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Global Talent visa: Scientists to be granted fast-track entry to UK after Brexit

Top scientists, researchers and mathematicians will get fast-track entry to the UK under a new scheme announced by Boris Johnson. The so-called Global Talent visa opens on 20 February, less than a month after Brexit, due to take place on Friday. It replaces the old tier-one "exceptional talent" visa, which allowed applicants to be recommended by a number of science and research academies.

Why Planting a Trillion Trees Should Start With Small Farmers

(Bloomberg) -- Trees are an important tool to counter climate change: They capture carbon dioxide, improve biodiversity and increase groundwater. Adding a trillion trees could scrub out two-thirds of all emissions, according to scientists, and that’s why everyone from the World Economic Forum to YouTube influencers have launched large planting programs. There’s just one problem: The success rate of typical programs is often dismal. Many end up with no trees surviving to maturity.After years of experiments, John Leary believes he has found the magic ingredient to boost results: local people.Leary is the executive director of Trees for the Future (TFF), a nonprofit group founded in 1989 and based in Silver Springs, Maryland. The first few million trees Leary and his team planted were aimed at reforestation, providing carbon offsets or wildlife conservation zones. But less than 5% of the trees survived without local supervision.That led them to the Forest Garden Approach, which trains farmers to use trees as a means of improving the productivity of degraded lands. Now TFF can plant each tree for as little as 10 cents while quadrupling the earnings of locals and boosting tree survival rates. Instead of releasing carbon through using techniques like slash and burn, the farmers growing the forest gardens are capturing more than 230 tons of carbon dioxide per acre over a 20-year period.The Forest Garden Approach looks to first make poor farmers richer, rather than focusing on the number of trees planted. It’s a lesson Leary took from his previous role as a volunteer for the Peace Corps, a U.S. program aimed at promoting economic and social development abroad. “You need to get local people involved and design any project such that it also benefits the local community,” he said.So far, Leary and his team have worked with farmers to build 10,000 forest gardens, which is estimated to sequester 2.4 million tons of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period—that’s like taking 25,000 cars off U.S. roads. Projects so far have focused almost exclusively in Africa, with major projects in Senegal, Kenya and Tanzania. TFF typically targets a distressed region in a poor country. Leary’s team recruits 100 or more farmers interested in improving their farms and then provides training.In the four-year program, TFF provides educational resources tailored to their local needs and ongoing support, along with seeds and saplings. Farmers are taught how to build a “living fence”—that is, planting trees all along the edges of the farmland. The green wall keeps grazing animals (and neighbors) from plundering the farm. The trees also help retain more water in the soil.By the end of the program, each acre of farmland can boast of as many as 1,500 trees, with many bearing produce that can be eaten or sold.One of the most common reasons lands degrade is because farmers grow the wrong kind of crop, and so Leary helps them recognize what will flourish. “In most countries, there tends to be one major cash crop that has destroyed the countryside,” Leary said. “It's peanuts in Senegal and maize in Kenya and Tanzania.”He teaches farmers to move away from monoculture. They also become adept at making their own fertilizers. The upshot is that the farmers have something to sell every month of the year. That results in an increase of income and consumption of more nutritious food in their diets.“It’s clear that the major solution to climate change has to be reduction in fossil-fuel emissions,” said Dominick Spracklen, professor of biosphere-atmosphere interactions at England’s University of Leeds, who hasn’t worked with TFF. “But we will also need negative emissions, and tree planting is the main way we can get there… it’s really important that local people are involved in any tree-planting program.”In the 12 months to July 2019, Leary’s group built nearly 6,000 forest gardens containing 11 million trees. The nonprofit’s budget has grown, too. Annual contributions to TFF have doubled to $5 million last year from $2.5 million in 2017, and Leary expects to raise as much as $8 million in 2020.While Leary’s attention will continue to be on African countries, TFF has built an app that any farmer in the world (who can read English and French) can use to learn the steps needed to build a forest garden. Leary has seen a large number of downloads in India, Australia and Zambia. “Anyone with a little bit of experience in gardening or forestry can pick up what we do pretty easily,” Leary said.To contact the columnist of this story: Akshat Rathi in London at arathi39@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Aaron Rutkoff at arutkoff@bloomberg.net, Emily BiusoMichael TigheFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Boeing 777X: One of world's biggest passenger planes completes test flight

Boeing has successfully completed the first flight of the world's largest twin-engine jetliner - a respite from the ongoing controversy surrounding the 737 MAX. It took three attempts to get the 777X off the ground, as the first two planned tests were abandoned owing to high winds. Four hours later, it landed at the historic Boeing Field, not far from rows of 737 MAX planes left grounded after two fatal crashes triggered safety concerns.

Alibaba's Taobao takes down overpriced face masks on its marketplace

Spy Novels Need to Come in From the Cold War

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The golden age of the spy thriller ended with the Cold War. But of late, news reports have provided enough material for a silver age to start — if authors take heed.The last time a spy thriller topped the list of a year’s bestselling novels in the U.S., compiled by Publisher’s Weekly, was in 1988 or 1989 — depending on whether one counts the latter year’s “Clear and Present Danger” by Tom Clancy as an espionage novel or a political one. (In 1988, another Clancy book, “The Cardinal of the Kremlin,” unmistakably a spy novel, was number one.) John Le Carre, who had his first book on top of the list in 1964 (“The Spy Who Came in from the Cold”) and was in the Top 10 a total of nine times, had his last big hit in 1989, too, with “The Russia House,” although he has continued to publish regularly. That year, glasnost reigned in Mikhail Gorbachev’s moribund Soviet Union and the Berlin wall came down. In November, 1989, the New York Times book critic Walter Goodman wrote — prophetically, as it turned out — about the future of spy fiction:With ideological walls tumbling and affinities popping up, lesser practitioners find themselves in straits whose direness matches those of their heroes. An Ian Fleming might bring into play some space-age Mafia out to extort billions from both Washington and Moscow, but his books were always kid stuff. Will [Len] Deighton resort to having his creations take on Colonel Muammar Qaddafi of Libya or General Manuel Antonio Noriega of Panama, at the risk of provoking a PEN resolution against picking on little guys? And will [Le Carre’s] next plot find hardliners in the Pentagon and the Kremlin united against the Greens? Until new threats present themselves, addicts of the spy stuff may find themselves out in the cold.All these tacks, and countless variations, have been tried, and some novels have sold well. But it’s a sign of the genre’s decline that the current Top 10 of espionage bestsellers on Amazon.com includes — in the third spot, no less — Le Carre’s “The Honorable Schoolboy,” originally published in 1977. The post-Cold War offerings in the genre, or at least those of them that didn’t take the reader back to the World War II and its long aftermath, suffered from a critical flaw: The absence of an underlying clash of civilizations and value systems. Not even the post-9/11 war on terror provided that missing element. In 2011, the website Salon.com collected the views of spy-novel writers and qualified readers on the genre’s post-Cold War development. Amid practitioners’ comments to the effect that spy fiction is alive and well regardless of who the adversaries of intelligence services are, the words of Tom Nichols, a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, stood out. “Without the Soviet Union (or Nazi Germany before it) and the struggle with a titanic power, there’s really not much to the genre,” he said. “The kind of novel where the world itself hangs in the balance, where moral choices are stark because they are moral choices — that’s gone now.”Without such a grand conflict, according to Nichols, spy fiction became cynical, painting all governments with the same critical brush. “Most importantly, the bad guys — usually greedy businessmen or terrorists — are now uninteresting,” Nichols said. “Terrorists are especially uninteresting, because for a spy novel to work, the agent needs a worthy adversary” — and terrorists are essentially just a bunch of petty criminals trying on a bigger hat that doesn’t fit them.In short, Western spy fiction needs state actors with strong non-Western or, better, anti-Western values to become exciting again. In real life, these state actors are back, and there’s a greater variety of them than during the Cold War.First, there’s Russia, of course. Highly professional Russian spies, reminiscent of the Cold War crop, operate in Le Carre’s latest offering, last year’s “Agent Running in the Field.” But the doyen of the genre is behind the curve: Today’s Russian spy thriller should, by rights, be a black comedy featuring the ham-handed operatives of the Russian military intelligence, formerly known as the GRU.The latest story providing fuel for this treatment features the two Russian “plumbers” with diplomatic passports discovered by the Swiss intelligence in Davos, Switzerland, apparently trying to install surveillance equipment to spy on the world leaders and billionaires who arrive there every year for the World Economic Forum. Earlier installments include the failed assassinations of three Bulgarian arms-making executives; the bungled poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England, by two thugs who claimed to have come to look at the spire of the local cathedral; and an amateurish coup attempt in Montenegro in 2016. Then, for authors still looking for sophistication in spying, there’s China, trying to make inroads into the European Union, a more welcoming playground for its state-owned businesses than the U.S. This month, the scandal making headlines in Brussels and Berlin involved a top former EU diplomat — named in a Politico story on Thursday — who is married to a Chinese woman and who reportedly spied for China while maintaining a network of high-powered friends. The ex-diplomat, lately employed by a lobbying firm, denies the accusations.Finally, there’s the almost-unbelievable story of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s suspected hacking operation against Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos. Here’s an almost-head-of-state reportedly personally involved in spying, and in cyber-spying at that. In all three cases, stark moral choices and values clashes are evident. In all three, the West’s adversaries are foreign powers, not mere lone wolves or terrorist groups. The conflicts are quintessentially modern: Law-governed states vs. authoritarian ones; free enterprise vs. state capitalism; moxie vs. mass surveillance. In an increasingly transactional, leaderless world, it’s every country for itself — and that’s potentially more interesting than the duality of Cold War. It’s not about “picking on little guys,” but rather a free-for-all that has come to involve smaller countries in more terrifying, and intriguing, ways than before.This is heady stuff just waiting for the literary equals of Le Carre or plot-moving geniuses of Clancy’s stature to turn into fiction. There are certainly lots of former spies around, bitterly disappointed by “deep state” narratives that devalue their work, who could try their hand at modernizing the espionage thriller. As an "addict of the spy stuff," to use Goodman's description, perhaps there's hope for me again.(This is my last column for Bloomberg Opinion. I'm moving to the news automation team at Bloomberg News to try my hand at teaching machines to help organize data into stories; I'm pretty sure they won't be writing columns anytime soon, though, so please keep reading my wonderful colleagues.) To contact the author of this story: Leonid Bershidsky at lbershidsky@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Economic Calendar - Top 5 Things to Watch This Week

By Noreen Burke