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Kyiv has been targeted by a wave of violent Russian airstrikes, which killed at least 11 people.
💡 SPOTLIGHT
When African leaders go to Washington, China is in the room
Some 100 of the most important political eyes in Africa aren’t turned towards the U.S. this week — they’re in the U.S. For the first time in eight years, the White House is hosting 49 African heads of state and leaders of government (and the Senegalese head of the African Union) for a U.S.-Africa summit. Not invited: any nation that has recently undergone a military putsch, or otherwise not in good standing with the African Union, like Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Sudan.
It’s only the second such summit, after Barack Obama held the inaugural one in 2014. For African nations, it’s a chance to push for trade agreements and international investment, as reports FinancialAfrik, as well as to showcase their most successful businesses. According to RFI, dominant in its coverage of West Africa, on the agenda are: fighting terrorism, climate change, food security, and a financial facility intended to facilitate African exports to the U.S.
These themes are recurrent in national coverage and official diplomatic communiqués, from the likes of Cameroon (whose communiqué pointedly notes the U.S.’s “lack of colonial history” in Africa), which is seeking to regain access to the the U.S. market under the African Growth and Opportunity Act, to Madagascar, which as an island nation, is particularly concerned with climate change.
But is the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit and the accompanying nice talk all just cynical cover for what are, in fact, purely U.S. strategic interests in its wider global competition with China? That’s certainly the message from Chinese media — but also a point of view either echoed, or simply acknowledged as matter of fact, by African voices.
“No matter how many fancy words the U.S. uses, the country still sees Africa as an arena to serve its strategic goal of competing with China,” Liu Xin writes for China’s state-run Global Times.
Indeed, for the U.S., the summit is a chance to move past the disinterest — if not outright disdain — that the Trump administration showed for Africa at a time when both China and Russia were ramping up their economic and military presence on the continent. Even if Biden Administration officials have been eager to talk about Africa on its own terms, the “long shadow” of China is everywhere, writes Kenya’s The Standard.
The U.S. is playing “catch up,” writes The Standard, having fallen behind China when it comes to foreign direct investment in Africa, and must convince African countries that it is a better partner than China. The Nairobi-based daily isn’t coy about Africa’s growing strategic importance, leverage, and need to be wooed, writing, “The continent, whose leaders often feel they’ve been given short shrift by leading economies, remains crucial to global powers because of its rapidly growing population, significant natural resources, and a sizable voting bloc in the United Nations.”
Cognizant of the UN voting bloc that African countries constitute, the Biden administration is eager to court their support for Ukraine, but maintains that irrespective of outcome, it wants Africa to have a louder international voice — perhaps, as Al Jazeera reports, by making an African nation a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
Finally, for Malcom Biiga, writing in the regional Francophone magazine Jeune Afrique, there is more than simply a U.S.-China competition at work, and the timing of the summit can’t be disconnected from France’s pullback from West Africa, in particular the announcement this year of the end of its military mission in Mali. “As anti-French sentiment grows larger across Africa, the U.S. is giving it a go with a charm offensive,” Biiga says. It’s not so much competitively “thumbing its nose" at French President Emmanuel Macron, but an expression of Washington’s worry that Russia or China will step in to fill France’s void — reminding readers that Russian military contractor group Wagner has done exactly that in Mali.
As Cameroonian research Paul Simon-Handy told RFI on Tuesday, the U.S. “is trying to define its own strategic vision [in Africa] while remaining a strategic ally of France [in the region].”
Biiga, meanwhile, concludes his analysis of the African leaders’ collective pilgrimage to Washington by wryly pointing out that neither President Joe Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris has yet to visit Africa.
🌎 7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW
• Ukraine rocked by airstrikes: Multiple explosions shook Ukraine this morning, as Russian airstrikes targeted the capital Kyiv and other cities. Ukrainian emergency services report at least 11 people killed and 64 wounded.
• New COVID surge in China: Following the sudden dropping of its Zero-COVID measures, China is now facing a new surge in cases, with the infection numbers spiking in Beijing. President Xi Jinping and senior officials are expected to meet to try to find new strategies to relaunch China’s economy, which has been weakened by COVID and its lockdown restrictions.
• FTX founder denied bail: A judge denied bail to disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, citing a high flight risk, a day after the crypto entrepreneur was arrested in the Bahamas. The billionaire will remain in custody until at least February, as he faces allegations of massive fraud.
• Bosnia to receive EU candidate status: Bosnia and Herzegovina has been given the green light to become a candidate for EU membership. It joins a long list of countries, including Serbia, Ukraine, and Turkey (a candidate since 1999) of countries hoping to meet the requirements to join the EU, which today counts 27 members.
• Facebook sued for role in Ethiopia civil war: A legal case filed in Kenya’s High Court blames Facebook’s algorithm for fanning hate and violence during Ethiopian’s civil war. Families of victims who were shot after being identified in Facebook posts are suing Facebook’s parent company Meta, seeking more than $2 billion.
• Moderna cancer vaccine shows promise: A cancer vaccine jointly developed by U.S. pharmaceutical companies Moderna and Merck, is showing promising preliminary results in the treatment of an aggressive type of skin cancer. The vaccine, based on the MRNA technology previously used against COVID-19, reportedly cut the risk of recurrence or death by 44%.
• The world’s most expensive city to live in: And the award for most expensive city to live in goes to … New York and Singapore, tied for first place. Perhaps surprisingly, this is the first time the Big Apple makes it to the top of the annual Economist Intelligence Unit list. Tel Aviv, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Zurich, Geneva, San Francisco, Paris and Copenhagen complete the top 10.
🗞️ FRONT PAGE
La Plata-based daily Diario Hoy joined virtually every Argentine daily in featuring a front page of Argentina’s 3-0 World Cup semifinal victory over Croatia. The team and its legendary captain Lionel Messi will face off in the finals Sunday against the winner of tonight’s France-Morocco match.
💬 LEXICON
갓생
Instagram’s South Korean office has revealed the keyword its users mentioned the most often this year: “Godsaeng,” a portmanteau of the English word “god” (which is pronounced “gat” in Korea, and is used as prefix to mean “excellent” or “awesome”) and the Korean word “saeng” which means “life.” The newly-coined word is used by young people to designate an industrious and productive life focused on self-development and achieving one’s goals — a more pragmatic version of the previously trending “You Only Live Once” (YOLO).
📰 STORY OF THE DAY
How Ukraine sank the Moskva, the never-before-told story of Russia’s most humiliating loss of the war
Details of Russia's devastating naval defeat in April are revealed for the first time, contradicting claims in Western media at the time that the U.S. or NATO provided the coordinates to strike the cruiser. Kyiv relied on its own radar — and some luck from the weather, reports Roman Romaniuk for online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda.
⛴️ On April 13, the Russian military suffered its worst naval defeat in modern times when the flagship of Moscow’s fleet, the cruiser Moskva based in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, was sunk. Russia still actively avoids any public references to the Moskva, and there are relatives of dead sailors who still have not received any information about the fate of their loved ones. The Russian Defense Ministry has offered no details about the causes of the sinking, claiming that the ship suffered "surfacing failure," after a fire. Moscow has made allusion to bad weather and claimed that all crew members had been rescued.
☁️ The day after the accident, Western media was quick to report that Moskva had been hit by Ukrainian operated Neptune missiles, thanks to the coordinates of the U.S. intelligence. However, Ukrainian military officials, speaking to Ukrainian Pravda, dismiss this version: the Ukrainian gunners got help from the terrible weather, not foreign intel. The operator of the southern missile complex in the Odessa region had only conventional radars at hand, which were not equipped to see targets further than 18 kilometers.
🎯 This reality was known by the Moskva crew, which turned out to be the fatal mistake. "At the time of the invasion, we had no over-the-horizon radars, and Russia knew it. But since the clouds were very low and the signal in this corridor between the water and the clouds had nowhere to go, the radar suddenly reached (and identified) Moskva,” the source explains. According to our sources, the Russians were so confident in their invulnerability that they probably hadn’t activated air defense systems.
➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com
📣 VERBATIM
“They have kept famine outside the door, but nobody knows for how much longer.”
— Speaking to reporters, spokesman for UN humanitarian agency OCHA Jens Laerke says that although the worst has so far been avoided, if aid is not stepped up soon, an estimated 8 million people in southern Somalia will face famine in the coming months.
📸 PHOTO DU JOUR
Rescue teams and law enforcement members stand near a building damaged by a kamikaze drone in the Shevchenkovskiy district of Kyiv. The Ukrainian capital city has been targeted by a wave of violent Russian airstrikes, which killed at least 11 people. — Photo: Anatolii Siryk/Ukrinform/ZUMA
👉 MORE FROM WORLDCRUNCH
• Free Speech v. Sexual Deviance: French Cartoonist Accused Of Promoting Pedophilia And Incest — WORLDCRUNCH
• Adiós Castillo: Why Latin America Is Ready To Close The Era Of "Cheap Populism" — EL ESPECTADOR
• Poland’s Ruling Party Seeks Tough New Blasphemy Law, Jail For Mocking Church — GAZETA WYBORCZA
✍️ Newsletter by Renate Mattar, Anne-Sophie Goninet and Hugo Perrin
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Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.
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