Bloomberg Businessweek-Europe Edition 12/18/2017

Asia ● Saudi Arabia lifted a 35-year ban on commercial movie theaters. Film content will be subject to censorship. ● Freezing temperatures temporarily trumped China’s curbs on burning coal as natural gas demand exceeded supply in the north. ● The Pakistan rupee fell to a record low against the dollar on Dec. 12 after the country’s central bank stopped propping up its value. ● Debt-laden Sri Lanka transferred the port of Hambantota, in a prime location on the sea route between Asia and Africa, to China on a 99-year lease. ● India’s broadcasting ministry banned condom ads from daytime television. Only about 5 percent of Indians report regularly using condoms. The country is on pace to become the world’s most populous by 2024. ● Australia is imposing jail terms of as long as 25 years on child-sex…

America’s sudden reckoning with sexual assault and the harassment of women has swept across the worlds of entertainment, media, and politics. But the cultural upheaval set off two months ago by the revelations of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct failed to reach one part of the political world: the segment of the Republican Party most vociferously supportive of Donald Trump. Until late in the evening of Dec. 12, Roy Moore of Alabama looked as if he might ratify this strange state of affairs. His bid to fill the Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions became global news after the Washington Post published allegations that Moore, a former state supreme court chief justice, had sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl when he was in his mid-30s and had routinely lurked in the local mall…

Saudi Arabia reacted to the Dec. 4 killing of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen by intensifying its bombing campaign in the country. A more suitable response—tactically, strategically, and morally—would be to completely lift the blockade it imposed in November on ports and airfields controlled by the Houthis, which prevents the delivery of humanitarian aid to millions of suffering Yemenis. There are no heroes in the civil war between the Saudi-led coalition supporting Yemen’s government and the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, who were responsible for killing Saleh, a former ally. Both sides have inflicted death and suffering on civilians. Hostilities have already killed or wounded at least 14,000 people in the past three years, and countless others have died from disease and starvation. Some 1 million people have contracted cholera in…

A few months ago, Amazon.com Inc. representatives met with fashion designer Jackie Wilson as part of the expansion of Amazon’s burgeoning apparel business. They wanted her to make a knit top for women that would be sold under an Amazon-owned private label. And they wanted the fabric to feel heavy and high-quality—attributes long associated in the shopping mind with name-brand attire. “They are not concerned at all about how many units they sell, and they’re not focused on margins,” says Wilson, whose company in Syracuse, N.Y., makes clothing for Kohl’s, American Eagle Outfitters, and J.C. Penney. “They’re concerned about customer satisfaction. They want five-star reviews.” Wilson’s knit top is in the vanguard of a private-label push that’s upended the $275 billion U.S. apparel sector. Amazon, Wal-Mart Stores, Target, and other big retailers…

“Companies like Apple are vulnerable to boycotts. It makes good sense that they would support these sorts of efforts” Ma Jun’s years as an environmental activist taught him this lesson: If you want factories to clean up their act, shaming them in front of Apple Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. works better than government fines. Ma’s strategy, backed financially by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s charitable arm, is to scrape real-time data off government websites that compile readings from effluent monitoring equipment at some 13,000 of the worst water polluters. The software aggregates the data on an app called Blue Map, where the public can easily identify wrongdoers. Factories caught polluting face repercussions. Disclosure by Ma’s nonprofit organization has caused some to be banished from Apple’s supplier list, denied a desired credit rating…

Healthy Pharms sounds like such an agreeable business, until you read a lawsuit filed by a would-be neighbor on Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass. It warns of “pungent odors,” “undesirable visitors,” higher crime rates, and lower property values if the medical marijuana shop opens as planned. Not incidentally, it also points out that Healthy Pharms would operate in flagrant disregard of the federal law that categorizes cannabis as a controlled substance every bit as illegal as heroin or cocaine. Raj Dhanda, the controlling partner of companies that own the Crimson Galeria and three other buildings near Harvard University, lodged the complaint in September under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act—marking at least the fourth time the statute known as RICO has been used to challenge a marijuana enterprise in states…