...

IT IS A small town with a big reputation. Greenwich, Connecticut, with a population of 60,000, has long been home to titans of finance and industry. A century ago Edmund C. Converse, the first president of Bankers Trust, Zalmon Gilbert Simmons, a mattress magnate, and two Rockefellers lived there. Among today’s residents are Ray Dalio of Bridgewater, the world’s most successful hedge fund, and Indra Nooyi, the former boss of Pepsi. It has one of America’s greatest concentrations of wealth. As... Читать дальше...

FIVE YEARS ago Anne Case and Angus Deaton of Princeton University introduced the world to the phenomenon of “deaths of despair”. A growing share of middle-aged white Americans, especially those without college degrees, are dying from suicide and drug and alcohol use. At first it seemed possible to hope that the troubling rise in death rates would reverse as the economy recovered from the financial crisis. Instead, mortality has risen further—a standing indictment of American society. Several books on the subject... Читать дальше...

ON JANUARY 8TH Carlos Ghosn, ebullient and combative despite a year in custody and under house arrest, gave a press conference in Beirut, where he fled after skipping bail in Japan. The former boss of Renault and Nissan presented a characteristically flamboyant defence against charges of financial wrongdoing. He would not be drawn on the details of his audacious flight, said to involve boxes with air holes and a private jet.

AMAZON IS AN amazing company. Its founder, Jeff Bezos, started an online bookseller and turned it into a retailing giant. On the way, the company became a platform for third-party sellers, launched a highly successful electronic-book reader and created a cloud-computing service that allowed millions to store their data. There is a fascinating tale to be told about this transformation.

TO SEE JUST how fast microchips are eating the world, look at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), an annual gadget-fest held in Las Vegas. This year’s event includes everything from ultra-high-definition televisions, “smart” light bulbs and powered exoskeletons to concept cars that can drive sideways and house robots designed to deliver toilet paper. Every one of these must-have consumer trinkets is a computer in disguise, with innards made from microprocessors, memory chips and circuit boards.

THE MIDDLE EAST is not the world’s only powder keg. But it vexes Western strategists more than other volatile places. Western investors likewise pay it close attention. The world’s stockmarkets shuddered on January 3rd, after an American missile killed Qassem Suleimani, a top Iranian commander, in Iraq. They wobbled again this week, after Iran first threatened and then carried out an attack on American bases on Iraqi soil.

Editor’s note (January 9th 2020): After this article was published, American media reported intelligence assessments that Ukrainian International Airlines’ Boeing passenger jet which crashed outside Tehran on January 8th had been brought down by Iranian anti-aircraft missiles, not mechanical failure.

THE BENETTON family became one of the biggest stars of Italian business by building a global fashion brand best known for colourful knitwear and a feisty social conscience, promoted with bold adverts featuring dying AIDS patients and death-row inmates. From humble origins with a second-hand knitting machine in the 1960s, the four Benetton siblings, Luciano, Carlo, Gilberto and Giuliana, diversified the business in an unlikely direction. Fashion now accounts for only a small chunk of their multi-billion-euro fortune. Читать дальше...

FOR TWO thousand years the fishermen of China’s great rivers have served the literati as symbols of hardships patiently endured. One of the country’s best-known poems ponders an old man fishing alone on a boat, protected from the snow by a straw hat. Another describes a fisherman on an island in the Yangzi, indifferent to the vagaries of fate. Political suffering was not forgotten by the poets of old. A fictional fisherman tells a celebrated official, Qu Yuan, who is feeling suicidal because of state corruption... Читать дальше...

AISHE GHOSH is no stranger to trouble. She heads the student union at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), a prestigious state-run institution of which the leafy campus in Delhi has long been a seedbed of radical activism. Even so, Ms Ghosh (pictured) did not expect to be attacked by a mob of masked, club-wielding thugs on January 5th, and to end up in hospital with a broken hand, multiple contusions and 16 stitches in her scalp. Nor did she expect police to file charges against her, rather than the aggressors. Читать дальше...

“A FEW BAGS and the cats” were all Brett Viewey could take when he fled his house in Kangaroo Valley, a small town in New South Wales. On January 4th he retreated to a bowling club in Nowra, a few hours south of Sydney, as a fire coursed towards his home. He is among tens of thousands of people who have moved out of the way of bushfires that are raging all across Australia, and especially in Victoria and New South Wales. So far the flames have burned across 11m hectares, larger than the area destroyed... Читать дальше...

TOURISTS VISITING Kenya’s lovely Lamu archipelago are normally stirred from their slumber by pleasant sounds, such as gently lapping waves or the call to prayer drifting across the water. But on January 5th some were woken by the less melodious rattle and crump of distant battle. Across Manda Bay, on the mainland, fighters from al-Shabab, a Somali jihadist group, were engaged in an unusually daring assault on American forces stationed at a Kenyan airbase.

ISABEL DOS SANTOS lives modestly these days. Or so the billionaire daughter of a former Angolan president, José Eduardo dos Santos, says. She arrived on foot to meet your correspondent at a smart hotel in London; and at the end of the interview she disappeared off towards a Tube station. It is a step down for a woman who once flew the rapper Nicki Minaj to Luanda, Angola’s capital, at a cost of millions. But these days Africa’s most prominent businesswoman has good reason to play it cool.

WHAT IS IT like being a taxman in Africa? “A lot of sleepless nights,” says Yankuba Darboe, the Gambia’s top revenue official, describing the pressure to meet targets. Politicians across Africa are asking ever more of their tax collectors, with good reason. The biggest hole in public coffers is not money squandered or stolen, but that which is never collected in the first place.

ALEJANDRO GIAMMATTEI, who will become Guatemala’s president on January 14th, did not have an easy ride to the top. The 63-year-old developed multiple sclerosis in his youth and walks with forearm crutches. His only previous government job was a brief stint a dozen years ago as head of the country’s prisons, which ended in his own incarceration. He spent ten months in jail during the investigation of the killing of seven inmates. Charges were dropped. He has a 20-year record of losing elections to be president and mayor of Guatemala City... Читать дальше...

JUSTIN TRUDEAU returned from his Christmas break in Costa Rica with a new look. Canada’s prime minister has sprouted a salt-and-pepper stubble, making him look slightly less youthful. His makeover hints that he intends to govern differently in his second term, which began late last year. He has plenty of reasons to change his approach. The election on October 21st was a close shave. Mr Trudeau’s Liberal Party won 1m fewer votes than it had four years before and lost its majority in Parliament. Читать дальше...

ON A FRIDAY night in 2016, Natalie Natividad, a 15-year-old in Hebbronville, Texas, took a fatal overdose of pills after enduring months of cyber-bullying. Most of the alleged taunts—that she was ugly, that she should kill herself—came on After School, an app that allows classmates to discuss one another anonymously. Her suicide prompted an investigation. The app’s operators tracked which accounts had sent the abuse, while officials interviewed teachers and students. “We just want some justice,” said Natalie’s sister shortly after the death.

THE ECONOMY is giving Americans plenty of reasons for cheer. The stockmarket has reached record highs. Job growth is strong. Despite fears of a recession in mid-2019, growth in GDP has held up. History suggests that incumbent presidents running when voters are happy about the economy almost always get re-elected. But new polling has confirmed that consumer sentiment has become less important to how voters evaluate recent presidents. This could spell trouble for Donald Trump at the ballot box in November. Читать дальше...

ELIOT ENGEL has unobtrusively represented southern Westchester County in the House of Representatives for 30 years, reliably voting with his fellow Democrats, ascending to a committee chairmanship (Foreign Affairs), making few waves and ruffling few feathers. Outside his district, he is probably best known for his pushbroom moustache and his shaking of every president’s hand at the State of the Union, except for Donald Trump’s. His constituents seem to like him: he was unopposed in 2018, and has... Читать дальше...