China talks of building a “digital Silk Road”

CHINA’S vague but much-vaunted Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been providing buzzword fodder for government leaders and official sloganeers since 2013, when the country launched the scheme to extend its political and economic influence abroad by investing in infrastructure and other big projects. The “belt” refers to an overland push across Eurasia and the “road” to a maritime route to South Asia and beyond. But in recent months some new rhetoric (consistent in its challenging use of metaphor) has been promoting a virtual dimension: a “digital Silk Road”.

Xi Jinping, China’s president, has revealed few details, beyond that it will encompass quantum computing, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, big data and cloud storage. In April he said it would involve helping other countries to build digital infrastructure and develop internet security. The digital Silk Road will help to create “a community of common destiny in cyberspace”, suggests Chen Zhaoxiong, a...Continue reading

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One of China’s poorest provinces wants to be a tech hub

A ROBOT taller than the Arc de Triomphe towers over a new theme park on the edge of Guiyang, the capital of the southern province of Guizhou. Attendants at Oriental Science Fiction Valley dress in blue-and-silver space suits. They greet visitors with salutes used by the Vulcans in “Star Trek”. The main attraction is an indoor rollercoaster. It simulates an air battle over a futuristic city with the help of virtual-reality headsets that are handed out to every rider. Outside, a troop of black-clad security guards armed with big sticks adds a genuine air of menace.

Such space-age fantasy appears incongruous in Guizhou. The mountainous region is one of China’s poorest provinces (see map). More than 4m of its 35m inhabitants live on less than $1.90 a day, according to the government. In 2016 less than 45% of them used the internet. Five years ago, however, Guizhou started selling itself as a good place for big companies to store vast reservoirs of data. Now it is experiencing a tech boom. Beneath a...Continue reading

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Expert preparing for 'CATASTROPHIC event' which could HIT Italy and European banks

EXPERTS have warned Italy's political crisis will continue to affect the stability of the global market, with economist Ian Shepherdson warning investors to prepare for a "catastrophic event" that could rock Italian and European banks.

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John Bolton, the world’s hope

JOHN BOLTON is not well-liked in Washington. A warmonger and bully, the national security adviser is disdainful of the bipartisan foreign-policy world and the governing institutions its members cycle in and out of. That he oversees one of them is typical of the plate-smashing Trump administration. Yet few doubt that Mr Bolton is a wily operator. As President Donald Trump’s third national security adviser—and the first with previous experience of civilian bureaucracy—he has already demonstrated his mastery of the inter-agency policy process. His role in derailing, at least temporarily, Mr Trump’s planned meeting with Kim Jong Un in Singapore therefore demands scrutiny.

Mr Bolton suggested the “Libya model” was what America wanted from North Korea. That was not illogical. Mr Trump had demanded Mr Kim take the same step as Muammar Qaddafi in 2003: denuclearisation in return for sanctions relief. Yet the fact that Qaddafi was later bombed from power by a NATO intervention, dragged from his...Continue reading

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Eight months after Hurricane Maria, the human toll is still unclear

MARIA was a brief visitor to Puerto Rico. The category-4 hurricane made landfall at 6am on September 20th last year and 11 hours later she was gone. She left a trail of destruction. Some 300,000 people were displaced; and the death toll? No one knows for sure.

The official estimate of 64 deaths seemed measly by contrast. That number includes only those directly killed by the hurricane, from flying debris and the like. Importantly, it excludes indirect deaths: disruptions to medical care or hurricane-induced suicides, for example. A back-of-the envelope calculation by The Economist of excess mortality above that expected by deaths in previous years puts the toll at about 1,200.

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Some good news from the fight against opioids

SOME 382,000 Americans have overdosed on opioids—a group of drugs that includes prescription painkillers, heroin and synthetics—since the year 2000. That is greater than the number of American combat deaths in the second world war and the Korean and Vietnam wars combined. Despite this epic toll, there are early signs that at least one battle may be ending.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provide the best data for tracking the opioid epidemic. Its latest data, which cover the 12 months to the end of October 2017, show that opioids were responsible for some 46,041 deaths (see chart) in that period. While provisional and subject to revision, that number was at least not dissimilar to the previous month’s figure of 46,202.

Two trends emerge from the numbers. The first gives cause for cheer: deaths from heroin and prescription opioids are falling. Combined, the two drugs were responsible for 29,600 deaths in the 12 months to October 2017, 4% below their...Continue reading

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American border officials are separating migrant families

MIRIAN and her 18-month-old son fled Honduras after soldiers threw tear gas into their home. They requested asylum at the American border with Mexico five weeks later. Mirian surrendered her Honduran ID card and her son’s birth certificate, which listed her as his mother, whereupon immigration officers took her son. “My son was crying as I put him in the seat,” Mirian told a court. “I did not even have the chance to comfort my son, because the officers slammed the door shut as soon as he was in his seat. I was crying too. I cry even now when I think about that moment.”

Since October, hundreds of children have been taken from their parents at the border and put in separate facilities. In March 2017, John Kelly, then secretary of homeland security, suggested his department would do that “to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network”. The administration has since backed away from the rationale of deterrence.

But this April Jeff Sessions, the...Continue reading

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Can a new mayor fix San Francisco’s housing and homelessness problems?

THE cliché of luxury penthouses and Gucci stores cheek-by-jowl with filth and poverty is usually reserved for poor-world entrepôts. But the contrasts in San Francisco—the richest city in America by median household income—could in places rival those in Mumbai. Fresh human excrement and discarded needles lie scattered on the streets of the Tenderloin district just a few blocks from the five-star hotels of Union Square in the city’s downtown. Complaints about shit in the street more than tripled, to 21,000, in the eight years to 2017; for needles the number shot up from 290 in 2009 to nearly 6,400 in 2017. The city’s sanitation department spends half its $60m street-cleaning budget on the stuff. Meanwhile, a typical one-bedroom flat now rents for $3,440 per month, according to Zumper, a rental website—the highest figure in the country. The median house price has nearly doubled in the past five years, to $1.6m.

On June 5th San Franciscans will elect a new mayor. The special election,...Continue reading

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California considers taking custody of some street people

IN 1967 Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, signed into law the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, an ambitious reform of the state’s mental-health laws. It was part of a wave of changes that closed asylums in the state and around the country. Half a century later, the state legislature is reviewing those decisions.

In February Scott Wiener, a state senator who represents San Francisco, introduced Senate Bill 1045. The bill aims to make it easier for his home city, as well as Los Angeles, to oblige chronically homeless people who suffer from mental illness or addiction to accept the appointment by a judge of a person or institution to look after them (a concept called “conservatorship”). London Breed, who is running for mayor of San Francisco, has backed the proposal.

The bill would affect between 40 and 60 homeless people in San Francisco, reckons Barbara Garcia of the city’s Public Health Department. That is less than 1% of its official homeless population. Along...Continue reading

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People in India often despair of their democracy

IN THE spring of 1947 the leaders of India’s independence movement reached a fateful decision. The right to vote in the soon-to-be-born Indian republic, they agreed, would no longer be restricted as under the British Raj, but open to every adult citizen. The move created the world’s largest democracy, and also burdened it with a colossal challenge. As Ornit Shani, an Israeli historian, deftly explains in a new book, the logistics alone were daunting. With more than 170m eligible voters to register—some 85% of them illiterate back then—it took tens of thousands of workers two full years just to compile the rolls for India’s first general election, conducted in 1951. At the time Rajendra Prasad, a politician who was to become the country’s first president, made a back-of-envelope calculation. Bound in one volume, he reckoned, the voter lists would be 200 metres thick.

Today that “phone book” is five times thicker. At India’s next general election, to be held sometime in the coming...Continue reading

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The legacy of Germany’s student protests in 1968

IT RESEMBLES just another Berlin courtyard—some straggly bushes and a bike rack—but Krumme Strasse 66 can claim to be a birthplace of today’s Germany. It was 1967; the Shah of Iran was at a performance of “The Magic Flute” at the nearby Opera; crowds of protesters had been forced into side streets; a shot rang out. Benno Ohnesorg, a 26-year-old, lay bleeding on the ground, his head cradled by another student in a photo that shocked the young Federal Republic and radicalised the movement for the demonstrations that swept German universities over the following year. Ohnesorg’s killer had been an unmarked police officer, later acquitted. This convinced protesters that, long after 1945, authoritarian violence still lurked in German society.

In Germany “1968” means more than just such events. It is a symbol—a “memory marker”, says Armin Nassehi, the author of a new book on the subject—that also denotes the wider downgrading of values like tradition, deference and unabashed national...Continue reading

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Uproar over new speed limits on French country roads

The good old days

PASSING through wide fields of wheat and potatoes, route D915 links the northern French port of Dieppe with Pontoise, north-west of Paris. On a straight stretch of single-carriageway road, lined with sycamores, cars tear along above the 90kph (55mph) speed limit, dodging oncoming traffic to overtake. Periodically, as on other similar roads, vehicles collide, killing their occupants. To curb the country’s accident rate, the French government is reducing the speed limit on country roads from July 1st. In rural France, few recent policies have prompted such indignation.

Speeding is the main cause of fatal traffic accidents in France, most of which, as elsewhere, take place on single-lane roads that lack a central reservation. Cars crash either into each other, or into one of the shade-providing trees that line many country routes. It was on just such a road that Albert Camus, at the age of 46, and his publisher, Michel Gallimard, were killed when their car...Continue reading

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Turkey’s opposition scents success against Erdogan

VICTORY for Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development (AK) party in presidential and parliamentary elections on June 24th should have been a foregone conclusion. The strongman enjoys unwavering support from his religious base, indirect control over practically all big news outlets, and emergency powers that allow him to rule by decree, lock up some critics and make others think twice before speaking.

The second-largest opposition party in parliament, the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), has been in effect banished from the airwaves. Its candidate for president, one of Mr Erdogan’s most outspoken rivals, Selahattin Demirtas, was arrested in 2016 on trumped-up terrorism charges, and is leading his campaign from a prison cell.

The president’s opponents are still the underdogs in the coming votes, to be held early and for the first time simultaneously. But they seem to have picked up momentum—and found the right candidates. Muharrem Ince, the nominee...Continue reading

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France’s strikes may now be starting to ebb

The last gasp?

ONE protester carried a placard depicting Emmanuel Macron as a Nazi. Another produced an effigy of the French president swinging from the gallows. As France prepares for its tenth week of strikes, the mood among protesters on the streets has ranged from festive to violent. On May 26th some 190 rallies and marches were held across the country in an attempt to create a “popular tide” against Mr Macron’s reforms of the railways, universities and much else besides.

At first glance, the pressure on the French president remains intense. Train drivers and other railwaymen are due to continue their rolling strike, on two days out of every five, until June 28th, as planned. On May 29th over half of train drivers were still observing the strike, thereby continuing to make life miserable for commuters. Last week civil servants also took to the streets to defend their special status. Fresh complaints by students arose after half of the 800,000 applicants to...Continue reading

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Ireland votes solidly to allow abortion

IN 1979, when Pope John Paul II visited the Republic of Ireland, 1.2m people attended his open-air mass in Phoenix Park in Dublin—more than a third of the population of the country at that time. As many again turned up at other smaller venues.

Four years later Catholic clergy and lay groups held back the tide of social reform sweeping across much of the rest of Europe by getting two-thirds of voters to back the eighth amendment to the constitution, banning abortion in any circumstances, including rape, incest and even an imminent threat to the life of the mother. Three years after that, in 1986, the same religious coalition persuaded 63% of voters to retain a constitutional ban on divorce.

By then, though, the power of the church had already passed its zenith. In 1985 the sale of condoms, previously tightly restricted, was liberalised despite the church’s best efforts. Divorce was permitted in 1995.

In 2012 Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old dentist, died of septic...Continue reading

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How welfare reform has hurt America’s poorest children

LAST month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing federal agencies to find ways to add new work requirements to welfare programmes and strengthen those that exist. He said that a bipartisan welfare reform made in 1996 had made progress in ending “long-term government independence” but that welfare designed to help families often still had the opposite effect, trapping many, “especially children, in poverty.” Tying welfare more closely to work would, the president said, “increase self-sufficiency, well-being and economic mobility.”

For some, perhaps. But it will also prevent welfare programmes from targeting many of the families who need them most. Indeed, this approach helps explain America’s comparatively poor performance in lifting children out of poverty.

A new paper shows how effective America’s welfare programmes are at ameliorating the effects of poverty on children. Its authors, Hilary W. Hoynes, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, both...Continue reading

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ROCK UP to roll out more climbing arenas as rising demand boosts shopping centre footfalls

INDOOR climbing centre developer Rock Up is to scale its operation in shopping centres where the walls’ wow factors for families are helping revive flagging footfalls.

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Plots and sackings in Ukraine

Ukraine’s security services seized the world’s attention this week by faking the murder of a Russian opposition journalist, Arkady Babchenko, as part of a purported sting operation. At the same time, another plot unfolded in the corridors of government: Oleksandr Danyliuk, Ukraine’s well-regarded finance minister, is being forced to resign, The Economist has learned.

Mr Danyliuk, an independent-minded reformer backed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has been under pressure from the country’s leadership before, as he pushed through fiscal reforms. Despite resistance, he has had successes: for instance, he helped secure an order in the London High Court to freeze $2.5bn worth of assets belonging to Ihor Kolomoysky, one of Ukraine’s most notorious oligarchs. But Mr Danyliuk had to act by stealth, and while working on the nationalisation of PrivatBank, brought to insolvency by Mr Kolomoysky, he had to move his family to a secret location for safety.

The...Continue reading

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Political chaos in Italy as new elections beckon

THE powers of an Italian president are few, but mighty. He—there has never been a she—can declare war, dissolve parliament and name the prime minister. The constitution also stipulates that the president names the ministers, “on the proposal” of the prime minister-designate—a provision that has been interpreted to mean that a prospective head of government must table a list of choices that the president can accept or, sometimes, reject.

On May 27th President Sergio Mattarella deployed the last of those powers to devastating effect, halting the formation of a populist coalition between the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) and the hard-right Northern League. He refused to swear in a Eurosceptic, Paolo Savona, as finance minister. After the prospective coalition partners refused to withdraw Mr Savona’s name, Giuseppe Conte, the lawyer who was to have headed their government, backed out.

His withdrawal raised the likelihood of an early election that could become a proxy...Continue reading

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Ripple price update: Crypto CEO claims Ripple will break free from competition after THIS

RIPPLE’S CEO Brad Garlinghouse has claimed over time people will gain a better understanding of the cryptocurrency he promotes because they are not “anti-government”.

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Pound euro exchange rate: GBP resilient despite above-forecast Eurozone inflation

THE pound euro exchange rate shifted towards €1.14 on Thursday morning after a surprising rise in UK net consumer credit and above-forecast Eurozone inflation print. According to Eurostat, consumer prices in the bloc climbed by an annual rate of 1.9 per cent in May – far higher than April’s 1.2 per cent.

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City News: Just 25 Hedge Fund managers pocketed almost the entire economy of Bosnia

JUST 25 city money-men trousered $15.4 BILLION in pay in one year – just short of the entire economy of Bosnia and Herzogovina, and MORE than nations like Nicaragua and Jamaica. The staggering pay-packets were topped by James Simons of Renaissance Technologies who earned $1.7bn in 2016, up from $1.6bn the previous year.

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Irish border issue serves Remainers and Eurocrats – EXPRESS COMMENT

THE Swiss, efficient in all things, have demonstrated to this newspaper how their frictionless border works with Germany, France and Italy. There is a vast and steady traffic of people, vehicles, lorries and goods.

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Pound US dollar exchange rate: GBP up as consumer confidence improves

THE pound has risen by 0.4 per cent against the US dollar today, making £1 worth around $1.333. This is a recovery for the pound, which is still down from May’s best exchange rate of $1.376.

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Beachcomber: 101 years old and still worried by ants and mice...

WHAT a week this has been for receiving disturbing news about animals. No sooner had I read about the ability of wasps to recognise the faces of other wasps , than I discovered something very worrying about ants.

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The Kremlin denies responsibility for MH17

IT WAS an important demand, if one with little hope of success. On May 29th the Netherlands’ foreign minister, Stef Blok, insisted at the UN Security Council in New York that Russia “accept its responsibility” in the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17. The airliner was shot down by an anti-aircraft missile over Ukraine in 2014, killing 196 Dutch nationals, 38 Australians and 64 others. Last week a UN-mandated Joint Investigation Team (JIT), led by Dutch prosecutors, announced it had determined that the missile belonged to a unit deployed to the area by the Russian Army’s 53rd anti-aircraft brigade, presumably to help Russian-backed secessionists fighting the Ukrainian army.

The Kremlin has always denied any involvement in the downing of MH17 or the war in Ukraine. (Asked about the JIT’s findings, Mr Putin responded, “Which plane are you talking about?”) Instead it has spread conflicting alternative theories blaming the Ukrainians, often backed up with demonstrably fake...Continue reading

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Donald Trump and the NFL

LAST week, the National Football League, a powerful organisation overseeing 32 teams worth a combined $80bn, announced that it would bar its employees from engaging in a peaceable and silent protest at work: kneeling during the pre-game national anthem. If they wanted to stay in the locker room “and out of sight during the anthem” that was fine. But “if they are on the field, they must stand”. The NFL also asserted its commitment to “advance social justice” and “promote positive social change” —precisely the goals of the kneeling protests. This is only the first of several contradictions inherent in the policy.

Roger Goodell, the NFL’s commissioner, rued the effect of the protests on the image of players. “It was unfortunate that on-field protests created a false perception among many that thousands of NFL players were unpatriotic,” he said in a statement. “This is not and was never the case.” But if the players weren’t unpatriotic then and still are not, why the major change in between?

In 2016, during...Continue reading

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Racist tweets from Roseanne spur ABC to cancel “Roseanne”

ONE of the defining features of life under Donald Trump is that even as his presidency reassures Islamophobes, xenophobes, misogynists, bigots and racists, it simultaneously stiffens the resolve of Americans who value tolerance and inclusion. Take the reaction to a tweet by Roseanne Barr, the eponymous star of the smash-hit reboot of a 20-year-old sitcom. On May 29th Ms Barr tweeted, in response to a thread discussing a loony conspiracy theory about the CIA spying on French presidential candidates in Barack Obama’s time, that “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj”. She was referring to Valerie Jarrett. Ms Jarrett, who was born in Iran but is not Muslim, is the daughter of a distinguished black pathologist and served as an aide to Mr Obama.

Ms Barr later deleted her tweets and apologised to Ms Jarrett. The response was nonetheless swift. Within hours of the tweet, ABC, the television network that airs “Roseanne”, cancelled a planned second season....Continue reading

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Did a police officer violate the constitution by inspecting a stolen motorbike?

FIVE years ago, Ryan Collins evaded police in Albermarle County, Virgnia by weaving through traffic at more than 140mph. But they caught up with him. Weeks later, after tracking down the extended-frame Suzuki Mr Collins had been driving, and finding it hidden under a tarp next to his girlfriend’s house, a police officer walked on the property, matched the licence plate to the rogue two-wheeler and got Mr Collins to admit he had bought the vehicle from someone who had stolen it. But when his case went to trial, Mr Collins claimed the officer’s investigation was a trespass and violated his Fourth Amendment rights; the evidence gathered during the search, he claimed, wasn’t admissible in court.

On May 29th, in Collins v Virginia, the Supreme Court sided with Mr Collins in an 8-1 vote by cabining the so-called “automobile exception” that has been in place for nearly a century. Police typically need a warrant to search someone’s property, but in 1925, the court adjusted the rules for automobiles. Cars, by their...Continue reading

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'Euro INSTABILITY will always HAUNT us' Chief strategist warns SMART people worry about EU

THE EUROPEAN UNION poses the "biggest risk" to international financial markets because of the "constant instability" of the euro, investment strategist Robert Albertson warned.

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Complex rules are too taxing for UK savers

POLITICIANS have turned the UK's savings and pension system into a "Frankenstein's monster" that is scaring Britons away from saving, and hitting them with unnecessary tax bills.

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Get right cover to take grandchildren abroad

GROWING numbers of doting grandparents are taking the little ones on summer holidays, but they need to take cover before jetting off to the sun.

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Dow Jones industrial average: What is Dow Jones stock price today? Italy crisis hits Dow

DOW Jones industrial average dropped off nearly 400 points today amid political unrest in Italy. The Italian Prime Minister’s decision to veto a cabinet appointment has sent the Euro and US stocks tumbling. What is Dow Jones stock price today?

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Euro exchange rate: Will Italy political crisis bring about END of the Euro?

EURO exchange rates show the pound has risen against the Euro today amid political turmoil in Italy. Will Italy’s political crisis bring about the end of the Euro?

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Pound euro exchange rate: GBP stumbles as German unemployment falls below expectations

THE pound euro exchange rate stumbled today as investors responded to a surprising fall in Germany’s unemployment rate. The pound is currently worth around €1.142 against the euro.

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