TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #72

Trump's travails around the globe … remember hydroxy? … war on Pepsi … Blinken hopscotches … China-Russia, no-limits friendship … then the bling … Osama Hajjaj with a glimmer of new year hope

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

It's still all about The Trump

Rocketing around the world at dinner time Friday in Washington, breakfast on Saturday in Asia and while most of the European continent was asleep, but still a lead story everywhere from Germany's DW to Singapore's Straits Times, Le Monde to Haaretz was, perhaps unsurprisingly, Donald Trump. As the Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reported:

The US Supreme Court is getting involved in the legal dispute, and the decision is expected soon. In the fraud trial against Trump, the public prosecutor's office is demanding a high penalty. The case, which could change the course of this year's presidential election, is scheduled to be heard in the capital Washington court on February 8th.

Lauren Fedor, reporting from Washington for London's Financial Times, observed:

A decision in favour of the Colorado voters who brought the case could invite similar challenges in other states, while a ruling against them could shut the door on a legal theory that activists had hoped would keep the former president from seeking another term.

While several of these dispatches observed that Trump had personally appointed three of the nine Supreme Court justices and at least two more had proven to be determinedly in his corner, not a single report recognized a legal reality. The court could simply say, he has still not been convicted of any crime, hence we must let "justice" play out, allowing him to appear on every primary ballot.

Others, like Hong Kong's South China Morning Post chose, instead, to focus on another of Trump's legal woes:

Donald Trump should be permanently barred from New York’s real estate industry for “outrageous” fraud, the state attorney general said in a court filing ahead of closing arguments in a civil case against the former US president. The filing by New York Attorney General Letitia James said Trump’s “myriad deceptive schemes” to “inflate asset values and conceal facts were so outrageous that they belie innocent explanation.”

Meanwhile, remember hydroxy?

Remember hydroxychloroquine? Better still, remember Donald Trump's embrace of this miracle cure for Covid?

Well, now it turns out, this drug is way more lethal than anyone might've thought. As Le Monde reported:

Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), promoted by Didier Raoult to treat Covid-19 quickly, showed its ineffectiveness during seriously conducted clinical trials. These also showed, like pharmacovigilance data, that the Marseille microbiologist's favorite molecule could be harmful, even fatal, for certain patients, particularly through cardiac damage. What assessment can we draw on an international scale from its use?....

A French study, published on January 2 in the journal Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy offers an estimate of the number of deaths induced by the administration of HCQ among patients hospitalized for Covid-19 during the first wave of the pandemic, between March and July 2020….

In France, excess mortality linked to the use of hydroxychloroquine is estimated at 199 deaths, but also for the United States (12,700 deaths), Belgium (240), Turkey (95 ), Italy (1,822) and Spain (1,895), for a total of nearly 17,000 deaths. But for Jean-Christophe Lega, from the evaluation and modeling of therapeutic effects team at the University of Lyon, and his colleagues, “these figures probably only represent the tip of the iceberg….Our fellow citizens must be aware that exposure to drug candidates without scientific evaluation is not desirable.»

Adjusted for population, that would make American deaths by far the world's highest—more than 12 times the death rate in France from "hydroxy" as Trump enjoyed calling it.

And then there's profits

"During Trump's presidency, his businesses received millions from foreign governments," Maciej Czarnecki reported in Poland's Wyborcza. "Most from China." His report continued:

The authors of the investigation believe that it is a violation of the constitution, and the Republicans say that nothing happened.

The 156-page report "The White House for Sale" was prepared by Democrats from the House of Representatives Oversight Committee on the basis of documents obtained in court from the Mazars accounting firm, which oversaw Donald Trump's financial empire for many years.

Congressmen managed to obtain only some of the documents before Republicans took over the House at the beginning of 2023 and put a stop to further efforts. Mazars did not provide documents regarding 80 percent of Trump's businesses. Therefore, the amounts presented in the report are probably lower than the actual ones….

The document recalls that before taking power, Trump sometimes bragged about how much money he was getting from foreign capitals and seemed to suggest that it could influence his moves.

Another Europe-American war

A blockbuster price war has broken out between Pepsi and one of its biggest European customers, as Francesco Bertolino reported in Corriere della Sera:

Carrefour will no longer stock the shelves of its over 1,500 stores in Italy with Pepsi group products . In the next few days, the large-scale retail chain will communicate the decision to customers. The reason for the exclusion, however, is the one already advanced by Carrefour for the similar measure already adopted in France: "the unacceptable increases" applied by the American multinational on the prices of Pepsi, Lay's, Doritos and other brands. 

For its part, PepsiCo explained that it has been in discussions with the French supermarket chain for months and that it wants to continue negotiations in good faith to get its products back on the shelves. The clash between Carrefour and Pepsi is raising its tone. Beyond Italy and France, the large-scale retail chain will no longer sell PepsiCo brands in Spain and Belgium either. Carrefour's move is the latest chapter in the clash that has been ongoing for months between large-scale retail chains and producers of consumer goods.

Elections 2024: They're beginning

Andelman Unleashed will be with you all the way. On Tuesday, our first issue of Elections 2024 will be chronicling the first-in-the world contest in Bangladesh where the 15-year reign of dictator Sheikh Hasina Wazed faces hardly any likelihood of a dramatic shift; the last in the world of 2023 when Congo re-installed its autocrat with again a hardly surprising outcome; and Taiwan where the final days of a truly competitive contest with dramatically high stakes for Asia and the world is unspooling right now. Stay tuned !

How others see the World

Peace forays?

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has embarked on another of his neo-Kissingeresque peace forays beginning in Turkey and hopscotching across the Middle East, with Hamas already weighing in. As Jack Khoury of the Israeli daily Haaretz reported:

The Head of Hamas's Political Bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, issued an unusual statement ahead of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken's Middle East tour. Haniyeh called on Blinken, who landed on Friday in Turkey and is expected to visit Israel and Ramallah, to "focus his visit on ending the onslaught on the Palestinian people, on the path to ending the occupation."

Haniyeh also urged leaders of the countries meeting with Blinken to emphasize that regional stability depends on the Palestinian issue. According to him, "The violence and destruction, without progress, won't achieve security and stability as long as the Palestinian people haven't attained their freedom and an independent state."

Meanwhile, Blinken's EU counterpart, Joseph Borrell was headed to Beirut this weekend to try to defuse the situation there and head off a broader Mideast conflict, but not before dropping a bit of a bombshell in Lisbon before heading out. As Al Jazeera reported:

European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has said the international community must impose a solution to the Israel-Hamas war as both sides are unable to come to terms.

“I believe that we have learned in these 30 years that the solution has to be imposed from outside because the two parties will never be able to reach an agreement,” Borrell said. “If this tragedy doesn’t end soon, the entire Middle East might end up in flames.”

At the same time, Scotland's leader, Humza Yousaf, had his own take on the war in Gaza, on Britain's Sky News and later on his own twitter page:

A no-limits friendship?

The war in Ukraine is not over yet, but already China is watching attentively just what might happen to Russia, especially its economy, on the other side. The war has certainly driven the two nations ever closer, as the South China Morning Post explored in a deep-dive probe by reporters He Huifeng in Guangdong and Kandy Wong in Hong Kong, beginning:

Having all majored in Russian, William Liu and his classmates from college enjoyed a bumper year in 2023 after their businesses made considerable inroads into Russia following the invasion of Ukraine a year earlier.

From machinery and cars to medical devices and home appliances, Chinese products have flooded the vast market to the north, filling the void left by Western companies who withdrew following the outbreak of war in February 2022.

Nearly two years into the war, Russia appears to have defied the Western sanctions that could have strangled its economy….Despite many differences in the two economies, Russia’s economic performance since the war started may still offer some references for China, which has upped the ante in its economic and technological rivalry with the United States.

China is also seeking to strike a balance between a push for self-reliance and increased integration with the global market….aiming to expand the potential of a resilient and large domestic market, backed by a burgeoning middle class of at least 400 million people….The strategy places a greater focus on the domestic market, while becoming less reliant on its export-oriented development strategy, but without abandoning it altogether….

But how about those sanctions?:

China enjoys more friendly regimes than Russia and possesses a more developed transportation and financial infrastructure, making sanctions less effective.

And then there's the bling

There's certainly been no end of sanctions layered on Russia in the nearly two years since Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. Some, on oil and gas, have had serious impact on nations far afield. But none, perhaps, as far reaching as the one that went into effect with the dawn of this new year.

As London's The Economist pointed out:

On January 1st the G7, a group of rich countries, and the European Union banned imports of rough diamonds mined in Russia—a third of the total extracted worldwide in 2022….This is the first phase of a comprehensive sanctions scheme: in March the G7 and EU will ban Russian gems that have been cut and polished abroad. In September they will introduce a certification scheme to verify where diamonds were mined. These measures add up to the biggest change to the business in decades….

Diamond traders in Antwerp, a hub for the industry, lobbied the Belgian government to slow down the implementation of sanctions in the EU….. Russian firms could [still] send gems abroad to be cut and polished: 90% of the global supply is processed in India. These could then be legally exported to America or Britain….The new sanctions will eventually close the loophole, locking all Russian diamonds out of G7 markets…. 

The new scheme will eventually make clear the source of every diamond sold in countries implementing the sanctions. It is not yet clear if those costs will be passed on to consumers…. but are unlikely to cripple its industry: it will pivot towards its growing customer base in China and India. 

Finally, there’s Hajjaj….

A rare glimmer of hope for the year that is just beginning comes to us from the great Jordanian cartoonist, Osama Hajjaj, whose contribution, dealing with the Mediterranean migrant crisis, we last featured in our Episode #45.

Osama Hajjaj, age 50, draws for the Jordanian daily Alquds but is known throughout the Arab world. Earlier, he worked for several newspapers including Al Mar'a, Al Dustour, Al Belad, Al Ittihad in Abu Dhabi, and Al Rray . He also worked with Jordanian television for the program “Ala Al Awa Sawa.” He is a member of the global, Paris-based collective Cartooning for Peace. 

Here’s how Hajjaj imagines himself: