Новости за 16.12.2020

AFTER YEARS of dithering, Cuba is finally about to take the plunge. On December 10th the country’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, announced that on the first day of the new year it would abolish one of its two currencies. That is a big step towards ridding the socialist economy of distortions that thwart production, drain the treasury and keep people poor. But it leaves in place many enterprise-crushing rules and creates new problems that the government will struggle to overcome.

COVID-19 HAS led to many innovations. In America one has been the drive-in political rally. On December 5th the two Democratic Senate candidates in Georgia, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, held one such event in Rockdale County, a fast-growing suburb of Atlanta where Joe Biden won almost 70% of the vote. Most of those attending listened to the speeches from their cars, honking enthusiastically rather than clapping. Despite the protection of their windscreens, almost everyone in the multiracial crowd wore masks. Читать дальше...

CLOSED SCHOOLS are bad for all children, but especially bad for poor and disadvantaged pupils. This basic pattern recurs wherever and whenever researchers look for it—in the wake of an epidemic of polio in America in 1916, after teachers’ strikes in Argentina since the 1980s, and after a devastating earthquake in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir in 2005.

FOR MAURICE COOK, a community organiser in Washington, DC, the covid-19 pandemic has brought mostly the worst of times—but in some ways the best.

LAST YEAR New Yorkers might have found a pair of headphones or perhaps some woolly socks in their Christmas stockings. Some lucky ducks might have found tickets to a Broadway show. This year’s most popular stocking-stuffer may be the portable ultraviolet-light sanitiser wand, which comes with a handy bag. It is one of the big sellers, says Valerie Zirema, who works in CV19 Essential, New York City’s first dedicated coronavirus-prevention shop.

THERE IS PLENTY of farmland in Fuzuli, one of Azerbaijan’s districts that ring the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. But there is nothing to harvest. Where wheat and grapes once grew, unexploded rockets sprout from the ground at odd angles, reminders of the vicious fighting that tore through the area in the autumn. The charred hulks of tanks remain. A cratered road snakes through a wasteland of villages and towns abandoned after an earlier bout of violence three decades ago. Thousands of landmines lurk underground. Читать дальше...

SQUINT A LITTLE, and Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen look rather alike. The British prime minister and the president of the European Commission were both children of Eurocrats, partly brought up in Brussels. Both were written off in domestic politics, only to be catapulted into the biggest jobs of their lives. Both have enough children to fill a minibus.

HEALTH-CARE systems everywhere are buckling because of covid-19. In south-east Europe, rising infection rates are hammering systems that were already run-down. Balkan doctors and nurses have been emigrating for years. The main reason is that conditions at home are poor. Pay is low, graft is rife and hospitals are often run by venal political appointees. Jobs in western Europe seem cushy by comparison.

ANGELA MERKEL, Germany’s chancellor, has long applied two operating principles in Europe: to keep the club united, and to postpone resolving crises until the last possible moment. Both were evident in an eleventh-hour deal struck on December 10th in Brussels between the European Union’s 27 heads of government. With a fiscal crunch looming, the leaders at last gave the green light to a seven-year EU budget worth €1.1trn ($1.3trn) as well as a one-off €750bn fund, financed by joint borrowing, to speed recovery from the covid-19 crisis. Читать дальше...

AS NATIVITY SCENES go, the one in St Peter’s Square unveiled on December 11th is a startling departure from tradition. Several of the 54 giant ceramic figures would not look out of place on a Star Wars set. “Ugly and demonic-looking,” one appalled Catholic called them on Twitter. But the crib, apparently inspired by Greek, Egyptian and Sumerian art, is of a piece with a year that has been as exceptional for Europe’s smallest state and its ruler, Pope Francis, as for the rest of the world.

FOR MUCH of human history and in many places, girls were considered property. Or, at best, subordinate people, required to obey their fathers until the day they had to start obeying their husbands. Few people thought it worthwhile to educate them. Even fewer imagined that a girl could grow up to govern Germany, run the IMF or invent a vaccine.

Snow. By Anthony Wood. Prometheus Books; 272 pages; $24.95 and £19.99

ANTHONY WOOD remembers sitting in the classroom one snowy morning as his teacher eyed the “saucer-size flakes” swirling outside the window. “Please boys and girls”, she implored, “pray that it stops snowing.” How little she grasped the mind of children, Mr Wood observes: “We were praying, alright—praying that it would snow until June.”

Everyone knows children love snow. Mr Wood’s new book is meant for adults who remain infatuated. Читать дальше...

All on the Board. Yellow Kite; 288 pages; £14.99

IT WAS MARCH 2017 and fans were streaming out of a concert by Craig David at the O2 Arena in London and into North Greenwich Tube station. As they jovially belted out their favourite tunes, an ode to the pop star, crammed with song titles and catchy rhymes, appeared on a whiteboard in the ticket hall. A crowd soon surrounded the board, giggling and taking selfies.

Hundreds of rhymes have since been posted mysteriously around London’s Underground network... Читать дальше...

WHEAT WAS among the first plants to be domesticated and is now the most widespread crop in the world. It thus sounds unlikely there would be much left to learn about what makes it thrive. Yet, some 12,000 years after relations between people and wheat began, a wheat plant has been caught doing something unexpected. It helped itself to a dose of much-needed phosphorus when its leaves received a coating of desert dust.

HUMAN BEINGS are good at locating the sources of sounds. Even when blindfolded, most people can point to within ten degrees of the true direction of a sound’s origin. This is a useful knack for evading danger. It is also an extraordinary cerebral feat. Partly, it is a matter of detecting minute differences of volume in each ear. Partly, it comes from tiny disparities in the time it takes a sound to reach two ears that are not equidistant from its source. The heavy lifting of sound-location, however, involves something else entirely. 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

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

IN MOST YEARS most countries improve in various ways. In 2020, however, premature death and economic contraction became the new normal, and most countries aspired only to dodge the worst of it. Inevitably, our shortlist of most-improved countries includes some that merely avoided regressing much.

“WHAT KIND of repression do you imagine it takes for a young man to do this?” So asked Leila Bouazizi after her brother, Muhammad, set himself on fire ten years ago. Local officials in Tunisia had confiscated his fruit cart, ostensibly because he did not have a permit but really because they wanted to extort money from him. It was the final indignity for the young man. “How do you expect me to make a living?” he shouted before dousing himself with petrol in front of the governor’s office.

FIVE YEARS ago antitrust was a backwater. In America complacent trustbusters had failed to spot the rise of big tech firms. In the European Union they noticed it, but didn’t do much. But the competition cops have at last sprung. On December 15th the EU unveiled two draft digital-services laws that would create a sweeping supervisory apparatus to control Silicon Valley. In America the federal government has just launched antitrust cases against Google and Facebook. These moves mark the biggest shift in competition policy in a generation... Читать дальше...

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

Brexit lays an egg

Your leader on British farming and food standards after Brexit underplayed the role of international agritrade policy (“Ploughing its own furrow”, November 28th). Take your example of free-range eggs. British consumers can buy them in confidence now because of high EU and British standards. A tariff on eggs and egg products protects the market from imports that are marked as free range but are of a lower standard. Читать дальше...

Front victorious in 20 of 26 divisions with the rest going to UDF

1. NFL Fantasy Football Start 'Em, Sit 'Em Week 15: Kickers  NFL.com
2. Fantasy Football Start 'Em, Sit 'Em Week 15: Wide Receivers - Sleepers, Fades, Matchups, DFS Bargains  Sports Illustrated
3. Week 15 IDP Waivers: Preparing for the Playoffs!  RotoBaller
4. Top Fantasy Football Waiver Wire Pickups for Week 15 | Rotoworld  NBC Sports
5. Fantasy Football Start 'Em, Sit 'Em Week 15: Running Backs - Fades, Sleepers, Matchups, DFS Bargains  Sports Illustrated
6. View Full... Читать дальше...

Tallinn's district of Lasnamäe has the highest infection rate in the capital followed by the City Center.

TESCO has issued food recall warnings on a number of products sold in stores. The items could cause a possible health risk for consumers. Here is the full list of affected products.