Новости за 22.07.2021

FIFTEEN YEARS ago Maria, a school secretary, and her husband Samuel, a technician at an electronics firm, had just bought a car when they found out she was pregnant. They couldn’t afford the payments with a baby on the way, so they returned it. Today the couple and their three children live in a three-bedroom house in Tesistán in western Mexico, and have just bought a second set of wheels. They eat out once a fortnight and have a subscription to Netflix, a video-streaming site. “My children used to ask me if we are poor and I would say ‘No... Читать дальше...

IN THE HALF-CENTURY since the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v Wade, lawmakers in conservative states have passed hundreds of laws designed to make it harder for women to have abortions. None has been as punitive as the one recently passed in Texas. From September, unless it is blocked, the law will authorise private citizens to sue anyone who “aids or abets” the abortion of a fetus with a heartbeat, that is, from some six weeks’ gestation. For every case that is successful, it authorises “damages”—in effect a bounty—of $10,000. Читать дальше...

RONALD REAGAN’s tub-thumper for Barry Goldwater in 1964, Barack Obama’s silky-smooth Democratic Convention speech of 2004: the political annals are replete with moments when a significant new talent announced itself. Could it be that in February Ron DeSantis of Florida produced another? The scene was a press conference in Tallahassee. The subject under discussion was the Republican governor’s view that conservatives are discriminated against by social and mainstream media companies. Don’t say it isn’t so... Читать дальше...

WHAT IS THE most important financial entity in the United States? The Federal Reserve sets the beat of global financial markets with its interest-rate decisions. JP Morgan, a bank, has a $3.7trn balance sheet. Some argue the United States Mint could help circumvent the ceiling Congress sets on the national debt by minting a trillion-dollar coin.

IN LATE MAY a throng of a hundred or so young men, most of them from African or Middle Eastern minorities, started fighting in a square in Hjallbo, a suburb of Gothenburg, Sweden’s second city. Members of rival gangs seem to have started the scrap over the theft of a moped. Two days later a man in a nearby grocery shop was shot in the back of the head, thought to be as an act of revenge for the gangland battle. Then a policeman in Biskopsgarden, another suburb of the city, was shot dead. A few... Читать дальше...

POLITICAL COMEBACKS are always a gamble. “Can the soufflé rise twice?” was the withering putdown once delivered by Australia’s then treasurer, Paul Keating, to a re-emergent rival. (It turned out that it couldn’t.) For Donald Tusk, a former prime minister of Poland who returned to domestic politics this month after an international career that took him to the presidency of the EU’s Council, the obstacles are formidable. Since coming to power in 2015, the right-wing populist Law and Justice party... Читать дальше...

EACH YEAR as the English Premier League prepares for kick-off, super-fans wait to see what their heroes will be wearing on the pitch. This year Manchester United stitched the words “youth, courage and success” inside players’ collars. Other changes have less high-minded motives: sponsorship. Once small and local (Arnold Laver, a timber merchant, sponsored Sheffield United from 1985 to 1995), now sponsors are multinationals. In the late 1990s tech and telecoms companies predominated; then financial and insurance firms muscled in. Читать дальше...

EVEN BEFORE the anti-vaxxers turned up, it was an absurd demonstration. Four groups—Labour Against the Witchhunt, Labour in Exile Network, Resist and Socialist Appeal—gathered outside a nearly empty building in the sweltering heat to protest against measures that would see their followers expelled from the Labour Party. It was no use. The party’s National Executive Committee (NEC), which was meeting online, voted to proscribe all four.

“AS SUN to day, as turtle to her mate,” declares Shakespeare’s Troilus of his commitment to Cressida. Chaucer wrote of “the wedded turtledove with her heart true”. Yet Britain has not been kind to these migratory birds, whose numbers in the British Isles have dwindled by 98% since the 1970s to an estimated 3,600 breeding pairs in 2016.

THE SCHOOL year in England did not draw to a close, so much as sputter out. By the time schools began breaking up in mid-July, nearly a quarter of pupils were already absent, according to government figures released on July 20th. A large share were stuck at home as a result of rules requiring whole classes to isolate for ten days, should any pupil test positive for covid-19. But absences for other reasons were also far higher than usual. Some parents appeared to have taken children out of school for fear they would be ordered to isolate... Читать дальше...

AS THEY PICK their way through a road verge on the outskirts of Blandford Forum, Giles Nicholson of Dorset Council and Phil Sterling of Butterfly Conservation list the plants they see. Being wildflowers, these mostly have common names, not the Latin monikers that gardeners use for their potted perennials: bird’s-foot trefoil, black knapweed, field scabious, lady’s bedstraw, ploughman’s-spikenard, pyramidal orchid, self-heal, wild carrot. “If it was bigger, it would be a nature reserve,” says Mr Nicholson, as the cars roar by. Читать дальше...

THE FLAMES of burning warehouses, shops and factories have at last been doused. In front of shattered malls, local residents wearing luminous yellow or orange vests stand watch like an army of school-crossing wardens. Crowds of volunteers—white and black, young and old, sometimes singing together—sweep up the broken glass and ashes after the week of riots instigated by allies of the tainted former president, Jacob Zuma, in a vain effort to reverse his recent jailing for defying the Constitutional Court. Читать дальше...

THE LATE Donald Rumsfeld once sent a letter to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to accompany his tax filing. “The tax code is so complex and the forms are so complicated”, he wrote, “that I know that I cannot have any confidence that I know what is being requested and therefore I cannot and do not know, and I suspect a great many Americans cannot know, whether or not their tax returns are accurate.” This is probably the least controversial statement that George W. Bush’s secretary of defence ever made. Читать дальше...

IF YOU HAD been riding on one of China’s crammed, rickety green trains in 1989, bouncing in a hard-seat carriage, you might have noticed Yang Huaiding sitting nearby. Or you might not. He had taken pains not to stand out, wearing drab clothes and carrying a faded mock-leather travel bag. The black-rimmed glasses, messy hair and stained teeth were his customary look. If he was smoking more than usual, and wiping more sweat, it was because in the bag, layered in newspaper, he had thousands of yuan in ten-yuan notes. Читать дальше...

The Story of Work. By Jan Lucassen. Yale University Press; 544 pages; $30 and £25

The Glass Wall. By Max Egremont. Picador; 320 pages; £25. To be published in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in September; $30

The Man Who Hated Women. By Amy Sohn. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 400 pages; $30

LAST OCTOBER young Nigerians took to the streets to protest against police brutality. At first “none of the traditional media companies were covering it,” recalls Wale Lawal. A few years earlier he had started the Republic, a quarterly magazine of ideas and analysis, and now his readers wanted to discuss the movement that was swelling around them. So he and his team in Lagos ran a series of online pieces on the protests, later collected in a special print edition. This kind of in-depth coverage... Читать дальше...

IN 2014 A GERMAN animal-rights group called SOKO Tierschutz planted a caretaker in the laboratory of Nikos Logothetis, a neuroscientist working at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen. The infiltrator secretly filmed around 100 hours of lab work over six months, some of which was later broadcast on German television. The footage showed monkeys with metal plugs grafted into their skulls—ports which researchers used to probe and study their brains. One vomits on camera, apparently as a result of... Читать дальше...

PEOPLE TEND to join dating apps to find love. But social-media users in Kazakhstan swipe right for less romantic services. On an array of platforms hustlers now do a roaring trade in fake vaccination documents.

STRUGGLING TO FIND extra staff, the manager of a bar in the Paris region recently asked her sister to drive for an hour to help out on a busy evening, during a televised football match. At a Normandy sea-front restaurant, a waitress says they are under-staffed because former colleagues will no longer put up with unsociable evening and weekend work. Diners in Paris report the sudden appearance of shorter menus, as restaurants adapt their kitchens to staff shortages, as well as the presence of improbably... Читать дальше...

AL CAPONE WOULD have recognised the tactic. When Hungary introduced a law that banned the “promotion” or positive portrayal of homosexual relationships or transgender people in schools, lawyers at the European Commission got to work. Brussels has little competence over a country’s education policy. No matter. Just as the Chicago gangster went down for tax evasion rather than racketeering or murder, Viktor Orban’s government found itself on 15th July accused of violating the Audiovisual Media Services... Читать дальше...

IT FEELS SURPRISING that July 24th marks only the second anniversary of Boris Johnson’s arrival at Number 10, the prime-ministerial residence: into those two years he has packed enough incident to keep another man going for two decades. He has divorced for a second time, married for a third, witnessed the birth of what is thought to be his sixth child, contracted covid-19 and flirted with the Grim Reaper. On the politics front he has prorogued Parliament, expelled 21 Tory grandees from the party for voting against the government on Brexit... Читать дальше...

THE HUMAN brain may be the most complex object on Earth. It contains 85bn nerve cells and trillions of interconnections. As these cells process information, people experience consciousness and thought. The brain is made even more mysterious by the fact it is scrutable only when alive. To truly understand brains means examining them while they are functioning inside the body.

Letters are welcome via e-mail to letters@economist.com  

No more lockdowns

I am dismayed that people who oppose lockdown measures have been consistently portrayed as crackpots motivated by conspiracy theories (“Opposites attract”, July 3rd). Each week your pages are filled with evidence of the disastrous impacts of lockdowns and the economic crises that they have created: from extreme poverty, to the strengthening of dictators, to the widening waistlines of a quarter of the population (“The attention recession”, July 3rd). Читать дальше...