Новости за 18.06.2020

DID A MISSED penalty kick help bring peace to Ivory Coast? In 2005 its national football team was on the brink of qualifying for the World Cup for the first time. Having won its final qualifying match, it just needed Cameroon to lose or draw the match it was playing against Egypt. The awarding of a late penalty set the Cameroonians up for a win. But Pierre Womé hit the post. The ball flew wide. Ivory Coast was in.

WHEN ASKED why she wanted to be mayor of Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr answers without hesitation: “My heart was breaking at what the city was becoming.” In her two years a lot has improved. Gutters have been dug in flood-prone districts. Dustbins have proliferated throughout the city. Grass is sprouting from a roundabout once strewn with litter. But there is still much to do. Electricity flickers. Taps run dry. Rubbish heaps bigger than football fields still fester.

GARTON KAMCHEDZERA is a man of reason. The professor of law at the University of Malawi teaches contracts, trusts and constitutions. But over the past year, as President Peter Mutharika has repeatedly been foiled in his efforts to distort the electoral process, Mr Kamchedzera has wondered whether there might be a higher power at work: God, perhaps, or “some kind of deus ex machina”.

SOUTH AFRICA had a plan for slowing the spread of covid-19. As outlined by Salim Abdool Karim, chair of the medical committee advising President Cyril Ramaphosa, on April 13th, the country would draw on its earlier experience using community health workers to deal with HIV and tuberculosis. It would screen millions of people in poorer areas. Those with symptoms would be tested and then treated and quarantined if necessary.

ON A SPRING afternoon in Mexicali, in northern Mexico, Erick Mercado pondered what was coming. The private Hispanic American Hospital, where he runs the accident-and-emergency service, had cancelled all elective surgery and made plans to seal off the second floor. In half an hour, he explained, the governor of Baja California would confirm the state’s first coronavirus cases. People with flu-like symptoms, Dr Mercado predicted, would “go into a panic” and rush to hospitals for testing. Sure enough... Читать дальше...

BETWEEN TAKING calls on his radio show, Horacio Abadie explains to a journalist Uruguay’s success in curbing the spread of covid-19. Rather than locking people down, the government trusted them, he says. And people behaved responsibly. “Mutual trust has us controlling the virus.”

SINCE IT was founded in 1959, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has had just four presidents: a Chilean, a Mexican, a Uruguayan and, since 2005, Luis Alberto Moreno, a Colombian. Under the gentlemen’s agreement by which it was founded, Latin America has the presidency and a small majority of the capital while the United States has the number-two job and some informal vetoes over how the bank is run. The IDB has not been free of the faults of such institutions, such as bureaucracy and a degree of cronyism... Читать дальше...

WHEN CONGRESS convened in January 2001, 11 of the 35 senators and representatives from New England were Republicans. That was not unusual: just as the South is ancestrally Democratic, much of New England is ancestrally Republican. Vermont has only ever elected one Democratic senator, Patrick Leahy, and between 1850 and 2007 elected just two Democratic representatives, who both served only one term (Bernie Sanders caucuses with Democrats but is an independent). The first African-American to win... Читать дальше...

ED KOCH, New York City’s mayor in the 1970s and 1980s, used to ask New Yorkers, “How’m I doin’?” to cheers and jeers. Bill de Blasio, the city’s mayor since 2014, does not ask the question. At the recent memorial service in Brooklyn for George Floyd, the unarmed man who died under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, Mr de Blasio heard loud and clear what many New Yorkers think of his unwavering support for the police. People there booed and turned their backs on the mayor during his short address. Читать дальше...

FROM A SELFISH perspective, this hot, quarrelsome month has brought two great joys to your columnist. It gave him his first opportunity to take part in American democracy, in the form of a local election for which his foreign citizenship was no bar. (The contest was also fiery, of which more shortly.) And it was the first June in which he has overseen a vegetable garden ripening at New World pace. Zucchini seedlings planted in late May provided their first sleek squashes to Lexington’s table this week. Читать дальше...

IN A NORMAL year, Robina Khalid might take on 70-80 clients at her midwifery practice in New York City. But 2020 has not been a normal year. She got around 150 calls in the first half of March alone. Some enquiring women were already late in their third trimester, she says, but were terrified of having their babies in a hospital for fear of contracting covid-19. Ms Khalid’s practice was not the only one inundated by calls from women entertaining the idea of a home birth. As the virus spread, so... Читать дальше...

FOR MANY economists, the model for a covid-19 furlough scheme has been Germany’s. It already had a good record, managing to avoid big job losses during the global financial crisis of 2008-09. Then, the German government paid the bulk of wages of people who had temporarily stopped working, rather than letting their employers fire them altogether. It did not prevent a nasty recession, but remarkably few jobs were lost.

THEY CAME wielding slippers, with which to squish the man they call “the cockroach”. Alexander Lukashenko, an idiosyncratic autocrat, has retained many of the oppressive structures and symbols of the Soviet Union in Belarus for the past quarter-century. But as the country heads towards a presidential election on August 9th, there are signs that the long-preserved edifice is crumbling.

THE EUROGROUP is arguably the European Union’s strangest institution. It started life as a dining club for euro-zone finance ministers to gossip before the official meetings of ministers from the whole EU, yet morphed into a forum where the fate of nations was decided. During the euro-zone crisis, the terms of bail-outs totalling more than €500bn ($550bn) were agreed at its informal, closed-door meetings, at which no minutes were taken (but alcohol and cigarettes were). Even its legal existence is a matter of debate. Читать дальше...

POLES WILL go to the polls on June 28th to vote for their next president, a mostly ceremonial position but with the crucial power to veto laws. The election will be the latest popularity contest between the ruling populist Law and Justice (PiS) party and the centrist Civic Platform, which governed from 2007 to 2015. PiS lost ground in parliamentary elections last year, and it looks as though the contest will go to a run-off on July 12th.

THE GOVERNMENT’S public-health performance may not look good, but Britain’s scientists are still top-notch when it comes to inventing and discovering drugs. On June 16th researchers at the University of Oxford announced that they had identified the first drug proven to reduce mortality from covid-19. Dexamethasone, a cheap steroid, reduces deaths by a third among the most severely ill patients. It is set to become the standard of care for the National Health Service (NHS) across Britain. Doctors around the world will... Читать дальше...

IN THE MAYFAIR office of Chris Hohn, the boss of TCI, a hedge fund, an enormous photograph of a melting iceberg hangs on one wall. Robert Gibbins, the founder of Autonomy Capital, another London hedge fund, says his desk is adorned with the deformed remains of a car bumper, melted by an Australian wildfire. An interest in modish office decor is a long-standing feature of high finance. An interest in climate change, though, was until recently rare; the preserve of boutique investment houses and pokey back offices in the large asset managers. Читать дальше...

THE FINANCIAL industry reflects society, but it can change society, too. One question is the role it might play in decarbonising the economy. Judged by today’s fundraising bonanza and the solemn pronouncements by institutional investors, bankers and regulators, you might think that the industry is about to save the planet. Some 500 environmental, social and governance (ESG) funds were launched last year, and many asset managers say they will force companies to cut their emissions and finance new projects. Читать дальше...

AS YOU READ this, over 60,000 cargo ships are on the high seas, laden with iPhones from China, dresses from Bangladesh, beef from Argentina, oil from the Gulf and much, much more. The industry likes to say that it is responsible for “90% of everything”. Indeed, its ships are the circulatory system of global commerce and their 1.2m merchant seamen its lifeblood. They enable nations to turn their comparative advantage into wealth. If they were to stop, much of humanity would soon begin to starve or freeze. Читать дальше...

In defence of prosecutors

As a former prosecutor, with more than a decade of experience in Miami, I take issue with your statement alleging that prosecutors are not inclined to bring charges against police because we’d rather secure convictions to advance our careers (“Order above the law”, June 6th). The “elaborate culture” described in your article of turning a blind-eye to police misconduct is an academic chimera. I have never met a prosecutor who engaged in that kind of unethical calculus... Читать дальше...

People who live alone and single parents can now join up with another household indoors from Friday as lockdown eases in Scotland.

One came from abroad, eight from other States

Speed is believed to be a factor in an early morning collision in south Edmonton that sent two people to hospital.

Julia Conley, staff writer

Immigrant rights advocates celebrated a major victory Thursday morning as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration cannot end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has allowed nearly 800,000 young immigrants to live and work in the United States.

Currently there exists no analysis regarding the reconstruction of which buildings the state should support and in what cases the state support thereof is economically reasonable, Minister of Public Administration Jaak Aab (Center) said.