The Economist - 13 July 2024

Год выпуска: July 2024

Автор: The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group

Жанр: Экономика/Политика

Издательство: «The Economist Newspaper Ltd»

Формат: PDF (журнал на английском языке)

Качество: OCR

Количество страниц: 88

HOWTO RAISE THE WORLD’S IQ

• Simple ways to make the next generation more intelligent: leader, page 9, and briefing, page 15.
• Schools in rich countries are making poor progress. They need to get back to basics, argues Mark Johnson. See our Special report, after page 36, and leader, page 10.

Will Biden’s dam break?

• America’s president is resisting calls to step aside. For how long? Page 19.
• Democrats’ anguish is borne out by the polls, page 20.
• The dysfunction afflicting both parties: Lexington, page 24.
• China looks on with mirth and some disquiet, page 33.
• Which is a better guide to politics, “Shogun" or “House of the Dragon"? Page 68.

The missing arms-industry bonanza

• America’s giant weapons makers are outgunned, page 52.

Ungovernable France

• After a shotgun election, relief is tempered with foreboding: leader, page 10.
• Voters rejected the hard right. Now what? Page 41.

Inside Al’s black box

• Researchers are finding ways to analyse the sometimes strange behaviour of large language models, page 64.

The world this week Politics

• NATO held a summit in Washington, marking its 75th anniversary. The main topic of discussion was support for Ukraine. The country is unlikely to be admitted as a NATO member soon. But “Make no mistake,” Joe Biden said, “Ukraine can and will stop Putin.” America, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Romania announced that they would provide five extra air-defence systems, including the Patriot system, to Ukraine. The summit started the day after Russia carried out its biggest wave of attacks in months, and st nick a children’s hospital in Kyiv. At least 41 people were killed across Ukraine and 170 injured.
• Mr Biden used the summit to try to put to rest questions about his mental acuity and ability to lead. Calls grew among some Democrats for the president to withdraw from the election. But other senior Democrats, including Chuck Schumer, in public at least, forcefully supported Mr Biden during party meetings in Congress. Mr Biden earlier insisted that “I am running and I am goingto win again.”
• The NATO summit was Sir Keir Starmer’s first foray on the international stage as Britain’s new prime minister. Sir Keir’s Labour Party won 411 seats in the general election, giving it a working majority of 181. The new government has made a busy start, scrapping a controversial scheme to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda, unveiling measures to liberalise the country’s planning regime and taking the first steps towards setting up a new national wealth fund.
• In Russia a court ordered that Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Alexei Navalny, should be arrested if she ever returns to the country. Navalny, Russia’s opposition leader, died in prison in February. Ms Navalnaya has continued his work of poking the Putin regime.

No way to run a republic

• The conclusion of the French parliamentary election produced a startling result. The hard-left New Popular Front alliance of parties won the most seats, Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Ensemble alliance came second and the hard-right National Rally (RN) third. An agreement by leftists and centrists to pull competing candidates from constituencies squeezed the RN; even so, the RN and allies took the biggest share of the vote, at 37%. No alliance is close to a majority. The left insists it has the right to form the new government, though Mr Macron asked Gabriel Attal to remain as prime minister for now.
• Residents of Barcelona marched against rising tourism; some of the protesters yelled “go home” at bemused holiday-makers sitting at pavement cafes. The local authorities have announced several measures aimed at lowering tourist numbers, such as a proposed ban on renting out apartments. Similar protests have been held in other tourism hotspots across Spain.
• Reports suggested that Hamas had dropped key demands blocking a ceasefire in Gaza. Anonymous Hamas and Egyptian officials said that the militants would accept an American proposal to start talks about releasing hostages and were no longer insisting that any deal should guarantee a permanent ceasefire. Meanwhile, an Israeli airstrike on a camp for displaced people in southern Gaza killed 29 Palestinians. The Israeli army said it was targeting a member of Hamas who had taken part in the attacks of October 7th and would look into accounts of civilian casualties. Israel instructed residents in north Gaza, where fighting has intensified again, to evacuate to the centre of the strip.
• Amin Abed, a Palestinian activist who organises antiHamas protests in Gaza, was seriously injured in an attack by a group of masked men. Anger at Hamas has grown in Gaza amid the devastation of war.
• Meta said it would now remove some speech that targets Zionists from its platforms, which include Facebook and Instagram. The company said that in some cases the word “Zionist” is clearly being used as a proxy for hate against Jews.
• Masoud Pezeshkian, a reformminded cardiologist, won Iran’s presidential election, beating Saeed Jalili, a hardliner, in the second round of voting. Mr Pezeshkian has promised domestic reforms and re-engagement with the West. His victory has checked the rise of the Paydari Front of religious zealots.
• In the Democratic Republic of Congo 25 soldiers were sentenced to death by a military tribunal for fleeing battles against M23 rebels. A moratorium on the death penalty was lifted in February, in part to deter desertion. The trial lasted one day.
• Military leaders in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger announced the creation of a confederation, signalling a decisive break with ECOWAS, the regional bloc. The new confederation’s treaty dam-
• pens any hope of a return to democracy in the three countries. It also highlights a rift between west Africa’s broadly democratic coastal states, and a group of poorer inland ones led by juntas with budding ties to Russia and Iran.
• South Africa’s new energy minister announced plans to sharply increase the use of renewable energy. This overturns the policies of his predecessor, a former coalminer, who had blocked the installation of new wind and solar capacity, arguing that “Coal will be around for a very long time.”
• At their twice-yearly meeting, the leaders of Mercosur, a trade block based on Brazil and Argentina, admitted Bolivia as a member. But their get-together was snubbed by Javier Milei, Argentina’s president, who preferred to speak at a hard-right conference in Brazil.
• Federal police in Brazil sought the indictment of Jair Bolsonaro on charges of embezzling an official gift of jewellery from Saudi Arabia. The former president already faces accusations of conspiring to overturn the result of the 2022 election and of falsifying his covidvaccination record.

Embracing death

• Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, visited Moscow, where he squeezed Vladimir Putin with a hug on the same day that Russian forces bombed a children’s cancer unit in Ukraine. At their meeting Mr Modi said, “When innocent children are killed, the heart bleeds”. Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, called the hug “a devastating blow to peace efforts”.
• Russia said all Indian citizens fighting in its army could be released. Indian nationals who were “misled into the service of the Russian army” will be granted an early discharge, the Indian foreign secretary confirmed. Four Indian citizens have died in the war.

The world this week Business

• In a court filing, America’s Justice Department revealed that Boeing would plead guilty to misleading air-safety regulators about its 737 MAX aircraft ahead of two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019. The agreement rips up a previous settlement from 2021 in which Boeing admitted that two employees had misled regulators.The government believes Boeing has failed to comply with that settlement. There have been a number of safety incidents this year, including a door plug that blew' off a 737 iMAX upon takeoff. The families of the crash victims are not happy. By pleading guilty, Boeing avoids the glaring publicity of a trial.
• Microsoft has reportedly given up its board seat at OpenAl amid scrutiny from competition regulators about the pair’s partnership. Microsoft holds a minority economic interest in the developer of ChatGPT. Apple has also decided not to join OpenAl’s board as an observer, according to reports. Apple recently struck a deal to incorporate ChatGPT into its new operating system.
• In what both companies described as the largest deal of its kind, Occidental announced an agreement to sell 500,000 tonnes of carbondioxide removal credits to Microsoft over six years. The arrangement allows Microsoft to offset its emissions by paying Occidental to take carbon from the atmosphere and store it underground. The tech giant’s emissions have soared in recent years, mostly because of the huge amounts of power needed for artificial intelligence and data centres.
• Shell said that it expects to book a write-down of between $600m and $1bn on the construction of a plant in Rotterdam that was supposed to convert w'aste into green jet fuel and biodiesel. The project has been put on hold, in part because an oversupply of biofuels has changed the economics of the industry. Mean while, BP issued a profit warning because of “significantly low'er” margins in oil refining.
• BYD boosted its plans to expand in Europe by sealing an agreement to build a factory in Turkey that will churn out its electric vehicles. The Chinese carmaker expects production to start at the end of 2026 at the plant, which will produce 150,000 EVs a year. The cars would avoid potential punitive EU tariffs on imported Chinese EVs, because Turkey is part of the EU’s customs union.

Moving forward

• Robotaxis continued their relentless drive to become a feature of everyday life. Shanghai is now allowing the driverless cars to accept non-paying passengers in a testing area (the cars previously had to have a safety supervisor behind the wheel). A handful of Chinese cities, including Beijing, have already started charging fees for robotaxis.
• There were no surprises in Jerome Powell’s semi-annual testimony to Congress.The Federal Reserve’s chairman didn’t indicate w hen the central bank would start cutting rates, as more evidence was needed that inflation was easing. Mr Powell’s main focus was the labour market, w'hich he said had “cooled considerably” from two years ago.
• A jury in New York found Bill Hwang, the founder of Archegos Capital Management, guilty of artificially inflating the value of stocks in his portfolio. The collapse of Archegos in 2021 led to hefty losses at banks that dealt with the fund, including Credit Suisse.
• Ariane 6, the European Space Agency’s new' heavy-lift rocket, launched its first voyage into space from its base in French Guiana. The mission, four years late, successfully deployed its satellite payload. Europe wants its own programme for delivering satellites, but questions have been raised about how competitive it will be against Space X and other private rocket providers.
• A new round of financing reportedly doubled the value over two years of Athletic Brewing, America’s biggest maker of non-alcoholic beer, to $8oom. Athletic’s brands, w'hich include Run Wild IPA and Upside Dawn Golden, have helped it become one of the top 20 brewers in the country. No-alcohol beer sales have surged, especially among the young, while sales of the harder stuff have drooped.

That’s a wrap

• After a months-long saga worthy of a Hollyw'ood drama, Paramount Global agreed to merge with Skydance Media, run by David Ellison, the son of Oracle’s founder, Larry Ellison. Skydance is one of the production companies behind such hits as “Top Gun: Maverick” and the recent Mission Impossible films. In a complex deal, Skydance is taking over the family company run by Shari Redstone that controls Paramount. The lengthy process to reach a deal saw an earlier proposal fall apart, rumours in markets of counter offers and the defenestration of Paramount’s chief executive.