TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #19
It's Christmas eve…cold & bleak in America…hope for Ukraine….Covid rears again….the Taliban brutalize their women….a fun list from Singapore…and our cartoon from Russo in the anteroom of the Eternal
This weekly feature for Andelman Unleashed, explores how the media of other nations are reporting and commenting on the United States, and how they are viewing the rest of the world.
And to all a good night ….
On Christmas eve, and the penultimate day of Chanukah, Andelman Unleashed would like to wish all our readers full stockings, tasty latkes, and a better end to a fraught year with hope for a more peaceful one to come. The great Swiss daily Neue Zurcher Zeitung put it very simply with a universal image of children…waiting and hoping:
How others see America
Cold and bleak
America's blustery entry into the holiday season has captured front pages around the world where many are coping with their own challenges for a blustery winter. Correspondent Corine Lesnes of the leading French daily Le Monde captured the spirit of the season in her report from San Francisco: "In the United States, a Siberian cold keeps Americans from celebrating the first normal Christmas since the pandemic."
"More than 8,000 canceled flights, more than a million people without electricity, catastrophic floods. Christmas promises to be dramatic for millions of Americans," Lesnes continued. More than 240 million people (out of 380 million inhabitants) are affected…in particular the Midwest, where extreme temperatures (−55°C) were experienced…humans risking hypothermia and even death….Americans haven't taken Joe Biden's advice to avoid travel."
And then there was a visitor
Energy and arms were very much on the mind of Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky, on his unprecedented visit to the White House and Congress where he raised themes that resonated broadly in this season of battlefield horrors and winter chills. Not surprisingly, The Times of London observed on its front page, "Zelensky echoes Churchill as he tells Congress: We will never surrender.”
Then correspondents Alistair Dawber in Washington, Mike Evans and Marc Bennetts observed, “in a nod to his audience, the president compared the bitter winter ahead for Ukrainian troops to the battle of the Bulge, when Allied forces resisted the last big German offensive of the Second World War….The stirring speech echoed Franklin D. Roosevelt and Churchill, who delivered a wartime address to Congress in 1941….'This battle will define in what world our children will live.'"
For another, not entirely unexpected, perspective on his historic visit, Kremlin-controlled RT headlined "Zelensky's ‘Hollywood-style’ US visit [is] a ‘proxy war’ promotion…to pursue the manic idea of defeating the Russians on the battlefield."
How Others See the World
Ukraine has its needs
In the wake of Zelensky's visit to Washington and his plea to Congress not to ignore Ukraine and its desperate, quite possibly open-ended need for arms and munitions including many even more advance types that are already en route or in place, the BBC assembled a comprehensive list of "Ukraine weapons: What military equipment is the world giving?"
The answer was clearly not enough. "President Zelensky has said the monthly cost of defence for Ukraine was about $5bn," the BBC reported, "Analysts say Ukraine badly needs better supplies of artillery and ammunition to hold on to key positions and retake more territory." The BBC concluded: "Since the start of the conflict in Ukraine, the UK has been a major supplier of weapons and equipment to Kyiv, though on a much smaller scale than the US."
Covid has hardly departed…
Certainly not from China where London's Financial Times reported in a stunning exclusive lead story that in the first 20 days of December, some "250 million people have caught Covid."
Correspondents Qianer Liu and Cheng Leng in Hong Kong, Sun Yu in Shanghai, and Ryan McMorrow in Beijing wrote: "18% of the population, were infected with Covid-19…as Beijing abruptly dismantled restrictions that had contained the disease for almost three years. The estimates—including 37 million people, or 2.6% of the population, who were infected on Tuesday alone—were revealed by Sun Yang, a deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention." The report added that estimates showed "more than half of the population in Beijing and Sichuan were already infected…..figures that contrast with [official] data put out by the National Health Commission, which reported 62,592 symptomatic Covid cases over the same period" nationwide.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post asked, "As Covid rages, is rural China ready for the biggest travel surge in years?"
Correspondent Zhenzhen Liu pointed out: "In two weeks, the biggest annual human migration on Earth will begin for the Lunar New Year, lasting about 40 days. Travel platforms such as Qunar.com have predicted a surge in trips throughout China that could reach 80 percent of pre-Covid levels. But as hundreds of millions of people prepare for a long-awaited return home [over the Chinese Lunar New Year], worries are growing that the waves of Covid-19 infections sweeping China’s big cities will overwhelm smaller urban centres and rural areas. In these areas, health systems tend to be more fragile, leaving many more people vulnerable to the dire consequences of mass infections."
Don't forget Afghanistan, especially the women
It's Yalda, celebration of the winter solstice in Afghanistan, and Germany's Deutsche Welle reported on a special gift for the nation's women: "The Taliban said they were suspending university classes for women until further notice, once more restricting women's access to formal education."
"You are all informed to immediately implement the mentioned order of suspending education of females until further notice," read a letter issued by the Ministry to all government and private universities that was tweeted on Tuesday. DW continued that the letter also included a "ban meaning that girls and women have been effectively locked out of classrooms after the 6th grade." As it happens, according to DW, "thousands of women [had just taken] university entrance exams across the country, with many aspiring to become teachers or medical practitioners. Universities had remained open to women since the Taliban swept back into power in August 2021, so long as they attended classes separated from male students. The Taliban-led government in Afghanistan also reportedly specified subjects that women could choose to study at their universities." No longer.
U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price shot back "this unacceptable stance will have significant consequences for the Taliban and will further alienate the Taliban from the international community." The world awaits these consequences.
Another continent, another war
All but lost in the mayhem of Russia's war on Ukraine or the horrific aftermath of Afghanistan is another war that has broken out on the continent of Africa. As Le Monde Afrique reported on Wednesday: "The diplomatic and media war between the DRC and Rwanda has accelerated since the Kishishe tragedy [when insurgents massacred scores of civilians]. Several Western chancelleries, including Paris, Brussels and Berlin, have denounced Kigali's support for the March 23 Movement rebels."
The report continued to explain: "For several months, Kinshasa has been denouncing the 'Rwandan aggression' on its territory and the support provided by Kigali to the insurgents. The latter now occupy a large part of the territory of Rutshuru, in the rich mining province of North Kivu, on the border of Uganda and Rwanda. Guilty of countless abuses, the M23 is accused, in a preliminary UN report, of having killed at least 131 civilians, including 17 women and 12 children, on November 29 and 30 in the village of Kishishe."
And then there are the lists….
The Straits Times of Singapore has gotten a jump on the inevitable year-end lists with a fun "Life Power List: The most influential lifestyle players of 2022."
Of course, there's the inevitable "Taylor Swift: Record breaker, again and again, with Midnights….The American pop star hits a new high almost every time she drops a new album. Still, no one saw the seismic wave coming with her latest and 10th album." But then there's "South Korean actress Park Eun-bin’s turn as an autistic lawyer in Extraordinary Attorney Woo. Or home-grown actress Hong Huifang as a K-drama-obsessed Singaporean widow in Ajoomma.” And finally, Uncle Raymond.
Despite the U.S. Congress's ban on TikTok from all federal cellphones, The Straits Times asks, "who says TikTok is only for GenZers? Older folk like baby boomers have hopped on board, with some becoming social media stars. Like Uncle Raymond (@raymondl88) in Singapore, who shot to fame this year after he started posting content on TikTok. He now has more than 90,000 followers. The 60-year-old, whose real name is Raymond Lin, is known for dancing energetically at MRT stations and other public locations such as Orchard Road and the Merlion Park—in his signature red striped shirt and trousers."
And finally, there’s …. Russo
A priest, a rabbi, and an imam waited in an anteroom of G*d, with storm clouds gathering above. That was the vision of one Christmas eve past from the celebrated French cartoonist Russo who sadly left us just one year ago this month….
Robert Russo, who embarked on his career as a drawing instructor, began his work as a cartoonist in 1969, publishing in a host of ground-breaking, at times utterly irreverent, but always compelling publications including Charlie Hebdo, and was an early member of the incomparable Cartooning for Peace collective. Here’s how he imagined himself: