Новости за 08.06.2017

IN 2016 a coroner’s office in Ohio had to store corpses in refrigerated lorries for a week because residents were overdosing on opioids faster than their bodies could be processed. This year has been no better: the coroner borrowed space from a local funeral parlour to stow the dead. Largely because of opioids, Ohio has the third-highest drug-overdose death rate in the country. In a recent survey, four out of ten adults there reported knowing someone who has overdosed on prescription painkillers. Читать дальше...

EVEN a bank failure can be presented as a triumph. This week Banco Popular, a big Spanish lender, endured a run. Depositors were said to be withdrawing €2bn ($2.2bn) a day. The bank lost half its stockmarket value in four days, as a self-imposed deadline to find a saviour loomed. On June 6th, it was declared by the Single Resolution Board (SRB), an independent agency of the European Central Bank formed in 2015 and charged with winding down banks, to be “failing or likely to fail”. The next morning... Читать дальше...

Not the world’s oldest customer

HELP is at hand for the world’s oldest bank. On June 1st the European Commission said it had agreed in principle to a bail-out by the Italian government of Monte dei Paschi di Siena, founded in 1472. For years Monte dei Paschi, Italy’s fourth-biggest bank by assets, has lurched from crisis to crisis. Last July it flunked a test by European supervisors of its capital strength. In December a private-sector restructuring scheme came to naught and the state decided to step in. Читать дальше...

IT IS a mystery. Last year Bangladesh’s army of migrant workers abroad increased by a record 750,000, to reach 8m-odd. They travel to earn money for their families. Yet the statistics suggest they are sending less money home. In the fiscal year that ends this month, recorded remittances will have fallen for the second consecutive year, this time by more than 10%, to $12bn (see chart). To explain the puzzle, look to the places they work, to technology and to the growing popularity of a fiddle used by Bangladeshi importers. Читать дальше...

IN THE 1940s Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine writer, wrote a short story about mapping. It imagines an empire which surveys itself in such exhaustive detail that when unfolded, the perfectly complete 1:1 paper map covers the entire kingdom. Because it is unwieldy and thus largely useless, subsequent generations allow it to decay into tatters. Great scraps are left carpeting the deserts.

ONE firm’s bad news is often another’s good fortune. For years Lyft, an app that offers on-demand rides, was outdone by its seemingly unstoppable rival, Uber, which zoomed into new markets and grabbed a near-$70bn valuation, the largest of any private American tech firm in history. Uber does not report a share price that would register its recent troubles, which include one investigation into alleged intellectual-property theft and another into its workplace culture. But that Lyft’s market share... Читать дальше...

The way the wind’s blowing

ONE of Ignacio Galán’s early jobs as an engineer was to design lead-acid batteries for the milk floats that used to trundle around Britain’s streets. So the 66-year-old Spaniard, who heads Iberdrola, one of the world’s largest utilities, claims he has been thinking about the storage of electricity for his whole career. That is useful, because for the second time since he took over Iberdrola in 2001, the industry faces a fork in the road. This time round, the... Читать дальше...

CONSIDERING the size of China’s economy, it seems inevitable that its firms will eventually play a huge role on the world stage. Yet China Inc’s adventures abroad in the past 15 years have been a mixed bag. Thousands of small deals have taken place, some of which will succeed. But of the mergers and acquisitions that have been worth $1bn or more, it is a different story. There have been 56 abandoned deals, 39 state-backed acquisitions of commodities firms at frothy prices, and, lately, wild sprees... Читать дальше...

GUESTS to the factory of Tsuyoshi Iwasaki are presented with a rasher of bacon. The succulent marbled sliver is branded with his name, title and e-mail address—an apt introduction to the owner of Japan’s biggest manufacturer of replica food. At the headquarters of Iwasaki Co on the outskirts of Tokyo, racks of golden-brown gyoza jostle for attention with boat-shaped dishes of lustrous raw tuna, bowls of creamy ramen and a dozen pinkish scallops in iridescent shells. The acrid smell of resin and... Читать дальше...

In the mood for buying?

FOR eight months up to this April, a French bookstore chain had video in a Paris shop fed to software that scrutinises shoppers’ movements and facial expressions for surprise, dissatisfaction, confusion or hesitation. When a shopper walked to the end of an aisle only to return with a frown to a bookshelf, the software discreetly messaged clerks, who went to help. Sales rose by a tenth.

The bookseller wants to keep its name quiet for now. Other French clients... Читать дальше...

IN JUNE 1956 a TWA Constellation collided with a United Air Lines DC-7 over the Grand Canyon in Arizona, killing all 128 people on both aircraft. At the time it was the worst ever airline disaster. Struggling with outdated technology and a post-war boom in air travel, overworked air-traffic controllers failed to spot that the planes were on a collision course.

PITY America’s big businesses. For years their efforts to reduce their carbon footprint were dismissed by environmentalists as “greenwashing”. Now, after months trying to persuade a supposedly pro-business new president, Donald Trump, of the merits of staying in the Paris climate accord, he practically laughed in their faces by withdrawing on June 1st.

No one cuts ribbons more brilliantly than Kim Jong Un

FEW could hope to rival the engineering feats of Choe Song Chon. One was a device to hoist a 45-tonne red metal flame atop the Juche Tower in Pyongyang, the showpiece capital of North Korea; the pillar, named after the country’s clunky state ideology, was built with 25,550 blocks of granite—one for each day to the 70th year of Kim Il Sung, the country’s founder and eternal president. Other exploits were the city’s May Day Stadium... Читать дальше...

“THEY are getting away with murder,” says Khalid Masud, director of the Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar, the largest in a province long racked by insurgency. Dr Khalid was not talking of the Pakistani Taliban or other extremist groups, but of his own doctors. Of the 45 senior consultants at the hospital, many pop in for no more than an hour a day if at all. Then they leave for their private clinics, taking with them those patients who can afford to pay. Patients without money can die before they see a specialist at the 1,750-bed facility. Читать дальше...

SAFE behind multiple walls of sandbags at his airbase on Yemen’s coast, a United Arab Emirates army commander points at a map of southern Yemen liberally covered in red. It indicates, he says, the reach of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in March 2016. A second map, dated six months after his men marched ashore that month, has just a few red blotches left.

Nowhere to go

BARUUD ABOKOR has lived in Baligubadle for the past four decades. Before settling in this remote Somali town abutting the border with Ethiopia, he roamed widely. “I was master of myself,” he says. “The economy was good and I had many animals.” But over the years successive droughts, and war between the breakaway region of Somaliland that he inhabits and the central government down south in Mogadishu, have taken their toll. His herd of more than 100 sheep has shrunk to a dozen. Читать дальше...

BY 2063, according to the African Union’s (AU) rather long-range prediction, Africa will be “a continent of seamless borders”. People, capital, goods and services will flow freely from South Africa to Tunisia and from Senegal to Somalia. Europe’s frontier-free Schengen area may be creaking under the strain of migration and terror, but another will arise, this one encompassing a continent of more than 1.2bn people. Last year, with that goal in mind, the AU boldly introduced a single African passport. Читать дальше...

You can’t read all about it

THE fall of Khaled Ali has been as swift as it has been absurd. Last year Mr Ali filed a lawsuit against the Egyptian government over its plan to return two islands to Saudi Arabia. The deal, which many Egyptians saw as a shameful swap of land for cash, sparked rare protests against Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt’s president. So when the country’s highest court blocked the transfer in January, Mr Ali and his supporters whooped it up outside the courthouse.

IN RECENT months the fluctuation of the Mexican peso against the dollar has resembled an electrocardiogram during a panic attack. The currency fell some 15% after the victory of Donald Trump, who promised to scrap the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA) linking Mexico, the United States and Canada. The peso has since recovered, on mounting hopes that Mr Trump’s administration will recognise the mutual benefit in NAFTA. But there is another nightmare troubling the currency markets: the notion that Andrés Manuel López Obrador... Читать дальше...

SWIVEL, clank, scoop, dump. On the outskirts of Desdunes, a town in Haiti’s fertile Artibonite valley, three enormous excavators sink claws into the banks of the muddy Duclos canal. Arching across it, their slender hydraulic arms uproot small trees and drag them through the clay-coloured water as they gouge out mud from the canal bed. They deposit the glistening sludge, mixed with tall grasses, on their side of the channel, forming a neat ridge. Bored-looking policemen lounge in the shade of palm trees... Читать дальше...

IN 2016 a coroner’s office in Ohio had to store corpses in refrigerated lorries for a week because residents were overdosing on opioids faster than their bodies could be processed. This year has been no better: the coroner borrowed space from a local funeral parlour to stow the dead. Largely because of opioids, Ohio has the third-highest drug-overdose death rate in the country. In a recent survey, four out of ten adults there reported knowing someone who has overdosed on prescription painkillers. Читать дальше...

Alex Honnold rehearsing at El Capitan

MOST people get sweaty palms just staring up at the sheer granite bulk of El Capitan, a spectacular rock formation in California’s Yosemite Valley. Alex Honnold’s stayed dry as he ascended the 3,000-foot (900-metre) vertical wall on June 3rd, jamming his hands in cracks and pulling on edges barely big enough for fingertips.

That is just as well, for Mr Honnold could not afford any slips. He carried no kit other than painfully snug shoes,... Читать дальше...

IN 1952 America granted self-rule to the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, which it had obtained from Spain in 1898. Last year Congress in effect revoked that autonomy, by creating a control board capable of vetoing any item in Puerto Rico’s budget.

Sun sets on Brownback-onomics

“WE HAVE gone too far to the right and are now swinging back to the centre,” says Melissa Rooker, a Republican state representative. Ms Rooker was one of the moderate Republicans who on June 6th joined forces with Democrats in the state house to override a veto by Governor Sam Brownback. The bill in question aims to raise $1.2 billion over two years by increasing income taxes and repealing a tax exemption for small businesses. In votes only a few hours apart... Читать дальше...

Caged Beast

WHAT place, if any, has humanity in a fight with barbarism? On June 5th such a question was posed in an unusual fashion in Italy when the country’s highest appeals court hinted that Salvatore “Totò” Riina should be freed to “die with dignity”. As the head of the Sicilian Mafia, Cosa Nostra, Mr Riina is credited with ordering or committing several hundred murders, including those in 1992 of two of Italy’s modern heroes, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two anti-Mafia prosecutors. Читать дальше...