March 26, 2023: Emma Nelson, Isabel Hilton and Lynne O’Donnell on the weekend’s biggest talking points. We also speak to our editorial director, Tyler Brûlé, in Dubai and Monocle’s Asia editor, James Chambers, in Bangkok.
Category Archives: Politics
Saturday Morning: News And Stories From London
March 25, 2023: Georgina Godwin and the weekend’s biggest discussion topics. Alex von Tunzelmann reviews the papers, Andrew Mueller recaps what we learned this week, and we find out how attitudes of young adults towards the US and China are changing.
Culture: New York Times Magazine – March 26, 2023
The New York Times Magazine – March 26, 2023:
The Age-Old Food Fight That Beats an Italian Town to a Pulp
Every winter, Ivrea erupts into a ferocious three-day festival where its citizens pelt one another with 900 tons of oranges. (Yes, oranges.)
The orange throwers are organized into nine teams, each with a different flag, logo, captain and uniform.
I Went on a Package Trip for Lonely Millennials. It Was Exhausting.
On traveling to Morocco with a group-travel company that promised to build “meaningful friendships” among its youngish clientele.
Sections
I’m Lost All the Time. So I Went on a Labyrinth Vacation.
The dizzying joys of maze tourism, in Barcelona, Paris and Chenonceaux.
The Parc del Laberint d’Horta, in Barcelona.Credit…Joakim Eskildsen for The New York Times
Seeking the Spirited, Mystical Jamaica Tourists Don’t See
A photographer’s journey through her native spiritual landscape of Jamaica, where Christian and Afro-centric traditions blend.
News: Netanyahu Visits UK, Macron Firm On Pension Reform, Honduras-China
March 24, 2023: Benjamin Netanyahu’s UK visit. Plus: Emmanuel Macron digs in his heels as pension-reform rallies erupt across France, Honduras switches ties from Taiwan to China and the latest business news.
Previews: The Economist Magazine – March 25, 2023
The world according to Xi
Even if China’s transactional diplomacy brings some gains, it contains real perils
A lesser man than Xi Jinping might have found it uncomfortable. Meeting Vladimir Putin in Moscow this week, China’s leader spoke of “peaceful co-existence and win-win co-operation”, while supping with somebody facing an international arrest warrant for war crimes. But Mr Xi is untroubled by trivial inconsistencies. He believes in the inexorable decline of the American-led world order, with its professed concern for rules and human rights. He aims to twist it into a more transactional system of deals between great powers. Do not underestimate the perils of this vision—or its appeal around the world.
Central banks face an excruciating trade-off
They have to choose between financial instability and high inflation. It wasn’t meant to be that way
The job of central bankers is to keep banks stable and inflation low. Today they face an enormous battle on both fronts. The inflation monster is still untamed, and the financial system looks precarious.
The trouble with Emmanuel Macron’s pension victory
The way a wise policy was forced through will have political costs
Any French president who asks his fellow citizens to retire later does so at his peril. When Jacques Chirac tried in 1995, crippling strikes made him shelve the project; 18 months later voters sacked his government. Piles of rubbish were left to rot on the streets, as they are today on the boulevards of Paris. Bin collectors have joined strikes against the decision by the current president, Emmanuel Macron, to raise the minimum pension age from 62 to 64. So it was with some relief that on March 20th his minority government narrowly survived two no-confidence votes, opening the way for his reform to enter the statute books.
Views: How Black Market Oil Fuels Terrorism (2023)
Catch all-new episodes of #TraffickedWithMarianavanZeller, Wednesdays at 9/8c on National Geographic.
Special Report: Insert Coin – The Rise Of Video Gaming
Ready, player four billion: the rise of video games
As video games move from teenage distraction to universal pastime they are following the path of other mass media, says Tom Wainwright
Battles over streaming break out for video games
Streaming subscriptions have revolutionised music and television. What will they do to games?
Africa: Somalia Is Facing Its Worst Drought Ever
“People say that this is the worst drought in 40 years, but that’s wrong,” says Adam Abdelmoula, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Somalia. “This is the worst drought in Somalia’s history, period.”
With the world distracted by the war in Ukraine, the crisis is escalating away from the public gaze. This week on Foreign Correspondent reporter Stephanie March and producer/cinematographer Matt Davis travel to Somalia where makeshift camps have become home to more than a million hungry children and their families.
There, they meet mothers with babies who have walked for days without food and very little water. They hear incredible stories of courage and survival in a landscape that is unforgiving and unsafe. And they also face their own safety problems when their security team worries al-Shabaab has been told of their whereabouts.
As the Somali government fights back against al-Shabaab, another threat, which they have no control over, is driving the extreme weather: climate change. In the midst of this turmoil, the Foreign Correspondent team meets extraordinary people who are determined to make their story one of survival.
News: U.S. Fed Raises Key Rate, Lebanon Protests, Floating Pools In Seoul
March 23, 2023: A report on the Federal Reserve’s crucial decision on interest rates. Plus: protesters in Lebanon try to storm the government headquarters, plans for urban ‘floating’ swimming zones in Seoul, and art collectors flock to East Asia for Art Basel Hong Kong.
Politics: The Guardian Weekly – March 24, 2023
The Guardian Weekly (March 24, 2023) – You’d be forgiven for having allowed the collapse of the tech industry lender Silicon Valley Bank, earlier this month, to pass you by. Even the news that SVB’s UK operation had been salvaged in a deal brokered by the British government might not have registered too much. But the rescue this week of Switzerland’s second-largest lender Credit Suisse had a more ominous feel to it, a sense of fiscal dominoes cascading slowly into one another.
For our big story this week, Anna Isaac and Kalyeena Makortoff report on a week that brought back anxious memories of the 2008 financial crash, while economics editor Larry Elliott argues that only the era of ultra-low interest rates that followed the previous crash has prevented a further correction happening sooner.
Chinese president Xi Jinping’s visit to Russia this week had the feel of a pivotal moment for global diplomacy. Russian affairs reporter Pjotr Sauer and senior China correspondent Amy Hawkins look at what the strengthening of the Sino-Russian alliance signifies for Moscow, Beijing and the rest of the world.
This week also saw the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. Diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour reflects on a botched intervention that still haunts global politics to this day, while on the Opinion pages Randeep Ramesh argues that the US foreign policy debacle still serves to underline what he describes as “the capricious and self-centred nature of American global power”.
