TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #52
Beginning on a divided island...Why Hawaii's ablaze...Barbenheimer in Japan...A Ukraine in Africa...Lookout for Sudan...Prince Harry plays polo…cartoonist Kamensky's rabbit patches up the world.
This weekly feature for Andelman Unleashed, continues on its mission to explore how the media of other nations are reporting and commenting on the United States, and how they are viewing the rest of the world. Reporting this week from Cyprus…next week from the Greek island of Chios.
The view from Cyprus
NICOSIA, Cyprus—Our Unleashed visit to this perennially divided island got off to an elegiac start when, at Athens airport we discovered that we would be on the maiden voyage to Larnaca Airport of the new Airbus A220 jet of Cyprus Airways, the flag carrier of this strategic island nation that dominates the eastern Mediterranean.
With temperatures hovering around the 100-degree mark and not a single cloud in the sky, it’s quite clear how deeply concerned the leaders of this nation and its airline might be with everything green—hence their choice for the two newest planes in the Cyprus fleet this model that CEO Paul Sies told me before he boarded with the rest of us is 40% more fuel efficient than their other planes. It even smelled new—you know that new-car smell of real leather seats that goes away after your first thousand miles or so? Well, we had it on the plane’s maiden voyage, and as the first revenue passenger on board.
Sadly, the nation itself remains divided—Turkish Cyprus to the north, Greek to the south, with Greek and Turkish Cypriot officers manning checkpoints, demanding passports and vehicle insurance on both sides, with a broad, barbed-wire neutral zone in between.
It reminded me somehow of other armed crossings of my years in communist-era eastern Europe—Berlin east and west, Austria to Czechoslovakia or Hungary, and every frontier with Rumania. All of these barriers, of course, are long gone to the history books. But Turkey, north and south remain. We will be exploring much of this shortly in Unleashed Voices with Metin Munir, a native of Cyprus, one of the most extraordinary journalists who has devoted his life to exploring, most graphically and quite often most effectively, many of those who have perpetuated his benighted island’s division between two nations.
How others see America
Fire all around
“In the Hawaiian language, Lahaina means ‘cruel sun,’” London’s The Economist began. “The north-east trade winds provide the eastern shore of Maui with ample rain and the West Maui mountains with a superfluity of it. But Lahaina, the capital of the Hawaiian kingdom in the 19th century, sits in the mountains’ rain shadow and so gets comparatively little. What is more, the rain that does fall does so almost entirely in winter: summers are hot and dry. As a result, it is no stranger to fires. But those that ripped through the beautiful city were unprecedented in their fury….
“Why were these fires so powerful? Fires need dry fuel. Various factors provided these fires with a lot of it. Hawaii as a whole has been in a drought for over a year. As of the week of the fires, more than a third of the island was in drought conditions and most of the rest was abnormally dry, in part the result of unseasonably hot weather. In Kihei, another town on Maui, the intense sunshine melted traffic lights on their poles.”
But The Economist‘s conclusion is even more dire. “As the world continues to get hotter, flash droughts are likely to become more common….[and] even cities that have survived for centuries should not feel safe.”
Trump’s on fire too
Washington correspondent Macarena Vida Liy in the Spanish daily El Pais: “The governor of Florida and Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States, Ron DeSantis, has given a significant turn to his campaign strategy. For the first time, he has declared flatly and unambiguously that his main rival in the primaries, Donald Trump, was defeated in the 2020 elections.” Still, he can’t or won’t go all the way….“But in his public interventions, the governor tries not to totally oppose the man who still maintains immense influence over his party. He refuses to criticize Trump or comment on his legal problems. Like many Republicans, he insists that the judicial system is ‘politicized.’ And he considers that there were ‘problems’ in the elections three years ago.”
And then there’s Barbenheimer
A blockbuster of a marketing ploy boosted two huge American films into the stratosphere. Everywhere but Japan. As Kantaro Komiya and Akiko Okamoto reported in The Japan Times, “’Barbenheimer’ memes linking the doll-themed movie with a biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer caused a stir and made distributor Warner Brothers apologize ahead of the release….in Japan, as the nation earlier this month marked the anniversaries of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 78 years ago….
“Fan produced memes depicted [Barbie’s Margo] Robbie with ‘Oppenheimer’ actor Cillian Murphy alongside images of nuclear blasts….A #NoBarbenheimer hashtag trended in Japan….No Japan release date has been announced for ‘Oppenheimer’ which has been criticized for largely ignoring the atomic bomb’s destruction of two major Japanese cities in 1945, accounting for more than 200,000 deaths.”
Unleashed Voices has presented a remarkable two-part reminiscence of Hiroshima by Audrey Ronning Topping… Part I and Part II.
How others see the World
Do we see another Ukraine ?
The French first arrived in what today is the nation of Niger nearly 200 years ago. By the end of the 19th century they were firmly established as the colonial overlords of what is today the nation of Niger and many of the surrounding nations that are now in the sway of military juntas and in the process of being re-colonized by a new, large power master—the Russian paramilitary Wagner Group.
As I wrote this weekend for CNN Opinion:
“Given all this, the US needs to do much more,” I continued. “At a minimum, it needs to back any moves by other West African nations to remove the junta and restore the democratically elected government, including supporting military moves other African democracies may be prepared to take. The U.S. can certainly do this with rhetoric, along with a potential combination of money, weapons, or intelligence.”
But I’d be prepared to go even further. If Niger continues along this parlous path, and Wagner manages to insert itself, western intervention here is in its own way no less critical in support of democracy than in Ukraine. The world continues to hold its breath as to the next moves from those most concerned.
How bad could it get?
The four-month old civil war in Sudan, that has all but faded from world headlines in the four months since it suddenly erupted, continues to burn. It should provide some lessons for those concerned with Africa further to the west. Saudi Arabia-based Arab News suggested: “At least 13 civilians died on Tuesday in the heaviest fighting since the conflict began there nearly four months ago….The situation in Omduram is ‘terrifying’ with the regular army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces bringing reinforcements and weapons [with] no signs of a breakthrough.”
The next day, Arab News continued, “UN officials said the people of Sudan continue to face ‘unimaginable suffering’ amid continuing clashes, ‘with neither side achieving victory nor making any significant gains.’”
And then, there’s Harry ….
If there’s one skill Prince Harry hasn’t forgotten since giving up his claim to royal succession and moving to America, it’s polo. As Gabrielle Chan reported in Singapore’s The Straits Times, “There was an air of royalty at the Singapore Polo Club on a cloudy Saturday afternoon, as Prince Harry returned to the Republic for the first time since 2017 to lend his star power in the annual Sentebale charity polo match. He helped raise around US$1 million (S$1.35 million) by participating in the match, and even managed to skillfully score two goals….
“However, they were not enough to help his side—the Royal Salute Sentebale—win the Handa Polo Cup, as they drew 7-7 with the Singapore Polo Club Team, captained by Argentinian polo player Nacho Figueras. Both teams shared the trophy.”
But Chan pointed out there was a whole lot more to this than four chukkas of polo: “By saddling up in Singapore, he followed in the footsteps of his father—then Prince Charles, now the King—who played at the club in Mount Pleasant Road in 1974, while his grandfather, Prince Philip, did so nine years earlier.”
Finally, there’s Kamensky….
The Austrian-based cartoonist Kamensky imagines the Easter Bunny in his off- season stitching up oh so many tears in the global fabric—from Niger and Wagner in Africa, across the Middle East and onward, with ample needle, thread and patches on the ground at his feet to paper over any number of global lacunae to come.
Marian Kamensky, who draws simply under his last name, currently calls Austria his home, though it might just as well have been his birthplace of Slovakia or any of several Slovak towns where he spent his youth, Germany where he learned lithography and began publishing in a host of European newspapers and magazines from Die Zeit to Der Spiegel, before settling finally in Vienna where he now works as an illustrator and cartoonist, drawing for the Cartoon Movement.
Here’s how Kamensky imagines himself:
As usual a wise observation from the good doctor !!
Oh my, you are so right … The Economist has really dug into this like few other media I’ve seen….I congratulate them !