👋 Salibonani!*
Welcome to Monday, where U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken heads back to the Middle East amid new strikes against Houthi missiles in Yemen, El Salvador’s president claims a sweeping re-election victory and Taylor Swift makes Grammy history. Meanwhile, Rome-based magazine L’Essenziale talks with Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone about his Oscar-nominated movie Io Capitano, a disturbing story about young people risking their lives to migrate to Italy.
[*Ndebele, Zimbabwe]
💡 SPOTLIGHT
What the U.S. got wrong in the Middle East — with Obama, Trump and Biden all to blame
Iran's allies are attacking the West across the region. The Hamas massacre, attacks on U.S. troops and the Houthi targeting of ships are possibly just the beginning. The fact that the Middle East is so unstable today is due to a decision first made by the U.S. a generation ago, writes Alfred Hackensberger in German daily Die Welt.
In his long career, the neoconservative U.S. official John Bolton has been called many things. He was said to be a "foreign policy hawk" who "relentlessly defended his country's interests". The mustachioed Republican has also been described as an "irascible hothead" and "warmonger."
The negative descriptions are probably based on the fact that Bolton is an advocate of classic deterrence policy and prefers to use military means sooner rather than later. This applies in particular to Iran.
The Republican has been warning of Tehran's attempt at regional hegemony for years.
At least until this weekend's targeted strikes, President Joe Biden has been doing far too little against the Shiite regime. Indeed, the series of attacks over the past three months by the Iran-led "Axis of Resistance" appear to confirm Bolton's assessments.
The Oct. 7 Hamas massacre in Israel was "de facto the opening move of the radical fundamentalists, which triggered a chain reaction of events," as Yaakov Lappin, a political analyst for The Jerusalem Post, put it.
The chain reaction includes Houthi attacks on international shipping routes, attacks by Lebanon's Hezbollah in northern Israel and drone and missile attacks on U.S. bases by Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria. Most recently, the "Tower 22" base in Jordan was hit by an Iranian Shahed killer drone, killing three American soldiers.
According to the Pentagon, there have been at least 165 attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria since mid-October. A total of 3,400 U.S. troops are stationed in both countries, supporting Kurdish, Iraqi and local Syrian forces in the fight against the Islamic State (ISIS).
Bolton, long in opposition, reacted sharply, "Sunday’s serious American casualties in Jordan, at the hands of an Iran-backed militia, tragically underscore Biden’s folly."
The Republican called for a "disproportionate" retaliatory strike against Iran. "To be clear, I don’t think it should be proportionate. I think it should be disproportionate. That’s how you create deterrence in the mind of your adversary, that the cost to them of attacking our forces is so high they won’t do it again,” Bolton said.
Washington has struck back. But certainly not in the manner that Bolton would like The retaliation will no doubt be "proportionate". [...]
— Read the full article by Alfred Hackensberger for Die Welt, translated into English by Worldcrunch.
🗞️ FRONT PAGE
Chilean daily La Tercera reports on the devastating forest fires in the coastal tourist region of Valparaíso, which have killed at least 112 people. Chile’s President Gabriel Boric has declared a state of emergency as responders continue to battle the blaze amid an intense heatwave and temperatures soaring to 40 °C (104 °F). It is believed to be Chile's deadliest forest fire on record and deadliest disaster since a 2010 earthquake and tsunami that killed 500 people.
🌎 7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW
• Blinken heads to Middle East after latest U.S. strikes on Houthis: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is making his fifth trip to the Middle East since Oct. 7. This comes after the U.S. said it carried out more strikes against Houthi missiles in Yemen on Sunday. The military said it had struck a land-attack cruise missile and four anti-ship missiles that “were prepared to launch against ships in the Red Sea.” Read more about Blinken’s own kind of diplomacy here.
• U.S. Senate unveils $118 billion deal on border, aid for Israel and Ukraine: The United States Senate has unveiled a $118 billion bipartisan deal that would boost border security and provide wartime aid for Israel and Ukraine. U.S. President Joe Biden along with Democratic and Republican leaders in the Senate have been pushing to continue sending aid to Ukraine but have faced resistance from conservative Republicans who have insisted measures be focused on tackling illegal immigration at the border with Mexico.
• El Salvador's Bukele declares landslide win in reelection: President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador says he has been re-elected. His popularity soared following a crackdown on crime that has transformed the country's security situation. Bukele declared himself the winner before official results were announced, claiming to have attained more than 85% of the vote. Provisional results showed Bukele winning 83% support with 31% of the ballots counted. Follow Worldcrunch’s coverage of El Salvador here.
• Australian writer Yang Hengjun given suspended death sentence in China: Australian writer Yang Hengjun has been given a suspended death sentence by a Chinese court, five years after he was arrested and accused of spying. The terms of the sentence mean Yang’s sentence could be converted to life imprisonment for good behavior.
• Senegal parliament to debate election delay after police disperse protests: Senegal’s parliament is meeting to consider the postponement of presidential elections announced by President Macky Sall, which critics have called a coup. Monday’s session is happening after a day of violent street protests in the capital Dakar, during which at least one senior opposition figure was arrested and led to growing international calls.
• South Korea court acquits Samsung chief: A court in South Korea has acquitted Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong of financial crimes regarding a 2015 merger. The Seoul Central District Court ruled on Monday that Lee is not guilty of stock price manipulation and accounting fraud. The case was the latest episode in an ongoing scandal, centered on the control of the country’s largest company and involving high-level corruption.
• Grammys recap: Taylor Swift triumphed at the Grammy Awards, becoming the first performer to win the prize for album of the year four times. The superstar had previously been tied on three best album wins with Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon and Frank Sinatra. Meanwhile, U.S. rapper and activist Killer Mike was detained and escorted by police out of the awards ceremony, following an altercation. Earlier in the night, he picked up three of the music industry’s biggest prizes for hip hop.
#️⃣ BY THE NUMBERS
€18/hour
Parisians have approved a steep increase in parking rates for SUV-style vehicles, tripling the rates to 18 euros ($19.50) per hour in the city center. In a citywide referendum, 54.55% voted for the increase for vehicles weighing 1.6 tons or more, which will mostly affect those coming from the suburbs who drive into Paris’ center for the day, with exemptions made for fully electric cars, taxi drivers, tradespeople, health workers and people with disabilities. Socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo, who had called for the vote, hailed a “clear choice of Parisians” in favor of a measure that is “good for our health and good for the planet.” However, only 78,000 (5.7%) of the 1.3 million eligible voters took part in the referendum.
📰 STORY OF THE DAY
Me Captain — how Matteo Garrone made the migration movie the world needs now
Rome-based magazine L’Essenziale features an interview with Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone, whose movie Me Captain is nominated for an Oscar, after he won the Silver Lion for directing at the 80th Venice International Film Festival. The tale centers around the life-and-death quest of migration, a topic that remains at the center of debate in Italy — and beyond.
🇮🇹 The plot of the movie begins several years ago: a friend of the director, who runs a reception center in Sicily, had told him about the story of an underage boy, Fofana Amara, who had brought hundreds of people to safety on a boat that had left Libya, but once in Italy was charged with aiding and abetting illegal immigration and ended up in jail for six months. A crime for which one faces up to 30 years in Italy today. "I was struck by the story of this boy, I imagined him as I later showed him in the final scene of the film."
🎥 Films about immigration can fail for a variety of reasons: they can be patronizing, inauthentic, too didactic. The risk is to get trapped inside some kind of rhetoric or to portray people as a caricature — or even to use them as a mirror. Matteo Garrone has not succumbed to any of these temptations, and has succeeded in making an almost impossible film: telling a very current story — a topic we see almost daily in the media — and transfigure it into an archetype.
💬 The filmmaker decided the film would be in Wolof, the native language of 40% of Senegalese, although he does not speak it. "I got help from the actors, but the truth is that I was going by ear, hearing a language that was incomprehensible to me," Garrone recalled. "But I felt like I understood when the actors were in and when they were out of character. The great thing about their interpretation is that it is very instinctive, they were living those emotions live."
➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com
📹 THIS HAPPENED VIDEO — TODAY IN HISTORY, IN ONE ICONIC PHOTO
➡️ Watch the video: THIS HAPPENED
📣 VERBATIM
“A reset is necessary.”
— In an interview with Italy’s state broadcaster RAI, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he was considering replacing several senior officials amid speculation that the leader was about to dismiss highly popular commander Valeriy Zaluzhnyi. When asked about Zaluzhnyi, Zelensky responded he had “in mind something serious that does not concern a single person, but the direction of the country's leadership.” The two have recently been at odds over the conduct of the nearly two-year-old Russian invasion of Ukraine, with Zaluzhnyi arguing that some Ukrainian institutions were keeping the country from achieving its objectives. For more, a Worldcrunch translation/adataton of a Mykhailo Dubynyanskyi article in Ukrainska Pravda: Zelensky At Risk: Russian Propaganda And Domestic Opponents Want Him Out By Spring.
📸 PHOTO DU JOUR
A member of the Iraqi's Popular Mobilization Forces stands guard during the Baghdad funeral of the 16 members killed in U.S. airstrikes. Washington said it had targeted more than 85 targets in Syria and Iraq, in response to the deadly attack by pro-Iranian militias that killed three U.S. soldiers in Jordan last week. — Photo: Ameer Al-Mohammedawi/dpa/ZUMA
👉 MORE FROM WORLDCRUNCH
• Inside A Gaza Shelter, The Catastrophe Of War Stares You In The Eyes — DARAJ
• Putin's Firewall: Russia Is Quietly Building A System For Restricting Internet Access — VAZHNYYE ISTORII/IMPORTANT STORIES
• Railway Chic, The Designers Reimagining Train Travel For The 21st-Century Jet Set — LES ECHOS
✍️ Newsletter by Emma Albright and Anne-Sophie Goninet
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