Новости за 04.03.2021

OFF THE coast of Formentera, an island in the Spanish Mediterranean, lives an organism that stretches 15km from one end to the other. Posidonia oceanica, more prosaically known as seagrass, spreads by sending shoots out beneath the sediment. Entire meadows, covering several hectares, can thus be made up of a single organism. The grasses are long-lived, too. The vast meadow in Formentera is thought to have been spreading for tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

THERE ARE few greater honours than becoming finance minister of your country. But there are better and worse days to start the job. Chatib Basri became finance minister of Indonesia, the fourth-most-populous country in the world, on May 21st 2013. That was only a day before the start of a financial sell-off known as the “taper tantrum”. Yields on American Treasuries rose abruptly after Ben Bernanke, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, spoke about reducing (or tapering) the Fed’s bond purchases. Читать дальше...

THE PANDEMIC is throwing up a new set of ethical issues for businesses. The premise of “stakeholder capitalism” is not just that firms should consider the interests of employees and customers, as well as shareholders. It is that, by doing so, everyone gains; shareholders will prosper if workers and customers are treated decently. But the pandemic may put different groups at odds. For example, customers may want companies to insist that all employees are vaccinated, while not wanting the same rule to apply to themselves. Читать дальше...

GERMANS ARE used to being top of the class. Early in the pandemic, when Germany controlled its outbreak better than most of the West, they felt they were. In vaccinating citizens against covid-19, by contrast, the country has been a laggard. One in 20 has received a shot, compared with nearly a third of Britons, a sixth of Americans and, as Die Welt, a daily, recently grumbled, even a tenth of Moroccans.

ON THE MORNING of November 13th last year Zambia’s vice-president told parliament, “This country will not default.” Hours later the inevitable happened. Having destroyed its relationship with the IMF, struggled to provide clear data on its borrowing from China and failed to win a reprieve from bondholders, Zambia missed a deadline to pay interest and defaulted on its debt. Lenders could only shake their heads in bemusement.

IN ITS HEYDAY in the 1960s and 1970s, the village of Dazhai was called a place of miracles. Millions of revolutionary pilgrims came to hear how local peasants had carved terraced grain-fields and reservoirs from its rocky hillsides, armed with little more than hand tools and love of Chairman Mao Zedong. Dazhai’s barely literate Communist Party secretary, Chen Yonggui, was summoned to Beijing and elevated to the Politburo with the rank of vice prime minister. Back then Liang Jiwen was a schoolboy, the son of a Dazhai official. Читать дальше...

SINCE CHINA imposed a draconian security law on Hong Kong last year, protests in the city—already dampened by pandemic-related controls—have been rare. But on March 1st hundreds of people gathered outside a court to demonstrate against the largest case so far related to the security bill. They held banners calling for the release of “political prisoners” and chanted slogans that were popular during the unrest that engulfed the territory in 2019. Students at a primary school nearby stood outside their classrooms, shouting in solidarity. Читать дальше...

EACH DAY this week some 100,000 Chileans aged 60 to 64 turned up to get their inoculation against covid-19. Having vaccinated nearly 20% of its adults, the sixth-best performance in the world, Chile is on track to meet its target of covering 80% of its 19m people by June 30th. After starting with health workers, the jabs are being applied in strict descending order of age, a different year each day, and to teachers, too.

BRENDA GUTIéRREZ, a 50-year-old shellfish gatherer, knew she was a Chango for as long as she can remember. When she was growing up in a fishing village in northern Chile, her parents always called her Changuita (little Chango girl). Her schoolmates, alas, called her “smelly” and “dirty” because of her indigenous roots.

IT LOOKED LIKE good timing at first. On February 27th the House of Representatives passed the maiden legislative hope of President Joe Biden, a behemoth $1.9trn package for covid-19 relief. It was speedy because it was unimpeded by any serious bipartisan negotiating—the legislation mirrored the White House’s proposal almost exactly, with not one Republican vote to show for it. That left more than two weeks for the Senate to pass the proposal before a self-imposed March 14th deadline, when emergency... Читать дальше...

THE BUILDING at 833 Bryant street in San Francisco’s trendy SoMa neighbourhood will be unusual. To start with, all the inhabitants of its 146 units will previously have been homeless. Its constituent parts will have been prefabricated, constructed miles away and fitted together on-site like puzzle pieces. Most unusually, the project will have been cheap to build, at least by Bay Area standards. A report by the Terner Centre at University of California, Berkeley found that, once completed in July... Читать дальше...

ON FEBRUARY 23RD, from a basement in Queens, New York, a little-known organisation announced that China would be receiving a special honour. “We present [the] People’s Republic of China with the H.R. 1242 Resilience Project W.E.B. Du Bois Award,” wrote the group’s president, Victor Mooney, in a letter to the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations. The award celebrates China’s donation of the Sinopharm covid-19 vaccine to African countries. “W.E.B. Du Bois is a vivid reminder that China is a... Читать дальше...

TO SOME HE was a military genius, strategic mastermind and visionary leader who bequeathed to France a centralised modern administration and sense of gloire. To others he was a tyrant and a butcher who squandered French supremacy in Europe on the battlefield of Waterloo. Napoleon Bonaparte, who died in captivity on the British island of Saint Helena at the age of 51, has long inspired both admiration and distaste, even in France. Now, ahead of the bicentenary of his death on May 5th 1821, those rival passions have been revived. Читать дальше...

FOR A MAN in his own army’s cross-hairs, Nikol Pashinyan, the Armenian prime minister, seems unfazed. As long as the Armenian people have the final say, “there will be no coup,” he told The Economist this week. The only way out of the crisis consuming his country, he says, leads through the ballot box and early elections.

WINFRIED KRETSCHMANN has a strong claim to be the world’s most powerful Green politician. True, Greens occupy a few junior ministries in places such as Austria and New Zealand. But Mr Kretschmann is the undisputed ruler of the state of Baden-Württemberg, an industrial powerhouse in Germany’s south-west that, with 11m people, is bigger than most EU countries. Ten years ago, voters spooked by the Fukushima nuclear accident and sick of decades of rule under the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) doubled the Greens’ vote... Читать дальше...

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Alternative energies

As your briefing on decarbonising America noted, New Mexico’s economy depends on robust oil-and-gas production in the Permian basin that was revitalised by fracking a decade ago (“The switch”, February 20th). New Mexicans, however, have been interested in innovation and energy diversification for quite a lot longer than the article implied. America’s only uranium-enrichment facility is in the state. It... Читать дальше...

InvestorPlace - Stock Market News, Stock Advice & Trading Tips

Technical signs are warning about a substantive stock market crash ahead of us. If so, you’ll want to avoid these growth stocks and instead, buy them after the collapse.

The post 7 Growth Stocks to Avoid Until After the Market Crashes appeared first on InvestorPlace.

• Why Everyone Is Investing in 5G All WRONG
• It doesn’t matter if you have $500 in savings or $5 million. Читать дальше...

Bescom submits a statement in writing to HC

In recent years, true crime documentaries have become all the rage. Sometimes though, the evil lies in our own backyard… Michael Paul Stephenson's Discovery+ documentary Attack of the Murder Hornets unironically disguises a nature documentary a a true crime show, writes Kate Knibbs at Wired. — Read the rest

InvestorPlace - Stock Market News, Stock Advice & Trading Tips

Vroom (VRM) stock is taking a beating on Thursday after the online seller of used cars reported results for the fourth quarter of 2020.

The post VRM Stock: Why Online Auto Retailer Vroom Is Crashing Today appeared first on InvestorPlace.

• Why Everyone Is Investing in 5G All WRONG
• It doesn’t matter if you have $500 in savings or $5 million. Читать дальше...

CRISTIANO RONALDO’S mother Dolores has revealed she thought she was going to die when she suffered a stroke this time last year. The 66-year-old was rushed to hospital on March 3, 2020, in her native island of Madeira after suffering an ischemic stroke. Dolores Aveiro was discharged from hospital almost three weeks later as she […]

The news that the Club is looking to maybe (probably?) sign Fredy Montero kicked off (sorry) discussion among the fans about whether it's a good signing.

MLB will celebrate its first "Lou Gehrig Day" on June 2 and hold what is expected to be an annual tribute to the Hall of Fame New York Yankees first baseman who battled amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.