Unnatural aristocrats

CLOSELY tracking the Shanghai Composite Index in its downward slide in August was the reputation of China’s government for consistency, competence and even common sense. Worse, its hapless response to the bursting of a stockmarket bubble, which its own propaganda had helped to inflate, was only one of a number of bungles. It mismanaged a modest devaluation of its currency, the yuan. And a catastrophic explosion in the northern port city of Tianjin revealed appalling lapses in the enforcement of regulations. All governments make mistakes. But China’s bases its legitimacy on its performance rather than a popular mandate. Now foreigners and citizens alike are asking whether the Chinese authorities have lost the plot.

Despite the rash of bad news, the Chinese Communist Party can still boast more than three decades of success in fostering spectacular economic growth and in raising China’s global standing. A few rough weeks do not give the lie to “the China model”—in which authoritarian one-party rule is said to be justified because it produces the social order and wise leadership that beget economic growth. Supporters of this idea like to point to the...

from The Economist: China http://ift.tt/1OcyTcy

Euregas!

ITALY’S state-controlled oil and gas company, ENI, has been in Egypt since it signed deals with Gamal Abdel Nasser, the country’s then dictator, in 1954. Now one of the world’s biggest oil firms and the largest foreign oil and gas producer in Africa, ENI said on August 30th that it had discovered a vast gasfield off the Egyptian coast. The Zohr field is thought to contain 30 trillion cubic feet of gas, equivalent to 5.5 billion barrels of oil. If so, Zohr will almost double Egypt’s reserves, and be the largest gas discovery in the Mediterranean. More may be found on further exploration.

The find is a boon for ENI at a time of plunging oil prices, and for Egypt, which has gone from being an exporter to an importer of gas. It may prove positive for other energy firms operating in Egypt, though it undermines Israel’s plans to develop its own fields and export gas to its neighbour.

Claudio Descalzi, ENI’s boss, says the discovery vindicates the firm’s strategy of focusing on developing markets in which it has long been present, and on conventional production rather than newer methods such as the fracking of shale beds. He...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1OcAfnw

Univision’s blurry picture

Entertaining the masses in Spanish

THE strongest selling-point for Univision is that it is the most popular Spanish-language broadcaster in America, where the Hispanic population is young, 57m-strong and growing. However, the company is heavily in debt, and losing both money and viewers. What is more, it is going for an initial public offering at a time when shares in several of America’s main English-language broadcasters are being savaged, amid worries about the future of the television business, not to mention general stockmarket turmoil.

The company’s flagship Univision network is available in 92% of Hispanic households in the United States. With its mix of telenovelas and other light entertainment, it has 13 of the country’s top 20 prime-time shows in Spanish. The group’s Univision Deportes network is the most-watched Spanish-language sports channel on cable, and it has local television stations in most of America’s biggest markets.

However, a leveraged buy-out in 2007 led by Haim Saban, an American-Israeli entrepreneur, has left it with so much debt that it struggles to turn a profit. It now owes $10....

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1NcGieJ

Kicking the Apple addiction

INSIDE an obscure warehouse in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, the robot revolution is under way, but it is far from glamorous. The test lab is hot, steamy and a bit dusty. Dozens of giant, aquamarine-coloured units are whirring and gyrating in patterns designed to test their endurance as they do polishing, machining and assembly. And forget about artificial intelligence: these tireless drudges will not move autonomously or learn by doing.

“We are a business,” explains Day Chia-Peng of the robotics group at Foxconn, the contract-manufacturing arm of Hon Hai of Taiwan. And his frugal bosses will not pay for his team to make flashy kit that does not add value. Foxconn says it already has more than 30,000 robots in use, including thousands at a factory in Chengdu that has fewer than 100 workers. Besides making bespoke robots in-house, the firm has also invested $118m in a division of Softbank, the Japanese firm that makes Pepper, an advanced automaton (pictured).

The push into robotics as a producer, not just a user, is just one part of Hon Hai’s strenuous attempts to diversify. Foxconn is so good at high-quality, high-volume...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1NcGfjk

Faster, cheaper fashion

STAFF line a wide aisle, cheering. Blue balloons bob in anticipation. Then the doors open and throngs of women rush in, clutching shopping bags to gather up their bounty—dresses, jumpers, shoes and other treasure. The scene, captured in a video of a store opening in France last year, is common for Primark—the company dubs such exuberance “Primania”. The Irish retailer, owned by Associated British Foods (ABF), now sells more clothes than any other retailer in Britain. In 2006 Primark opened its first store in Spain. Since then it has marched steadily across the continent, establishing outposts in the Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Austria and France. Sales rose by 150% between 2009 and 2014, making Primark a new force in the global rag trade (see chart).

Now the retailer is plotting its boldest invasion. On September 10th it will open its first shop in America, the world’s biggest clothing market. Boston will...

from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1OcAdw2

You have waked me too soon…

BRITAIN’S health department calls it “the silent killer”. Others have labelled it “the new smoking”. Lack of physical activity has crept up the list of global causes of death to fourth place, after high blood pressure, smoking and high blood sugar—not least because it helps waistlines expand.

Even a little exercise has a huge health effect, whether or not people shed their extra pounds. Research presented on August 30th at a cardiology conference in London suggests that walking fast for 25 minutes a day can buy three to seven years of extra life. A bigger study by a team at Cambridge University tracked 300,000 Europeans over 12 years, and found that a brisk daily 20-minute walk, or the equivalent, cut the annual death rate for people of normal weight by a quarter, and for the obese by 16%. Getting everyone sedentary to do this would save twice as many lives as ending obesity, says Ulf Ekelund, the lead researcher.

Walking 20 minutes a day falls just short of the minimum exercise that the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends. Adults, it says, should do at least 150 minutes weekly of moderate exercise, such as walking...

from The Economist: International http://ift.tt/1hXfZwt

Streetwise

AT 6am on a sweltering Sunday the centre of Gurgaon, a city in northern India, is abuzz. Children queue for free bicycles to ride on a 4km stretch of road that will be cordoned off from traffic for the next five hours. Teenagers pedal about, taking selfies; middle-aged men and women jog by. On a stage, a black-belt demonstrates karate; yoga practice is on a quieter patch down the street. Weaving through the crowd dispensing road-safety tips is a traffic cop with a majestic moustache.

Gurgaon’s weekly jamboree is called Raahgiri, (“reclaim your streets”). Amit Bhatt of EMBARQ, a green think-tank, started it in 2013, inspired by Bogotá’s ciclovía, pictured above, for which Colombia’s capital closes 120km of streets on Sundays and holidays. Such events are part of a movement that is accelerating around the world.

From Guangzhou to Brussels to Chicago, cities are shifting their attention from keeping cars moving to making it easier to walk, cycle and play on their streets. Some central roads are being converted into pedestrian promenades, others flanked with cycle lanes. Speed limits are...

from The Economist: International http://ift.tt/1hXfX7S

A charge that sticks

The road to dusty death

THE widespread use in recent years of nets, insecticides and new drugs has helped to bring malaria under a measure of control—but evolution is constantly pushing back by generating resistant strains of both the parasite that causes the disease and the mosquito that spreads it. Even resistant mosquitoes, however, can take only so much chemical abuse, and Marit Farenhorst, a researcher at In2Care, a Dutch mosquito-control firm, and her colleagues think they have devised a way to dish out more of it.

Their method, as they report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a version of the party trick of making a balloon stick to a wall by imbuing it with static electricity. Substituting mosquito nets and insecticide particles for walls and balloons, Dr Farenhorst believes, yields a way of delivering more, and more diverse, insecticides, and really making them stick where they are needed—on the cuticle of the target insect.

Current mosquito nets are woven from fibres impregnated throughout with an insecticide. This permits them to be washed and used...

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1KtFEZY

What Europe means to the young

IT IS Sunday night at the rooftop bar of the Wombat’s Hostel in Berlin and the tequila is starting to flow. But there is still time for a quick chat about the European Union’s common agricultural policy. Drew, a sparky 20-year-old University of London student, cannot abide the “mad” subsidies the EU pays to its farmers. “In many ways,” he adds, “I’m an anarchist.” And yet he thinks Britain would be foolish to vote to leave the European Union in the referendum the government will hold by the end of 2017.

Drew and his 19-year-old girlfriend Emma, like millions of young Europeans before them, are spending the summer in a carefree haze of travel and fun, the fruits of the freedom afforded by an Interrail pass. Launched in 1972 to mark the 50th anniversary of an international rail industry group, Interrail was a single ticket that granted access to a large part of Europe’s rail network, turning much of the...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1hXdWbD

Sprechen Sie power?

SUCH was the status of German in the 19th century—for Europeans generally and for Jews in particular—that Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, once proposed making it the official language of a future state of Israel. In the event, devotees of Hebrew won out. After the Holocaust, German was particularly despised. But times change. Israeli 14- to 15-year-olds going back to school after the summer holidays now have the option of German as a foreign language for the first time at five public schools, to be followed by more.

German is also becoming popular among adult Israelis, and not only the more than 20,000 who have moved to Berlin in recent years. This reflects a broader shift in perceptions. Fifty years after Germany and Israel established diplomatic relations, 70% of Israelis have a positive view of the country, according to a poll by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a German think-tank. Many find Germans honest and trustworthy. With the possible exception (at least lately) of Greece, people elsewhere agree, polls show.

This suggests a big gain for Germany in “soft power”. Joseph Nye of Harvard University, who coined the term in...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1JDNUD6

Waiting for the train

Armoured warfare on the eastern front

THE hills surrounding Walbrzych, an old mining town in south-west Poland, have been a hive of activity since two men claimed last month to know the underground whereabouts of a train missing since the second world war. According to legend, the Nazis dispatched it laden with gold from the then-German city of Breslau (now called Wroclaw and in Poland) farther west in the final months of the war. It then apparently vanished near Walbrzych.

Locals are used to false alarms. The train has nonetheless become a national matter. Piotr Zuchowski, deputy minister of culture, says he is “over 99% certain” that the train has been found. He is less certain about its contents. They could include military equipment or archives.

The train has also stirred up memories of wartime loss and looting. The World Jewish Congress calls for any items stolen from Jews to be returned to their former owners or heirs. If none can be found, the gold should go to other Polish Holocaust survivors, who have “never been adequately compensated”, the congress says.

Russia could yet get involved. Some speculate that the train...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1hXdVo9

From protest to power

Build your mosque somewhere else, says Mr Nauth

THE neat rows of polished headstones and potted geraniums in the municipal cemetery of Mantes-la-Ville speak of fresh memories and civic diligence. Yet the solemn calm masks its place in a sour struggle following the election as mayor 18 months ago of Cyril Nauth from the National Front (FN), France’s far-right party.

Previously run by Socialists and Communists, Mantes-la-Ville long supplied workers for a giant power station and car factories on a stretch of the Seine valley between Paris and Normandy. Today the industrial certainties of the past have given way to disquiet, and to votes for xenophobes. The new mayor’s preoccupation is stopping local Muslims, who make up an estimated third of the town’s population, from buying a disused tax-collection office, which sits next to the municipal cemetery, to turn it into a mosque.

“Lots of people are hostile,” declares Mr Nauth, a 33-year-old teacher with the cautious manner of a political novice. “They understand the right to a place of worship,” he says. “But they don’t want it near them.” Instead, he proposes to...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1hXdTfX

Ruffians in Rome

ON AUGUST 27th the coastal district of Rome, with a population of around 230,000, became the biggest administrative unit in Italy to be put under direct government control because of mobster subversion. The chairman of its council had been arrested in June, accused of chumminess with a band of alleged gangsters who will be put on trial in November. Prosecutors claim that they developed corrupt ties involving politicians and officials not only in Ostia, Rome’s recreational port and playground, but in other parts of the city too. The overall council for the metropolis only narrowly avoided being disbanded on grounds of infiltration by mafiosi.

For years Italians had assumed that although Sicily and much of the south were prey to the mafia, their beautiful capital was much less vulnerable: the last criminal syndicate to win notoriety in Rome was the so-called Banda della Magliana in the 1970s and 1980s. Recent events have shown that comforting vision to be wrong on two counts. Italy’s southern mafias have been quietly building stakes in the capital’s economy, and Rome has been revealed to host an autonomous underworld more...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1JDNSv4

Our turn to eat

ON STREET duty in Amsterdam, a 35-year-old Dutch police officer bemoans four years without a pay rise. “The economy is picking up, the rich are getting richer and yet we at the police continue to suffer,” he says. Unhappy with new terms offered by the government (a salary increase of 5% over two years along with a possible pension cut), members of the national police union plan to stop all but essential work on September 15th and besiege government offices on the 16th.

European workers are having a decidedly discontented summer. Calls for higher wages are picking up as they sense a recovery. Airport staff in Spain, dock hands in France and crèche employees and train drivers in Germany have been on strike. More are likely to follow. In Germany the number of workdays lost to industrial action has gone up from 156,000 last year to about 1m already this year.

Maarten Keune, a labour-market expert at the University of Amsterdam, detects a feeling throughout austerity-hit Europe of “being owed”. He says, “Before the downturn people were told wages had to stay low to stimulate exports, then came the crash so wages continued...

from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1hXdV7K

Travels through a mindscape

WHEN Oliver Sacks was asked his profession, he often replied “Explorer”. He did not mean this in the geographical sense. As a boy he had devoured Prescott’s books on the conquests of Mexico and Peru; as a young man he had travelled by foot, train and motorbike the length and breadth of North America. But what became an obsession with him was to climb inside the brains of his patients. He chose specifically those with right-hemisphere disorders; and, having reached those “furthest Arctics and Tropics”, slipping on ice or hacking through the unimaginable, near-impenetrable jungles of the self, he would then describe in extensive and sympathetic detail the world as it appeared from there. So compelling was this urge that even when teaching, as a professor of neurology at Columbia and NYU, and even when in great demand on the lecture circuit, he retained his ordinary medical practice in order to keep exploring.

Over the years he accumulated stacks of clinical records, abundant with every detail of the quirks and tribulations of his patients. He often wrote late into the night, monkish in his solitude. Hundreds of articles and essays, 13 books and (...

from The Economist: Obituary http://ift.tt/1Fligq2

Being Franzen’s friends

Purity. By Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 576 pages; $28. Fourth Estate; £20.

“THE reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator,” Jonathan Franzen, an American novelist, has said. Following this rule, he has written two exceptional books that bring readers deep into the lives of troubled Midwestern families. “The Corrections”, about grown-up children home for Christmas, won a National Book Award in 2001, and “Freedom”, about a troubled marriage in the George Bush era, was even more emotionally deft and haunting.

“Purity”, his latest novel, follows a now-familiar formula, tracing the interlocking lives and personal musings of a cast of broken characters. The protagonist Pip, whose real name is Purity, is a lost young woman with $130,000 in student loans, searching for the identity of her father. Like Pip in Dickens’s “Great Expectations”, she evolves from innocent to worldly wise through a novel full of twists and unlikely coincidences. Pip moves from Oakland to Bolivia to be an intern for Andreas Wolf, a German internet activist who runs the Sunlight Project, a...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1hDep1Y

Net worth

Herring Tales: How the Silver Darlings Shaped Human Taste and History. By Donald Murray. Bloomsbury Publishing; 272 pages; $26 and £16.99.

THE herring is hardly the grandest of fish, but as a cheap source of protein it is hard to beat, and herring-fishing was a way of life for many communities around the North Atlantic from the Middle Ages up to the 20th century. Trade in the fish made merchants wealthy. In Scotland herring are known as “the silver darlings”; in Norway they are called, even more lovingly, “the gold of the sea”.

A new account of the herring industry by Donald Murray, a journalist and poet, has almost as many facets as his slippery subjects have scales. His tale offers fillets of history, culture and zoology, with an emphasis on the eclectic—not to say wilfully eccentric. Yet his approach faithfully reflects our relationship with Clupea harengus, which has never been straightforward.

Part of the herring’s attraction for mankind lies in its sociability. It forms vast shoals, a trail of silver below the ocean’s surface that is irresistible for fishermen. But this is...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1hDenqS

The arc of history

The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle. By Lillian Faderman. Simon and Schuster; 816 pages; $35 and £25.

OF THE quarter of a million people who massed in Washington, DC, on August 28th 1963 to hear Martin Luther King proclaim “I have a dream”, few would have noticed—much less known what to make of—the six white men who stood in the crowd with signs identifying them as members of the “Mattachine Society”. One of them surveyed the vast ocean of faces and later asked his fellows, “Why aren’t we gays having civil-rights marches too?”

With gay Americans’ astonishing strides in the past decade, it is easy to forget that just a half-century ago the very notion of gay or transgender civil rights was as strange to most Americans as black civil rights had been a century earlier. Until the early 1960s government employees were fired for being homosexual, and the American Civil Liberties Union generally sided with the government. The few “homophile” organisations took deliberately obscure names; Mattachine was supposedly a French medieval secret fraternity.

Lillian Faderman’s new book, “The Gay Revolution...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1LXlcks

East meets West

• 
  Desk on stand by José Manuel de la Cerda. Lacquered and polychrome wood with painted decoration

  Source: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/ Hispanic Society of America, NY
• 
  “Southern Barbarians Come to Trade” by Kano Naizen. Japanese, Edo period, c.1600. Ink and gold leaf on paper

  Source: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• ...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1hDenak

Drugs that live long will prosper

WHATEVER ails you, if you have to take two pills a day for it instead of one, you can blame metabolic clearance. Before they can get busy, drug molecules must run a biochemical gauntlet as the body’s machinery tries to break them down. As a result, much of what is in a pill may be excreted in useless pieces before it has had a chance to work its wonders.

Last month, though, America’s pharmaceutical regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, received a request to approve a drug, currently called SD-809, that could change this. SD-809 is intended to treat the palsy caused by Huntington’s chorea—a rare and terrible genetic illness. If approved, it will open the gates for a new type of drug that, thanks to a few well-placed atoms of a variant of hydrogen called deuterium, is able to evade metabolic clearance, and thus remain active longer.

An atom’s chemical properties are determined by its electrons, which interact with those of other atoms. Those electrons are equal in number to the protons in an atom’s nucleus (electrons are negative and protons positive, so the atom’s overall charge is zero), and this number in turn defines an atom’...

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1PNytdh