Is investors’ love affair with commercial property ending?
Jun 25th 2020THE SECOND week of March was a heartbreaking one for Will Beckett. The boss of Hawksmoor, a chain of steakhouses that employs 700 workers in Britain, had been days away from opening his first New York outpost. Instead government-imposed lockdowns forced him to close all his restaurants down. The City types that usually…
China is the world’s factory, more than ever
NORMALLY 200,000 buyers, hailing from just about every country, would have flocked to the Canton Fair, the world’s biggest trade show. This year, because of the pandemic, it has been conducted entirely online, running for ten days and ending on June 24th. Although no substitute for meetings in the flesh, the virtual fair was a…
A former president of Kyrgyzstan is imprisoned for corruption
THE PRESIDENCY of Kyrgyzstan is not a job for the fainthearted. In the past 15 years two incumbents have been toppled by mass protests. Last year an ex-president, Almazbek Atambayev, was arrested amid a deadly clash between supporters and police. This week a court handed him an 11-year prison sentence on corruption charges that he…
Singapore’s ruling party calls an election
“THIS GENERAL election will be like no other that we have experienced,” Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, declared this week, announcing that the city-state would go to the polls on July 10th. Procedures may be a little different from usual, given the continuing outbreak of covid-19. But the outcome will be just like the…
The Rise of ASMR Videos
If you’ve never heard of the concept of ASMR videos, prepare to enter into a world that may seem very strange at first. And perhaps even longer than that. Firstly, ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, which may not make things any clearer, so we’ll sum it up more simply by saying that it’s…
Economists grapple with their race problem
Jun 27th 2020WASHINGTON, DCIN JANUARY 1970 a group of black economists wrote a letter to the American Economic Association (AEA). They criticised colleagues who ignored discrimination in the profession and paid no heed to racial inequality in their own research. Just over half a century later, similar complaints have resurfaced. This time the AEA seems…
How Wirecard fooled most of the people all of the time
WIRECARD’S SUCCESS was once regarded in Germany as rivalling that of SAP, a software-maker and the country’s most valuable firm. No longer. Felix Hufeld, the head of BaFin, the financial regulator, was blunt: the accounting scandal at the payment-processing firm is a “complete disaster”, and a “shame for Germany”. “We would have expected such a…
A malfunctioning spy camera causes a scandal in Fiji
“WE DON’T REALLY go in for that any more,” says a British spook witheringly of gadgets disguised as pens in “Skyfall”, a James Bond film. In Fiji, though, such devices have become a national fascination. A man called Ferrel Farizal Khan told the head of the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation, Riyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, that he was an…
Japan’s soldiers are greying. Time to draft robots?
BRIGHT YOUNG faces gaze out from a recruitment poster on the thick grey walls of the Defence Ministry in central Tokyo. But in greying Japan, finding enough youngsters to fill the ranks has become, by the ministry’s own admission, “an imminent challenge”. The number of Japanese between 18 and 26 years old, long the prime…
Feuding couple throw buckets of urine and feces at each other
Police in Wichita Falls arrested 39-year-old Matthew Vasquez after he reportedly threw a bucket of urine and feces at a woman. Shortly after 5 p.m., Monday, officers answered a call at the 3700 block of Hudson for a commotion, according to the probable cause report. When the police arrived, they found the perp, later named…