Reading the Globe: A weekly digest of the most important news, ideas and culture around the world.
Season 1
by Michael Washburn
On November 24, 1971, the day before Thanksgiving, a man walks into the terminal at Portland International Airport. Giving his name as Dan Cooper, he pays with cash for a seat on a Northwest Orient Airlines Boeing 727 jet scheduled to make the quick flight from Portland up to Seattle. Thus begins one of the strangest and most fascinating crimes in American history, a crime that remains unsolved til this day.In this special edition of Reading the Globe, AudioHopper presents “The D.B. Cooper Mystery at 50.” Michael Washburn takes us deep into a true crime thriller in which a pseudonymous man extorted $200,000 in ransom and parachuted into thin air over southwestern Washington State. He was never conclusively spotted again, dead or alive. After interviewing nearly 1000 suspects over 30 years, the crime remains, according to New York magazine, “the only skyjacking in the world that has gone unsolved.” In this special feature featuring archival audio, much of the record is corrected, including the legend that “Cooper” left nothing behind. In fact, he did—his clip-on tie (and tie pin), among other items. The author also makes a powerful case that the skyjacker may have been Canadian. Was he eaten? Where’s the parachute? How did a young boy find $3000 of the ransom money? Why are some of the possible subjects buying cars with cash and making death-bed confessions? What the hell happened? At 50, the case still fascinates all true-crime junkies. Washburn, an expert on the case, presents a reasoned analysis of every possible known subject and presents a compelling case for one of them being the skyjacker. It’s the perfect holiday listen.
Zemmour Rising One of the most widely reported phenomena on the French political scene is the rise in opinion polls of Éric Zemmour, who looks set to rival the incumbent president, Emmanuel Macron, in next April’s election. While Zemmour has decided views on many issues, he opposes unchecked immigration above all as an existential threat to France. Zemmour has long been a fringe figure. Some know him as an essayist who states in a polemical form certain of the themes, ideas, and messages found in the work of the enfant terrible of French letters, Michel Houellebecq. An article by Angelique Chrisafis in theGuardian Weekly’s October 15 edition, “From pundit to president? The far-right rise of Eric Zemmour,” quotes two sources who are fiercely hostile to Zemmour. Stanford University Professor Cécile Alduy tells the Guardian that Zemmour’s message is not new but that it is quite unprecedented for someone espousing such views to gain the platform that Zemmour has acquired. The article also quotes French comedian Yassine Belattar calling Zemmour a provocateur and making the questionable assertion that never before in history has racism run so high. Radical Fist-Pumping as Education An article in the Economist’s October 23 issue, entitled “Race and class,” (paywalled) denounces the moves that eight U.S. states have made to ban critical race theory from public school curricula, and makes a case for ethnic studies lessons. The Economist details how San Francisco’s school district launched an ethnic studies pilot program in 2010-2011, relying heavily on faculty of San Francisco State University. The article cites findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that purport to show that the implementation of ethnic studies curricula in San Francisco schools has had positive effects. The same Economist article reports findings of Sade Bonilla of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and her colleagues purporting to show that the program boosted high-school attendance by six to seven percentage points and also had an effect on graduation rates. But perhaps the most significant finding reported in the article is the UMass researchers’ claim of a higher GPA for those who have enrolled in ethnic studies courses. The radical educators have the last laugh. The Economist notes that California plans to make ethnic studies a requirement for graduation throughout the state by 2030. Books Are Burning When published in 1953, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 stood as a warning about where consumerism, instant gratification, and anti-intellectualism might lead. It depicts a dystopia where corps of firemen make the rounds, not putting out fires but gathering whatever books they can find and setting them ablaze. From our vantage point in 2021, the awful truth is that Fahrenheit 451 is a more literal prophecy than readers, critics, and maybe even the novel’s own author believed it to be. Yes, ideologues and fanatics are burning books. One example cited in my recent review for Book and Film Globe is a book-burning organized in Ontario in 2019 as part of a supposed effort at reconciliation with indigenous people who have been the victim of racist stereotyping in the past. And more...
Whither the European Union? The reasons for voting in favor of the 2016 Brexit were many and varied, but with some hindsight, it is hard to deny that voters frustrated with the workings of the E.U. had a basis for their grievances. Just look at the gas crisis that is making life in the E.U. unbearable for millions of people. An article by Laurence Norman in the Wall Street Journal’s October 14 edition, “Gas Crisis Prompts Fresh Proposals from E.U.,” quotes energy commissioner Kadri Simson calling the crisis an unusual situation and maintaining that E.U. energy policies over the last 20 years have worked well. But the article details how the European Commission is grasping for solutions to deal with the tripling of wholesale gas prices within E.U. borders and the concomitant spike in inflation, which jeopardizes the economic recovery everyone has been hoping for as the continent tries to move on from the Covid pandemic. A New Direction for New York Mayoral candidate Eric Adams once again has refused to mince words or tiptoe around an issue of growing concern to New Yorkers: the scourge of shoplifting that has left entire shelves bare in some stores, drugstores in particular, and about the need to back law enforcement unequivocally, a brave stance to take in this age of rabid anti-police activism and hysterical rhetoric. An article in the New York Post on October 14, “Mayoral hopeful Eric Adams talks tough against NYC shoplifting spike,” quotes Adams saying that once he takes office, his administration will adopt an aggressive stance toward the crime wave plaguing New York. He plans to visit precincts in person and reiterate his strong support for the police. Adams spoke partly in response to public concerns aroused by repeat offenders like the so-called Man of Steal, who police have arrested no fewer than 57 times this year, including 46 arrests for retail theft. Curtains for Durst Robert Durst, the real estate heir suspected in crimes that provided tabloid fodder and inspired both a feature film and a six-part HBO documentary, is unlikely ever to be a free man again. Evan Symon’s October 15 article in The California Globe, “Robert Durst Receives Life Sentence in LA Superior Court Ruling,” details the outcome of a lengthy proceeding complicated by the Covid pandemic and concerns about the health of the wheelchair-bound 78-year-old defendant. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Mark Windham has sentenced Durst to spend the remainder of his life in prison, with no chance of parole, for the murder of Susan Berman, whose body police found in her Benedict Canyon home on December 24, 2000. Evidence implicating Durst in the crime included letters with the same misspellings that Durst had made in other correspondence. Durst is also on camera in the HBO documentary confessing to having committed murders. And more...
Ben & Jerry’s is back in the news again, carrying on a long campaign in favor of progressive social issues and a tactic of withholding or withdrawing its ice cream from a market as a form of protest against what founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield see as injustice in the country, province, or territory in question. Last month, in what it meant to be a bold statement against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, the company announced that it would cease selling its products in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, though not in Israel as a whole. One of the last places one would expect to find criticism of Ben & Jerry’s is in the pages of the almost monochromatically liberal New York Times. But one of the paper’s very few idiosyncratic voices, Bret Stephens, wrote a column on August 11 that questions how much of a sacrifice Ben & Jerry’s is really making, from a business standpoint, given the relatively minuscule market for its ice cream in the places in question or indeed in Israel as a whole. Has Andrew Cuomo’s career really come to an end? The New York governor has announced his resignation, after numerous allegations of sexual harassment came to light for which he faces likely prosecution and a ban against running for state office. As might be expected, the loss of a pillar of New York State’s powerful and entrenched Democratic establishment produced a spate of reactions, often depending on people’s political affiliations, but it is notable that liberals and progressives did not rush to defend the disgraced governor and many of them praised his resignation as the right thing to do. In an editorial entitled “End of the road,” the liberal New York Daily News says that Cuomo has made the right move, while calling this a sad moment and sternly warning people not to rejoice over the derailment of a political enemy’s career, given the vast amount of difficult work that lies ahead for his successors. The points are well taken, but one cannot help wondering whether the News’s editorial might have a slightly different tone if the career of a prominent conservative politician had just come to such a dramatic and disgraceful end. But an article by Michael Gartland in the same edition of the Daily News, “’22 race wide open after Andy shocker,” examines the huge field of potential candidates in next year’s gubernatorial election, and does not discount the possibility, however remote, that a chastened Cuomo may try for a comeback. And more...
Japan’s New Leader The Economist magazine continues its usually astute and detailed coverage of the Japanese political scene with an article about the country’s new prime minister, Kishida Fumio, who was recently elected president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Fumio has taken the reins of office from Yoshihide Suga, an unpopular leader who announced last month that he would not seek reelection as leader of his party. Fumio’s record in Japanese politics and international diplomacy is uneven. As foreign minister under prime minister Shinzo Abe in the last decade, Fumio drank vodka with Russian diplomat Sergei Lavrov, but the somewhat forced conviviality did not achieve the hoped-for breakthrough in Russian-Japanese relations. Fumio also organized a visit by then-U.S. president Barack Obama to his hometown of Hiroshima and tried to work out an agreement whereby Japan would compensate South Korean women whom the Japanese military forced into sexual slavery during the Second World War. No such deal ever came about, but the Economist’s article blames a change of government in South Korea rather than any failure on Fumio’s part. The New Republic Slams Tucker The New Republic’s October issue features a cover story highly critical of Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Before getting into the content of this piece, it is worth noting that there was a time well within living memory when TNR was popular among some conservatives. Not just neoconservatives, who shared its concern for Israel and U.S. policy in the Middle East, but even social conservatives who found some of its in-depth articles in the 1990s to be quite trenchant. The examples spring to mind of Heather Mac Donald’s scathing piece on diversity training programs that enriched those who conducted them while bullying and ostracizing the employees who had to undergo them, and Stephanie Guttmann’s cover story debunking the politically correct hype about a gender-integrated military and exposing the serious problems that integration has caused. TNR also blasted the incompetence and corruption of the police force in Washington, D.C., and the force’s bungling of murder cases. Since the magazine’s acquisition by Facebook billionaire Chris Hughes and its sale in 2016 to Win McCormack, a once-lively and eclectic publication has grown much more consistently left-wing. For a magazine trying to tilt the country in a more progressive direction, Fox News host Carlson, one of the most outspoken and prominent conservative commentators on the planet, is an obvious target. Haruki Murakami Library Opens in Tokyo Finally, returning to Japan, we’ve got a story by yours truly on Book and Film Globe chronicles the official opening of the Waseda International House of Literature in Tokyo. One of the most admired writers in Japan today, Haruki Murakami, is also the impetus behind the launch of an institution that is sure to be popular in a Covid-wracked nation nursing its wounded pride after the letdown of the 2021 Olympics. Amid the pandemic, the 72-year-old Murakami has emerged as one of his country’s most candid and empathic public figures, and his bold move is a salve to a nation in tormented times. And more...
The nation of Morocco, which recently established closer diplomatic and economic ties with Israel and began welcoming direct Israir and El Al flights in Marrakech in July in accordance with a pact the two nations signed last year as part of the Abraham Accords, looks poised to take the next big step in the strengthening of its ties with the West. Morocco World News reported on September 26 on the plans that Simon Morrish, the founder and CEO of Xlinks, has been developing to construct the longest power cable in the world, extending 3,800 kilometers underwater from wind and solar energy generators in the Guelmin Oued-Noun region roughly in the middle of Morocco to the U.K., where, Morrish claims, it will provide power to perhaps seven million homes. The tiny Central Pacific island nation of Nauru, which has roughly 12,000 residents and no official capital, has long been a dumping ground for refugees seeking entry to Australia. Now, as the Guardian has reported in its edition of September 24, Australia has reached a deal with Nauru for the indefinite prolongation of the detention center, where conditions are reportedly ghastly and human rights abuses abound. Some companies just can’t stay out of trouble. Evan Symon’s September 25 report in the California Globe details how the Shasta County District Attorney’s office has charged PG&E with 11 felonies, including four counts of manslaughter, in the aftermath of the catastrophe known as the Zogg Fire. PG&E only just emerged from bankruptcy resulting from having to pay $13.5 billion to the victims of a 2018 fire, and that is but one of the higher-profile legal troubles to have beset the utility in recent years. Sometimes tales of heroism are absurdly inflated. At other times, the sacrifices of past generations can come to seem all the more awe-inspiring when you realize just how inadequate were the resources entrusted to them given the challenges they faced. Jon Diamond’s article in the October 2021 issue of World War II History magazine, “Two Battles at Singapore’s Bukit Timah,” situates the reader in a time in place, Singapore in the early months of 1942, when desperate British, Australian, Dutch, and Indian troops tried to block the lightning moves of the Japanese army down the Malay peninsula and into Singapore, which ultimately fell to the forces of the wily and ruthless Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita on February 15, 1942, but not without a fight. And more...
The Senate, by a vote of 50 to 49, conferred its approval on a $3.5 trillion budget resolution that paves the way for the hugely ambitious economic package Biden has long promised to make a reality. As Clare Foran and Ali Zaslev detail in article on CNN, Senate Democrats cast their vote in favor of the package after a long series of so-called amendment votes. It is now up to the House to pass the budget resolution. Pillars of the resolution include massive spending on infrastructure, job creation, aid to families, and environmental programs. It is easily one of the most sweeping and ambitious domestic spending programs in American history, establishing a Civilian Climate Corps, implementing universal pre-K for three- and four-year-olds, and making community college tuition free for two years, among other provisions. It appears that in the view of CNN’s authors, the liberal Democrat viewpoint is the only one that truly matters here. This package is what “people” want. Only fuddy-duddies with eccentric views would stop and ask what part of the Constitution says that government is to pay for community college or universal pre-K. Not very many people today would cite or even know the text of the Tenth Amendment, which explicitly delimits the functions and prerogatives of the federal government and stipulates that any powers not specifically granted to it under the Constitution belong to the states, or the people. Who cares about such nit-picking legal and Constitutional issues when the mobs to which Democrat politicians are beholden are clamoring for more of this and more of that. The Constitution is just a scrap of paper written by dead white men. Americans can never get enough of true crime, and the persistence of the Covid pandemic has not denied them the spectacle of seeing the notorious Robert Durst, heir to the Durst real estate fortune, put on trial in Los Angeles for the murder of friend Susan Berman. An August 10 Reuters article reminds readers how police in 2000 found the body of 55-year-old Berman in her Beverly Hills home shortly after the reopening of an investigation into the disappearance and presumed murder of Durst’s wife, Kathleen McCormack Durst, in 1982. Durst is also the prime suspect in the killing of Morris Black, a neighbor in Texas, in 2001. The article dusts off the theory that Durst wanted Berman out of the picture because of what she might have been able to tell police about the fate of Kathleen. The Reuters article details how Durst’s attorneys have taken a somewhat unusual step in putting the wheelchair-bound 78-year-old, who suffers from many ailments including bladder and esophageal cancer, kidney disease, high blood pressure, neuropathy, and osteoporosis, on the stand to answer tough and probing questions about his alleged role in Berman’s death. And more...
The United States and Indonesia are building a formidable alliance, driven largely by the two nations’ shared antipathy toward the Chinese government’s designs on the South China Sea and more general concerns about China’s role in the region. An August 3 Reuters report detailed the marked success of Tuesday’s meeting in Washington between U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi. The two officials reportedly spoke at length about a strategic partnership designed to counteract China’s longstanding territorial ambitions in the waterways north and east of Indonesia and also to continue a joint response to the Covid-19 crisis. In the last year and a half, the U.S. has emerged as one of Indonesia’s most generous benefactors in the fight against Covid, donating eight million vaccine doses to the Asian nation. Horror author Cynthia Pelayo is the latest in the seemingly endless parade of victims of cancel culture. As Rachel Llewellyn has reported in an article on the website Book and Film Globe on August 2, Pelayo planned to follow up her hit police procedural Children of Chicago with an anthology of writings entitled Cops vs. Monsters. In an age when so many progressives loathe and seek to disrupt and defund the police, that’s a rather unfortunate title. To the woke mob, cops are monsters. Not some of them, but all of them. The very people who never tire of warning others about the evils of stereotyping and generalizations joyously engage in the same and are quick to lash out at anyone seen as sympathetic to those who don uniforms and badges and put their lives on the line to protect the public. Online rage against Pelayo’s editorship of Cops vs. Monsters led her to abandon the project in haste and cancel her online accounts. As the trial of disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes looks set finally get underway, with July selection scheduled for the end of August, speculation abounds about what strategies the prosecution and the defense will put to use. Elizabeth Holmes is the defendant who, as a nineteen-year-old Stanford dropout, launched Theranos back in 2003 with extravagant claims about her company’s potential to revolutionize the medical and startup fields. And more...
One of the more encouraging pieces of news this week is the inauguration of direct flights between Israel and Morocco, undertaken in accordance with the joint declaration that the two nations signed on December 22 of last year as part of the breakthrough Abraham Accords. Morocco World News reported on July 26 that the arrival of two Israir and El Al flights in Marrakech this past weekend was something of a joyous event. Bands specializing in music alluding to folk tales and legends of Morocco turned out to fete the hundreds of tourists and visitors, and the U.S. State Department sent out a positive tweet about the event. We have heard over and over that the eruption of Covid-19 around the world has shown us all how unprepared we were for the advent of a highly contagious disease. But the real lesson of the past year and a half may be just how precarious are personal liberties in the supposedly free nations of the Western world and how abruptly and arbitrarily officials may revoke those freedoms with little or no statutory basis and without the consent of those who elected them. Nowhere is this lesson more evident than in Australia, where people are enduring restrictions on their movements and activities that make a dystopian fantasy like Orwell’s 1984 seem tame. As the Economist reports in its issue of July 24, the state of Victoria has enacted its fifth lockdown, and the state of South Australia has issued stay-at-home orders, in response to outbreaks and infections. The Economist’s figures indicate that more than half of a population of 25 million people, the population of an entire continent, are now under lockdown. Any honest and balanced account of Australia’s lockdowns ought to mention what has happened in recent days. As BBC News reported early this week, protestors bearing signs with messages like “Emergency SOS Free Australia” have turned out by the thousands in Sydney, and critics of lockdowns have also organized events in Brisbane and Melbourne. New South Wales premier Berejiklian has said protestors should be ashamed, but, as Californians know all too well, it is easy for officials or the governor of a state to denounce people for their unwillingness to live under restrictions from which politicians themselves are often exempt. As the identities of the last unnamed victims of the catastrophic collapse of a 136-unit condominium tower in Surfside, Florida, on June 24 at last come to light, the reaction to this horrible event focuses on the failures of structural maintenance and upkeep that allowed the disaster to happen. An expose in the New York Times published on June 26 and since updated has outlined in detail how consultant Frank Morabito in a 2018 report analyzed extensive water damage and cracking throughout the complex that should have raised flags immediately about the unsafe conditions prevailing at Champlain Towers South and spurred the building’s management to take action. The Times quotes a statement from Morabito Consulting: “Among other things, our report detailed significant cracks and breaks in the concrete, which required repairs to ensure the safety of the residents and the public.” And more...
When people hear the term voter suppression, they are likely to think of efforts led by Republicans in Georgia and other states to impose strict voter ID requirements on all who wish to take part in the political process. But in California, recent actions by Secretary of State Shirley Weber have given new meaning to voter suppression. To put it more precisely, Weber may have severely limited the choices that voters have by excluding candidate Larry Elder from the ballot in the recall election scheduled for September14. As detailed in a report by Katy Grimes in California Globe on July 20, Weber has attempted to kick Elder off the ballot on the grounds that redactions on the tax returns released by Elder went beyond what a candidate may legally redact. Elder has sued to remain on the ballot. UPDATE: As reported by California Globe, on Wednesday evening, Judge Laurie M. Earl ruled in Elder’s favor. “I don’t find Mr. Elder was required to file a tax return at all,” she wrote, and ordered the Secretary of State to qualify Larry Elder as a candidate and put his name on the ballot. Once one of the most powerful men in the history of entertainment, Harvey Weinstein’s penal ordeal hit a new low on Tuesday as the convicted rapist underwent extradition from New York State to California, where he faces charges of having sexually assaulted five women between 2004 and 2013. Oddly, even in this age of cancel culture, there appears to be no backlash in the offing against the celebration, enjoyment, and iconic status of the films that Weinstein produced before his ignominious fall. In fact, Pulp Fiction remains such a popular and iconic film that there is even buzz about the possibility of Quentin Tarantino working on a prequel. A piece by Joe Gillis on the Screenrant.com website explores how Tarantino might go about telling the story of the two “Vega brothers,” namely John Travolta’s Vince Vega from Pulp Fiction and Michael Madsen’s Vic Vega from Reservoir Dogs. For many sci-fi and horror fans, one piece of big news this month has been the announcement that Noah Hawley, known for his work on the Fargo TV series, has signed on to be the showrunner behind the adaptation of another iconic, legendary film for the medium of TV. Hawley has reportedly written scripts for early episodes of an Alien series that will air on FX some time in 2022. According to reports in Esquire, the Guardian, and other sources, Hawley plans to emphasize a specific theme of the 1979 film and make it the thrust of the new series, namely the tension between blue-collar protagonists and the corporate masters whose interest in harnessing the Xenomorph species for aggressive military and cynical profit-based ends led to calamity in the Alien movies and thwarted characters’ efforts to destroy the dangerous aliens when they had a chance.