Новости за 02.07.2020

YOU CAN tell a lot about the slow-changing culture of Irish politics from the names of its three largest parties. Micheal Martin, who took over as prime minister this week after months of deadlock, has led Fianna Fail, or the “Warriors of Destiny”, for nine years. His predecessor as taoiseach (prime minister), Leo Varadkar, drops to deputy prime minister, but could swap jobs with Mr Martin again if their new coalition lasts more than two years. Mr Varadkar’s party is Fine Gael, the “Tribe of the Gaels”. Читать дальше...

WHEN HE WON the French presidency in 2017 at the age of 39, Emmanuel Macron triumphed in France’s big cities. In Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux and Strasbourg he topped first-round voting, and grabbed over 81% of the run-off vote against the nationalist Marine Le Pen. The former economy minister, who enthused about tech startups and modernising France, was a natural candidate for bike-riding metropolitans. Yet in the second round of municipal elections on June 28th, his party, La République en Marche (LREM), failed to secure a single big French city.

ON JUNE 30TH Vladimir Putin posed in front of a 25-metre bronze statue to the Soviet soldier which he had just unveiled. Filmed from below, to give him extra height, President Putin appealed to his people to vote on a package of constitutional changes, for the sake of the motherland that millions of Russians died to defend against Hitler.

1. American Airlines says it's overstaffed by 20,000 employees for fall schedule  CNBC
2. U.S. Treasury agrees on loan terms with American, four other airlines  Yahoo Finance
3. American among airlines set to receive cash infusion from US government  CNN
4. Five U.S. airlines reach deals with Treasury Department for billions in coronavirus loans  CNBC
5. American Airlines, 4 others finalize Treasury loans amid coronavirus travel bust  Fox Business
6. View Full Coverage... Читать дальше...

JOSé AVILLEZ, a Portuguese chef, has picked up two Michelin stars for his inventive takes on traditional dishes such as a pudding that daringly combines chocolate ganache with cuttlefish ink. On June 29th he experimented again: his Lisbon-based restaurant, Bairro do Avillez, started serving gourmands at home via Uber Eats.

ONCE HE GOT back to his office at the Heilongjiang Daily and shrugged off his cameras, Li Zhensheng became a busy man. He had to develop his roll of film, and since he was the youngest photographer at the paper the older guys gave him theirs to develop, too. He would sometimes spend hours in the darkroom, singing to himself when he felt hard done by.

The Margot Affair. By Sanaë Lemoine.Hogarth; 336 pages; $27. Sceptre; £16.99. 

Surviving Autocracy. By Masha Gessen.Riverhead Books; 288 pages; $26. Granta; £12. 

EVERY YEAR the Edinburgh Television Festival, one of the highlights of the industry’s calendar, invites a prominent figure to deliver a talk known as the MacTaggart lecture. Past speakers have included Rupert Murdoch, Eric Schmidt and Armando Iannucci. In 2018 Michaela Coel, a British writer and actor, took to the podium. She was the first woman from an ethnic minority to do so and, at 30, the youngest lecturer in the festival’s history.

The Last Kings of Shanghai. By Jonathan Kaufman.Viking; 384 pages; $28. Little, Brown; £20. 

ALONG THE Siberian highway, between Tyumen and Tomsk, Anton Chekhov stayed the night in a coach driver’s cabin. Two months earlier a gentlewoman had stopped there with her newborn boy. Suspecting that he was illegitimate, and childless herself, the driver’s wife offered to take him in. The lady left him with the couple while she decided—and then vanished. Was he theirs or not? “Please help, for God’s sake!” the driver implored as his wife, besotted with the baby, fled the room in tears.

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM holds that battery-powered cars are the future of motoring. But Hyundai, a big South Korean vehicle-maker, is not so sure. Over the past few months it has been running a worldwide public-relations campaign extolling the virtues of an alternative source of electrical power—fuel cells. Instead of storing and then releasing electricity gathered from the mains in the way that a battery does, a fuel cell generates current from a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen comes from the air. Читать дальше...

A CENTURY AND a half ago an alien insect alighted in Europe. It displaced millions, ruined local economies and forced scientists, politicians and ordinary folk into a frenzy of defensive activity. Phylloxera, a member of the group known to entomologists as Hemiptera, or “true” bugs (as opposed to all the other critters known colloquially as bugs), appeared in France in the 1860s and proceeded to eat its way through many of the Old World’s vines.

A GENERATION OF English cricket fans know the Aussies are loth to surrender a lead. For much of the past two decades, Australia has been a high interest-rate economy. But not any more. In March the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) cut its benchmark cash rate to 0.25%. That is the lowest interest rates have ever gone, and as low as they are likely to go. To signal its intentions that rates will stay put, the RBA has pledged to fix three-year-bond yields at 0.25%.

“IN WARM WEATHER, fewer people wear socks,” says Paul Rotstein of Gold Medal International, a wholesaler in New York. People may not sport socks in the summer but his firm starts shipping them to retailers in July, ahead of the start of the school year. There is, however, a big lag before he is paid. He normally uses trade-credit insurance to protect against the risk that his invoices go unpaid, but this year the insurers have slashed the amounts they are willing to cover by 50-90%. That leaves him with two options... Читать дальше...

AMERICA’S HOUSING market is behaving oddly. Residential property—worth $35trn, slightly more than America’s stockmarket—seems strangely oblivious to the economic carnage around it. House prices in May were 4.3% higher than a year earlier. That rate of growth is only marginally below the average since the end of the housing crash a decade ago. Prices in even the costliest places, such as San Francisco, where the average pad sets you back $1.1m, continue to march upwards. Many economists still expect... Читать дальше...

THE FOUR-LANE, 62-km toll road being built between Masiaka, a business hub in Sierra Leone, and Freetown, the country’s capital, promises shorter journey times, fewer accidents and smoother drives. It is nonetheless controversial. Awarded to China Railway Seventh Group, the project added over $160m to the country’s foreign debt, according to the China-Africa Research Initiative (CARI) at Johns Hopkins University. The work has suffered delays, which the company blames on the pandemic and the need to compensate property owners... Читать дальше...

Editor’s note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our coronavirus hub

WHEN FINANCIERS and governments redesigned the financial system in order to make it safer after the debacle of 2007-09, most of them imagined that a shock as bad as the subprime fiasco would be a generation away. In fact it arrived only a decade or so later. Lockdowns have led to a savage recession that is expected to produce huge loan losses as firms and households suffer.

CHINA PUT its first domestically built aircraft-carrier into service last December, the culmination of three decades of work. The government hopes for a faster return on efforts to create what it calls an “aircraft-carrier-class securities firm”—ie, an investment bank powerful enough to prevail amid intensifying competition in the country’s capital markets. It is poised to draft its biggest financial force into battle, by allowing giant state-owned commercial banks to enter investment banking.

Editor’s note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our hub

BENJAMIN SWAN’S farm is on the fourth floor of an office building in an industrial part of Singapore. To see his crops, visitors are escorted past a door unlocked with a thumbprint and through an airlock. (“Our air is certified,” says an assistant.) Room after room is filled with plumes of kale and lettuce, evenly spaced on long trays stacked in floor-to-ceiling racks. Cables snake across the racks and ceilings, like an electrical root system. LED lights, designed to emit only the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that plants can absorb... Читать дальше...

FAIZA IBRAHIMI is too young to remember when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan as a theocracy. She can scarcely believe her parents’ stories about it. She is a radio presenter in the western city of Herat. The idea that gun-toting zealots from the countryside used to forbid women to leave home unless fully veiled and accompanied by a male relative seems almost inconceivable: “My mother was unable to work and find bread. I couldn’t imagine that time again.”

VAST SWARMS of locusts have swept through Kenya and Ethiopia since January, devastating fields, pastures and livelihoods. Governments have struggled to suppress them. They have continued to breed in their billions, threatening whole economies, which are also being battered by the covid-19 pandemic.

THERE IS A blueprint for presidents keen to rig elections. First, use state resources to bribe, fool and bully people before the poll. Once voting starts, stuff the ballot boxes or fiddle the tallies. Afterwards, make sure the army and judges are on your side in case opponents take their case to the streets or to the courts.