News Desk

June 25, 2014

The Shame of Gijón

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Whether the U.S. team is able to advance to the next round of the World Cup will be decided over the course of ninety-odd minutes this Thursday; those stakes, however, will be spread across two different games, played simultaneously. Fans will be forced to choose between watching U.S. vs. Germany and Ghana vs. Portugal. While this may be inconvenient for television viewers, FIFA requires that the final pair of matches for each group start at the same time, to keep teams from knowing in advance the outcome of the other decisive match in their group—an advantage that proved too tempting to resist more than thirty years ago.

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June 25, 2014

The Pope Excommunicates the Mafia, Finally

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In some ways, it is surprising that Pope Francis made news by travelling to Calabria and excommunicating members of the Mafia. He went to a town where members of a local Mafia group, known as the ’Ndrangheta, had murdered a three-year-old boy, together with his grandfather, and burned their bodies, in a case tied up with suspected drug trafficking. The Catholic Church, under Pope Francis, had excommunicated an Australian priest for his support for the ordination of women and for gay marriage. Surely it shouldn’t be a dramatic move for him to say that those responsible for a grisly crime like the one in Calabria are outside the grace of God.

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June 24, 2014

Protesting the Al Jazeera Verdict

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The seductive idea of steady human progress toward democracy has presented itself, at least to Americans, repeatedly in the Middle East during the past decade, almost always to be dashed. Three years ago, in Egypt, it was possible to believe that the fall of Hosni Mubarak was a step along the democratic path. What democracy looks like now in Egypt was last month’s Presidential election, in which Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who took power in a military coup, got ninety-seven per cent of the vote.

Freedom of the press has even more of the air of inevitability about it—how can anyone stand in the way of the Internet, of information? But, absent democracy and the basic suite of liberties and legal protections that goes along with it, press freedom is impossible to maintain. In Egypt this week, three Al Jazeera journalists, Baher Mohammad, Peter Greste, and Mohamad Fadel Fahmy, along with twenty other people whom the government deemed too sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood, were sentenced to long prison terms—seven years for Fahmy, a Canadian citizen, and for Greste, an Australian, and ten for Mohammad. (Three other foreign journalists were in a group that was tried and convicted in absentia; they are unlikely to report back to Egypt to serve their terms.) Press-freedom advocates and news organizations have been eloquent in protesting the Al Jazeera journalists’ prosecution, but it’s important to keep their co-defendants in mind: their presence in the dock demonstrates how deeply press freedom is nested inside political freedom.

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June 24, 2014

Luis Suárez Chews His Way Out of the World Cup

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I wasn’t going to write about the World Cup today. Honestly, I wasn’t. When I sat down at my desk this morning, I had more serious things on my mind: the G.O.P. primary runoff in Mississippi, the phone-hacking verdicts in London, and the ongoing debate about the Federal Reserve’s policy. But there’s something about this tournament that won’t let you get on with your normal life.

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June 24, 2014

The Italian Exception

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“Do you know where Africa begins?”

“Where?”

“At the suburbs of Rome.”

This was a common exchange when I lived in Tuscany and Venice, between 1988 and 1992. “Southern Italy equals Africa” was a slur disguised as concern, dispensed as a supposed curative against any naïve ideas I may have had about travelling in that direction. The northern Italian racist issuing such advice-invective would always be kind and hospitable in manner. A few months ago, on a return trip, I found myself in a conversation with a man who, after giving me one of the best tours of the Venetian civic buildings that are usually off limits (his strategy: just walk in), told me, apropos of nothing, “Blacks and whites should not have children with each other. Mixing the blood of people from widely dispersed parts of the globe is good, and strengthens the bloodlines—so long as it happens amongst whites. But offspring of whites and blacks is a kind of pollution.”

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June 24, 2014

An Incomplete Phone-Hacking Verdict

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A British jury has declared Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of the News of the World and executive at News Corp., not guilty of criminal charges. She had been charged with participating in the paper’s phone-hacking practices, with covering up evidence, and with involvement in payoffs to silence the police or solicit their help in fetching fresh news stories. At the same time, they found Andrew Coulson, Brooks’s successor—who went on to serve as communications director for the Prime Minister—guilty on charges of conspiracy to intercept phone messages. Stuart Kuttner, the paper’s former managing editor, was also found not guilty; charges against some of the editors’ other colleagues have yet to be resolved. But a criminal case is not the final word on whether either editor, News Corp., or much of the British tabloid press has betrayed the principles of journalism.

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June 24, 2014

A Better World Cup

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This is, hard to believe, my eleventh World Cup. I saw my first one when living as a kid in London, in 1974, while my academic parents were on sabbatical. I was mesmerized by the (to my mind) still unrivaled Johan Cruyff and the (not to my mind alone) still unequalled Dutch team of that year, which lost the Cup final, to Germany, but won all watching eyes and hearts. I have stuck with the game, and loved the tournament, ever since. Given the difficulties, until not that long ago, of even seeing the games in America, this year’s wall-to-wall coverage, with its unapologetic mulligan stew of accents on ESPN—Cockney and Argentine and Dutch and Portuguese, and no one in the executive offices, apparently, objecting—feels like a luxury. (I recall that the games in ’82 were shown on Univision alone, in Spanish, and my mind even turns back to an earlier tournament—’78?—when, unless my imagination is running wild, Jack Klugman was doing television commercials selling tickets to watch it on screen at a local arena.)

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June 23, 2014

Donald Trump and the Central Park Five

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Donald Trump is angry about the settlement the city reached, this weekend, with the Central Park Five—the men who had, as teen-age boys, been wrongly convicted in the “Central Park jogger” rape case and been called animals by just about every institution in this city. The rape had been committed between 9 or 10 P.M., on an April evening in 1989; someone had beaten the jogger so badly and so brutally that by the time she was found, hours later, stripped and covered with mud, she had lost three quarters of her blood. The police detective on the scene told reporters that her body had already turned cold; she wouldn’t have survived much longer. The woman, as she later let the world know in a book, was Trisha Meili, then an investment banker at Salomon Brothers; she had been bashed in the head and remembered nothing. The rest of New York, though, was sure of what had happened to her, and who was to blame. Here was the headline in the Daily News, on April 21, 1989:

WOLF PACK’S PREY
Female jogger near death after savage attack by roving gang

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June 23, 2014

Argentina’s Car Troubles

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Rolando Domizi, a Hyundai salesman in Buenos Aires, has lately been spending a lot of time rearranging his showroom and checking on the parking lot in which his cars are stored. Last year, he was selling between twenty and thirty cars per month. So far this year, he has sold eight. “You have to do something to kill the time,” he told me. “There’s nobody coming through the door.”

Domizi did not suddenly lose his salesman’s touch. He is struggling because the government, trying to increase the reserves of hard currency that it uses to pay off foreign debt, recently introduced a car tax and devalued the Argentinian peso. Dealers now pay a tax of thirty to fifty per cent on many models, up from ten per cent in the past, and that cost is passed on to buyers. In 2013, people bought nearly one million new vehicles in Argentina, a record; this year, that figure is projected to be around six hundred thousand, according to ACARA, Argentina’s association for car dealers.

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June 23, 2014

The Day America Fell in Love with the World Cup

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Let me guess. A day after Cristiano Ronaldo’s last-minute wonder pass denied Team U.S.A. a guaranteed place in the last sixteen at the World Cup, you are still feeling a little bit deflated. It just wasn’t fair, was it?

All that hard work after handing Portugal the gift of an early lead. The U.S. team was playing, quite possibly, its best game ever. The midfielder Jermaine Jones scored a thumping equalizer from outside the penalty box, and, in the eighty-first minute, the center forward Clint Dempsey bundled a go-ahead goal over the line. Portugal was done, or so it appeared. Cristiano Ronaldo, recently voted the best player in the world, was nowhere to be seen, and Chris Wondolowski, who substituted for Dempsey late in the match, repeatedly ran the ball into the Portugal corner flag—a classic time-wasting maneuver. The five minutes of time added for injuries and stoppages were almost up. In the Arena Amazonia, in the sweltering city of Manaus, twenty-thousand-plus Americans had their eyes fixed on the referee, urging him to blow the final whistle. Then Michael Bradley, who had played a great game, lost the ball in midfield. It went out to Ronaldo on the right wing. He looked up and curled in a cross that eluded the U.S. defense, and—no, no, this couldn’t be happening!—his colleague Silvestre Varela, racing from the center circle, headed it into the net with the last touch of the game.

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