The World Economic Forum in Davos is ending with talk of a rupture in world affairs, a collapse of international law, a descent into chaos and the rise of a new global order in which bullies rule like kings. This must all sound extremely odd to the Indigenous people of Canada, America, Australia or Greenland, for whom that old order meant only catastrophe.
The destruction of Palestinian lives is now a base line in a holding pattern. The ferocious white heat of the past two years of unrelenting attacks has receded from view, but the genocide continues. There is far less coverage on social media, where my accounts are instead filled with requests for aid.
Chimpanzees, New Caledonian crows – and now cows. The list of animals that use tools grew a little longer this week, with a paper in Current Biology reporting that an Austrian cow called Veronika uses a broom to scratch herself. Appealing to tool use as a defining feature of humanity has always been a shaky argument, though a curiously persistent one.
‘Safety is a trigger word for me,’ Aliyah says on the first day of the women’s circle in the documentary Holloway.
Cognac sales have been in decline since 2022, particularly in its two biggest markets, the United States and China. The reasons include tariffs, inflation and tequila. A recent publicity stunt to promote a collaboration between Hennessy and LeBron James fell very flat. If celebrity no longer sells, perhaps the cognac industry could fall back on an old marketing ploy: claiming it’s medicine. In 1918, the Daily Mirror ran the headline ‘Brandy for Influenza’: ‘Arrangements have been made to provide immediately extra supplies of spirits for medicinal purposes during the influenza epidemic.’ During Prohibition, one of the only legal ways to buy alcohol was on prescription.
Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Base) in northern Greenland, October 2023 (Ritzau/Alamy)
The US desire to annex Greenland is traceable to at least 1867 and the ambitions of the secretary of state William H. Seward, who negotiated the Alaska purchase that same year. Whatever the motivation – fancy cannot be dismissed – Trump has a vision of Greenland as a second Alaska.
Donald Trump’s attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of its head of state have overshadowed his less brazen but possibly more effective regime-change operation in Honduras. No one can be sure if the National Party’s Nasry ‘Tito’ Asfura really won the presidential election on 30 November, but he was Trump’s endorsed candidate and will almost certainly assume office on 27 January.