What do you remember from the news this week?
1. What was the reported reason for the laughably long table separating French President Emmanuel Macron from Russia's Vladimir Putin during their meeting in Moscow?
2. Which animal did Australia add to its endangered list?
3. Instead of accusing Democratic leaders of "Gestapo" tactics, what dish did a Republican U.S. congresswoman serve up?
4. What news story have we summed up here in emoji form? 🇨🇦 🚚 🚌 🚛 🚐 🚚 🚛 ⛔ 🙉
[Answers at the bottom of this newsletter]
Information Is Power, Among Enemies And Friends
The state leverages information in both public and private ways. With the West’s standoff over Russian troop buildup at the Ukraine border, we’ve been getting a healthy diet of the public stuff for the past couple of months: spicy declarations, well-guided press reports, turns of phrase meant to steer events in the interest of one government or another.
This past week reached peak communication warfare. U.S. President Joe Biden used a pre-recorded NBC interview to urge U.S citizens to leave Ukraine, saying that things “could go crazy” very quickly.
“That’s a world war,” he said. “When Americans and Russians start shooting one another, we’re in a very different world.” The “crazy” talk was of course not just intended for the smattering of American expats in Kyiv, Odessa and Lviv — but also wider audiences in the U.S. and Russia. Uncle Joe’s folksy doomsday language seems to be part of an ongoing effort to use a kind of reverse psychology to dissuade Moscow from invading.
Still, the most notable turn of phrase came from Russian President Vladimir Putin following his meeting with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron on Monday, sending an odd-sounding message to Ukrainians: “Like it or don't like it, it's your duty, my beauty.”
As Anna Akage wrote, the focus of the commentary has been on how insulting the phrase is, but the real impact is in the substance, more than the form:
”His veiled threat to Zelensky was not about a new invasion, but about the Minsk accords that the Ukrainian leader opposes since it confirms Russia’s occupation of Donbas and Crimea. With the world paying attention, and a nasty remark, Minsk is now back on the table. Chapeau. Standing ovation to the man from the Kremlin!”
Whether we can call these “attempts at public diplomacy” or “war-by-propaganda” will only be determined by how it all turns out at the Ukraine-Russia border.
But there are also new reminders that information warfare is a constant, and almost never quite what it seems in public. The Copenhagen-based daily Politiken has been reporting the latest updates in a spy story that dates back at least two years: It involves a surreptitious program inside the Danish government to allow the U.S. to use its data to spy on fellow European allies and politicians, including former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Last month, Lars Findsen, former head of Denmark's military intelligence service, was taken into custody on suspicion of leaking highly classified information.
Asked about the case, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden told Politiken that the U.S. seeks as much data — classified or not — from friends as from enemies. “It is not about Denmark being an enemy, but about the NSA being part of the American state, which seeks to maximize its power and influence in all corners of the world. So it is also their job to understand Denmark, the Danish government, the hierarchy in your military.” We’re told that information is power: It’s wise to watch the different ways it’s wielded in private and in public.
— Jeff Israely
• Oscars 2022 nominations: Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dogs and Dennis Villeneuve’s Dune lead nominations for the Academy Awards. This upcoming 94th edition (on March 27) also marks a new record for U.S. filmmaker Steven Spielberg, who became the first person to be nominated 11 times in the “Best Picture” category … and to receive “Best Director” nominations in six different decades.
• Hindi singing icon Lata Mangeshkar dies: India observed two days of national mourning after the death of iconic Indian singer Lata Mangeshkar, last Sunday at age 92. The “Nightingale of India,” as she was nicknamed, recorded more than 5,000 songs featured in more than 1,000 Bollywood movies.
• UNESCO warns of crisis in creative industries due to COVID: The creative sector is going through an unprecedented crisis as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, exacerbated by a decline in government spending on the arts over the past few years, warns UNESCO. According to a new report, 10 million jobs were lost in the creative industries in 2020 worldwide.
• Record-breaking “World Painting”:The World Painting, an art project aimed at uniting people, broke a Guinness World Record for “Most people in an online video using and passing a paint brush”. The canvas can be seen at the Dubai EXPO 2020 in the UAE.
• Lebanon returns ancient tablets to Iraq: A private Lebanese museum gave more than 300 ancient cuneiform writing tablets back to Baghdad, in an effort to restore looted antiquities and promote the region’s historical and archeological heritage.
The anniversary of the 1979 Iranian Revolution highlights the divide between the older generations who fought for a different future for their country and their children, who feel their parents had little impact on the political and social climate. Now entering middle age, the descendants of these revolutionaries are bitter for the catastrophe they have inherited. And each year as the historical memory of this event continues to fade, the Middle Eastern country remains marred with the same sort of corruption and inequality that led to the birth of an Islamic Republic.
Read the full story: After The Revolution, What Happens When Iran's 1979 Generation Fades Away
She is the diva of Havana nights. Periodismo de Barrio journalist Ernesto J. Gómez Figueredo meets with Félix, a native of a poor neighborhood called Santa Amalia in Havana, who is pushing Cuba to open up the conversation on gender fluidity in a country that offers no legal recognition of the identity.
Read the full story: Meet Félix, Havana's Gender-Fluid Diva Opening Cuban Eyes And Minds
It’s hard to revive friendships that have been damaged during the long months of isolation due to the pandemic, writes psychotherapist Wolfgang Schmidbauer in German newspaper Die Welt. Clearly, the way we interact with each other has fundamentally changed, with previously mundane gestures like handshakes now carrying potentially drastic health consequences. An unexpected analogy can be found in J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic The Lord of the Rings, which also provides an anecdote for returning to some version of normality.
Read the full story: Lord Of The Rings, A Guide For Mending Relationships Damaged By COVID
A study conducted by a marine conservation biologist at Arizona State University found that fitting fishing nets with green LED lights could prevent sea animals such as sharks, rays and turtles, from being accidentally entangled, with the lights acting as a kind of warning or deterrent. The solution was successfully tested off the coast of Baja California, Mexico, and had no impact on the amount of targeted fish caught. According to experts, unwanted sea creatures caught by commercial fishing account for 40% — the equivalent of 38 million tons — of the world’s global catch.
Japanese ski jumper Sara Takanashi issued an emotional apology to her team and supporters in an Instagram post after she was disqualified from the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics because her suit was too big. Her post went viral, gathering more than 45,000 comments in less than 24 hours. Takanashi was one of five female ski jumpers competitors who were disqualified from the mixed team ski jump final over a uniform violation on Monday.
La Gatimanada is a project founded by Dante, an independent animal rescuer near Buenos Aires, which seeks to provide a home for cats in need. To raise awareness, and help match cute kitties with adopters, La Gatimanada launched Gatitinder (“CaTinder”), where you can swipe right and meet your dream cat!
Attack Of The Visa Bots: When Hackers Make Life Hell For Immigrants
Worldcrunch’s Hannah Steinkopf-Frank wrote a first-hand experience of how illegal bots are making it impossible for many immigrants in France to live here legally.
On a Sunday night in mid-January, I was prepared with a computer and phone to try to get a ticket for the hottest event in Paris. A cool new band concert? A Champions League soccer match? No, as an American citizen living in France, I was simply trying to get an appointment to pick up my renewed visa. When the clock hit midnight — when new slots were supposed to open up — I immediately clicked on the button to see the available times.
Sadly, though, I instead received the same message I’ve now gotten for over a month: Il n'existe plus de plage horaire libre pour votre demande de rendez-vous. (“There are no more free time slots for your appointment request.”) I went to sleep with the growing sense of anxiety over my ability to stay in France and also of defeat that illegal tampering with the visa system was preventing me, and countless others, from regulating our residency statuses.
As a tech-savvy millennial, I was shocked at first that I was unable to navigate a seemingly simple booking system. I’ve also lived in France for more than two and a half years, and have gotten pretty good at dealing with the country’s notoriously headache-producing bureaucracy. I’ve spent more money than I’d like to admit making triplicates of documents and hours waiting in lines to only be told I’d forgotten a certain document or filled out a form incorrectly.
But at this point in the visa process, I’d already had my paperwork approved and was simply trying to make an appointment to pick up my visa from the prefecture, a government administrative building. The slot I wanted to make is only for five minutes because that’s all the time it takes to show an official you paid an online fee and for them to go to a backroom and find your visa. But for more than a month, I’ve been unable to find an available slot. When I emailed the help desk, they simply said to keep checking because new appointments would be added; clearly, that was not the case.
I started complaining about this situation to friends. My temporary visa would eventually expire and if I didn’t have the permanent one, I’d be living here illegally. One commiserating fellow foreigner alerted me to the real reason I couldn’t make an appointment: Some entrepreneurial (in the worst way) individuals are deploying bots that automatically book all the available appointments when they go online. Then through apps and Facebook groups, they sell the slots for upwards of 400 euros, as French newspaper Le Monde reported last year.
Some people have been forced to wait longer than a year trying to get an appointment because of the bots. The French Ministry of the Interior told Le Monde that "several mechanisms have been put in place to limit this risk,” with 58 million illicit or malicious connections identified and thwarted in the final four months of 2020.
There are even some who, unable to make appointments, have hired lawyers to argue their cases, though given that many can’t even afford what a bot appointment costs, this is a largely inaccessible route.
Reading through the Le Monde article reminded me of what I already knew, even in the worst moment of frustration: Others had suffered far more than me at the hands of the bots and their greedy masters. The newspaper reported stories of desperate immigrants and refugees who were unable to confirm their status because of bots. Karima, a 40-year-old from Morocco, has been living at a government-run facility and was unable to work because she doesn’t have a visa. She has to borrow a computer each time she tries to make an appointment.
Lisa Faron, who works for Cimade, an association that helps migrants, told Le Monde that even they weren’t able to book appointments for their clients. Faron blamed the scarcity of slots for the reason bot businesses have popped up.
Indeed, the practice spans a range of activities, with increasingly stealthy bots used by scalpers to get concert and sport tickets or to enter online raffles. Whether this is fair or unfair manipulation of the markets for these kinds of activities, it’s certainly salacious when it targets the ability of people to be able to work or live in a town or country.
A week later, I once again stayed up again to try to book a midnight appointment, again with no luck. But when I woke up the next morning and tried again, I finally found a slot. Though I was relieved — ok, ecstatic! — that I finally got my golden ticket, it also made me think again of all the people who aren’t as lucky in what should be basic administration, not the lottery.
On that morning, I had also noticed that the only information I gave to finalize the appointment was my name and email, which I’m told makes it much easier for bots to take the slots. I’m no expert, but even just one added step of further identity verification could stop most illegal activity.
My weeks-long run-in with the visa bots left me thinking about other would-be immigrants facing far more difficult circumstances — a reminder that cyber security isn’t just for the rich and powerful, but is vital to protect the very basic rights to live in society.
• The Winter Olympics head into final full week in Beijing and surrounding locations; Super Bowl LVI takes place Sunday in Los Angeles, with the LA Rams hosting the Cincinnati Bengals. The halftime show will feature five of hip hop’s biggest names: Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige and Kendrick Lamar.
• United Nations official Tomas Ojéa Quintana, the special rapporteur on North Korean human rights, will travel to South Korea to collect data on rights abuses on the border for an annual report.
• U.S. President Joe Biden plans to interview possible candidates to serve in the U.S. Supreme Court, before announcing his pick at the end of this month.
News quiz answers:
1. A new report reveals that in his meeting Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Emmanuel Macron refused to take a Russian COVID-19 test for fears of them using his DNA for malicious purposes — hence the (social) distance.
2. Given the impacts of brush fires, habitat loss and disease, koalas have gone from being listed as threatened to endangered in Australia.
3. Controversial Republican U.S. congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene accused Democratic leaders of “gazpacho” tactics on Capitol Hill, apparently confusing Hitler’s secret police, the Gestapo, with the popular Spanish cold tomato soup …
4. Protesting truckers in Ottawa were ordered to stop honking their horns following complaints from local residents and business owners. The “Freedom Convoy” protests, which started as demonstrations against vaccine requirements for truckers crossing the U.S.-Canada border, has been paralyzing Ottawa’s city center for two weeks, prompting its mayor to declare a state of emergency on Monday.
✍️ Newsletter by Worldcrunch
Sign up here to receive our free daily Newsletter to your inbox (now six days/week!)
*Photo: Emmanuel Macron's official Instagram account
