The White House said on Thursday it is discussing new dates for the United States (US) – ASEAN Summit after it had been postponed because not all leaders could attend later this month.
The White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said they are working through the schedules of a number of ASEAN leaders. “That’s always a challenge and a factor,” she said.
The White House announced last month that US President Joe Biden would play host to a special summit with ASEAN on March 28 and 29.
Recently, the press secretary said in a statement the special summit will be an opportunity to demonstrate the US’ commitment to ASEAN and to mark 45 years of US-ASEAN relations. It is a top priority for the Biden-Harris administration to serve as a strong, reliable partner and to strengthen an empowered and unified ASEAN to address the challenges of their time, she said in the statement.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki speaks during a press briefing at the White House. AP
Cambodian Foreign Minister Prak Sokhonn recently said the meeting had been postponed because some ASEAN leaders could not attend on the proposed dates.
WARSAW (AFP) – Stuck to the door of one Warsaw high school is the sign “Laskavo prosimo do shkoli“, or “Welcome to school“ in Ukrainian, along with the flags of Poland and Ukraine.
Chattering in Russian and Ukrainian, teenagers who have just fled their wartorn homeland use magnetic key cards to enter and are welcomed again with a large yellow-blue flag and the slogan “Slava Ukraini“ or “Glory to Ukraine“.
It was their first day of school in Poland, where the 13 – to 15-year-olds have sought shelter since Russia invaded their country.
Divided into two groups of 20, they were greeted by their new teacher, who shuttles from one classroom to the other throughout the lesson.
From the Ukrainian city of Lviv, a refugee just like them, Mariana Druchek, laid out the plan for the day and passes out a maths test.
“Uh oh,“ came the response. “It’s on things we covered three years ago, in grade eight – I forgot it all,“ said 16-year-old Viktoria, to which the others chime in with “same“.
But they relaxed soon enough. By break time, they were all smiles, saying the atmosphere was “really good“ and “positive“ and “the class and school in general are all right“.
ABOVE & BELOW: Students are seen passing by a sign reading in Ukrainian ‘Welcome to school’ at the entrance of the Limanowski High School in Warsaw; and Ukrainian teacher Mariana Druchek teaches a group of Ukrainian students in a class newly created for them. PHOTOS: AFP
It is as if their mad dash out of Kyiv with barely any luggage – to the backdrop of bombs and blasts – was already fading somewhat into the distance. But the sense of danger is still there.
“We’re afraid the Russians will even make their way over here, because everything is possible,“ Viktoria told AFP.
Limanowski High School has been able to accommodate the new students and hire new teachers thanks to funding from the mayor’s office.
On day one, Renata Kozlowska, a city official for the school’s neighbourhood of Zoliborz, came to welcome the teenagers.
She told them that “all of Poland is with you“ and stressed that they have the right to “an education and peace“.
The teenagers – who come from various cities, including Kyiv, Zhytomyr, and Lutsk – will follow a pared-down version of Poland’s curriculum, including English, Polish, history, maths, physics and gym.
The classes will be taught by Ukrainian teachers who themselves had fled the war, with a bilingual educator at the helm of each group.
“What’s most important is to offer them some semblance of normalcy and quiet,“ the school’s principal Andrzej Wyrozembski told AFP.
Druchek, who crossed into Poland with her three children just after the invasion, agreed.
“It’s not a matter of maintaining their knowledge levels, but to make sure they have psychological support and friends, that they know that everyone wants to help,“ she said.
A Polish student Janusz said he is all for the initiative, calling it “cool“ to have welcomed the Ukrainians into their school. “It means they can keep going to school and won’t be thinking non-stop about what’s going on in Ukraine,“ he added.
While the new students will be attending separate classes from their Polish counterparts, the school is keen on helping them integrate.
Each Ukrainian will be partnered up with a Pole their age to join for after-school activities and the like.
Limanowski is the first school in town to have launched such a programme, but others are due to follow soon.
Wyrozembski stressed that it was his teachers who took the lead on the initiative once refugees began flooding Poland.
But he too had his reasons to get involved: when Poland was attacked in September 1939, his father fled Warsaw for Lviv, which was a Polish city at the time.
Since the invasion began, nearly 54,000 Ukrainian children have been enrolled in Polish schools, Education Minister Przemyslaw Czarnek said.
For Wyrozembski, the most important thing now would be to set up special schools for Ukrainian students aged 16 and 17, who would normally be preparing for a final exam before college.
Were they to switch to the Polish curriculum now and prepare for the equivalent testing here, it would “put them back three or four years“, he said.
In our news item New Mercedes-Benz C-Class, E-Class unveiled published on Page 8 on March 18, the second paragraph should read as “modern and sportier interpretation of the flagship S-Class”, and not as stated. The error is regretted.
MOUNT MAUNGANUI (AFP) – Pace bowler Shamilia Connell collapsed while fielding for the West Indies at the Women’s Cricket World Cup in New Zealand yesterday and was taken from the ground in an ambulance.
It was not immediately clear what happened to the 29-year-old but she was able to walk to the ambulance and team-mate Hayley Matthews said that “we believe she’ll be alright”.
“Obviously it’s a bit worrying to see her go down like that but she’s a fighter,” said Matthews.
The incident came in the latter stages of a gutsy West Indies fightback that saw them edge Bangladesh by four runs.
Matthews produced a player-of-the-match performance to bowl a career-best 4-15 and spare the West Indies’ blushes after Bangladesh dismissed them for 140-9 at Mount Maunganui.
The win puts the West Indies ahead of hosts New Zealand, India and defending champions England in the race for a top-four semi-final berth alongside favourites Australia and South Africa.
But Bangladesh threatened to blow the tournament wide open when their spinners ripped through the West Indies’ batting line-up.
The modest target of 141 proved too much however for the tournament debutants, who fell four runs short with three balls to go in the final over.
“How our bowlers started was incredible but I’m pretty disappointed with the batting,” said captain Nigar Sultana, Bangladesh’s joint top-scorer with 25 runs.
Shamilia Connell receives attention after collapsing. PHOTO: AFP
BAGHDAD (XINHUA) – Four Katyusha rockets on Thursday struck the Balad Air Base, Iraq’s largest military air base in north of the capital Baghdad, a local security source said.
The rockets landed at the Balad Air Base in Salahudin province, some 90km north of Baghdad, causing no human casualties, Colonel Mohammed al-Bazi from the provincial police told Xinhua.
Three of the rockets hit a building inside the base, leaving minor damages, while the fourth landed in an empty area, al-Bazi said, adding that the rockets were fired from the neighbouring province of Diyala.
Balad Air Base houses Iraq’s F-16 fighters. The United States technical team has already withdrawn from the base amid rocket attacks by unidentified militias.
MANILA (XINHUA) – The Philippines’ Department of Health (DOH) reported 545 new COVID-19 infections yesterday, bringing the number of confirmed cases in the country to 3,673,201.
The DOH said the death toll from COVID-19 complications now reached 57,999.
“The COVID-19 cases are now on a slow decline,” Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire told an online briefing, noting that the total bed utilisation is at low risk, and the country’s intensive care utilisation is steadily declining.
The DOH has reported under 1,000 daily cases since March 2 as the Omicron wave, which peaked in mid-January, ebbed. It reported the highest single-day tally on January 15, with 39,004 new cases.
FRANKFURT (CNA) – Luxury sportscar maker Porsche AG, which parent Volkswagen could float in a partial stock market listing later this year, yesterday set out a more ambitious sales target for electric vehicles.
More than 80 per cent of newly sold Porsche vehicles will be fully-electric in 2030, Porsche AG chief executive Oliver Blume said at the group’s annual press conference.
That target previously applied to Porsche’s electrified models overall, which also includes plug-in hybrids.
Porsche AG also stuck to its long-term target of an operating margin of at least 15 per cent, finance chief Lutz Meschke said.
Volkswagen and its top shareholder Porsche SE struck a framework agreement for a potential partial listing of Porsche AG, which could value the division at up to EUR90 billion.
Such a listing would include listing up to 25 per cent of Porsche AG’s preferred stock, selling 25 per cent plus one ordinary share in the carmaker to Porsche SE and paying out 49 per cent of IPO proceeds to Volkswagen’s shareholders as a special dividend.
THE WASHINGTON POST – Rick Steves is hyped. That’s not so unusual: Infectious joy is surely one key to Steves’s success as America’s kindly vacation guru. Still, when he leaves soon on a 40-day trip to update his European guidebooks – a ritual he used to perform each spring – it will be the first such journey since COVID-19 erased his travel calendar, which explains his current level of euphoria.
“Just to get back in the saddle has got me so filled with adventure, with energy,” he said. “I can hardly wait.” The trip follows a pandemic-long dry spell that quieted presses across the guidebook industry. United States (US) travel book sales in 2020 were down about 40 per cent from the previous year, according to NPD BookScan. (The category includes, but doesn’t single out, travel guidebooks.)
Facing stalled sales and the prospect of ongoing upheaval amid the pandemic, many guidebook print runs were postponed or canceled. “We put all the guidebooks on pause,” said Pauline Frommer, co-president of the guidebook company her father, Arthur Frommer, founded in 1957. “It was very clear from the beginning of the pandemic that things were going to change drastically, and I did not want to print guidebooks that were not worth the paper they were printed on.”
The pandemic knockdown came following uncertain decades for the guidebook industry. After reaching 19,005,029 in 2006, US travel book sales halved over the next decade. In 2013, BBC Worldwide sold Lonely Planet, a move followed by massive layoffs. Then, having acquiring Frommer’s, Google quietly stopped all production of Frommer’s print guidebooks. (The Frommers repurchased rights and resumed printing guidebooks.)
That’s how 2013 became the year of essays trumpeting the demise of travel guidebooks, each attributing cause of death to some combination of apps, influencers, online searches and digital powerhouse Tripadvisor. But the doomsaying was nothing new. “The whole time I’ve been working on guidebooks, people have been like, ‘The end of guidebooks is nigh’,” said author Zora O’Neill, who wrote her first travel guidebook in 2002 and has penned titles for both Moon and Lonely Planet.
Rick Steves guidebooks on the shelf. PHOTO: RICK STEVES’ EUROPE
Although the end never came, O’Neill saw the industry change. Rates have fallen or stagnated in the past two decades, while in many cases, work-for-hire arrangements replaced traditional royalty contracts. And the once-dominant role of guidebooks in travel culture changed, too.
As an old millennial who started travelling in guidebooks’ supposedly halcyon age, I’ve watched that transformation with interest. Sometimes with nostalgia, too: I miss swapping annotated, dog-eared books with fellow travellers in bars or hostels. Now, you can reliably find those same places filled with people glued to their screens.
Twenty years ago, however, I would have said guidebooks contributed to an informational monoculture I found aggravating. I noticed that people using the same brand of travel guides seemed to follow each other, slightly abashed, from place to place.
On one months-long trip through Central America in 2002, fellow owners of Lonely Planet’s hefty Central America on a Shoestring became familiar faces as we popped up at the same places in city after city. When new businesses opened, owners struggled to get the word out.
Lurid tales of questionable guidebook ethics circulated. Outdated or incorrect entries in a book could leave you stranded, but few other sources existed.
“When I started writing, the problem was that there was not enough information,” said Steves, noting that, at one time, guidebooks were almost the only way to decide where to stay in an unfamiliar city. As times changed, that sameness gave way to the untamed, thrilling diversity of today’s digital wilderness.
“It got to the point where there was too much information,” he said, noting that proliferating sources made it harder to know what was reliable. Researching a trip online can be a Mad Max infinity loop of unvetted user-generated reviews and self-appointed experts. Trading free trips for sunny features is common practice in the world of travel influencers, with little transparency about who is footing the bill for a given blog post or YouTube video.
While earlier travellers just needed some basic info, Steves said, guidebooks’ main value proposition might now be an escape hatch from that digital overwhelm. “Part of my job is to curate all the options – the glut of information – with a consistent set of values,” he said.
What’s more, a print guidebook offers a chance to unplug, allowing travellers to put down their phones, Steves noted. With a screen close at hand, it’s too easy to let your attention drift away from that chic Parisian bistro and into drearily quotidian scrolling.
It seems to be working out, because Steves’s 2019 royalty checks were the highest of his career. Despite apocalyptic warnings, in fact, guidebooks are generally doing okay. After the rocky industry news of 2013, travel book sales stabilised, then stayed roughly even until the pandemic hit.
Most travellers who still buy print books, though, now seem to read them in conjunction with, not instead of, online resources. In recent Facebook and Twitter posts, veteran traveller and content creator Abigail King queried followers about how they use guidebooks today, noticing some buy for pre-trip research, reverting to the Internet for facts on the ground.
Others turn books into a kind of souvenir stuffed with ticket stubs and handwritten notes.
“I use them in a really different way now, too, mainly for reading about the country and planning an itinerary,” said King, who lives in the United Kingdom. She noted that, when travelling to destinations in Europe with consistent cell coverage, she’s unlikely to bring a hard copy along.
“Guidebooks are now among a suite of tools people use,” said Grace Fujimoto, acquisitions director at Avalon Travel, which oversees the Moon Travel Guides imprint that is the United States’ top guidebook seller. (Disclosure: I’ve written several Moon guidebooks.) Fujimoto said the pandemic accelerated that shift toward book-plus-digital, partly because information has changed so quickly in the past two years.
But it just underscores a broader trend of recent years, she said. “Guidebooks are becoming more and more inspirational, in addition to just being repositories of information,” Fujimoto said, offering a forthcoming guidebook to Spain’s Camino de Santiago pilgrimage trail as an example. “It does have a lot of good practical information, but it combines it with ways of appreciating what you’re seeing and doing almost every step of the way,” she said.
Lonely Planet is another publisher leaning into the shift. “Guidebooks are evolving into this experiential, curated collection,” said Lonely Planet spokesman Chris Zeiher. This month, the company released a new line of photo-heavy “Experience” guides, which Zeiher said are designed to inspire.
The first titles in the series, guidebooks to Italy, Portugal, Japan, Ireland, Scotland and Iceland, are noticeably lacking in the old-style comprehensive listings of hotels and restaurants. In their place are expert interviews and short, magazine-style features on the kinds of experiences travellers might build a trip around.
Flip through these to get fired up for chasing waterfalls in Iceland, for instance, or to dream up an itinerary focused on visiting Japanese temples. And unlike the earliest Lonely Planet guides, which were oriented to longer, more comprehensive trips, these are tailored to the shorter vacations increasingly common among travellers from the United States.
Zeiher, too, heard predictions of print guidebooks’ demise since he joined Lonely Planet nearly 17 years ago. But he’s optimistic about the coming decade. “One thing that Lonely Planet’s always done, is we’ve always evolved,” he said. “I think we’ll continue to do that.”
As the pandemic recedes and travellers return to the world, he’s betting there’s room in their bags for a book.
MADRID (AFP) – The Clasico tomorrow will likely have very little bearing on the current season for either Barcelona or Real Madrid – but it should set the tone for the next one.
Atletico Madrid’s limp title defence, Sevilla’s late fade and Barca’s miserable start have all helped ensure Real Madrid, now 10 points clear at the top of La Liga, will almost certainly be crowned champions in May.
Those hoping for a dramatic finish have wondered if a comeback could yet be possible given Barca’s recent surge and Carlo Ancelotti has been trying to play down the idea the league is already won.
Asked on Monday, after their victory over Mallorca, how Real Madrid could ever lose the league from here, Ancelotti said: “How do you lose a Champions League final when you are 3-0 up? It happened to me once. I hope it doesn’t happen again.”
All logic, though, suggests the league is over, regardless of the result tomorrow. Even if they beat Madrid at the Santiago Bernabeu and win their game in hand, Barcelona would be nine points behind Madrid, with nine games left to go. To close the gap would require both Barca having a faultless finish and, more improbably, Madrid suffering a collapse, that for a solid and experienced outfit seems entirely inconceivable on the basis of what has gone so far.
“Winning La Liga will be very difficult,” said Xavi Hernandez last weekend after Barcelona’s win over Osasuna. “You can’t rule it out but we can’t be optimistic.”
The more tangible rewards on offer for the victor this weekend will be either Real Madrid tightening their grip on the trophy or Barcelona entrenching their place in the top four, with their chances of pipping Sevilla to second already growing by the week.
More significant, though, will be the impact the result has on how this season is viewed, which could in turn be hugely influential on how both clubs approach the summer.
For Barcelona, a win at the Bernabeu would put some substantial evidence behind the theory this team is ready to challenge again, certainly in Spain, even if not yet with the richest and most powerful clubs in Europe.
After the final days of Ronald Koeman, who increasingly saw the club’s crippling debts as an excuse for resignation and pessimism over poor results, Xavi has transformed the mood.
He took over with Barca lying ninth and they now sit third. They have not lost since December and have won their last four in a row, scoring 14 goals in the process.
Ousmane Dembele is reintegrated and revived. Pedri and Gavi have been superb. Even fringe players like Memphis Depay, Riqui Puig and Luuk de Jong have contributed.
The January signings have been decisive too, with Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Ferran Torres scoring 11 goals between them since the end of the transfer window.
“Auba has been a gift from heaven,” Xavi said last weekend.
If La Liga began on January 1, Barcelona would be top, which prompts the question: where would they be if Xavi had been appointed sooner?
Before Xavi’s first game on the bench back in November, Barca drew to Celta Vigo and Alaves, after losing to Rayo Vallecano. If they had won even just two of those, the title race might now be salvageable.
ADDIS ABABA (XINHUA) – The African Union (AU) has convened a high-level continental forum on unconstitutional changes of government in Africa, focussing on finding solutions in addressing the resurgence of unconstitutional changes of government in Africa.
The Reflection Forum on Unconstitutional Changes of Government, which was held from March 15 to 17 in Accra, Ghana’s capital, envisaged continental response for the resurgence of unconstitutional changes of government in Africa, shared perspective on Africa’s governance deficits, the AU said in a statement on Thursday.
Ghanaian President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo said while addressing the forum that “coups have never been and will never be the solution to Africa’s problems”, as he emphasised the need for effective deterrence, bold actions and adequate preventive measures.
“This Forum offers a platform to engage in deliberations on a disturbing development on the continent – unconstitutional changes in governments in Africa,” the AU statement quoted Akufo-Addo as saying.
AU Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security Bankole Adeoye underscored that the high-level forum will have an eye on some of the aspirations of the AU’s 50-year continental development Agenda 2063.
