Новости за 07.11.2019

GUO BING, a legal academic in the eastern city of Hangzhou, likes to spend his leisure time at a local safari park. But when the park informed season-pass holders like him that admission would require a face-scan, Mr Guo objected. Late last month he filed a lawsuit, claiming the new rules violated his privacy. Facial-recognition technology is widely used in China. Doubtless to the relief of the government which makes extensive use of it, there has been little public debate about it. State media... Читать дальше...

WALKING THROUGH the Minharot Olam (Perpetual Tunnels) project in Jerusalem is like navigating a massive honeycomb. The developers have cut a mile (1.6km) of tunnels through the earth that are over 50ft (16 metres) high. Some are 18 storeys below ground. Within each, giant drills have burrowed thousands of holes into the walls and ground. Soon they will be filled not with honey, but bodies: 23,000 of them, to be exact.

ON A PLANTATION in Tiko, in south-west Cameroon, Adeline rubs the gap in her right hand where her index finger used to be. She arrived in the town in July 2018, having fled Ekona, 15 miles away. In that village soldiers terrified civilians by burning houses and shooting indiscriminately as part of a crackdown on militias that want the primarily English-speaking areas of Cameroon to secede from the predominantly Francophone country. Adeline hoped Tiko would prove a sanctuary.

INSIDE AN ORNATE conference hall the boss of a $100bn tech fund spoke to rows of empty chairs. Then he briefly fell asleep. Outside the hall Anthony Scaramucci, the colourful financier who lasted ten days as Donald Trump’s communications director, dispensed questionable political analysis. An American company hawked jetpacks. A robot urged passers-by to tickle her head. “It will make you feel better,” she said.

SOME 70 PEOPLE gathered under a tent on a balmy Monday evening recently in Trench Town, a stone’s throw from the housing project where Bob Marley grew up. Outside, three policemen armed with rifles patrolled in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Trench Town is one of the roughest neighbourhoods of Kingston, Jamaica’s capital. But the mood in the tent is mellow. The air smells faintly of ganja. The Trench Townspeople have gathered not to talk about violence but about economic policy.

AT 11.40PM ON October 22nd, two days after Bolivia’s presidential and congressional elections, Paul Handal met a dozen neighbours on the street in Villa Fraterna, an upper-middle-class neighbourhood of Santa Cruz, the country’s biggest city. Suspicions were mounting that the president, Evo Morales, was trying to avoid a run-off vote by fraudulent means. Opposition leaders had called a general strike to demand one. Mr Handal and his neighbours dragged trees and tyres to an intersection to build a barricade. Читать дальше...

“MILWAUKEE IS RESILIENT, like this building,” says Mandela Barnes, a 32-year-old from Wisconsin’s largest city. He chats over ginger tea in Shindig Coffee, a lively spot inside the Sherman Phoenix, a complex of dozens of small shops, hair salons, yoga studios and galleries. It opened a year ago, renovated after arsonists attacked the building, a former bank, during anti-police riots in 2016. Its rise and the success of its black-owned businesses are symbols of optimism in a place that is short on it. Читать дальше...

WHEN SERGEANT LIAM DWYER of Connecticut trod on a booby-trapped bomb in southern Afghanistan the explosion could be heard 13 miles away. It blew off his left leg, much of his right one, left his left arm “hanging by threads” and smashed his right arm. “I’m bleeding out and about to die,” he recalls thinking before he blacked out. His field-medic turned away to work on lesser casualties. But another marine sergeant clapped tourniquets on what remained of Mr Dwyer and hauled him to a helicopter. Читать дальше...

A ROUND a century ago, a furniture magnate from Rochester, New York named Harvey Baker Graves spent a day boating through the estuarine wilds of upper Biscayne Bay, along the southern Atlantic coast of Florida. What today is beach-front property was then a verdant, claustral jungle; in photographs the dinosaurs seem to be lurking just outside the frame. Graves was so enamoured of this landscape and its potential that he bought a large swathe of mangrove forest and tortuous waterways dotted with uninhabitable little islands. Читать дальше...

THE TYPICAL Russian big-city mayor exhibits several traits. He is male and middle-aged. He lives more opulently than his neighbours. He represents the ruling United Russia party. And he won his post not at the ballot box, but by appointment.

AFTER JESSIKKA ARO, a 38-year-old Finnish journalist, exposed pro-Kremlin trolls, they started trolling her. They released her medical history and her home address. They created a music video mocking her as a “Bond girl”. They claimed, without basis, that she was a prostitute soliciting male bigwigs from the CIA and NATO, who fed her lies about Russia. Some Finns read and believed the bogus stories online, then threatened to rape or kill her.

ON THE DESK of a government building, a diorama is laid out. Little vehicles sit by the side of a road, watched over by little policemen. On two recent mornings, this scene was recreated in real life. Drivers caught speeding along the road between Tallinn and the town of Rapla were stopped and given a choice. They could pay a fine, as normal, or take a “timeout” instead, waiting for 45 minutes or an hour, depending on how fast they were going when stopped.

MIXING POLITICS and history is perilous. David Rieff, the author of “In Praise of Forgetting”, argues that the commemoration of past wrongs can become a moral cudgel, cynically weaponised over and over again for political ends. That is certainly how Turkey’s government sees it when foreigners refer to the deaths of over a million Armenians at the hands of Ottoman forces in 1915 as genocide. On October 29th America’s House of Representatives voted to do just that. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was furious. Читать дальше...

THIS YEAR’S electioneering already has a greener tinge than 2017’s. A summer heatwave and Extinction Rebellion’s activism have given environmental issues a fillip. Polls by YouGov find that around a quarter of the public list the environment among the top three problems facing Britain, up from closer to one in ten at the time of the last election. The level of interest is well below that shown in Brexit or the health service, but comparable to that in political staples such as the economy.

THE MOST famous face in recent Brexit debates may have been that of the Speaker of the Commons, John Bercow. But he has now quit and MPs have picked his deputy, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, to replace him. Since he won by a large margin, including strong cross-party support, Sir Lindsay can expect to be confirmed after the election.

BRITAIN’S FIRST pollster, Henry Durant, quipped that his was the “stupidest of professions”. For who would make a claim one day only to be contradicted on election night? Undeterred, beginning with their accurate forecast that Clement Attlee would beat Winston Churchill in 1945, polling firms gained a hard-won respectability.

Tower of compassion
“I think if either of us were in a fire, whatever the fire brigade said, we would leave the burning building. It just seems the common-sense thing to do, and it is such a tragedy that that didn’t happen.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Conservative leader of the House of Commons, on how he would have survived the Grenfell Tower fire. LBC

JEREMY CORBYN has the most radical views on national security of any leader in the Labour Party’s history. He is a long-standing opponent of both NATO and nuclear weapons. He has called Hamas and Hezbollah “friends”. Faced with overwhelming evidence of Russian state involvement in the poisoning of two people in Salisbury, he first obfuscated and then demanded that Russia should be involved in the investigation.

IN NORTHERN IRELAND Brexit has served mainly to harden already uncompromising attitudes. But in the election campaign there are surprising signs that it has inspired a new—though probably temporary—form of pragmatism.

BASHING BILLIONAIRES is gaining popularity—especially among candidates to be America’s president. Elizabeth Warren wants to take up to 6% of their wealth in tax every year. Bernie Sanders says they “should not exist”. “Every billionaire is a policy failure,” goes a common left-wing slogan. In Britain’s election, too, the super-rich are under fire. Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, says that a fair society would contain none. On October 31st he vowed to “go after” Britain’s plutocrats... Читать дальше...

FOR 37 YEARS one man has ruled Cameroon, a staggeringly corrupt, oil-rich state in central Africa. President Paul Biya is an old-fashioned autocrat. When democracy swept across Africa after the cold war ended, he called it a “distasteful passing fetish”. Then he realised he would attract less foreign criticism if he quietly intimidated opponents and rigged elections instead of banning them. He has done so ever since, and kept on good terms with Western powers by posing as a champion of stability in a fissile region. Читать дальше...

DEBATE ABOUT using science to create “bespoke” human beings of one sort or another usually revolves around the ideas of genetic engineering and cloning. People worry about these for two reasons. One is practical. The tinkering involved could end up harming the resulting individual. The other is a more visceral dislike of interfering with the process of reproduction, perhaps best encapsulated in the phrase “playing God”.

ADULTERER, PERVERT, traitor, murderer. In France in 1793, no woman was more relentlessly slandered than Marie Antoinette. Political pamphlets spread baseless rumours of her depravity. Some drawings showed her with multiple lovers, male and female. Others portrayed her as a harpy, a notoriously disagreeable mythical beast that was half bird-of-prey, half woman. Such mudslinging served a political purpose. The revolutionaries who had overthrown the monarchy wanted to tarnish the former queen’s reputation before they cut off her head. Читать дальше...

Who wrote the Bible?

Your obituary for Harold Bloom noted that his list of great writers in “The Western Canon” was “almost all male” (October 26th). In that same book, Bloom also credited the earliest source of the Bible to a woman. “The Book of J”, which Bloom wrote before “The Western Canon”, embraced the documentary hypothesis, which holds that the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, were written primarily by four authors, conventionally referred to as J, E, P and D. Those works were later edited... Читать дальше...

THE TRADE conflict between China and America has been a clash not just of giant economies but of utterly different public negotiating styles. In one corner are President Donald Trump’s tweets, in which he veers between heaping praise on China and declaring that he has pummelled it. In the other is a Chinese bureaucracy that has stuck doggedly to the same message: tariffs must be removed for the two countries to reach a trade agreement. A mini-deal, hashed out last month, is shaping up to be a mini-test of their contrasting approaches. Читать дальше...