Новости за 13.08.2020

DURING HIS term in office, Donald Trump has often bashed China while occasionally praising its leader, Xi Jinping. Similar two-mindedness characterises his administration. China hawks, led by Robert Lighthizer, his trade representative, and Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, have tussled for influence with more dovish figures such as Steven Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, who have tried to prevent a rupture between the two giants. Companies and investors from both countries have watched the contest closely. Читать дальше...

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THE LAST whole ice shelf in Canada’s Arctic was no match for this summer’s heatwave. In northern Ellesmere Island temperatures since May have been 5⁰C warmer than the 30-year average of 0-1⁰C. On July 30th-31st, the 80-metre (260-foot) thick Milne ice shelf, which juts out from the island’s north-western coast, split in two. A slab measuring 80 square km (31 square miles), more than 40% of the shelf’s surface area, broke away. By August 3rd the wandering wedge of ice split again. The two strays... Читать дальше...

PLOT TWISTS in Mexico’s underworld happen quickly. In Netflix narco-dramas, Joaquín (El Chapo) Guzmán, the former boss of the Sinaloa drug gang, is the country’s chief mobster. In real life Mr Guzmán is serving a life sentence in a Colorado prison. He has been eclipsed by Nemesio Osegura Cervantes, the boss of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG). Five years ago it appeared for the first time in the list of top drug-trafficking gangs put out by the United States’ Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Читать дальше...

MOST OF THE liquid oxygen in Bolivia comes from Santa Cruz, many miles and many mountains away from other cities. For years doctors urged Evo Morales, the socialist president who was overthrown last November, to boost production in La Paz, the administrative capital, or to equip hospitals with systems to make their own. Supplies were running low even before August 3rd, when supporters of Mr Morales, Bolivia’s first president of indigenous origin, began blockading roads across the country to protest... Читать дальше...

IN JUNE DUTCH police cracked open a shipping container on a farm and found it had been converted into a torture chamber, with walls covered in sound insulation and a dentist’s chair equipped with arm and leg restraints, as well as handcuffs, hacksaws and pliers. They were tipped off by an informant inside Caloh Wagoh, a Dutch motorcycle gang whose leader, “Keylow”, had been arrested and charged with running a murder-for-hire scheme. Prosecutors say a Moroccan-Dutch drug kingpin hired Caloh Wagoh to carry out 11 hits... Читать дальше...

NO VOTING SYSTEM is flawless, as any political-science student can tell you. Britain’s first-past-the-post method can give a thumping majority to a party that wins far less than half the vote. Ultra-proportional systems, as in the Netherlands, lead to fragmented chambers full of fringe parties, with no local links, devoted to animal rights or the elderly. Germany’s “mixed-member proportional” system is supposed to offer the best of both worlds. Unfortunately its size has begun to matter.

IT DOESN’T SOUND dramatic. Technicians in the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are preparing to change the frequency of their electric grids. This will involve desynchronising from a regional power system called IPS/UPS to allow synchronisation with another one, the Continental Synchronous Area. But look closer, and the switch is part of a contest that pits democratic Europe against autocratic Russia and its tinpot ally Belarus.

OF ALL THE disturbing sounds and images streaming out of Belarus, it was the broken voice of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya that spoke loudest. If the election on August 9th had been remotely free or fair, Ms Tikhanovskaya, a former English teacher with no political experience, might now be president-elect of her country. During the campaign, she attracted vast, cheering crowds. In the few polling stations where votes were properly observed and counted, she won more than 70% of them.

YOU MIGHT think that by now Turkey had run out of handcuffs. But although the wave of arrests related to the bizarre coup attempt that rocked the country in the summer of 2016 has certainly slowed, it has not stopped. Every week seems to bring a new round-up of suspected members of the Gulen community, or cemaat, the Islamist movement that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blames for the coup. At least 41 people, many of them soldiers, were detained on July 27th. Warrants for over two dozen others were issued last week. Читать дальше...

BORIS JOHNSON is taking a fortnight’s holiday in Scotland, armed with a volume of Lucretius, William Boyd’s novel “Any Human Heart” and Brendan Simms’s “Britain’s Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation”. Few would begrudge him his break: he has lived a lifetime in the past year, having got divorced and remarried, had another child, almost died of covid-19 and struggled with the worst crisis since the second world war. But Bagehot would nevertheless suggest adding a fourth book to... Читать дальше...

CLIVE THINKS immigration has overwhelmed the health service. Pat says her town is swamped by new housing. Elizabeth voted for Brexit, but doesn’t want a trade deal with America, “especially the pharmaceutical side of it, Trump and his chickens.” So did Kathleen, but she now thinks a no-deal exit will mean shortages of groceries and medicines. “I’m prepared to do without stuff,” she says.

WHEN BORIS JOHNSON opened the year with a video message promising an “exhilarating decade of growth, prosperity and opportunity”, his supporters were quick to predict a new “roaring 20s”. They were not so wide of the mark. This year has opened with Britain’s deepest recession since the post-first-world-war crash of 1919 and 1920.

IN A COUNTRY in the heart of Europe grisly acts were being committed this week, with the approval of Russia and China, the mildest of European protests and near-silence from America. An election was rigged; the challenger was forced to leave the country; protesters are being beaten and jailed. The perpetrator is Alexander Lukashenko, a 65-year-old dictator who has ruled the former Soviet republic of Belarus for most of its 30 years of independence. With luck, though, he may have overreached.

ACROSS THE developing world vast numbers of people have lost their jobs or seen their incomes fall. Many are being forced to sell their meagre belongings to pay for food. Ideally state handouts would plug the gap in their finances, but in many countries the public coffers are empty. Often people are too poor a credit risk, or live too remotely, to get help from banks. Microcredit, a form of lending tailored to them, should be part of the answer, but the industry is flunking one of its biggest tests. Читать дальше...

NORTHERN EUROPEAN countries think of themselves as rather superior to southern European ones—economically healthier, less corrupt and generally better run. Britain, of course, places itself firmly in the former group. But since the covid-19 crisis exploded, it has found itself running with a different pack. Its death rate from the disease has been as bad as the worst that southern Europe has seen, and far worse than those in most of northern Europe or America. And now GDP figures from the first half of the year... Читать дальше...

A home from home

Your first-class report on looking after the elderly suggested that caring for old people in their own homes is cheaper and better than caring for them in care homes (“No place like home”, July 25th). So far as cost is concerned, you pointed to a study that put the saving from staying at home at $4,500 a year. But the average for a group conceals wide variation. A person requiring trained nursing 24 hours a day can be cared for much more cheaply in a nursing home where... Читать дальше...

Windows 10's Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling can reduce latency and improve graphical performance, but it's set to "off" by default.

FC Dallas defender Reggie Cannon sounded off against the boos at Toyota Stadium on Wednesday

The taxman should focus on the problems of today, rather than chasing suspected violations of an erstwhile tax regime without clear evidence

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) - It looks like Spain’s soccer league finished just in time.

Philippe Coutinho wants to return to the Premier League after his Bayern Munich loan finishes but could yet remain with parent club Barcelona, according to his agent Kia Joorabchian. Coutinho left England for Barca in 2018 having spent five years with Liverpool, with the Catalans bringing him in to help alleviate the loss of Neymar […]

https://www.skysports.com/watch/video/1 ... d-hockaday

Interesting interview with David Hockaday about his 70 day stint at Leeds.

Ethen Kim Lieser

Politics, Europe

Experts have raised serious concerns about Moscow's rushed vaccine.

Russia has doubled down on its claim that its coronavirus vaccine is both safe and effective.

On Tuesday, the country announced that its vaccine had been approved by its health regulators—making it the world’s first coronavirus vaccine to be registered.

Large-scale production of the vaccine, perhaps up to five million doses a month, is slated to begin in September... Читать дальше...

1. Coronavirus: England's contact tracing app trial gets under way  BBC News
2. NHS Test and Trace app: 9 new features from quarantine countdown clock to pub QR scanner  Mirror Online
3. Covid-19: New trial for England's revamped NHS contact-tracing app  Digital Health
4. Test and Trace service reaches more than 250000 people since launch  GOV.UK
5. Coronavirus: England's contact-tracing app gets green light for trial  BBC News
6. View Full coverage on Google News