Новости за 25.03.2021

SALINA, Kan. – In a game that looks fairly even on the stat sheet, the Baker Wildcats fell to Kansas Wesleyan, 2-0 on Wednesday evening.

SUSTAINABLE INVESTING is in the firing line, as two recent events have shown. Last week, the board of Danone, a French food-maker, fired its boss, Emmanuel Faber, who had long championed the benefits of stakeholder capitalism and sustainability. Shareholders were unhappy with the firm’s languishing share price.

IT TOOK Olaf Scholz weeks to persuade Mark Branson to take the job as the next head of BaFin, Germany’s financial regulator. He was offering less pay for a bigger and tougher job than Mr Branson’s current role as boss of Finma, the Swiss financial watchdog. But in the end Germany’s finance minister won over the 52-year-old Briton, who perfectly fits his idea of the next BaFin boss: an outsider with international experience who knows the banking industry. Before joining Finma in 2010, Mr Branson worked for UBS and Credit Suisse. Читать дальше...

AT FIRST GLANCE the Indian names on the billionaires list compiled by Hurun Report, which tracks such things, reinforce the image of the powerful growing more so. At the top, to no one’s surprise, was Mukesh Ambani (worth $83bn), followed by Gautam Adani ($32bn). Both owe their riches to industrial conglomerates (centred, respectively, on petrochemicals, and ports and power plants). Both have a knack for navigating India’s obstreperous courts and bureaucracy. Both operate mainly in Maharashtra and Gujarat... Читать дальше...

A YEAR HAS passed since many developed economies locked down and office workers, like Bartleby, started to toil from home. This was a plague that launched a thousand forecasts, with pundits predicting everything from a revolution in working lives to an eventual return to normal.

EVER SINCE Ostpolitik was conceived in the 1970s, Germany has preferred engagement with Russia to confrontation. Now political relations are at a low point after an attempt last year by Russian security agents to poison Alexei Navalny, a prominent opposition politician, who was flown to Germany for treatment. So is trade. In the wake of sanctions imposed after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its incursion into Ukraine in 2014, the country’s trade with Germany dwindled in value to €45bn ($54bn) last year, from €80bn in 2012. Читать дальше...

IN 2015, WHEN the International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded the 2022 Winter Olympics to Beijing, some people criticised the decision because of China’s human-rights record. Just in the previous few weeks China had rounded up hundreds of civil-society activists across the country. But the rival candidate for the games was another authoritarian state, Kazakhstan. Democracies such as Norway had pulled out of the race. And few people even imagined that, within two years, China would be building... Читать дальше...

IN EARLY MARCH a small aeroplane being used by a local weather bureau crashed in a village in the southern province of Jiangxi. All five people on board were killed and one person on the ground was injured. Footage captured on mobile phones showed thick black smoke billowing from the ruins of a house struck by the aircraft, which had been deployed to seed clouds in the hope of causing more rain.

THE ISLANDS of Sinan county, off South Korea’s south-western coast, have never been a centre of anything much. Sustained by fishing, seaweed harvesting and salt farming, most are sparsely populated or entirely uninhabited. Reaching Mokpo, the nearest city, requires choppy ferry rides or slow car journeys along winding roads and across enormous bridges. As in most rural areas of South Korea, the local population is shrinking and ageing fast—and economic opportunities have been atrophying with it.

THE SUNFLOWER beauty salon on Russel Street in Kolkata has been gutted for renovation, but a row of elegant Indian ladies sits perched inside its temporary digs, an air-conditioned cargo container. The hairdressers, sisters-in-law named Winnie and Patsy, snip away while chatting to their clients in Hindi, Bengali and English—and to each other in Hakka, a language of southern China. Prettified heads can look through makeshift windows at signs in Chinese across the street, which announce the Shanghai Company... Читать дальше...

IT IS DIFFICULT for anyone to argue that Sam Rainsy, Cambodia’s leading opposition figure, is not guilty of the crimes for which he was sentenced on March 1st to 25 years in prison. That is because the charges were so nebulous as to encompass almost everything an opposition politician does. He was accused of attacking the country’s institutions, and encouraging others to do the same.

WHEN NARENDRA MODI, India’s prime minister, stripped Kashmir of its statehood in 2019, most Indians cheered. The Muslim-majority territory had long been troublesome. The triumphal consensus was that Kashmir’s special autonomy, which Mr Modi abolished using all kinds of constitutional tricks, had only encouraged “anti-national” attitudes, and that Kashmir had got what it deserved.

“A STAIN ON Iraq’s sovereignty.” That is how an Iraqi army officer describes the billboard glorifying Qassem Suleimani, a stunningly successful Iranian commander who was killed in an American air strike on Iraqi soil in January 2020. The hoarding looms over Baghdad’s administrative district, known as the Green Zone. Many Iraqis once hailed Suleimani as hero for mobilising local forces that beat back the jihadists of Islamic State. But public sentiment in Iraq has turned. The masses who cheered... Читать дальше...

SIX YEARS have passed since Saudi Arabia declared victory in what it dubbed Operation Decisive Storm, the opening salvo of its war in Yemen. Yet the kingdom is still trying to find its way out of the squall. On March 22nd it offered a ceasefire to its opponent, the Houthis, a Shia militant group that seized control of the Yemeni government (and much of the country) in 2015. The Saudi proposal called for a nationwide truce and offered to ease the air and sea blockade it has imposed on Houthi-controlled territory. Читать дальше...

As The Economist went to press, there was no clear winner of Israel’s parliamentary election, held on March 23rd. The parties expected to support a government led by Binyamin Netanyahu, the current prime minister, are unlikely to win a majority of seats in the Knesset (Israel’s 120-seat parliament). But none of his rivals seems to have the support of a majority either. Political stalemate is nothing new for Israel. It has held four elections in less than two years, each failing to produce a stable government. Читать дальше...

THERE IS NO mention of using wave machines or water cannons to blast asylum-seekers crossing the Channel in flimsy boats. Those were reportedly among the ideas mulled by officials to stop the arrival of undocumented migrants. But deterrence remains the object of “the biggest overhaul of the UK’s asylum system in decades”, announced by the home secretary, Priti Patel, on March 24th. Even minus wave machines the proposals are radical.

BUBONIC PLAGUE killed between one and two thirds of Europeans when it struck in the 14th century. Covid-19, mercifully, has exacted nothing like that toll. Its demographic impact, however, is likely to be significantly larger than the nearly 3m tragic deaths so far attributed to the coronavirus thanks to an associated, worldwide baby bust. Births fell by about 15% in China in 2020, for example, while America recorded a 15% drop in monthly births between February and November of last year. As a consequence... Читать дальше...

THERE IS SOMETHING of the “Herbie” about Herbert Diess, boss of Volkswagen Group. Like his four-wheeled namesake, the star of several Disney films, he has a mind of his own and a flair for grabbing attention. He is in a high-stakes race in which he is seen as the underdog. And his main rival, Tesla’s Elon Musk, is a “frenemy” with whom occasionally he banters. Investors are salivating: during the past month the German giant’s share price has surged by 60% while Tesla’s has slipped. That is mainly... Читать дальше...

THE MISSION statement of Bilibili, often dubbed “China’s YouTube”, stands out for its modesty. Instead of promising to change the world, the firm aspires merely to “enrich the everyday life of young generations in China”. If user figures are a guide, the Chinese young feel enriched. In the last quarter of 2020 the number of people who used the service at least once a month shot up by half from a year earlier, to 202m. Nearly nine in ten were under the age of 35. Videos on the platform, which range... Читать дальше...

BIG OIL EQUALS big payouts. The covid-induced collapse in the price of crude, which wiped billions from supermajors’ profits, tested this regularity—but not to breaking point. ExxonMobil booked an annual net loss of $22bn but still paid $15bn to shareholders. On March 21st Saudi Aramco said it, too, would maintain its $75bn dividend, on which its kingdom’s budget depends. Never mind the 44% fall in earnings.■

IN COLONIAL TIMES the eastern half of Bengal was one of the poorest parts of British India. After independence and partition in 1947, it became one of the poorest bits of Pakistan. And after it declared itself an independent country, Bangladesh, in 1971, it became poorer still, as the rump of Pakistan fought a savage war to retain it, destroying a big share of its few assets and killing many of its best and brightest.

“IT’S EASIER to elect a pope than to approve a small apartment building in the city of Vancouver,” says Ginger Gosnell-Myers, of Nisga’a and Kwakwak’awakw heritage, and formerly the city’s first-ever indigenous-relations manager. Such is the power of local NIMBYs that it is difficult to build new homes, and legions of young people are doomed to live with their parents for years, if not decades. But on some land the normal rules do not apply. No one can tell the Squamish First Nation, an indigenous group, what to build on their territory. Читать дальше...

WITH LESS than three weeks to go before Peru’s presidential election, opinion polls suggest a clear winner: a nihilist rejection of all 18 candidates. Add up the “don’t knows” and those who tell pollsters they will cast blank or spoilt ballots and they come to around 30%. But two people must go through to a run-off in June. Most of the candidates with a good shot of doing so are populists and outsiders, from both the left and right.

THIRTY YEARS ago South America had only recently emerged from dictatorships and protectionist isolation. It seemed like a revolutionary step when in 1991 the presidents of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay sat down in Asunción and signed a treaty setting up a free-trade area that soon became Mercosur, a customs union of 200m people and a combined GDP of $1trn. Coinciding with a wave of market-freeing reform, the philosophy behind it was known as open regionalism. “With regional integration... Читать дальше...

J ONATHON ACOSTA wore a blazer with a guayabera, a traditional formal shirt in the Caribbean, on his first day as a senator in Rhode Island’s legislature. Since then he has worn informal attire, a better reflection, he says, of his mainly Latino constituents. He often wears knitted hats and cardigans. The only wardrobe rule said that people must be “properly dressed”. That changed on March 23rd, when the chamber passed a new dress code stipulating “proper and appropriate attire”, such as blouses and collared shirts with a jacket. Читать дальше...