Talking Points
- Hurricane Laura barrelled into the US Gulf Coast
- Favourable weather helped contain Californian wildfires
- TikTok's American CEO Kevin Mayer quit amid the Trump dispute
- Jeff Bezos's net worth crossed the $200b mark
- Japanese PM Shinzo Abe announced his impending resignation
- German doctors confirmed Aleksei Navalny's poisioning
- Flash floods killed at least 150 in northern Afghanistan
- Turkey and Greece continued their Mediterranean stand-off
- Marieke Lucas Rijneveld won the International Booker
- Bayern Munich beat PSG to win the Champions League
Deep Dive
An African-American man is gunned down. A city burns. A white vigilante kills protesters. A new cycle of violence has emerged in America - one that is predicated on hundreds of years of racial injustice, and electrified by the contemporary culture wars.
Killer cops
There are some pieces of advice that, even when repeated ad nauseam or given the Hallmark treatment, retain their sting. African-American civil rights activist and poet Maya Angelou had one such pearl, "when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time".
In 2018, Sheriff David Beth of Kenosha County, Wisconsin – a white man – held a press conference following a theft that had led to a police chase and automotive crash. He had this to say, "Society has to come to a threshold where there is some people who aren't worth saving. We need to build warehouses, to put these people into, to lock these people away for the rest of their lives... At some point we have to stop being politically correct."
And if you're wondering what sort of people Beth believes are not worth saving, consider this: Wisconsin's prisons have America's second-worst racial disparity in terms of incarceration rates. A staggering 11.5 African American males are incarcerated for every white male. And Wisconsin jails African American men at twice the national average. These are predominantly poor people (two-thirds of the state's Black prison population comes from the poorest six counties in the state), and they are jailed for trivial offences (40% of Milwaukee County's Black prison population are there for minor drug offences like smoking marijuana). Beth is still in charge of the Kenosha police department that this week shot Jacob Blake.
Blake was shot in the back seven times at close range – close enough for the officer to be holding a fistful of his t-shirt. Witnesses say he had just broken up a fight between two women on the street. His apparent provocation was failing to comply with a police order, by walking away from them and opening the driver's side door of the car in which his children were seated. He survived, barely. And will be paralysed from the waist down for life. An onlooker filmed the incident – the gruesome footage makes plain the fear that is at the heart of American policing. As many have noted in recent months, the militarisation of America's police departments does not refer only to kitting out suburban cops with heavy munitions and combat vehicles - troubling though that is. The bigger issue appears to be a poisoned police culture that evaluates every citizen as a possible threat. It's not just mine-resistant troop carriers that were taken home from Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the troops in them.
What happened next in Kenosha could have been scripted. Spontaneous protests broke out once the footage of the incident emerged. People took to the streets in rage and grief over another – another – police shooting. Riots raged for two nights in spite of a curfew and the deployment of the national guard . On the third night, various self-styled right-wing militias went out in force, brandishing assault rifles and fraternising with the police. One of them, a 17-year-old white male from Illinois, shot three Black Lives Matter protesters, killing two of them. Despite being identified as the murderer, he was allowed to pass through police lines unmolested, and returned to his home state – it was only the following day that he was arrested on two counts of homicide.
Racist language
How can one justify homicide? There is simply no way to square that circle. But that hasn't stopped Fox News from trying. Its firebrand anchor, Tucker Carlson, defended the murderer , and we'll quote him in full to avoid losing context, "Kenosha has devolved into anarchy because the authorities in charge of the city abandoned it. People in charge from the Governor of Wisconsin on down refused to enforce the law. They stood back and they watched Kenosha burn. So are we really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder? How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided that they had to maintain order when no one else would?". It is undeniable that comments like this deserve significant blame for the growing hostility in contemporary America. And sadly, such comments are no longer outliers. Many voices in the conservative media have lined up behind what is effectively Trump's re-election pitch: that only he can stop the anarchy on the streets.
When Minneapolis burned in May, following the brutal murder of George Floyd by police, Donald Trump had tweeted "when the looting starts, the shooting starts". It's a line he borrowed from former Miami police chief Walter Headley who had uttered it during the race riots in the summer of 1967. Headley had followed it up with, "we don't mind being accused of police brutality". He in turn had borrowed his line from the infamous Bull Connor of Birmingham, Alabama circa 1963. There is a straight, unbroken line that runs from the Birmingham Campaign right to Kenosha.
Desipte the gravity of these events, the political response has been insipid. Both sides have simply dissembled or deflected, our of fear of alienating their bases. For their part, the Democrats are urging people to get out and vote in November – a ludicrous presumption that this racial injustice will be solved at the ballot-box; particularly given Wisconsin's voting record over the last three decades (Clinton-Clinton-Bush-Bush-Obama-Obama-Trump). Fortunately, while the politicians babbled platitudes, America's athletes actually did something . The Milwaukee Bucks refused to take to the court in their playoff game against Orlando Magic. The wildcat players strike tore through major league sports. NBA playoffs were postponed in a historic first – several teams are considering a withdrawal from the finals altogether. The WNBA followed suit. Tennis champion Naomi Osaka dropped out of her game in New York. The Mets and Marlins took their playing positions on Citifield, stood in silence for 42 seconds (the jersey number Jackie Robinson wore like a cross), and departed.
These are desperate, fleeting strikes. It's up to the rest of the country to follow that lead and take a stand against racism and police brutality.
Worldlywise
Africa declared free of wild polio
Poliomyelitis is a terrible disease. The infection is often transmitted through water that has been contaminated with faecal matter . It is particularly aggressive in children under the age of 5. It takes root in the intestine and from there attacks the nervous system. In young bodies the disease contorts limbs in unnatural directions, rendering them useless. And in serious cases, it causes paralysis. It is incurable , and was, until Dr. Hillary Koprowski's first successful test in 1950, unpreventable. In the decade that followed, an inactivated vaccine was improved upon by Jonas K. Salk and then perfected in an oral format. It was an enormous success.
But the disease proved to be a persistent challenge in many of the poorest corners of the planet. In 1996, two years after it had been eradicated from the Americas, polio paralysed some 75,000 African children. That year, South African President Nelson Mandela launched the "Kick Polio Out Of Africa" campaign. The plan was unbelievably ambitious: sending an army of millions of healthcare workers into every village, town, and city on the continent to conduct vaccinations. It was difficult and thankless work. And it was stalled for years by conflict in central Africa (most recently by Boko Haram which prevented tens of thousands of children from being vaccinated in Nigeria).
But this week, at long last, Africa was finally declared free of wild polio. It is, as Matshidiso Moeti of the World Health Organisation beamed, "a momentous milestone for Africa".
Having run out Yingluck, Prayut runs out of luck
No one was particularly surprised when Thai leader Yingluck Shinawatra was deposed in a 2014 coup d'état. Thailand averages one coup every 6.8 years; Yingluck wasn't even the first member to have her premiership cut short by the overzealous officer class of the Royal Thai Army. For those who opposed the allegedly malign hand of Shinawatra influence in local politics, General Prayut Chan-o-cha represented a welcome change. But after five years at the head of the 'interim' junta, Prayut decided he was quite partial to the role of leader and decided to stand in the 2019 election. Let's just say that election was not without its critics, but Prayut nonetheless swapped his epaulettes for a tie.
After a year in the top civilian job, Prayut has hardly won many fans. Widespread anger over the less-than-commendable state of Thailand's democracy has boiled over. Student-led demonstrations have swamped Bangkok and regional cities for most of August. The largest protest since the 2014 coup was held on the 16th. The protesters have three demands: the resignation of the cabinet, the dissolution of parliament, and the drafting of a new constitution. Incredibly, even some gentle implied criticism of the monarchy has made its way into the conversation (despite Thailand's absurdly stringent lèse-majesté laws). The protesters have promised to stay on the streets in the face of overwhelming security pressure and numerous high-profile arrests .
Now, if you were to make an educated guess, which tech company would you expect to have stumbled into this imbroglio? Three points for anyone who guessed Facebook! The social media giant, which seems to have adopted the cliche "there's no such thing as bad publicity" as a guiding principle, has come up short in yet another test of its commitment to free speech.
Facebook acceded to the Thai government's request to muzzle a protest page that had more than one million followers. It has now promised to launch a legal action against the government, but as with most of Facebook's responses to crises, the move smacks of closing the barn door after the horse bolts.
The Best of Times
Art benefactor
The British street-turned-gallery-artist Banksy has financed a search-and-rescue ship to help stricken refugees cross the Mediterranean in one piece. It's named for Louise Michel, a trailblazing French anarchist, and will coordinate with other refugee-safety NGOs. It couldn't be more welcome after a shocking spate of mass drownings between Libya and southern Europe.
Artificial photosynthesis
A team at Cambridge's chemistry department has revealed a device that converts sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water into clean energy in a carbon-neutral process. As always, the answer is in nature.
The Worst of Times
Brace yourself against the warmth
Between 1994 and 2017, the world lost 28 trillion tons of ice . That’s the finding of a study conducted by researchers from the universities of Leeds, Edinburgh and the University College of London. It’s the first study to look at all of the ice melting across the entire planet — as opposed to specific areas like Greenland or the Antarctic.
Losing ice at such a rate could cause global sea levels to rise by 1m by the end of the century — which is in line with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s worst-case-scenario predictions.
For context, 28 trillion tons is enough to cover ‘the entire surface of the UK with a sheet of frozen water that is 100 metres thick,’ said Tom Slater of Leeds University.
Weekend Reading
The image
The quote
" But the forest is not gone...it will regrow. Every old growth redwood I've ever seen, in Big Basin and other parks, has fire scars on them. They've been through multiple fires, possibly worse than this ."
– Laura McLendon , conservation director for the Sempervirens Fund, bringing a ray of hope to California’s charred landscape .
The numbers
463m
- The number of students worldwide without computers who are missing out as the world moves to virtual classrooms .
$21b
- That’s the amount of ESG investment in the first half of this year — topping last year’s record $20.6b. 2019’s record, in turn, beat 2018’s record of $5.5b worth of ESG investment. Now we just need to work out whether it's ethical or not.
The headline
"'UFO' in Congo jungle turns out to be internet balloon" – Reuters .
The special mention
To Timesha Beauchamp , who was found breathing and minding her own business a full two hours after she had been declared dead and zipped up in a body bag. Never let the haters, or the coroners, keep you down.
A few choice long-reads
- Foreign Affairs learns a lesson about valuing workers
- Bloomberg tests the scientific basis for Elon Musk's Neuralink
- The Economist on tackling the rising threat of dementia
Tom Wharton
