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Kiwis of all faiths came together for Friday prayer. PHOTO: The Atlantic
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- New Zealand swiftly banned assault weapons after Christchurch
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Japan's Olympic boss Takeda resigned under a cloud of corruption
- Parallels between two recent Boeing crashes prompted scrutiny
- Brexit continued to be Brexit
- Bosnian Serb war criminal Radovan Karadžić received a life sentence
- Disney completed the $70b purchase of 21st Century Fox's assets
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The Philippines withdrew from the ICC to avoid oversight
- Another runaway Indian billionaire was arrested in London
- Trump endorsed Israel's occupation of Syria's Golan Heights
- South Korean police busted a massive spy-cam porn ring
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Cyclone Idai reduced this village to rubble. PHOTO: Zinyange Autony / AFP
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Water is – as trendy bottled water brands like to tell us – life itself. It has helped raise our species to the exalted position we now occupy on Earth. And if one day we end up going the same way as the Dodo, it's entirely possible that water will be the thing that sends us on our way. Here then is a montage of stories about the reality of living in a world in which water comes either in a deluge, or not at all.
South-east Africa is drowning
Intense Tropical Cylone Idai is believed to be the worst weather event to hit the southern hemisphere. Ever.
It started in the turbulent tropical depression that hung off the Mozambique coast early in the month, and first made landfall on the 4th. The rain fell like hammers on the villages of central Mozambique as the storm system made its way north. There it hovered over Malawi – one of the poorest countries in the world, and one scarcely equipped to handle the emergency – before turning on a dime and heading back to sea. It then tore across the narrow Mozambique Channel separating Madagascar from the mainland; drawing energy from the sea, accelerating. The intensification earned it the title of cyclone. After dropping a titanic amount of water on northern Madagascar, Idai then practically reversed direction, and barrelled back towards Mozambique again.
On the 14th of March Idai clocked wind speeds exceeding 175km/h. That was the day it made landfall for the second time, directly over Mozambique's fourth city, Beira. The city is – without hyperbole – mostly gone. A place that half a million people called home saw 90% of its structures destroyed or damaged in just a few short hours. Across the delta, a swath of land measuring 125km by 25km was swallowed by a vast new inland sea. And yet, for all the overt damage done to the coastline, the real tragedy lies further inland.
Idai punched through central Mozambique and into Zimbabwe. There it wiped away townships by the hundreds. The official death toll currently stands just above 600 but we'd advise you not to place stock in this number. The few specialised emergency service personnel who have made it io the region are reporting devastation on a scale that is several orders of magnitude higher. There are reportedly 1,000 bodies just in the ruins of a single shattered Zimbabwean village.
Thankfully, the rainwaters are slowly subsiding; but thousands continue to cling to trees, roofs, anything they can find. It is a tragedy of circumstance that in the coming days many more will die of thirst – there is a critical lack of disaster relief expertise, evacuation transport, or supplies. As the rescue operations ramp up those who remain will face a growing list of threats: disease, dehydration, hunger, and fatigue. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of human bodies (and animal corpses) are draining back toward the sea. Their decomposition also poses significant health risks for the survivors.
As tragic as this story is, it merely sets a pattern that is likely to be repeated: a natural disaster exacerbated by climate change smashing apart communities that have been left behind by the global economy.
Idai deserves a great share of your attention, but the effects of severe flooding are also being felt from the midwest of the United States to the highlands of West Papua. The richest, and the poorest, parts of the world are equally unprepared for the stress that climate change is placing on our rivers, catchments and livelihoods.
Water shortages from Manila to London
The Philippine capital of Manila is currently suffering its worst water shortage in years. Long lines snake across the city as bucket-carriers wait hours for a precious few seconds of water flowing from public bowsers. These may be familiar scenes to those who bore witness (firsthand or otherwise) to Cape Town's 'day zero' water crisis. But while Cape Town is home to just over 4 million people – greater Manila's population tops 12 million. The effects of the water shortage here are difficult to comprehend: rolling cut-offs mean the taps are dry for most of the day. The lines that form around government water tanks stretch on for blocks – so long in fact that people need to take the day off work just to wait their turn.
And if you are struggling to picture Manila grinding to a halt – how about London? How can it be possible that a country perpetually blanketed by grey rain clouds can't keep its dams full? This is the question that the United Kingdom's environmental chief laid out in stark terms this week. Sir James Bevan outlined a grim future; without a drastic (read: expensive) overhaul of Britain's water infrastructure the country will run dry within 25 years.
Dire calculations and predictions like these were once the sole province of officials in remote Australia or northern Africa. Now the reality of water shortages is hitting home all over the world.
2019 may well be remembered as the year in which climate change went from being a possible problem in our future, to a real problem in our present. It is well and truly time for us to be done with debating this issue. It is time to act.
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Guess who's coming to town? PHOTO: AFP
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Xi's Euro-Trip
Chinese President Xi Jinping is visiting Italy this week and getting a lot of Europeans rather cross. By the time you read this, Xi and his Mediterranean counterpart, Giuseppe Conte, will be hours away from signing a memorandum of understanding that outlines Italy's participation in China's Belt and Road Initiative. The bone of contention is Beijing's cash splash in the Italian port city of Trieste (and we use the term Italian quite loosely here – most Triestini consider themselves Triestini first, second and third).
A new pier here, a new terminal there, so what's the big deal? Everything, apparently. The takes range from good old-fashion pearl-clutching to outright hysteria (one former Italian politician even querulously questioned whether Italy would be Beijing's trojan horse into Europe). So controversial is the agreement that Conte's deputy Matteo Salvini is leaving Rome for the day! Europe is certainly darkening to China's overtures.
Perhaps the ongoing controversy over Huawei's 5G network (fuelled by American discontent) has put a sour taste in European mouths. But the overblown antipathy still sounds odd because the EU is China's largest trading partner. The bloc and the People's Republic share one billion Euros in bilateral trade every single day.
One of the great ironies of our modern era is that the greatest former cheerleaders for a globalised world are now the ones most concerned about it.
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A step side-ways for Germany's two biggest lenders. PHOTO: Kai Pfaffenbach / Reuters
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Febrile takeover
Deutsche Bank AG and Commerzbank AG – Germany's two largest banks – have entered merger talks. The combined entity would have a balance sheet of over $2 trillion. But this is not the creation of a super-power in European banking, rather it's an acknowledgement of a poor and worsening economic climate; a tactical merger to save the furniture. The fact of the matter is that Germany's banks are in a state of flux. One commentator generously described it as a necessary but painful transition. Yet another commentator called the proposed tie-up a 'merger of weakquals'. It's a complete reversal of fortunes for Deutsche Bank which, within recent memory, was a hard-charging European bank with a vast global footprint. In fact, both banks have spent billions restructuring since the GFC. And yet neither has gotten to where it needs to be.
There's also a political angle to this story. While Angela Merkel has issued public statements claiming that any merger must be driven by the bankers themselves, it's painfully obvious that the chancellor has a keen interest in strengthening the banking sector. European banks finance a far greater share of home loans and businesses than their counterparts across the Atlantic do. In real terms that means the banks provide three quarters of all business credit, and nine tenths of all household credit in Germany. But confusing matters (at least for Merkel) is the fact that the merger would trigger layoffs – possibly as many as 30,000 in Germany.
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Something to savour. PHOTO: AFP
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Batting away the blues
Year after year we hear about rankings of the happiest countries on earth. Inevitably a small cluster of Scandinavian countries makes a clean sweep of the top spots. But this story is not about them - being happy in homogenous, wealthy, cohesive societies is not newsworthy. What is newsworthy is happiness in Afghanistan, a country that ranks as the third least-happy on Earth (according to the U.N.'s World Happiness Report).
And yet, in the midst of military occupation and a shockingly violent civil war, Afghanis are finding happiness where they can. This week that happiness came from Afghanistan's national cricket team which won its first-ever test match (against Ireland). It's been a long journey to get to this point. Cricket was banned under Taliban rule, but many Afghanis cut their teeth playing cricket in refugee camps in Pakistan with their famously cricket-loving neighbours.
As the Taliban influence in Kabul has waned over the last decade and a half, cricket has blossomed into the national sport. The fact that a new generation of Afghanis can look up to batsmen like Rahmat Shah and Ihsanullah Janat is something worth celebrating everywhere.
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An industrial disaster. PHOTO: Reuters
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Chemical bothers
Yesterday in China a pesticide plant exploded in devastating fashion, killing at least 44 people and injuring 600 more. The blast was so powerful that it registered as a minor earthquake. The site of the disaster was the Chenjiagang Industrial Park in Yancheng. Investigators are yet to discern the cause of the explosion – the conflagration is yet to be extinguished – but what is known is that the fire spread to nearby chemical and gas warehouses. The event recalls the shocking Tianijn port explosion in 2015 that killed nearly 200 people.
Plastic not fantastic
A beautiful Cuvier's beaked whale washed ashore in the Philippines this week. It had died with 40 kilograms of plastic in its stomach. Academics quickly ascertained that the sheer volume of plastic swallowed had clogged up the whale's stomach; the blighted creature had starved to death, vomiting blood as it went.
Stop allowing your plastic to make its way into the sea.
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Quote of the week
"Your grandparents came here … and they returned in caskets. Have no doubt we will send you back like your grandfathers."
– Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan threatened tourists from Australia and New Zealand. The blusterous leader (yes, it's an election year) was drawing an awkward link between the disastrous ANZAC landing at Gallipoli (in 1915) and the Australian terrorist responsible for the attack on the mosques in Christchurch. It's an odd remark, not least because it seemed to validate the ahistorical nonsense that the terrorist himself spouted (his weapon was adorned with the Greek word 'turkofagos', or 'Turk-eater', and references to the 1683 Siege of Vienna!)
Headline of the week
Politician who opposes mandatory chickenpox vaccinations contracts chickenpox
– The Independent
A special mention
Our inaugural special mention goes to a plucky and heavily-armed Brazilian drug gang that shot up a convoy of trucks carrying nuclear fuel. While experts have rushed to reassure the public that the uranium – destined for a nearby reactor – was not in a dangerous radioactive state, it is astonishing that anyone would shoot at something bearing a yellow-and-black nuclear hazard symbol.
Weekend long-reads
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EDITOR'S NOTE: This week we launched an inkl Original series: The Margin, with Rohan Connolly. This is the first of several such series in our pipeline for the year, as we look to bring you more diverse perspectives from some of the world's foremost experts in their fields. So watch this space.
In The Margin, one of Australia's great sports writers proffers a broad lens (and no small measure of wit) on Australia's national game. We highly encourage you to spend some time with his column, he'll be filing each Wednesday. You can read the first edition here. And for those not partial to the Australian Football League: there is time yet to get on board.
Tom Wharton
@trwinwriting
P.S. Don't forget to download the inkl app and check out our tailored news recommendations just for you. And definitely don't forget to log into the app by tapping on this link.
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