|
Год выпуска: September 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: 96
THE BREAKTHROUGH Al HEEDS
- A race is on to push Al beyond todays limits: leader, page 13.
- How Silicon Valley is being transformed, page 56.
- Chinese firms are innovating around hardware bans, page 71.
- Al has returned chipmaking to the heart of computer technology, says Shailesh Chitnis. See our Technology Quarterly, after page 40.
Who’s winning in Pennsylvania?
- Buckets of money and vicious ad wars have left the race there a virtual tie, page 23.
- Kamala Harris’s debate win is showing up in the polls, page 26.
How the world’s poor stopped catching up
- Convergence has stalled, with dire consequences. To restart it, liberalise: leader, page 14, and analysis, page 62.
Asia’s ferocious tutors
- In the poorer countries private lessons are booming, page 36.
Peak woke: the numbers
- By all sorts of measures, America is becoming less woke: briefing, page 19.
- That creates an opportunity: leader, page 16.
- The right is taking the culture wars to culture itself: Lexington, page 28.
The world this week Politics
- At least 12 people were killed, including two children, and 2,800 injured when thousands of pagers used by members of Hizbullah, an Iranian-backed militia, exploded in Lebanon and Syria. The next day walkie-talkies blew up across Lebanon, killing another 20 people and injuring 450. Israel is assumed to be behind the attacks. It is thought that Israeli agents planted explosive substances inside the devices before they were imported into Lebanon. Israel had just expanded its war aims to include the safe return of 60,000 evacuees, displaced by Hizbullah rockets, to the country’s north.
A 2,000 km punch
- A missile fired by the Houthis in Yemen struck central Israel for the first time. Going by shrapnel from the blast, it seems that Israel’s air-defence systems failed to destroy the missile before it entered the country’s airspace.
- A terrorist group linked to al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for attacks in Bamako, the capital of Mali. Militants stormed a military-police school and an airbase where aircraft and mercenaries from the Wagner Group, a Russian network, were present.
- Bassirou Diomaye Faye, Senegal’s president, dissolved parliament. The anti-corruption crusader wants a fresh slate of MPs to carry out reforms, such as renegotiating oil and gas contracts with foreign firms. The dissolution worried investors and sent Senegal’s bond yields jumping, but Mr Faye’s party is expected to win an election in November.
- South Sudan postponed until 2026 elections that were due to take place in December, adding to a growing sense of crisis in the country. Since it took office after independence from Sudan in 2011, South Sudan’s government has repeatedly avoided going to the polls.
- Arvind Kejriwal stepped down as chief minister of Delhi’s regional government, after India’s Supreme Court freed him on bail from six months detention in an alleged corruption case. Mr Kejriwal says the allegations against him are politically motivated and he wants a clean mandate from voters in a forthcoming election. Mr Kejriwal is from the Aam Aadmi Party and is a fierce critic of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which heads India’s federal government.
- The initial stage of voting began in the first regional election in Jammu & Kashmir for a decade. The results are expected on October 8th.
- The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that at least 5,350 civilians had been killed by Myanmar’s army since the coup that brought the junta to power in 2021, and that 2,414 of those had been killed between April 2023 and June 2024 alone. Adding to the country’s misery, at least 260 people have died in floods and landslides in the aftermath of Typhoon Yagi. In Vietnam the death toll from the storm rose to almost 300.
- Joe Biden and Sir Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, held talks at the White House aimed at finding a way of allowing Ukraine to use Western missiles against targets inside Russia. The talks were inconclusive. Vladimir Putin said recently that permitting Ukraine to fire the weapons at Russia would be a direct act of war. In an attempt to increase pressure on Britain, Russia expelled six British diplomats shortly before the White House meeting.
- Meanwhile, Ukraine expanded its drone attacks inside Russia. People were evacuated from the town of Toropets, which lies 470km (292 miles) north of the border with Ukraine, after a weapons warehouse targeted in the attacks exploded. Russia continued to bombard Ukrainian cities.
- Georgia’s parliament approved a law curtailing the few rights gay people have in the country. If enforced it will outlaw Pride marches, ban the rainbow flag and censor films and books with a gay theme.
- Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, unveiled her new commissioners. The biggest surprise was the resignation of Thierry Breton, a French heavyweight who was in charge of the internal market. He had fallen out with Mrs von der Leyen and she reportedly said she could no longer work with him. Teresa Ribera, an environmental minister in Spain, is the new competition commissioner. She will replace Margrethe Vestager, who imposed huge fines on American tech firms.
- America’s Secret Service came under pressure again, after a gunman hid undetected for 12 hours on Donald Trump’s golf course in Florida. Agents saw the man and fired shots at him, with Mr Trump on the course about 350 metres away. The FBI said it was an attempted assassination, the second in two months to target the Republican. The suspect, who is reportedly a fervent supporter of Ukraine and tried to recruit Afghans to help its fight against Russia, was arrested.
- Faced with a demographic crisis and looming pension shortfalls, China said it would raise its strikingly low retirement ages for men and women for the first time since the 1950s. Starting next year, the pensionable age for most workers will begin to move closer to rich-world norms.
- Canada’s ruling Liberal Party lost another by-election in what had hitherto been a safe seat, this time in Montreal. The defeat adds to the pressure on Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, to call an early federal election before the next one is due in October 2025.
- In Mexico Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the president, signed into law a constitutional amendment that will see judges elected instead of appointed. The overhaul has been roundly condemned as a blow to democracy by business groups, academics and NGOs. But Mr Lopez Obrador is committed to pushing through a raft of reforms in his last month in power.
- Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, presented a proposal to amend the constitution to once again allow foreign military bases in the country. For years Ecuador has been wracked by clashes between drug gangs and Mr Noboa wants international help. The United States operated a military base to combat drug-trafficking in Ecuador until 2009, when it was asked to leave.
He knows his audience
- In an unusual gesture Javier Milei, Argentina’s president, presented the government’s budget to Congress himself. In a televised set-piece speech he railed against the profligate “miserable rats” in the opposition and repeatedly said there would be “zero deficit”. Any legislation which threatens that would be vetoed, he promised. Markets cheered the speech, sending one measure of the risk of default to its lowest level in three months.
The world this week Business
- The Federal Reserve cut interest rates for the first time since March 2020, reducing its key rate by half a percentage point to a range of between 4.75% and 5%. The central bank suggested it would cut rates again later this year. With inflationary pressures easing, the Fed is pivoting to tackle a cooler labour market.
- Workers in Boeing’s biggest union went on strike, after they resoundingly rejected an offer to raise pay by 25% over four years. The union has been pushing for a 40% increase. It is the first strike to hit Boeing since 2008. It has suspended hiring and furloughed whitecollarstaff to cut its costs during the industrial action. The strike “jeopardises our recovery in a significant way”, said the company.
Succession obsession
- A hearing got under way at a courtroom in Reno, Nevada, to determine who will control Rupert Murdoch’s media empire when he dies. The 93-year-old mogul reportedly wants to change the terms of the family trust so that his eldest son, Lachlan, takes full control of News Corporation and Fox. The trust currently transfers voting shares to four of his children. The court’s judge has refused access to the press, determining that the Murdochs’ confidential personal and financial information needs to be protected.
- BP decided to get out of the wind-power business in America and put its operational wind farms, spread across seven states, up for sale. The energy company wants to focus on solar energy in its renewables portfolio instead. Solar capacity is expected to vastly exceed that of wind in America over the next decade.
- BlackRock launched а $30bn investment fund aimed at expanding the infrastructure that powers artificial intelligence at data centres and the new energy sources needed to support Al. The fund, one of the biggest of its type ever in America, is backed by Microsoft and MGX, an investment firm in Abu Dhabi. Nvidia will offer its expertise. The $30bn that the fund raises from private capital swells to a potential $ioobn when debt financing is included.
- With its share price down by more than half this year, Intel said it would pause the expansion of its chipmaking capacity in Germany and Poland for two years. The company wants to focus on turning its foundry business, which produces processors for other chipmakers, into an independent subsidiary. The German government had promised €10bn ($11bn) in subsidies to Intel to build a new factory.
- The European Union’s General Court ruled that Google should not pay a €1.5bn ($1.7bn) fine imposed on it by the European Commission in 2019 for forcing websites to use its AdSense platform to place search ads. The court found that the commission’s antitrust regulator had failed to show how innovation had been hampered. It was a big win for Google, coming a week after the European Court of Justice upheld a €2.4bn penalty against it in a separate case.
- Amazon ordered its employees to return to the office five days a week, the toughest such edict yet among America’s big tech firms. Staff had been required to turn up three days a week. An option of working anywhere for four months a year has also been scrapped. Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, said the change was needed so that workers could “invent, collaborate and be connected”. Employees in America will at least get their own offices back: Mr Jassy also scrapped hot-desking.
- TikTok launched its appeal against the Biden administration’s plan to ban it in America unless it separates from Byte-Dance, its Chinese parent company. Lawyers for the video-sharing app told the appellate judges that the government was imposing an “extraordinary speech prohibition” on a single entity, which was unconstitutional. The government says ByteDance is a national-security threat. Both sides have asked for a decision by December 6th, so that the Supreme Court can hear the case before the ban comes into force on January 19th.
- Meta banned RT (formerly Russia Today) from its platforms, after the American government accused the Russian broadcaster of trying to sway foreign politics. Two employees at state-backed RT have been charged with attempting to influence Americans through social media.
Taking a bite in the Big Apple
- Pret A Manger reported annual global sales above £1bn ($1.3bn) for the first time. The purveyor of coffee, sandwiches and snacks has 690 shops, 480 of which are in Britain, its home country. But the Pret empire is spreading and international expansion is driving growth. The firm describes New York as the “overseas capital” for customers.
скачать журнал: The Economist - 21 September 2024
|
