Новости за 16.09.2021

THE IDEA that the spoils of the modern economy are unfairly distributed has become part of public discourse in the rich world. One common villain is the growing class of wealth-owners living off the returns from capital rather than hard-earned wages, an explanation popularised by Thomas Piketty in his book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, published in 2013. The idea has gained currency with politicians. And studying the “labour share”, the slice of national income earned by workers through wages... Читать дальше...

UNLIKE MOST rich European countries, America lacks a coherent public child-care regime. But it has come surprisingly close to having one. During the second world war Congress set up federal child-care centres to encourage women to work in factories; these were later dismantled. In 1971 Congress passed a comprehensive child-care plan. But President Richard Nixon vetoed the bill, calling it “the most radical piece of legislation” to have crossed his desk, and arguing that “good public policy requires... Читать дальше...

IN EARLY JANUARY the Communist Party published a five-year plan for the development of “socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics”. Most of the document is domestically focused, but one section is devoted to foreign matters. It calls on China to help shape international law, to turn itself into the first choice of jurisdiction when resolving cross-border disputes and to encourage the use of Chinese law abroad.

PROTESTS BY ANGRY investors are common in China. Average folk who have been deceived by online lenders or other scam artists have few outlets for redress. They occupy office lobbies until a senior executive appears to calm their nerves. It is rare, however, for demonstrators to target well-known companies, and rarer still for connected protests to crop up all across the country. Events such as these have made Evergrande, a massive property developer on the brink of default, something of a spectacle in recent days. Читать дальше...

COVID-19 FORCED ten years of digital transformation in schools to take place in a month, says John Martin, the former leader of Sanoma Learning, an education technology (edtech) company. Teachers suddenly became more willing to use technology because the alternative was not to teach. Much of this technology will remain as pupils head back to the classroom this term. But the experience has refined what edtech is really for.

ANDREI GROMYKO, the Soviet Union’s pre-eminent America-watcher, remarked that the object of his study had so “many doctrines and concepts proclaimed at different times” that it was unable to pursue “a solid, coherent and consistent policy”. And that was during the cold war, a period of relatively cool-headed American policy analysis. How much more applicable does Gromyko’s observation seem to the first eight months of Joe Biden’s presidency. Half a dozen different versions of the Biden Doctrine... Читать дальше...

PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN has every reason to be angry. He has tried to poison Alexei Navalny, Russia’s opposition leader. He has locked him up in one of Russia’s harshest penal colonies. He has outlawed his anti-corruption foundation. He has chased his comrades out of the country and barred his allies from standing in elections. And yet, after all this, Mr Navalny and his movement are still featuring at the heart of the elections to Russia’s Duma (its parliament) on September 19th.

FIRST IT WAS pets, then fish. Now it’s poultry and pigs. The list of animals allowed to feed on insects is growing. A new EU law authorising the use of insect protein in poultry and pig feed came into force earlier this month, a significant milestone for an industry keen to worm its way into the animal-feed business.

IN 2019, WHEN Labour’s vote collapsed, Deborah Mattinson headed north to listen. Throughout the New Labour era she had run focus groups of swing voters. What car would Labour politicians drive? What did they drink and smoke? But she had not tested opinion in “red wall” seats in the Midlands and northern England, home to voters who had been among Labour’s most reliable before Brexit drove them into the arms of the Conservatives.

[By:Kongsberg Digital] Kongsberg Digital is proud to announce that it has signed a contract to de...

IT IS QUITE possibly the most famous two-note phrase in post-war European music: a stepwise trip up the scale that sounds like a question. Repeated over and over, it invites you to stretch your arms out wide, lift your chin and start clicking your fingers. The first time you hear the opening notes of the theme tune to “Zorba the Greek”, which was composed in a single late-night jamming session in 1964, Anthony Quinn is telling Alan Bates about his santuri, the instrument he cares for like a child. Читать дальше...

ON A BALMY September evening locals stroll in a leafy park in Kyiv. Parents push prams. Couples kiss. Young men perch on benches with cans of beer and shawarmas. Among the trees and promenaders stand slabs of granite the height of a person. Implanted in each is a peephole, like the lens of a camera. Peer into one of them, and you see a colour photograph taken on this spot 80 years ago: a ravine, scattered clothes, three German officers looking over the edge. This is Babyn Yar.

NOBODY SEEMS to like like—or nobody with access to a printing press. Letters to newspapers and comment pieces often harrumph about this new, meaningless filler word. Can’t it, they wonder, somehow be eliminated?

Inseparable. By Simone de Beauvoir. Translated by Sandra Smith. Ecco; 176 pages; $26.99. Published in Britain as “The Inseparables”. Translated by Lauren Elkin. Vintage Classics; £12.99

THE JANICKI OMNI PROCESSOR, a $2m machine paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, turns human waste into water and electricity. In poor cities such as Dakar in Senegal, where it has been piloted, the hope is that people will send sewage to sanitation plants to be processed, rather than chucking it into the streets.

WHAT WITH his dozens of concubines, his obsession with collecting precious jade and his penchant for inscribing his own (not very good) poems onto ancient paintings, the Qianlong emperor makes an unlikely hero for the Communist Party of China, especially one led by Xi Jinping, a stern ascetic. Qianlong was a man of formidable intellect and will, whose long reign from 1736-95 marked a high point of the Qing dynasty. But he was also a conservative aristocrat, from his passion for genealogy to his love of bowhunting on horseback... Читать дальше...

AS COVID-19 MEASURES relax across the world, nothing brings quite so much relief as the reopening of schools. For India’s 320m schoolchildren, its 8.5m teachers and for parents, too, the relief is particularly acute. Not only have Indian schools suffered some of the world’s longest closures—an average of 69 weeks. For reasons peculiar to India, its shutdowns have also been especially disruptive. And they have exacerbated the awful learning outcomes from the vast lower tier of schools.

ACROSS MUCH of Asia, the pandemic has given national leaders an excuse to unleash authoritarian instincts—think Thailand, the Philippines or India. Australia, though, provides a stark contrast. There, authority has conspicuously ebbed away from the federal government and to the vast country’s six states.

IN MARCH, WHEN Tashnuva Anan Shishir appeared on Bangladeshi television screens, she created history as the country’s first transgender news anchor. A few weeks later a madrassa exclusively for khwaja saras opened in Pakistan. In India “Phirki”, a television show that ran for 225 episodes last year, portrayed in unprecedented detail the lives of hijras.

EDWARD BAKA, the headmaster of a school in Kono district next to Sierra Leone’s biggest gold mine, recalls how once he had to sell the school’s books to pay for a roof. Of the 700 children aged 4-13 under his care, 80% are in work, too, he reckons. Most toil in mines or on farms. The working kids are easy to spot. They have less energy. They can’t concentrate. They have health problems. Recently a child from a neighbouring school was killed in a mud slide at a mine. “Everyone knows that mining is not for children,” says Mr Baka. Читать дальше...

MANY AFRICANS still harbour a grudge against the IMF that dates back to the 1990s, when it became known for the bitter medicine it administered. Before any bail-outs, the fund would insist that countries agree to painful structural-adjustment programmes that included cutting government spending and liberalising economies. Since then the IMF has worked hard to present itself as a cuddlier lender than the cold-hearted fund of old. These days it attaches far fewer conditions to loans and sometimes overlooks even those. Читать дальше...

IT WAS A surprising choice for a summer holiday. On August 18th Tahnoon bin Zayed, the national-security adviser of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), turned up in Ankara to meet Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey. The countries have been at odds for years over Mr Erdogan’s support for Islamist groups around the Middle East. Turkish officials accused the UAE of abetting a failed coup in 2016. But none of that was mentioned in the official statement after their meeting, which talked instead of economic co-operation. Читать дальше...

GOD, SAYS the Koran, chose Arabic for his revelation because it is easy to understand. But many of the world’s 470m Arabic-speakers beg to differ. According to a report by the World Bank, almost 60% of ten-year-olds in Arabic-speaking countries (and Iran) struggle to read and understand a basic text. Despite decades of investment in education, the Middle East and north Africa still suffer from what the report calls “learning poverty”. “School systems don’t see the importance of engaging kids in... Читать дальше...

THE STRICT Islamism of the Taliban may be back in Afghanistan, but peaceful Islamists in the Arab world have struggled of late. Ennahda, which styles itself “Muslim democratic”, had been the biggest party in Tunisia’s parliament—until President Kais Saied suspended the assembly in July. Just over a month later, in Morocco, the Justice and Development Party (PJD), another moderate Islamist outfit that led the ruling coalition, suffered a crushing defeat at the polls, losing 90% of the seats it had held. Читать дальше...

FOR A DOZEN years from 1980 a malign, invisible presence haunted Peru, acquiring ever greater menace. Abimael Guzmán, a Marxist philosopher who created a shadowy terrorist army called Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), ordered massacres, murders, car bombs and the destruction of police stations. Yet he never appeared in public. His capture in 1992, through old-fashioned detective work, meant he spent the rest of his life in a maximum-security prison. By the time he died, on September 11th, aged 86, many Peruvians had little memory of him. Читать дальше...