Новости за 27.08.2020

ON AUGUST 20TH, shortly after Steve Bannon was arrested aboard a yacht in Long Island Sound in connection with an alleged charity fraud, the owner of the yacht, a property developer named Guo Wengui, posted a video online intimating that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had orchestrated the downfall of the former White House adviser. Mr Guo, who fled China in 2014, has established a formidable online persona as an outspoken dissident who, in his telling, will bring down the CCP.

FOR THE many British families who have been struggling to look after children while clinging on to their professional lives, the prospect of schools reopening next week is a heartening one. But there is one aspect of the rentrée to which no parents look forward: the school-uniform bill. The Children’s Society, a charity, reckons that the cost of a state-educated pupil’s secondary school uniform is now £337 ($445), up from £316 in 2015.

DECADES FROM now when the grandchildren of the covid generation ask, wide-eyed, “What did you do during the great pandemic of 2020?” the wizened elders will pause to reflect on hardships past and they will answer: “I did my bit for the country. I ate a lot of steak-frites.”

A NORTH LONDON book club, which includes a top civil servant, a senior Bank of England official and one of the country’s best-known publishers, normally picks the latest novels to dissect. But when lockdown began in late March its six members decided to take on “Madame Bovary”, Gustave Flaubert’s masterwork about the danger of getting carried away by social and romantic ambition. The shift in the book club’s tastes was a reaction to the anxious zeitgeist, says one of its members. “We wanted a book that had stood the test of time. Читать дальше...

“KEIR IS AN absolutely fantastic fit for here,” says Andrew Western. It’s a striking claim, for Altrincham and Sale West, a constituency south of Manchester, is not natural terrain for the Labour Party. Sir Graham Brady, a Tory bigwig, has represented the medieval market town since 1997, and his party hasn’t lost since 1924. The area is home to footballers, their wives and their actor pals, and bristles with charming restaurants, hair salons and Scandi furniture shops. It has some of the country’s... Читать дальше...

“IDEALLY,” WROTE George Orwell in “The Road to Wigan Pier”, his account of pre-war poverty, “the worst type of slum landlord is a fat wicked man, preferably a bishop, who is drawing an immense income from extortionate rents. Actually, it is a poor old woman who has invested her life’s savings in three slum houses, inhabits one of them, and tries to live on the rent of the other two—never, in consequence, having any money for repairs.”

“I LOVE CHINA,” declared Boris Johnson, then mayor of London, in 2013, exhorting British children, his own included, to study Mandarin. Seven years on, he is a lot less keen on China, and the vogue for studying Mandarin seems to be fading.

“WHY THE Germans do it better”—the title of a new book by John Kampfner, a respected journalist—speaks volumes about the current state of the British psyche. The government is replacing Public Health England, the body that was supposed to stop Britons from dying of covid-19, with a new outfit modelled on the Robert Koch Institute, the body at the centre of Germany’s public-health system. James Kirkup, head of the centrist Social Market Foundation, says his aim is to “make Britain more like Germany”. Читать дальше...

THE ALLEGATIONS are unproven but stunning. In a 63-page deposition, disclosed on August 19th, Emilio Lozoya, once head of Pemex, Mexico’s state oil firm, accuses 17 prominent Mexicans of corruption. According to Mr Lozoya, Enrique Peña Nieto, president in 2012-18, benefited from the payment of millions of dollars by Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction firm that has bribed officials across Latin America. The money financed his election campaign and coaxed legislators to vote for energy reforms (see article). Читать дальше...

OF ALL THE troubles facing the world, the rising prevalence of dementia might seem among the less pressing. The reason behind it—longer lifespans—is to be cheered; it does not advance at the speed of a viral infection but with the ponderous inevitability of demographic change; and its full effects will not be felt until far into the future. But the reality is very different. As our special report this week makes clear, dementia is already a global emergency. Even now, more people live with it than can be looked after humanely. Читать дальше...

IN ECUADOR PEOPLE are still searching for the bodies of relatives who died of covid-19 four months ago. In Italy a boy begged a priest to forgive the “sin” of lowering his face mask outdoors. Not since the second world war have so many people in so many places been traumatised at once (see article). Even after the disease itself is brought under control, the mental scars will linger.

THE PARENTS of a screaming new-born baby typically have no time to spare. But if they live in Europe, they should spend a few minutes shopping around for nappies. Three enormous boxes of Pampers come to €168 ($198) on Amazon’s Spanish website. By contrast, the same order from Amazon’s British website costs only €74. (Even after an exorbitant delivery fee is added, the saving is still €42.) If sleep-deprived parents are too groggy to work out how much they could save in a year, they could pep themselves up with a new coffee machine. Читать дальше...

WHEN FRANCIS DRAKE rounded the globe in 1577-80, he took an astrolabe, compass and cross-staff with him. As Ferdinand Magellan, the first known circumnavigator, started out in 1519, he had at least an astrolabe and compass. But when Marvin Creamer set sail from Cape May, New Jersey in 1982, into thick overcast and a howling gale, on a voyage of 30,000 miles requiring nearly a year at sea, he carried, to his delight, no instruments at all.

THE ARMS are those of a tall young man, his muscles toned and skin firm. One is covered in thick sweeps of black Chinese calligraphy from shoulder to wrist. That and the other limbs—around ten in all—are piled in a disembodied heap on Wu Shang’s desk. They are models that he commissioned, made of silicon rubber that looks and, crucially for him, feels like real skin. Wu Shang is a tattooist in the coastal city of Wenling. Having seen hundreds of his carefully inked pieces of art walk out of his studio door... Читать дальше...

The Lying Life of Adults. By Elena Ferrante. Translated by Ann Goldstein.Europa; 324 pages; $26 and £20. 

THE ONLY benefit to overplaying the Beatles’ greatest albums—surely a common problem in these lockdown days—is that it forces the listener back to their less celebrated material. Weary of “Rubber Soul” and “Help!” is at hand.

The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World. By John Dickie.PublicAffairs; 496 pages; $32. Hodder & Stoughton; £25. 

WHAT DO A malaria drug, a Russian vaccine and the blood plasma of people who have recovered from covid-19 have in common? All have been approved for use by governments in response to the coronavirus pandemic, with little or no scientific substance to back those decisions up.

THE NIGHTMARE began in earnest for residents of Parque das Tribos when their cacique, or local chief, died of covid-19. Messias Kokama had battled politicians, developers and drug gangs to transform a dusty informal settlement on the outskirts of Manaus, a city of 2m people deep in the Brazilian Amazon, into a haven for some 600 indigenous families from 35 ethnic groups. He was 53 and said he wasn’t afraid of the virus. His death on May 13th shook the community.

THE CURTAINS are still down at most American cinemas but in China the box office is back in business. This week audiences lined up—socially distanced, of course—to see films including “The Eight Hundred”, a war drama for which Americans will have to wait. Next week Disney will send its summer tentpole, “Mulan”, straight to streaming in most of the West, whereas Chinese filmgoers will get the chance to watch it on the big screen.

Letters are welcome via e-mail to letters@economist.com  

The Democratic ticket

Kamala Harris, you claim, “comes from the Democratic Party’s centre”, is “not particularly ideological”, and never strays “too far from where a majority of voters are” (“What Kamala says about Joe”, August 15th). Her voting record in the Senate indicates otherwise. According to UCLA’s VoteView website, Ms Harris’s votes are more left-leaning than that of any other senator, except Elizabeth Warren. Her... Читать дальше...

These days, it’s impossible to look back at the movies of the great Mel Brooks without somebody getting their panties in a bunch about their lack of political correctness. To that, I say, “lighten up.” Comedy is supposed to push boundaries, and poke fun at people’s sensitivities and societal norms.

Did anybody in the entire world ever eat Lucky Charms for the cereal? Really?

I caught up with its Cloudpunk creator Marko Dieckmann to discuss the neon-noir title and the struggles it took to create it. ...

The new strategy shows the Fed's acceptance that low unemployment "can be sustained without causing an unwelcome increase in inflation," Powell said.