Sunday Roundup - April 13

“I believe the only way to live and to be truly successful is by collective effort, with everyone working for each other, everyone helping each other, and everyone having a share of the rewards at the end of the day.”

- Bill Shankly, Liverpool FC Manager from 1959-74

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from outside the US mainstream media.  Today we look at Russia-US relations, Syria, and the World Cup.

Russia-US Relations
The overthrow of Russia-leaning Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, the Crimean referendum to rejoin Russia, and Russia's subsequent annexation of Crimea have placed US-Russia relations in about as bad a place as they have been since the end of the Cold War.  Congressional Republicans have ratcheted up their rhetoric and seem to have lost their senses on the issue of nuclear safety.  As The Nation's editor Katrina vanden Heuvel writes on April 10: Representatives Michael Turner (R-OH) and Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Buck McKeon (R-CA) introduced a bill that, among other things, prohibits "the contact, cooperation or transfer of technology between the National Nuclear Security Administration [NNSA] and the Russian Federation until the Secretary of Energy certifies the Russian military is no longer illegally occupying Crimea, no longer violating the INF treaty, and in compliance with the CFE treaty." Engendering nuclear instability by using safety as a stick is an incredibly reckless way to approach global security.  The bill has little chance of prevailing and, even if it does, it will be vetoed by President Obama.

NASA/AFP/Getty Images (appears in Al Jazeera article)

Thankfully, the crisis in the Ukraine has not affected operations at the International Space Station.  Al Jazeera reported on April 9: While relations between American and Russian space officials have frayed because of the crisis in Ukraine, work together on the station remains the same, officials say....The Russian cargo shuttle launched Wednesday morning from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, and after about four spins around the Earth it docked with the ISS, delivering food, fuel and cosmic knickknacks to one Japanese astronaut, two American astronauts and three Russian cosmonauts on board.

The Japan Times offers this take on the deterioration of relations between the two superpowers: Underlying the ferociously strong sense of grievance that prevails among the Russian people against the West is one simple, overpowering emotion: “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore” (to use the classic line from Howard Beale, the Mad Prophet of the Airwaves from the classic 1976 movie “Network”).  Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has not just seen its historic standing and interests in its ancient zone of influence, going back hundreds of years, shrink; worse, Russia’s reach has been systematically dismantled by the United States. One solemn promise after another, made to the Russians, has been forgotten, ignored or scrapped.  It is one thing to talk about other nations’ freedom and independence (and rejoice when they receive it). It is quite another matter if those powers then move deliberately to put those freed countries fully into their orbit.

Syria
In a bleak account of the possibilities for peace in Syria, Yezid Sayigh, writing for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes in an April 8 article: The grim truth is that for those determined to extract a diplomatic exit from the crisis under present conditions, Iran’s latest four-point peace plan is the only potentially feasible bid on the table. It calls for a general ceasefire, a national unity government composed of the regime and Syria’s “internal” opposition, the successive transfer of a wide but unspecified range of presidential powers to the government over several years, and general and presidential elections.

World Cup

Bill Shankly turned Second Division Liverpool into an English Premier League "bastion of invincibility"
Photo by Bob Thomas appears in The Far Post article

Roads and Kingdoms continues its excellent "The Far Post" series on the global soccer culture in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup.  One of the most interesting and thought-provoking in the series is philosopher Simon Critchley's March 11 piece, "Working Class Ballet", on the "spectacle, poetry and importance of professional football."  It's a personal telling of his life-long love of the sport.  Along the way, he speaks of the great Liverpool coach Bill Shankly, his memories of previous World Cups, of his relationship through the sport to his father and to his son, and the film Zidane: A Portrait of the 21st Century.  Here are a few quotes from the article, reflecting on the World Cup:
The World Cup is a spectacle in the strictly Situationist sense. It is a shiny display of teams, tribes and nations in symbolic, indeed rather atavistic, national combat adorned with multiple layers of commodification, sponsorship and the seemingly infinite commercialization...

The World Cup is an image of our age at its worst and most gaudy. But it is also something more, something bound up with difficult and recalcitrant questions of conflict, memory, history, place, social class, masculinity, violence, national identity, tribe and group....

The World Cup, then, is about ever-shifting floors of memory and the complexity of personal and national identity. But at its best it is about grace...an unforced bodily containment and elegance of movement, a kind of discipline where long periods of inactivity can suddenly accelerate and time takes on a different dimension in bursts of controlled power. 

Sunday Roundup - February 23, 2014

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from outside the US mainstream media.  Today we look at the Iran nuclear talks, Arctic ice, Gaza, soccer in Brazil, video games as treatment for learning disabilities, the Syrian Civil War and the chaos in the Ukraine.


Iran
With the breakdown in the Syrian Civil War talks and with the apparent stalemate in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, it's encouraging to find at least one ray of hope for the troubled Middle East.  As reported in The Guardian Thursday: "Three days of talks between Iran and six world powers in Vienna have ended to 'a good start' as diplomats negotiating for a final nuclear deal, agreed on a mutual framework before they could discuss details in future sessions."  EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who acts as "the convenor of talks on behalf of Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia and the US – the group known as P5+1 – is negotiating directly with Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran's foreign minister."   Ashton said both sides had "agreed to start the technical work and further political discussions as early as March. They would set a timetable over four months to discuss the differences that have so far prevented settlement of the decades-long dispute over Tehran's nuclear programme."



Climate Change
It's been a wild winter in the Northern Hemisphere - drought in California, avalanches in the Rockies, winter storms in the Midwest, Northeast, and Southeast, massive flooding in the UK.  Anyone out there still unconcerned about global climate change or humankind's role in causing it?  Ryan Koronowski reported Thursday on the ClimateProgress website of a new "record".  In February, Arctic sea ice dipped to "record low levels in February. On the 18th, sea ice covered 5.544 million square miles of the Arctic, while the previous low on that date was in 2006, at 5.548 million square miles."   The sea ice is dwindling even in the almost perpetual darkness of winter "because there is less of its bright whiteness to reflect back sunlight into space. As the ice melts, more of the surface area changes to darker ocean water, which absorbs the sun’s energy, warming the ocean and allowing more ice to melt."  Some researchers are blaming the frequent strong winter storms in the UK on this phenomenon.
(Image of flooding near Tewksbury is from the Daily Mail; copyright by Adam Gray/SWNS.com)



Gaza
Bad as the Palestinian situation is in the West Bank, it's much worse in the Gaza Strip, where Israel, with assistance from Egypt, has maintained a blockade on Gaza's 1.7 million inhabitants since 2007.  Gaza is back in the news in recent weeks.  After the Arab Spring there was some easing of restrictions on the Egyptian side.  Unfortunately,  Egypt closed supply tunnels on its border with Gaza after the Muslim Brotherhood was removed from power.  Earlier this month, far-right members of the Israeli Knesset walked out on a speech by European Parliament President Martin Schulz when he criticized Israel for its blockade of the Gaza Strip and for the Israeli water policy in the Occupied Territories.  On February 12, a dozen human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, called upon the European Union to urge Israel to "immediately, unconditionally and completely...lift the unlawful closure of the Gaza Strip, and demand that all parties comply with their obligations under international law."  Calling Israel’s closure of the Gaza Strip a collective punishment of 1.7 million Palestinians and a "breach of international humanitarian law", the rights organizations noted that the "impact of the closure and the violence on the population’s right to life, health, education, food, water and an adequate standard of living has never been clearer."
(Photo of two Gaza children looking through rubble after an Israeli airstrike is by EPA/Mohammed Saber and appeared in The Telegraph in Nov 2012)


Brazil and Soccer - The Beautiful Language
As we all know, the World Cup is being played in Brazil this year.  In a brilliant article for Roads & Kingdoms' "Far Post" series, sportswriter Jack Lang writes about the unique Brazilian "language" for the sport.  As the World Cup approaches "amid the FIFA-approved images of soccer stars in sun-drenched stadiums, much of what truly defines Brazilian football will be concealed, lost in translation. For while Neymar, Thiago Silva et al represent one aspect of this nation’s continuing clout in the sport, there is another sphere in which it excels. No other nation can match the verve with which Brazil talks and writes about o jogo bonito."  From players' nicknames to sportscasters' commentary to their creative shorthand descriptions of play, the article is a great romp through the language and character of Brazil's soccer culture. 


Your Brain and Video Games
On Tuesday, the Utne Reader reported on an Oxford University study that "indicates that video games may be able to help the 5 to 10 percent of the world’s population who are affected by dyslexia.  UR notes that this is not the first study to point out the benefits of video games. "Past research has shown that playing video games can improve mental reasoning and decision-making skills as well as precision and self-esteem."


Ukraine
The violence in the Ukraine, which has resulted in as  many as 100 deaths over the past week, seems to have ended thanks to a deal to cut the President's powers, revise the Constitution and release an opposition leader.  Mother Jones tries to describe "why Kiev is burning":  "The EuroMaidan protests, which started on November 21 in response to President Viktor Yanukovych's rejection of a European Union trade deal, have been going on for nearly three months....the conflict is fueled by sharp political and ethnic divides. A significant portion of the population wants closer ties to Europe, but Putin has been pressuring Yanukovych's government toward closer economic integration with Russia."

In Brief/Other Links 

For more on the second reason for the Israeli far-right-wing walkout during Martin Schultz' address to the Knesset, see  Haaretz, February 16 "The Israeli 'watergate' scandal: The facts about Palestinian water"


For other soccer culture articles, here's a link to the home page of "The Far Post" series.


Syrian and American diplomats "blamed each other for a lack of progress at peace talks in Geneva aimed at opening a dialogue between Damascus and opposition representatives from the Syrian National Coalition, who are fighting a civil war that activists say has claimed 140,000 lives. The peace talks broke off Saturday (Feb 13), and it’s not clear when, or if, they’ll resume." [Al Jazeera, February 16]

Football - International Style

Back in 2004, Franklin Foer's How Soccer Explains the World examined the soccer culture in various countries and the soccer culture's relationship to the era of globalization.  Soccer has been a globalized sport for decades with many of the greatest players playing in, primarily, European professional leagues.  The anecdotes Foer shares are fascinating but the title is hype.  The anecdotes certainly don't explain the world but they do provide memorable and colorful examples of his basic premise - that there's an innate tendency towards tribalism and local culture that resists globalization.  Foer, at one point, seems to imply that maybe the furthest we can go as a species is an enlightened nationalism, at least at this stage in our evolution.

International competitions such as the FIFA World Cup and the upcoming Winter Olympics give us all a chance to exhibit our national pride in a non-belligerent manner.   The Olympics of  ancient Greece were a period of peace. Whatever city-states were fighting at the time put down their weapons and made a truce so that the athletes could travel safely to the games.  Of course, there were no Winter Olympics back in sunny Greece.  There were far fewer events (track and field, boxing, wrestling, and chariot racing), and the Olympics were as much a religious event as an athletic competition.  After all, the Greek gods resided on Mt. Olympus.


The World Cup was the dream and brain-child of Frenchman Jules Rimet, who was "of the generation that had gone through World War I, a conflict that left a monument in every French town with a list of the young men who died in the trenches....For his part, Jules Rimet came home with a dream: that rather than sending their young to gun each other down with machine guns and stabbing each other with bayonets, nations might instead compete on the pitch. They could celebrate their pride and difference while also sharing a set of rules and what he considered to be the most universal language on the planet: soccer." [SI/CNN/The Far Post]

So exhibiting a bit of my national pride, I must point out that the American team has one of the toughest draws in the tournament.  Of the field of 32, only Australia, Ghana and Costa Rica appear to face a more difficult challenge.  If the US advances out of the group stage, it will be a tribute to how far soccer has come in this country.  Not only are the highly ranked sides from Portugal and Germany in the group, the fourth member is the well regarded Ghana team.  Ghana matches up well against the US - they eliminated the US in the 2010 World Cup.  Here's the final draw for the group stage:

(Image is from the FIFA website.)

Foer wrote How Soccer Explains the World in 2004.  For an up-to-date look at the world's soccer scene, I'd recommend the Roads and Kingdoms series "The Far Post".  Every two weeks until the World Cup, they are posting an article on the teams and culture of "the beautiful game".

Football - American-Style

It's been a hectic and exciting couple of weeks with all the college football bowl games and NFL playoff games playing on TV.  The college BCS Championship was decided Monday night in what's been called a "game for the ages" and the hype is now building towards Super Bowl XLVIII - the first outdoor, cold weather Super Bowl ever.  I like most sports but football is my favorite. The sheer number of possible offensive plays, defensive alignments, and outcomes appeal to the tactician in me; the game plans, to the strategist.  The athleticism, speed and strength of the players result in incredible and sometimes acrobatic plays.  It's truly a game of inches and seconds where execution is paramount and many games are decided in the closing ticks of the clock.  The relatively low number of  games played in a football season (12 in college; 16 in the pro's) assures that just about every game is meaningful in the quest for a championship.

What can you say about the NFL's "wild card weekend"?  Two of the four games were decided on the last play with no time remaining.  Saturday night the New Orleans Saints won at Philadelphia on a field goal, 26-24.  In one of the Sunday games, played with the thermometer hovering just above 0 degrees F. and with a wind chill diving towards -20, San Francisco defeated Green Bay 23-20 on a 33-yard field goal that cleared the uprights with zero time on the clock.  It's a game of inches...a Green Bay defender nearly blocked the kick, the ball barely making it through his outstretched arms. (Link to a video of the near-block)  A third NFL playoff game saw an amazing comeback by the Indianapolis Colts who rallied from 28 points down to defeat the Kansas City Chiefs by 1 point.

Future college national championships will be decided by a four-team playoff.   So, the national championship game Monday night brought the much-debated BCS era to an end.  And what an end it was!  The ACC's Florida State, dominant and undefeated in 13 games,  were double-digit favorites against the SEC's Auburn.  Auburn had made it to the championship game on the strength of a 106 yard return of a missed field goal by Alabama as time expired and a loss by the until-then undefeated Ohio State team.  The SEC had won nine BCS national championships, including the last seven, and most of "Football Nation" was rooting for Florida State.  (In the interest of full disclosure...I am a big SEC fan.) 

Auburn almost did it.  At one point in the first half they were up by 18 points.  But Florida State changed the momentum of the game late in the first half when they converted a fake punt and went on to score a touchdown.  Then there was the wild conclusion.  In less than 5 minutes at the end of the game, we saw three touchdowns and three lead changes.  Florida State, with a 100 yard kickoff return for touchdown and led by their Heisman Trophy winning quarterback, Jameis Winston, came away with the victory.  The Auburn Tigers had run out of miracles.

Sports are the one place that our ancient tribal tendencies are, most times at least, relatively harmless.  Fans of rival clubs can be notably antagonistic towards one another -  the shorter the distance between the club's home fields, the greater the antagonism.  So tribalism is a good analogy.  But in spite of this tribalism and fierce competitiveness, sports consistently delivers moments of grace, fairness and respect... moments where it is clear that the joy of playing the game and respect for the opponent are the driving force of the players' action.  It even has a name - "good sportsmanship"Who can ever forget the farewell tribute to Mariano Rivera in last year's baseball All-Star Game?

Sports also give us a chance to be passionate about something that, in the grand scheme of things, does not matter that much.  It gives a chance to escape, for a few hours at least, from our everyday concerns and responsibilities.  It provides us with the "circus" of the usually derogatory "bread and circuses".

There is no bigger circus in American sports than professional football's Super Bowl.  Complete with a blockbuster half-time show and specially created commercials, it draws a television audience of over 100 million people and creates a party atmosphere across the entire nation.  Never mind that often times the Super Bowl is a disappointing affair with a lop-sided score.  People are enjoying themselves.  And the game can have some amazing moments - here's a link to one website's collection of the ten greatest Super Bowl plays of all time.



Finally, international competitions, such as the Olympics and the World Cup, give us a chance to exhibit our nationalistic pride where it can do little damage. More on this in the next post.