Новости за 07.12.2017

ANOTHER week, another record. The repeated surge of share prices on Wall Street is getting monotonous. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has passed another milestone—24,000—and the more statistically robust S&P 500 index is up by 17% so far this year. Emerging markets have performed even better, as have European shares in dollar terms (see chart).

“AFRICA must unite,” wrote Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, in 1963, lamenting that African countries sold raw materials to their former colonisers rather than trading among themselves. His pan-African dream never became reality. Even today, African countries still trade twice as much with Europe as they do with each other (see chart). But that spirit of unity now animates a push for a Continental Free-Trade Area (CFTA), involving all 55 countries in the region. Negotiations began in 2015... Читать дальше...

Data-mine ore

FOR millennia, man has broken rocks. Whether with pickaxe or dynamite, their own or animal muscle, in a digger or a diesel truck, thick-necked miners have been at the centre of an industry that supplies the raw materials for almost all industrial activity. Making mining more profitable has long involved squeezing out more tonnes of metal per ounce of brawn. Now robots, not man, are settling themselves into the driving seat.

Rio Tinto, one of the world’s largest mining firms... Читать дальше...

Four-sided bandit

A DECADE ago the idea of paying real money for virtual items was strange and exotic. These days many video-game publishers build their business models around it. Some of the world’s biggest games, such as “League of Legends”, cost nothing to buy. Instead they rely for their revenue on players buying things for use in the game, such as new characters to play with or costumes to put them in.

A new twist on that model has been attracting the attention of regulators in recent weeks. Читать дальше...

A BOA constrictor swallowing capitalism. A cyclone dragging the economy into its vortex. If you look back at how people described Walmart a decade ago, it is eerily similar to how Amazon is viewed now. The supermarket chain has “a scale of economic power we haven’t encountered before”, warned “The Walmart Effect”, a best selling book in 2006. But capitalism never stands still. The world’s largest company by sales is now the perceived underdog in an escalating grocery war with Amazon to fill 320m American bellies. Читать дальше...

MCDONALD’S drew ridicule in China when it changed its registered name there to Jingongmen, or “Golden Arches”, in October, after it was sold to a Chinese consortium. Some on Weibo, a microblogging site, thought it sounded old-fashioned and awkward, others that it had connotations of furniture. The fast-food chain was quick to reassure customers that its restaurants would continue to go by Maidanglao, a rough transliteration that has, over the years, become a recognisable brand name. But for most companies now entering Chinese markets... Читать дальше...

ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) has already changed some activities, including parts of finance like fraud prevention, but not yet fund management and stock-picking. That seems odd: machine learning, a subset of AI that excels at finding patterns and making predictions using reams of data, looks like an ideal tool for the business. Yet well-established “quant” hedge funds in London or New York are often sniffy about its potential. In San Francisco, however, where machine learning is so much part... Читать дальше...

COMMANDING the plot lines of Hollywood films, covers of magazines and reams of newsprint, the contest between artificial intelligence (AI) and mankind draws much attention. Doomsayers warn that AI could eradicate jobs, break laws and start wars. But such predictions concern the distant future. The competition today is not between humans and machines but among the world’s technology giants, which are investing feverishly to get a lead over each other in AI.

“WE’RE bringing health care to where people live and work.” So declared Larry Merlo, chief executive officer of CVS Health, an American retail-pharmacy giant, on December 3rd, announcing a $69bn deal to buy Aetna, a health insurer. The deal is worth some $77bn after CVS’s assumption of Aetna’s debt, and is due to close in the second half of next year.

For Akihito, April is the kindest month

IT WAS an understandable request. Last year an 83-year-old Japanese man, who has survived prostate cancer and heart surgery, asked to retire. Yet it took much debate and a change in the law before the government could even set a date for him to do so. When it finally did, on December 1st, it deferred the event for over a year, to April 30th, 2019. But at least the long-suffering emperor, Akihito, will be allowed to step down, even though the law previously... Читать дальше...

INDIA’S national parliament, the Lok Sabha, sits for barely 70 days a year. The shortest of its three sessions normally starts in mid-November. This year, though, the government has given MPs an extra month’s holiday. The reason: Gujarat, a bastion of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and home state of Narendra Modi, the prime minister, will hold a staggered election on December 9th and 14th for a new state legislature.

Treasure and menace

VENETIANS have their vaporettos, Londoners their double-deckers, Japanese their bullet trains and Filipinos their jeepneys. None of those other vehicles, however, is as dirty, dangerous and uncomfortable as the jeepney, a Frankenstein’s monster of a minibus that was first cobbled together some 70 years ago. Yet when the government announced plans to phase jeepneys out, opponents accused it of trying to expunge the soul of the nation.

The first jeepneys were made... Читать дальше...

THE first daigou, meaning someone who makes purchases on another’s behalf, were Chinese students studying abroad, who hauled desirable products home on behalf of family and friends. Adding a commission helped them pay their tuition fees. The spread of social-networking apps such as WeChat, China’s most popular, brought the business online. Daigou could then offer their services to friends of friends, and promote items they thought might appeal to their network. But whereas daigou in America and... Читать дальше...

JERUSALEM is both heavenly and earthly, holy and sinful. “Ten measures of beauty God gave to the world, nine to Jerusalem and one to the rest,” says the Talmud. Sometimes, however, it seems as if ten measures of suffering God gave to the world, nine to Jerusalem and one to the rest. The medieval Arab geographer, al-Muqaddasi, called the holy city “a golden bowl full of scorpions”.

SOME political theorists argue that the law draws legitimacy not just from voting, but also from public debate before legislation is passed. In voting through a tax-reform bill on December 2nd, Republicans in Congress have tested this principle to destruction. The bill, like most, has its strengths and its weaknesses, but Republicans have rushed it through disregarding the value of consistency and evidence. Their success will weigh on the quality of American government.

IN AMBO, a town in central Ethiopia, a teenage boy pulls a tatty photo from his wallet. “I love him,” he says of the soldier glaring menacingly at the camera. “And I love socialism,” he adds. In the picture is a young Mengistu Haile Mariam, the dictator whose Marxist regime, the Derg, oversaw the “Red Terror” of the 1970s and the famine-inducing collapse of Ethiopia’s economy in the 1980s. Mr Mengistu was toppled by rebels in 1991 before fleeing to Zimbabwe, where he still lives. He was later sentenced to death, in absentia, for genocide. Читать дальше...

EVERYONE knew this year’s summit of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) would be contentious. But the envoys barely had time for a cup of tea. Since June, three out of six GCC members (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain) have blockaded a fourth (Qatar), cutting ties and trade until it stops backing Islamist groups. Kuwait, the host, hoped to use the summit on December 5th to broker a solution. “We believe that wisdom will prevail,” said the emir, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, at the opening. Читать дальше...

THE old taxi park in central Kampala, Uganda’s noisy, traffic-clogged capital, is a huge patch of bare earth and mud filled almost entirely with minibuses. Battered, often still with old Chinese names painted on the side, these are the core of the city’s transport system. Each day, they bring thousands of commuters into the city.

A swift revenge

IT WAS an unceremonious end. On December 4th Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s former dictator, was killed outside the capital Sana’a, which has been paralysed by a week of fighting. A video circulated online showed his bloodied body wrapped in a gaudy blanket, surrounded by militiamen. State television called the former president “the leader of the traitors” (see Obituary).

His death was emblematic of Yemen’s complexity: Mr Saleh was killed by the Houthis, enemies who had become allies, only to become enemies again. Читать дальше...

FOR so long the last man standing in Europe, Germany has suddenly become its Sleeping Beauty. Several Princes Charming are gathered around the bed, desperate to rouse the princess from her slumber. Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, urges Germany to wake up for the sake of Europe. Brussels anxiously watches the princess’s repose. Even Alexis Tsipras, who as Greece’s prime minister is more used to taking instructions from Berlin than giving them, has been whispering into her ear.

THIRTY years ago, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, banishing an entire category of destabilising weapons from Europe. Some 2,700 ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km were destroyed in a deal that presaged the end of the cold war. Yet today the treaty is imperiled by Russian violations. If those do not cause it to collapse, the response America is contemplating may.

FOR a few days, Honduras felt like a country on the brink of chaos. People queued for hours at banks, supermarkets and petrol stations, as they had before a hurricane in 1998 and a coup in 2009. Shopkeepers shut early to prepare for looting. Thousands of people took to the streets in protest; some banged pots, burned tires and hurled Molotov cocktails. Security forces killed a dozen people; the government imposed a curfew. On December 4th two elite police units denounced “repression” by the government... Читать дальше...

THE electoral commission of Honduras (TSE) will not declare a winner in the presidential election, held on November 26th, until after a recount of some kind. The first count suggests that Juan Orlando Hernández won re-election. He beat Salvador Nasralla, a sports broadcaster, by 42.98% to 41.38%.

The future

THE state of China’s smallest rooms is no small matter. So said Xi Jinping, the Communist Party’s general secretary, in statements carried prominently by state media last month. For three years national and local authorities have been busily scrubbing up the country’s public lavatories, an effort the party has dubbed the “toilet revolution”. Having hit the programme’s original set of targets, Mr Xi is requesting another push.

In the past few decades China has done a fairly good job of supplying basic sanitation. Читать дальше...

THREE hours into his marathon speech to the Communist Party congress in October, as delegates glanced surreptitiously at their watches, Xi Jinping, China’s president, sprang a surprise. “The practice of shuanggui,” he suddenly announced, “will be replaced by detention.” Shuanggui is a system in which party members accused of corruption are locked up in secret jails, beyond the reach of the judiciary and isolated from family or lawyers. In 2016 Human Rights Watch, an NGO, documented cases of beatings... Читать дальше...