This week’s news stories and books (2 Feb 2017)

Some articles from the past week of note:

• “Barclays settles on Dublin for post-Brexit EU hub,” The Irish Times, 26 January 2017.
• http://www.dw.com/en/gambian-president-barrow-receives-warm-welcome-following-post-election-crisis/a-37293520
• For cat lover’s: Will Grant, “Our cat in Havana,” BBC News, 22 January 2017.
• Justin Huggler and Roland Oliphant, “Russia is targeting French, Dutch and German elections with fake news, EU task force warns,” The Telegraph, 24 January 2017.
• Sella Oneko, “Will AU Members Really Withdraw from the ICC?” Deutsche Welle, 1 February 2017.
• Norman Dombey, “North Korea’s Bomb,” London Review of Books 39(3): 8-9 (2 February 2017).
• Patrick Cockburn, “Who supplies the news?” London Review of Books 39(3): 7-9 (2 February 2017).
• Yonathan Mendel, “Divide and divide and divide and rule,” London Review of Books 38(19): 13-16 (6 October 2016).

 

It is not often that world news provides an opportunity to write about our feline friends. The story of Django, as told by BBC correspondent Will Grant, was a reminder of my own beloved Cubby and Jelly. It also serves as a remembrance of the poor black kitty whose body lies along the side of CVRT in Oakville.

The current issue of LRB offers interesting articles. Dombey writes about alternative ways of dealing with a nuclear North Korea, which sounds reasonable and would be less confrontational. It remains to be seen if policy makers around the world would buy into such an approach. Meanwhile, Cockburn notes that Western media outlets, in part because of the dangerous situation, have outsourced their coverage of the civil war in Syria almost exclusively to the rebels. He insists that this gives a distorted view of atrocities in the war, which have been committed by all sides. He also notes that this means more coverage has been given to the Siege of Aleppo than the, perhaps more important, Battle of Mosul.

I have been catching up on my back issues of LRB: Mendel’s review of Hillel Cohen’s 1929: Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict was an interesting read. It provides a great deal of information about the simmering issues of interwar Palestine and the construction of the conflicts that baffle diplomats and world leaders to this very day.

Finally, I came across a reference to the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921, a little remembered incident in American history where a thriving African-American community was attacked. See: Scott Ellswoth, Death in the Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).