New census data showed that London has become even more diverse. White Britons now account for less than half its 8.2m population (45%) for the first time and more than one in three residents is foreign-born. (Over 1.2m “other whites”, mainly of east European origin, also reside in the capital.)
Xinhua, an official news agency, had already declared “irrefutable” the evidence against Ms Gu and an employee of her household, Zhang Xiaojun, in the murder last November of Neil Heywood, a British businessman.
殺害に関して動かし難い証拠がある，と政府系報道機関が発表。
Analysts expect that this mitigating motive might help her avoid an immediate death penalty. Instead, she might receive a “suspended” death sentence and be locked away.
The question then becomes what to do with Mr Bo. Some think that, having already seen his lofty political ambitions snuffed out he might get off relatively lightly, with only political punishment.
Party leaders have a good motive for containing the case against Mr Bo: they do not want to highlight the wealth amassed by his family. Many of them have rich friends and relatives of their own. This may explain why Ms Gu faces prosecution for murder but not, as yet, for economic crimes.
Yet Mr Bo does not seem the type to go gently into the night. Xi Jinping, like him the son of a revolutionary hero, is to take the reins of power in a once-in-a-decade leadership transition later this year. He might want to make sure Mr Bo’s political career really is over. Expulsion from the party followed by a criminal sentence would do the trick. For perverting the course of justice, perhaps? That would be another open-and-shut case.
When Mr Putin came to power 12 years ago, many Russians were grateful for the stability and prosperity he brought with him. The political chaos and drop in incomes after the collapse of the Soviet Union had soured their belief in democratic politics and encouraged them to focus on making money. Mr Putin rode high in the polls. To the rest of the world, Russia looked like a cynical society where people were interested only in personal wealth and national muscle.
But Russia is changing. A richer and more vocal middle class has sprung up, one that recognises Russia as an ill-governed kleptocracy. That became evident last September, when Mr Putin first announced his plan to return to the Kremlin by swapping jobs with Dmitry Medvedev, who was formally president even though Mr Putin retained ultimate control. Discontent began to rumble. The rigged parliamentary poll in early December was followed by street protests in Moscow and elsewhere.
The problem is not what Mr Putin says, but that he is the person saying it. People are tired of him. More fundamentally, they are fed up with the personalised system that he presides over. It looks not just corrupt but increasingly anachronistic. Ever more Russians want legitimate institutions. They want to know power can change hands. And because this is exactly what Mr Putin cannot offer, the conflict between him and them is irreconcilable.
China still runs a sizeable trade surplus. But its net exports fell in 2011 (in absolute terms) for only the third time since 2000, subtracting 0.5 percentage points from its growth. Thanks to home-grown spending, China’s economy still managed to expand by 9.2% in 2011, remaining surprisingly strong even in the fourth quarter. This growth owed an unusual amount to consumption (both public and private), which contributed over half for the first time since 2001. As a consequence, the share of consumption in China’s GDP edged up in 2011 after falling for ten years in a row.
China this week reported that the price of new homes fell in 52 out of 70 cities across the country in December, compared with the month before. Households are struggling to obtain mortgages; developers are finding it almost impossible to obtain a loan. The drying up of foreign funds is particularly dramatic, points out North Square Blue Oak, a research firm based in London and Beijing. Foreign capital fell by 65% in December, compared with a year earlier.
The flight of foreigners from property partly explains another unusual twist in the China story. Its foreign-exchange reserves fell in the fourth quarter for the first time since the height of the Asian financial crisis in 1998. The drop was small, from $3.2 trillion to $3.18 trillion, but also a little mysterious. China still exports more than it imports, and attracts more foreign direct investment than it undertakes. These two sources of foreign exchange must, then, have been offset by an unidentified drain.
The worry is that China’s capital controls have sprung a leak. “Hot money”, attracted by the country’s growth, may be flowing out as the property market falters. Some even speculate that China’s rich may begin to smuggle their new-found wealth out of the country en masse.
Victor Shih of Northwestern University reckons that China’s richest 1% hold $2 trillion-5 trillion in liquid wealth and property. If they were ever to smuggle that money out, the outflow would dent even China’s reserves. That would be a disaster for China’s economic management, putting heavy downward pressure on the yuan. At least China’s critics could no longer trot out another familiar accusation―that it undervalues the exchange rate.
AMERICA’S trade deficit with China hit another record last year. Estimated at almost $300 billion, it made up over 40% of America’s total deficit. Yet official data grossly overstate US imports from China.
Take the iPad, which America imports from China even though it is entirely designed and owned by Apple, an American company. iPads are assembled in Chinese factories owned by Foxconn, a Taiwanese firm, largely from parts produced outside China.
According to a study by the Personal Computing Industry Centre, each iPad sold in America adds $275, the total production cost, to America’s trade deficit with China, yet the value of the actual work performed in China accounts for only $10.
Using these numbers, The Economist estimates that iPads accounted for around $4 billion of America’s reported trade deficit with China in 2011; but if China’s exports were measured on a value-added basis, the deficit was only $150m.
China’s small contribution to total costs suggests that a yuan appreciation would have little impact on its exports. A 20% rise in the yuan would add less than 1% to the import price of an iPad.
For imports such as clothing and toys the Chinese value added is much higher. But electrical machinery and equipment, with more complex cross-border supply chains, make up one-quarter of China’s exports to America.
Pascal Lamy, the head of the World Trade Organisation, has suggested that if trade statistics reflected true domestic content, America’s deficit with China might be more than halved.
Under “consumer-driven health plans”, workers must cough up part of the price of any treatment before their insurance coverage kicks in. Most have an untaxed account to spend on health; they think twice before depleting it. In 2006 only 10% of workers had to pay at least $1,000 before their insurer picked up the rest of the bill. By 2010 that share had more than tripled.
そのプランのもとでは、保険料がおりる前に、いくらか自分で払わないけいけないとか、
負担が目に見える形になっているわけですね。
コストを下げようと、そのプランを採用する企業が増えていて、
General Electric (GE) shifted its salaried employees into consumer-driven plans in 2010. It urged them to shop around for bargains, but they found this nearly impossible due to a lack of information. “People started saying: ‘If you want me to be an active consumer, I need to know prices,’” explains Virginia Proestakes, the head of GE’s benefits programme. When employees asked doctors for prices, the doctors were baffled. They had no clue how much different insurers paid for the same procedure, or what share a patient would pay. A recent study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a public watchdog, reported similar problems.
Barack Obama’s health reform requires hospitals to list standard prices each year, and more than 30 states have either proposed or passed laws to promote price transparency, according to the GAO. None of these measures has come close to solving the problem. Few provide enough data to allow people to shop around.
オバマケアでは、病院に毎年、標準的な治療の価格をリストするよう求めている。
So private firms are having a go. GE, for example, hired Thomson Reuters, an information firm, to show employees the cost of different services. Thomson Reuters analyses prices from prior purchases—by workers at GE and other firms—to show the cost of a given procedure at different hospitals and clinics.
Despite this, greater transparency seems inevitable. Smart insurers are hawking their own tools. Cigna uses Thomson Reuters’s technology to support its “cost of care estimator”. Aetna, another insurer, offers a sophisticated web tool that patients use more than 67,000 times a month. Meg McCabe of Aetna hopes that consumers will soon be able to use their smartphones to enter symptoms, find doctors, compare prices and schedule an appointment.
それは避けられないようよみえる。賢い保健会社は、開示を売りにしているところがある。
Such experiments will serve insurers well. If Mr Obama’s health law stands, millions will soon shop for insurance on new exchanges. The easier the plan is to understand, the more people may pick it. A fully transparent market is years away. But a bit of sunlight is creeping in.
The absurdity of the rigging became clear as results came in. In some regions the sum of votes cast for all parties exceeded 140%. In Chechnya, ruled by Ramzan Kadyrov, a Kremlin-friendly strongman, United Russia’s result was 99.5%. A similar result was achieved in a Moscow psychiatric hospital.
不正は明らかで、ある地域では全政党の得票が140％を超えてしまった。チェチニアでは99.5％。
The ballot is likely to strengthen the image of United Russia as a party of "thieves and crooks", as it is known to many Russians. But it could also fan anti-Caucasus sentiment, to potentially explosive effect.
投票結果はユナイテッドロシアの、泥棒と詐欺師、というよく知られたイメージを強化しそうだ。
Why did United Russia perform so dismally? As Alexander Oslon, a pollster who advises the Kremlin, says, it is partly the result of the job swap announced in September between Mr Medvedev and Mr Putin, who will return to the presidency next March. “If a captain of your football team says there is someone stronger than him, your confidence in the team weakens,” he said.
メデベージェフとプーチンとの役職交換が今回の不人気に一役買っているとの指摘がある。
But many political observers say this is just a symptom of the regime's loss of legitimacy. “They cannot allow genuine competition because they are scared of losing power,” comments Dmitry Oreshkin, a political analyst. The next step could be purges within United Russia; Mr Gryzlov could be the first to go, according to Ekho Moskvy, a radio station.
The death toll from malaria seems to have responded to a big injection of money
OF 108 COUNTRIES where malaria is endemic, ten are on track to eliminate the disease in the near future, according to a report by Roll Back Malaria published on October 18th. For many others getting to zero deaths from the parasite is a distant dream. But that should not stop a celebration of the progress that has been made over the past decade, during which time deaths from malaria have fallen by 20% (see chart).
ここ10年でマラリア死亡者は20％低下した。
The correlation between reduced deaths and money spent is fairly strong, much more so than the correlation between conventional aid and economic development. Given that improved health often comes before advances in GDP per capita, spending on malaria may eventually show an even greater return than it already has to date.
