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A municipal worker lays wreaths on the graves of unidentified people killed in Bucha, as Ukrainians continue burying the more than 450 people killed by Russian forces across the city in February and March.
Welcome to Thursday, where Guterres and Erdogan meet with Zelensky to address the situation at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, a blast at a Kabul mosque kills at least, and surf’s up in Venice, much to the mayor’s chagrin. Meanwhile, Clarín visits an old friend: that botched restoration of a Christ mural, still a tourist hit 10 years on.
[*Xhosa, South Africa]
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• Zaporizhzhia talks: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan are due to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Lviv today. High on the agenda is nuclear safety and the situation at the Zaporizhzhia power plant.
• Kabul mosque blast kills 21: The Afghan police said at least 21 people died in the bombing that hit a Sunii mosque in Kabul during evening prayers on Wednesday. Another 33 people were reportedly injured following the explosion that shattered windows. The perpetrators have not yet been identified.
• U.S.-Taiwan trade talks: The Biden administration announced that the U.S. and Taiwan will start new bilateral trade talks to boost ties, which are expected to begin in early fall. This comes amid high tensions with China after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan and China’s military drills.
• Man arrested for murder of 87-year-old on mobility scooter: A 44-year-old man has been arrested by the police in London and is the main suspect in the murder of Thomas O’Hallaran. The 87-year-old man was stabbed to death while riding a mobility scooter in west London on Tuesday.
• New Zealand floods: Hundreds of New Zealand’s South Island residents have been forced to evacuate as the area is being hit by torrential rains for the third day in a row. According to experts, such bad weather is due to an “atmospheric river,” a huge corridor of moist air.
• Japan encourages young people to drink more alcohol: The National Tax Agency in Japan has launched a contest “Sake Viva!” aimed at encouraging young people to drink more alcohol, to boost an industry that has been hard hit by the pandemic.
• Khaby Lame given Italian citizenship: TikTok superstar Khaby Lame, who was born in Senegal, has been given Italian citizenship during a ceremony in Chivasso near Turin, where he grew up. He has lived there since he was one and said he “always felt Italian.”
Chinese daily the Global Times features a dry Yangtze running through Chongqing on its front page, as the region recorded its lowest rainfall in more than 60 years. Weather conditions in China, which included severe floods and rainstorms in other parts of the country, are expected to ease by the end of August.
A federal judge in Cleveland ordered Walgreens, CVS and Walmart to pay more than $650 million in damages to two Ohio counties over the harm caused to communities in the way the three U.S. pharmacy chains distributed opioids to customers.
The clumsy restoration of a mural of Christ in a Spanish chapel 10 years ago shocked, then amused, Spaniards and millions more abroad, and gave the local town a level of publicity and tourist revenues it never could have hoped for. Here's how it looks 10 years later, writes Marina Artuso in Argentinian newspaper Clarín.
⛪ Among the countless pictures and images of Christ around the world, it might not be outlandish to imagine that one of them might seek revenge — using humidity as the instrument of its vengeance. Painted in 1930 by a painter and academic, the Christ mural inside a chapel in Borja in the province of Aragón in Spain, was smothered in 2012 by Cecilia Giménez Zueca, a local resident and amateur painter. She wanted to help no doubt, but her "unfinished" restoration turned a venerable image of the suffering Christ — an Ecce Homo — into a bloated, indefinable cartoon.
🧑🎨 It made the news, big time, putting Borja on the tourist map. Travel agencies began organizing tours to Borja, and over 235,000 tourists have already visited the comical disaster. Pepa, a Borja resident who charges the entry fee for the chapel, says "you think this is the first time she touched it?" Cecilia, she adds, habitually came every summer to clean the chapel, walking five kilometers up a hill from Borja. Indeed, she had an "interventionist" reputation with the local heritage.
🗣️ Today, Pepa says "there were all kinds of reactions because there are people who don't like our town being known for this, and others who do." She doesn't mind, she says, "but there is so much more to Borja." She admits so many people used to pass through Borja without stopping. Now, she says, "they come to see this and stay in the area."
➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com
Look at these two overbearing idiots making a mockery of the City.
— Venice’s mayor Luigi Brugnaro was visibly not amused by two surfers frolicking on the city’s Grand Canal, as shown on a video he shared on his Twitter account. The two foreign tourists were seen zig-zagging around gondolas and water buses on motorized surfboards, prompting the mayor to urge his followers to help him find the culprits (offering them a “dinner” as reward). The young men were eventually identified and fined €1,500 each.
✍️ Newsletter by Lisa Berdet, Chloé Touchard, Lila Paulou and Bertrand Hauger
Let us know what’s happening in your corner of the world!
Military activity near the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine has raised fears of a Chernobyl scenario. The UN Secretary-General is meeting with Ukraine’s president to discuss the situation — but threatening nuclear disaster is a tool Putin has used before.
Misguided arguments about air conditioning's environmental impact are stopping people from installing systems in homes and offices. But in the age of solar power, there's no need to stew in your own sweat "for the sake of the planet."
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.