The question...
What does the future of the world's largest religion look like?
Talking Points
- Tennis world #1 Ash Barty quit at the age of 25
- Disgraced Hillsong megachurch founder Brian Houston resigned
- Nine years of cruelty ended with AUS-NZ refugee resettlement
- Pakistan's Imran Khan was beset by a vote of no confidence
- Rodrigo Duterte's party backed Marcos Jr for the presidency
- Russia demanded that "unfriendly" gas buyers pay in rubles
- Salva Kiir and Riek Machar were back at it in South Sudan
- SCOTUS nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson fronted hearings
- Disney tied itself in a knot over Florida's "Don't say gay" law
- America recognised the Rohingya genocide
Dive deeper
Everyday in China some 12,500 domestic flights arrive safely at their destinations. On Monday, China Eastern flight MU5735 did not. It took off from Kunming in the early afternoon but never made it to Guangzhou.
The steepest descent
The plane didn't so much crash as spear into the earth from 29,000ft. The petrifying footage spreading on social media (beware: some of it is fake) shows the Boeing 737-800 come screaming out of the firmament almost vertically. In the clip, trees sway gently in the foreground, the rest of the vision taken up by grey spring clouds. In the distance, the slender silhouette of a passenger jet knives silently into the shot. In just three or four seconds flight 5735 disappears behind some faraway hill. Early in its descent the plane was travelling at more than 966kmh ; just shy of the speed of sound.
It's been raining steadily in Wuzhou all week. Guangxi province, like all of southern China, is balmy and drizzly this time of year. That's perfectly tolerable weather on most occasions. But this week, in the fold of wooded hills just outside the city, the rain has rendered the bleak task of air crash recovery nigh impossible. The goat track leading to the scene of devastation has turned to mud beneath the boots of first responders. The impact crater — a deep gouge in the slope — is damp and slick. The fires didn't burn long, but the downpour that extinguished them has also caked and disguised the remains in earth. What emergency workers have gathered up with great care all week are mere fragments: plane, belongings, and the 132 people on board.
The impact was of such tremendous force that one industry specialist mused, "It looks like it literally evaporated into a crater". Parts of the wreckage were driven 20m below the surface. A scrap of tail bearing the China Eastern logo was the largest object at the crash site — one of the few objects to take more than a single pair of hands to collect . Late in the week, among the detritus, one of the two black boxes was recovered. If the flight recorder can be successfully extracted, we'll know a great deal more about what happened on board.
Questions without answers
For now, questions abound. Are more Boeing models suffering from fatal technical or computer failures? This model, the 737-800 is the most widely-flown type of aeroplane on the planet. Why did it, just 40 seconds before impact, briefly pull out of the dive and momentarily ascend? Were the crew and passengers conscious in their final moments? Was it intentional? Attention has swiftly turned to the pilots, as is often the case. In 2015, the copilot of Germanwings Flight 9525 locked his colleagues out of the cabin and snuffed out his own, and 149 other, lives. Is that what happened here? And of course there's the ongoing mystery of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 which disappeared somewhere over the Indian Ocean. No smoking gun there, the two pilots were highly qualified — a combined 39,000 hours of flying time — and had "stable" family conditions".
By Tuesday, dozens of family members had arrived at the site to hold vigil for their departed relatives . Held back from the site by a checkpoint, they could do little but wait, grieve, and ask questions. They have received nothing but "rainbow farts" (a Mandarin idiom for excessive and deflective praise) from the authorities. Chinese state media has focused on the efforts of emergency workers at the expense of all other considerations. Accountability will have to wait till after the state completes an investigation — there will be no further audience participation at this time. In the era of total social media saturation there is really no effective way to stage manage a disaster, but Beijing is certainly trying. After a particularly information-free briefing from a China Eastern executive, one lark said, "The chairman obviously lacked experience in news conferences, and he didn't know how to cleverly evade questions when he couldn't answer them."
Late in the week the discovery of a piece of fuselage 10km from the crash site raised the prospect of a mid-air breakup . It will be days, weeks perhaps, before we discover what on earth happened to Flight 3735.
Worldlywise
Sri Lanka can't catch a break
Effects of the invasion of Ukraine have been felt the world over. Delays, price-shocks, and shortages are whip-sawing commodity and manufactured product markets. Half a world away, Sri Lanka has been plunged into its worst downturn since independence. An economy that had limped out of the civil war has gotten absolutely pummelled over the last three years. An ambitious plan to transition Sri Lanka's entire agriculture industry to organic farming proved an unalloyed failure. A failure that coincided with a pandemic. And now it's been engulfed by the global energy crisis.
Tertiary services industries make up more than half of Sri Lanka's GDP: with no tourists this economic lifeline is flatlining. Now, the cost of simply being on the island is rising in tandem with oil import prices. Many Sri Lankans have been forced to line up for hours in sweltering heat to purchase food, medicine, and fuel. This week two elderly men died of heat exhaustion while queueing for essentials. Power shortages have necessitated rolling blackouts. There's a lack of just about everything: millions of students are unable to sit their exams due to a dearth of paper .
While it would be easy to heap blame for all this outside the walls of the Kremlin, Sri Lanka's own economic management has left much to be desired. Last decade, tax cuts were thrown about even as government debt soared, prompting a bailout from the International Monetary Fund in 2016. Then, Colombo grabbed a high-interest loan from the Chinese and a $1bn credit facility from the Indians. You've got to spend money to make money, right? Right now, Sri Lanka's government is on the hook for $27bn but has just over $2bn in foreign currency reserves . In 2018, the country's central bank slammed a report that found Sri Lanka most at risk of an exchange rate crisis. That crisis is no longer hypothetical.
The options now range from bad (massive austerity) to worse (taking on another loan to pay the last one).
Don't let the door hit you on the way out
The Spanish may have brought slavery to Jamaica, but it was the British who dined out on it. After seizing the island nation in 1655 the British transformed it into a vast slave labour sugar plantation. For nearly two centuries, generation after generation of Africans, seized at gunpoint and whisked across the Atlantic, were forced to work in abysmal conditions. Brutal punishment was meted out by buccaneers the Crown had deputised. The processed sugar shippd from Jamaica made plantation owners stupendously wealthy and padded the Exchequer's tax receipts. It took several bloody revolts in the 1800s for the slaves to win their emancipation. Jamaica was granted independence from Britain in 1962, but the job isn't quite done .
The famed Caribbean nation is ditching the Queen for good. And what better time to do it than when her brood are in town? Prince William, second-in-line for the throne, and his wife Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, are on a glitzy publicity tour of their domain. But while they may have been greeted with cheers last century, protesters now line the streets instead. Jamaican PM Andrew Holness told the royals point blank that his nation was already in the process of removing Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. Indeed, it would be done "as soon as" they left the island. In a speech on Thursday Prince William professed his "profound sorrow" at the "abhorrent" practice of slavery that his kin and nation inflicted upon Jamaica. He had nothing meaningful to contribute amid calls for slavery reparations. Too little, too late.
And that may not even be the worst loss for the Crown in the region. England is touring the West Indies at the moment and has ground out two drawn tests. Now the Poms have started the third with another archetypal top order batting collapse. Forget the empire, they could probably do with a British umpire right about now.
The best of times
Good chat
Do you think that the neologisms and linguistic quirks of your group chats are unique? Think again! New research has found that orangutan vocabularies are also shaped by their peers. Like our own ape ancestors, communication for these tree-dwelling socialites is a socially emergent process. How do you say 'meme' in orangutan?
We can't hold it any longer
In a world of 176-minute-long movies (looking at you, The Batman ) it's no wonder our humble bladders can't hack it anymore. Welcome to the burgeoning movement to bring back intermissions in feature-length films. THANK GOD. We've reached peak physiological denialism in Hollywood, and things need to change. Alternatively, just make every film the perfect length: a tight 90-minutes.
The worst of times
Education is everything
This week the Taliban reneged on an earlier promise to reopen high schools to the girls of Afghanistan. The last minute decision caught the Education Ministry by surprise and shocked the country ; a newsreader wept as he read the policy shift.
Shelling a chemical plant
The besieged Ukranian city of Sumy narrowly avoided a chemical disaster when Russian artillery caused an ammonia leak . If the fighting could be moved towards open fields instead of nuclear power stations and chemical refineries that would be great.
Weekend Reading
The image
This week Covid claimed the life of 74-year-old Stephen Wilhite , the inventor of the GIF format. The jury is still out on whether the internet was a good idea or not. But it is undeniable that our shared online experience is a little funnier, funner, and easier thanks to Stephen. Don't tell us how to pronounce it properly — we don't care. GIF supplied by Stephen's handiwork.
The quote
"I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it."
– Madeline Albright , the first woman to ascend as America's secretary of state, died this week aged 84. The quote above was from 1996, when she was US Ambassador to the UN, when asked whether 500,000 Iraqi children starving to death under US sanctions was a fair price for influencing Saddam Hussein's policies.
The numbers
99% effective
- A new male oral contraceptive is overwhelmingly successful when tested on mice. First mice, next guinea pigs (you). This may finally make the balance of reproductive responsibility a little more equitable without involving a snip.
A one-third reduction in solar potential
- It's all well and good for India to be slathering its cities and countryside with solar panels but the pollution crisis has massively diminished the efficacy of those PV cells.
The headline
"'Crime against nature': the rise and fall of the world's most notorious succulent thief" — The Guardian .
The special mention
A well-earned special mention in the category of Pulling A Swifty goes to Evan Neumann . This 49-year-old from Marin County has given up the lovely climes of northern California to seek political asylum in Belarus! Neumann was facing a stretch in the slammer for assaulting officers during the January 6 riot. The Cold War never ended, it just got stupider.
A few choice long-reads
- Businessweek really left us hanging with this one: The Future of Boosters Is Somewhere Between Unnecessary and Urgent.
- How do you end a war that no one is likely to win? Foreign Affairs with a crucial read.
- It's not all sunshine and world domination for Silicon Valley's tech giants. Financial Times investigates how they are losing the anti-trust fight in Europe.
The answer...
African and female . Time to sell the Vatican.
