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In The News

China’s Missile Drills, Taliban Doubts On Al-Zawahiri, Good Great Barrier Reef News

a chinese helicopter fliying above a bridge on Pingtan island ahead the largest military exercises China planned following Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan
Lila Paulou, Lisa Berdet, Laure Gautherin and Anne-Sophie Goninet

👋 Alii!*

Welcome to Thursday, where China launches missiles in largest ever drills near Taiwan following Nancy Pelosi’s visit, Germany braces for a potential energy gas crisis next winter, and there’s good news from Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Meanwhile, Die Welt visits Germany’s Baden-Baden, which went from the destination of choice for wealthy Russian tourists to a tourist ghost town.

[*Palauan, Republic of Palau]

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🌎  7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW

• China kicks off military drills:China launched missiles near Taiwan in unprecedented live-fire military exercises due to run until Sunday. This comes as a response to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan earlier this week.

• Ukraine update: According to Ukrainian officials, about 6,000 civilians trying to evacuate Russian-occupied areas in eastern Ukraine are stuck on the road to the city of Zaporizhzhia due to floods hitting the country. Meanwhile, U.S. officials now believe Russia has fabricated evidence linked to last week’s explosion at a prison that killed Ukrainian prisoners.

• Taliban raises doubts about al Qaeda leader killing: A Taliban official declared that an investigation is under way “to find out about the veracity of the [U.S.] claim” that the leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was killed in a U.S. drone strike.

• Myanmar junta charges Japanese journalist: The Myanmar junta charged Japanese journalist Toru Kubota with breaking an immigration law and encouraging dissent against the military. Kubota was arrested in early July while covering a protest in Yangon and faces at least two years of prison.

• Panic buying in Germany: Sales of electric heaters soared in Germany as the country braces for a potential energy gas crisis next winter. Germany turns towards alternative sources of energy as Russia is reducing gas supplies.

• Great Barrier Reef’s record coral cover: Australian marine scientists have recorded the highest levels of coral cover in 36 years on some parts of the Great Barrier Reef, a positive sign that coral is expanding. Global warming continues to be the Great Barrier’s biggest threat

• Sailor survived 16 hours in capsized boat: A 62-year-old French sailor survived 16 hours in his capsized boat in the Atlantic Ocean by using an air bubble. He was rescued by the Spanish coast guard that received a distress signal on Monday, which described the feat as “verging on impossible.”

🗞️  FRONT PAGE

Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar commemorates the two-year anniversary of the blast that killed more than 200 people, when 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate ignited in a warehouse in the port of Beirut. Lebanon’s investigation into the explosion has met political interference, with the country’s politicians filing more than 25 requests to dismiss the judges in charge of the probe. A civil case was filed in the U.S. in mid-July by a Swiss-based organization to seek $250 million in damages for the survivors and to uncover new evidence to push the investigation.

#️⃣  BY THE NUMBERS

708,000

More than 708,000 people across the world tracked U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s flight on Flightradar24 when it landed in the Taiwanese capital of Taipei — making it the most tracked live flight in the website’s history. More than 2.9 million people tracked at least a portion of the flight, amid uncertainty that Pelosi would actually land on the island nation due to threats and warnings from China, which doesn’t recognize Taiwan’s independence.

📰  STORY OF THE DAY

Baden-Baden postcard: Haven for wealthy Russians reduced to tourist ghost town

For 200 years, the Black Forest spa town of Baden-Baden has been the destination of choice for Russian tourists, with oligarchs shopping in the luxury boutiques and buying up swathes of property. Now Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has changed all that and the town's once-bustling streets are empty, writes Hannelore Crolly for Die Welt.

🇩🇪 The small spa town near the Black Forest is home to around 1,150 Russian citizens, and a similar number of people with dual nationality. There are around 750 Ukrainians living there, and in recent months, almost 1,800 Ukrainian refugees have arrived. There is also an unknown but significant number of people of German origin who emigrated from Eastern Europe after the Second World War. People like I.T. expert Schneider, who was born in the North Caucasus region 43 years ago and has lived in Germany since 1994.

💸 The quiet streets are an unfamiliar sight in a city that has grown rich from the Russian tourists who have poured in over the last 200 years. Since 1793, when Princess Luise from Baden-Baden married the man who would later become Tsar Alexander, the fashionable spa town has attracted nobility and diplomats, literary greats and wealthy people from the East.

🇷🇺 Baden-Baden is twinned with both Yalta in Ukraine and Sochi in Russia. The Festspielhaus – the largest opera house in Germany has distanced itself from star conductor Valery Gergiev due to his connections to Putin, although Gergiev saved it from bankruptcy about 25 years ago. At the end of the day, a politician says, Baden-Baden is cutting off its nose to spite its face. “Many Russians invested in the town when it was struggling.” And its economy is dependent on the affluent Russian clientele. “Many people don’t seem to appreciate that.”

➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com

📣 VERBATIM

We are seeing these excessive, outrageous profits from the oil and gas industries at a time when we are all losing money.

— During a press conference, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres slammed the “greed” of big oil and gas companies amid an economic crisis he said was caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Guterres also called on national governments to tax the companies' profits and use them to help the “most vulnerable.”

✍️ Newsletter by Lila Paulou, Lisa Berdet, Laure Gautherin and Anne-Sophie Goninet


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Society

What's Spoiling The Kids: The Big Tech v. Bad Parenting Debate

Without an extended family network, modern parents have sought to raise happy kids in a "hostile" world. It's a tall order, when youngsters absorb the fears (and devices) around them like a sponge.

Image of a kid wearing a blue striped sweater, using an ipad.

Children exposed to technology at a very young age are prominent today.

Julián de Zubiría Samper

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ — A 2021 report from the United States (the Youth Risk Behavior Survey) found that 42% of the country's high-school students persistently felt sad and 22% had thought about suicide. In other words, almost half of the country's young people are living in despair and a fifth of them have thought about killing themselves.

Such chilling figures are unprecedented in history. Many have suggested that this might be the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but sadly, we can see depression has deeper causes, and the pandemic merely illustrated its complexity.

I have written before on possible links between severe depression and the time young people spend on social media. But this is just one aspect of the problem. Today, young people suffer frequent and intense emotional crises, and not just for all the hours spent staring at a screen. Another, possibly more important cause may lie in changes to the family composition and authority patterns at home.

Firstly: Families today have fewer members, who communicate less among themselves.

Young people marry at a later age, have fewer children and many opt for personal projects and pets instead of having children. Families are more diverse and flexible. In many countries, the number of children per woman is close to or less than one (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong among others).

In Colombia, women have on average 1.9 children, compared to 7.6 in 1970. Worldwide, women aged 15 to 49 years have on average 2.4 children, or half the average figure for 1970. The changes are much more pronounced in cities and among middle and upper-income groups.

Of further concern today is the decline in communication time at home, notably between parents and children. This is difficult to quantify, but reasons may include fewer household members, pervasive use of screens, mothers going to work, microwave ovens that have eliminated family cooking and meals and, thanks to new technologies, an increase in time spent on work, even at home. Our society is addicted to work and devotes little time to minors.

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