Elon Musk’s $44bn Twittocracy

 Al Jazeera English

When I was asked to write about the $44bn purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk – the South Africa-born CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and richest person on the planet – I was torn. I have written about Musk on various occasions in the past, like when Time magazine selected him as its “2021 Person of the Year” even while acknowledging his track record – which comprises numerous allegations of atrociously sexist and racist conditions in his US factories, as well as violations of local pandemic regulations to keep workers working and Twitter threats against employees wishing to unionise.

Time mused that “the vast expanse of human misery can seem an afterthought to a man with his eyes on Mars”, as though apathy for the human condition is somehow a romantic, Person of the Year-type attribute. Earthly misery has meanwhile only been exacerbated by the fact that we now have to hear about Elon Musk day in and day out – which is why I was at first hesitant to contribute to the din. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Resurrection by reading: An ode to used books

Al Jazeera English

It has by now become platitudinous to remark that people hardly read books any more – and physical ones even less – absorbed as we are by the demands of the digital age: scrolling, clicking, obsessively checking likes, and converting emotions into sequences of little yellow faces.

As a child, I read books constantly – along with everything else: the magazine that arrived with the Austin American-Statesman every Sunday to my parents’ house in Texas, appliance warranty papers, the text on the cereal box at breakfast. Decades later as I travelled the world in my twenties and thirties, resurrecting the ravenous reading habit was always on my to-do list – and yet it was inevitably easier to just continue scrolling and clicking.

Prior to spending the month of February 2022 in Cuba, I had not read a book for leisure in nearly a year – and I had not even finished that one. Then, one afternoon in Havana, I was overcome with spontaneous determination and dispatched myself in search of a used bookstore. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The UK’s quick Rwandan fix for the ‘Migrant Menace’

 Al Jazeera English

Back in December 2020, the Independent reported that Chris Philp – the then UK parliamentary under secretary of state and minister for immigration compliance and justice – had “refused to rule out sending asylum seekers to a remote island or disused oil platforms, or creating a ‘giant wave machine’” to repel migrant-bearing dinghies in the English Channel.

Now, Britain’s Conservatives have devised an even better solution to the migrant issue, whereby the United Kingdom will simply send asylum seekers to the African nation of Rwanda, about 6,500km (4,000 miles) away. And the new plan is already making waves. As John Washington, author of The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexican Border and Beyond, remarked on Twitter: “How much more darkly bonkers the global border regime will yet become is terrifying”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Wine-washing the Israeli occupation

 Al Jazeera English

Back in 2016, Washington Post emissary Anne-Marie O’Connor ventured to the illegal Israeli West Bank outpost of Havat Gilad to report on how “tourism is the new front in Israeli settlers’ battle for legitimacy”. Indeed, there were not many better ways for a major US newspaper to contribute to this battle than by dispatching a writer to sample “‘the good life’, with fine cabernets and artisanal cheese on the hilltops of the rugged, rural Bible land populated by the gun-toting children of Abraham”.

In the Zionist view, of course, the territory’s association with “Bible land” confers more-than-sufficient legitimacy upon its illegal usurpation from Palestinians. In Havat Gilad, O’Connor mustered such charming politico-touristic observations as “Holiday chalets are new facts on the ground” and “Wine tastings are a new weapon against a two-state solution” – with a proliferation of West Bank boutique wineries effectively constituting a wine-washing of occupation.

The journalist chose to conclude her report with a quote from Karni Eldad, co-author of a West Bank vacation guidebook, who insisted that the local panorama was about so much more than “hilltop youth burning a house” in the village of Duma – a reference, O’Connor explained, to the “young Jewish extremists who are the alleged perpetrators of a firebombing” in 2015 that “killed a Palestinian mother and father and their 18-month-old baby, and severely burned their 5-year-old boy”.

At that “same hilltop” that produced the alleged firebombers, Eldad emphasised, “there is a herd of goats that has unbelievable cheese”. Enough said. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

El Salvador: A state of emergency indeed

 Al Jazeera English

On Saturday, March 26, El Salvador registered 62 homicides, the most recorded on any single day since the end of the country’s bloody civil war in 1992. The killings were attributed to a spike in violence presided over by the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 gangs.

Late that night, President Nayib Bukele took to Twitter – his preferred platform for presidential communications – to pressure Salvadoran lawmakers to approve a “state of exception”, which they obediently did in the wee hours of the morning on Sunday, March 27.

Currently in place for 30 days but eligible for extension, the state of emergency basically entails a formal suspension of any residual hint of civil liberties in a nation where the president self-defines as the world’s “coolest dictator” and sports a backwards baseball cap accordingly. The emergency arrangement eliminates the right to association and legal defence while increasing the permissible period of detention without charge from 72 hours to 15 days and authorising the state to spy on private correspondence sans court order – not that the state ever seemed to require a court order for such activities in the first place. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.