Новости за 23.08.2018

TWO months ago, in Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the Supreme Court handed a victory to Jack Phillips, a Christian baker who asserted a constitutional right to refuse to make a cake celebrating the marriage of two men. The vote was lopsided (7-2), but the judgment was narrow.

All along the watchtower

LONG inured to the squalor and violence of Britain’s prisons, Peter Clarke was still shocked by what he found in Birmingham on a visit in early August. The government’s chief inspector of prisons observed filthy common areas with rubbish piling up; fleas, cockroaches and rats; blood and vomit left overnight; and cramped cells “not fit for habitation”. Some prisoners refused to emerge from their cells for fear of violence. His inspection team’s own cars were torched in a supposedly secure car park. Читать дальше...

PACARAIMA is a speck of a town in the Brazilian Amazon on the border with Venezuela. Recently, it has been the entry point for tens of thousands of Venezuelans fleeing hunger, violence and hyperinflation at home. Most continue by foot 220km (135 miles) on the motorway to Boa Vista, the capital of the state of Roraima, where they struggle to survive by unloading lorries, hawking crafts and selling sex. About 2,000 of the poorest have stayed in Pacaraima, pitching tents in the streets. That has... Читать дальше...

SINCE the publication of Omarosa Manigault Newman’s book about her time in the Trump administration, the president’s political opponents have been indulging in a charmingly old-fashioned debate. Ms Manigault Newman suggests she was fired because people in the White House thought she knew the whereabouts of a recording from the president’s reality TV days in which he used the N-word. Given President Donald Trump’s fondness for derogatory epithets, it would be mildly surprising if he had avoided this one. Читать дальше...

TALL jars filled with rice beer await customers by the riverside in Yanji, a city in north-eastern China close to the border with North Korea. Servers in aprons fork out spicy salads from rows of red plastic bowls. Atop a nearby trestle table a butcher has laid out three skinned dogs. The early-morning market exudes the distinctive character of Yanbian, an ethnic-Korean enclave of which Yanji is the administrative heart. Youngsters chatter in Mandarin and Korean. Shop hoardings are written in both languages. Читать дальше...

It’s not so fun on the other side

FOR much of the year the lake in the crater at the top of Mount Changbai, a dormant volcano that straddles the frontier between China and North Korea, is covered with ice or hidden by clouds. On a recent weekend its waters, through which the border runs, shone a stunning azure blue. Sightseers on the Chinese side of the peak jostled for elbow-room at a busy cliff-top viewing point, grinning excitedly for selfies. Across the lake, in North Korea, there was not a soul to be seen. Читать дальше...

ZABALAZA MSHENGU was born on a farm in Ashburton, in the east of South Africa, on January 11th 1914. Seven months earlier the government had passed the Natives Land Act, which marked out 90% of the country for whites, who made up just 21% of the population. It was among the first of many laws to codify segregation. From 1948, under apartheid, 3.5m blacks were forcibly moved to isolated reservations called “homelands”. Mr Mshengu, however, remained. He became a “labour tenant”, working without... Читать дальше...

Closing in on counterfeits

FOR nine months a year, no men are to be seen in Aguacatenango. They leave the village in the southern state of Chiapas to work elsewhere in Mexico and return in summer to harvest maize. It falls to the women to raise the children, chop firewood and make some extra money. On a recent Saturday 18 women huddled on a porch, chatting in a mix of Spanish and Tzeltal, an indigenous language, as they fashioned swatches of fabric into dresses whose flower-and-wheat design is unique to the village. Читать дальше...

Take me to church

AMID wafts of incense and marijuana smoke, hordes of smiling folk in fairylike garb or, for a few, just body paint, dance in a patchwork of majestic forest glades near the town of Tidewater, Oregon. Others meditate in yoga postures. Some caress crystals or each other in gently writhing “snuggle puddles”. Colourfully painted signs read “Redesign the Paradigm”, “Make Love to the Mystery”, and, on paths to compost toilets, “Conscious Pooping This Way”. A speaker who replaces... Читать дальше...

The city that skips

ONE of the artefacts on display at the Lithuanian World Centre, a vast community centre on more than 18 acres of land in Lemont, a leafy village on the outskirts of Chicago, is a wooden sculpture of Hitler and Stalin scalping a kneeling man. The man is Lithuania. The country suffered under Soviet, Nazi and again Soviet occupations for 50 years, and before that under tsarist rule. “We used to be the largest country in Europe and then we just disappeared from the map,”... Читать дальше...

RETURNING to Turkey from Germany with four children in tow was not easy for Faisl Alakrch, a 36-year-old Syrian. He had to use a people-smuggler to retrace, in reverse, the route he had taken the year before. His younger brothers have remained in Germany and are studying at university, but he wanted to work, and complains that “I could not do anything there.” Turkey, by contrast, has made it easy for him to operate. He was able to register a company and set up a café in Gaziantep, a city close to the Syrian border. Читать дальше...

SURROUNDED by vast wheatfields, the camouflage-painted former pig farm just outside the village of Dolna Krupa looks both incongruous and menacing. A knock on the compound’s metal gate goes unanswered, but a giant guard dog snarls back through a narrow gap. The high walls are studded with barbed wire. Small signs warn that photographs are forbidden; a larger one, somewhat implausibly, advertises the building as a “Museum”.

JANEZ JANSA sits sullenly in Slovenia’s National Assembly, scrolling through social-media posts on his phone and occasionally sending a sarcastic tweet. The parliament is debating the nomination of Marjan Sarec as the country’s next prime minister. Strangely, Mr Jansa, leader of the largest opposition party, does not speak once during the debate. Stranger still is that Mr Jansa’s Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) is in opposition at all: it won a quarter of the votes in June’s parliamentary election, twice as many as its nearest rival. Читать дальше...

Fantasising about fried fish

WITH an “Evening of Bagpipes and Polenta” (boiled cornmeal, popular in north and central Italy), the mountain town of Barga will on September 3rd launch one of Italy’s more unusual cultural festivals: its annual Scottish Week. This year it features the presentation of a book in Italian on Scottish football and another in English on Barga cathedral (though it has a population of barely 10,000, Barga is officially a city).

The weeklong festival celebrates an unlikely two-way traffic in people... Читать дальше...

“THEY take out the glass windscreens so people won’t shatter them,” says Karl Robbjens, nodding at a bare tram stop in Hjallbo, a poor suburb of Gothenburg. Mr Robbjens, who is of mixed Swedish and Libyan parentage, grew up on a housing estate in this immigrant neighbourhood. To an outsider it looks as immaculate as most of Sweden, with its carefully tended vegetation and flagstone-paved shopping square, but Mr Robbjens paints a rougher picture: “I used to get my ass kicked all the time.” He points... Читать дальше...

EACH year, as the summer winds down across Europe, so do measles cases—which tend to peak in late spring. August is, therefore, a good time to take stock of the measles season for the year. The tally for Europe, published on August 20th by the World Health Organisation, shows that cases in the first six months of 2018 exceeded the annual total for each of the past five years. About half of the 41,000 cases this year were in Ukraine. Infection rates also jumped in Serbia, Greece and Georgia. In... Читать дальше...

THERE is quiet excitement among a dozen sisters of the Redemptorist order as they gather for evening mass, along with 30 or so other devout souls, in a plain, modern chapel with a practical, circular design. A discreet row of flags heralds Pope Francis, due on August 25th for what promises to be a tumultuous weekend.

IN 2005 the World Health Organisation branded Glasgow the murder capital of Europe. The city’s gangs specialised in administering “Glasgow smiles”: cuts at each corner of a victim’s mouth, leaving scars running up their cheeks. But since then, knife crime has plummeted. The number of people admitted to the city’s hospitals for slashes and stab wounds fell by 65% between 2004-05 and 2016-17. These days, the trauma surgeon at Glasgow’s facial-surgery unit has so much spare time that he spends some of it removing wisdom teeth. Читать дальше...

Hygge but harmful

INTERIOR-DESIGN magazines and television programmes have in recent years fuelled a fashion for wood-burning stoves. About 7.5% of homes in Britain burn wood for ambience or warmth, according to a survey in 2015. By now the share is probably higher, since about 175,000 new stoves are sold each year.

The trouble is that the wholesome-looking burners are big emitters of fine particles, specks of dust and soot measuring less than 2.5 micrometres (0.0025 millimetres)... Читать дальше...

ASKED to describe Boris Johnson, the eight Remain voters gathered around a table in a conference room in a shabby hotel in Sutton Coldfield do not hold back. “Troublemaker.” “Egotistical.” “Idiot.” “Laughing stock.” “Malicious.” Nor do the group of Leave voters who enter afterwards have a particularly high opinion of the former foreign secretary. “Goof.” “Joke.” “Buffoon.” “Selfish.”

Portsmouth’s pitch to pupils

ALMOST all university applicants now know where they will be going in the autumn. As recruitment winds down, two changes are apparent. The first is a rise in the proportion of candidates who found a university via “clearing”, having already received their A-level results, which is up to 9.2% from 7.5% at the same stage in 2013. The second is a big rise in the number of unconditional offers, where entry does not depend on obtaining certain grades. In 2013... Читать дальше...

IN HIS speech to the Labour Party conference in Brighton last year, Jeremy Corbyn argued that British politics was moving inexorably leftward. With the neoliberal orthodoxy that had held for decades blown up by the financial crisis, Britons were demanding a more active role for government, in the name not just of fairness but also of efficiency. “It is often said that elections can only be won from the centre ground,” he told his adoring audience. “And in a way that’s not wrong—so long as it’s... Читать дальше...

JOHOR BAHRU, a sprawling, gritty city in Malaysia, would once have been an unusual home for a British university. But just off one of the main roads out of town, past signs to Legoland, sits EduCity, a development which is home to three British institutions, each a humid five-minute stroll from the other. The University of Reading is filled with greenery and gleams in the sun. Newcastle transplants the architecture of the university’s Tyneside home to Malaysia. Southampton completes the unlikely trio. Читать дальше...

WHAT is the single most effective way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions? Go vegetarian? Replant the Amazon? Cycle to work? None of the above. The answer is: make air-conditioners radically better. On one calculation, replacing refrigerants that damage the atmosphere would reduce total greenhouse gases by the equivalent of 90bn tonnes of CO2 by 2050. Making the units more energy-efficient could double that. By contrast, if half the world’s population were to give up meat, it would save 66bn tonnes of CO2. Читать дальше...

NICOLÁS MADURO calls it “a really impressive magic formula”. His paquetazo rojo (big red package) features a new currency that lops five zeroes off the nearly worthless bolívar, a sharp increase in the price of fuel and a rise in the minimum wage of more than 3,000%.