Новости за 04.03.2021

“THERE’S something going on. I can’t prove it, but I can smell it,” said Gordon Jackson QC, as he concluded the defence of Alex Salmond last March. Mr Salmond, the former first minister of Scotland, was on trial for 13 charges of sexual assault, including an attempted rape, against nine women. Mr Salmond, his lawyer conceded, could be a “bad boy”, but the allegations of criminality were the product of a “murky, murky world” of Holyrood intrigue. Mr Salmond was cleared by the jury. The previous year... Читать дальше...

HOLLY Willoughby was left stunned by Stacey Solomon’s uber-organised cupboards after the star gave This Morning an exclusive peek inside. The 40-year-old host was in awe with the Loose Women panellists immaculately tidy shelves. Stacey appeared on the ITV show yesterday speaking about her new book about organisation in the home. After the segment, her […]

SUPPLIERS HATE being made to wait for the cash they are owed almost as much as their customers hate parting with it. What if high finance could help? Specialist firms have indeed sprung up, offering to pay suppliers up front, then cashing in their customer’s cheque as the bill comes due weeks later. By charging fees or a spread, the intermediary takes a cut for what is in effect a loan. But the woes this week of Greensill Capital, a provider of such supply-chain financing, highlight some of the... Читать дальше...

“THE WRITER of this piece deserves a big raise,” says Bret “The Hitman” Hart, a professional wrestler from the 1990s. “He is the best there is, the best there was, the best there ever will be,” he adds, echoing his old catchphrase. Your correspondent paid Mr Hart $150 to sing his praises. 

THE PHRASE “first in, first out” has become shorthand for China’s experience of the covid-19 pandemic: it is both where the virus started spreading and the first large country to control it. Its early failure and subsequent success will be studied by epidemiologists for years to come. But for economists and investors, it is another “first in, first out” that matters more at the moment. China was the first country to open its lending and spending taps in the face of the coronavirus downturn. Now... Читать дальше...

FROM DRIVE-IN cinemas to drive-through restaurants, Americans love doing things without getting out of their cars. During the covid-19 pandemic they have taken to shopping in a similar fashion, too. Kerbside pickup, where buyers’ vehicles pull up to retail outlets and dedicated staff help load online orders into the boot, helped supermarket chains notch up a banner year. One in two American shoppers used kerbside or in-store collection last year, according to a survey by ShipStation, a maker of shipping software. Читать дальше...

WHICH ECONOMY contracted most sharply last year? That dubious honour almost certainly belongs to Macau, a former Portuguese colony that is now part of China. On March 5th the autonomous region’s statistical agency is expected to announce that GDP fell by at least half from 2019. Unsurprising, perhaps, given that the covid-19 pandemic has dealt a blow to Macau’s sole engine of growth: casinos. Gross gaming revenue in Macau, the only place in China where casinos are legal, plummeted from $36bn in... Читать дальше...

PEOPLE HAVE to eat, so food firms the world over give reassuringly consistent profits, even in lean times. Mexico is no different. The country’s 126m people buy $55bn-worth of packaged food annually. Sales of such fare have been growing quickly, notes Euromonitor, a research firm. Between 2015 and 2020 they expanded by 6.9% a year, compared with 4% in America.

GONE IS THE carnival atmosphere that pervaded Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city, during the first weeks of protests against a military coup on February 1st. The protesters have exchanged tongue-in-cheek placards for home-made shields and tiaras for hard hats, the better to fend off the increasingly violent security forces. For most of the past month the army—notorious for violently crushing past democracy movements—had responded with water cannons, rubber bullets and tear gas, but nothing worse. But as the demonstrations have worn on... Читать дальше...

LAST MONTH retailers in Manila went on a two-week “pork holiday”. That was not a fad diet, nor even a few days off scarfing sausage and bacon. They simply refused to sell the stuff, in protest at a price cap imposed by presidential decree.

AT FIRST GLANCE one might have thought the cardboard box was a visiting head of state. On February 13th Lebanon’s first batch of covid-19 vaccines emerged from a jet at Beirut’s international airport. A delegation of officials drove out to meet it; local media broadcast the event live. Never mind that the shipment contained a meagre 28,500 jabs. After a miserable year of pandemic, economic collapse and a catastrophic explosion in Beirut, the vaccines offered a dose of hope.

WHEN GAY Nigerians took to the streets to join massive protests against police brutality last year, it was not just the police who attacked them. Fellow protesters also hurled insults at them, ripped up their rainbow flags and tore placards from their hands. “I felt like a lot of people just wanted me dead,” says Matthew Blaise, a 21-year-old student.

THINGS ARE moving quickly in Qaraqosh, a sleepy Christian town just outside Mosul in northern Iraq. Pope Francis arrives on March 7th, four years after Islamic State (IS) was chased out. So local priests have been hurriedly cleaning up al-Tahira, their cathedral and one of Iraq’s largest churches. They have refurbished its burnt interior and repaired most of the masonry that the jihadists used for target practice. When your correspondent visited, five days before the pope, smashed chandeliers... Читать дальше...

IT STARTED WITH a squashed tomato that led to a killing. It has since escalated into clashes that have taken at least 20 lives and a standoff between northerners and southerners that has paralysed Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation.

ON MARCH 1ST Russian news announced that Alexei Navalny was moving to a new prison, Penal Colony No. 2, notorious for psychological torture. Two days later his lawyers found him in a different, and less ghastly, jail. Russia’s justice system likes to keep people guessing.

IN AUGUST 1936 Henry “Chips” Channon and his wife, Lady Honor Guinness, went on an official visit to the Berlin Olympic games along with a bunch of other British grandees. They had a simply wonderful time. They didn’t pull off the ultimate social coup of having dinner with Hitler—the closest they got to the Führer was when he visited the Olympic stadium and “one felt as if one was in the presence of some semi-divine creature”. But the rest of the Nazi elite went out of their way to entertain the visiting Britons. Читать дальше...

JOE BIDEN has made no secret of his frustration with Saudi Arabia. A “pariah” with “very little social redeeming value”, he called its government in 2019. One of his first acts as president was to end American support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. Last week he released an intelligence report that blamed the kingdom’s crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, for the murder of a journalist in 2018. But at that point Mr Biden’s ideals collided with America’s national interest. The prince may be a brute... Читать дальше...

PURGES HAVE grown more common since Xi Jinping took over as China’s leader in 2012. To curb graft and snuff out any opposition to his rule, Mr Xi has been hunting in every corner of the country’s vast bureaucracy. Hundreds of thousands of officials have been punished. Thousands, many of them high-ranking, have been sent to prison. Remarkably, however, some people do not appear to have got the message. A new campaign has just been launched within the domestic security services (see article). Weeding out the disloyal is its primary goal. Читать дальше...

SLOWLY, WITH infinite effort, the elderly black woman got out of the car. Helped by a friendly arm, she laboured up the steps to the terrace. But there, squaring her shoulders, lifting her chin, she shrugged her helpers off. She knew how to walk, and she could walk from here. Her aim was to get to the water fountain by the sheriff’s office, the one that said “White Only”. Step by dragging step, leaning on her cane, she pressed on. The white officers by the door let her pass; they could hardly obstruct an old woman. Читать дальше...

This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends. By Nicole Perlroth. Bloomsbury; 528 pages; $21 and £14.99

Klara and the Sun. By Kazuo Ishiguro. Knopf; 320 pages; $28. Faber £20

TWO TELEVISION shows about Catherine II of Russia recently had their premiere. The first, “Catherine the Great”, a collaboration between Sky in Britain and HBO in America, was released in October 2019. Set in the aftermath of the empress’s overthrow of Peter III, her husband, in 1762 the series was an earnest costume drama starring a grande dame of British acting, Helen Mirren. It focused on Catherine’s consolidation of power and her relationship with Grigory Potemkin, with the occasional speech... Читать дальше...

WHEN IT comes to using artificial intelligence (AI), intelligence agencies have been at it longer than most. In the cold war America’s National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) explored early AI to help transcribe and translate the enormous volumes of Soviet phone-intercepts they began hoovering up in the 1960s and 1970s.

FACE-MASKS HELP reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19. Several studies have reported the more surprising finding that, even if wearers do become infected, their disease is usually milder. Now Joseph Courtney and Ad Bax, a pair of researchers at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, think they may have worked out why. As they report in the Biophysical Journal, it comes down to humidity, the immune system, and the protective powers of mucus.

USING A computer used to mean bashing away at a keyboard. Then it meant tapping on a touchscreen. Increasingly, it means simply speaking. Over 100m devices powered by Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant, rest on the world’s shelves. Apple’s offering, Siri, processes 25bn requests a month. By 2025 the market for such technology could be worth more than $27bn.