Weekend Box: Russia’s Last Man Squatting, A Perfect Eleven & more
Welcome to The Weekend Box, Audley’s weekly round-up of interesting or obscure political, business and cultural news from around the world.
Image credit/Presidential Executive Office of Russia/License
RUSSIA’S LAST MAN SQUATTING IN AUS
It’s been quite the week for Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation. Along with facing an internal mutiny at home, the Russian diplomatic core in Australia faced eviction. One delegate in particular has stolen the headlines by turning to desperate measures in an attempt to keep ownership of their new embassy HQ.
On June 15th, the Australian government introduced legislation to end the Russian Federation’s 15-year lease on a piece of land situated 400m from the Parliament House in New South Wales; once ear-marked for the new Russian embassy. Russia has held the lease for the land since 2008 but had not yet built its new centre, after reports building works were taking much longer than expected.
The current Russian embassy is reportedly a ‘cramped building’ on the outskirts of Canberra. However modest the dwellings, they would appear far more lavish than those taken up by the Russian delegate on the proposed new site, who chose to squat in a portable cabin for 7 days on the disputed land.
Despite the Australian police initially having difficulty removing the squatter due to his diplomatic immunity, on Monday the lone diplomat vacated the land, with Russian representatives promising to challenge the decision in the High Court on ‘constitutional grounds’.
The Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese seemed relatively nonplussed about the whole affair, dismissing both the squatter and legal challenge by suggesting Russia was not in a position to discuss international law “given their rejection of it so consistently and so brazenly with their invasion of Ukraine.”
This is another fiasco the Russian Federation did not need, in a week where President Putin faced the strongest challenge in his 20 years of power in the form of a rebellion by Yevgney Prizgozhin’s Wagner Group (albeit one that lasted less than 24 hours).
Now the question remains of whether Ukraine, like Australia, will be able to use these cracks in the president’s armour to their advantage and evict the falling giant from his crumbling tower.
ELECTION LAW THEORY THROWN OUT OF COURT
On Tuesday, the US Supreme Court ruled on a decision relating to a congressional map in North Carolina. In doing so, the court may have saved democracy in America.
It was feared that if the court ruled in favour of North Carolina’s Supreme Court, it would officially legitimise a fringe reading of the US constitution that the state court was using to justify its decision. In doing so, the Supreme Court would have given state legislatures “a blank check to write election laws without oversight from state courts,” representing a massive shift in power towards the Republican Party who control the majority of legislatures in the US.
North Carolina’s Supreme Court had requested a ruling after it reversed its decision to reject a newly drawn map of its congressional districts, which had originally been thrown out as it was seen to have been designed for gerrymandering. The reversal came after the court flipped Republican in November last year.
To justify this decision to the Supreme Court, the state court used the ‘independent state legislature theory’. The ‘theory’ is based on two clauses of the constitution, the Presidential Electors Clause and the Elections Clause, which have traditionally been understood to subject election laws to the lawmaking processes of each state – its legislatures – as dictated by its constitution. The ‘independent state legislature theory’, however, interprets the clauses as giving legislatures “exclusive and near-absolute power to regulate federal elections.”
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ultimately found the North Carolina court’s case was moot. The outcome has been celebrated by civil rights groups, who argued that legitimising the ‘independent state legislature theory’ would make it easier “for rogue legislators to enact policies that suppress voters and subvert elections without adequate oversight from state court.”
IT’S JUST NOT CRICKET
A 317-page report into discrimination in English cricket was published on Tuesday. It made for distressing reading for anyone who cares about the reputation and standing of cricket in this country.
The report was compiled by the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC), which spent more than two years speaking to cricket players and institutions both professional and amateur. The ICEC was unequivocal in its finding that the sport in England and Wales has failed to ensure equal and fair treatment of everyone involved in the game at all levels.
Personal stories from cricketers of bullying, harassment and exclusion shared in the report were deeply upsetting. Cricket is meant to be about ‘fair play’ and polite conduct. But as the ICEC says, in far too many instances and for far too many people, it has been nothing of the sort.
For the England and Wales Cricket Board – the body that runs the game – this report is a candid and cutting compilation of its failures over many years.
And it is not just failing to deal with complaints of bullying and harassment properly, it is the fact little has been done by the authorities to counter the idea that cricket is the preserve of the privately educated white men. It is a reputational problem and ultimately a commercial one for cricket.
That is why the ICEC report recommends more investment and development for state school cricket and women’s cricket, together with action to counter the dropping participation in the sport among black Britons.
With so many sports and leisure activities competing for the public’s attention, unless cricket becomes much more welcoming and sheds its elitist image, its very sustainability will be under threat.
OFF THE SHELF VS BETTER HEALTH
This week the Welsh government announced restrictions on discounting unhealthy foods from next year, seeking to address a public health crisis where 60% of adults are over a healthy weight and over 25% of children are overweight or obese by the time they start school. The move is designed to help make healthier options more available, affordable, and appealing for the Welsh consumer, versus the processed foods high in fat, sugar, and salt that now dominate many people’s diets, especially those on the lowest incomes.
Brazilian nutrition scientist Carlos Monteiro first coined the term ‘ultra-processed foods’ (UPFs) while demonstrating the link between them and increasing obesity rates in Brazil. He has since developed the NOVA classification system to grade degrees of food processing, from unprocessed whole foods to UPFs: ‘industrial formulations’ made up entirely of substances extracted from other foods or ‘synthesised in laboratories’ and ‘hyper-palatable’ from the additives they contain.
The Washington Post have shown the comparative qualities of canned sweetcorn versus a corn chip: in the chip, a long series of processes, including ‘extrusion’ which effectively pre-digests the refined corn starch, removes original nutrients and fibres while adding other flavourings and textures. At a molecular level, the product has a degraded ‘food matrix’, which affects how our bodies absorb the compromised nutrients, leading to higher spikes in blood sugar levels while denying the gut essential fibres and slower release nutrients such as polyphenols.
Professor Tim Spector explains further in his book ‘Food for Life’ the pernicious effects of UPF-heavy diets: the gut microbiome loses essential pre- and pro-biotic nutrients and diversity, while UPFs’ chemical compounds fool our systems into wanting more of the same empty yet fattening, sugary, salty foods.
Such growing evidence in labs, reports, on waistlines, and in public health metrics of just how damaging these foods are when they largely replace whole foods has made UPFs a political challenge that governments worldwide are increasingly compelled to tackle.
A PERFECT ELEVEN
Summer holiday season fast approaches and, with it, frantic holiday planning as parents ponder how to fill the 8-week chasm between terms. Enter Which? which has spent what one can only imagine is a great deal of time searching the prices of different durations of package holidays. The result? 11-day package holidays can work to be over £1000 cheaper than 10-day sojourns.
The research found that due to a variety of factors including supply and demand and flight prices, if you’re willing to be flexible on dates and stay an additional night you could save your family money.
We’re all familiar with the package holiday from hell stories: non-existent flights, hotels miles from the advertised location, hundreds of pounds in unexpected additional costs. This ‘rare travel hack’ highlights the issue with package deals, which aren’t always the bargain they’re set out as. In 2021 the CMA warned package holiday companies to ‘respect the refund rights of holidaymakers ahead of the summer period’ after receiving 23,000 letters from customers whose holidays were cancelled thanks to Covid with no refund options.
At the other end of the holiday spectrum, Airbnb have listed the pink mansion from the impending Barbie movie on its site. Four lucky guests will win a free night, while bookings open on 17 July for paying guests. With ‘Ken’ as your host, guests can enjoy Barbie’s cowboy themed bedroom, raid the couple’s wardrobes and borrow their roller skates and surfboards for the full effect. As Ken explains in the listing, ‘There’s so much stuff to do – some days, I’m not sure what to do first. I mean, do you catch waves before or after firing up the grill? And how do you know when to visit the horses?”
If that’s a bit much, the film directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling will be released in cinemas on 21 July. This may be a quicker (and cheaper) way to get your pink fix.
And that’s it for this week. I hope you found something of interest that you might want to delve into further. If so, please get in touch at cwilkins@audleyadvisors.com.
For now, that’s The Weekend Box officially closed.