Новости за 07.11.2019

(Telecompaper) WhatsApp added a catalogs feature to its WhatsApp Business app to allow small businesses to present their products and services in a catalog to their...

The Patriots time and time again make the necessary adjustments in order to take the next step. This starts with... Read More »

Since Elon Musk introduced the brain-AI interface this past summer, Neuralink has more than doubled its workforce.

A lot of head coach would’ve pulled the plug by this point if they saw how Mitch Trubisky was performing. They wouldn’t be blamed either. Just run down the list. Five TD passes in seven games. On track for less than 3,000 yards passing. A refusal to use his legs anymore and an ongoing inability […]

Niall Horan and Diplo are officially doppelgangers and the remix video for Niall‘s new song, “Nice To Meet Ya” has 100% convinced us. Diplo just dropped a new remix for Niall‘s hit song and it’s almost an exact copy of the vertical video. “My good friend @diplo made a remix of Nice To Meet Ya [...]

IN 1977, FIVE years after China and Japan re-established diplomatic relations, Miyakoshi, an electronics manufacturer, became the first Japanese firm to receive a business permit from the Communist Party, to make cassette-tape recorders. In 2017 around 32,000 Japanese companies had investments worth $117bn on the mainland, one of the biggest foreign corporate footprints. Last year they poured close to $11bn into China, up by half since 2010 and not far off America’s long-stagnating tally. Big... Читать дальше...

ACCORDING TO ONE of the great myths of American politics, George Washington could not tell a lie. No politician since has felt such compunction. Slandering opponents has been part of the political playbook since at least the 1800 election, when John Adams’ campaign accused Thomas Jefferson of being “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” Given this, last month’s controversy over Facebook’s refusal to take down a Donald Trump ad slandering Joe Biden might seem strange. Читать дальше...

Take the psychopath test.

THE FORDOW nuclear plant in northern Iran would make an ideal lair for a Bond villain. Russian-made surface-to-air missiles guard the skies around it. The facility itself is buried under a mountain. Several hundred feet down, in two cavernous halls, neat rows of centrifuges spin uranium gas to produce fissile isotopes, which could be used for nuclear energy—or, if concentrated enough, a nuclear bomb.

CREEPY CRAWLIES intrigued him. Beetles, centipedes, cockroaches, crickets, geckos, toads and snakes. The way they devoured each other while at the same time providing sustenance for their fellow creatures was symbolic of humans’ existence on Earth, he felt, and he poured them into “Theatre of the World”, one of his best-known works. Best of all were the snakes. Where the River Loire empties into the Bay of Biscay in his adopted France, you can see one of his colossal shimmering serpents emerge... Читать дальше...

In Love with George Eliot. By Kathy O’Shaughnessy.Scribe; 400 pages; £16.99.

97,196 Words. By Emmanuel Carrère. Translated by John Lambert.Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 294 pages; $28. Jonathan Cape; £18.99.

Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago and the Rise of America’s Xanadu. By Les Standiford.Atlantic Monthly Press; 288 pages; $27.

The Russian Job. By Douglas Smith.Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 320 pages; $28. Picador; £25.

THE STAIRS rise elegantly, twisting towards the heavens. At the top is the small room where Emperor Menelik II prayed for God’s blessing as he dramatically enlarged Ethiopia’s territory in the last decades of the 19th century. The watchtower, as this wing of the palace is known, was also a perfect vantage point for surveying his subjects on the open plain beneath its windows. It was here that Menelik founded Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, in 1886. The grand palace he built on a hilltop became the heart of each regime that succeeded his... Читать дальше...

SOMETIME NEXT year, if all goes to plan, a gay male couple in California will have a child. The child in question will have been conceived by in vitro fertilisation. In this case a group of eggs from a female donor are now being fertilised by sperm from both fathers (half from one, half from the other). Of the resulting embryos, the couple will choose one to be implanted in a surrogate mother. An uplifting tale of the times, then, but hardly a newsworthy event. Except that it is.

IF THIS ARTICLE were a TikTok video, it would already be almost over—and you would be smiling. TikTok’s 15-second clips are all the rage among teenage netizens. The app was downloaded more than 750m times in the past 12 months, more than Facebook plus its sister services, Instagram and WhatsApp, combined. Fun aside, TikTok raises serious questions—about data geopolitics, the power of internet incumbents and who sees what online.

LOCAL UTILITIES’ predictable businesses and steady dividends have earned them the moniker “widow-and-orphan shares”. Not in California. Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E), its biggest electric utility, declared bankruptcy in January, citing $30bn of potential liabilities arising from its role in causing deadly wildfires. Its share price is down by nearly 90% since 2017. It recently shut off power to millions of Californians to prevent its installations from sparking new blazes. Customers and politicians fumed. Читать дальше...

A LATIN PHRASE beloved by every old-fashioned British schoolmaster was mens sana in corpore sano—a healthy mind in a healthy body. With that, the pedagogue would dispatch some shivering schoolchild in vest and shorts on a three-mile cross-country run.

To: CEO
cc: PA
Subject: A hard-headed guide to corporate diversity

Dear David,

YOU FACE pressure to “do something” about diversity in your company—not only from your wife and woke children. Corporate clients increasingly demand it in your supply chain. Regulators, who use a “stable” or “inclusive” culture as a proxy for low risk, are breathing down your neck. Governments like Britain’s, which now mandates pay-gap reporting, insist on making more of your sensitive data public. Читать дальше...

THE SWIFTNESS of Steve Easterbrook’s exit from McDonald’s matched that of Don Thompson, his predecessor, in 2015. Mr Thompson was pushed out for poor performance. Not Mr Easterbrook, who was widely admired for doubling the American fast-food giant’s share price. On November 3rd the company announced it was sacking its British-born boss because of “a recent consensual relationship with an employee”. Chris Kempczinski, who runs its domestic business, takes over.

TO A VISITOR from messy Mumbai, on the surface Hong Kong seems, despite months of anti-government protests, in order. Busy shops, clean streets, trains that run on time—or at all. CLP, the 118-year-old electric utility, has just moved from its old headquarters in Kowloon to a new one over a shopping mall (inevitably). Both digs are (inevitably) to be redeveloped. Business as usual, then?

IN 2016 THE World Health Organisation (WHO) declared Britain to be officially free from measles, a highly infectious illness that killed about 110,000 people around the world in 2017. The success was short-lived. After 991 infections were recorded in England and Wales in 2018, the WHO revoked Britain’s disease-free label.

GROWING UP in the Dabie mountains of western Anhui at the height of the Cultural Revolution, Yu Yan learned from a young age that many innocent acts could get her into trouble, starting with using her mother tongue—a dialect of the Chinese language known as Lower Yangzi Mandarin—in her school playground. Fully 70m Chinese speak some form of Lower Yangzi Mandarin, a language that is unintelligible to Chinese raised in northern cities such as Beijing. But back in those dark days of thought control... Читать дальше...

A FEW DAYS ago, Huang Qixuan, a 21-year-old from mainland China who is studying accountancy in Hong Kong, was walking through his campus, talking to his father by phone. He passed a black-clad local student who was holding a placard in support of the pro-democracy unrest that has racked the city for nearly five months. “It’s chaotic,” he said to his father in Mandarin, the mainland’s common tongue. Incensed, the local shouted into Mr Huang’s face in Cantonese, the language of most Hong Kongers. Читать дальше...