Tabloid shock: Fashionista in Somalia

If you think the fuss over the cost of Adidas rugby jerseys and Telecom’s abstain for the All Blacks campaign confirms the triumph of trivia, think again.

In the home of phone hacking by the media, the controversy du jour is the Daily Mail’s dispatch of a fashion writer to check out the aid camps in Kenya and Somalia.

In a story reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, the newspaper that exposed the phone-hacking scandal is appalled the Daily Mail sent Liz Jones, 52, who

…has been on a number of previous trips to report back on the suffering of others, including one to Bangladesh, which resulted in an article illustrated with a grinning Jones posing like a model in front of her suffering subjects… But even if she is motivated, writes well and is capable of grasping wider issues, isn't it grotesque to send someone who represents the worst excesses of the western fashion industry's obsession with dieting and appearance into situations where people are struggling to survive?

Well, Ms Jones has responded with a highly illustrated column that must have had her critics choking on their words:

What on earth is a woman like me — who has spent a lifetime working in the fashion world, and who has long written about her own battles with her weight, her image, her debts — doing in a place like this, where the cost of my recent facelift  would feed, what, a thousand children for a year?

Jolie’s next in line
After answering that indulgent question at length, Ms Jones describes visits to various camps and their wretched “beneficiaries” – most of whom are young mothers who have several children they can’t feed – before turning to the unreal world of aid workers, who wash down their 4WDs each night.

Talk in the UN High Commission for Refugees bar that night is of the extreme demands of the press, celebrities and dignitaries who are clamouring to come here. Kristin Davis caused a stir here a week or so ago and Angelina Jolie is expected soon. The most high-maintenance VIP so far has been the President of Kenya. He required a red carpet and an orchestra.

An irony is that a fake Twitter account in Jones’ name raised £12,000 in a few hours for the UK relief fund, which has reached £45 million in just four weeks.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports the UN's World Food Programme is investigating allegations that thousands of sacks of grain and other supplies intended for famine victims have been stolen by unscrupulous businessmen and then sold on the open market for a profit.

That’s on top of what aid organsations are already dealing with: threats from freelance gunmen and Islamist gangs, diseases such as cholera, malaria and measles, and the needs of hundreds of thousands of starving children.

Is that a franc in your pocket?
The sturdy, well-heeled citizens of Switzerland are not waiting to see if the central bank can hatch a scheme to bring down the value of the franc. As the euro and the US submit to mountains of sovereign debt, the franc has become the world’s most valuable currency.

But it has turned the notoriously patriotic Swiss into a nation of international shoppers. Spiegel Online reports the border town of Lörrach in Germany is experiencing a boom with its retailers saying revenue is up 35% since early August.

The provincial community of just 48,000 in the tri-border region with France and Switzerland has become a shopping stronghold. Not a single storefront stands empty in the city center, and one property for rent recently had more than 30 interested parties, Mayor Marion Dammann says.

Everyday products such as deodorant and olive oil now cost up to three times as much in Switzerland as they do on German shelves.

But the boom in Lörrach and other German border cities has a downside – Swiss merchants are suffering. Their stores are empty, particularly on weekends, as customers go deal-hunting in Germany, France and Italy.

Obama and The Wall
Follow-ups on President Obama and the anniversary of the Berlin Wall bring new perspectives to a couple of last week’s items.

The left-wing paper Junge Welt (Young World) has shocked Germans with a list of the Wall’s positive achievements. According to Spiegel Online, they include "28 years of securing peace in Europe," "28 years without German soldiers taking part in wars" and "28 years of childcare provision through kindergartens."

Junge Welt praised the alleged absence in the GDR of unemployment, homelessness, neo-Nazi election campaigning and hedge funds, as well as the universal education and health care. It also praised elements of East German culture such as "Club Cola" and nudism with Spiegel noting list,

…which appears to be at least partially tongue-in-cheek, also praised "28 years of lusty sex" without the influences of German author Charlotte Roche's bestselling erotic novel Wetlands or the "specialist knowledge" of the mass-circulation newspaper Bild.

The final words go to Norman Podhoretz, one of the founders of the neo-conservative movement, who has leapt to the defence of President Obama from his critics of both left and right.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Podhoretz says Obama has not changed:

…he imagines that he is helping America to repent of its many sins and to become a different and better country. But I emphatically agree with [Rush] Limbaugh and [Thomas] Sowell about this president's attitude toward America as it exists and as the Founding Fathers intended it.

That is why my own answer to the question, "What Happened to Obama?" is that nothing happened to him. He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president, and it is this rather than inexperience or incompetence or weakness or stupidity that accounts for the richly deserved failure both at home and abroad of the policies stemming from that reprehensible cast of mind.