Новости за 26.04.2018

Into the mix

IN 2021 Charterhouse’s hushed cloisters and vast, immaculate lawns will welcome new arrivals. For the first time since the boarding school’s foundation in 1611, girls will be among the “yearlings”, the term for those joining at the age of 13. Alex Peterken, the school’s head teacher, is excited by the change. He believes that co-education holds many advantages, one of which is that it helps militate against a “macho, alpha-male culture, based on hierarchy and order”.

For centuries... Читать дальше...

GLOBAL deals may be growing at a rapid clip, but they seldom offer instant gratification. Qualcomm, an American chipmaker, first bid for NXP Semiconductors, a Dutch company, in October 2016. The union has since been blessed by eight regulators worldwide, but one hurdle remains: China. With no decision yet from its regulator, the companies, which were expecting to have closed the $44bn deal this week, now hope to conclude it by July. The purchase of the chip unit of Toshiba, a troubled Japanese company... Читать дальше...

BENEATH a lustrous 33-metre bronze statue of Guanyin, the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy, a young monk on Mount Putuo tallies the cash donated by visiting faithful: “Daily, anywhere between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of yuan,” he says (100,000 yuan is a little under $16,000). Over 8m trips are made yearly to the tiny islet in Zhoushan city, about a four-hour drive from Shanghai (11m visited Shanghai Disneyland in its first year, after it opened in 2016). When it comes to temple fundraising, the monk is resolute. Читать дальше...

“THIS port is for the Togolese,” says Sherif Tchedre, a mechanic standing among containers that line the shorefront in Lomé, Togo’s capital. “But it is Bolloré who runs everything.” He thinks little of the port’s French operator, Bolloré Group, or the conglomerate’s eponymous owner-boss, Vincent Bolloré. They do “nothing for Togo”, he says, adding that the Frenchman is too cosy with African presidents.

THE herd of water buffalo ambling over rolling hills may look like a scene from southern Italy. In fact the beasts roam in southern Ireland. Johnny Lynch, who owns a 150-acre farm in County Cork, makes plump balls of mozzarella from their milk, and bids customers a cheerful, Irish-accented “Buongiorno!” in online advertisements for his produce.

TO THE untrained eye, the activity looked innocent enough. Patriotic Kazakhs marked a public holiday in March by displaying balloons of the same turquoise colour as the national flag. The hitch was that Mukhtar Ablyazov, an exiled oligarch, had urged citizens to display turquoise balloons to demonstrate their support for his political movement, Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DVK by its Russian acronym), which a Kazakh court had banned days before as “extremist”. It was unclear how many of the... Читать дальше...

ECONOMISTS have spent the past decade wringing their hands over the health of the euro area’s economy. Last year, in a welcome respite, it expanded by a robust 2.3%, outstripping forecasts and matching America’s growth rate. But it has appeared less rosy-cheeked since.

In prolific form at the Stade Velodrome but fragile at the back, Al Hain-Cole expects Les Phoceens to produce an entertaining clash against Rose's men

IF SIZE matters, which it does for Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then the $12.5bn building site on Istanbul’s northern fringe matters a lot. The construction zone, a sea of concrete and cement, spills over 76.5 square kilometres (29.5 square miles), dotted by dozens of buildings, including an ultra-modern passenger terminal. It already covers an area bigger than Manhattan. A roaring hive of steamrollers, cranes, dredges, lorries loaded with piles of rubble and 35,000 workers completes the scene. Читать дальше...

EVERY four years researchers at the University of North Carolina and other institutions ask experts to place Europe’s political parties on various spectrums. The latest version of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey reviewed 132 parties in 14 EU countries, including the five biggest. It finds that since 2014, socialist, Christian democrat and conservative parties have as a group moved towards more restrictive immigration policies and that the liberal, Christian democrat and especially conservative ones... Читать дальше...

FOR anyone seeking to understand what America wants and how it hopes to achieve it, the random early-morning grumbles of a 71-year-old man are rarely the best place to start. Yet Donald Trump’s Twitter account has its uses for Europeans frustrated by his administration’s trade policy. For while the president is often erratic, on international trade he has been admirably consistent: the rules are stacked against America, deficits are a result of weakness, and previous presidents have been played for fools. Читать дальше...

IN RECENT years, as Italy has struggled economically, Milan has been happily out of step. It enjoyed a revival that reached a peak three years ago when it hosted Expo 2015. The universal exhibition left Milan with a clutch of renewed urban areas and rekindled its spirit of optimism. The city centre, ever stylish, nowadays feels flamboyantly affluent.

AMONG Latin America’s handful of autocracies, that of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua once stood out for its stability. Mr Ortega was the most prominent leader of the revolutionary Sandinista regime of the 1980s, but lost an election in 1990. He later forged a dirty deal with a conservative rival that let him return to power with just 38% of the vote in 2006, and has since clung to office by nobbling democratic institutions. At the last election in 2016, he banned the main opposition. Nicaragua thus joined Venezuela... Читать дальше...

ROUND numbers would be irrelevant if investors were rational. But they are not. This week the ten-year Treasury-bond yield passed the 3% threshold for the first time in over four years and investors shuddered. Their worry is that the long downward march in yields, which began in 1982, may at last be over. Is it?

THE wild ride seems to have calmed. Late last year speculators sent the price of crypto-currencies soaring. The value of bitcoin, the best-known, has fallen by half since then. But the momentum behind all things crypto remains powerful. Bitcoin is still worth seven times what it was just a year ago. In the first quarter of this year, according to CoinDesk, a news service, $6.3bn was raised through initial coin offerings (ICOs), a form of funding in which firms issue digital tokens, more than in all of 2017. Читать дальше...

WANTED: qualified candidates to work for the world’s most scrutinised organisation. Applicants should be aware that the CEO has a history of undermining staff and firing them publicly. They should also know that his lawyer is under criminal investigation. Oh, and that the former head of the FBI is looking into how the CEO got the job. The successful candidate will face a televised inquisition by members of the Senate in which questions will be raised about their character.

ADMIT it. The world’s commentators, Banyan included, have underestimated North Korea’s leader. Kim Jong Un was preparing this week to meet South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, on the southern side of the demilitarised zone between their two countries, on April 27th, just after The Economist went to press. Even six months ago, no one imagined Mr Kim capable of leading a diplomatic dance that has drawn in not just South Korea but America and China. He is proving to be an adept young dictator.

DRAGONS are lithe and prickly and cunning. When excited they breathe fire. Elephants are tubby, lumbering and shy. They never forget a slight, and when angered grow fierce and implacable. If the metaphorical animals typically used to depict them are anything to judge by, it is not surprising that China and India, the world’s two most populous countries, tend to compete more than co-operate.

The noose is not the answer

ON APRIL 25th a court in the city of Jodhpur sentenced a 77-year-old religious leader known as Asaram Bapu to life imprisonment for the rape of a 16-year-old girl. That, after a five-year trial, a judge should uphold the word of a poor, provincial woman against a bearded Hindu holy man who is not only venerated by millions, but cultivated by powerful politicians, including at one time Narendra Modi, the prime minister, seems to suggest that in India justice can, after all, prevail. Читать дальше...

“WOMEN hold up half the sky,” Mao Zedong used to say, when not harassing peasant girls. They also hold up 41% of China’s GDP, the biggest share in the Asia-Pacific (see chart), says a new report by the McKinsey Global Institute, the consultancy’s think-tank.

SHALOM OUANOUNOU was declared dead in September. The 25-year-old Canadian had suffered an asthma attack so severe that he was taken to hospital in Ontario where he was put on a ventilator. After carrying out tests, doctors found that his brain lacked functions such as consciousness and respiratory reflexes. They issued a death certificate and prepared to disconnect the medical equipment.

THE fifth in line to the throne arrived in some style on April 23rd. The private Lindo wing of St Mary’s hospital in London, where the as-yet-unnamed prince made his entrance, offers luxurious suites, afternoon tea and a comprehensive wine list for celebrating parents. Yet the cost to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge was probably slightly less than the price of delivering the average baby in America. In 2015 the Lindo wing charged £5,670 ($8,900) for 24 hours in a deluxe room and a natural delivery. Читать дальше...

Taxi for Carwyn

THE resignation of Carwyn Jones on April 21st took almost everyone by surprise. Wales’s first minister had been in the job for nearly a decade and only last month had told reporters that he had no plans to quit. Even some of his fellow Labour cabinet ministers had not got wind of his plans.

His departure seems to be a belated consequence of the suicide last November of Carl Sargeant, a former Welsh cabinet minister. In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein affair and the... Читать дальше...

THE count took place in near silence, it was that close. As ballot boxes were brought into the Barclaycard Arena in Birmingham, the only noise was the flutter of votes being tallied, recalls Andrew Mitchell, a local Conservative MP. In the end Andy Street, the Conservative candidate, was elected mayor of the West Midlands, a Labour heartland. Predictions followed that his triumph augured a Tory landslide in the general election due the following month. A year on from Mr Street’s victory, things look rather different. Читать дальше...

SCOTT PRUITT, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is still standing after a fusillade of scandals that would have felled a lesser cabinet member. As soon as he took up his post, Mr Pruitt lodged in a luxury flat owned by a lobbyist, paying $50 per night only on the evenings he slept there—a remarkable bargain for Capitol Hill. Mr Pruitt denied any impropriety, but it emerged this week that he had met his landlord’s husband, also a lobbyist representing a pork manufacturer before the agency... Читать дальше...