Новости за 16.12.2020

With the thrust on e-mobility, the government is on mission mode to boost the battery ecosystem

Marcos Rojo has also been ruled out over the festive period.

TikTok began rolling out a new text-to-speech feature this week that will automatically convert text to a voiceover as users watch videos that have the feature enabled. Our guide will show you how to activate text-to-speech on your videos before posting them. Note: These screenshots were captured in the TikTok application on iOS. Step 1:...

Texas AM enters the final week of the regular season ranked fifth in the College Football Playoff, in prime position to maintain pressure on the top four contenders in the hopes of securing a bid. A

XIANZI WAS an intern at China’s national television network when she visited the dressing room of Zhu Jun, a presenter, in 2014. She wanted to interview him to gather information for a project at her university. Once they were alone, she says, he groped and kissed her. When she later complained to the police, they told her not to sue him because it would reflect badly on the Communist Party. Mr Zhu is a household name. His jobs have included hosting China’s annual new-year gala, the world’s most-watched television show. Читать дальше...

WHEN AMERICA withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council in 2018, China expressed regret. No one bought it. The forum deals with a topic that is a huge potential embarrassment for China. The absence of the world’s most powerful democracy from its deliberations made it likelier that China’s abuses would escape censure. But with Joe Biden preparing to take over as America’s president, China fears trouble ahead. It is girding its loins in the council.

WHEN IT COMES to voicing demands, India’s 150m farmers are not shy. Recent protests have seen throngs of them descend on the national capital to express desperation by, among other things, stripping naked, being buried alive, displaying skulls (allegedly of fellow farmers who have killed themselves in despair), and even by eating rats and human faeces.

WHEN JAKARTA went into lockdown in April Asian Tigers Group, a moving company, received a flurry of business from wealthy expatriates who had fled overnight. Removal teams were led into deserted homes by maids or colleagues. Without the owners on hand to sort belongings, they found themselves stripping beds and packing dirty sheets into boxes alongside broken toys and other junk.

ON DECEMBER 11TH Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, flew off to take a holiday at his country home in Daura, an ancient seat of Islamic learning in the northern state of Katsina. That night hundreds of gunmen riding on motorbikes stormed a boarding school in Kankara, also in Katsina state. Some schoolboys jumped over a fence and ran away when they heard gunshots. But more than 300 were rounded up and herded into the surrounding forest. One who later escaped told the BBC they were beaten, threatened and forced to walk through the night. Читать дальше...

IT IS NOT yet noon but the streets of Luhihi, a tiny town in eastern Congo, are already full of revellers. Men fall about outside bars filled with prostitutes. Gamblers hover over draughtboards. Music blares from a makeshift club near the river where miners sift through mud for gold.

EVEN BY IRAN’S standards the justice was rough. Four days after sentence was passed, Ruhollah Zam was hanged. The judge said he had spied, incited violence and “sown corruption on earth”. Most Iranians took that to mean that he had simply disagreed with the right of the ayatollahs to rule.

THE SAGA of the potential third runway at Heathrow, Britain’s largest airport, has been called the longest take-off in history. A commission in 1993 recommended expansion, and the government first endorsed the plan in 2003. But it was not until 2018 that the transport secretary finally gave the project the go-ahead. A Court of Appeal ruling in February 2020 that the runway was not compatible with Britain’s obligations under the Paris climate agreement of 2015 appeared to have finally scuppered the plans. Читать дальше...

MICHAEL JACKSON had Bubbles, a chimpanzee. Justin Bieber had OG Mally, a capuchin, until it was seized by German customs officials and put in a zoo. Rihanna has been photographed bottle-feeding a baby monkey on holiday. The trio of stars would find few fans in the British government, which on December 12th proposed new restrictions on keeping primates as pets. Somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 marmosets, lemurs, tamarins and other little species are kept in private ownership in Britain, the government reckons, often bored to misery. Читать дальше...

BORIS JOHNSON has often claimed that a story he wrote as a journalist in May 1992 entitled “Delors plan to rule Europe” helped swing Danish voters towards a narrow rejection of the European Union’s Maastricht treaty. That the article, like much that he wrote about the EU, bore little relationship to the truth has never appeared to trouble him much; yet the suspicions around his character which his coverage of Brussels engendered in the European Commission are now coming back to bite him, for they... Читать дальше...

SINCE THE European Union’s single market took effect in 1992, goods have flowed freely across Britain’s border with the EU without the suite of checks normally carried out at a country’s frontier. When Britain leaves the union at 11pm on December 31st, this arrangement will end. Pol Sweeney of Descartes, a supply-chain technology company, estimates that Britain’s departure will create a requirement to inspect a volume of goods some five to ten times larger than are checked at present. Those checks will be required with or without a deal... Читать дальше...

A BRITISH CHRISTMAS is inseparable not just from a jolly fat man in a red suit but also from a grumpy, thin “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner”. Charles Dickens’s novella “A Christmas Carol” was an instant hit. Within two months of its publication in 1843 there were 12 adaptations on the London stage. Nearly two centuries on, its anti-hero retains his hold on the popular imagination. The internet offers a dancing Scrooge, a singing Scrooge, a woke Scrooge... Читать дальше...

No. 7 Villanova and No. 17 Virginia will not play at Madison Square Garden as scheduled on Saturday due to ongoing COVID-19 concerns in the Cavaliers' program, according to multiple reports. Virginia

IN THE AFTERMATH of the first world war, the gold standard inspired nearly religious fervour from central bankers. European officials dutifully re-pegged their war-battered currencies to gold at great cost to their citizens. A hundred years on, it has lost its lustre. Judy Shelton’s past support for it may have derailed her nomination to the Federal Reserve’s board. A recent paper* shows why the gold standard’s tarnished reputation is well deserved.

EVEN IN NORMAL times, there is an element of drama to the markets. The oil price may spike or slump in reaction to a geopolitical wobble; bond yields may leap on strong jobs figures; and shareholders may pump up a stock that posted juicy profits. But 2020 has taken the drama to an extreme (see chart 1). The equity sell-off in March was unmatched in its swiftness: stocks lost 30% of their value in a month. The yield on ten-year American Treasuries, the most important asset worldwide, fell by half... Читать дальше...

EXXONMOBIL, ONCE the world’s most valuable publicly traded oil company, is not easily swayed. As green investors urged it to develop cleaner energy, it planned instead to pump 25% more oil and gas by 2025. As rivals wrote down billions of dollars in assets, it said its own reserves were unaffected. But in the maelstrom of 2020 even mighty Exxon had to budge. On November 30th it announced a write-down of between $17bn and $20bn, and cuts to capital spending of up to a third in 2022-25, implicitly scrapping its production goal. Читать дальше...

Editor’s note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our hub

IF ANY INDUSTRY could use help from Wonder Woman, it is cinemas. Lockdowns and a dearth of new releases have reduced worldwide box-office takings by about 70% in 2020. Thankfully for theatre owners, the corseted crusader will charge to the rescue on Christmas Day, giving audiences a reason to go back to the movies.

Editor’s note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our hub

SINCE MYANMAR began to reverse decades of isolationism in 2011, it has embraced modernity with a zeal befitting a country deprived of it for so long. Students tap smartphones, food-delivery jockeys zip down the streets and cash machines are everywhere. But while the people of Yangon, the country’s biggest city and commercial capital, are rushing into the present, much of the urban fabric remains firmly in the past. Most buildings in the city centre were built in the colonial era, when Rangoon... Читать дальше...

IT IS AN anniversary no one is eager to mark. The numbers boggle the mind: half a million people dead; another 16m displaced from states no longer recognisable. There are the individual stories too, of dreams dashed and hopes shattered. One former activist, who long since gave up on the politics of his native Egypt, scrolls through the contacts on his phone, stopping now and then to list his friends’ fates: exiled, disappeared, dead.