Новости за 30.12.2020

IN A VIDEO posted in February to YouTube, Zhang Zhan (pictured) insisted that people in China had the right to speak freely and monitor officials. She was reflecting on efforts by officials to silence those, like her, who had dared to report independently on the epidemic of covid-19 then engulfing the city of Wuhan. A court in Shanghai plainly disagrees. On December 28th it sentenced Ms Zhang, who has been on a prolonged hunger strike, to four years in prison for “picking quarrels and causing trouble”. Читать дальше...

OUTSIDE A HOSPITAL in southern Sri Lanka on December 22nd, a handful of Muslim men bowed their heads against the rain, chanting prayers as an unpolished coffin was loaded into an ambulance. They were given just minutes to pay their respects to the deceased, who, doctors said, had tested positive for covid-19. But that was not the most distressing part of it. Against the wishes of his family, his body was being rushed not to a cemetery, but to a crematorium.

SLUNG OVER Pen Keo’s shoulder is a big wicker basket containing wire-mesh traps, which he lays, one by one, on a rice field where rats are known to scamper. There are so many traps there already, it is difficult to find space for his. In Takéo, a rural province in southern Cambodia, rat-catching serves two purposes. The creatures would otherwise ravage crops, and can also be sold for tidy sums in neighbouring Vietnam. There rats nourished on a free-range diet of rice stalks and roots are a delicacy. Читать дальше...

“CONFUCIAN LAND” is a cultural exhibition in the South Korean city of Andong. It first asks visitors to reflect on the horrors of contemporary society, including war, consumerism and sexual licence. It then invites them to travel through a “tunnel of time” to 16th-century Korea, when Confucianism was the official philosophy of the royal court. The Korea of yore is portrayed as a harmonious Utopia, save for the occasional battle against Japanese invaders. Virtuous conduct, imply the displays charting... Читать дальше...

THE TRIBESMEN outside the Pakistani embassy in Kabul huddle into their woollen shawls and wait. A few years ago, grumble Abdul Haq Barakzai and his friends, a trip to Pakistan for medical treatment was as straightforward as slipping a border guard a few hundred rupees. As well as the main crossing at Torkham, a rich choice of tracks led across the mountainous frontier. No paperwork was needed to cross. Now he must stand in line with a bundle of doctors’ notes to obtain a visa.

HIRAI TAKUYA keeps a tablet computer propped on his desk and an Apple Watch on his wrist. It is an unusual look for a Japanese politician. As Japan’s new minister of digital reform, his task is to make the stubbornly analogue Japanese government work a bit more like him.

THE POLICE vans on the ferry were a bad sign. On December 30th Bobi Wine, a pop star who is running for the Ugandan presidency, was campaigning on an island in Lake Victoria. Police and soldiers were waiting for him. They stopped his convoy and arrested members of his entourage. They threw tear gas grenades at journalists on the scene, then ordered them to stop using their phones. Mr Wine himself was bundled into a helicopter: the police insisted they were not arresting him, but merely taking him home. Читать дальше...

FOR 15 YEARS Binyamin Netanyahu has been the undisputed leader of the Israeli right. In 2009 he guided his nationalist Likud party to power, becoming prime minister. He has held the office ever since. Challengers from the centre and left have tried mightily, and failed, to unseat him. They pose little threat as Israel gears up for an election on March 23rd. Now, though, Mr Netanyahu (pictured, left) faces a challenge from former allies on the right.

LITTLE IS KNOWN about Abdelmadjid Tebboune’s bout with covid-19. For nearly two months beginning in October, Algeria’s 75-year-old president, a heavy smoker, disappeared from public view after travelling to Germany for treatment. On December 13th, amid swirling rumours about his health, Mr Tebboune’s men posted a proof of life: a five-minute video in which the visibly thinner president pledged to come home soon. At last, on December 29th, he did return, looking as if he had regained the weight. Читать дальше...

IF LOUJAIN AL-HATHLOUL is guilty of trying to harm national security and advance a foreign agenda, as a Saudi court found on December 28th, then what about Muhammad bin Salman? For Ms Hathloul merely campaigned to end the ban on woman drivers in Saudi Arabia. Prince Muhammad, its de facto ruler, actually lifted the ban in 2018, not long after Ms Hathloul was detained.

FIRST COME muffled sobs, gradually growing louder with each new voice that joins the chorus. A woman in a black shawl begins to wail, her body rocking towards the portrait of a smiling young man in the middle of the room. Abraham was 35 years old when he was shot, says an older brother who is hosting mourning relatives on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. Last month armed men arrived at the family home in Adwa, a town in the northern region of Tigray. By then many of the town’s residents had fled... Читать дальше...

IN THIRTY YEARS Chile’s wine industry has gone from backwater to global powerhouse. Its vineyards are blessed with few pests, warm summers and low costs. That has helped it become the world’s largest non-European wine exporter by volume. Now it is taking China by storm; only Australia and France send more wine there.

AT THEIR DINNER table in Mendoza, Antonio and Marta, husband and wife, disagreed over the Russian vaccine Sputnik V. “If it’s available, and free, why not?” asked Antonio, a sprightly businessman in his early 70s. “Not for me,” retorted Marta, a decade younger. “No way I think the Russians have the safe answer to this virus.”

THERE IS ONE bottle of China Lily soy sauce left in Vilma Portillo’s kitchen and she is measuring it out—drop by drop. “We know we have to ration it so we’re only using very small amounts, like one drop at a time,” says Ms Portillo. “We’re about two fingers into our last bottle.” The last time there was a China Lily soy-sauce drought in northern British Columbia, in 2018, Ms Portillo’s husband, Cody Malbeuf, stopped eating rice for three months. He vowed never again to be caught short.

MEXICO CAN be relieved to finish the Trump era in one piece. Swingeing tariffs and border closures, ever threatened, never came. Nor did the bill for a wall on America’s southern border which Donald Trump promised to build at Mexico’s expense. The president’s attack on the North American Free Trade Agreement, which includes Canada, catalysed advocates of trade and integration. One could almost conclude that Mr Trump will leave relations between the two countries sturdier than he found them.

ABOUT THE only light note of a grim Christmas season on Capitol Hill was provided, characteristically, by Lamar Alexander. At the end of a gruelling negotiation of the $900bn stimulus that President Donald Trump belatedly signed this week, the 80-year-old Tennessean, who will retire from the Senate in January, took to a piano in the Hart building to play carols.

FOR GENERATIONS, demographers considered America a standout. Lots of immigration and relatively high fertility rates increased its population faster—and kept it more youthful—than its rich-country peers. Americans within their borders were also exceptionally mobile. Over many generations they proved much readier than Europeans, for example, to flit between cities (or states) in search of a new job or lifestyle. That dynamism helped to produce a flexible labour force and lively economy.

WHEN AMERICA’S founders included in the constitution the power to “grant reprieves and pardons for crimes against the United States”, they sought to hand presidents a “benign prerogative” to show mercy to repentant law-breakers and “restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth”, as Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist 74; without such a tool, he fretted, “justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel”. Opponents worried that it would tilt the nation towards “vile and arbitrary aristocracy or monarchy”. Читать дальше...

ACCORDING TO A Manhattan Institute poll, more than half of high-earning New Yorkers are working entirely from home and 44% are considering leaving the city. Ned Lamont, Connecticut’s governor, has said “the old idea of the commuter going into New York City five days a week may be an idea that’s behind us.” It does seem unlikely that the tens of thousands who commute from Mr Lamont’s state will continue to do so, or indeed the 400,000 that commute to the Big Apple from New Jersey. The region’s... Читать дальше...

“THE OPIOID epidemic is as bad as ever,” says Caleb Alexander at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In a year when all eyes were on the death toll from covid-19, about 80,000 Americans died from drug overdoses from June 2019 to May 2020, more than during any other 12-month period ever recorded, according to preliminary figures from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Both federal and state governments have been suing companies for their part in this. On December 22nd... Читать дальше...

WHEN THE trade deal between the EU and Britain was done, there was little celebration in Brussels. Instead, the moaning began. “This is a dark day for the European fishing industry,” declared Gerard van Balsfoort, chairman of the European Fisheries Alliance, a lobby group for fishermen. Indeed, conflict over matters piscatorial dominated the final stages of the negotiations, leaving economists flabbergasted that such a tiny sector could hook so much attention.

STAY ABROAD or rot in jail. That was the choice Vladimir Putin offered this week to Alexei Navalny, the opposition politician currently in Germany recovering from an attempt by Russian security agents to assassinate him last August. The new threat was delivered by Russia’s federal prison agency, which accused Mr Navalny of violating a probation period imposed as part of a trumped-up embezzlement conviction in 2014. It was an obvious sham: the probation period expired on December 30th, but on December... Читать дальше...

THE FRENCH, wrote George Canning, a British statesman, to a ministerial colleague in 1825, “have but two rules of action: to thwart us whenever they know our object; and when they know it not, to imagine one, and to set about thwarting that.” Canning’s grumble, made a decade after the end of the Napoleonic wars, sounds oddly familiar two centuries later. And today it is not only the British who follow what might be called Canning’s law: when in doubt, blame the French. Suspicion of France’s intentions... Читать дальше...

“WHAT A PRESIDENCY it has been!” After a gruelling all-night EU summit in mid-December, Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, reserved her biggest smile for Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor. The summit, at which the EU’s leaders found agreement on a number of tricky issues, capped Germany’s six-month presidency of the EU Council, which it will hand over to Portugal on January 1st. It may also prove to be the high-water mark of Mrs Merkel’s final term in office.

LIKE MANY people, Viviane Gravey became more interested in gardening during lockdown. She bought dill and lettuce seeds from Real Seeds, a firm in Wales, and grew them on her balcony. But next year’s crop will have to come from another source, for the firm emailed her to say that, because of the new border in the Irish Sea, it would no longer sell to Northern Ireland.