Nutritix

Category: Sports

  • Europe grew faster than the US last year. 

    Europe grew faster than the US last year. 

    Europe’s stock markets have beaten Wall Street by the biggest margin in more than three decades over recent months as its economy looks set to dodge a recession many thought inevitable just a few weeks ago.

    Since late September, European market benchmarks have risen by 20 percentage points more than Wall Street — the largest outperformance seen in a four-month period in the past 30 years. 

    Though over the past two weeks, Europe’s stocks have posted slightly smaller gains than US equities, this has done “little to erode their outperformance since September,” Graham Secker, chief European equity strategist at Morgan Stanley, told CNN. 

    The overall rise is a reversal of a 15-year trend that has seen US stock indices, flush with fast-growing tech companies, consistently beat those across the Atlantic.

    “It had been quite a sharp turnaround and the sharpest in a while,” Thomas Mathews, senior markets economist at Capital Economics, told CNN.

    In a note earlier this month, Morgan Stanley said the reversal was driven by a combination of falling gas prices and better-than-expected economic data in Europe, as well as China’s swift reopening.

    Similarly, Mathews at Capital Economics noted that the “steady outperformance” of European stocks can be dated back to a decline in European wholesale gas prices from their all-time high reached in late August. Europe’s benchmark gas contract is now trading at €57 ($62) per megawatt hour, sharply down from the peak of €346 ($375) per megawatt hour.

    Consumer price inflation in the region has also ticked down in recent months. In the countries that use the euro, inflation fell from a record high of 10.6% in October to 8.5% in January, preliminary data from the EU statistics office showed on Wednesday. 

    More broadly, investors have been encouraged by Europe’s economic resilience over the past year. GDP in the eurozone grew 3.5% in 2022 — more than in the United States or China — including a slight expansion in the final quarter, according to a preliminary estimate by the EU statistics office.

  • The big picture: the messy and magical reality of motherhood

    The big picture: the messy and magical reality of motherhood

    Hungarian photographer Andi Gáldi Vinkó’s playful portrait of her child, part of series on becoming a parent, combines humour and intimacy.

    o say the subject of Andi Gáldi Vinkó’s book is a diary of motherhood doesn’t get anywhere near to the fleshy, playful vulnerability of her pictures. Titled Sorry I Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I’m Back, the Hungarian photographer’s journal is a kind of traveller’s tale from the magical and estranging foreign land of childbirth. “When I realised I was pregnant,” she writes, by way of introduction, “I had no idea what awaited me. How messy and how raw, how unpredictable and how out of control motherhood really was compared to the images I had in my mind from films, photos, paintings done by men.”

    Her images take you deep into that out-of-control place, her body no longer all her own, colonised by other dramatic forces. Her camera watches it all swell, as she pictures befores and afters: “Then I was an emerging artist, travelling around and going to art fairs and exhibitions and openings. Now I am a mother of two working on borrowed time hoping the years I’ve lost to mothering can be written into my CV without guilt and shame.”

  • Government promises robust crypto regulation

    Government promises robust crypto regulation

    The government has published proposals for crypto-asset regulation it hopes will “manage” the risks of the “turbulent industry”. 

    The sector has had a calamitous year, with assets collapsing in value by an estimated 75% from their peak of about $3 trillion in November 2021.

    Ministers estimate up to 10% of UK adults now own some form of crypto.

    They plan to use existing regulations for the industry, rather than creating a bespoke regime.

    The Treasury says that will allow crypto to benefit from the “confidence, credibility and regulatory clarity” of the existing system for financial services, as set out in the UK’s Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (FSMA).

    It wants to create a level playing field between traditional and emerging financial services, where the principle is “same risk, same regulatory outcome”.

    But it also acknowledges some crypto businesses may simply choose to continue operating in offshore jurisdictions that “do not impose equivalent market-abuse rules”.

    The Treasury says its proposals – which it’s now consulting on – will:

    • lay down rules on crypto-asset promotions which are fair, clear and not misleading
    • enhance data-reporting requirements, including with regulators
    • implement new regulations to prevent so-called pump and dump, where an individual artificially inflates the value of a crypto asset before selling it

    Ministers say the measures will “mitigate the most significant risks” of crypto technologies, while “harnessing their advantages”. 

    Economic Secretary to the Treasury Andrew Griffith said the government remained “steadfast in our commitment to grow the economy and enable technological change and innovation – and this includes crypto-asset technology”.

    “But we must also protect consumers who are embracing this new technology – ensuring robust, transparent and fair standards,” he added.

  • The street art that expressed the world’s pain

    The street art that expressed the world’s pain

    In 2020, murals in cities all over the globe gave voice to black protest and resistance. Arwa Haider explores the powerful graffiti art that memorializes George Floyd and others.

    Over the summer of 2020, a portrait recurred on city walls across the world: an image of the black American George Floyd, who was brutally suffocated to death by police officer David Chauvin on 25 May, 2020. Most of these portraits were based on Floyd’s 2016 selfie, taken from his own Facebook account; many referred to the torment of his killing, and his final words. Thousands of miles from the US, protests numerous graffiti tributes to Floyd appeared in European cities and in Asia, Africa and Australia.

    In Karachi, truck artist Haider Ali painted a portrait inscribed with English tags (‘#blacklivesmatter’) and Urdu song lyrics (“This world doesn’t belong to white or black people, it belongs to the ones with heart”); in Idlib, northwestern Syria, Floyd appeared among the war-ravaged ruins; in Nairobi, he was depicted alongside the Swahili word “haki“, meaning ‘justice’ (in a work by Kenyan artist Allan Mwangi, aka Mr Detail Seven); Palestinian artist Taqi Sbatin painted Floyd on the West Bank barrier; in Berlin’s Mauerpark, Floyd was portrayed on the wall by Dominican-born artist Eme Freethinker, alongside an array of iconic black US figures: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, Jean-Michel Basquiat and the musician Prince.

    These portraits are a testimony to human empathy, and the reach of the vast, multi-stranded Black Lives Matter movement. Graffiti is both an ancient form (traced back to writing on the wall in Ancient Greece and Rome) and a vital contemporary statement about society; independent graffiti and commissioned public art have also brought vivid focus to BLM. In a year when history is being emphatically questioned, and where a global pandemic has shut conventional galleries and museums, street art also highlights a diversity of viewpoints. The very public horror of Floyd’s killing (captured on videocam) lingers, but he is rarely an isolated figure; mural memorials also say the names of generations of innocent black US victims: among them, Breonna Taylor (killed by the police in her own home, 13 March, 2020); 12-year-old Tamir Rice (fatally shot by the police, 22 November, 2014); 14-year-old Emmett Till (lynched by racists, 28 August, 1955).International artists bring their own resonance; the Nairobi mural of Floyd also draws attention to accusations of police brutality in Kenya; Freethinker was adamant that his Berlin mural should honor Floyd’s life, rather than visualize his death, although he added in an interview with NPR: “I saw many, many other guys die by the police in my country, like almost for nothing. So I know how it is.” Syrian artist Aziz Asmar, who created the Idlib mural with Anis Hamdoun, told The National: “Art is a universal language. Our humanity requires us to unite with other people who are facing injustice. When we draw on the walls of destroyed buildings, we are telling the world that underneath these buildings there are people who have died or who have left their homes. It shows you that there was injustice here, just like there’s injustice in America.”

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