The Economist USA + UK - 30 November 2024

Год выпуска: November 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: 80

“MY CONTEMPT FOR THE STATE IS INFINITE”

What Javier Milei can teach Donald Trump

• Javier Milei is idolised by the Trumpian right. They should get to know him better: leader, page 9.
• An interview with Argentinas president, page 25.

The least bad deal for

• Ukraine How to make peace talks with Putin work: leader, page 10.
• What will be Donald Trump's approach to the war in Ukraine? Page 15.
• For Russia, advances on the battlefield mask growing pressure at home, page 17.
• The frightening maths of Europe's military black hole, page 43.

Mapping out a trade war

• The threat of tariffs will hurt business, whether or not the Trump administration imposes them: leader, page 11, and analysis, page 61.
• Not the law, but other considerations could constrain the president-elect, page 20.

The problem with ultra-processed foods

• They harm health. Scientists are racing to find out why, page 68.

The best books of 2024

• Readers will never think the same way again about games, horses and spies, page 72.

The world this week Politics

• A ceasefire began in Lebanon, scheduled to last initially for 6o days. Israeli forces and those of Hizbullah, a Shia militia backed by Iran, will gradually withdraw from a buffer zone south of the Litani river. A five-country committee led by the United States and France will oversee the process. Joe Biden said he hoped the breakthrough would lead to peace in Gaza, and in the wider region. Lebanese officials said more than 3,800 citizens had been killed by Israeli bombardments; Israel said it had lost 82 soldiers and 47 civilians.
• The International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant. In principle, signatories to the court’s statutes would be obliged to arrest them if they visited. But France suggested it might not as Israel did not sign the treaty that established the ICC, and Germany said it was “examining” its position.
• The South West African People’s Organisation, better known as SWAPO, which has ruled Namibia since its independence in 1990, faced its biggest-everchallenge in a presidential and general election. Opinion polls show it is increasingly unpopular.
• A refugee camp near the city of el-Fasher in south-west Sudan housing about 500,000 people, many of them said to be close to starvation, received its first aid convoy in several months. Deliveries by the UN had been held up by fighting during the 18-month-old civil war.
• Police investigators in Brazil accused Jair Bolsonaro, the country’s hard-right president from 2019 to 2023, of plotting a coup after losing his bid for re-election. The police said that Mr Bolsonaro and 36 allies pressed government and military officials to support a coup, drafted a state of emergency to keep Mr Bolsonaro in power and entertained an assassination plot to kill the election winner. The police sent the indictments to the public prosecutor, who will decide whether to press charges. Mr Bolsonaro described the accusations as “creative”.
• Yamandu Orsi won Uruguay’s presidential election for the centre-left, beating Alvaro Delgado, a former aide to the current centre-right president. Mr Orsi promises to keep business taxes at a reasonable level and attract investment.

If at first you don’t succeed

• Donald Trump filled out more of his prospective cabinet appointments, including Scott Besse nt, a hedge-fund manager, as treasury secretary. iMean-while, Matt Gaetz withdrew from consideration as attorney-general amid allegations of sexual misconduct. Mr Trump is likely to have more luck with his second choice, Pam Bondi, a former attorney-general of Florida.
• Russia increased the pace of its assault on Ukraine, launching a huge missile attack on the country’s energy infrastructure. Russia recently struck Ukraine with a new conventional intermediate-range missile, hitting a weapons facility. For its part Ukraine said it had damaged an oil depot near Moscow and targets in Russia’s Bryansk and Kursk border regions. Russia said that an airbase that housed an air-defence system had been hit with ATACMS, longer-range missiles that America is allowing Ukraine to fire into Russia.
• Police fired tear-gas and water cannon at protesters in Tirana, the capital of Albania, who are calling for the Socialist government to be replaced with a caretaker administration of technocrats. Two opposition leaders have been charged with corruption, which they say is a politically motivated act. The prime minister, Edi Rama, claims the opposition is trying to seize power illicitly.
• The first round of Romania’s presidential election produced a shock result. Calin Georgescu, a pro-Russian critic of NATO, came first with 23% of the vote, and Elena Lasconi, who heads the centre-right opposition, came second with 19%. Both candidates go through to a run-off on December 8th. Mr Georgescu had scant support before the election. The result has raised fears that Russia is gaining influence in Romania, which joined NATO in 2004. Liberals are rallying around AMs Lasconi.
• Anne Hidalgo announced that she would not run fora third term as mayor of Paris. Since taking office in 2014 Ms Hidalgo has overseen a controversial plan to reduce motor traffic in the city by giving priority to cyclists. It has not been universally popular. Paris now has more than 1,000km (620 miles) of bike lanes, up from 200km in 2001.
• India’s lower house of Parliament twice suspended proceedings as opposition MPs made noisy demands for a debate on the bribery charges laid by American authorities against Gautam Adani, one of India’s most prominent busi-nessmen.The opposition Congress party claims that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has tried to thwart previous investigations into Mr Adani, who is an ally of Narendra Modi, the prime minister. The Adani Group says the bribery allegations are “baseless”.
• In Pakistan six people, including four soldiers, were killed amid protests calling for the release of Imran Khan, a former prime minister, from prison. Separately, more than 80 people died in clashes between Shia and Sunni Muslims in the country’s north-west in a dispute overland.

A family feud

• The rocky relationship between Ferdinand “Bong-bong” Marcos, the president of the Philippines, and Sara Duterte, the vice-president, hit a spectacular new low, when Ms Duterte claimed she had hired an assassin to kill Mr Marcos and his wife if she herself were killed. When officials called for an explanation, Ms Duterte said her comment was a “conditional act of revenge”. Mr Marcos and Ms Duterte, who both hail from political dynasties, have detested each other ever since forming an uneasy alliance to win election in 2022.
• Australia’s House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that would ban children underi6 from having access to social media. Google and Meta had asked for the legislation to be delayed until they could complete tests of age-verification systems. Elon Musk weighed in,describing the bill as a “backdoor way to control access to the internet by all Australians”.
• The COP29 climate summit in Baku almost ended in acrimony in a row over finance. In the end a compromise deal of $300bn a year for countries most vulnerable to the effects of global warming was reluctantly agreed to by poorer states, but many, especially India, were angry. The Indian negotiator said it was a “paltry” sum.

The world this week Business

• Donald Trump fired the opening salvo in his trade war by threatening to impose tariffs of 25% on all goods exported to the United States from Canada and Mexico and a further 10% on all Chinese goods. Mr Trump said he would do this because Canada and Mexico were permitting illegal migrants and drugs to cross their borders, and because China was not executing enough fentanyl smugglers. Economists warned of soaring prices in America if the duties are imposed. Canada’s oil industry said the tariffs would undermine energy security. After his announcement Mr Trump said that he had had a “wonderful conversation” with Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, about stopping migration.
• Meanwhile, Mr Trump chose Jamieson Greer to be the trade representative in his new administration. Mr Greer was a senior aide to Robert Light-hizer, the trade chief in Mr Trumps first government. In May Mr Greer said that “The effort to pursue strategic decoupling from China will cause short-term pain.”
• Peter Carlsson stepped down as chief executive of Northvolt, shortly after the Swedish maker of battery cells declared bankruptcy. Northvolt had once been hailed as Europe’s champion in the global market for electric-car batteries, which is dominated by China, but it collapsed under a pile of debt. The company laid off workers earlier this year as it struggled to survive. Some of its problems came from its rapid expansion into technological areas, such as artificial intelligence, which attracted investors but which Northvolt failed to commercialise. Its main factory, in remote northern Sweden, never reached full capacity.

Sticks, but no carrots

• Stellantis decided to close its factory in Luton, near London, which makes vans under the Vauxhall brand. The carmaker said it hoped it could relocate hundreds of workers to a plant near Liverpool, though unions warned that 1,100 jobs were at risk. Stellantis reportedly blamed the British government for imposing targets on carmakers to produce electric vehicles when consumer demand for EVs was slowing. Ford also chimed in, decrying the lack of incentives in Britain for drivers to switch to EVs.
• Amazon doubled its investment in Anthropic, an artificial-intelligence startup, to $8bn. It made an initial investment only in September last year. Amazon is integrating Anthropic’s technology into its cloud services, and aims to incorporate Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude, in its Alexa voicecommand platform. Separately, SoftBank was reportedly planning to invest an additional $1.5bn in Open AI. After its latest round of fundraising Open AI is now thought to be worth $150bn.
• For the second time this year Samsung overhauled the senior-management ranks of its chip division, which is strug-gling to compete with the likes of TS.MC. “I am fully aware that there are grave concerns about the future of Samsung,” acknowledged its chairman, Lee Jae-yong.
• The share prices of Dell and HP fell sharply after both PC-makers reported disappointing earnings. The companies hope that sales will improve when consumers buy new PCs with Al capabilities.
• UniCredit, Italy’s second-biggest bank, offered to buy Banco BPM for $11bn, which its smaller rival rejected. The proposal was unexpected. UniCredit has ambitions to take over Commerzbank, a large German lender, though that proposition is fiercely resisted in Germany.
• In the first of four big divestments that it announced in May, Anglo American sold its remaining coal assets to Peabody Energy for $3.8bn.
• Macy’s had to delay the full publication of its quarterly earnings report, which would have included its forecast of the crucial Christmas shopping season, because it uncovered an attempt by a former employee “to hide approximately $132m to $154im” of delivery expenses since 2021. The employee reportedly did not make a financial gain. It is unclear whether this was an accounting error that had gone unnoticed.

The war on woke

• Robby Starbuck, an online activist, claimed another victory in his fight against corporate diversity, equity and inclusion policies, when Walmart told him it would no longer provide preferential treatment to suppliers based on diversity and discontinue racial-equity training, among other things. Mr Starbuck had threatened to highlight Walmart’s DEI practices ahead of the Christmas season, which might have prompted a conservative boycott of its stores. Announcing Walmart’s climbdown, he said “companies can clearly see that America wants normalcy back".

скачать журнал: The Economist UK - 30 November 2024