Taylor & Trump: global warnings...Elon loosed...bombs over deserts...Ukraine brings home the bacon...knives over Paris...then there's the farmers...Messi in Hong Kong...cartoonist Paresh's desert fire
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.
How other see America
Taylor and Trump: Global warnings
Composite/Andelman Unleashed
It grabbed the eyes on the front page of Le Monde this weekend:
Taylor Swift madness gives cold sweats to the Trump camp
Indeed, it was Michel Guerin, the magisterial editor-in-chief of Le Monde, the leading French daily, who weighed in personally:
That Taylor Swift is being smeared by those close to Trump proves that she is becoming a threat to the American presidential election.
Do you know the “Taylor Swift effect”? These are phenomena, each more improbable than the last, that the American singer provokes due to her unparalleled popularity. The list is staggering. Just like the way she occupies land other than her own, without seeming to touch it. The stakes are high. It is true that she has strengths. At 34, she holds a string of records . She is the most listened to singer of all time or the most downloaded in the world….two concerts in Seattle (United States), in July 2023, caused a seismic disturbance of magnitude 2.3—due to the dance steps of 144,000 people in a stadium.
All this is small matter compared to the looming stakes. Will she have an influence on the American presidential election on November 5 by supporting Democrat Joe Biden? Long discreet on politics, she called to vote for him in 2020, accusing Trump of “fanning the flames of white supremacism and racism”.
Understanding the danger, Trumpist foot soldiers have been shooting at Taylor Swift for several days, accusing her of being a Pentagon agent or of practicing black magic on stage. They say this sports romance is as rigged as the February 11 [Super Bowl]. The singer would use it in order to expand her fan base, which she will place at the service of Biden when the time comes. That Taylor Swift is being smeared by those close to Trump proves that she is becoming a threat to the presidential election.
Where are all those migrants coming from?
It may look like they're all from Latin America. Not exactly, certainly not entirely. The French daily Le Monde put a team on tracing their origin. And lo 'n behold, thousands, actually tens of thousands, are coming from everywhere else, especially Africa, but as far afield as Uzbekistan and on into Asia. Just transiting through Central America—in fact through Nicaragua…the "trampoline" for migrants, destination U.S.
As Angeline Montoya, Sandrine Morel in Madrid and Julia Pascual wrote:
Nicaragua [has become] a thriving hub for migrants heading to the United States. Managua organizes the arrival on its soil of many people from the continent, but also from Africa and Asia, seeking to reach North America. The country gets a financial windfall from it and finds a way to embarrass Washington.
“Ticket to Nicaragua available. Price: $8,500”; “Senegal-Nicaragua plane ticket available. Interested inbox more info thank you”; “Tickets and files 3 million [CFA francs / US$5,000 ]” … On Facebook, the announcements are rampant. It has been more than a year since a migration route took off for Senegalese wanting to reach the United States. They book flights to Managua, Nicaragua, then travel overland through Central America to their final destination. “In 2023, travel agencies have said they will be overwhelmed with requests in Dakar,” reports Nelly Robin, of the Research Institute for Development.
One transit point is Madrid, so much so that beginning February 19, all Senegalese will need a transit visa just to disembark at Madrid's airport, en route to Nicaragua. But that’s hardly dissuaded many:
Tierno (first name has been changed) joined the United States in the fall of 2023. This 29-year-old Senegalese landed in Managua on September 29 and entered Arizona twelve days later. Today, he is staying with a compatriot in Ohio. “I’m waiting to get my work permit," he said. Afterwards, there is work in warehouses like those of Amazon….In the United States, the working permit lasts five years and allows you to be part of the country."
Tierno paid nearly €7,000 euros for his trip, which he made by plane, but also by bus, by car, by canoe to go up Central America and Mexico. “In Nicaragua,” he remembers, "you leave the airport, there are a lot of people offering you their services. I paid a certain Pedro $60 dollars to go to Honduras. I stayed in his hotel, and we traveled in 4×4s. We were a group with Cameroonians, Mauritanians, Indians…”
Elon on the loose
On the front page of the French daily Le Figaro, the editors pose the question: "The lurches of Elon Musk, do they threaten his empire?"
Then, next to a contemplative photo, they continue:
The drug use and repeated provocations of the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and X worry both the leaders of these companies and some of their clients, starting with NASA and the Pentagon.
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How others see the World
Bombs over deserts
Most of the attention has gone to American air strikes, first on Iranian-backed Houthi targets in Yemen, then on Iranian-backed militia groups in Syria and Iraq. But trust me, Britain is all in too.
As The Times of London noted:
David Cameron tells Iran: You're accountable for terror….The foreign secretary says Britain must use every tool at its disposal to 'put out fires'…[And] across the Beqaa valley, close to the Syrian border, watching a drill from above on a viewing platform was Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, who had come to Rayak, east Lebanon, to meet soldiers trained by the British Army.
Britain is proposing a plan to de-escalate tensions on the Lebanon-Israel border, where the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Israeli forces have been trading fire almost daily for the past four months, sparking fears of a wider war….[It was] his third visit to the Middle East since becoming foreign secretary in November….
On Saturday night Britain and the United States launched a third wave of assaults on Iranian proxies, this time striking at least 30 Houthi targets in ten locations…. Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, said it was Britain’s duty to protect innocent lives and Red Sea trade.
The Brits were flying out of their vast, high-security air and naval facility on Cyprus, the closest western base to the action, whose perimeter took Andelman Unleashed two hours to drive around last October. American warplanes and Tomahawk cruise missiles attacked off the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, destroyers USS Gravely and the USS Carney, while long-range B-1B Lancer bombers are based in the U.S.
Ukraine brings home the bacon
The autocratic ruler of Hungary, Victor Orban, has held Europe, but especially Ukraine hostage interminably. Finally, after unrelenting pressure from fellow European leaders from Germany, France and especially Italy, he gave in. Ukraine will have the €50 billion it so desperately needs in the wake of America's GOP blocking any further aid in its battle for survival and just as the sands are beginning to run out.
It took any number of cooks to boil the broth as Ukraine has survived to fight another day.
The front-page banner in the Milan daily Corriere della Sera:
Aid to Ukraine, Orban votes yes ... Compact Europe, Meloni's mediation. Talks with Budapest on the Salis case: 'Respect asked for.'
[ NB: Italian activist, Ilaria Salis, has been charged with taking part in an anti-fascist group's assault on Hungarian far-right activists. Much to the chagrin of Italy's far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, images of the Italian elmentary school teacher from Manza in handcuffs and shackles in a Hungarian court has outraged her nation, the BBC reported, with strong feelings roused after a year she’s spent in a cell "filled with rats and insects." ]
Just below the banner, is the brutal column by Corriere's leading columnist Federico Fubini:
Long before transforming George Soros into the bogeyman who would manipulate every conspiracy, Viktor Orbán in distant years studied at Oxford thanks to a scholarship financed by the same Hungarian philanthropist. And it shows. He is an aspiring autocrat; he reigns over a corrupt and brutal system; he has no scruples. But no one can accuse him of being crude. As the doyen of European summits, the Hungarian leader is very good at reading the moods of a room full of leaders. He is skilled at pulling the strings, he knows how to try to extract the maximum price despite the small weight of his country, but he is equally quick in understanding when it is appropriate to fall back and close a game as soon as possible.
In Brussels Orbán realized that he had to give up. If he had not done so, he could have forgotten about the €20 billion of European funds for Hungary which remain frozen today due to the anti-democratic nature of his government. That money represents more than 10% of the Hungarian economy: it is as if someone had blocked around €240 billion in funding from Brussels for Italy. The joint pressure from Germany, France and Italy made it clear to the man from Budapest that this time the European system would not allow itself to be blackmailed further.
So Orbán removed all obstacles to the €50 billion aid package for Ukraine, without achieving practically anything.
Knives not guns
There are few mass murders in France since, quite simply, you can't buy an assault weapon at your local super-marché. Instead, folks use knives. There's no shortage of knife attacks, but few victims wind up dead. Early Saturday, France 24 network reported:
A knife attack in the Gare de Lyon rail station in Paris left three people wounded, police said, ruling out terrorism at this stage.
Benjamin Dervaux, writing in the daily Le Parisien reported a day before that "a knife attack in front of a high school in Paris, led to 4 suspects arrested.”
All minors, they were placed in police custody for attempted murder. They are suspected of having participated in the violent attack on a 15-year-old teenager near the school on January 25, in [Paris's] 20th arrondissement.
In December, the Paris bureau of the Reuters news agency assembled a list of knife attacks in France just last year:
-Dec 2 - An assailant killed a German tourist in a knife attack in the heart of Paris and later told police he could not bear the deaths of Muslims in Afghanistan and the occupied Palestinian territories. Two other people were hurt after being struck with a hammer in the attack.
- Oct 13 - One teacher was killed and another wounded in a knife attack at a high school in northern French town of Arras.
- June 9 - A Syrian national wounded four and two pensioners in a knife attack in the Alpine town of Annecy.
- May 22 - An assailant fatally stabbed a nurse and wounded another hospital worker with a kitchen knife in Reims.
- Jan. 11, 2023 - A man attacked and wounded six people at the Gare du Nord train station in Paris with a homemade weapon, leaving one with serious injuries, before being shot by off-duty police officers.
This spate of violent incidents prompted President Emmanuel Macron to denounce what he called a process of "decivilization" in French society. As Le Parisien quoted his remarks to a cabinet meeting at the Elysée Palace:
We must be intractable. No violence is legitimate, whether verbal or against people. We must work in depth to counter this process of decivilization.”
There's also the farmers…
A problem avoided by Macron in France. As Andelman Unleashed suggested last week, he handled them much the same way as the virulent "yellow vest" movement in his first term in office, threw them a bone, then asked them to go home, as Le Figaro reported:
To calm the anger of farmers, the executive announced the temporary cessation of the plan to reduce by 50% the pesticides used in crops by 2030….a break with the 'ecological five-year term' promised by Emmanuel Macron before his re-election.
Still, this problem with Europe's farmers very much lives on…across the continent. The Charlemagne column (written in fact by a direct, lineal descendant of that same 8th century Carolingian leader) in The Economist observes:
It took 120 ships laden with bearded Vikings to besiege Paris in the spring of 845 AD. They moved on only after being paid a tribute of 7,000 pounds of silver. In 1870, Prussians required two armies and batteries of cannons to blockade the city, which surrendered after locals grew tired of eating rats, cats, horses and whatever animals could safely be plucked from the zoo….Politicians looking to avoid becoming electoral roadkill may yet need to dodge a few tractors….
Across Europe, a revolt of the peasants is brewing. From Belgium to Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Spain, farmers are up in arms. A sector used to exorbitant privileges—roughly one-third of the EU’s budget goes on subsidies to the common agricultural policy, after all—has felt them slip from its grasp. It is in many ways a familiar story, of a privileged caste sensing its status declining. For what is Europe if not an attempt to hold on to things as they once were in a changing world? Being wed to tradition and yet buffeted by modernising forces is the story of the continent writ large, as Europeans feeling the swoosh of China, India and others zooming past can attest. Farmers are not the only Europeans who would like the world to stop so that they can get off (and retire early).
And then … it's becoming quite Messi in Hong Kong
"Taylor Swift and Coldplay bypassed Hong Kong for Singapore, Japan and the Philippines," the Hong Kong daily South China Morning Post observed. "It was a stinging snub with the city so in need of big events to lure tourists and put itself back on the global map after social unrest and Covid-19."
But now make way for Messi…as the SCMP continued:
A much-anticipated visit by football superstar Lionel Messi and his Inter Miami team has drawn tourists from mainland China and the region to Hong Kong for a glimpse of the legend in person.
The city’s Causeway Bay shopping hub, where Hong Kong Stadium is located, was awash in pink as fans streamed in for an open practice session.
Fans draped in pinkish Inter Miami jerseys and the Argentina white-and-blue stripe jerseys started filing into the stadium as early as an hour before doors opened, when police began to cordon off roads in the area to control the crowds.
Government officials were on hand at the airport to meet Messi’s Inter Miami, co-owned by former Manchester United star David Beckham, when they arrived for an [exhibition match] against a team drawn from the local Premier League.
Kiratchapat Sirisareewattang, 17, said her family, all decked out in Inter Miami jerseys, came from Thailand to see the football star….Phaidon Dalakakis and Jonas Gantner, both 22, travelled from Germany to Hong Kong for the first time to catch the 36-year-old Messi in Asia, which they said was a rare opportunity…. Mario Zhang, 20, left home in Shenzhen at 9am for the training session.
Finally, there’s Paresh….
The great Indian cartoonist Paresh warns just what might be in store for Iran as Uncle Sam's firetruck bristling with arms heads toward a Middle East in flames…..
Our cartoonist, Nath Paresh is an Indian artist who began drawing for the Herald Tribunein India from 1990 to 2005 before working for the daily newspaper Khaleej Times, published in English in Dubai and the United Arab Emirates since 2005. Andelman Unleashed last published Paresh in October 2023, his cartoon dealing with Israel's Mobius strip of choices. He is a member of the inestimable Cartooning for Peacecollective.
Here's how Paresh sees himself:
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You are SO kind, Walter … yes I do remember those days in Le Monde … but then The Times of London once ran only classified ads on its front page !!
As for entertaining/depressing …. I do try to amuse and inform (not mutually exclusive!)
;-))
Totally !
Reliably and determinedly anti-American !!