Новости за 23.01.2020

WHEN ANNA SCOTT left her Honda Jazz in a commuters’ car park outside Oxford on January 10th, she had little reason to think that criminals would take an interest in the 12-year-old car. Yet the next afternoon a group of shifty characters were spotted sawing off its catalytic converter. Such incidents have become more frequent across Britain as prices for palladium and rhodium, metals contained in the devices, have rocketed. The price of rhodium has risen by 63% in the first three weeks of January alone... Читать дальше...

AS RECENTLY AS a week ago, a big transatlantic bust-up seemed inevitable, with the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos in Switzerland the most likely boxing ring. America had taken offence at France’s digital-services tax, which hits the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Google, on the ground that it discriminates against American companies. The French had insisted that the tax was only a temporary measure and would be repealed as soon as governments were able to reach a multilateral agreement on tax reform. Читать дальше...

THERE IS NOTHING that maddens online shoppers more than seeing air fares rocket just as they are about to click “buy”. Yet price turbulence may be an even bigger headache for airlines. Whereas carriers have some control over fares, these can be buffeted by surges in supply or demand, caused, say, by economic slumps or political rows. Over the past five years, ticket prices on a given date (net of taxes and fees) have varied by an average of 7% in Asia and 16% in Europe. Even in North America, where airlines have more pricing power... Читать дальше...

IN JANUARY 2009 Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned energy giant, cut off gas supplies through Ukraine, one of several disputes in which Russia wielded its energy might. Eleven years later, it seems poised to become even more dominant. Europe’s gas production is declining. Russia has both rising supply and new ways to export it. On January 8th President Vladimir Putin celebrated the launch of TurkStream, a pipeline to bring Russian gas to Europe. American sanctions on Nord Stream 2, a controversial gas pipeline from Russia to Germany... Читать дальше...

BY MOST MEASURES Australia’s bushfires have caused destruction on an epic scale. They have killed at least 29 people and perhaps a billion animals. Over 100,000 square kilometres of land, an area bigger than Scotland, has been charred. More than 2,600 homes have been destroyed. In big cities, including Sydney and Canberra, the air has turned toxic. Yet on one measure the fire has done less damage: businesses seem to have got off lightly.

LAST YEAR was one for corporate Europe to forget. Although the continent was not in recession, its firms were—at least in terms of profits. The STOXX Europe 600 index of biggest European companies suffered three consecutive quarters of falling earnings. From July to September these declined by 4.3% year on year. As Europe SA reports results for the decade’s final quarter in the coming weeks, analysts expect a modest earnings bounce of 2.5%.

MURAKAMI YOSHIAKI, activist investor and scourge of Japanese boardrooms, knows how to rattle cages. On January 21st his family launched a hostile bid for Toshiba Machine, a maker of industrial robots. The company’s threat to block the takeover by issuing shares should alarm anyone who cares about how Japanese firms are run, says Mr Murakami’s daughter, Aya, who runs one of the family funds.

AFTER A WHIRLWIND romance and two years of dating, Emma and her girlfriend, Han, have tied the knot (see picture). They invited about 100 people to their wedding on January 18th in the south-western city of Kunming. It involved a ceremony, with the two women in matching white wedding dresses, followed by a banquet and an after-party. Emma says she was both excited and nervous. The wedding meant “commitment and responsibility” and “the courage to spend the rest of my life with the one”. She is looking forward to starting a family with Han. Читать дальше...

IF JUDGED BY words, rather than deeds, China is the world’s most powerful supporter of European unity. At a time when populist leaders such as President Donald Trump barely conceal their scorn for the European Union and other multilateral institutions, China talks of deepening and strengthening ties with the EU and other international bodies dear to Europeans.

CHINA’S LEADER, Xi Jinping, often warns officials to be wary of “black swan risks”, meaning sudden unexpected events that can harm the economy. People typically assume he means wobbly banks or trade tensions. But the most immediate threat may be a new, sometimes deadly, virus that appears to be spreading. The outbreak raises dark memories of another one 17 years ago that killed hundreds of people and, briefly, nearly halted China’s growth.

TO SEE HOW topsy-turvy Malaysian politics have grown, consider the case of the previous prime minister, Najib Razak. In 2018 the party he led lost power for the first time since independence. Mainly to blame were allegations of massive graft against Mr Najib, who denied wrongdoing but admitted that almost $700m had found its way into his bank accounts. Soon after he left office, police seized a thumping haul of bling belonging to his wife, Rosmah Mansor, who also denies any crime. It included 567 handbags, 423 watches and 14 tiaras. Читать дальше...

DURING AN EXCITED exchange on a Pakistani talk show earlier this month, a government minister produced a well-polished boot and placed it on the studio desk. Scorning the opposition’s claims to champion civilian authority over the armed forces, he accused them instead of “laying down and kissing” the boot. Even in the confrontational world of Pakistani politics shows, Faisal Vawda’s stunt had the power to shock.

ISABEL DOS SANTOS styles herself as a visionary, an entrepreneur and a potential future president of Angola. Her vast fortune was self-made, she boasts. Running Sonangol, Angola’s state oil firm, was a “big personal sacrifice”. Many Angolans “see me as a role model”, she recently told The Economist.

TO CALL IT a success is a sign of low expectations, not high achievements. On January 19th the parties in Libya’s civil war gathered in Berlin for a peace conference. The Libyans themselves—Fayez al-Sarraj, who leads the UN-backed government in Tripoli, and General Khalifa Haftar, the warlord who controls most of the country—were invited only at the last minute. The summit was mostly an effort to plead with foreign powers that have turned a local conflict into a global proxy war.

IN 1939 CARLOS DENEGRI, a young reporter, investigated a murder by gunmen working for Maximino Ávila Camacho, the governor of the state of Puebla and brother of the next president of Mexico. Denegri delivered a detailed account of Ávila’s crimes to the editor of Excélsior, the country’s most important newspaper. The editor did not publish it, explaining that the governor was a source of much paid advertising. “In this business we don’t only sell information and advertising space: above all, we sell silence,” he went on. Читать дальше...

LAST JUNE the Intercept, a news site, published hacked messages that showed improper collaboration between Brazilian prosecutors and judges conducting the anti-corruption investigation known as Lava Jato (Car Wash). The leaks tarnished the image of Sergio Moro, the justice minister, who had been the judge in charge. They enraged Brazil’s nationalist president, Jair Bolsonaro, whose election in 2018 owed much to anger about corruption.

WHEN CRIME rates were last as low as they are today in Michigan, the Beatles topped the charts with “Hey Jude”. Half a century on, Michigan’s police arrest fewer people with each passing year. In the decade to 2018 arrests fell by one-fifth. One might expect, in turn, the state’s jails to be eerily empty. Quite the opposite. A new study by Pew Charitable Trusts found 16,600 people were held in county jails on an average day in 2016, over three times more than in 1970.

IT STARTED AS a joke. Beth Dow received an article from her husband about Vermont paying workers to move to the state. But the jest soon became reality. Within a few months, Mrs Dow and her husband had left their home in Denver for Bennington, a town of 15,000 in southern Vermont, and were paid $5,000 to cover their move.

ROMANIA’S NEW state-owned supermarket, the Unirea Agro-Food Trade House, looks like a nod to the communist past. The first two stores, which opened in October, are bare-bones, their shelves stocked with mono-branded staples like pear jam and pork in lard. But this is not a food bank supplying cheap calories to the poor; prices are similar to those at private competitors. Rather, it is an effort to get Romanian agriculture, now largely off the books, to enter the formal economy—and start taxing it. Читать дальше...

MORE THAN a million people, 90% of them Jews, had been murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau by the time the Soviet army liberated it on January 27th, 1945. The biggest German death camp in Poland is a universally acknowledged symbol of Nazi evil. Yet the 75th anniversary of its liberation has become a political battleground.

EVER SINCE the populist Law and Justice (PiS) party took power in 2015, Adam Bodnar, Poland’s human-rights ombudsman, has been warning against its relentless efforts to get control of the courts. To illustrate the danger, he uses an expression from communist times: lex telefonica. In the Polish People’s Republic, verdicts were routinely dictated by a phone call from an apparatchik at party headquarters. Today’s government has more subtle techniques, but the goal is the same, Mr Bodnar says: “If... Читать дальше...

IT TAKES SURPRISINGLY little effort to get a Eurocrat to talk about sex. The European Commission plugs its various exchange programmes with cartoons of young people dreaming of meeting hot Spanish ladies and hunky French men. Spokespeople boast that such liaisons on its Erasmus student exchange have led to 1m babies. The scheme “increased the European libido” said Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourgish former president of the European Commission. Umberto Eco, an Italian writer, summed up this strand of thinking about the EU... Читать дальше...

THE SCOTTISH NATIONAL PARTY (SNP) looks in fine fettle. In the general election it secured 48 of Scotland’s 59 seats in the British Parliament, an increase of 13. Surveys regularly show about 40% of voters back it, far more than can be said for its rivals. After 13 years in charge of Scotland’s devolved government, this is an extraordinary achievement. Its pro-EU views chime with those of the majority of voters north of the border. And Scots are unimpressed by the two main Unionist parties under Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn. Читать дальше...

OLDER PEOPLE tend to regard 20-somethings as avocado-toast munching types who flit from job to job. The reality is very different. Job mobility among the young has declined over the past decade.

THE BIGGEST argument in the final stages of the EU withdrawal bill this week was over EU citizens in Britain. The House of Lords passed an amendment to give them an automatic right to stay, along with a reassuring document. But as The Economistwent to press the Tory-dominated Commons was overriding all changes to the bill, leaving many EU citizens nervous about their future. They have reason to worry.