Новости за 13.08.2020

ANDREW JOHNSTONE runs a fund that goes “where people have not gone before”. Launched in 2015, Climate Investor One finances renewable-energy projects that the market deems too risky, such as wind farms in Vietnam and hydropower facilities in Uganda. It uses grants from development agencies to attract capital from pension funds. That allows it to raise more cash. For every $1 in grants, it has secured $12 from the private sector.

AMERICA’S ONGOING assault on firms from China, spurred by worries about its citizens’ personal data being passed to the Chinese government, will have put wry smiles on some faces—not least those of activists who for years have used similar arguments to try to stop their governments passing individuals’ financial data to America and other countries. Their legal challenges against transfers of tax-related data have had little success so far. But a recent ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the EU’s top court, could change that. Читать дальше...

THERE SEEMED to be no end to the unusual measures Turkey would take to shore up the lira. The government had made it prohibitively hard for foreigners to bet against the battered currency. By the end of June the central bank had burned through $65bn in foreign reserves to protect it, in effect pegging it to the dollar for the past couple of months. On August 6th, however, the bank gave up and allowed the lira to float. It promptly sank (see chart 1). The currency fell by more than 3% during the day, reaching a record low. Читать дальше...

SEVERAL STARTLING things awaited 20 blind Chinese youngsters attending a residential course that began in Shanghai this week, designed to prepare them for university. Adult instructors, many of them also blind, broached topics that protective parents rarely raise, from the rules of raucous student party-games to the perils of falling in love. Learning to navigate a campus alone is not just about finding libraries or canteens, noted Yang Qingfeng of Golden Cane, the charity organising the course. Читать дальше...

THE SYMBOLISM of the spectacle was lost on few Hong Kongers. On August 10th, amid the city’s third wave of covid-19, which has resulted in restrictions on public gatherings of more than two people, 200 police raided the offices of Apple Daily, a local tabloid, bound the wrists of its owner Jimmy Lai, paraded him around the newsroom and marched him away. Employees live-streamed the show on Facebook.

BANGLADESH MAY be the homeland of microcredit, but no country is keener on it than Cambodia. According to its central bank, there were some 160,000 branches of microfinance institutions around the country in 2016—one for almost every square kilometre of Cambodian territory. Almost 2.2m of Cambodia’s 10m-odd adults have a microcredit loan outstanding, according to the Cambodian Microfinance Association (CMA), an industry group. The average debt is $3,320—roughly twice the country’s annual GDP per person. Читать дальше...

IN DECEMBER IT will have been ten years since Muhammad Bouazizi, a Tunisian street peddler, set himself on fire. He was protesting against harassment by local police, who often demanded bribes to let him carry on earning his modest living. His death inspired the Arab spring: a series of popular uprisings that toppled autocrats, Tunisia’s included, across the Middle East.

HE IS THE type of leader donors revere. When Alassane Ouattara became president in 2011, Ivory Coast was a ruin, despoiled by two civil wars and a decade of political turmoil. Under his stewardship the country has grown calmer and richer. He has attracted foreign investment, made inroads against corruption and presided over an economy that has grown by an average of 8% a year since he came to power. Ivory Coast was once regarded as the jewel of Francophone Africa. Mr Ouattara (pictured) has restored some of its sparkle. Читать дальше...

“MY OUTFIT FOR the day determines what hair I will be wearing,” says Olayinka Titilope, a Nigerian wigmaker. She has a different peruke for each day of the month. The weather also influences her choice. On cooler days she might opt for long, thick locks. During the summer she tends towards lighter bob-cuts. Ms Titilope hopes her hairdos will inspire the customers who visit her wig gallery in downtown Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital. She sells wigs for between $60 and $800. Those at the top end are made of human hair from Cambodia... Читать дальше...

THE DEAD were still being buried, victims treated, rubble cleared. But less than a week after the massive explosion at Beirut’s port on August 4th, which devastated much of the city centre, Lebanon’s leaders had returned to their usual priority: self-preservation. The prime minister, Hassan Diab, announced his resignation six days after the blast. He will linger on as a caretaker until the country’s political leaders choose a replacement. They are determined to escape blame for a disaster of their own making—and... Читать дальше...

FROM THE parade of politicians and journalists passing through, one might think that the Kisutu Resident Magistrate Court is a high-society haunt. But instead of being offered cocktails and gossip, they are here to be tried (or, at least, denied bail) by a judiciary that looks increasingly like the strong arm of Tanzania’s government.

Kamal Harris, the right choiceBy picking Kamala Harris as his running mate, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has created history and effectiv

A WHILE AFTER his argument with the patio table, when his sliced right thumb had had stitches and appeared to be healing, Leon Fleisher noticed a sluggishness in his right index finger. It was especially unresponsive when he tried to play trills, and that was no small matter. The ascending trills in the cadenza of the adagio of the Brahms first piano concerto, each joined by the next and then prolonged with a touch of the pedal—just a little, nothing showy—had a resonance like the shimmering of the universe. Читать дальше...

The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today. By David Stasavage. Princeton University Press; 424 pages; $35 and £30. 

Ring of Spies. By Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones.History Press; 288 pages; £20. Published in America as “The Nazi Spy Ring in America” by Georgetown University Press in September; $29.95. 

HIS GRANDPARENTS were slaves. His father painted houses. His immigrant mother washed laundry. For a poor, mixed-race boy born in Brazil in 1839, their son had done well to become an apprentice typesetter in Rio de Janeiro. But a priest taught him Latin, and a literary gent spotted the gifted lad at the Imprensa Nacional, the government press, and soon he was contributing to newspapers, writing plays and poems and starting a literary circle.

FROM THE moa in New Zealand to the dodo in Mauritius, the arrival of humans has often spelled extinction for tasty but previously isolated animals. Many scientists had assumed that the woolly rhinoceros, a shaggy beast that sported an enormous horn, suffered the same fate. The animal was common in northern Europe and northern Asia 30,000 years ago, when the first humans arrived. Shortly after, it disappeared.

IN RAY BRADBURY’s science-fiction story “A Sound of Thunder”, a character time-travels far into the past and inadvertently crushes a butterfly underfoot. The consequences of that minuscule change ripple through reality such that, upon the time-traveller’s return, the present has been dramatically changed.

IN SOME PARTS of the world, covid-19 is not the only plague that 2020 has brought. In parts of Asia and east Africa, swarms of locusts have stripped fields. The UN reckons the swarms in India and Pakistan are the largest for a quarter of a century, and that the numbers in Kenya are the highest for 70 years. One swarm in northern Kenya was estimated to be 25 miles (40km) long and 37 miles wide.

CLOSING TIME for the Kondapur branch of Muthoot Finance, in Hyderabad, is usually 5.30pm on a Monday. But on August 10th it was only two hours later that the manager, Haripuri Padmavati, and her five colleagues, could shut the doors. More than 150 customers had visited the gold-backed lender, six times as many as on a Monday before covid-19. Among the borrowers were those caring for infected family members; those who had lost their jobs but had big bills, such as school fees, to settle; and business... Читать дальше...

THIS AWFUL year could, paradoxically, be a good one for what economists call convergence. This normally takes place when poor economies grow faster than rich ones, narrowing the income gap between them. This year will be a bit different. Few emerging markets will grow at all—perhaps China, Egypt and Vietnam. But because advanced economies will probably retreat even faster, the gap between them will narrow. In the pandemic, like a 400m race, the laurels go to whoever slows down least.

IMAGINE BEING locked in a dark room. Fearful of slamming into a wall or tripping, you inch forwards, arms outstretched. That is roughly how the European Central Bank (ECB) has approached interest-rate cuts since it first ventured into sub-zero territory in 2014. It knows there is a limit to how low rates can go, and that the limit is near, but, like the economics profession more broadly, it has no idea when it will hit the wall. With growth and inflation subdued, it cut rates gingerly, by 0.1 percentage points at a time. Читать дальше...

LAST YEAR 184 of America’s mightiest bosses vowed to manage their firms in the interest not just of company owners but also of other stakeholders—from employees to the environment. Of America’s 50 states, 32 have at least one law that lets a firm’s fiduciaries take some non-shareholder interests into account. Still, as new research from Harvard Law School suggests, many firms are only paying lip-service to the fashion for purpose. Tellingly, it finds that ceos did not consult their boards before signing the pledge... Читать дальше...

HOW MUCH is an airliner worth if it is languishing on the tarmac, and may never fly passengers again? In the age of covid-19 that is the fate of many double-decker A380 superjumbos built by Airbus, Europe’s aerospace giant. Once seen by airlines as the future of commercial aviation, many are being retired early as covid-19 has cast a pall on the future of globe-trotting. Those still in service could be yours for a few million dollars.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S sabre-rattling against corporate China has had a real but, so far, limited impact on relations between the world’s two biggest economies (see article). That could change if he decided to go all out and cut China off from the global payments system, which America controls thanks to the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency and lubricant of commerce.