What do you remember from the news this week?
1. Who are Ketanji Brown Jackson, Leondra Kruger and J. Michelle Childs?
2. Australian Open organizers were under fire for their decision to ban T-shirts about which player?
3. Astronomers discovered a “spooky” spinning object in the Milky Way. What is so mysterious about it?
4. What news story have we summed up here in emoji form? ❄️ ❄️ ❄️ 🇹🇷 🕌 ❌ ✈️ ❄️ ❄️ ❄️
[Answers at the bottom of this newsletter]
East v. West v. South: Three Pandemic Realities, One World
“Tonight we can … find the smile again.” Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen cast aside the typical Danish reserve as she proudly announced that Denmark would be the first European country to lift all remaining COVID-19 restrictions from Feb. 1.
The move comes in spite of an Omicron wave persisting in the country and across Europe. On Tuesday, France reported a record 500,000 daily cases, the first time the number surpassed half a million — but there too restrictions were eased last week. Indeed,
countries are relaxing COVID rules across the West. In Sweden, Health Minister Lena Hallengren said the majority of restrictions could be removed on Feb. 9; in the UK, the only legal restriction in place since January 27 is isolation for infected people.
Europe’s relaxation of measures follows the move by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Protection to drastically cut isolation and quarantine times from 14 days to just 5 earlier this month. The new approach is clear: we have to learn to live with the virus.
But as the West relaxes restrictions, the Chinese government is doubling down on its Zero-COVID approach of rapid testing, contact tracing and lockdowns. In early January, officials issued restrictions for the 14 million people living in the port city of Tianjin after a cluster of just 20 cases. And now, China is ready to take its draconian strategy into the Beijing Winter Olympic Games that kick off Feb. 4.
So while China continues to try to stamp out all cases and the West aims for the virus to become endemic, the reality is that neither can succeed on its own. The real question is whether the virus will mutate further, particularly in parts of the Global South, where vaccines are scarce — in large part because rich countries continue to hoard doses for third and fourth rounds of booster shots. As President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyden put it: “No one is safe until everyone is safe.”
— Carl Johan-Karlsson
• The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club in China: Released more than two decades ago, David Fincher’s Fight Club had so far been banned by China’s tough censorship laws. But the cult movie was finally made available on streaming platform Tencent Video … albeit with a very different ending (*SPOILER ALERT*): Instead of the explosive anarchy-wins-over-consumerism finale, the plot gets foiled by the police at the last minute. The alternative take sparked outrage online but Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the original Fight Club novel on which the movie is based, praised the new ending, calling it “SUPER wonderful.”
• Paris exhibition honors Yves Saint Laurent: A huge exhibition dedicated to French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent has taken over six museums in Paris starting Jan. 29 to mark the 60th anniversary of YSL’s first fashion show.
• Neil Young v. Joe Rogan v. Spotify: Folk rock icon Neil Young gave streaming service Spotify an ultimatum: It’s either him or Joe. Concerned about COVID-19 misinformation spread on the popular “The Joe Rogan Experience” interview podcast, Young demanded Spotify remove it — or else to take his music catalogue down. Spotify chose the latter.
• Botticelli auction: Man of Sorrows, a portrait of a thorn-crowned Christ by Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli, went under the hammer at $45.4 million at Sotheby’s in New York, a hefty price but well short of last year’s record for the artist.
• Cosmic verses: On January 30, radio waves will be sent into space, broadcasting poetry from around the world. The “Universal Poem” is a project mixing art and science that was launched in December 2020 with the idea to gather verses written by contributors everywhere into a single poem, turn it into radio waves and blast it into the cosmos. It is due to reach the Coalsack Nebula, its final destination, in 600 years.
With the looming risk of a Russian conflict with Ukraine, the world is trying to wrap its collective head around that of the enigmatic Russian leader. French magazine
L’Express sees Putin as a poker player whose decisions are difficult to anticipate, “a master at muddying his game."
More than 20 years after U.S. President George W. Bush said he “looked into the soul” of Putin, other Russian and Western experts have pointed to Putin’s height, age and his relationship with “mother” Russia — taken together, a sure sign that the enigma remains intact.
Read the full story: Putin Psychology 101: The World Tries To Get Inside Russian Leader’s Head
Three journalists were killed in the first three weeks of 2022, sparking nationwide protests. But not only narcotraffickers are to blame: The state, corrupt private companies, and even media companies themselves hold responsibility for leaving journalists vulnerable on the frontline.
The precarious conditions of journalists puts them at risk of violence and denies them a decent livelihood. Indeed, the latest victim was in a long-running dispute with a former employer, who is a political ally of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Read the full story: Why Mexican Journalists Keep Getting Killed — And It’s Not Just Narcos
How do you run an art museum under heavy state censorship? That’s the challenge facing the new M+ in Hong Kong, which houses the collection of Uli Sigg, a Swiss-born businessman and most important collector of Chinese contemporary art. Some of the art is critical of the Chinese Communist Party, and it’s a minor miracle the exhibition was approved by authorities increasingly cracking down on political dissent in Hong Kong.
Still, Sigg, a journalist who became a successful businessman and diplomat, is looking beyond domestic success. He hopes that M+ will compete with international powerhouses like the MoMa in New York and Centre Pompidou in Paris. His 1,500-piece collection includes works by world-famous exiled artist and regime critic Ai Weiwei and from Wang Xingwei, a painter known for incorporating cultural and historical references.
Read the full story: How The Top Collector Of Chinese Art Evades Censors In New Hong Kong Museum
Researchers from the Technical University of Munich have developed an innovative system for blind people, which consists of goggles equipped with 3D dual infrared cameras and a haptic feedback sleeve. The pads inside the sleeve will vibrate against the forearm, to warn of obstacles detected by the cameras, with more or less strong vibrations depending on the distance of the obstacle. The German research team hope this system can replace the cane, allowing blind people to use both their hands when navigating in public spaces.
TV presenter and actress Ece Erken is this week’s most searched term on Google in Turkey, after her husband Şafak Mahmutyazıcıoğlu, the former manager of top soccer team Beşiktaş, was shot dead by unknown assailants at a restaurant in Istanbul.
Claudia López Prieto, a teacher at a secondary school in London working with migrant students, had a big surprise for one of her workshops around identity and inclusion: She asked Los Angeles-based star stylist Sophie Lopez to come to speak to Latin American girls from the school about her recent collection with Barbie for Hispanic Heritage Month. “To see yourself reflected by a global toy brand is about more than just a toy. It's about these brands sending out powerful messages that everyone should be included and celebrated,” the teacher said.
Inside Sweden's "100,000-Year" Solution To Bury Nuclear Waste
As last fall’s climate summit in Glasgow made it clear that the world is still on route for major planetary disaster, it also brought the question of nuclear power squarely back on the agenda. A growing number of experts and policymakers now argue that nuclear energy deserves many of the same considerations as wind, solar and other leading renewables.
But while staunch opponents to nuclear may be slowly shifting their opinion, and countries like France, the UK and especially China plan to expand their nuclear portfolios, one main question keeps haunting policymakers: how do we store the radioactive waste?
In Sweden, the government claims to have found a solution.
Climate Minister Annika Strandhäll announced the approval this week of a plan to bury 12,000 tons of nuclear waste 500 meters underground, Dagens Nyheter reports.
The method, proposed by the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB), relies on the stability of the granitic bed-rock and two engineered barriers: a copper-cast iron canister enclosed by highly compacted bentonite clay.
"The government supports the assessment by the Swedish Radiation Protection Authority, expert authorities and researchers that the method is safe for storing the waste," Strandhäll said.
While there are over 400 nuclear power plants in operation across 38 countries, Sweden is first in the world to approve the use of a so-called "final depository."
Still, controversy remains over whether the storage technique will hold up under pressure. Nuclear waste must be stored safely for at least 100,000 years to allow the radiation to go down to the same levels of natural uranium ore. In an interview with Dagens Nyheter, Jessica Palmqvist, head of the research and development at SKB, claimed that the copper capsules will essentially last forever.
But critics argue that sufficient testing is lacking. For example, the capsules haven’t yet been exposed to live radiation while in the storage environment. "No one knows exactly how long the copper capsules will last," said Christofer Leygraf, professor emeritus in corrosion theory at the Royal Institute of Technology. "But it is more about them lasting 100 years than 100,000 years."
Of course, estimating the resilience of any material meant to last for 4,000 generations involves a lot of variables. For example, the final repository needs to withstand earthquakes, climate change and the weight of the 3.5-km thick ice which could cover the area during the next ice age in 50,000 years or so. That is also the reason why many other countries, such as Spain, have made the decision to rely on intermediary storage space while more testing is carried out.
But Sweden was hard-pressed to reach a decision. The Scandinavian country announced last year that it's running out of intermediary space to store the waste produced by its six reactors that supply roughly one third of the nation’s power — risking a national power crisis should plants need to be halted as the storage site reaches full capacity by 2024.
In August, the government announced an expansion of the intermediate storage — where radioactive waste is put in water basins 30 meters into the bedrock — from 8,000 to 11,000 tons. But as constructing the permanent depository will take ten years, and the actual waste disposal another 50-60 years, the final sealing of the repository won’t take place until the turn of the next century. Should the decision drag out, the temporary storage risks filling up before it can be moved to the new facility.
Despite the controversy, more countries are likely to follow Sweden’s lead. In Finland, a final depository for nuclear waste is already under construction using the same techniques as in Sweden. Although a decision is yet to be made regarding the actual disposal, the facility will be ready in 2024. In China, where another 22 reactors will soon be added to the country’s existing 32, construction started last year of an underground laboratory in the Gobi Desert to decide whether it would be a suitable location for a nuclear waste dump. In Canada, a four-year drilling program to assess the geographical conditions for a depository in northwestern Ontario was wrapped up last month and is now entering a water-testing phase.
Meanwhile, the European Union has drawn up a landmark proposal to classify some nuclear power as green investments. If approved, it could set off a landslide of nuclear energy projects on the continent.
In the U.S., the White House's Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal signed in November last year allocated $6 billion to prevent premature retirement of existing zero-carbon nuclear plants. More broadly, an Associated Press survey of the energy policies across all U.S. states found that about two thirds say nuclear — in one form or another — will help take the place of fossil fuels.
Indeed, as the world has so far failed in significantly bending the global emission curve, and the energy sector remains the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, nuclear power is increasingly emerging as part of the answer. As such, we can only hope that today’s climate decisions don’t end up harming future generations once again.
• Next Sunday, Costa Ricans will head to the polls to vote for a new president to succeed Carlos Alvarado and 57 members of the Legislative Assembly.
• There is still time to fly to Canada to attend the Quebec winter carnival! The unique winter event takes place in the world’s snow capital in February each year. Festivities will kick off next Friday for ten days.
• With the official Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games opening ceremony taking place Friday, Beijing will go down in Olympic history as the first city in the world to host both the Summer and Winter Games. Events will be held from Feb. 4-20. Many world leaders are boycotting the Games to protest China’s human rights abuses, though no major athlete boycott is expected. The events will take place under tight COVID-19 restrictions.
News quiz answers:
1. With U.S. States Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announcing he would retire later this year after three decades on the job, President Joe Biden says he will honor his pledge to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court. Ketanji Brown Jackson, Leondra Kruger and J. Michelle Childs are three of the top contenders for the lifetime tenure.
2. Australian Open organizers banned T-shirts displaying “Where is Peng Shuai?,” in support of the Chinese player who had disappeared from the public eyes after accusing a Chinese top official of sexual misconduct. The organizers justified their decision by saying the tournament doesn’t allow clothing, banners or signs that are commercial or political — but later reversed the ban.
3. The mysterious object, spinning around 4,000 light years away, sends massive bursts of energy every 20 minutes or so, before disappearing for a few hours and then repeating the cycle. Some believe this could be a slow spinning neutron star.
4. ❄️ ❄️ ❄️ 🕌 ❌ ✈️ ❄️ ❄️ ❄️ Turkey faced its heaviest snowfall in decades, paralyzing traffic and forcing Istanbul airport — Europe’s busiest — to shut down after the roof on one of the cargo terminals collapsed under the snow.
✍️ Newsletter by Worldcrunch
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*Photo: Dominic Chiu/SOPA Images/ZUMA
