英语咖啡馆：2023年3月8日英语新闻

Antony Blinken, America’s secretary of state, met his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, for the first time since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The pair spoke briefly on the sidelines of an acrimonious meeting of G20 foreign ministers, which ended without consensus on the war. Mr Blinken urged Russia to withdraw from Ukraine and rejoin New START, a nuclear-arms-reduction treaty. A spokeswoman for the Kremlin dismissed the meeting as “nothing interesting”.

Ukraine clung on to Bakhmut as its forces repelled more Russian assaults on the eastern city. The Kremlin believes seizing Bakhmut would allow it to control the rest of the Donbas region. Meanwhile Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, said that Ukrainian “terrorists” attacked civilians on the Russian border regions of Bryansk; Ukraine dismissed the accusation as a “deliberate provocation”.

Euro zone inflation slowed to 8.5% year on year in February, a 0.1 percentage-point decrease from the previous month. The drop, mainly due to cheaper fuel, was less than expected; core inflation, which excludes volatile energy and food prices, rose from 5.3% to 5.6%. Stubbornly high inflation figures mean the ECB will probably continue to raise interest rates.

More than half of the world’s population, or 4bn people, could be overweight or obese by 2035, according to a new report by the World Obesity Federation, an NGO. That would be a big increase over 2020 when 38% of the world (or 2.6bn people) were obese. The level of obesity is growing most rapidly in children, among whom it could double by 2035.

Kem Sokha, an opposition leader in Cambodia, was sentenced to 27 years of house arrest after being found guilty of treason. Mr Sokha was arrested in 2017 for allegedly conspiring with America to overthrow the government of Hun Sen, the strongman who has ruled Cambodia since 1985. America dismissed the charges as “fabricated conspiracy theories”.

Arm, a British chip designer, said it would pursue a listing in America this year. Britain’s government had been hoping to convince the home-grown firm to sell its shares on the shrivelling London Stock Exchange. But Arm, which is owned by Softbank, a giant tech investor, reckons an American IPO would be the “best path forward”.

Fact of the day: $45trn, the total value of American housing. 

TODAY’S AGENDA

Greece’s rail-crash disaster

On Saturday a stationmaster from Hellenic Train, the operator of Greece’s railways, faces a court hearing on manslaughter charges after at least 57 people died in a fiery crash near Larissa on Tuesday. A freight train collided with a high-speed express on Greece’s main rail link with central Europe. According to a fire-service official, there is “virtually no hope” of rescuing more people from the wreckage. Dozens of family members converged on local hospitals to take DNA tests to identify victims. 

Giorgos Gerapetritis, the newly appointed transport minister, will oversee an investigation into the disaster. Some experts have blamed a manual switching error at Larissa station that set the two trains on course for a head-on collision. Thanks to a years-long delay in upgrading the mainline to EU standards many stretches of track lack electronic signalling. The tragedy has incited sometimes violent protests throughout the country, and voters are likely to punish the ruling New Democracy party at a general election due by July.

Flying high with Lufthansa

Lufthansa, Europe’s second-largest aviation group by number of passengers—it includes Austrian Airlines, SWISS, Eurowings and Brussels Airlines—will report results for last year on Friday. They are likely to be much rosier than those of the two preceding years. And after a loss in the last quarter of 2021, analysts are expecting a profit for the last quarter of 2022.

During the peaks of the covid-19 pandemic passenger travel dwindled so dramatically that in May 2020 the German government stepped in with a €9bn ($10bn) bail-out package. This included taking a 20% stake in the carrier, which it sold in September last year. In anticipation of better times ahead, on Thursday the board extended by five years the contracts of Carsten Spohr, Lufthansa’s CEO, who is himself a pilot, and Remco Steenbergen, his chief financial officer. It was the reward for steering the airline through maybe the toughest period in its history.

America’s fledgling property-market rebound

When mortgage rates soared last year, America’s housing market suffered, with transactions, prices and construction all slumping. In recent weeks, though, it has started to recover. New-home sales in January jumped to a ten-month high. That matters for the economy, because property is a bellwether of how America is coping amid high interest rates.

The next few months will show whether the property rebound is sustainable. Spring selling season is the sector’s busiest time of the year. The case for optimism is that America’s property market has found a floor. The case for pessimism is that when the Federal Reserve sees that such a rate-sensitive sector is shrugging off tight monetary policy, it may decide that it needs to be more hawkish. In that gloomier and regrettably more realistic scenario, the rebound will soon fade away, and property will be a harbinger of recession rather than recovery.