When France extorted Haiti – the greatest heist in history

Marlene Daut, 

Professor of African Diaspora Studies,

 University of Virginia
Sun, May 22, 2022

Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer receiving Charles X's decree recognizing Haitian independence on July 11, 1825. Bibliotheque Nationale de France

Much of the reparations debate has revolved around whether the United States and the United Kingdom should finally compensate some of their citizens for the economic and social costs of slavery that still linger today.

But to me, there’s never been a more clear-cut case for reparations than that of Haiti.

I’m a specialist on colonialism and slavery, and what France did to the Haitian people after the Haitian Revolution is a particularly notorious examples of colonial theft. France instituted slavery on the island in the 17th century, but, in the late 18th century, the enslaved population rebelled and eventually declared independence. Yet, somehow, in the 19th century, the thinking went that the former enslavers of the Haitian people needed to be compensated, rather than the other way around.

Just as the legacy of slavery in the United States has created a gross economic disparity between Black and white Americans, the tax on its freedom that France forced Haiti to pay – referred to as an “indemnity” at the time – severely damaged the newly independent country’s ability to prosper.

The cost of independence

Haiti officially declared its independence from France in 1804. In October 1806, the country was split into two, with Alexandre Pétion ruling in the south and Henry Christophe ruling in the north.

Despite the fact that both of Haiti’s rulers were veterans of the Haitian Revolution, the French had never quite given up on reconquering their former colony.

In 1814 King Louis XVIII, who had helped overthrow Napoléon earlier that year, sent three commissioners to Haiti to assess the willingness of the country’s rulers to surrender. Christophe, having made himself a king in 1811, remained obstinate in the face of France’s exposed plan to bring back slavery. Threatening war, the most prominent member of Christophe’s cabinet, Baron de Vastey, insisted,“ Our independence will be guaranteed by the tips of our bayonets!”

In contrast, Pétion, the ruler of the south, was willing to negotiate, hoping that the country might be able to pay France for recognition of its independence.

In 1803, Napoléon had sold Louisiana to the United States for US million. Using this number as his compass, Pétion proposed paying the same amount. Unwilling to compromise with those he viewed as “runaway slaves,” Louis XVIII rejected the offer.

Pétion died suddenly in 1818, but Jean-Pierre Boyer, his successor, kept up the negotiations. Talks, however, continued to stall due to Christophe’s stubborn opposition.

“Any indemnification of the ex-colonists,” Christophe’s government stated, was “inadmissible.”

Once Christophe died in October 1820, Boyer was able to reunify the two sides of the country. However, even with the obstacle of Christophe gone, Boyer repeatedly failed to successfully negotiate France’s recognition of independence. Determined to gain at least suzerainty over the island – which would have made Haiti a protectorate of France – Louis XVIII’s successor, Charles X, rebuked the two commissioners Boyer sent to Paris in 1824 to try to negotiate an indemnity in exchange for recognition.

On April 17, 1825, the French king suddenly changed his mind. He issued a decree stating France would recognize Haitian independence but only at the price of 150 million francs – or around 10 times the amount the U.S. had paid for the Louisiana territory. The sum was meant to compensate the French colonists for their lost revenues from slavery.

Baron de Mackau, whom Charles X sent to deliver the ordinance, arrived in Haiti in July, accompanied by a squadron of 14 brigs of war carrying more than 500 cannons.

Rejection of the ordinance almost certainly meant war. This was not diplomacy. It was extortion.

With the threat of violence looming, on July 11, 1825, Boyer signed the fatal document, which stated, “The present inhabitants of the French part of St. Domingue shall pay … in five equal installments … the sum of 150,000,000 francs, destined to indemnify the former colonists.”

French prosperity built on Haitian poverty

Newspaper articles from the period reveal that the French king knew the Haitian government was hardly capable of making these payments, as the total was more than 10 times Haiti’s annual budget. The rest of the world seemed to agree that the amount was absurd. One British journalist noted that the “enormous price” constituted a “sum which few states in Europe could bear to sacrifice.”

Forced to borrow 30 million francs from French banks to make the first two payments, it was hardly a surprise to anyone when Haiti defaulted soon thereafter. Still, the new French king sent another expedition in 1838 with 12 warships to force the Haitian president’s hand. The 1838 revision, inaccurately labeled “Traité d’Amitié” – or “Treaty of Friendship” – reduced the outstanding amount owed to 60 million francs, but the Haitian government was once again ordered to take out crushing loans to pay the balance.

Although the colonists claimed that the indemnity would only cover one-twelfth the value of their lost properties, including the people they claimed as their slaves, the total amount of 90 million francs was actually five times France’s annual budget.

The Haitian people suffered the brunt of the consequences of France’s theft. Boyer levied draconian taxes in order to pay back the loans. And while Christophe had been busy developing a national school system during his reign, under Boyer, and all subsequent presidents, such projects had to be put on hold. Moreover, researchers have found that the independence debt and the resulting drain on the Haitian treasury were directly responsible not only for the underfunding of education in 20th-century Haiti, but also lack of health care and the country’s inability to develop public infrastructure.

Contemporary assessments, furthermore, reveal that with the interest from all the loans, which were not completely paid off until 1947, Haitians ended up paying more than twice the value of the colonists’ claims. Recognizing the gravity of this scandal, French economist Thomas Piketty acknowledged that France should repay at least billion to Haiti in restitution.

A debt that’s both moral and material

Former French presidents, from Jacques Chirac, to Nicolas Sarkozy, to François Hollande, have a history of punishing, skirting or downplaying Haitian demands for recompense.

In May 2015, when French President François Hollande became only France’s second head of state to visit Haiti, he admitted that his country needed to “settle the debt.” Later, realizing he had unwittingly provided fuel for the legal claims already prepared by attorney Ira Kurzban on behalf of the Haitian people – former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide had demanded formal recompense in 2002 – Hollande clarified that he meant France’s debt was merely “moral.”

To deny that the consequences of slavery were also material is to deny French history itself. France belatedly abolished slavery in 1848 in its remaining colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion and French Guyana, which are still territories of France today. Afterwards, the French government demonstrated once again its understanding of slavery’s relationship to economics when it took it upon itself to financially compensate the former “owners” of enslaved people.

The resulting racial wealth gap is no metaphor. In metropolitan France 14.1% of the population lives below the poverty line. In Martinique and Guadeloupe, in contrast, where more than 80% of the population is of African descent, the poverty rates are 38% and 46%, respectively. The poverty rate in Haiti is even more dire at 59%. And whereas the median annual income of a French family is ,112, it’s only 0 for a Haitian family.

These discrepancies are the concrete consequence of stolen labor from generations of Africans and their descendants. And because the indemnity Haiti paid to France is the first and only time a formerly enslaved people were forced to compensate those who had once enslaved them, Haiti should be at the center of the global movement for reparations.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on June 30, 2020.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

Ethiopian regional authority arrests four staff members of media group

Sun, May 22, 2022

NAIROBI (Reuters) -Authorities in Ethiopia's northern Amhara region have arrested four employees of a U.S.-based online media outlet, while the whereabouts of two others was unclear, the outlet said on Sunday, in the latest round of arrests involving media.

The arrests would add to those of five journalists in another Amhara media outlet on Thursday over what their colleague said was the outlet's reporting of the activity of a local volunteer militia, known as Fano.

"We have four confirmed employees who are in jail and two unknown. Out of the four, one (is a) fulltime editor, one in the process of hiring for editor position, one fulltime reporter, one human resource and finance lead," Nisir International Broadcasting management, said in a message to Reuters on Sunday.

Nisir said three of the employees were arrested on Thursday, and two were in custody in the regional capital Bahir Dar. The third employee and a fourth one who was arrested on Friday are in the town of Gayint, some 160 km (100 miles) from Bahir Dar, Nisir said.

Gizachew Muluneh, spokesperson for the Amhara regional administration and government spokesperson Legesse Tulu did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Nisir calls itself an impartial and independent online media agency focusing on Ethiopian news, paying close attention to Amhara region. It did not give a reason for the arrests.

Amhara is the second-most populous region in Ethiopia, and a key constituency for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. But recently some Amhara leaders who previously backed his government have publicly criticised his handling of a war with the neighbouring region of Tigray.

Amhara forces and the Fano militia backed Abiy's federal troops against rebellious forces in northern Tigray when fighting erupted there in 2020.

Critics say Abiy, who won a Nobel Peace Prize after taking office as a reformer in 2018, is cracking down on dissent around Ethiopia. He says he is guaranteeing stability and law and order in the multi-ethnic nation.

In another case, Solomon Shumiye, an Addis Ababa-based talk show host, was arrested on Friday, taken to court with three others and ordered detained for 14 days, his sister Tigist Shumiye told Reuters.

Solomon has been critical of the government and the war in Tigray.

Government spokesperson Legesse and Markos Tadesse, spokesperson for the Addis Ababa Police Commission, did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment on the arrest.

The arrests add to those of a prominent general critical of Abiy, and some ethnic Amhara activists in the last week.

The state-appointed Ethiopian Human Rights Commission said in a statement on Sunday "the recent arrests don't follow basic Human Rights principles and are inappropriate".

(Reporting by Addis Ababa NewsroomWriting by George ObulutsaEditing by Frances Kerry)

If Roe v. Wade is tossed it would mark the first time the Supreme Court overturned precedent 'to limit civil rights, not expand them,' expert says


Kelsey Vlamis
Sun, May 22, 2022





Pro-choice signs hang on a police barricade at the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, DC, on May 3, 2022.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

A leaked draft opinion showed the Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade this summer.


A former federal prosecutor said it's rare for the court to overturn precedent to limit civil rights.


Experts worry the court's reasoning in the draft opinion could be used to overturn other rights.

According to a leaked draft opinion, the Supreme Court is likely to overturn Roe v. Wade and make history in a number of ways — including by overturning itself to limit the rights of Americans.

"Overturning Roe v. Wade would be such a significant decision because it would be the first time in the history of the Constitution that precedent would be overturned to limit civil rights, not expand them," according to Neama Rahmani, the president of West Coast Trial Lawyers and a former federal prosecutor.

The draft opinion indicates the court seems poised to overturn the 1973 landmark decision that enshrined the right to an abortion. Written by Justice Samuel Alito, the draft was unflinching in its condemnation of the reasoning behind Roe, prompting concerns it could help set the stage for additional rights to be overturned.

For instance, Rahmani said in an email to Insider that the Supreme Court's reasoning to overturn Roe could be extended to erode Miranda rights, which require law enforcement to inform a criminal suspect of their right to remain silent.

"There is no requirement in the Constitution that law enforcement must inform you of your rights, which is essentially what the 1966 Miranda decision provided," Rahmani said. "Miranda is something the court read into the Constitution."

Miranda v. Arizona was an example of the court overturning precedent to expand civil rights. The 1966 position dismissed two prior court rulings and held that law enforcement violated Ernesto Miranda's rights by not informing him of his right to remain silent and request an attorney.

Other prominent cases of the Supreme Court overturning itself have resulted in an expansion of civil rights.

In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education overturned the infamous 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which allowed "separate but equal" segregation laws. By overturning the precedent set by Plessy, Brown granted additional rights to Black Americans, namely the right to attend schools that previously were limited to white students.

More recently, Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 guaranteed the right for couples to marry regardless of their sex, overturning the 1972 decision in Baker v. Nelson and extending the constitutional right to marry to same-sex couples.

"Instead of using the Constitution to expand rights to the citizens of this country, now the conservative right is starting to limit the rights of people in this country," Doron Kalir, a professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, told Insider.

The Supreme Court currently has a 6-3 conservative majority, with three justices nominated by former President Donald Trump, who campaigned on selecting judges that would overturn Roe.

Kalir said landmark decisions like Roe and Obergefell extended rights to those who wanted them, adding Roe never forced anyone to get or perform an abortion, and Obergefell never forced someone to marry someone of the same sex or perform a same-sex marriage.

The language in the draft opinion that would overturn Roe was harsh and sweeping, with Alito calling the decision "egregiously wrong from the start." Kalir said it indicates the court may be open to limiting a whole host of rights that pertain to the right to privacy and the sanctity of the home.

"Can you imagine a police agent knocking on your door and asking if you used contraception?" Kalir said, adding that in a post-Roe world, investigating criminalized abortion could involve police searching homes or internet data for evidence that a person performed or assisted in an abortion.

"This may really be the harbinger of horrible things to come," he said.

Anyone in contact with monkeypox must isolate for three weeks

Kirsten Robertson

METRO
© Provided by Metro The UK Health Security Agency has confirmed 20 cases of the disease in the UK (Picture: AP/Getty)

People who come into contact with monkeypox cases should isolate for three weeks and avoid children, health experts have advised.

There are currently 20 confirmed cases in the UK.

New guidance from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has urged those who have had ‘unprotected direct contact or high-risk environmental contact’ to self-isolate.

This would include no travel, providing details for contact tracing and avoiding direct contact with immunosuppressed people, pregnant women and children under 12.

Dr Susan Hopkins, chief medical adviser for UKHSA, this weekend warned monkeypox is spreading through community transmission.

Speaking to BBC One’s Sunday Morning, she said: ‘We are detecting more cases on a daily basis and I’d like to thank all of those people who are coming forward for testing to sexual health clinics, to the GPs and emergency department.’

Those who are considered at high risk of having caught monkeypox may have had household contact, sexual contact, or have changed an infected person’s bedding without wearing appropriate PPE.

The UK should expect to see more cases on a ‘daily basis’, Dr Hopkins added.

© Provided by Metro Monkeypox produces a similar to disease to smallpox (Picture: World Health Organisation)

© Provided by Metro Monkeypox cases have been recorded across the globe (Picture: Metro.co.uk)

Monkeypox is rarely seen outside Africa but has been confirmed in the UK, US, Canada, Spain, Italy and more in recent weeks.

Austria, Israel and Switzerland became the latest countries to record their first cases over the weekend.

The disease, first found in monkeys, can be transmitted from person to person through close physical contact, including sexual intercourse.

Globally, the number of confirmed and suspected cases has reached 145 across 13 countries.

A mandatory quarantine has been implemented in Belgium, where the isolation period is also 21 days.

© Provided by Metro Dr Hopkins says the virus is spreading through community transmission 

(Picture: Reuters)

© Provided by Metro The stages of Monkeypox are seen above in this UK Health Security Agency graphic (Picture: PA)

The UKHSA has advised that people at high risk of having caught monkeypox should be offered a smallpox vaccine.

Dr Hopkins said: ‘We are finding cases that have no identified contact with an individual from west Africa, which is what we’ve seen previously in this country.

‘The community transmission is largely centred in urban areas and we are predominantly seeing it in individuals who self-identify as gay or bisexual, or other men who have sex with men.’

Asked why it is being found in that demographic, she said: ‘That’s because of the frequent close contacts they may have.

‘We would recommend to anyone who is having changes in sex partners regularly, or having close contact with individuals that they don’t know, to come forward if they develop a rash.’

The first case in the UK was recorded in 2018 but, unlike several of the cases being identified in this outbreak, was linked with travel to an African country where monkeypox is common.

Monkeypox produces a similar to disease to smallpox but has a lower death rate, with most people making a full recovery.

Initial symptoms include fever, headache, aching muscles, backache, swollen lymph nodes, chills and exhaustion.

A rash can also develop, usually starting on the face before spreading to other parts of the body. It eventually forms a scab which falls off.

Monkeypox does not spread easily and is not airborne like Covid-19, instead relying on people coming into close contact with an infected person or animal.

On Friday, Health Secretary Sajid Javid said: ‘Most cases are mild, and I can confirm we have procured further doses of vaccines that are effective against monkeypox.’

His comments came amid news a child had been rushed to the intensive care unit of a London hospital after they were diagnosed with monkeypox.

Theories emerge for mysterious liver illnesses in children

By MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical Writer 

NEW YORK (AP) — Health officials remain perplexed by mysterious cases of severe liver damage in hundreds of young children around the world.

The best available evidence points to a fairly common stomach bug that isn't known to cause liver problems in otherwise healthy kids. That virus was detected in the the blood of stricken children but — oddly — it has not been found in their diseased livers.

© Provided by Associated Press FILE - Kids are silhouetted against a pond at a park in Lenexa, Kan., on Saturday, Dec. 26, 2020. Health officials remain perplexed by mysterious cases of severe liver damage in hundreds of young children around the world. In May 2022, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials said they are now looking into 180 possible cases across the U.S. More than 20 other countries have reported hundreds more cases in total, though the largest numbers have been in the U.K. and U.S. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)

© Provided by Associated Press FILE - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Deputy Director for Infectious Diseases Jay C. Butler speaks during a COVID-19 briefing at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarter campus in Atlanta, Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2020. Health officials remain perplexed by mysterious cases of severe liver damage in hundreds of young children around the world. “This is an evolving situation,” said Butler, in a call with reporters on Friday, May 20, 2022.

 (Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)

“There's a lot of things that don't make sense,” said Eric Kremer, a virus researcher at the Institute of Molecular Genetics of Montpellier, in France.

As health officials in more than a dozen countries look into the mystery, they are asking:

— Has there been some surge in the stomach bug — called adenovirus 41 — that is causing more cases of a previously undetected problem?

— Are children more susceptible due to pandemic-related lockdowns that sheltered them from the viruses kids usually experience?

— Is there some mutated version of the adenovirus causing this? Or some other not-yet-identified germ, drug or toxin?

— Is it some kind of haywire immune system reaction set off by a past COVID-19 infection and a later invasion by some other virus?

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and investigators around the globe are trying to sort out what's going on.

The illnesses are considered rare. CDC officials last week said they are now looking into 180 possible cases across the U.S. Most of the children were hospitalized, at least 15 required liver transplants and six died.

More than 20 other countries have reported hundreds more cases in total, though the largest numbers have been in the U.K. and U.S.

Symptoms of hepatitis — or inflammation of the liver — include fever, fatigue, loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, dark urine, light-colored stools, joint pain and jaundice.

The scope of the problem only started to become clear last month, though disease detectives say they have been working on the mystery for months. It's been maddeningly difficult to nail a cause down, experts say.

Conventional causes of liver inflammation in otherwise healthy kids — the viruses known as hepatitis A, B, C, D and E — didn't show up in tests. What’s more, the children came from different places and there seemed to be no common exposures.

What did show up was adenovirus 41. More than half of the U.S. cases have tested positive for adenovirus, of which there are dozens of varieties. In a small number of specimens tested to see what kind of adenovirus was present, adenovirus 41 came up every time.

The fact that adenovirus keeps showing up strengthens the case for it playing a role, but it's unclear how, Dr. Jay Butler, the CDC’s deputy director for infectious diseases, told The Associated Press.

Many adenoviruses are associated with common cold symptoms, such as fever, sore throat and pink eye. Some versions — including adenovirus 41 — can trigger other problems, including inflammation in the stomach and intestines. Adenoviruses previously have been linked to hepatitis in children, but mostly in kids with weakened immune systems.

Recent genetic analysis has turned up no evidence that a single new mutant version of the virus is to blame, said Dr. Umesh Parashar, chief of the CDC group focused on viral gut diseases.

Adenovirus infections are not systematically tracked in the U.S., so it's not clear if there's been some recent surge in virus activity. In fact, adenoviruses are so common that researchers aren't sure what to make of their presence in these cases.

“If we start testing everybody for the adenovirus, they will find so many kids” that have it, said Dr. Heli Bhatt, a pediatric gastroenterologist who treated two Minnesota children with the liver problems.

One was a child who came in nearly five months ago with liver failure. Doctors couldn't figure why. Unfortunately, “not having a cause is something that happens,” Bhatt said. Roughly a third of acute liver failure cases go unexplained, experts have estimated.

Bhatt said the second child she saw got sick last month. By that time, health officials had been drawing attention to cases, and she and other doctors began going back and reviewing unexplained illnesses since October.

Indeed, many cases added to the tally in the last few weeks were not recent illnesses but rather earlier ones that were re-evaluated. About 10% of the U.S. cases occurred in May, Butler said. The rate seems to be relatively flat since the fall, he added.

It's possible that doctors are merely discovering a phenomenon that's been going on for years, some scientists said.

Another possible explanation: COVID-19.

The CDC recently estimated that, as of February, 75% of U.S. children had been infected by the coronavirus.

Only 10% to 15% of the children with the mysterious hepatitis had COVID-19, according to nasal swab tests given when they checked into a hospital, health officials say.

But investigators are wondering about previous coronavirus infections. It's possible that coronavirus particles lurking in the gut are playing a role, said Petter Brodin, a pediatric immunologist at Imperial College London.

In a piece earlier this month in the medical journal Lancet, Brodin and another scientist suggested that a combination of lingering coronavirus and an adenovirus infection could trigger a liver-damaging immune system reaction.

“I think it's an unfortunate combination of circumstances that could explain this,” Brodin told the AP.

Butler said researchers have seen complex reactions like that before, and investigators are discussing ways to better check out the hypothesis.

He said it was “not out of the realm of plausibility, at all."

A Case Western Reserve University preprint study, which has yet to be peer reviewed, suggested children who had COVID-19 had a significantly higher risk of liver damage.

Dr. Markus Buchfellner, a pediatric infectious diseases doctor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, was involved in the identification of the first U.S. cases in the fall.

The illnesses were “weird” and concerning, he said. Six months later, “we don’t really know exactly what we’re dealing with.”

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Two Palestinians Go Dogging review – devastatingly human portrait of conflict sears itself on the mind

Arifa Akbar

THE GUARDIAN

FILM

Don’t be fooled by the title. This is not – bar a few fruity scenes – a play about dogging, and there are more than two Palestinians in it. There are Israelis too, living in contested territory and enacting the fear, hostility and oppression of that conflict which has become so dreadfully familiar to us through news feeds that even the language around its reporting is inflammatory.

What this slowly rumbling earthquake of a show does so startlingly well is take the conflict and make it small, specific, multi-layered – yet as devastatingly epic as Greek tragedy. Sami Ibrahim’s script revolves around a Palestinian family living in a village east of Jerusalem and being slowly destroyed. Reem (Hala Omran, bolshy, mercurial) is its matriarch and our central narrator; alongside her is her melancholic husband, Sayeed (Miltos Yerolemou, just wonderful).

When an Israeli soldier, Sara (Mai Weisz), is murdered, there are calls for retribution; but Reem has her own scores to settle after her children are killed. Through her we get a sense of a community living under siege, seething with powerless anger, while Sayeed just emanates hopeless resignation.

This local focus on one family has echoes of Lorca, in its intractable grudge-bearing and cycles of violence. Reem tells us of the terror of the Red Zone, of Israeli troops taking sniper shots at unarmed Palestinians, of drone strikes on houses, of children being gunned down at point blank range – including her own 12-year-old girl and then a second daughter, Salwa (Sofia Danu).

Directed by Omar Elerian, the production is many things at once: playful and tragic, baggy and taut, always pulling back from whimsy at the tipping point of self-indulgence. Just as we are lulled by a moment of comedy or metafictive silliness, violence comes careering around the corner.

So many of its scenes stay seared on the mind: Reem watching a video of her son’s last moments; Sara begging for her life before it is horrifyingly stamped out. The saddest scene, for me, is a quiet one with Reem and Sayeed sitting side by side, she sifting lentils, he peeling an orange. “Can you imagine what it’d be like, not living here? Not doing all of this? … Protests and campaigns and watching people die?” he says to her, and she sounds nonplussed by such an implausible thought.

It is a play with a reach way beyond its fictive bounds, addressing everything from Palestinian martyrdom to the international community’s inaction over illegal settlements, while the recent, appalling killing of Shireen Abu Aqleh casts a long shadow. Yet there is no simple binary of Palestinian victimhood versus Israeli oppression here. Reem’s son, Jawad (Luca Kamleh Chapman), is a murderer turned mascot. Sara is given a voice beyond her death, and a searing scene brings a battle for supremacy between her and Salwa after they have died: the conflict is clearly never-ending, even reaching into the afterlife. Meanwhile, Sara’s father, Adam (Philipp Mogilnitskiy), gives us one of the play’s most furious satires on the absurdities of war.

Initially, Two Palestinians Go Dogging feels like a rambling piece of improv, beginning as a standup act and slowly turning into a family story set two decades into the future, in the midst of the “fifth intifada”. It seems deliberately scrappy, too: bare-boned in its staging with minimal props (some rocks, fake blood, microphones) and a set made of corrugated iron and draped sheets. All of which gives it a furtive sense of illicit street theatre that could be dismantled quickly if needed.

It also resembles a Complicite production in the meta-theatrical games it plays – sometimes too drawn out and distracting – and contains a boldness that is almost reckless in its dramatic risks. Every actor is in a flak jacket, and the performances are moving across the board. As a drama, it seems to call for action even as it tells us that the conflict is so unresolvable it will still be chugging on in 2046.

It ends with a letter from the playwright stating its own Truman Show artifice, but we walk out in discomfort, not able to ignore the fact that this fiction is someone’s reality. If I have a grumble it is that the show could be tighter, but it nonetheless comes with an enormous gut-punch, and is all that theatre should strive to be.

• At Royal Court theatre, London, until 1 June.

Beyond The Scream: why Edvard Munch was no one-hit wonder

Nicholas Wroe 

THE GUARDIAN 

Few artists are as strongly associated with a single painting as Edvard Munch is with The Scream. Even before its endless memeability became apparent it was as much a fixture of popular culture as of art history. But there has always been more to Munch than his most famous work, and a new show at London’s Courtauld Gallery gives a rare chance to trace his wider career.

The exhibition comes from the collection of Norwegian industrialist Rasmus Meyer, who discovered Munch’s work in the early years of the 20th century and soon became an avid supporter and collector, going on to buy paintings directly from Munch’s studio, the paint almost still wet, as the saying goes. This is the first time his collection, held in the Kode art museum in Bergen, has been shown together outside Scandinavia. It takes work from the 1880s, when Munch was the rising star of Norwegian art, through his “golden decade” of the 1890s – when he developed his characteristic style and produced what became known as his The Frieze of Life series, including various iterations of The Scream – and into the 20th century.

“Norway had only really begun to crystallise as an independent nation at the end of the 19th century,” explains Courtauld curator Barnaby Wright, “and Meyer wanted to put together a collection of Norwegian art that would say something powerful about their culture and identity.” Not that Munch’s work was universally appreciated in 19th-century Norway. While he was attaining international recognition, disputes between conservative and avant-garde opinion played out in similar ways as they had with French impressionism in the 1870s.

The layout of the Courtauld, passing through their stellar collection of impressionist and post-impressionist art on the way to the exhibition space, is fortuitously suited to this show. Munch had been fascinated by the impressionists’ exploration of the effects of light, and new techniques for capturing them, but the lessons he took were then deployed for his own purposes. Rather than following Monet in taking his canvas outdoors to nature, Munch was more interested in painting from memory and out of his imagination, using light in a far more expressive and symbolic way.

By the 1890s he had developed this style of painting, employing richer and moodier colours to conjure an atmosphere of anxiety in which figures and landscapes increasingly reflected one another. He named these explorations The Frieze of Life, and “his ambition was to cover a spectrum of the most profound human emotions and experiences”, explains Wright. “Often drawing on his own memories from childhood; the loss of loved ones; torturous relationships with women. What makes these pictures endure is the complexity and multiplicity of feelings and emotions he evokes. However great The Scream is, it is just one example of Munch’s extraordinary output. This collection shows why so many of his pictures still speak so powerfully to us.”

‘Morbidity, death and precarious anxiety’: four key works from the exhibition

Evening on Karl Johan Street (1892, main picture)Light plays a critical role in all of Munch’s work, and here he captures the creative possibilities of a strange moonlight mixed with gaslight. Evening on Karl Johan Street is a key Frieze of Life picture and the first time Munch used those skeletal faces that loom out of the canvas, which he repeated in his Scream paintings. This is the origin picture for that now famous visual device.

Self-Portrait in the Clinic (1909)When Munch had a nervous breakdown he sought treatment at a clinic in Copenhagen. His life had been lived at an intense pitch. When Munch was a child, his father was zealously religious, and an air of morbidity and death hung over the family. It clung to Munch for the rest of his life and it was this sense of precarious anxiety that fed into his art. This particular work has an interesting parallel with Van Gogh’s self-portraits after his severe mental episodes in depicting a man and an artist attempting to rebuild himself.

Children Playing in the Street in Åsgårdstrand (1901–03)Munch spent many of his summers in the small coastal fishing town of Åsgårdstrand. Here, he takes a seemingly mundane everyday activity and turns it into something more profound. Are the boys taunting the young girl, looking at her as an object of desire or just playing? Equally enigmatic, is she, on the borderline of adolescence, pleading for assistance or facing them down?

Melancholy (1894–96)The idea that emotions are at their most extreme when people are on the edge between areas, such as the shore and the water, was a fertile one for Munch. Here it reflects the state of mind of the central figure, lost in his own tragic thoughts and also isolated from the two background figures on the jetty. This was the first time Munch adopted this new deeply moody and symbolic manner.

Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen is at the Courtauld Gallery, London, from Friday to 4 September.

US woman Elizabeth Line jokingly thanks Queen for attending Crossrail ceremony in her place


A US businesswoman named Elizabeth Line has jokingly thanked the Queen for attending the unveiling of the new London transport link in her place.

© PA Crossrail

After discovering her name had been trending on Twitter, the CEO of Digital Citizen spoke of her “disappointment” at not being able to attend the opening ceremony this week.

In a tweet, she said: “Obviously disappointed I couldn’t attend in person but Her Majesty always comes through in a pinch. Thanks again TfL.”

While at Paddington station, the Queen unveiled a plaque to commemorate the day and was given a special Elizabeth line Oyster card.

In 2016, when the roundel was unveiled, she said she was delighted to share her name with the capital’s £20billion transport alink.

However, this isn’t the first time Ms Line has inadvertently been caught up in the online interest surrounding the Crossrail line.

Speaking to the Standard at the time, she said: “I’m thrilled about it. Nothing like waking up to a little insta-celebrity.

“When I found out I was trending on Twitter this morning, there were a few moments of ‘what did I do last night’ panic but now I’m just having fun with it."

When asked about the chosen colour, Ms Line said she “loved the purple”.

The service will operate for passengers on Tuesday and comes over three and a half years since it was meant to open.

The new line includes 41 stations between Reading and Heathrow in the west, through central London, to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east.

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Beam me up, Priti! The sci-fi about teleporting refugees that feels very real

Alex Rayner 

Five months ago, a pretty important envelope dropped into the mailbox of Meriem Bennani’s lawyer. The Moroccan-born, New York-based artist had been granted a green card, and was now a lawful, permanent resident of the US. “It’s weird,” she says over a glass of sparkling water in a bar close to Nottingham Contemporary, the gallery where she is installing Life on the Caps, her new video exhibition. “Of course, I’m grateful. My whole life has been lived from visa to visa.” She expresses ambivalence towards her new home, before adding that she doesn’t want to focus too much on herself, “because, you know, I’m OK”.

This puts Bennani in dramatic contrast to the characters in Party on the Caps and Life on the Caps, her two half-hour videos set in a futuristic sci-fi detention camp called Caps (short for “capsule”), situated on an island in the middle of the Atlantic. In the films, teleportation has replaced air travel. Would-be illegal immigrants to the US are intercepted as they attempt to zap across the Atlantic, and interned in the camp, which has developed from an insular holding pen to a sprawling migrant settlement and Latin quarter.

The animation in Mary Poppins blew me away! I was like: How do they do that?

We’re introduced to the camp by Fiona, an animated crocodile, cereal box character and unofficial camp mascot (Bennani has a master’s degree in animation from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, as well as a bachelor’s in fine art from the Cooper Union in New York). Then we meet the human inhabitants of the Moroccan neighbourhoods, who party, protest, play music, undergo strange age-reversal procedures, create memes, flip off the American “troopers” who oversee the island, and sometimes address the camera directly, in this strange mix of pseudo-documentary and sci-fi cartoon.

Bennani loved Disney movies as a child growing up in Rabat, the Moroccan capital, and was particularly taken with the ones that mixed live action with animation, such as the 1964 musical Mary Poppins. “That blew me away!” she says. “I was like, ‘How do they do that?’”

The artist is familiar with postcolonial politics, understanding now how two staples of her childhood – Disney videos and the Cartoon Network channel – may have served veiled, neocolonial ends. She regards Fantasia, the 1940 Mickey Mouse movie, as Disney’s biggest imperialistic “flex”. She says: “It’s the pure awesomeness of animation, plus the addition of European classical music. It’s like ‘empire!’ but it’s still beautiful and magical.” A third Caps film, not showing in Nottingham, pays tribute to Fantasia, while twisting the story to address the multitudes who lie beyond America’s borders.

Moroccan rappers and social media stars perform alongside Bennani’s friends and family in her Caps films, each acting the part of an islander. This addition of north African pop, as well as computer-generated animation, means the films stay pacy, and never shade into boring polemics.

It all sounds like an odd mix for a film-maker, but for Bennani it’s a pretty well-established formula. In Fly, an animated fruit fly guides viewers around the private lives of citizens in Rabat and Fez. In Mission Teens, Bennani appeared as a CGI donkey, shooting footage of real-life, snotty teens at elite, French-speaking schools in Rabat. And in 2 Lizards, Bennani and her flatmate – fellow animator Orian Barki – cast themselves as languid talking reptiles, trying to make the best of life in lockdown Manhattan.

This work, which the animators posted on Instagram, became a pandemic hit, and led to more commercial inquiries. “We developed a TV show, but it didn’t work out,” Bennani explains. “It was too mainstream for the art world, but too weird for Hollywood.”

I’m quite bored by the art world. That’s not who I make the work for

She and Barki are working on a new script, but while that’s in development she’s happy to be opening her show at a free-to-visit gallery in the centre of a significant British city, which draws in visitors from many walks of life. “That’s really important to me,” Bennani says, adding that she’s included an indoor playground-style space for younger gallery-goers. “I’m quite bored by the art audience, the art world,” she says. “That’s not who I make the work for.”

Nottingham is, of course, the setting for one of Disney’s better-known films, Robin Hood. “It wasn’t one I watched a lot,” she says. “But ethically, it’s not bad.”). And British politics is providing Bennani’s show with a fitting backdrop, the government having recently announced its plans to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda. The artist sighs as I mention this. Science fiction, for her, isn’t about craftily predicting the future, but more about finding ways to think about our lives today. The Home Office’s overseas processing plans place her imaginary island in perspective. “It is,” she says, with a brisk, almost cartoonish sense of despair, “barely a dystopia.”

Meriem Bennani: Life on the Caps is at Nottingham Contemporary until 4 September.

Time to act is now as UN expert suggests fossil fuels are "dead end"

Neil Ever Osborne - Saturday

The Weather Network

Extreme weather has become the day-to-day “face” of the climate crisis, stated experts from the UN upon the release of their new State of the Global Climate report.

Ringing yet another alarm about global disruptions — made worse by heat trapping emissions — the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) agency highlighted the “vulnerability of populations to current weather and climate events” and reported “loss and damages of more than US$100 billion, as well as severe impacts on food security and humanitarian aspects due to high-impact weather and climate events.”

This sentiment surrounding the relevance of extreme weather is supported by many Canadians who in recent surveys shared an understanding of climate change through their direct experiences with weather events, such as when a heat dome and subsequent flood devastated parts of Western Canada in 2021.

According to WMO Secretary General Dr. Petteri Taalas, “Our climate is changing before our eyes. The heat trapped by human-induced greenhouse gases will warm the planet for many generations to come.”

The new UN report found 2015 to 2021 are the seven warmest years on record and notable key climate indicators set new records in 2021.A wind turbine farm in Ontario, Canada. (Neil Ever Osborne)

Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere reached a new high of 413.2 ppm — a 149 per cent increase from the pre-industrial era. As a consequence of melting ice and glaciers, along with thermal expansion, the global mean sea level reached a new high after averaging a 4.5 mm rise per year from 2013 to 2021.

Ocean heat content in 2021 was also the highest on record, and the report noted this warming trend will only continue. The report also stated ocean acidification was measured to be at its lowest in 26,000 years, a result of the ocean absorbing almost 25 per cent of human-induced emitted carbon.

Additionally in 2021, the State of the Global Climate report noted the Antarctic ozone reached a maximum area, Greenland had its first-ever rainfall at its highest point, and heatwaves shattered records across the globe, notably in Death Valley with a temperature of 54.4°C.

The WMO further concluded the “compounded effects of conflict, extreme weather events, and economic shocks, further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, undermined decades of progress towards improving food security globally.”

On the report’s findings, the UN Secretary General António Guterres stated, “The climate report is a dismal litany of humanity’s failure to tackle climate disruption.” Guterres singled out the impact of oil and gas in particular.

“Fossil fuels are a dead end — environmentally and economically,” he said.


© Provided by The Weather Network

Time to act is now as UN expert suggests fossil fuels are "dead end"An Indian firefighter cools hot coal at a stockyard at a coal-fired thermal power plant belonging to Essar Power in Salaya, some 400 km from Ahmedabad, on Oct. 4, 2016. Essar Power Ltd. is one of India's largest private sector power producers and owns power plants in India and Canada. (Sam Panthaky / AFP / Getty Images)

On the matter of the UN agency’s report, Canada’s Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault stated, “From devastating wildfires to floods, extreme weather in 2021 drove home the urgency of climate action and ambition. Not only do we need to cut the emissions that cause climate change, we need to ensure our communities and our economy are prepared for this new reality.”

Guilbeault continued, “As we address the human drivers of extreme weather,” the WMO “reminds us that it’s critical to build communities and an economy that are resilient.”

For its part in seeking a solution to the climate crisis, along with the nationwide adoption of renewable energy strategies, Canada launched the 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan this past March.

Meanwhile, in Europe this past week, the European Commission launched the RePowerEu initiative, a swift response to the invasion of Ukraine that will reduce the EU’s natural gas imports from Russia by two-thirds before the end of this year and in full by 2027. The emergency package, as it has been described, seeks to bolster the move towards sourcing clean energy.

With a similar action in mind, four European Union countries including Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and Netherlands recently signed an agreement to increase offshore wind capacity tenfold by 2050. With a 150 GW potential capacity, the offshore energy source dubbed the “Green Power Plant” of the North Sea could power as many as 230 million European households, a number well above the current number of homes that rests at 195 million.


Thumbnail Image: Two boys struggle to push up their bike loaded with coal thats been collected at the Jharia coal fields. According to the World Economic Forum, India was home to six out of 10 of the world's most polluted cities in 2020. A majority of India's energy production comes from fossil fuels.

 (Jonas Gratzer / LightRocket / Getty Images)