Новости за 16.08.2018

ON OCTOBER 1st, the first day of its upcoming term, the Supreme Court will consider what the future holds for the dusky gopher frog, an endangered amphibian. The judgement in Weyerhauser Co.

SEVERAL times a year, groups of silver-haired Chinese people camp out overnight. They do so in order to get prime spots to register for places at the country’s universities for the elderly. Since 1983, when China’s first such school opened, 70,000 more have cropped up across the country.

A SPAT between the leaders of America and Turkey escalated this week. In response to Turkey’s detention on cooked-up charges of an American pastor, Donald Trump ramped up tariffs on Turkish exports of steel and aluminium, and the Turkish lira fell 20% against the dollar.

FOR many regular travellers—or at least those without access to fast-track security lanes—it has become a fact of life. When you pass through airport security, you have to load your carry-on bag onto the x-ray belt, and take out your liquids and large electronic items.

LAUREN GREENFIELD is a documentarian of American aspiration and excess. Over three decades she has taken hundreds of thousands of photographs of wealthy housewives, plastic-surgery addicts, porn stars, nightclubs, strip clubs, young girls with eating disorders, children who grew up rich and children who strive to look rich.

ROD DREHER is one of America’s most influential religious commentators. He has made the case that in today’s godless West, the only viable strategy for traditionally minded followers of Jesus Christ is to make a partial withdrawal from society, and abandon the struggle to assert political power.

Such, such were the joys

LIN MING, a ten-year-old who has two years left at his primary school in Beijing, does not remember the last time he returned home before 6pm on a weekday during term. As soon as school is out, his mother, Yang Mei, shuttles him around the city, dropping him off at tutoring agencies where he studies advanced maths and English grammar. Ms Yang accepts that she is “maybe putting a bit too much stress” on her son. But she has no choice. “Around 90% of my son’s classmates attend after-school lessons. Читать дальше...

STANDING at the edge of a field where his soyabean crop will be harvested in a month’s time, Liu Xijiang gives a tepid review to a local experiment with rural land reform which the central government is promoting as a great success. “It’s a good idea and it’s working well enough, but in reality it doesn’t make all that much difference to most of us,” he says. The experiment in Linying, a county in the central province of Henan, relates to one of China’s biggest policy conundrums: how to let farmers... Читать дальше...

Any faith you like, as long as it’s patriotic

DURING the past year campaigners, academics and journalists have been shedding light on the detention for “re-education” of vast numbers of ethnic-Uighur Muslims in China’s far-western province of Xinjiang. On August 13th the topic was raised at the UN, when experts undertaking an audit of China’s policies towards ethnic minorities said they had heard that as many as 1m Uighurs are being locked away. Hu Lianhe, a Communist Party official flown in for the hearing... Читать дальше...

Fentanyl furniture

THE first of the four drugs was administered on August 14th at 10.24am at the state penitentiary in Lincoln. Fifteen minutes later a curtain was lowered, and by 10.47 Carey Dean Moore, aged 60, who had been incarcerated for 38 years for murdering two taxi drivers, was pronounced dead. It was the first time in 21 years that Nebraska had executed a prisoner. And it was the first time ever that fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, had been used for an execution.

After declining for years... Читать дальше...

IN HER opening policy meeting as Scotland’s first minister in 2014, Nicola Sturgeon left no doubt of her priority: education. Falling standards, clear from international surveys and the government’s own tests, would no longer be tolerated. In the run-up to the 2016 Scottish parliamentary election, she asked voters to judge her on whether she had improved schools and closed the gap between rich and poor pupils. “If you’re not, as first minister, prepared to put your neck on the line over the education of our children... Читать дальше...

At least their uniforms are spotless

EVERY summer across north India, millions of Hindu youths honour Lord Shiva by travelling to the sacred Ganges to collect holy water for anointing the Shiva lingams in their local temples. The pilgrims travel on foot and use a wooden yoke or kanvar to balance two small buckets. But though the sight of orange-clad kanvarias on country roads is picturesque, the scene Indians may remember best from this year’s Kanvar Yatra took place in the crowded heart of Delhi, India’s capital. Читать дальше...

SOME time after midnight on August 10th, residents of Ghazni, a large town straddling one of Afghanistan’s busiest road arteries, awoke to the rattle of intense gunfire. By morning it was clear that an invading force of Taliban fighters had reached the city centre. Only after four days of fighting, the dispatch of 1,000 Afghan army reinforcements and some three dozen air strikes by American warplanes did the Taliban withdraw.

ALBERTO opens his wallet to show how little is in it. It contains no money and no bank card, only the identity card issued by the government of El Salvador, from which he has just fled. He left his job as a car repairman in San Salvador, the capital, which paid $100 a month, because members of the MS-13 gang had demanded from him more money than he could afford. “They killed my brother. And my son,” he says. Alberto and his wife, Gabriela, who is four months pregnant, have found refuge, at least for now... Читать дальше...

TWENTY years ago, on August 17th 1998, the Russian government devalued the rouble, defaulted on its domestic debts and suspended all payments to foreign creditors. It was one of the most dramatic days of a year-long emerging-market crisis that began with the devaluation of the Thai baht. South Korea and Malaysia would suffer brutal recessions. President Suharto of Indonesia was forced to resign after 32 years that May. But it was Russia’s default that shook the world.

IN THE early 1980s Peru’s government founded Ciudad Constitución to be the capital of the country’s Amazon region. Today, it serves as the capital of Peru’s war on drugs. Clandestine airstrips etched into the jungle make the area a hub for smugglers. They form part of an “air bridge”, with small planes flying in from Bolivia to pick up cocaine paste or refined cocaine, stopping in Bolivia to refuel and then heading to Brazil, from which the drug is dispatched to Europe. A single plane can carry 300kg (660lb) of cocaine, worth some $350,000. Читать дальше...

In an air-force base in Wyoming, for now

THE last time any of the bells of the Church of St Lawrence the Martyr rang out in the central Philippine town of Balangiga was in 1901. Spain had ceded the Philippines to America three years earlier. Filipino independence fighters regarded American soldiers first as liberators to be welcomed, but later as invaders to be resisted. In Balangiga, about 500 men of the town, some disguised as women, attacked the occupying soldiers as one of the bells tolled. Читать дальше...

JOE DONNELLY is almost indistinguishable from the voters he is mingling with in Doug Burnworth’s barn. A burly figure, in denim jeans and a yellow shirt bearing the legend “Indiana Pork”, the Democratic senator from Indiana looks like a prosperous farmer. He also knows his onions—or rather, his corn and soyabeans, the main crops in Noble County, northern Indiana.

AS A candidate, Donald Trump promised to “drain the swamp” and make government work for ordinary Americans. As a president, he presides over a staggeringly fetid administration. His former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, even wears clothes made from swamp creatures. Among the luxury goods on display during his trial on 32 counts of financial fraud and money-laundering was a python coat for which he paid $18,500, nearly twice what he paid for an ostrich waistcoat, but a mere fraction of what he spent on clothes... Читать дальше...

Eight Cokes and a frown

ONE by-product of the Trump administration’s extraordinarily high turnover is likely to be a large number of tell-all books from former staffers. The 45th president has only been in office for a year and a half and yet there are already three such books—by Sean Spicer, James Comey and, now, by Omarosa Manigault Newman. The author, who was offered a White House job largely on the strength of her performance in Season 1 of “The Apprentice”, is an authentically... Читать дальше...

IT IS about 100 days since the leadership of Malaysia changed hands after 61 years of rule by one party. The electoral victory in May of Pakatan Harapan (PH), a coalition of parties, startled many people in Malaysia and beyond. The upset also surprised PH itself. Most members of the cabinet are still struggling to get the hang of what being in power entails. Malaysia’s nonagenarian new prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad (pictured), is an exception. He already has plenty of form as a national leader. Читать дальше...

Sofa, not so good

NEVER underestimate a successful man’s propensity to waste money on hideous personal items. Justin Bieber, a Canadian troubadour, reportedly spent $15,000 on jewelled tooth covers. Allen Loughry, West Virginia’s chief justice, spent $32,000—slightly less than the average income per person in his state—on a blue sectional sofa (pictured) that looks like something one might find, stained with beer and other fluids, in a fraternity house.

The sofa accounted for... Читать дальше...

IN 1546 Girolamo Fracastoro, a doctor and poet, published an elegant theory of contagion. Infections spread in three ways, he argued: by direct contact, via an intermediary, or at a distance, through the air. In medicine, his theory is now considered quaint. In economics, however, it still works pretty well.

The code breaks the silence

FOR an inkling of how hard it is for Italian authorities to identify Mafia activity, consider how mobsters disguise the pizzo, or protection payments, they extort. The owner of a business may find that customers have been scared off by a menacing stranger. Within days a mysterious man visits. He may request a regular donation for a poor family, or ask a business to switch to a new supplier. Owners put two and two together, says Daniele Marannano, an anti-Mafia activist in Palermo... Читать дальше...

A stitch in time

TAX collection in Africa resembles an exasperating fishing expedition, in which the big fish wriggle into tax havens and the tiddlers hide in the informal sector. It is made even harder by a self-inflicted problem. Governments give out a range of exemptions, thereby poking holes in their own nets.

Consider “tax expenditures”, a measure of the revenue lost by deviations from usual tax rates. Taxmen in Kenya and Uganda let about 5% of GDP slip through their fingers in this way, according to the World Bank. Читать дальше...