Talking Points
- Tennis star Novak Djokovic was detained in Australia
- The EU revisited the question of whether gas and nuclear are green
- Europe's Court of Human Rights threw out the 'gay cake' case
- South Africa's mammoth corruption inquiry released findings
- A Palestinian imprisoned without charges was released after a 141-day hunger strike
- A jury admission sparked calls for a new Ghislaine Maxwell trial
- Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty on 4 counts of fraud
- Biden's public service vaccine plan was left in legal limbo
- Chicago public schools remained closed due to a union dispute
- Canada reached a $32bn settlement over First Nations abuse
Dive deeper
The election that was. The coup that wasn't. And the cause that just won't die. A year on, America has all the rhetoric but few answers about the events that transpired on January 6, 2021.
The stage is set
The Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol is a place of solemn grandeur. It's a neoclassical nod to an ancient amphitheatre: an ornate semi-circular room with soaring marble columns. In the first half of the 19th century, the room hosted America's House of Representatives. Today it is home to the stony likenesses of American heroes. Visitors to the Capitol are, under the vaulted ceiling, invited to reflect on the legacies of Samuel Adams, Rosa Parks, or Kamehameha I. But a year ago, almost to the day, there wasn't a whole lot of reflection in evidence. January 6 2020 was a day of high drama. Outside, thousands of Trump supporters broke through police lines in a violent frenzy. Once inside, the rioters walked between the red velvet cordon in the centre of the Statuary Hall like a school group.
On Thursday, the hall was transformed into an actual light and sound show, to accompany the remarks of America's President, Joe Biden. For some Americans, there remain questions about whether Biden is the rightful POTUS. But they are in the minority. With a year of reflection under the belt, Biden delivered a speech that was crafted to reiterate the majority view: that the January 6 riots constituted an attack on the body and ethos of democracy, that Trump bears singular responsibility for it , and that liberty remains under threat from dark forces. But this is, as noted above, not the only view.
A little bit of history repeating
One particular image from the Capitol riots appears to have stuck in Biden's craw: that of a Confederate flag hoisted through the corridors of Unionist power. There's an argument to be made that the Lost Cause remains a potent political myth today because of the leniency of the victors during Reconstruction. In the 1860s, America was unable to dispossess a small Southern planter class in the name of racial equality or justice. That failure reverberates today.
So what measure of severity can we expect the current establishment to impose on last year's rioters and plotters? The answer is, not much. The rioters on the day were mostly white, mostly men, and mostly white collar workers or business owners . They are suburban and peri-urban dwellers from red, blue, and purple states. Only one in ten of the 700 arrests made on and after January 6 has resulted in a successful prosecution. And the former president and his allies who disputed the election result (including at the fateful rally on the Ellipse before the march on Congress) remain mostly unscathed.
A mid-term (mental) break
For all their appeals to patriotism, January 6 is a day of remembrance for Democrats alone. There is a palpable hollowness to the Speaker of the House introducing the cast of Hamilton to mark the occasion by performing 'Dear Theodosia'. This is not only because the Democrats seem to be more interested in the image of power than the exercise of it, but also because the cheesy performance was to a chamber of Democrats — Republicans had made themselves scarce on the day! For his part, Trump cancelled a rally at his summer palace of Mar-a-Lago and opted for a pair of broadsides delivered by email. The first slammed Biden, the second urged his supporters to stand firm. Don't expect any of this unhinged energy to dissipate: it's an election year and no less than 57 of the January 6 rioters are standing for office.
Worldlywise
Petrol, protests, and Putin
Buildings torched. Police officers beheaded . Dozens of protesters gunned down in cold city squares. Why has Kazakhstan's largest city convulsed with violence?
Protests erupted in the country's west last weekend over a rise in fuel prices. The central Asian power produces 1.6m barrels of oil per day and sits on vast reserves; the move to pass price increases onto the working-class has proven a drastic mistake . It turns out that this innocuous commodity is a source of bitterness: emblematic of an elite who've enriched themselves off resources while leaving the rest of the country behind. The key figure of discontent is Kazakhstan's founding president Nursultan Nazarbayev — a man who deemed it necessary to name the new capital after himself. After Nazarbayev stepped down in 2019, his hand-picked replacement (there are no opposition parties to speak of in Kazakhstan) Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has been quite rightly regarded as a puppet.
As the protests spread from the regions to the capital during the week, a common chant emerged "Shal ket!" — "Old man, out!" Nazarbayev was in the crosshairs. By Wednesday, the authorities had cut internet and phone access across the country, a move which obscured the shocking violence that was to come. In Almaty, the largest city, thousands of protesters clashed with riot police. The dissidents attempted to storm the presidential residence and were bloodily repelled — unconfirmed reports claim that dozens were gunned down. As Almaty smouldered, the government formally requested assistance under a defence pact between Central Asian republics and Russia. Heavily-armed paratroopers arrived within hours to clear the central districts of Almaty. While it's clear that thousands have been arrested and hundreds hospitalised, the true extent of this suppressive action may take many months to be realised.
The road ahead
In India a fake app that purports to auction off Muslim women has highlighted a virulent strain of Islamophobia. Bulli Bai, a derogatory and sexualised term for Muslims, emerged on Github on Saturday . The photos of over 100 Muslim women — lawyers, activists, journalists — were added to fake profiles on a website in which they would be sold to the highest bidder. It was online for less than 24 hours before complainants had it removed, but it is depressingly the second time in a year this has happened. These women, each vocal about the their treatment in modern India, had profiles emerge on a similar app Sulli Deals last year. In a nauseating turn, one profile was of activist Fatima Nafees who disappeared five years ago after a dispute with a right-wing student organisation. The aim of Hindu fundamentalists is clear: evoke the threat of sexual violence and slavery to silence Muslim women.
Multiple arrests have been made in relation to Bulli Bai: 18-year-old student Shweta Singh and 21-year-old Mayank Rawat were nabbed in Uttarakhand, while Vishal Kumar Jha, a 21-year-old male engineering student, was arrested in Bengaluru. Later in the week, the supposed mastermind 20-year-old Neeraj Bishnoi, another engineering student, was taken in Assam. The common thread between the four is a proficiency with internet tools and a strong affinity with fundamentalist Hindu right-wing online groups. But these were not, as is often glibly stated in foreign reporting, simply attack dogs of the ruling party. The mainstream Hindutvavadi are political Hindus who cleave towards Modi's religiously conservative party lines. They are known as 'Raitas' online. But these four are part of a breakaway subculture of Trads (followers of America and Europe's ultra-right-wing fringes may already be familiar with the term). Trads believe in rigid caste supremacy and deride Raitas for their perceived weakness.
As we've seen in the United States, the fever dreams of the lunatic fringes can burst into the offline world at any moment. And in Uttarakhand especially, where at Haridwar Hindu religious leaders called for a genocide against Muslims just last month, there is very little imagination required for violence to materialise.
The best of times
It's getting bright in here
A team in China has created a device capable of generating a temperature five times hotter than the sun. The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamek sustained 70,000,000°C for a quarter of an hour this week which I'm sure you'll all agree is fairly warm. Fusion energy has, in the last decade, moved from the category of 'total joke' to 'graspable reality'.
Arrived and gone in a hurry
The Omicron wave in South Africa hasn't just crested: it's collapsed . In what is hopefully an indicator for what is to come, the sharp spike of cases was followed by an equally sharp decline.
The worst of times
Two weeks in Xi'an
A stringent lockdown is wearing thin for the 13 million residents of the capital of Shaanxi province. The Covid-zero approach of the Chinese government is being tested in realtime; daily infections are hovering around 100. However, it is the restrictions themselves that are drawing ire — non-Covid medical procedures have been pushed out of the healthcare system. On Thursday, a city official apologised after a woman in her third-trimester miscarried outside a locked down hospital.
Another LAPD killing
Remember Valentina Orellana Peralta's name. The 14-year-old was killed in North Hollywood by a stray police bullet in mid-December. In the intervening weeks she has been held up as an ethnic victim of trigger-happy police — a phenomenon that happens far less often in majority-white areas of the city. Civil rights leader Reverend Al Sharpton will give the eulogy at her funeral.
Weekend Reading
The image
The quote
"We had to use black and white. Colour made the [Texas] town look too...pretty, I guess. And one of the things in the back of my mind was the hope that maybe we could help break that silly taboo against black and white. Orson Welles told me once that all the great performances have been in black and white. That is almost literally the truth. There's something mysterious and enriching about black and white. Colour is too realistic."
– Acclaimed US director Peter Bogdanovich in 1972 on the decisions involved in making his masterpiece, The Last Picture Show . He died this week, aged 82. Go back and watch the film that made him.
The numbers
A 32% greater likelihood of death
- By smoking? Juggling chainsaws? No — by being a woman who is operated on by a male rather than a female surgeon. Complications, bad outcomes, and risk of injury and death all rise for women on the operating table when a man is handed the scalpel. A British study of over one million simple procedures suggested this significant disparity in harm will be locked in for some time to come: 9/10 British surgeons are men.
A $3,000,000,000,0000 valuation
- For a brief moment on Monday, Apple's market capitalisation breached the $3tn mark. To put that in perspective, it's larger than the GDP of the United Kingdom, India, or France. Extraordinarily, the company only reached $1tn in 2018.
The headlines
"'Thematically richer than the Bible': What I learned at the first annual Boss Baby symposium" – The Guardian . A sub-editors dream come true.
"Italian mafia fugitive arrested in Spain after being spotted on Google Street View"
– The Independent . This hardly seems fair.
The special mention
Amateur treasure hunters Dennis and Kem Parada did the right thing when they believed they had stumbled across a hidden treasure of Civil War-era gold: they told the authorities. Now the federal government won't even disclose what, if anything, they dug up. This is a disgrace. If treasure hunters — the most whimsical among us — can't trust the authorities, no one can. Justice for the Paradas, now!
A few choice long-reads
- The Surfside Condo tragedy was just the beginning of the ordeal for the survivors and the families of the deceased. Fantastic, dogged reporting from the Miami Herald.
- Here's one loud and clear message from Foreign Affairs: Rich Countries Cannot Outsource Their Migration Dilemmas.
- From the Financial Times. Evergrande is teetering — what does that mean for the Chinese economy at large?
