Новости за 26.04.2018

Up Pompeo

THE drama in the average congressional committee hearing makes Samuel Beckett’s plays look like fast-paced thrillers. But the afternoon session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23rd contained a genuinely exciting reversal. Reporters were prepared for the committee to deliver a historic rebuke and vote to recommend that Mike Pompeo should not be confirmed as secretary of state, something that has never happened before. Republicans hold a one-seat majority on the committee; Rand Paul... Читать дальше...

THE episode that encapsulated the Republican establishment’s capitulation to Donald Trump had been planned as a repudiation of him. It was when Senator Marco Rubio, in a bid to salvage his sinking candidacy in the 2016 Republican primaries, suggested that Mr Trump had a small penis. Formerly known as a high-minded conservative, Mr Rubio also mocked the Republican front-runner’s hair and “orange” skin. “Donald Trump likes to sue people,” he told a crowd in Virginia, ahead of the round of primaries... Читать дальше...

ONE year ago, stung by what he termed “ridiculous” judicial defeats for his travel ban and sanctuary city policies, Donald Trump tweeted, “see you in the Supreme Court!” On April 25th, Mr Trump followed through on that promise. Trump v Hawaii asks whether the third version of the president’s restrictions on travel from primarily Muslim countries is consistent with immigration law and the constitution. After lower courts repeatedly froze Mr Trump’s edicts for discriminating against Muslims, the... Читать дальше...

Pacific rest

THREE years ago John Radcliffe, a jovial retired lobbyist in Hawaii, was diagnosed with terminal stage four colon and liver cancer. He has since undergone 60 rounds of chemotherapy but doctors suspect he has just six more months to live. His illness often leaves him feeling exhausted but, undeterred, he has spent the past few years pushing to pass one last bill: Hawaii’s “Our Care, Our Choice Act”, which allows doctors to assist terminally ill patients who wish to die. Earlier this month... Читать дальше...

THE Federal Trade Commission, the agency responsible for data privacy and antitrust enforcement, had a staid 2017. Amazon’s $13.7bn acquisition of Whole Foods grocery chain sailed past it after a short review. No acquisitions made by Google or Facebook were examined, despite mounting concerns that tech giants are able to buy up new firms before they ripen into true competition. The FTC was short-staffed for most of the year: thanks to presidential foot dragging and partisan spats, just two out of five commissioners were in place. Читать дальше...

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW was once so angry with a subeditor that he complained to the newspaper. “I ask you, sir,” Shaw wrote, “to put this man out.” The cause of his fury? The editor had insisted on “correcting” split infinitives. “Set him adrift and try an intelligent Newfoundland dog in his place,” Shaw fulminated, “without interfering with his perfect freedom of choice between ‘to suddenly go’, ‘to go suddenly’ and ‘suddenly to go’.”

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War. By Paul Scharre. W.W. Norton & Company; 448 pages; $27.95.

Circe. By Madeline Miller. Little, Brown and Company; 400 pages; $27. Bloomsbury Publishing; £16.99.

Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-1950. By Agnès Poirier. Henry Holt; 352 pages; $30. Bloomsbury Publishing; £25.

TYPHOID affects some 21m people each year, and about 1% of cases are fatal. Before antibiotics were used to treat the disease 70 years ago, death rates were much higher. If left unchecked, typhoid can cause internal bleeding, perforation of the gut and, in up to a fifth of cases, death. Researchers are now concerned that an “extensively drug resistant” (XDR) strain of Salmonella enterica serotype Typhi (S. typhi), the bacterium that causes the disease, could see a return to those dangerous days.

OLD hands at some water companies still on occasion whip out a pair of dousing rods or find a Y-shaped twig to search for a leak in an underground pipe. Dousing, or water witching as it is known in America, has no basis in scientific fact. A somewhat more reliable method involves using acoustic equipment called geophones to listen for escaping water. The trouble is it takes an experienced ear to distinguish the sound of a leak from the normal gurgle of water passing though pipes, let alone to... Читать дальше...

Our galaxy, far far away

FOR something so enormous, astronomers know remarkably little about the Milky Way, Earth’s home galaxy. They know its rough dimensions—somewhere between 100,000 and 180,000 light-years across. And they know that it contains 100bn stars—or perhaps 200bn, or maybe even twice that again.

For part of the galaxy, though, things are about to become much clearer. On April 25th the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite released one of the biggest chunks of data in the history of astronomy. Читать дальше...

THE notion that nothing good happens after midnight does not seem to apply to times of birth. Around the world the peak hours for vaginal births that have not been induced by drugs fall between 1am and 7am; the numbers then dwindle throughout the rest of the day. This has led many scientists to believe that giving birth during the early morning offers some sort of evolutionary advantage, perhaps gained long ago when hunter-gatherer mothers and their infants would benefit from having their group... Читать дальше...

EVERY year human endeavours emit 50bn tonnes of “carbon dioxide equivalent”. This way of measuring things reflects the climatic importance of CO2, which traps heat in the atmosphere for centuries before it breaks down, compared with other, shorter-lived greenhouse gases.

The new NAFTA model has many moving parts

ONE year ago, a member of President Donald Trump’s administration drafted a short executive order to withdraw America from the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a trade deal with Canada and Mexico. The obvious interpretation was that Mr Trump was irresponsibly bullying the Mexicans and Canadians into giving America better terms. A kinder view held that he was aiming at a domestic audience. Congress was dragging its feet at the time over the confirmation of Robert Lighthizer... Читать дальше...

MICROECONOMISTS are wrong about specific things, Yoram Bauman, an economist and comedian, likes to say, whereas macroeconomists are wrong in general. Macroeconomists have borne the brunt of public criticism over the past decade, a period marked by financial crisis, soaring unemployment and bitter arguments between the profession’s brightest stars. Yet the vast majority of practising dismal scientists are microeconomists, studying the behaviour of people and firms in individual markets. Their work... Читать дальше...

TECHNOLOGY has transformed finance. Consumers bank and buy their insurance policies online. They use technology to manage their pensions and other investment portfolios. But can tech improve returns? Only if it is used wisely.

THE notion that the gentle flap of a butterfly’s wings can cause chaos on the other side of the world is well known. But commodity markets have been tested in recent weeks by what could be called the 800-pound-gorilla effect: the idea that chest-beating in the White House can unleash turmoil in global metals, agricultural and energy markets.

Parag Pathak penned a pupil-picker paper

BOSTON parents were fed up. To get their children into public schools they had to submit a list of their preferences. Spots were allocated first to those who put a school top. Only then would schools consider pupils who put them second or third. Sounds fair? Hold on. The best schools are popular. Picking them risks rejection. Good schools are sought after, too. If put second they may also fill up, leaving only places at worse schools. Should parents aim for the best and risk mediocrity... Читать дальше...

THE concept of a universal basic income (UBI), an unconditional cash payment to all citizens, has in recent years captured the imagination of a wide spectrum of people, from leftist activists to libertarian Silicon Valley techies. Proponents see a neat solution to poverty and the challenges of automation; detractors argue it would remove the incentive to work. Trials of UBI have been launched, or are about to be, in several countries. Most are publicly funded, although Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley startup accelerator... Читать дальше...

THE rise of the big tech firms is easy to spot in downtown Chicago. Apple’s minimalist store looms over the riverfront, close to a skyscraper carrying the name of another omnipresent brand—Trump. At a bus stop a Facebook advertisement promises that its new algorithm will combat fake news. On the Magnificent Mile’s digital hoardings Google urges pedestrians to swoon into the arms of its voice-activated assistant.

ONCE he started the music—flinging up his right arm, while his left hand worked the decks to bring it flooding, then crashing in—the crowd in the hall could not resist. Caught up with him, they would shudder, pulse, sway, dance, then go “completely apeshit”, pumping their arms, buckling their half-naked bodies. He usually viewed it from above, a seething mass of sweaty shoulders, whiplashing hair and imploring hands, cut into sections by laser lights or masked by drifting dry ice. Relentlessly the oontz-oontz-oontz-oontz of a bass beat... Читать дальше...

Lessons from the past for AI

Your special report on artificial intelligence in business (March 31st) mused that “AI will make workplaces more efficient, safer—and much creepier”. The emphasis on industrial engineering on the factory floor in the mid-20th century brought about men with clipboards telling employees exactly how to do their job, even going so far as to tell workers not to think, just perform. But in the 1970s one company that got its quality-control process right was Toyota. Читать дальше...

Hundred of students protested in Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, on April 16, the same day the country’s parliament announced elections for the Prime Minister would be held on May 1. The election comes after the resignation under pressure of former Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan on April 23. Opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan urged demonstrations to resume after a meeting with the acting Prime Minister, Karen Karapetyan, was cancelled late on April 24. Credit: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty via Storyful

BEIRUT (AP) — The Latest on Syria developments (all times local): 5:50 p.m. A group of Syrians has arrived at the headquarters of the global chemical weapons watchdog in the Netherlands, where Russia has organized a briefing for them. Russia has said the Syrians will explain that they were "real witnesses of (a) staged 'chemical attack'" in the Syrian town of Douma on April 7. About 15 Syrians, including at least three young children, arrived at The Hague headquarters of the Organization for the... Читать дальше...