Day: September 3, 2023

BEIJING — Much of southern Taiwan came to a standstill Sunday as Typhoon Haikui churned over towns and farmland. Residents were urged to stay home and flights, rail transport, ferry services, classes and outdoor events were suspended, but there were no reports of injuries or serious damage.

The storm made landfall in Taitung county on the Pacific-facing east coast around 3 p.m. (0700 GMT) Sunday, bringing sustained winds of 155 kph (96 mph) and gusts of 190 kph (120 mph).

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The winds and driving rains forced in unsecured doors, uprooted trees — at least one of which crushed a parked minivan — and caused flooding in some low-lying areas.

By Sunday evening, almost 4,000 people had been evacuated from mountain communities that are at high risk of landslides and flooding, according to the Interior Ministry. Families brought sleeping mats and other necessities to school gymnasiums and public meeting halls, where they were provided with food and drink.

About 75,000 homes temporarily lost power in Taitung and Hualien counties along the east coast, and a guesthouse collapsed on Green Island just off the coast, but no injuries were reported.

There appeared to be little serious damage, and some shops remained open, partly to dispose of locally grown fruits and vegetables that would otherwise go to waste.

Among events canceled in Taiwan were a hot air balloon festival in the central Taichung region, several outdoor concerts, art events and a baseball game. National parks and treacherous roads in the island’s mountainous center were also closed.

Haikui is expected to continue toward China after crossing over Taiwan, and authorities in the Chinese city of Shantou in Guangdong province were advising residents to take precautions.

Haikui arrived as Typhoon Saola continued to weaken while swirling along the Chinese coast, where 900,000 people and 80,000 fishing vessels had been moved to safety. Most of Hong Kong and parts of the coastal mainland had suspended business, transport and classes.

Damage appeared to be minimal, however, and restrictions had largely been lifted by Sunday. On Saturday night, the Hong Kong Observatory had canceled all warnings.

Because of Typhoon Saola, workers in a number of Chinese cities stayed at home and students saw the start of their school year postponed from Friday to Monday. Trading on Hong Kong’s stock market was suspended and hundreds of people were stranded at the airport after about 460 flights were canceled in the key regional business and travel hub.

The cross-border bridge connecting Hong Kong, the gambling hub of Macao and manufacturing center of Zhuhai was closed at one point, with Macao leader Ho Iat Seng ordering a halt to casino operations.

In recent months, China has experienced some of its heaviest rains and deadliest flooding in years. Dozens of people have been killed, including in outlying mountainous parts of the capital, Beijing.

Despite the twin storms, China’s military continued to conduct operations meant to intimidate Taiwan, a self-ruled democracy that Beijing seeks to bring under Chinese sovereignty by force if necessary.

Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said it was monitoring the movements of Chinese military aircraft and navy ships near the island. However, it said there were no indications any had crossed the median line in the Taiwan Strait or entered Taiwan’s air defense identification zone as they frequently do.

It seemed wistfully appropriate, somehow, that news of Jimmy Buffett’s death emerged at the beginning of the Labor Day weekend, the demarcation point of every American summer’s symbolic end. Because for so many, the 76-year-old Buffett embodied something they held onto ever so tightly as the world grew ever more complex: the promise of an eternal summer of sand, sun, blue salt water and gentle tropical winds.

He was the man whose studied devil-may-care attitude became a lifestyle and a multimillion-dollar business — a connecting filament between the suburbs and the Florida Keys and, beyond them, the Caribbean. From Margaritaville to the unspecified tropical paradise where he just wanted to eat cheeseburgers (“that American creation on which I feed”), he became a life’s-a-beach avatar for anyone working for the weekend and hoping to unplug — even in the decades before “unplugging” became a thing.

“It’s important to have as much fun as possible while we’re here. It balances out the times when the minefield of life explodes,” he posted last year.

The beach has stood in for informality and relaxation in American popular culture for more than a century, propelled by the early Miss America pageants on the Atlantic City boardwalk and the culturally appropriative “tiki” aesthetic that GIs brought back from the South Pacific after World War II. It gained steam with the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello “Beach Blanket Bingo” years, the mainstreaming of surfing and beach-motel culture and the Beach Boys’ “California Girls.” And it continues unabated — just look to the dubious stylings of MTV’s “Jersey Shore.”

That train arrived at Margaritaville in the 1970s, and Buffett jumped aboard and became the conductor and chief engineer of its gently rebellious counterculture. He was hardly a critical darling, but he was, as he sang, “a pirate, 200 years too late” who believed that latitude directly impacted attitude. That accounted for a lot of the mass appeal.

These days, for every piece of the culture that made the shoreline or the tropical island a potentially dispiriting place to become unanchored — “The Beach” or “Lost” or even, heaven help us, “Gilligan’s Island” — there is a counterbalancing Buffett song right there to tell you that at the edge of the land you can find peace, or at least a chance at it.

There was of course “Margaritaville,” the song that launched a “Parrothead” empire, the one that prescribed taking time “watching the sun bake” and invoked “booze in the blender” and shrimp “beginnin’ to boil” (from which you can draw a direct line to the sensibility of seafood restaurant chains like Joe’s Crab Shack).

There was “Last Mango in Paris,” in which the singer had to “get out of the heat” to meet his hero, who told him to inhale all that life offers, and that even after that, “Jimmy, there’s still so much to be done.” There was “’Bama Breeze,” an ode to a bar along the Gulf Coast where “you’re one of our own” and, says the protagonist, “Good God, I feel at home down there.”

And there was “Come Monday,” in which a trip to do a gig in San Francisco — on Labor Day weekend, no less — became a meditation on city (“four lonely days in that brown LA haze”) vs. paradise (“that night in Montana”) and which he liked better.

Here was the funny thing, though: In that song, the unrepentantly inland Montana became his beach, his paradise of the moment. That was part of why he resonated: because the metaphorical Buffett beach could be pretty much anywhere that contained people looking for a bit of peace.

Just as country music spent decades building “country” from an actual geography into an entire state of mind, Buffett — whose roots were in country and folk — did the same thing with the beach. In his hands, it became an aesthetic as much as a place — the anti-city, where the backbreaking labor and the cubicle blues could be left behind for a realm where real people roamed. That’s been a deeply American trope from the beginning.

Americans have always romanticized the frontier — the edge of civilization, the place whose exploration defined them. But the frontier was, of course, a lonely and dangerous place. As Buffett rhapsodized, the sand-covered edge of the land that he so adored was also the edge of civilization — but only in the most appealing (and, not coincidentally, mostly apolitical) ways possible. In the universe of his songs, the beach was a safe frontier that you could explore if you wanted to. But you could also sit back in a straw hut and hat, sip a Corona, contemplate your navel and your sins — and be left alone.

In their 1998 book “The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth,” Lena Lenček and Gideon Bosker trace the emergence of the beach as “a narcotic for holiday masses.” They write: “Before it could be transformed into a theater of pleasure, it had to be discovered, claimed and invented as a place apart from the messy business of survival.”

Buffett and his music — and the empire they begat — became pivotal figures in that claiming and invention. Through them, the off-the-grid sensibility and the loud-shirt aesthetic were vigorously mainstreamed and popularized.

All of his imagery, beach and beach-adjacent, shouted to us that there was a better, more relaxing way than regular daily life. It said that all those characters and people were waiting there for us with bare, sandy feet and cold beers and a bit of melancholy, and that we could jack into that sunny world and escape the monotony — for a long weekend or forever.

And therein lies a rub.

These days, summer ain’t what it used to be. With apologies to Buffett and the Beach Boys, the notion of an “endless summer” has a different, more unsettling connotation after these climate-change-inflected months of dangerous heat and devastating wildfires in places like Maui. Five years ago, even Paradise burned. So “watching the sun bake” has become a statement with multiple layers, and some of them are more rueful than relaxing.

Jimmy Buffett’s work was big on not reading too much into things. You could say, fairly, that his musical aesthetic was built around a three-word statement: Don’t overthink it. “Never meant to last,” he once sang. But as with most artists who echo resoundingly in the culture, his work — and, not incidentally, the legions of Parrotheads whose lifestyles he inspired — takes on additional dimensions when you pull the lens back and consider the broader shoreline.

That was true especially when the flip-flop fantasy collided with the reality that most people live. That collision took place at the intersection where Buffett was the most memorable, where the summer of the mind met the reality of the rest of the year. As he put it in “Son of a Son of a Sailor”: “The sea’s in my veins, my tradition remains. I’m just glad I don’t live in a trailer.”

Give us 5 minutes, and we’ll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Swedish police on Sunday arrested two people and detained around 10 people after a violent riot broke out at a protest involving a burning of the Quran, police said.

The protest was organized by Iraqi refugee Salwan Momika, whose protests — which have included public desecrations of the Muslim holy book — have sparked outrage across the Middle East.

Sunday’s protest was held in a square in the southern city of Malmo, which has a large immigrant population, and according to public broadcaster SVT around 200 people had showed up to watch.

“Some onlookers have shown upset feelings, after the organizer burned writings,” police said in a statement.

“The mood was at times heated,” the statement said, adding that a “violent riot” occurred at 1:45 pm (1145 GMT).

According to police, the event had ended after the organizer left but a group of people remained at the scene.

About 10 people were detained for disturbing the public order and another two were arrested, suspected of violent rioting.

Local media reported that some onlookers threw rocks at Momika, and video from the scene showed some trying to break through the cordon before being stopped by police.

In another video a man could be scene trying to stop the police car that transported Momika from the location by getting in front of it.

Through a series of demonstrations, Momika has sparked anger directed at Sweden and diplomatic tensions between Sweden and several Middle Eastern countries.

The Swedish government has condemned the desecrations of the Quran while noting the country’s constitutionally protected freedom of speech and assembly laws.

Iraqi protesters stormed the Swedish embassy in Baghdad twice in July, starting fires within the compound on the second occasion.

Swedish envoys have also been summoned in a slew of Middle Eastern nations. 

In mid-August, Sweden’s intelligence agency heightened its terror alert level to four on a scale of five, noting that Sweden had “gone from being considered a legitimate target for terrorist attacks to being considered a prioritized target.”

Sweden also decided to beef up border controls in early August.

In late August, neighboring Denmark — which has also seen a string of public desecrations of the Quran — said it plans to ban Quran burnings.

Sweden has meanwhile vowed to explore legal means of stopping protests involving the burning of texts in certain circumstances.

Give us 5 minutes, and we’ll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

If the mass killings in the US have something to do with the Prigozhin’s “private Spetsnaz”, they were paid for, and paid well. Prigozhin is declared dead, and his billions are redistributed. It is likely that this line of financing will dry up. However, as Reuters reports, the news of Prigozhin’s demise might be somewhat exaggerated. 

If the mass killings in the US have something to do with the Prigozhin’s “private Spetsnaz”, they were paid for, and paid well. Prigozhin is declared dead, and his billions are redistributed. It is likely that this line of financing will dry up. However, as Reuters reports, the news of Prigozhin’s demise might be somewhat exaggerated. 

In October 1943, after the Nazis began a brutal occupation of their former ally, German troops hanged six Italian civilians on a hillside in southern Italy as collective punishment for the killing of a soldier, who had been foraging for food.

Eighty years later, some of the relatives of the men put to death in Fornelli are finally set to receive a share of 12 million euros ($13 million) awarded by an Italian court as compensation for their families’ trauma.

“We still mark the event every year. It hasn’t been forgotten,” said Mauro Petrarca, the great-grandson of one of those killed, Domenico Lancellotta, a 52-year-old Roman Catholic father of five daughters and a son.

All but one of the family members alive at the time of the killings are now dead, but under Italian law, damages owed to them can still be passed on to their heirs. This means Petrarca is set to receive around 130,000 euros ($142,000) under the terms of a 2020 court ruling.

In an ironic twist, it will be Italy rather than Germany that pays up, after it lost a battle in the International Court of Justice over whether Berlin could still be liable for damages tied to World War Two crimes and atrocities.

Jewish organizations in Italy believe Berlin should be paying to acknowledge their historical responsibility. But victims’ groups also fear Rome is dragging its feet in dealing with a deluge of claims that could weigh on state accounts.

“This is a very tormented issue, both from a political and a legal perspective,” said Giulio Disegni, the vice president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), which has been following the issue on behalf of Jewish victims of Nazi horrors.

A study funded by the German government and published in 2016 estimated that 22,000 Italians were victims of Nazi war crimes, including up to 8,000 Jews deported to death camps. Thousands more Italians were forced to work as enslaved laborers in Germany, making them eligible for reparations.

The first people likely to benefit from the new government fund set up to deal with claims are descendants of the six Catholic Fornelli men, who were hanged as German soldiers played music on a gramophone stolen from a nearby house.

Their killing came a month after Italy had signed an armistice with the Allied forces, ending its participation in World War Two and abandoning the Nazis, who immediately started their occupation of the country.

‘Cupboard of shame’

In 1962, Germany signed a deal with Italy whereby it paid Rome 40 million Deutsche mark, worth just over 1 billion euros in today’s money, which the two nations agreed covered damages inflicted by Nazi forces on the Italian state and its citizens.

Italy gave pensions to those who had been politically or racially persecuted during the conflict, and to their surviving relatives. However, it did not offer reparations for war crimes.

“They didn’t look at war crimes and this was a mistake. Maybe at the time they thought everyone had committed war crimes, not just Germany, and didn’t want to go down that path,” said Lucio Olivieri, the lawyer who led the Fornelli litigation.

In 1994, a cupboard was found in the offices of Rome’s military prosecutors packed with files documenting hundreds of war crimes that had never been prosecuted.

Spurred on by the so-called “Cupboard of Shame”, Italy looked to bring Nazis to trial for their role in multiple massacres, while courts started to award victims reparations.

Germany refused to pay, arguing the 1962 accord prevented further claims. In 2012, the International Court of Justice backed Berlin, but Italian courts continued to hear compensation cases, saying no limit could be imposed on war crimes.

‘Question of pride’

The Fornelli suit, which opened in 2015, was levelled against both Germany and Italy, which tried, but failed, to shut down proceedings.

“I found it amazing that Italy took the side of Germany in the case against us. It was like they were (wartime) allies again,” said Petrarca, who is a workman in Fornelli.

With ever more cases hitting the courts, the then-prime minister Mario Draghi created a fund in April 2022 to cover the growing compensation costs, hoping to close a dark chapter in Italy’s history.

A deadline for presenting new legal claims expired on June 28 and the Italian Treasury, which is handling payouts, told Reuters that it had so far received notification of 1,228 legal suits, but said others might not yet have been forwarded to it.

Each suit is likely to involve multiple plaintiffs, meaning the 61 million euros earmarked for the reparations might not be nearly enough to cover all the expected payouts, lawyers say.

The fund has already been topped up from an original 55 million, but the Treasury said it was too soon to say if this would be sufficient.

The government also has given itself the right to review any court verdict before deciding whether to pay out – adding an additional bureaucratic hurdle to claimants, although the government denies creating obstacles for families.

“It is a mockery,” UCEI vice president Disegni said.

For Fornelli, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Under the terms of a government decree issued in July, the first disbursement should be made to locals by January, even though the town insists their case was about much more than cash.

“This wasn’t about the money. It was about seeking justice for a war crime, a question of pride,” said Fornelli mayor Giovanni Tedeschi.