Roadtrip week.
And some art.
I’m on a road trip in New England this week, eating faux fish sandwiches on the South Shore in Massachusetts, wondering why wild Turkeys want CBD, visiting family and my all-time favorite museum, and wandering around Salem, soaking up the history of witchcraft and working from an AirB&B that’s directly in front of a cemetery.
If you’re ever in Boston and can go to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, I recommend it. They have several paintings by Botticelli and the most beautiful courtyard I’ve ever seen. They also have the original John Singer Sargent painting, “El Jaleo,” which captures an Andaluz flamenco dancer in southern Spain in 1879.
I left with a print of the Rape of Europa, which Titian painted in Venice in the 1560s. It portrays a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the God Jupiter transforms into a white bull and carries a young girl named Europa away to Crete. The original is in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
It’s a little slice of Europe in the middle of New England, surrounded by half a dozen university buildings and international students donning baseball caps. I love it. When I briefly lived in Boston eight years ago, I spent afternoons watching the art students sitting near the courtyard with their sketchbooks, deep in their own art.
In Salem, I discovered the Punto Urban Art Museum, a series of murals tucked into residential buildings. The majority seemed to center on race, identity, belonging, and multiculturalism.
What I’m writing:
• I dug into what’s behind the coup in Niger and what it means for the future stability of the Sahel region. Weak states, jihadism, and a growing backlash against the West all form the backdrop of Niger’s new military junta. This story is unlocked and free to read.
What I’m reading:
• Five Victorian-era diseases are back in Europe and the U.S., Politico Europe reports. Endemic leprosy in Florida, the threat of tens of thousands of measles cases in London, and syphilis increasing by 50 percent or more in Ireland and Portugal.
• The United States and Saudi Arabia reached an initial agreement for Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel in exchange for concessions to the Palestinians, U.S. security guarantees, and assistance with civilian nuclear technology, the Wall Street Journal reports. U.S. officials hope this deal's details can be agreed upon within a year.
• Belarus has begun military exercises near its border with Poland and Lithuania, the Associated Press reports. Poland will send 2,000 more troops to its border with Belarus.
• The situation in Ukraine still favors Kyiv despite the limited progress made in its counteroffensive so far, according to a piece in TIME entitled How the Ukraine Counteroffensive Can Still Succeed.
• A woman was arrested over a Russian plot to kill Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the BBC reports.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the heads of all regional military enlistment offices across Ukraine would be dismissed, the Kyiv Independent reports. The decision comes after a nationwide inspection of Ukraine's recruitment offices revealed multiple violations, including corruption, power abuse, and fraud.
• Russia blamed Ukraine for a spate of arson attacks on military recruitment centers, alleging that callers in Ukraine are tricking elderly Russians into committing such crimes, the BBC reports.
• Alexei Petrov, a Kremlin official involved in the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia, was associated with online white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements as a teenager, Reuters reports.
• Spain’s political future will be decided by one secluded man in a damp corner of Belgium, Politico Europe reports. Six years after organizing an illegal referendum that sought to make Catalonia an independent republic, the region’s former President, Carles Puigdemont, is once again positioned to shake Spain to its core (in other words, we still don’t know what the outcome of the recent elections in Spain will be, and Puigdemont could play a role in determining that).
• At least 82 people are missing, and ten have died after three migrant boats capsized in the Mediterranean Sea, the Washington Post reports. The rising number of disasters comes as European Union officials work to designate Tunisia as a “safe third country” that can receive the EU’s rejected asylum seekers. Human Rights Watch criticized partnerships like these because of the abuse migrants face.
• It took a viral video for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to finally break his silence on ongoing ethnic violence in the northeastern state of Manipur, Foreign Policy reports.
• India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi defeated a no-confidence vote in the parliament concerning his handling of the deadly ethnic clashes in Manipur state, the BBC reports.
• Fernando Villavicencio, an Ecuadorian presidential candidate, was assassinated during a campaign rally, the Associated Press reports.
• The State Department “strongly condemned” as terrorism the killing of a Palestinian by suspected Jewish settlers, in a sign of U.S. frustration with surging violence in the occupied West Bank under Israel’s hard-right government, Reuters reports. Israeli police detained two settlers after they allegedly threw rocks, torched cars, and shot a 19-year-old.
• Mali’s military and foreign security partners, presumed to be the paramilitary organization Wagner Group, are using “systemic” sexual violence against women and other “grave human rights abuses” to spread terror, Reuters reports, citing the United Nations.
• The United Arab Emirates sent munitions to Sudan in support of a warlord after promising to deliver aid, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Interesting statements:
You can write to me for any reason: c.maza@protonmail.com