Новости за 09.08.2018

THE phrase “forlorn hope” entered English from Dutch and German in the 17th century. It referred to a suicide mission or, more often, the ambitious and condemned men chosen to execute it. The most celebrated British forlorn hope was a band of aristocrats and ne’er-do-wells sent to scale the walls of the Spanish city of Badajoz in 1812. They carried sacks of hay to cushion their leap into its defensive ditch. Many were blown up by French mines the moment they landed.

POLISH banks should be in Polish hands, or so says the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party. Since PiS came to power in 2015, Polish ownership of banks’ shares has risen, last year surpassing 50% for the first time since 1999. What the government calls “repolonisation” is a form of creeping nationalisation, with foreign-owned banks being bought up (on a voluntary basis) by state-controlled companies. But while PiS extols the virtues of economic patriotism, economists are more wary.

SOVIET SQUARE in Voronezh no longer looks especially Soviet. Children dart through a dancing fountain. BMX bikers barrel across new tiles. Grassy groves play home to picnicking teens. “It’s practically Spain,” gushes a pensioner.

MORE than most people the British pride themselves on being sensible. Others might go in for such silly things as revolutions and theories. Britons prefer pragmatism to ideology, moderation to extremism, continuity to change. Walter Bagehot praised his fellow-countrymen for their “inconsistent moderation”. George Orwell thought that the essence of Englishness lay in continuity. “It stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature.” George VI once pronounced that “abroad is bloody”. Читать дальше...

YOU return from work on a muggy August evening. Your unwashed teenage son is on the sofa playing Fortnite, as he has been doing for the past eight hours. Your daughter, scrolling through Instagram, acknowledges your presence with a surly grunt. Not for the first time, you ask yourself: why are school summer holidays so insufferably long?

WITH just two months to go before the first round of Brazil’s elections, no one has a clue what will happen. The front-runner for the presidency, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a left-wing former president, is in jail; the courts will almost certainly bar him from running. The rest of the presidential field is fragmented—no candidate polls over 20%. Unless someone wins a majority, the vote will go to a second round on October 28th. At the moment, any of four or five people could win it.

IT WAS like “selling Mount Vernon to the redcoats”. That was the cry when Fujitsu, a Japanese technology giant, proposed a friendly takeover of Fairfield, a once-pioneering Californian semiconductor firm, in 1986. At stake, in the eyes of the deal’s critics, were America’s economic strength, military security and technological competitiveness. So emerged the first effort to screen foreign direct investment (FDI) into the United States on national-security grounds. Since then, things have become immeasurably more complicated. Читать дальше...

AMERICA’S mid-term elections in November will be hugely consequential. If the Democrats capture the House of Representatives, as The Economist’s model suggests they have a three-in-four chance of doing, they will control congressional committees that now protect President Donald Trump from harsh investigation. If Republicans hold on, they can pick up their attempt to repeal Obamacare. Yet few Americans are expected to vote in the mid-terms. Last time, in 2014, just 37% of eligible voters turned out. Читать дальше...

German military capability

Long-term underfunding is indeed the main reason for the parlous state of Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr (“Outgunned”, July 28th). Nevertheless, although Germany spends just over 1% of its GDP a year on defence, this still represents a significant budget, especially for a non-nuclear power. At over €40bn ($46bn), it is not far short of either Britain’s or France’s. Yet, it has fewer capabilities than either.

Moreover, in order to address shortfalls... Читать дальше...

The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States: A Speculative Novel. By Jeffrey Lewis.Mariner Books; 304 pages; $15.99. WH Allen; £9.99.

CoDex 1962. By Sjon. Translated by Victoria Cribb. Sceptre; 527 pages; £18.99. To be published in America by MCD in September; $30.

Waiting for the good times to roll

Dreamers: How Young Indians are Changing the World. By Snigdha Poonam. Harvard University Press; 288 pages; $17.95. Hurst; £14.99.

VINAY SINGHAL and his brother, Parveen, co-founded WittyFeed, a content-factory that churns out clickbait, as a Facebook page in 2011. By 2016 it had its own website, 150 writers around the world, a valuation of $30m and a big HQ in Indore, a third-tier city about halfway between Mumbai and Delhi. Mr Singhal has... Читать дальше...

Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East. By David Kirkpatrick. Viking; 384 pages; $28. Bloomsbury Publishing; £21.

Consider the poppies of the field

Milk of Paradise: A History of Opium. By Lucy Inglis. Pegasus Books; 448 pages; $28.95. Macmillan; £25.00.

HUNTINGDON, West Virginia, is dying. As a share of the town’s population, overdoses kill more than ten times the American average. Startling numbers of babies are reportedly addicted to opioids at birth. The country at large is suffering, too: 42,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2016, compared with 58,000 fatalities in the Vietnam war. Читать дальше...

In Beijing workers obliterated the studio of Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist and dissident. Mr Ai has been living in exile in Berlin since 2015, after years of skirmishes with authorities over his politically charged art and advocacy. The demolition came without warning, putting some artwork at risk, but was not necessarily a political act. The lease had expired, and the area is due for commercial development, including shopping malls. If the destruction of the studio were an installation, it might have been called “Progress”. Читать дальше...

IN THESE populist times, a head of state whose summer break shuts down much of a busy beach resort might expect a few grumbles. It says much about today’s China that—as Communist leaders arrived for an annual summer gathering in Beidaihe, north-east of Beijing—no peep of dissent could be heard on the town’s packed public beach, in clear sight of the fenced-off leaders’ district with its turreted villas, pine woods and empty, sandy shoreline. Several holiday-makers nervously insisted that they... Читать дальше...

FROM Auckland to Amsterdam, Sydney to San Francisco, house prices in the best locations have gone through the roof. The Economist’s new house-price index covers 22 of the world’s most vibrant cities (see table). They are home to 163m people, with an economic output equal to Germany and Japan combined. The average price of a home in these cities rose by 34% in real terms over the past five years. In seven cities it rose by more than half.

IF YOU are a high earner in a rich country and you lack a good accountant, you probably spend about half the year working for the state. If you are an average earner, not even an accountant can spare you taxes on your payroll and spending.

DONALD TRUMP says it is “not fair” for Europe’s largest economy to spend proportionally so much less on defence than America does. Germany spends just 1.2% of its GDP on defence, and it shows.

Dawn’s early light

ON AUGUST 6th a flimsy-looking pilotless aircraft, the Zephyr S, came slowly in to land at an undisclosed location in Arizona, and was caught by a group of people jogging along beside it. The reception committee was needed because the craft, which weighs less than 75kg, lacks an undercarriage—or, indeed, anything else that would add unnecessary weight. The touchdown meant the Zephyr S had set a new flight-endurance record for a drone, of 25 days, 23 hours and 57 minutes. Читать дальше...