Why bitcoin is up by almost 150% this year | Delivery robots will transform Christmas | The unfair trial of Jimmy Lai begins in Hong Kong | Why Congo’s chaotic election matters

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Why bitcoin is up by almost 150% this year - The Economist

Chopping off their heads does not work: cockroaches can live without one for as long as a week. Whacking them is no guarantee either: their flexible exoskeletons can bend to accommodate as much as 900 times their body weight. Nor is flushing them down the toilet a solution: some breeds can hold their breath for more than half an hour. To most, roaches are an unwelcome pest. Their presence is made all the worse because they are indestructible.

An unwelcome pest is how many financiers and regulators would describe the crypto industry. Criminals use cryptocurrencies to launder money. Terrorists use them to make payments. Hackers demand ransoms in bitcoin. Many crypto coins are created simply so their makers can make off with the money.

The industry also appears to be indestructible. Crypto prices were crushed by higher interest rates in 2022. The industry’s head has been chopped off: Changpeng Zhao and Sam Bankman-Fried, the founders of the world’s biggest and second-biggest crypto exchanges, now both await sentencing for financial crimes (breaking anti-money-laundering laws and fraud, respectively). Regulators are cracking down. Yet not only has crypto survived, it is once again soaring: bitcoin climbed to a two-year high of almost $45,000 on December 11th, up from just $16,600 at the start of the year.

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Delivery robots will transform Christmas - The Economist

A shop assistant leaves a Co-op convenience store in Milton Keynes and opens the lid of a white box, about the size of a small suitcase, with a red flag on top and six wheels. After the assistant drops a bag of shopping inside and scans a bar code, the box trundles off. Travelling at a brisk walking pace along the footpath, it pauses at a road junction until two cars have passed before crossing safely. Neither pedestrians nor car drivers give it a second glance. Delivery robots like this have become part of the scenery since they started work in this town, some 80km northwest of London, in 2018.

“That’s when you know a new technology is successful,” says Ed Lovelock. “People don’t notice it any more.” Mr Lovelock is product manager for Starship Technologies, a Californian firm that has so far delivered more than 5m shopping orders and restaurant meals in Europe and America using its autonomous Starships.

In some places such deliveries arrive by air. “It soon becomes a normal part of your life,” says Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, the boss of Zipline, a drone-delivery firm also based in California. Zipline began using drones to deliver blood and medical products in Rwanda in 2016. It is expanding into groceries and meals and now operates in other parts of Africa as well as America and Japan. In 2024 Zipline will begin deliveries to hospitals and clinics in the north of England for Britain’s National Heath Service.

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The unfair trial of Jimmy Lai begins in Hong Kong - The Economist

IT HAS BEEN more than three years since the police in Hong Kong arrested Jimmy Lai and stuck him in Stanley Prison. But as Mr Lai stood in court on December 18th, facing charges of sedition and colluding with foreign forces, it felt like the culmination of a much longer saga. The pro-democracy media tycoon has spent decades challenging the administration in Hong Kong and the national government in Beijing. They, in turn, consider Mr Lai a traitor and have been relishing the chance for some public payback.

Mr Lai was one of the first big targets of Hong Kong’s national-security law, which the national government imposed in 2020 after big pro-democracy protests rocked the city. He was often at the front of those demonstrations, as he had been in 2014, when protesters demanding free and fair elections occupied parts of the city in what became known as the Umbrella Movement. The security law aimed to crush such dissent. More than 250 activists, lawmakers and protesters are thought to have been detained for violating it. Mr Lai, the most prominent, has denied any wrongdoing.

The government in Hong Kong has gone to great lengths to ensure that Mr Lai’s trial goes its way. It prevented him from appointing his preferred barrister, a Briton named Tim Owen. (The fight over that contributed to the trial’s being delayed for months.) Paul Lam, Hong Kong’s justice minister, insisted that Mr Lai be tried not by a jury, but by three judges approved by John Lee, the city’s chief executive (this is now the norm in national-security cases). Chris Tang, the security minister, has already proclaimed that the trial will prove Mr Lai is “bad”. The government likes to boast that it has a 100% conviction rate in national-security trials.

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Why Congo’s chaotic election matters - The Economist

One of the world’s least orderly elections will be held on December 20th. Or will it? A presidential ballot is scheduled in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a mineral-rich but breathtakingly poor country of 100m people. However, the preparations have been so shambolic that some locals expect a delay, or an extension of voting. Many areas will not receive crucial papers for recording the results by election day. By one estimate 70% of voter-identity cards are illegible, raising fears that some people will be barred from voting, while others will vote twice. And those are just some of the problems in the parts of the Congo that are not at war.

Fighting has forced 7m Congolese people to flee from their villages, including 450,000 in the six weeks to the end of November. A confusion of conflicts makes life in much of the east of the country unbearable—some of the militias there loot rapaciously and seek to subjugate local populations through mass rape. No other country, bar Sudan, endures displacement on such a scale.

One of the strongest militias, the M23, is backed by Rwanda, though Rwanda denies it. Tensions between the two countries are frighteningly high. Some observers fear open war may break out; Avril Haines, the White House intelligence chief, has been bending ears in both countries’ capitals to avert such a calamity, and seems to have brokered a temporary ceasefire in their proxy war. On the campaign trail, Congolese politicians denounce their neighbour in incendiary terms. Around the time Britain’s Parliament was declaring Rwanda to be safe for asylum-seekers, Congo’s president, Félix Tshisekedi, was telling a cheering crowd near the border that his Rwandan counterpart, Paul Kagame, was acting “like Hitler” and would end up like him.

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