Новости за 08.06.2017

INSIDE a modern business centre in Moscow, of the kind that has mushroomed across Russia in the 17 years that Vladimir Putin had been in power, a team of 30-year-olds are making plans to replace the president with Aleksei Navalny, a 41-year-old former lawyer and anti-corruption crusader. Perched on the edge of white desks or lounging on red bean bags, Mr Navalny’s team exude youthful confidence as they discuss last-minute preparations for a big rally. It all looks like a normal presidential election campaign. Читать дальше...

THE next parliament will be dominated by Brexit. Formal negotiations are due to start in Brussels in the week of June 19th. Besides their sheer complexity, there are three big reasons why they are so daunting. The European Union is better prepared than the British; the gap between the two sides is widening; and the clock is ticking to March 2019, when Brexit is due to happen.

IF TERRORISM’S success is measured by its disruption of a city’s way of life, the reaction of Richard Angell exposes the fanatics’ failure. “If me having a gin and tonic with my friends and flirting with handsome men…is what offends these people so much, I’m going to do it more, not less,” Mr Angell, an eyewitness to a terrorist attack on June 3rd, defiantly told the BBC.

INSIDE a modern business centre in Moscow, of the kind that has mushroomed across Russia in the 17 years that Vladimir Putin had been in power, a team of 30-year-olds are making plans to replace the president with Aleksei Navalny, a 41-year-old former lawyer and anti-corruption crusader. Perched on the edge of white desks or lounging on red bean bags, Mr Navalny’s team exude youthful confidence as they discuss last-minute preparations for a big rally. It all looks like a normal presidential election campaign. 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...

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...

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...

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.

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.

On... Читать дальше...

THE next parliament will be dominated by Brexit. Formal negotiations are due to start in Brussels in the week of June 19th. Besides their sheer complexity, there are three big reasons why they are so daunting. The European Union is better prepared than the British; the gap between the two sides is widening; and the clock is ticking to March 2019, when Brexit is due to happen.

IF TERRORISM’S success is measured by its disruption of a city’s way of life, the reaction of Richard Angell exposes the fanatics’ failure. “If me having a gin and tonic with my friends and flirting with handsome men…is what offends these people so much, I’m going to do it more, not less,” Mr Angell, an eyewitness to a terrorist attack on June 3rd, defiantly told the BBC.

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...

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...

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.

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 of the Paris startup behind the technology... 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...

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...

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 big... Читать дальше...

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...

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.

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...

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.

Print section Print Rubric:  America is creating a vacuum in global leadership. Does China really want to fill it? Print Headline:  Still shy of the world stage Print Fly Title:  Banyan UK Only Article:  ... Читать дальше...

THE day after Cambodia held its five-yearly local elections, both sides could claim some kind of victory. The ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) celebrated because, according to preliminary results—which both sides appear to accept—it won 1,162 of the country’s 1,646 communes. But the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) did remarkably well, increasing the communes it will now control more than tenfold, from 40 to 471. Unofficial totals suggest that it won 46% of the popular vote, up from the 30% the opposition won in 2012. Читать дальше...