Новости за 25.03.2021

IN THE PAST year pundits have closely tracked America’s “jobless claims” data, published every Thursday by the Department of Labour to show how many people are newly claiming unemployment insurance (UI). These data once provided invaluable insights: in 1995 Alan Greenspan, then chair of the Federal Reserve, personally intervened to ensure that they continued to be produced during a government shutdown. Yet in the current crisis more people are starting to realise their limitations. 

DARRYL RICHARDSON is proud of making his call. One of nearly 5,800 workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, he says he was the one who first phoned the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) to ask it to organise his fellow workers. As a result, since February, staff have been voting in a mail-in ballot. After that concludes on March 29th, Bessemer may become a unionised plant, Amazon’s first in America after a quarter-century of operations.

TROUBLE HAS been brewed on Mount Circeo, south of Rome, ever since it was home to Circe, a legendary sorceress who turned Odysseus’s shipmates into pigs. The latest tribulation arrived in envelopes that plopped onto doormats in and around the modern town of San Felice Circeo in recent weeks, and demanded that the occupants stump up five years’ back payments of a levy some had no idea they owed. The demands are the latest twist in a dispute with its origins in the Middle Ages.

ANTONIO MACHADO, a Spanish poet, once referred to Madrid as “the breakwater of all the Spains”. That is the effect a snap election for the capital’s regional government on May 4th is having on national politics. A polarised campaign has roiled both right and left. The contest has prompted Pablo Iglesias, the leader of Podemos, a hard-left party, to step down as Spain’s deputy prime minister to stand in the election himself because, he said, of the risk of “an extreme right-wing government” in the capital. Читать дальше...

AT AN ARMY base in Dorset, 16 soldiers nestle in the woodland next to dune buggies. Drones, some of them no larger than a sparrow, weave through the conifers above, beaming footage to a phone strapped to each soldier’s chest. Specialists in electronic warfare hoover up enemy signals; a member of Britain’s 77 Brigade, dedicated to psychological operations, clutches a camera.

WITH THE possible exception of William Wallace, the best-known Scottish nationalist was, for a while, a woman. In 1967, Winifred Ewing, “a slight, blonde woman in a purple coat” in the words of one newspaper, became only the second Scottish National Party (SNP) candidate to be elected to Westminster. (The first, Robert McIntyre, only lasted three months.) When she arrived at Parliament, policemen escorted her through a crowd of supporters waving saltires. She soon became known as “Madame Ecosse”. Читать дальше...

IT WAS MARCH 29TH 2018, and in an Edinburgh office building a civil servant’s birthday party was under way. After the cake and singing, Geoff Aberdein asked to speak to Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, alone in her office. What happened next is uncertain, for no one else was in the room.

SAM HAGGER shut the three pubs he owns in and around Leicester a few days before the government ordered a national lockdown last March. Many of his workers were deeply upset, but the younger ones—about half were under 25—were relatively sanguine. Some even brought cakes and cards to the pubs, as though misfortune had befallen not them but somebody else.

WHEN THE pandemic hit, firefighters acted as ambulance drivers to relieve pressure on the NHS. But there were limits to their union’s willingness to help out: under a deal with local authorities, the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) agreed that its members would deliver food to vulnerable people but not check on their welfare. The deal expired in January, and the union has since urged its members not to volunteer individually to help with the vaccine roll-out. A report from the national inspectorate... Читать дальше...

AMERICA IS HOME to both Silicon Valley and Wall Street, yet it has long seemed in the dark ages on digital payments. Until 2018 card purchases required hand signatures, 15 years after Europe switched to chip-and-pin. A cosy credit-card duopoly, consisting of Visa and Mastercard, works with the banks to issue cards, with the result that there has been too little competition and sky-high profit margins. Asia has leapt ahead, with pervasive, fast and dirt-cheap payments services, and a new generation... Читать дальше...

ISTANBUL’S STOCK exchange does not open until shortly before 10am, a more civilised hour than most bourses. Investors therefore had time to brace themselves on March 22nd before discovering the full cost of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s reckless decision to fire Turkey’s admired central-bank governor, Naci Agbal, over the preceding weekend. The selling frenzy triggered an automatic suspension of trading twice in the first 45 minutes. Combined with a deep fall in the lira, Turkey’s stocks declined... Читать дальше...

A KNOCK ON the head can change the course of a whole life. Traumatic brain injuries affect around one in ten people in rich countries. Those who have experienced such injuries are more likely to suffer mental-health problems and loneliness. They are more likely to struggle with addiction to drink or drugs, or to be homeless. They are also more likely to commit crimes, including violent ones, although most do not. Estimates vary, but they consistently show that people in prison are many times more likely to have brain injuries. Читать дальше...

“WON’T YOU give some bread to get the starving fed? We’ve got to relieve Bangladesh,” sang George Harrison, a former Beatle, in 1971. His pleading was warranted. No sooner had local politicians declared the independence of the eastern half of Pakistan (as Bangladesh had previously been) on March 26th of that year than the Pakistani army initiated a brutal war to crush the separatists, at a cost of somewhere between 500,000 and 3m lives. The fighting, along with devastating floods and cyclones... Читать дальше...

There were only about 72,000 bald eagles in the lower 48 states in 2009. Researchers say the population is now above 300,000.

ONE DAY, AT the age of ten, Nawal El-Saadawi was sent to put on her cream dress. Such a thing was special in their poor household, in the huddled village of Kafr Tahla in the delta of the Nile. Her father, she was told, had a guest for her to meet. So she put on the cream dress, but also smeared raw aubergine on her teeth to turn them black. That way the guest, who was meant to be her future husband, would never, ever want to marry her.

THINGS WERE looking rosy for Alexi McCammond. Black, female and 27, she was named editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue after a successful stint as a political correspondent for Axios, a Washington-insider news outfit. Teen Vogue had become an unlikely voice of resistance in the Donald Trump era, combining makeup tips with arguments for universal child care. Ms McCammond was to lead the magazine into the Biden years.

Do Not Disturb. By Michela Wrong. PublicAffairs; 512 pages; $32. Fourth Estate; £20

Until the World Shatters. By Daniel Combs. Melville House; 400 pages; $28.99 and £25

The Gun, the Ship and the Pen. By Linda Colley. Liveright; 512 pages; $35. Profile Books; £25

ON MARCH 21ST Canadian Pacific Railway unveiled a $25bn bid for Kansas City Southern, a smaller American rival. The biggest-ever tie-up of freight railways would, if blessed by antitrust authorities, leave the merged firm with tracks linking Canada with Mexico, via the entire length of America’s contiguous states. It would also drive what Canadian Pacific’s boss, Keith Creel, enthusiastically dubs “an industrial renaissance”. “The prospects are compelling for growth across the industrial heartland,” Mr Creel says. Читать дальше...

THE FLOTILLA of tugs and a giant digger look tiny against the backdrop of Ever Given, reflecting the scale of their task. One of the world’s largest container ships was wedged athwart the Suez Canal on March 23rd, blown off course by high winds. The problem for global shipping seems as immense.

MANUEL SUFFERED two serious brain injuries as a child in Denver, Colorado. The first was the result of a fall. The second occurred when someone threw a rock at his head, causing him to lose consciousness. He made it the short distance home before blacking out. On both occasions he received brain scans but he does not remember getting any other treatment.

ACCORDING TO THE letter of the law, a Chinese family court should be a safe haven for Wang Fumei (not her real name), a 36-year-old battered wife and mother of two. In-store security cameras were rolling when her husband, a heavy-drinking gambler, came to the shop where she worked in southern China, and beat her without pity. The tape is now with the police. It gives Ms Wang grounds to invoke a law against domestic violence that took effect in 2016, allowing judges to punish abusive partners.

RWANDA IS PREPARING to put on a show. The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting begins on June 21st in Kigali, the capital. And if, despite the pandemic, foreign bigwigs come, President Paul Kagame wants them to be safe, comfortable and impressed. 

IN MANY RESPECTS, the murder of Alante Hands last year on a Chicago street was sadly unremarkable. He was young, just 27, and black, like four in every five homicide victims in the city. Like nine in ten murders in Chicago, his life was taken by a gun—bullets pierced his arm, chest and leg. He had a lengthy criminal record, beginning a decade ago when he was arrested while still a minor for shooting at a police officer. He died in the violent West Side of the city on West Rice Street, where six... Читать дальше...