Narendra Modi’s rise to the top of Indian politics took place in May when he was elected as the country’s new prime minister in a landslide victory. His rise to the top of global politics began this weekend.
Japan is reforming its gambling industry, with plans to introduce a new law this autumn that will legalize casinos as a way to boost economic growth and tourism before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. One of the biggest potential beneficiaries? Pachinko, the pinball-slot machine hybrid played across the country.
Ireland is rare in the industrialized world in that it doesn’t have postal codes—at all. In the countryside, some places don’t have street names or house numbers even. But the country is moving from one of the world’s most opaque postal systems to one of the most detailed. Ireland’s upcoming postal code system will assign numbers to every home and business in the country at a cost of $32 million.
Thom Yorke, the lead singer of Radiohead, released his new album, “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes,” on Friday for $6 via the file-sharing service BitTorrent. As BitTorrent is normally associated more with piracy than album sales, many won’t know that it has a service called Bundles, which allows creators to send their work as torrents to the network’s 170 million users. BitTorrent’s user base is “the size of Spotify, Hulu, and Netflix combined and doubled,” Matt Mason, the service’s chief content officer, told The Guardian. “This is now what we hope is the world’s first direct-to-fan publishing system that truly has a global audience.”
This weekend, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus went on sale to record pre-orders and insanely long queues. Sure, there’s pent up demand from the public, which has been clamoring for bigger devices for years.
By watching his children play, Edward Adelson got the idea for a new kind of robot. “I expected to be fascinated by watching how they used their visual systems, but I was actually more fascinated by how they used their fingers,” the MIT professor of vision science said. ”But since I’m a vision guy, the most sensible thing, if you wanted to look at the signals coming into the finger, was to figure out a way to transform the mechanical, tactile signal into a visual signal.”
The former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, announced his return to politics on Friday. Two years after being defeated by Francois Hollande and vowing to leave public life, Sarkozy said on his Facebook page (in French) that he will run for head of his rightist UMP party in November. (The post is approaching 90,000 likes.)
Neal Stephenson, the celebrated author of sci-fi classics Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, began working on a sword-fighting video game called Clang in 2012 and raised $526,000 on Kickstarter. “I’m dissatisfied with how sword-fighting is portrayed in existing video games,” he said at the time. “These could be so much more fun than they are. Time for a revolution.” One year ago, Stephenson announced that they had burned through the half-million, asked people to be “patient,” and said they were looking for extra money. And on Sept. 18, a year after that last update, Stephenson announced to his backers that the project was dead in the water.
As Scotland prepares to vote on independence on Sept. 18, the future of its currency has taken center stage.
It now costs 1.6 cents to produce each US one cent coin due to the high price of zinc, which makes up 97% of each coin, according to the Wall Street Journal. President Obama has proposed phasing out pennies and nickels (5-cent pieces) on numerous occasions, including in the 2015 budget, but Congress has yet to bite. The Canadians stopped producing their one-cent coin in 2013 for the same reasons.
Formula E is here. The first motor-racing championship featuring all-electric cars began its inaugural season in Beijing on Saturday, and it was won in an exciting finish by Audi Sport’s Lucas Di Grassi after leader Nicolas Prost crashed at the final corner.
Switzerland makes an important distinction between public and private corruption.
Under Armour has overtaken Adidas for the first time among sportswear brands in the US, the Wall Street Journal reported. The US brand’s sales are up 20% to $1.2 billion so far this year, while its German rival’s sales are down 23% to $1.1 billion. But both companies are still several times smaller than the number one sportswear brand. Nike has generated $8.9 billion in sales over the same period.
A surprising new poll by YouGov for The Sunday Times (paywall) shows that 51% of people in Scotland approve of independence compared to 49% who do not. That is a remarkable turnaround; a month ago, the unionists had a 22-point lead over secessionists. The poll comes with less than two weeks before the Scots referendum. The head of the Better Together campaign, the former chancellor Alistair Darling, said the poll was a “wake-up call.”
China’s anti-corruption drive has already cramped the style of government officials, who have had to get by with fewer lavish banquets and perks. The latest target: mooncakes, the sweet treat given in southern China as a gift during the Mid-Autumn festival, which starts Monday.
Costa Rica is still getting around to introducing a national system of street signs and addresses. To find a house or a shop, instructions often go along the lines of “It’s 150 meters west of the dentist” or “Try opposite the McDonalds.”
After months of pro-democracy protests, including over the weekend, China finally has unveiled the framework for Hong Kong’s 2017 election of its chief executive. On the subject of universal suffrage, the people of Hong Kong ”put forward various views and suggestions,” the Standing Committee of National People’s Congress said. They were summarily ignored.
Emmanuel Macron has been the French economy minister for less than a week and already his words are coming back to haunt him.
Remember when a house was somewhere you lived, wine was drunk because it tasted good, and art was something to be considered not appraised? Probably not. They are all ”asset classes,” things to invest in for the reasons that you can and, perhaps one day, somebody else will pay you more for it—such as the New York apartment bought for $88 million, the single painting sold for $250 million, and the bottle of 1947 Cheval Blanc that cost $300,000. Add another beautiful example of human achievement to the list—classic cars.
This item has been corrected.
The US videogame industry is shifting rapidly. Gamers are almost equally split between males and females now (pdf), at 52% to 48%, according to the latest annual report by the Entertainment Software Association. Eight years ago, males were 63% of US gamers. More than that, adult women now outnumber teenage boys among gamers in the US by 36% to 17%—more than two to one. And female gamers over 50 have increased by a third.
The British authorities suspect a rapper from London, known as L Jinny, of being one of the ISIL militants who beheaded the journalist James Foley in a video released earlier this week, reports the Independent. Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary is thought to be one of three British militants—dubbed the Beatles—who are guarding hostages near Raqqa, Syria. He has left a macabre trail on social media.
On Aug. 22, an unmanned rocket launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company exploded after an “anomaly” was discovered during a test flight in McGregor, Texas. Check it out here:
A group of crowd-funded citizen journalists seem to have located a training camp for the militant group ISIL using only online mapping services and some old-fashioned detective work. Bellingcat, which raised almost £51,000 ($85,000) to do its own unique form of journalism, was founded by Eliot Higgins, who became famous (and was profiled by the New Yorker) for proving Syria was using chemical weapons from his bedroom in Leicester, England using only images and videos available online. His team includes a mix of bloggers, research analysts, and traditional reporters.
