Новости за 07.12.2017

He’s reading a poll and checking it twice

JEREMY CORBYN’S raucous online supporters have a simple mantra whenever a new poll appears: “It will go higher.” Dismissed as magical thinking when it began in the spring, it has turned into one of 2017’s more accurate political predictions. Labour’s polling almost doubled, from 25% of voters when the election was called in April to 45% in one recent survey. Magical thinking trumped political expertise.

Yet the growth has stalled. On December... Читать дальше...

Britain is heading for a bad deal. That is the view not only of those who voted to remain, but a plurality of those who voted to leave, according to NatCen Social Research. Since February the share of Leavers expecting a good deal has fallen almost by half, to 28%. But few have changed their minds about Brexit. They are no more willing to accept free movement in return for freer trade, nor to vote Remain in a new referendum. Instead they blame the EU, as well as their own government: half of Leavers say it is bungling the talks. Читать дальше...

Holidays are coming

“IT’S as easy as buying a drink from an off-licence.” That is how Ellen Romans, a recovering drug addict, describes picking up cocaine near where she lives in London. And today top-notch blow is much cheaper than it was five years ago, when she started using it heavily. David McManus, her treatment worker at Blenheim, a rehabilitation charity, agrees. Pubs and bars are “flooded” with the stuff. Dealers know that their product is no longer scarce. They are more tolerant of hagglers and are resorting to gimmicks... Читать дальше...

NOT all trade tension is made in America. China is suing the European Union at the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Hearings began this week. China thinks it deserves treatment as a “market economy”. The EU, supported by America, disagrees. As they lock horns, each side sees the other as breaking a promise.

Happier families

FEW tasks in developing countries are as tricky—or as important—as convincing parents to keep their daughters in school longer. One way of doing so is to make contraceptives available, concludes a new working paper by Kimberly Singer Babiarz at Stanford University and four other researchers.

Conducted in Malaysia, the study used a happy coincidence of surveys going back decades and family-planning programmes rolled out in a way that made it possible to measure their effect. Читать дальше...

FOR many it is a reflex as unconscious as breathing. Hit a stumbling-block during an important task (like, say, writing a column)? The hand reaches for the phone and opens the social network of choice. A blur of time passes, and half an hour or more of what ought to have been productive effort is gone. A feeling of regret is quickly displaced by the urge to see what has happened on Twitter in the past 15 seconds. Some time after the deadline, the editor asks when exactly to expect the promised copy. Читать дальше...

“EVERYBODY meets in Buenos Aires,” said Cecilia Malmstrom, the European Union’s trade commissioner, days before heading there for the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) biennial gathering of ministers, which opens on December 10th. Some non-governmental organisations have been blocked by the protest-averse Argentine authorities, but a meeting of people will indeed take place. One of minds is another matter.

THE battling begums, Sheikh Hasina Wajed and Khaleda Zia, used to alternate in power with metronomic regularity. Both laid claim to aspects of Bangladesh’s founding myth. Sheikh Hasina is the daughter of the “father of Bangladesh”, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the first president. Mrs Zia is widow to Ziaur Rahman, to whom, as an army officer under Mujib, fell the honour of declaring Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971. He may have known of the coup that lead to Mujib’s death, in 1975. Either way... Читать дальше...

SHIRIN MUSA draws on bitter experience to inspire her work to help women caught between legal and cultural worlds. Educated and long-resident in the Netherlands, she was unhappily married to a man from her native Pakistan. In 2009 a Dutch judge put a legal end to their union but her husband would not grant an Islamic divorce. Although she lived in secular Europe, this refusal mattered. If she remarried, she would be considered an adulteress under Islamic law and risk punishment if she returned to Pakistan. Читать дальше...

More than Canada can handle

MENTION polygamy in Canada and what might come to mind is Bountiful, a suitably named town in British Columbia. It is home to Canada’s best-known polygamist, Winston Blackmore, who has an estimated 148 children. He and James Oler, a fellow adherent of a fundamentalist splinter sect of the Mormon church, practised “plural marriage” for decades until a court found them guilty in July of the crime of polygamy. (Their appeal will be heard on December 12th.)

It... Читать дальше...

AFTER the Maidan revolution and the start of the Russian war against Ukraine in 2014, Western policy had two aims: to halt and punish Russian aggression and to help Ukraine become a democratic state governed by the rule of law. America imposed sanctions on Russia, ordered the president, Petro Poroshenko, to establish an anti-corruption force and sent Joe Biden, then vice-president, on repeated visits to insist on fighting graft. The EU imposed sanctions on Russia, and made support for civil-society... Читать дальше...

FOR Roberto Azevêdo, its director-general, the WTO is a “hostage of its own success”. For President Donald Trump it is “a disaster”. Mr Trump would not be alone in balking at Mr Azevêdo’s formulation, meant to manage down expectations for the WTO’s two-yearly ministerial meeting in Argentina later this month (see article). The WTO has not achieved a big breakthrough in its mission of trade liberalisation for more than two decades. Its last big round of trade talks, the Doha Development Agenda... Читать дальше...

TWO letters can add up to a lot of money. No area of technology is hotter than AI, or artificial intelligence. Venture-capital investment in AI in the first nine months of 2017 totalled $7.6bn, according to PitchBook, a data provider; that compares with full-year figures of $5.4bn in 2016. In the year to date there have been $21.3bn in AI-related M&A deals, around 26 times more than in 2015. In earnings calls public companies now mention AI far more often than “big data”.

WHEN Houthi rebels broke into Ali Abdullah Saleh’s house in Sana’a on December 4th to ransack it, they found several bottles of vodka and premium Lebanese arak. The unIslamic hoard cast doubt on the president’s public shows of prayer and the great mosque, with six white minarets, looming beside his palace. It surprised no one who knew that, as a highlander from Yemen’s northern mountains, he probably liked a chaser after a pleasant chew of qat in the afternoons. Others would have remembered how... Читать дальше...

HALL AND WOODHOUSE has been brewing beer amid the Georgian splendour of Blandford St Mary, in Dorset, since 1777. The company’s founder, Charles Hall, made his fortune during the Napoleonic wars selling ale to the troops bivouacked in nearby Weymouth, ready to repel the French. Today the seventh generation runs the firm and the extended family still owns almost all the shares. It is a venerable example of the dominant form of business structure in modern Britain, where over two-thirds of companies are family owned. Читать дальше...

FEW things are as flexible as a deadline—as Northern Ireland’s politicians know well. They have spent most of this year ignoring deadlines set in Westminster for the conclusion of talks to restore the devolved government in Belfast, which has been suspended since January. On December 4th they forced Theresa May to break another deadline, when they vetoed her plan to move the Brexit talks forward.

ANY hope that a chancellor of the exchequer who is a former defence secretary might have taken a sympathetic view of the plight of Britain’s squeezed armed forces was dashed by the budget on November 22nd. Voters’ alarm about the wheezing condition of the National Health Service persuaded Philip Hammond to provide an extra dollop of cash for health, but there is no equivalent constituency expressing worry at the erosion of the country’s defensive capabilities. And despite his stint at the Ministry of Defence in 2011-14... Читать дальше...

IN 1845, as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, Benjamin Disraeli, a young politician on the make, published a novel, “Sybil”, which lamented that Britain was dividing into “two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy”. Today, as the information revolution gathers pace, Britain suffers from the same problem. The country is more divided than it has been for decades, with the rich consolidating their power and people who are born in the wrong class or region seeing their chances of getting ahead declining. Читать дальше...

REPUBLICANS like to say that their tax bill, which passed the Senate on December 2nd, is the first tax reform since 1986. President Donald Trump likes to call it the biggest tax cut in history. Mr Trump’s claim is easily disproved (see chart). Yet the comparison with the law of 1986, passed under Ronald Reagan, is more curious. There is no doubt today’s bill, like the older one, contains significant reforms. But the differences between the two efforts stand out more than the similarities. They... Читать дальше...

Not so monumental

IN THE sere wilderness of southern Utah, green highlands retain and filter water from storms, providing sustenance for plants, animals and people. The Navajo, who lived in the region long before Europeans set foot on the continent, refer to such areas as nahodishgish—places to be left alone. They sit at the centre of Bears Ears—a 1.35m-acre reserve teeming with archaeological, paleontological, and natural wonders that Barack Obama designated as a national monument on December 28th 2016. Читать дальше...

SEXUAL mores change faster than the law does. This has been the case with child marriage, which is generally defined as involving those under 18 but also includes girls (for almost all of them are girls) younger than 16. Depending on the law in different states, older men are allowed to marry minors if they get parental consent, a judge’s approval, or even just the nod of a clerk. Stories about the Republican candidate for the vacant Alabama senate seat, Roy Moore, and his pursuit of teenage girls... Читать дальше...

AMID the spicy anecdotes, superficial insights, sycophancy, score-settling and casual loutishness displayed in a new memoir of Donald Trump’s election campaign, “Let Trump be Trump”, by Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, the two essential characteristics of Trumpland shine through. One is a permanent state of confusion, and sometimes chaos, attending a campaign that initially did no opinion polling, had no detailed policies, set its communications strategy by whatever crazy thing Mr Trump had just made up... Читать дальше...

Politics and current affairs

The Retreat of Western Liberalism. By Edward Luce. Grove Atlantic; 234 pages; $24. Little Brown; £16.99
Few doubt that something big has happened in Western politics over the past two years, but nobody is sure what. Turmoil in Washington and London contrasts with centrist stability in Paris and (mostly) in Berlin. In this grim diagnosis Edward Luce, a Washington-based commentator, argues that the liberal order cannot be fixed without a clear view of what has gone wrong. Читать дальше...

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power and its Absence in the Twenty-First Century. By Ryan Avent. St Martin’s Press; 288 pages, $26.99. Allen Lane; £9.99
The world of work is changing fast—and not as you would expect, by our Free Exchange columnist.

ONE theory to explain the low share of women in senior academic jobs is that they have less self-confidence than men. This hypothesis is supported by data in a new working paper, by a team of researchers from five universities in America and Europe. In this study, observers counted the attendees, and the questions they asked, at 247 departmental talks and seminars in biology, psychology and philosophy that took place at 35 universities in ten countries. On average, half of each seminar’s audience was female. Читать дальше...