Новости за 15.08.2018

Mrs Endeavour takes a break

Endeavour: The Ship and the Attitude that Changed the World. By Peter Moore. Chatto & Windus; 432 pages; £20. To be published in America by Farrar, Straus & Giroux next year.

ONE clear moonlit night in June 1770, James Cook ran into yet more proof of how remarkable the newly explored continent of Australia was. Literally: his ship, Endeavour, ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef. The next 23 hours were spent bailing water in terror, until finally Endeavour slid free. Читать дальше...

The price of a car

The Shoemaker and His Daughter. By Conor O’Clery. Doubleday Ireland; 384 pages; £14.99.

RUSSIA demands to be written about. Journalists posted to Frankfurt or Brussels rarely take a year off to tell the country’s back-story over 350 pages, but Moscow correspondents find the prospect hard to resist. Conor O’Clery of the Irish Times is the latest to grapple with Russia’s tumultuous recent past, but he does it in an unusual way. “The Shoemaker and His Daughter” is the story of his wife’s relatives... Читать дальше...

The streets of San Francisco

A River of Stars. By Vanessa Hua. Ballantine Books; 304 pages; $27.

ONLY the wealthiest Chinese women make their way to Perfume Bay, a five-star secret compound near Los Angeles for expectant mothers. Here the spoiled wives of Shanghai bosses—all carrying prized male heirs—consume diets rich in superstition (no bananas, which cause babies to slip out early); schedule Caesareans on auspicious dates; and pick English names worthy of their princelings (perhaps Stanley... Читать дальше...

TURKEY’S president often complains that the one area of national life on which his conservative, Islamist-rooted government has not made a permanent mark is culture and the arts. Earlier this year, standing inside the Hagia Sophia—a Byzantine basilica converted into a mosque by the Ottomans and then into a museum by modern Turkey’s secular founders—Recep Tayyip Erdogan made his case for an art that evoked his country’s religious and imperial lineage, as well as its modern ambitions.

The Fighters: Americans in Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. By C.J. Chivers. Simon & Schuster; 374 pages; $28 and £20. )

THE 39 people who died when the Morandi Bridge in Genoa collapsed on August 14th— perhaps more, since some are still missing in the rubble—could not possibly have imagined that the 50-year-old concrete structure would suddenly crumble beneath them. But engineers saw it coming.

IT WAS the stuff of motorists’ nightmares: on August 14th, a pillar supporting a bridge over the Polcevera river in Genoa collapsed. Three heavy vehicles and up to 35 cars plunged 45 metres from the A10 motorway into the river bed and onto nearby warehouses. As The Economist went to press, 38 people were known to have died; the search for survivors was suspended for fear of further collapse.

ONLY a few months ago, Canadians were earnestly debating whether or not the country’s Liberal administration was right to go ahead with executing a $12bn contract to deliver armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia. The government said it would, but acknowledged its critics’ concerns by agreeing to adopt a version of an international treaty that limits arms sales to rogues (see article).

IF ALL—or even most—countries abided by the letter and spirit of the UN Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), the world might be rather less grim. Governments that sign up are supposed to halt exports of weapons if they have good reason to think they will be used to flout international humanitarian law. That could cover both internal repression and waging wars by inhumane methods.

China expands

As well as Eurasia and Africa, China’s Belt and Road Initiative has also reached the shores of the Caribbean (“Gateway to the globe”, July 28th). Often thought of as America’s backyard, this region is increasingly becoming America’s soft underbelly. Years of strategic neglect by Washington have provided Beijing with opportunities to build relations with many of its nations. China has built a host of new embassies across the region, one of the biggest of which is in tiny Dominica, a country with just 74,000 inhabitants. Читать дальше...

THE STORY came to Joan Lindsay in a dream in 1966. She had holidayed at Hanging Rock as a child. The vivid and disturbing vision recurred for two weeks; she shut the door to her study and wrote it down, feverishly, through a cold winter.

Unholy shroud

CATHOLIC America was already in shock, and then another hammer-blow fell. Two weeks after one of the country’s best-known prelates handed in his cardinal’s hat, amid allegations of molesting young men, a report has documented in sickening detail the sexual crimes that were perpetrated by over 300 priests in Pennsylvania over 70 years.

More than 1,000 children, and probably several times that number, were victims of clerical abuse that was systematically swept under the carpet... Читать дальше...

Quick, put a strongman in their way

MUCH of Syria lies in ruins, but Bashar al-Assad’s bureaucracy of repression hums along. Earlier this year a pro-opposition website published a list of Syrians wanted by the regime. The database is both staggering in scope—1.5m people, or 7% of the pre-war population—and incomplete. Jamil Hassan, the head of the air-force intelligence service, is said to have told senior officers in July that he wants to arrest twice that number. On August 9th another... Читать дальше...

HE WAS struck again and again by the wonder of being in his own house, the audacity of it: to walk down a farm track in Wiltshire to his own front gate, to close his doors and windows on his own space, privacy and neatness, to walk on cream carpet through book-lined rooms where, still in a towelling robe at noon, he could summon a wife to make coffee or take dictation. Outside, he could wander over lawns to the manor house, or a lake where swans glided, or visit the small building that served as his wine cellar. Читать дальше...

IN 1998 the Lancet, a medical journal, published a paper which made a claim that continues to infect public discussion: vaccines can cause autism. The article was later retracted and its primary author, a British researcher named Andrew Wakefield, lost his medical licence.

IN JANUARY last year President Donald Trump signed an executive order reviving Secure Communities, a programme that empowers the federal government to check the immigration status of anyone arrested by local police. Launched in the last year of the George W.