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woodlu

The Economist's French election model | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...results-round-one

politics

shared by woodlu on 11 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • mmanuel Macron will face Marine Le Pen in the final round of the French election on April 24th, in a repeat of 2017.
  • Ms Le Pen, a nationalist populist, followed on 23%
  • In 2017, many voters judged Ms Le Pen to be beyond the pale.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The results provide further evidence of the hollowing out of the French centre ground. More than half of votes went to candidates outside the political mainstream.
  • Mr Macron’s votes were concentrated in urban areas
  • By contrast, Ms Le Pen triumphed in rural areas and what Christophe Guilluy, a geographer, calls “peripheral France”—poorer, disconnected parts of the country, far removed from urban centres.
woodlu

Russia's war in Ukraine has caused at least $68bn in physical damage | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...-least-68bn-in-physical-damage

politics history crisis economics

shared by woodlu on 06 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • according to an early analysis by the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), the physical damage already exceeded $68bn as of April 1st, equivalent to more than a third of Ukraine’s GDP in 2021.
  • $28bn worth of damage to roads
  • damage to bridges, ports and railways, and the infrastructure bill exceeds $58bn
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • 196 health-care facilities have been destroyed across Ukraine, which will cost another $2bn to rebuild
  • 300 kindergartens lay in ruins, amounting to $226m worth of damage.
  • economic losses, destruction of livestock and crops, and a shrinking workforce as people flee are not included
  • Ukraine’s Ministry of Economy and KSE estimate that all losses combined could range from $564bn to $600bn, or 2.8 to 3 times its GDP in 2021
woodlu

How the Ukrainian refugee crisis will change Europe | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ugee-crisis-will-change-europe

politics crisis history

shared by woodlu on 30 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said on March 30th had passed 4m. That does not count the 6.5m people displaced within Ukraine by Russia’s invasion.
  • Nearly a quarter of the population has been forced to move.
  • So far, the western response has been enlightened and generous. But that could change if governments mismanage the reception and integration of refugees, and disillusionment and fatigue set in.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • The Ukrainian exodus is nearly triple the size of the wave of Syrians and others who reached Europe in 2015.
  • Germany and Sweden were initially welcoming, but there was then a surge in support for anti-immigrant politicians all across Europe. This led to a hardening of Europe’s borders, a deal with Turkey to prevent Syrian refugees from proceeding to other parts of Europe, “push-backs” of asylum-seekers arriving by boat and challenges by politicians to the very idea of asylum.
  • In response to the Ukrainian crisis, Europe has rolled out welcome mats, both metaphorical and literal.
  • On March 3rd the European Union invoked for the first time its temporary-protection directive, giving Ukrainians the right to live, work and receive benefits in 26 of its 27 member countries.
  • Poland has taken in 2.2m. Hungary, whose prime minister, Viktor Orban, was the first European leader to build a fence to keep out refugees in 2015, has admitted 340,000.
  • America is joining in. On March 24th President Joe Biden said his country would take in up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees and contribute $1bn to help Europe cope with the influx. Canada, which has the world’s biggest Ukrainian diaspora outside Russia, has said it will take as many Ukrainians as want to come.
  • Poland’s government encourages such generosity by offering hosts 40 zloty ($9) per day per refugee for two months.
  • Britain’s is giving £350 ($460) a month per household, although its forbidding bureaucracy has made it hard for many Ukrainians to come.
  • The contrast with the reaction to Syrians in 2015 is due not just to the lighter skin and Christian religion of most Ukrainians, though that is surely part of the explanation. It is also that welcoming refugees is part of a mobilisation for a nearby war in which NATO and Europe, although non-combatants, are passionately partisan.
  • Ukraine’s closest neighbours are already feeling strained. Moldova, which has received 370,000 refugees, equivalent to about a tenth of its population, is overwhelmed.
  • Newer refugees, who tend to be poorer and are less likely to have family already in western Europe, may also stay in larger numbers.
  • Parts of Poland, too, are buckling. Around 300,000 refugees have come to Warsaw, the capital, increasing its population by 17%. More than 100,000 are in Krakow, the second-largest city, which is usually home to 780,000 people. “[T]he more people, the worse the conditions will be,”
  • Countries on the route taken by refugees in 2015, from Greece to Belgium, have greatly improved their ability to register and process them.
  • Some, such as Germany, passed laws and set up institutions to integrate refugees.
  • For economies, refugees could be both a burden and a boon.
  • the EU’s four biggest countries will spend nearly 0.2% of GDP to support the influx, assuming 4m refugees come to the region.
  • Ukrainians already in Germany have higher qualifications than did Syrian refugees, which should help them find work. The relative abundance of work means that there is little risk that Germans will accuse the newcomers of taking their jobs.
  • The forecasters may also be overestimating how much work single mothers, traumatised by their flight from Ukraine and worried about the husbands they left behind, will be able to do, especially where day-care places are scarce and expensive.
  • If the war grinds on, economies slow and governments fail to provide the newcomers with housing, services and jobs, Europe’s welcome mats could be withdrawn.
  • Dissent can already be heard in some overburdened countries. In Romania a nationalist fringe contends that Ukraine, not Russia, is the enemy. In Moldova some Ukrainians’ cars have been vandalised. Filippo Grandi, the head of the UN’s refugee agency, fears that hostility will spread.
woodlu

The Stalinisation of Russia | The Economist - 1 views

www.economist.com/...the-stalinisation-of-russia

politics crisis history

shared by woodlu on 10 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • He has ended up restoring the terror of Josef Stalin. That is not only because he has unleashed the most violent act of unprovoked aggression in Europe since 1939, but also because, as a result, he is turning himself into a dictator at home—a 21st-century Stalin, resorting as never before to lies, violence and paranoia.
  • Russia’s president thought Ukraine would rapidly collapse, so he did not prepare his people for the invasion or his soldiers for their mission—indeed, he assured the elites that it would not happen
  • he is still denying that he is waging what may become Europe’s biggest war since 1945.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • he has shut down almost the entire independent media, threatened journalists with up to 15 years in jail if they do not parrot official falsehoods, and had anti-war protesters arrested in their thousands.
  • Having failed to win a quick victory, Russia is trying to sow panic by starving Ukrainian cities and pounding them blindly.
  • If Mr Putin is committing war crimes against the fellow Slavs he eulogised in his writings, he is ready to inflict slaughter at home.
  • even if the war drags on for months, it is hard to see Mr Putin as the victor.
  • Mr Putin’s puppet could not rule without an occupation, but Russia does not have the money or the troops to garrison even half of Ukraine.
  • American army doctrine says that to face down an insurgency—in this case, one backed by NATO—occupiers need 20 to 25 soldiers per 1,000 people; Russia has a little over four.
  • Russia has lost mountains of equipment and endured thousands of casualties, almost as many in two weeks as America has suffered in Iraq since it invaded in 2003.
  • by attacking Ukraine, Mr Putin has committed a catastrophic error. He has wrecked the reputation of Russia’s supposedly formidable armed forces, which have proved tactically inept against a smaller, worse-armed but motivated opponent.
  • Western tech firms are wrong to shut their operations in Russia, because they are handing the regime total control over the flow of information.
  • Mr Putin will not impose a puppet government—because he cannot—then he will have to compromise with Ukraine in peace talks.
  • Western exporters are withholding vital components, leading to factory stoppages. Sanctions on energy—for now, limited—threaten to crimp the foreign exchange Russia needs to pay for its imports.
  • Mr Putin is destroying the bourgeoisie, the great motor of Russia’s modernisation. Instead of being sent to the gulag, they are fleeing to cities like Istanbul, in Turkey, and Yerevan, in Armenia.
  • Those who choose to stay are being muzzled by restrictions on free speech and free association.
  • In just two weeks, they have lost their country.
  • Stalin presided over a growing economy. However murderously, he drew on a real ideology.
  • Even as he committed outrages, he consolidated the Soviet empire. After being attacked by Nazi Germany, he was saved by the unbelievable sacrifice of his country, which did more than any other to win the war.
  • Not only is he failing to win a war of choice while impoverishing his people: his regime lacks an ideological core. “Putinism”, such as it is, blends nationalism and orthodox religion for a television audience.
  • Factions in the regime will turn on each other in a spiral of blame. Mr Putin, fearful of a coup, will trust nobody and may have to fight for power. He may also try to change the course of the war by terrifying his Ukrainian foes and driving off their Western backers with chemical weapons, or even a nuclear strike.
  • The central bank does not have access to the hard currency it needs to support the banking system and stabilise the rouble.
  • NATO should state that it will not shoot at Russian forces, so long as they do not attack first. It must not give Mr Putin a reason to draw Russia into a wider war by a declaring no-fly zone that would need enforcing militarily.
  • However much the West would like a new regime in Moscow, it must state that it will not directly engineer one. Liberation is a task for the Russian people.
  • Mr Putin is isolated and morally dead; Mr Zelensky is a brave Everyman who has rallied his people and the world. He is Mr Putin’s antithesis—and perhaps his nemesis.
woodlu

The economic consequences of the war in Ukraine | The Economist - 1 views

www.economist.com/...equences-of-the-war-in-ukraine

politics crisis history policy economics

shared by woodlu on 24 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • The immediate global implications will be higher inflation, lower growth and some disruption to financial markets as deeper sanctions take hold.
  • The longer-term fallout will be a further debilitation of the system of globalised supply chains and integrated financial markets that has dominated the world economy since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
  • Russia is one of the world’s largest oil producers and a key supplier of industrial metals such as nickel, aluminium and palladium.
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  • Russia and Ukraine are major wheat exporters, while Russia and Belarus (a Russian proxy) are big in potash, an input into fertilisers.
  • the price of Brent oil breached $100 per barrel on the morning of February 24th and European gas prices rose by 30%.
  • Their delivery might be disrupted if physical infrastructure such as pipelines or Black Sea ports are destroyed. Alternatively, deeper sanctions on Russia’s commodity complex could prevent Western customers from buying from it.
  • Sanctions after the invasion of Crimea did not prevent BP, ExxonMobil or Shell from investing in Russia, while American penalties on Rusal, a Russian metals firm, in 2018 were short-lived.
  • Russia may retaliate by deliberately creating bottlenecks that raise prices. America may lean on Saudi Arabia to increase oil production and prod its domestic shale firms to ramp up output.
  • America is thus likely to put much tougher Huawei-style sanctions on Russian tech firms, limiting their access to cutting-edge semiconductors and software, and also blacklist Russia’s largest two banks, Sberbank and VTB, or seek to cut Russia off from the SWIFT messaging system that is used for cross-border bank transfers.
  • The tech measures will act as a drag on Russia’s growth over time and annoy its consumers.
  • The banking restrictions will bite immediately, causing a funding crunch and impeding financial flows in and out of the country.
  • Russia will turn to China for its financial needs. Already trade between the two countries has been insulated from Western sanctions, with only 33% of payments from China to Russia now taking place in dollars, down from 97% in 2014.
  • What does all this mean for the global economy? Russia faces a serious but not fatal economic shock as its financial system is isolated. For the global economy the prospect is of higher inflation as natural-resource prices rise, intensifying the dilemma that central banks face, and a possible muting of corporate investment as jittery markets dampen confidence.
woodlu

Vladimir Putin's war | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...vladimir-putins-war

policy politics crisis

shared by woodlu on 24 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • In his battle speech, recorded on February 21st and released as he unleashed the first volleys of cruise missiles against his fellow Slavs, Russia’s president railed against “the empire of lies” that is the West. Crowing over his nuclear arsenal, he pointedly threatened to “crush” any country that stood in his way.
  • It was unclear in what strength they were moving. But Mr Putin seemingly covets all of Ukraine, just as American and British intelligence reports had claimed all along. In acting, he has set aside the everyday calculus of political risks and benefits. Instead he is driven by the dangerous, delusional idea that he has an appointment with history.
  • He may not invade the NATO countries that were once in the Soviet empire, at least not at first. But, bloated by victory, he will subject them to the cyber attacks and information warfare that fall short of the threshold of conflict.
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  • Mr Putin will threaten NATO in this way, because he has come to believe that NATO threatens Russia and its people.
  • he raged at the alliance’s eastward expansion. Later, he decried a fictitious “genocide” that he says the West is sponsoring in Ukraine. Mr Putin can’t tell his people that his army is fighting against their Ukrainian brothers and sisters who gained freedom.
  • He is obsessed with the defensive alliance to its west. And he is trampling the principles that underpin peace in the 21st century. That is why the world must inflict a heavy price for his aggression.
  • Even though Russia has set out to build a fortress economy, the country is still connected to the world and, as the initial 45% fall in Russia’s stockmarket suggests, it will suffer.
  • Russia is Europe’s main supplier of gas. It exports metals like nickel and palladium and along with Ukraine it exports wheat. All of that will present problems at a time when the world economy is struggling with inflation and supply-chain glitches.
  • Until now, the alliance has sought to live within the pact signed with Russia in 1997, which limits NATO operations in the former Soviet bloc. NATO should rip it up and use the freedoms that creates to garrison troops in the east.
  • NATO should prove its unity and intent by immediately deploying its 40,000-strong rapid-reaction force to the frontline states. These troops will add credibility to its doctrine that an attack on one member is an attack on all
  • Some will say that it is too risky to challenge Mr Putin in these ways—because he has lost touch with reality, or because he will escalate, miscalculate or hug China
  • After 22 years at the top, even a dictator with an overdeveloped sense of his own destiny has a nose for survival and the ebb and flow of power.
  • Even China should see that a man who rampages across frontiers is a threat to the stability it seeks.
  • They will also signal to Mr Putin that the further he pushes in Ukraine, the more likely he is to end up strengthening NATO’s presence on its border—the very opposite of what he intends.
  • NATO is not about to deploy troops to Ukraine—rightly so, for fear of a confrontation between nuclear powers. But its members should give Ukraine assistance by providing arms, money and shelter to refugees and, if need be, a government in exile.
woodlu

Labour v capital in the post-lockdown economy | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...21807700

policy economics

shared by woodlu on 14 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • Dissatisfaction rages in the post-lockdown economy. Households say that price-gouging companies are jacking up prices, contributing to an inflation rate across the rich world of 6.6% year on year.
  • Companies bat such accusations aside, believing that they are the truly wronged party. They complain that staff have become workshy ingrates who demand ever-higher wages
  • A “battle of the markups”, between higher wages and higher shop prices, is under way.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • economic output must flow either to owners of capital, in the form of profits, dividends and rents, or to labour, as wages, salaries and perks. Economists refer to this as the “capital” or “labour” share of GDP. Who has the upper hand in the post-lockdown economy?
  • First we calculate a high-frequency measure of the capital-labour share across 30 mostly rich countries.
  • In 2020 the aggregate labour share across this group soared (see chart 1). This was largely because firms continued to pay people’s wages—helped, in large part, by government-stimulus programmes—even as GDP collapsed. Advantage, labour.
  • More recently, however, the battle seems to have shifted in favour of capital.
  • most economists anyway argue that labour’s share is not a perfect gauge of economic fairness, since it is so hard to measure.
  • In the first camp is Britain. There, underlying wage growth is in the region of 5% a year, unusually fast by rich-world standards.
  • But corporations seem not to have much pricing power, meaning that they are struggling to fully offset higher costs in the form of higher prices.
  • Labour seems to be winning out at the expense of capital.
  • The second group consists of most other rich countries outside America.
  • There, neither labour nor capital seems able to triumph. After correcting for pandemic-related distortions Japan’s pay growth appears to be slowing to below 1% a year
  • Pay settlements in Italy and Spain are treading water, while wage growth in Australia, France and Germany remains well below where it was before the pandemic. Workers in these places are not really joining in with the inflationary party.
  • In Europe pre-tax profit margins, as measured in the national accounts, have risen in recent months but remain below where they were just before the pandemic.
  • In Japan the “recurring” profits before tax of large and medium-sized firms recently returned to pre-pandemic levels. The profits of smaller firms remain well below, however.
  • Here wage growth is rapid, at about 5% a year. But as shown in their most recent financial results, big listed American firms are doing a better job at protecting margins than analysts had expected.
  • A series of unusually large stimulus payments may mean that households are able to absorb the higher prices that companies impose.
  • Wages are rising, but nonetheless markups are responsible for more than 70% of inflation since late 2019,
  • In a recent report, analysts at Bank of America argue that greater pricing power helps explain why American equities have a higher price-earnings ratio than European ones.
  • Some economists wonder if workers will before long demand even higher wages to compensate for higher shop prices.
woodlu

How to predict winners at the winter Olympics | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...winners-at-the-winter-olympics

culture policy

shared by woodlu on 10 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • The strongest countries have arrived with ambitious medal targets and will be keeping track of their chances of matching those tallies throughout the games. Until recently working out who was likely to win an Olympic event was a guessing game based on hunches and limited data.
  • Some of the most popular sports, like athletics and swimming, have had unofficial world rankings based largely on form in any given season. But generally onlookers have had to rely on the odds produced by bookmakers for a guide of who is likely to win Olympic glory.
  • The most comprehensive publicly available projection belongs to Gracenote Sports, an analytics company owned by Nielsen, an American market-research firm.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • A handful of financial institutions produced them when Rio de Janeiro hosted in 2016, using a mixture of macroeconomic indicators and performances at previous Olympics to forecast total medal hauls for each country.
  • Gracenote’s distinguishing feature is the ability to produce quantitative analysis for each event.
  • The company has created a performance index that tracks around 500 events across the various sports in the summer and winter Olympic programmes.
  • Gracenote still uses the old system to produce its public medal table, which also deals in absolute forecasts, rather than fractional ones. If a French athlete, say, is the most likely to win an event, France gets awarded one gold medal in the table, even though the true probability of the athlete winning gold is less than 100% and his chances of claiming silver and bronze are greater than 0%.
  • the Elo rating system, which was developed for chess by Arpad Elo, a Hungarian physicist. The formula exchanges ranking points from the loser to the winner, with greater rewards for beating stronger opponents. The difference in ratings points between two rivals can be easily used to calculate the probability that one will beat the other.
  • Yet only two events on the winter Olympics programme, curling and ice hockey, involve head-to-head contests.
  • Gracenote devised an Elo-style mechanism with modifications. Rather than simply measuring whether an athlete wins or loses a competition, the system predicts the share of opponents that he beats. If he finishes higher than expected, based on his previous rating and the strength of the field for the competition in question, his rating improves.
  • Those that compete in teams have their scores blended with their compatriots. And for those that participate in a number of events, such as Ms Dahlmeier, results in related disciplines affect multiple ratings. A strong performance in the biathlon sprint, a group race, would boost her ranking in the pursuit, a staggered race, for example.
  • The best way to answer that question is to take every previous contest in the sport and analyse how past results correlate with future success.
  • The bans have benefited Norway most, as the country will likely gain of the five of the 12 foregone medals—enough to nudge it ahead of Germany into first place in terms of total medals won.
  • Mr Gleave notes that the favourite only wins about 30% of the time, a lower share than in any other winter sport. Ms Dahlmeier’s rating has dwindled a little, but not by enough to suggest that last year’s record breaker has become this year’s flop.
  • Gracenote’s research into age curves for each sport shows that the best biathletes can maintain their peak performance into their early 30s (see chart). Expect to see more event-by-event forecasting at future Olympics, too.
woodlu

A new low for global democracy | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...a-new-low-for-global-democracy

politics history

shared by woodlu on 10 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • LOBAL DEMOCRACY continued its precipitous decline in 2021, according to the latest edition of the Democracy Index from our sister company, EIU.
  • The global score fell from 5.37 to a new low of 5.28 out of ten. The only equivalent drop since 2006 was in 2010 after the global financial crisis.
  • For the second year in a row, the pandemic was the biggest source of strain on democratic freedom around the world.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Through lockdowns and travel restrictions, civil liberties were again suspended in both developed democracies and authoritarian regimes.
  • Pedro Castillo’s narrow victory in Peru in June was contested for weeks by his opponent, Keiko Fujimori, and the Nicaraguan poll in November was a sham. Chile was downgraded to a “flawed democracy” partly because of low voter turnout in its deeply polarised elections, and Haiti is still in political crisis after the assassination of the president, Jovenel Moïse.
  • North America fared only slightly better. Despite riots in the Capitol and attempts by the departing president Donald Trump to overturn the election results, the inauguration of Joe Biden proceeded smoothly and America’s democracy score only fell by 0.07 points.
  • Canada suffered a far bigger setback, of 0.37 points. Again, pandemic restrictions were the main cause of frustration and disaffection. According to the World Value Survey, which is used in some of the quantitative sections of the EIU’s survey, just 10.4% of Canadians felt that they had “a great deal” of freedom of choice and control. More alarming, 13.5% expressed a preference for military rule.
  • The fall in Canada’s index score reflected popular disaffection with the status quo and a turn to non-democratic alternatives.
  • The trucker blockade in Ottawa may presage more political upheaval. But the biggest challenge to the Western model of democracy over the coming years will come from China
  • After four decades of rapid growth it is the world’s second-biggest economy; within a decade the EIU forecasts that it will overtake America. If China’s absence from Mr Biden’s recent Summit for Democracy is anything to go by, the West is not looking to engage it. China’s response to being snubbed was to declare the state of American democracy “disastrous”.
woodlu

North Korea Launches 2 Ballistic Missiles, South Korea Says - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...north-korea-missile-test.html

politics us history crisis economics

shared by woodlu on 09 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles off its east coast on ​Thursday ​in its ​sixth missile test this month, the South Korean military said.
  • The latest launch came ​two days ​after North Korea​ fired what South Korean defense officials said were two cruise missiles.
  • The two missiles flew 118 miles after they were fired from Hamhung, a port city on the North’s east coast, according to the South Korean military, which said its analysts were studying the trajectory and other flight data to help determine the types of missiles launched.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The latest flurry of missile tests suggests that ​North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, is both pushing ahead with his program of modernizing his country’s missile forces and trying to jolt the Biden administration out of its diplomatic slumber​ and force Washington to engage with North Korea on Mr. Kim’s terms.
  • In 2017, North Korea launched three intercontinental ballistic missiles and claimed it was capable of targeting the continental United States with nuclear warheads. Mr. Kim then entered into diplomatic talks with President Donald J. Trump.
  • In late 2019, Mr. Kim warned that he no longer felt bound by his self-imposed moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests.
  • North Korea’s latest launch came amid reports that its internet service appeared to have been hit by a second wave of outages in as many weeks, possibly caused by a so-called distributed denial-of-service cyberattack.
  • In North Korea, only a small group of elites are allowed access to the global internet. Its websites, all state-controlled, carry propaganda for Mr. Kim’s government and report developments, such as its weapons tests, that it wants the world and the North Korean people to be aware of.
woodlu

Where will the next coronavirus variant of concern come from? | The Economist - 1 views

www.economist.com/...s-variant-of-concern-come-from

politics pandemic

shared by woodlu on 07 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • Mutation is a random process, which is why successful new variants are more likely to come from places where lots of mutation is occurring
  • Airfinity’s hypothesis is that this will occur where few people have had the jab and where many suffer from weakened immune systems.
  • Airfinity’s researchers concluded that Burundi, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Yemen and Nigeria are most at risk of producing a new variant.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • By January 29th, less than 6% of people living in the four African countries had been fully vaccinated against coronavirus. In Burundi, the country the researchers found to be by far the most at risk, that figure was just 0.05%
  • Distribution remains difficult in poor countries: many lack the necessary infrastructure, including reliable electricity, to store vaccines at very low temperatures. Vaccine hesitancy is a problem, too.
  • It does not take into account the differing protection offered by various covid vaccines, natural immunity, the impact of population density on transmission or covid treatment options for immunocompromised people. Estimating the number of immunocompromised people is itself hard: the model the data was based on includes only a few conditions. Others, like severe type-1 diabetes or rheumatoid arthritis, were absent. Nor is everyone with such conditions immunocompromised. But the study still offers insight into where to look for future variants—and where to focus efforts on increasing the supply and take-up of vaccines.
woodlu

Beijing's Winter Olympics symbolise a world divided | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...pics-symbolise-a-world-divided

politics history pandemic

shared by woodlu on 04 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • No leader of a big Western power will attend the games. The pandemic has provided some with an excuse for staying away. But the main reason is the scale of the repression that Xi Jinping has unleashed since he took power in 2012.
  • In Xinjiang Mr Xi has sent about 1m people, mostly ethnic Uyghurs, to camps to “cure” them of “extremism”—a euphemism for stamping out their culture and Muslim faith.
  • Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, does not share their scruples. As tensions mount over Ukraine, he will enjoy the limelight as the most important guest and Mr Xi’s “best friend”.
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  • The West worried about China then, too. The country had been waging a fierce campaign to crush unrest in Tibet following widespread protests there. Human-rights groups were calling for boycotts. But many Western officials still believed that engaging with China might nudge it towards acceptance of the Western-led global order, or at least help tame the rise of anti-Western nationalism.
  • Mr Xi has fuelled an ugly nationalism and clearly wants a China-centric order. The motto he has chosen for the winter games alludes to this. It is shorthand for one of his favourite catchphrases, about building a “community with a shared future for mankind”.
  • They may clap, but not shout. The athletes, their support staff and journalists are being kept in a “closed loop”, isolated from the local community. Dozens of them are testing positive.
  • State media suggest that the opening ceremony is unlikely to be such a full-throated celebration of China’s greatness as was seen at the launch of the games in 2008, when thousands of costumed troops took part in grandiose performances.
  • No foreign visitors, other than invited guests, have been let into China to watch the games. Tickets are not being sold to people in the country. Fearful of recent outbreaks of covid-19, the government says it will “organise” people to attend.
  • That means a world in which countries co-operate with China regardless of its politics. Many in the West abhor the idea.
  • Protections make sense when admitting 30,000 foreigners into a country that lacks a highly effective vaccine (because it has not approved foreign jabs), and whose population has acquired no immunity from infections.
  • But they also show how far China is diverging from the rest of the world in its handling of the pandemic. China is excoriating other countries trying to co-exist with the virus for failing to protect human lives. It sees its zero-covid approach as proof of its own system’s superiority.
woodlu

Both main candidates for the South Korean presidency are reviled | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...-korean-presidency-are-reviled

politics history economics

shared by woodlu on 03 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • LL OF SOUTH KOREA’S past presidents have been tainted by corruption investigations.
  • Politicians usually manage to get elected before becoming mired in scandals.
  • Both Lee Jae-myung of the ruling Minjoo Party and Yoon Seok-youl of the conservative opposition People Power Party (PPP) have been accused of serious wrongdoing since the campaign began. The pair deny any misdeeds. Yet each camp has tried to find advantage in the other’s adversity. With just six weeks to go, the campaign has been heavy on mudslinging and light on serious debate.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Mr Lee’s biggest potential headache is an investigation into allegedly corrupt land deals in Seongnam, a middle-class suburb of Seoul, while he was its mayor. He denies any involvement and has survived a parliamentary audit into the matter.
  • Two officials who were indicted on corruption charges in the case committed suicide in December. That reduces the chances that the full tale will ever come to light.
  • The opposition portrays him as a gangster, playing up alleged links to organised crime and berating him for defending men who had killed their partners when he was a lawyer.
  • prosecutors are investigating claims that, as chief prosecutor, Mr Yoon abetted an underling who allegedly helped the PPP file criminal complaints against Minjoo party lawmakers in the run-up to elections in 2020 (he denies the allegations).
  • Mr Yoon’s numerous gaffes include claims that “poor or uneducated” people do not feel the need for freedom and that those fighting against South Korea’s military dictatorship in the 1980s did not really care about democracy.
  • Mr Yoon’s family is an additional liability. His mother-in-law has received a three-year prison sentence for medical fraud. His wife, Kim Keon-hee, has admitted that she forged most of her CV when applying for jobs as an art curator.
  • This is particularly awkward given that Mr Yoon oversaw the investigation that led to the jailing of the wife of Cho Kuk, Mr Moon’s disgraced justice minister, for forging documents to help her daughter’s university application.
woodlu

What Spotify should learn from the Joe Rogan affair | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...21807509

culture policy

shared by woodlu on 03 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • Yet he has broken no laws, nor even, Spotify seems to believe, the company’s content rules.
  • As a matter of principle, Mr Rogan should be able to speak. As a commercial question, Spotify has made a publisher’s gamble that his wildly popular show will attract more customers than it repels—just as Netflix recently bet that Dave Chappelle’s risqué comedy show would tickle more subscribers than it turned off. The gamble is, in the most literal sense, Spotify’s business.
  • The result is that the content mix on audio platforms is starting to look less like the curated library of Netflix and more like the infinite hotch-potch of YouTube. Unlike other social networks, however, audio platforms have little experience in moderating content.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Most of the 3.2m podcasters on Spotify are not like Mr Rogan, who sold his show to the company in 2020 for a reported $100m. The vast majority are amateurs,
  • The vaccines bust-up is their first taste of an argument that other social networks have grappled with for years and which is now coming to audio.
  • On the one hand, most consumers want protection from the most harmful content, the best example being the incitement to violence, which even America’s First Amendment condemns.
  • On the other hand, few want tech executives to become censors. Plenty of good music features bad language, disturbing ideas and violence. Some podcasts will stoke controversy. Free speech must be the default.
  • The starting point is transparency, which the audio platforms sorely lack.
  • Apple, the next-biggest streamer, has content guidelines for podcasts but a rough style guide for music. Amazon, the third-largest, has published even less in the way of rules. And whereas Facebook and co release regular reports on what content they have taken down and why, the audio streamers are opaque.
  • Amid the Rogan crisis, Spotify casually mentioned that it had removed 20,000 other podcast episodes over covid misinformation. What else is it taking down? No one knows
  • But clear, predictable rules can protect speech as much as containing it. Rules determine not just what is banned, but also help defend what is allowed.
  • The social networks are far from perfect, but rules that are open to public scrutiny can gradually be improved on.
  • By contrast, the failure to spell out what is and isn’t allowed risks having a chilling effect, in which people steer clear of controversy for fear of triggering the unpredictable censor.
  • The lack of well-defined rules encourages an ongoing free-for-all of the sort seen this week, in which critics hope that by withdrawing their business or shouting loudly enough, they can force companies to cancel acts they disapprove of.
  • As platforms like Spotify open their gates to more user-generated content, the same free-speech battles are coming to audio. Streamers should get their rules ready now, and prepare for the next, inevitable explosion.
woodlu

Purpose and the employee | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...purpose-and-the-employee

culture

shared by woodlu on 02 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • The very idea of a purposeful employee conjures up a specific type of person. They crave a meaningful job that changes society for the better. When asked about their personal passion projects, they don’t say “huh?” or “playing Wordle”. They are concerned about their legacy and almost certainly have a weird diet.
  • Bain identifies six different archetypes, far too few to reflect the complexity of individuals but a lot better than a single lump of employees.
  • “Pioneers” are the people on a mission to change the world; “artisans” are interested in mastering a specific skill; “operators” derive a sense of meaning from life outside work; “strivers” are more focused on pay and status; “givers” want to do work that directly improves the lives of others; and “explorers” seek out new experiences.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Having a purpose does not necessarily mean a desire to found a startup, head up the career ladder or log into virtual Davos. Some people are fired up by the prospect of learning new skills or of deepening their expertise
  • executives were far likelier than other respondents to say that their purpose was fulfilled by their job.
  • Pioneers in particular are more likely to cluster in management roles. The Bain survey finds that 25% of American executives match this archetype, but only 9% of the overall US sample does so.
  • Others derive purpose from specific kinds of responsibility.
  • People who had been working as station agents before their elevation were generally satisfied by their new roles. But supervisors who had previously worked as train drivers were noticeably less content: they felt their roles had less meaning when they no longer had direct responsibility for the well-being of passengers.
  • Firms need to think more creatively about career progression than promoting people into management jobs. IBM, for example, has a fellowship programme designed to give a handful of its most gifted technical employees their own form of recognition each year.
  • There is some logic here. Employees with a calling could well be more dedicated. But that doesn’t necessarily make them better at the job. And teams are likelier to perform well if they blend types of employees: visionaries to inspire, specialists to deliver and all those people who want to do a job well but not think about it at weekends. Like mayonnaise, the secret is in the mixture.
woodlu

A war in Ukraine could have global consequences | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...could-have-global-consequences

politics history crisis

shared by woodlu on 27 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Russia would also suffer heavy sanctions. Its banks would be harshly penalised and its economy deprived of crucial American high-tech components.
  • Sanctions might be lighter, but they would still be painful. Russia’s decoupling from the West would still accelerate. Moreover, if the government in Kyiv remained independent, it would only redouble its efforts to join the West.
  • And the subjugation of Ukraine would come at a strategic cost to Russia. Every country in its shadow would revise its security calculations. NATO would reinforce the defences of its eastern members. Sweden and Finland might join the alliance.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • For Mr Putin, the economic consequences of war would be survivable, at least in the short term. His central bank has $600bn in reserves—more than enough to weather sanctions. But the political gains in Ukraine could easily be overwhelmed by setbacks at home which, as Mr Putin knows better than anyone, is where his fate will ultimately be determined.
  • Perhaps, then, he will start with a less ambitious invasion. However, a limited war could claim many lives and be hard to contain.
  • Perhaps Mr Putin is planning a full-scale invasion, with Russian forces thrusting deep into Ukraine to seize the capital, Kyiv, and overthrow the government. Or he may seek to annex more territory in eastern Ukraine, carving out a corridor linking Russia with Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula Mr Putin grabbed in 2014. Then again, he may want a small war, in which Russia “saves” Kremlin-backed separatists in Donbas, an eastern region of Ukraine, from supposed Ukrainian atrocities—and, at the same time, degrades Ukraine’s armed forces.
  • The global order has long been buttressed by the norm that countries do not redraw other countries’ borders by force of arms. When Iraq seized Kuwait in 1990 an international coalition led by America kicked it out.
  • if he seizes a bigger slice of Ukraine, it is hard to see him suddenly concluding that the time has come to make peace with NATO.
  • More likely, he would push on, helped by the newly established presence of Russian troops in Belarus to probe NATO’s collective-security pact, under which an attack on one member is an attack on all.
  • Not only would he relish the chance to hollow out America’s commitments to Europe, but he has also come to rely on demonising an enemy abroad to justify his harsh rule at home.
  • The likelihood of China invading Taiwan would surely rise. The regimes in Iran and Syria would conclude they are freer to use violence with impunity. If might is right, more of the world’s disputed borders would be fought over.
  • West should respond in three ways: deter, keep talking and prepare. To deter Mr Putin, Western powers—especially Germany—should stop equivocating, present a united front and make clear that they are willing to pay the price for imposing sanctions on Russia and also to support those Ukrainians who are ready to resist an occupying army.
  • Meanwhile, diplomats should keep talking, looking for common ground on, say, arms control and pressing for a face-saving climbdown that Mr Putin and his captive media would be free to spin however they wish.
  • And Europe should prepare for the next crisis by making clear that its energy transition will cut its dependence on Russian gas by using storage, diversification and nuclear power.
  • Russia would benefit from better, closer, peaceful relations with the West. Such ties would be available if Mr Putin didn’t behave so abominably. Only he benefits from discord, since he can tell Russians they are under siege and need a strongman to defend them. But even the wiliest strongman can miscalculate. Invading Ukraine could ultimately prove Mr Putin’s undoing, if it turns into a bloody quagmire or makes Russians poorer, angrier and more eager for change.
woodlu

Corruption is getting worse in many poor countries | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...g-worse-in-many-poor-countries

politics culture history policy

shared by woodlu on 27 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • the NGO scores countries from 0 to 100 based on perceptions of corruption in the public sector, with 100 indicating a squeaky clean record. In the latest ranking, released on January 25th, almost 70% of countries score below 50.
  • Poor countries tend to do worse than rich ones, partly because poverty makes corruption worse and partly because corruption makes poverty worse.
  • Some high-scoring democracies showed “significant deterioration” over the past year too—so much so that America dropped out of the 25 least corrupt countries for the first time.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • But the biggest drops were in countries whose governments muffled the press and suppressed civil liberties under the cover of covid-19 prevention.
  • Belarus has dropped by six points since 2020, when a rigged election saw Alexander Lukashenko become president. The killing of human-rights defenders under Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and the strangling of the free press in Nicaragua and Venezuela, contributed to low scores.
  • Countries usually move by only a point or two from one year to the next, if at all. But regime change can prompt faster improvement: Armenia’s score has risen by 14 points since 2017.
  • Poor countries, especially those in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, are singled out for the bad behaviour of their governments. Yet companies based in rich countries often facilitate corruption abroad.
  • Some countries at least enforce anti-bribery laws. Britain and Switzerland are among the “active” enforcers while Germany, Norway and Sweden are “moderate” ones, according to Transparency International.
woodlu

Why Russia has never accepted Ukrainian independence | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ccepted-ukrainian-independence

politics history crisis

shared by woodlu on 26 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Yeltsin did not just want what Mr Kravchuk had achieved in Ukraine for economic reasons. Independence would, he felt, be crucial to consolidating his power and pursuing liberal democracy. And Ukraine—never, until the 19th century, a well-defined territory, and home to various ethnic enclaves and deep cultural divides—becoming an independent unitary state within its Soviet borders set a precedent for Russia to define itself the same way, and refuse independence to restive territories such as Chechnya.
  • That was why the Russian republic was one of the first three polities in the world to recognise it as an independent state.
  • if a world in which Ukraine, Russia and indeed Belarus were completely independent from the Soviet Union was attractive, one in which they were not tied to each other in some other way was very troubling to a Russian like Yeltsin.
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • It was not just that Ukraine was the second-most-populous and economically powerful of the remaining republics, its industries tightly integrated with Russia’s. Nor was it the question of what was to happen to the nuclear forces stationed there but still notionally under the command of Soviet authorities in Moscow. It went deeper.
  • The need to let the Baltic states go was clear—and when they left the Soviet Union in 1990, Solzhenitsyn, Yeltsin and most of Russia rallied against revanchist attempts to keep them in. Much the same was true of Central Asia and the Caucasus; they were colonies. Belarus and Ukraine were part of the metropolitan core. The bonds which tied “Little Russians” (ie Ukrainians), “Great Russians” and Belarusians together, Solzhenitsyn argued, must be defended by all means short of war.
  • For centuries Ukraine had anchored Russia’s identity. As the centre of the storied medieval confederation known as Kyivan Rus, which stretched from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, Kyiv was seen as the cradle of Russian and Belarusian culture and the font of their Orthodox faith.
  • Being united with Ukraine was fundamental to Russia’s feeling of itself as European.
  • Instead the shooting down of planes, along with the violation of Ukrainian sovereignty, the seizure of Crimea, the reassertion that the legacy of Kyivian Rus meant the nations must be shackled together and the reversion of Belarus to dictatorship—that all came later, a sequence of events which led, 30 Decembers later, to 70,000 or more Russian troops on the border of Ukraine and, in a ghastly sideshow, thousands of Middle Eastern refugees stuck in the Belovezh forest itself. The once seemingly settled question of post-Soviet relations between the three nations has once again become an overriding geopolitical concern.
  • The agreement reached, in draft form, at 4am on Sunday morning achieved those aims with a rather neat piece of casuistry. For Russia simply to have followed Ukraine into independence would have left moot the question of the Soviet Union’s residual powers. So instead they abolished the union itself.
  • The Soviet Union had been formed, in 1922, through a joint declaration by four Soviet republics—the Transcaucasian republic and the three represented at Viskuli. With the Transcaucasian republic long since dismembered, the presidents dissolved by fiat what their forebears had bound together. In its place they put a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)—Mr Kravchuk would not allow any use of the word “union”—with few clearly defined powers which any post-Soviet state would be welcome to join. There was to be no special relationship between the Slavic three.
  • The importance of Ukraine was not an abstract matter to him. Like Solzhenitsyn, he was the child of a Ukrainian mother and a Russian father. He grew up singing Ukrainian songs and reading Gogol, who reimagined his native country’s folk magic as rich poetry after moving to St Petersburg. The Soviet Union had meant that Mr Gorbachev and others like him, whatever their parentage, could partake in both identities.
  • disassembling a multi-ethnic empire of 250m people was still a subject of huge trepidation. As Solzhenitsyn had written in “Rebuilding Russia”, “The clock of communism has stopped chiming. But its concrete edifice has not yet crumbled. And we must take care not to be crushed beneath its rubble instead of gaining liberty.” The fact that in that rubble, if rubble there was to be, there would be the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, spread between four separate countries (the three Slavic ones and Kazakhstan), frightened statesmen around the world.
  • “the Kyivan myth of origins…became the cornerstone of Muscovy’s ideology as the polity evolved from a Mongol dependency to a sovereign state and then an empire.” Russian empire required Ukraine; and Russia had no history other than one of empire. The idea of Kyiv as just the capital of a neighbouring country was unimaginable to Russians.
  • When, as the economy worsened, Mr Gorbachev went to President George Bush for $10bn-15bn, Bush’s top concern was the nuclear threat. The same worry had led him to oppose Ukraine’s secession in a speech given just before the August coup. “Do you realise what you’ve done?” Mr Gorbachev demanded of Mr Shushkevich. “Once Bush finds out about this, what then?”
  • Yeltsin was overcome by a sense of lightness and freedom. “In signing this agreement,” he later recalled, “Russia was choosing a different path, a path of internal development rather than an imperial one…She was throwing off the traditional image of ‘potentate of half the world’, of armed conflict with Western civilisation, and the role of policeman in the resolution of ethnic conflicts. The last hour of the Soviet empire was chiming.” Maybe the convoluted interdependency of Russia and Ukraine did not matter as much as people thought; maybe democratic nationhood was enough. Maybe the problem had been a failure of imagination.
  • His foreign supporters stood by him too, and the following year a security agreement saw America, Britain and Russia guarantee respect for Ukraine’s integrity within its existing borders—which is to say, including Crimea—in exchange for its giving up the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the Soviet Union. Ukraine was grateful; the West saw further evidence of a transition towards a liberal, democratic Russian state.
  • Yeltsin’s unburdened moment among the trees had been that of a man who did not want to, and did not have to, rule an empire. He consciously rejected not just the Soviet Union’s ideology and central planning, but also the tools of statecraft that had held it together—repression and lies. To him, the market economy was a condition for freedom, not a substitute for it. His successor, Vladimir Putin, also embraced capitalism. But he saw no need for it to bring freedom with it, and had no problem with a state run through repression and lies. He thus reversed Yeltsin’s democratic project and, though not at first territorially imperialist himself, took the country down the other side of Brzezinski’s fork. It is that which puts Russia and its Slavic neighbours in such a parlous position today.
  • But when pollsters asked people what they expected of their incoming president, reducing this corruption was not their highest priority. The standing of the state was. Russians wanted a strong state and one respected abroad. As Mr Putin’s successful manifesto put it,
  • “A strong state is not an anomaly to fight against. Society desires the restoration of the guiding, organising role of the state.” When, shortly after his election, Mr Putin restored the Soviet anthem, it was not as a symbol of reverting to central planning or rebuilding an empire. It was a signal that the strong state was back. State power did not mean the rule of law or a climate of fairness. It did not have, or need, an ideology. But it did have to take on some of the “geopolitical reality” that the meeting in Viskuli had stripped from the Soviet Union.
  • The strong state which provided an effective cover for kleptocracy in Mr Putin’s Russia was not an option for Mr Kuchma’s similarly oligarchic Ukraine. It had no real history as a state, let alone a strong one. Its national myth was one of Cossacks riding free. So in Ukraine the stealing was instead dressed up in terms of growing into that distinctive national identity. The essence of the argument was simple. As Mr Kuchma put it in a book published in 2003, “Ukraine is not Russia”.
  • And the West, spooked by the increased belligerence Russia had shown in Georgia, was taking a keen interest in Ukraine. The EU offered the country an association agreement which would allow Ukrainians to enjoy the benefits of a deep and comprehensive free-trade agreement and free travel across Europe.
  • Mr Kuchma could have used force against them; Mr Putin encouraged him to do so. But various considerations, including Western opprobrium, argued against it.
  • Perhaps most fundamental was his sense that, as a Ukrainian president, he could not thus divide the Ukrainian nation. He stayed his hand and allowed a second vote. Viktor Yushchenko, pro-Western and Ukrainian-speaking, beat Viktor Yanukovych, a corrupt thug from Donbas (the easternmost part of the country and, save Crimea, the most ethnically Russian) who had claimed victory the first time round. The “Orange revolution”, as the protest came to be known, was a serious setback for Mr Putin—all the more so when a similar uprising in Georgia, the Rose revolution, put another pro-Western state on his borders.
  • Mr Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 came at a time when the global financial crisis had choked the Russian economy.
  • The degree to which Ukraine was not Russia became clearer, though, in 2004, when a rigged presidential election saw hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians protesting in the streets.
  • A year earlier a group of economists had told Mr Putin that a customs union with Ukraine would be a smart move. What was more, such a deal would preclude Ukraine’s association with the EU. Pursuing it was thus a way for Mr Putin to achieve three things at once: push back against the West; give Russia a victory that would prove its importance; and help the economy.
  • Mr Yanukovych did not want to be Russia’s vassal. Nor did he share western Europe’s values—especially when applied to matters of anti-corruption. But eventually he had to choose a side. At a secret meeting in Moscow in November 2013, as European leaders were preparing to sign their agreement with Ukraine, he was promised a $15bn credit line with $3bn paid up front. He ditched the European deal. And at 4am on November 30th his goons bludgeoned a few dozen students protesting against his betrayal in Kyiv’s Independence Square, known as Maidan.
  • This was far worse, for Mr Putin, than the Orange revolution. Ukraine had made geopolitical reality, to coin a phrase, of the independence it had claimed two decades before. Its demands for dignity resonated with Russia’s middle class and some of its elite, making it a genuinely dangerous example. So Mr Putin annexed Crimea and started a war in Donbas.
  • According to Russian state media, Mr Putin was not undermining a revolution against a corrupt regime quite like his own; he was protecting the Russian people and language from extermination at the hands of western Ukrainian fascists. The relevance to Russia of the issues that had led to what was being called in Ukraine “the revolution of dignity” was thus obscured
  • the annexation was supported by nearly 90% of the Russian population.
  • tract published in both Russian, Ukrainian and English in July 2021, Mr Putin described how the inheritors of “Ancient Rus” had been torn apart by hostile powers and treacherous elites, and how Ukraine had been turned from being “not Russia” into an anti-Russia, an entity fundamentally incompatible with Russia’s goals.
  • All baloney. Mr Putin did not attack Ukraine in order to honour or recreate an empire, whether Russian or Soviet. He attacked it to protect his own rule; the history is window-dressing. At the same time, following Brzezinski, for Russia to be something other than a democracy it has to at least be able to think of itself as an empire. And in Russia, empire requires Ukraine—now more deeply opposed to union with Russia than ever before.
  • “The Russian state, with its severe and inflexible interior, survived exclusively because of its tireless expansion beyond its borders. It has long lost the knowledge [of]—how to survive otherwise.”
  • The only way Russia can escape chaos, he argued, is to export it to a neighbouring country.
  • What he did not say was that Mr Putin’s export of chaos, and violence, to that end has severed the ties between the Slavic nations and their peoples in a way which the collapse of the Soviet empire did not.
  • Ukraine is not a province, or a colony; it is a beleaguered nation in a messy, perilous process of self-realisation. Belarus, for its part, is a grim illustration of how “severe and inflexible” things have to get in order to stop such aspirations welling up. Mr Lukashenko has met a nationalist resurgence with ever more brutal and well-orchestrated repression—a bloody irony given that he helped start it.
  • Like Ukraine, Belarus had no real history of statehood; all that Mr Lukashenko had given it since 1994 was a rough approximation of its Soviet past, fascism with Stalinist trappings. But the idea of something better had taken hold.
  • But change is afoot; it can be seen in the way that demography increasingly trumps regional allegiance. Even in the east nearly 60% of those born since 1991 see their future as in the EU—countrywide, the figure is 75%. All told 90% want Ukraine to stay independent, and nearly 80% are optimistic about its future.
  • That is why Alexei Navalny was first poisoned and is now jailed. As the leader of the opposition to Mr Putin he has championed the idea of Russia not as an empire but as a civic nation: a state for the people. It is why Russia has recently become much more repressive. It is why Mr Putin cannot tolerate a true peace on his borders.
  • Unlike Ukrainians and Belarusians, Russians cannot separate themselves from Russia, so they have to change it from within. They cannot do that in a forest retreat, or with a few phone calls. But only through such change will they become truly independent of the Soviet Union.
woodlu

North Korea Says It Will Skip Beijing Olympics Because of the Pandemic - The New York T... - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...th-korea-beijing-olympics.html

politics culture policy

shared by woodlu on 24 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • North Korea said on Friday that it would not participate in the Beijing Winter Olympics because of the coronavirus pandemic and moves by “hostile forces.”
  • Its no-show at the Beijing ​Games would deprive South Korea of a rare opportunity to establish official contact with the ​North.
  • the country’s Olympic Committee and its ministry of sports wished Beijing a successful Games even though “the U.S. and its vassal forces are getting evermore undisguised in their moves against China aimed at preventing the successful opening of the Olympics,”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • although North Korea “could not take part in the Olympics due to the hostile forces’ moves and the worldwide pandemic,” it “would fully support the Chinese comrades in all their work to hold a splendid and wonderful Olympic festival.”
  • The 2022 Winter Olympics has been hit by a series of diplomatic boycotts from Australia, Britain, the United States and other countries as human rights groups and Western governments have accused China of atrocities in its Xinjiang region.
  • Mr. Kim used the North’s participation in Pyeongchang ​as ​​a signal to start diplomacy after a series of nuclear and long-range missile tests. Soon, inter-Korean dialogue followed, leading to three summit meetings between Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon. Mr. Kim also met with President Donald J. Trump three times.
  • It has rejected outside aid and shut its borders, reportedly placing its guards there under “shoot to kill” orders. The country has claimed no Covid-19 cases, and it has rejected offers of millions of vaccine doses, leaving its population vulnerable to explosive outbreaks should its borders reopen.
  • Officials in South Korea had hoped the Beijing Olympics could provide a venue where officials from the United States, China and the two Koreas could meet.
  • The North is one of China’s closest allies. It depends on China for most of its external trade while struggling under heavy sanctions imposed by the United Nations for its nuclear weapons development
  • But since the collapse of Mr. Kim’s diplomacy with Mr. Trump in 2019, North Korea has shunned official contacts with South Korea or the United States. The pandemic has deepened its diplomatic isolation and economic difficulties. ​On Wednesday, it launched what it called a hypersonic missile.
woodlu

The parable of Boris Johnson | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...the-parable-of-boris-johnson

politics history crisis culture

shared by woodlu on 20 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • In the coming days or weeks, he may be kicked out of office by his own MPs. More likely, he will cling on in 10 Downing Street under the permanent threat of eviction. Either way, he no longer controls the fate of his own premiership.
  • Downing Street indulged in routine late-night booze-ups while the rest of the country was under strict lockdown. The prime minister’s disingenuous attempts to wriggle out of being blamed did him no good—indeed, they served only to reveal his and his wife’s own carousing.
  • Double standards at the top tend to corrupt the whole of public life. More important, it raises two other of Mr Johnson’s attributes that plague post-Brexit Britain.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • The first is Mr Johnson’s childish lack of seriousness about the business of government. Downing Street’s fightback this week, supposedly under the title “Operation Red Meat”, launched a fusillade of Tory-pleasing pledges to abolish the BBC licence fee and stop asylum-seekers from reaching Britain across the English Channel.
  • The government says it will get the Royal Navy to police the seas and send applicants away, reportedly to be processed in Ghana or Rwanda. None of that bluster survived the briefest encounter with reality.
  • This lack of seriousness has infected the government.
  • This week the Tories took credit for the fact that Britain has the fastest annual growth rate in the G7 and that output regained its pre-pandemic level in November, ahead of forecasts. But they have not grappled with Brexit’s probable long-term hit to productivity, of about 4%.
  • Over five years, Britain’s growth rate has been poor. Inflation, which reached 5.4% in the 12 months to December, a 30-year high, means real average weekly pay is less than in 2007. Business investment is lower than before the referendum.
  • unveiled plenty of big economy-boosting ideas, including levelling up prosperity across Britain, tearing down planning restrictions and making Britain a science superpower.
  • The big ideas are either still slogans or have been quietly abandoned
  • At the same time, the Tories have pressed ahead with crowd-pleasing, illiberal bills that trample civil liberties and restrict the rights of new citizens. It is a mark of Mr Johnson’s unseriousness that he tosses aside his vaunted classical liberal beliefs as carelessly as an empty bottle.
  • To get Brexit done, Mr Johnson agreed on a customs border in the Irish Sea and then proceeded to pretend he hadn’t.
  • He argued that Britain would escape the regulatory straitjacket of the European Union, but he has avoided doing much deregulating—which, however swashbuckling it sounds in a headline, tends in real life to be unpopular.
  • To prosper, Britain needs decent relations with the EU, its closest neighbour and biggest trading partner. But Mr Johnson relishes picking fights instead, because he likes to play to the gallery.
  • Mr Johnson has crumbled because he repeatedly failed to tell the truth to Parliament and the nation about Downing Street’s bacchanals.
  • First he declared that his staff did not hold parties. When that was disproved, he denied knowing about them. When it emerged that he had been at one, he said he had not realised they counted as parties. And when it was claimed that he had been warned they did, he seemed to suggest that he misunderstood the rules his own government had drafted. It is a pattern that stretches back to his time as a journalist, when he lied to his editors; to when he was an editor, when he lied to his proprietor; and to when he was a shadow minister, when he lied to his party’s leader.
  • almost half of Conservative Party members still believe that Mr Johnson’s account of Number 10’s revels is true, compared with just 13% of all voters in a poll published a few days earlier.
  • the excesses of Partygate have shown that the post-Brexit Tory party has lost touch with reality.
  • It is a strength of the parliamentary system that MPs can bring about a rapid change of direction. If the Conservative Party is to find its way, it will need a new leader. If reforms are to take root, they will need detailed planning and sustained application.
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