Random News from the Rest of the World

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was set to win a second term in office as his Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) racked up an overwhelming majority of the votes being counted across India on Thursday. The tallying of votes in the world's biggest democracy showed the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) winning at least 350 seats in parliament of the 542 that were up for grabs. The BJP alone was poised to take about 290 seats. 

A British man has been arrested in Uganda on suspicions of “intoxicating the public” after he claimed to have carried out a trial of a “miracle cure” on local villagers using industrial bleach.

Sam Little, 25, from Arlesey in Bedfordshire was picked up by Ugandan police at 6am on Thursday in a village church in Kitembi, a few miles outside Fort Portal in western Uganda. Also arrested were two Ugandans who are suspected of being involved in the distribution of the bleach, which is known by advocates as MMS or Miracle Mineral Solution.

The arrests come five days after the Guardian exposed a massive distribution network of MMS in poor areas of Uganda that was being supervised by an American pastor from New Jersey. The network by its own estimation was handing out quantities of the bleach to up to 50,000 Ugandans every month and telling them that it was a cure-all for almost every serious disease including HIV/Aids and cancer.

Caster Semenya has won a temporary block against regulations that would require her to lower her testosterone levels artificially before being allowed to compete in some races.

Betrayed D-Day
By Laurent Joffrin, Director of Libération - June 5, 2019

In sixty-five years of commemorations, the tributes paid on June 6 to the D-Day soldiers have profoundly changed the collective vision of this heroic operation, bringing it gradually closer to the truth. But hypocrisy now dominates.

In the beginning, an image: that of the credits scene of the Longest Day, the film that has for a long time commanded the mythology of D-Day: a GI helmet on a beach in Normandy on a background of sea waves, to the sound of martial music. An American operation, therefore, of which film director Darryl Zanuck gives a vision both tragic and watered down, entirely dedicated to the courage of the "boys" and officers, played by the finest in Hollywood, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and Henry Fonda.

The first correction took place just before filming. Reading the script, General de Gaulle noted that there was scarcely any mention of the role of the French Resistance. He threatened to ban all shooting in France. In haste, Zanuck added a sequence at the beginning of the film where we see a resistance commando blowing up an electric pole...

It also became known that the British, in fact, were in no way suppletives of the Americans in this affair: there were more soldiers from the British Empire on these beaches and boats on June 6th than Yankee troops. The British had largely designed the battle plans and presided over the vast misinformation campaign ("Fortitude") that had deceived Hitler into believing for weeks that the Normandy landing was a diversion.

The Longest Day, going by the standards of the time, had also attenuated the violence of the fighting. At the time of the commemorations of 1984, director Samuel Fuller, who had himself landed on Omaha Beach, explained to Libération that one could not show on the silver screen what he had seen on June 6, 1944: the massacre, the sea reddened by blood, soldiers mutilated by bullets, slaughtered en masse or decapitated by shrapnel. Much later, Spielberg would get closer to the reality of that battle, in the startling opening scene of Saving Private Ryan.

Similarly, the extreme harshness of Allied aerial bombardment would gradually emerge in the collective consciousness. French people used to be portayed as exultant at the arrival of "the Americans". In fact Allied troops were often welcomed in an icy silence by a population decimated by the bombs and whose towns and villages had been ruthlessly razed by the liberating planes. [...]

The ceremonies too have gradually changed in nature. They once celebrated the victory, the sacrifice, the liberating armies of Europe. From the 80s on, when François Mitterrand decided to make the ceremonies a political event by inviting the heads of state on the Norman beaches, they added to the military tributes some words about peace and reconciliation. The D-Day became politicized by celebrating international cooperation, "multilateralism" and the European construction, imagined soon after the victory to prevent the return of war in Europe. In 2004, under Chirac, even German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was invited to take part in the festivities. A great first, which Mitterrand had once rejected the possibility, it is said, by an abrupt: "I believe the Germans lost that war." Even the Russians finally got invited, which was only fair as there were many more German soldiers and armored divisions busy fighting the Red Army than Nazi troops stationed in Normandy at the time.

Was this some pacifist, politically-correct rewriting of history? In no way. The war aims proclaimed by the Allies before June 6 were not only to defeat the Nazis, but also to establish a new world in line with Franklin Roosevelt's views, built on cooperation, democracy, free trade, rejecting monetary wars, as evidenced by the creation of the United Nations, the establishment of democratic regimes in the liberated territories, the Bretton Woods agreements or the creation of the European common market.

In this respect, the presence of Donald Trump this year brings a bitter paradox: the US president professes political and diplomatic views opposite to those of his predecessor of 1944. He is constantly fighting against multilateralism, promotes nationalism, revives trade wars and yries to weaken the European Union. Just like the United Kingdom, which at the time came to the rescue of occupied Europe, now seeks to detach itself from it.

Hypocrisy dominates the 2019 ceremonies: the US and British governments have in fact turned their backs on the principles inherited from the post-war period. Behind the trite homage to the heroism of D-day soldiers, looms the pure and simple betrayal of their ideals.

Botswana's high court has thrown out a colonial-era law that criminalized same-sex relations in a landmark ruling lauded by activists. People who broke the law had faced the threat of a seven-year prison sentence.