Flagship

Red tape throttling EU business

The European Union is falling behind its rivals as red tape, weak innovation, and high energy prices reduce its competitiveness, a report by a former European Central Bank chief found. Hugely increased levels of paperwork are particularly hitting small businesses, the Financial Times reported: The 2019 “Green Deal” climate law “has spawned reams of legislation that businesses across the EU are struggling to implement, or even understand.” The textiles industry alone is subject to 16 new laws requiring it to gather data “on water use, energy consumption, labour conditions, waste, chemical use and emissions.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said last year that business must be “faster and easier,” with “less red tape.”

China deflation risk rises

China’s inflation rate was lower than forecast, intensifying fears of deflation in the world’s second-largest economy. Whereas much of the globe has been struggling to slow price increases, China could face the rarer problem of falling prices, a crisis that may spiral as consumers halt purchases under the expectation that goods will be cheaper in the future. It could have a knock-on effect globally as China “exports” deflation, cutting prices around the world. Policy makers in Beijing “are getting uncomfortable,” Goldman Sachs’ chief China economist told Bloomberg.

Missing Chinese minister alive

Qin Gang, the former Chinese foreign minister who mysteriously disappeared from public view last year, is working in a low-level salaried job at a publishing company, The Washington Post reported. Qin, a Xi Jinping loyalist, enjoyed a meteoric rise to power as an advocate of aggressive foreign policy, before his even more abrupt fall from grace: Rumors claimed he was dead or in prison. The opacity of the Chinese political system makes it near-impossible to know what led to his removal, although one theory is that he had an extramarital affair and child with a celebrity, who herself has not been seen for a year. Sources told the Post that he was alive, and “not going to jail, but his career is over.”

Harris and Trump neck-and-neck

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are neck-and-neck in national polls heading into tomorrow’s key presidential debate. According to a new survey by The New York Times, the Republican leads by a single percentage point nationally, although Harris leads in three swing states, and is tied in four others. However, whereas voters have a firm grasp of who Trump is, the poll found almost a third of respondents said they need to know more about Harris, underscoring the importance of tomorrow’s debate, the only one both candidates have agreed to so far. “Presidential debates often don’t matter much… but given the state of the race, there’s little doubt that the stakes are much bigger than usual,” The Washington Post’s chief political correspondent wrote.

Musk, China want to head to Mars

SpaceX will send its first Starship to Mars when the planets align in two years’ time, Elon Musk said. If the uncrewed 2026 launches go well, crewed flights will follow at the next launch window two years later, he added. Musk is known for overpromising, but Starship has made progress: Its fourth test successfully splashed down in June. China also promised to send its own Mars mission in 2028. In other signs of how space flight is no longer the preserve of Russian and US government programs, Musk’s Starlink constellation now accounts for 62% of all satellites in orbit, and samples gathered by China’s Chang’e mission revealed evidence of volcanism on the moon as recently as the dinosaurs’ era.

Catastrophic hunger doubles

Global catastrophic hunger has more than doubled this year compared to 2023, largely due to the ongoing wars in Sudan and Gaza. According to the United Nations, 99 million people are facing a food crisis. The report comes after a famine was officially declared in Sudan, perhaps the world’s deadliest in at least 40 years. Meanwhile an economic collapse since the Taliban took power in Afghanistan has forced 3.2 million children into acute malnutrition, most of whom are beyond the reach of aid agencies. “This is like doomsday for me,” an Afghan mother who has lost six children told the BBC. “I feel so much grief.”

Cubans protest water shortage

A lack of drinking water sparked protests across Cuba, which is experiencing its worst economic crisis in decades. Authorities in Havana have uncharacteristically recognized that more than 600,000 people lack drinking water, nearly a quarter of them in the capital. Experts believe the real figures to be many times larger, El País reported. Cuba’s economy has been devastated as the economic prospects of Russia, China, and Venezuela — the three countries on which the island nation’s economy relies — have diminished. The crisis has forced millions to flee, leaving behind a population of just 8.5 million compared to more than 11 million in 2022.

Russian ship’s desperate Arctic move

A non-ice-breaking Russian cargo ship is taking the dangerous Arctic trade route to Asia for the first time. Everest Energy, part of Moscow’s suspected “dark fleet” of fuel tankers, picked up a shipment from the Arctic LNG 2 gas plant in northern Russia and headed east. It’s a sign both of Russia’s desperation for customers willing to take the cargo despite US-led sanctions, but also of the impact of climate change on shipping routes: Both the Northern Sea Route along the north coast of Eurasia and the Northwest Passage through the islands of Arctic Canada are now ice-free for part of the year, making conventional non-icebreaker voyages risky but possible.

Dog stroller sales up in South Korea

Sales of dog strollers in South Korea outstripped those of actual baby buggies last year. The country has the world’s lowest birth rate, at just 0.72 — barely one-third that needed to maintain the population. Half of South Korean women below 49 say they have no plans to have children. The number of dogs, meanwhile, jumped to a record high: There are now twice as many registered as in 2018, and sales of dog strollers have quadrupled in the last five years. The government is worried: One minister said young people are “not loving each other… instead they love their dogs.” The dogs may not all be on board: One man told The Wall Street Journal that his adult daughter bought a stroller, but “the dog keeps jumping out.”

Almodòvar takes ‘overdue’ Venice prize

Pedro Almodòvar won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival. The Room Next Door, which tackles themes of euthanasia and climate change, is the veteran Spanish filmmaker’s first English-language movie, and received an 18-minute standing ovation upon its premiere last week. Almodòvar had never won Venice’s top prize, despite being “a mainstay of world cinema for the past four decades, feted and adored,” The Guardian noted: The Room Next Door is not “quite his finest work” but the award is “epically overdue.” At 74, though, Almodòvar is a relative spring chicken when it comes to winning awards compared to Dick van Dyke, who aged 98 became the joint-oldest winner of the Creative Arts Emmy: Van Dyke celebrated with an on-stage dance move.

• Pope Francis begins the East Timor leg of his Asia-Pacific tour.
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• Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, the long-awaited sequel to 2011’s Space Marine, is released on PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S.

Tell me about it, spud

Of all the things exchanged between the Old and the New Worlds after Columbus’ crossing, the least glamorous is probably the potato. But it may have been among the most important, says the economic historian Nicholas Decker. Before its arrival from North America, Europeans lived largely off grains, but potatoes yielded three times as many calories per acre. “The potato is a wonder food,” Decker writes, “containing almost all the vitamins needed to sustain life… One can live off of — boring though it is — a diet of potatoes alone.”

A new study of early modern Europe found that the arrival of the potato led to healthier citizens: French soldiers had their height taken upon enlistment, giving us a reliable dataset. Soldiers from places that adopted the potato were half an inch taller than those who weren’t. The story of potatoes in Ireland is famous and tragic, but they were popular there for a reason: Until the famine, Irish peasants were “noticeably healthier in appearance, and taller than English peasants.”

That ship has sailed

In 2022, China built 1,794 large, oceangoing ships. South Korea and Japan built more than 1,300 between them. All of Europe together managed just 319. But the US built… five. The greatest industrial nation in history is not building ships, writes Brian Potter in Construction Physics. And unusually for tales of American manufacturing decline, it’s not a story about enormous dominance followed by later years of stagnation: It’s a longstanding problem. “US shipbuilders have struggled to compete in the commercial market since roughly the Civil War.”

Back then, the US had world-leading expertise in building wooden ships, and those technologies were still improving. The skills required to build metal steamships were very different and rapidly industrializing Britain had a significant head start, so the US concentrated on sail. By the 1890s the steamship was king, and the US’ industry was outdated: Just 8% of trade was carried on American-built ships. An enormous government-backed construction boom in and between the world wars also never translated into an efficient, profitable industry: US shipyards were mothballed and by 1950, it was once again marginal, allowing other countries to steam ahead.

Shine on, you crazy diamond

In 1773, in what was presumably a very costly experiment, the French chemist Lavoisier used the sun’s rays to burn diamonds. It was the first step toward discovering that diamond is the same stuff as coal — charbon, in French; carbon. Lavoisier did not live to make the final connections, carelessly being guillotined during the Revolution, but as Javid Lakha notes in Works in Progress, in the 1950s the obvious next step was taken: Turning cheap, readily available coal into rare, precious diamond, through the careful application of incredible heat and pressure.

The first synthetic diamonds were barely dust: Useless for jewelry, but not for industry, where they were employed in grinding tools and saws. Over time techniques improved and they became larger and purer: Now, they can be purer than any natural diamond and impossible to distinguish with the naked eye, and nearly half of engagement rings use them, up from 19% in 2019. We have yet to exhaust their potential: Diamond is an excellent semiconductor in certain circumstances, and could be used to make transistors that dissipate heat better and thus can be packed more tightly than silicon ones.

In the Key of Joy, the last album by Brazilian Bossa Nova legend Sergio Mendes, who passed away last week at the age of 83. The 2020 album, which was released alongside a documentary on Mendes’ life, “celebrates the multifaceted genius” of the musician, The Arts Desk wrote. Stream it on Spotify or Apple Music.

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