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Recognition of tobacco smoke's destructive health effects has diminished social acceptance of smoking and led to extensive restrictions on lighting up in public spaces, tobacco advertising bans, anti-smoking campaigns and higher cigarette taxes. So tobacco companies have pivoted to "safer," smoke-free alternatives such as e-cigarettes, heated tobacco products and nicotine pouches.
Now they're being squeezed on this front as well. In Germany, for instance, a ban on outdoor advertising of heated tobacco products went into effect on January 1, forcing the brands IQOS by Philip Morris International (PMI) and British American Tobacco's (BAT) glo from billboards and advertising columns. Outdoor advertising of e-cigarettes is prohibited beginning in 2024.
The tobacco companies are fighting back. Alexander Nussbaum, head of scientific and medical affairs for PMI in Germany, argues that since many smokers are unable or unwilling to quit smoking completely, it would be better if they switched to smoke-free alternatives such as heated tobacco products. Broad public information on these products is therefore necessary.
"Using e-cigarettes or heated tobacco products has a lower potential for harm than continuing to smoke," he says. "There's still no widespread awareness of this."
PMI has a substantial economic interest in "heat-not-burn" products, which along with e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches are part of an expensive change of tack by the company. In recent years it has invested $9 billion in "reduced-risk products" (RRPs) in order to secure a profitable line of future business as sales of regular cigarettes face ever stricter legal restrictions.
And intensive street advertising of IQOS is aimed at helping to make it a mass-market brand.
The German Association of the Tobacco Industry and New Products (BVTE) expresses certainty that the market share of these products will continue to grow. The only question is how rapid the growth will be, according to BVTE General Manager Jan Mücke, who calls the ban on outdoor advertising of heated tobacco products "a major political mistake."
The tobacco industry has ambitious goals for its heated tobacco products. PMI hopes to have more than 40 million IQOS users worldwide by 2025, more than double the current number. In Germany there are 670,000 users, says PMI, which puts the brand's share of the German tobacco market at 3.7%, 0.9% more than in autumn 2021.
PMI rival BAT is touting a "transformation" too, and aims to jack up sales of glo. "The pace at which adult smokers are switching to these alternatives continues to pick up," a company spokeswoman says.
PMI in Germany is using a recent survey that it commissioned, conducted by the Nuremburg-based market research institute GfK, to support its argument that smokers should be better educated about "the role of tobacco combustion as the primary cause of smoking-related diseases."
The survey, among 1,000 adult cigarette smokers in Germany, found that 54% of them didn't want to quit, 17% wanted to quit in principle but didn't know when they'd try, and 11% wanted to quit at all costs but hadn't thought about when. Among the 29% who wanted to stop smoking and had set a timeframe, only 3% were planning to quit within a month.
The older the smokers were, the less motivated they were to stop.
Since many cigarette smokers can't be persuaded to give up tobacco, Nussbaum says, switching to smoke-free tobacco products - which also contain the addictive chemical compound nicotine - would at least reduce the harm they do to their bodies.
Addiction researchers are highly critical of PMI's argumentation. "The tobacco industry is presenting itself as a problem solver, but it caused the problem of countless cancer deaths itself," remarks epidemiologist Daniel Kotz.
The industry wants to create the impression that it's putting a product for health protection on the market, he says, which is "hypocritical and misleading." What it really wants, he goes on, is to bind customers to another nicotine product.
Kotz is director of the government-funded German Study on Tobacco Use (DEBRA). According to the study, 0.3% of the German population aged 14 years and older used heated tobacco products in 2021, 0.1% more than in 2020. Kotz expects figures for 2022 to show a slight increase as well.
Dr Katrin Schaller, head of the cancer prevention department of the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ), warns against portraying heated tobacco products as "good alternatives."
"They're not good - they're risky," she asserts, and says smokers should be supported in efforts to quit smoking and "not guided towards the next harmful, risky product." What's more, she adds, the long-term health effects of heated tobacco products are unclear because long-term studies on them have yet to be done.
The German federal government's commissioner for drug and addiction policy, Burkhard Blienert, also expresses disapproval of heated tobacco products. While it's true they contain fewer toxic substances than tobacco cigarettes, he says, "they're still harmful to health."
His message to smokers is to "stop completely if at all possible" and make use of professional help and support if needed.
Two people were killed and five injured in a knife attack on a train from Kiel to Hamburg in northern Germany on Wednesday, Schleswig-Holstein's Interior Minister Sabine Sütterlin-Waack told dpa.
A man attacked passengers with a knife shortly before 3 pm (1400 GMT), before the train arrived at Brokstedt station, police said earlier.
Police officers arrested the suspected attacker shortly afterwards in Brokstedt. The motive was not clear.
The railway station was closed off by police.
Brokstedt is a small community about 60 kilometres north of Hamburg in the state of Schleswig-Holstein.
Members of the Coast Guard engage in search and rescue operation in waters 148.2 kilometres southeast of the city of Seogwipo on Jeju Island after Jin Tian, a Hong Kong-registered cargo ship carrying 22 crew members, sank off the southern island. -/YNA/dpa
At least 14 crew members have been rescued after a cargo ship sunk in the sea between South Korea and Japan, a spokesperson for the South Korean cost guard said on Wednesday.
However it was unclear how many of the rescued crew were still alive, he said. South Korean news agency Yonhap reported that at least 11 were unconscious when rescued.
The ship sent a distress call early on Wednesday morning about 150 kilometres south-east off the South Korean island of Jeju, Yonhap reported. When the coast guard reached the location, the vessel had already sunk. The cause of the incident was initially unclear.
According to preliminary information, 22 people had been aboard the 6,551-ton freighter that was sailing under the flag of Hong Kong, transporting timber.
Six of the crew members were pulled out of the water by the South Korean coast guard while the rest was rescued by the Japanese coast guard as well as civilian vessels, according to the spokesperson.
Sweden cannot count on Turkey's support for joining NATO after a right-wing extremist politician burned a copy of the Koran in Stockholm, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Monday.
"If you don't show respect for the Turkish Republic or the religious beliefs of Muslims, then you can't get any support from us in terms of NATO," Erdogan said in Ankara.
Sweden needs Turkey's approval to become a member of NATO. But tensions between the two countries have risen in recent weeks, stalling Stockholm's bid.
The latest setback comes after a small protest in the Swedish capital on Saturday led by Rasmus Paldudan, a politician and anti-Islam activist from Denmark.
Swedish media said a a copy of the holy book of Islam was burned near the Turkish Embassy.
The stunt was a "disgrace," Erdogan said.
Sweden and neighbouring Finland applied for NATO membership in May last year in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
All 30 NATO members must ratify the bids. Only Turkey and Hungary have yet to approve the expansion.
Turkey accuses Sweden of supporting groups which Ankara considers terrorists, including Kurdish insurgents and a group blamed for a failed military coup in 2016. It is demanding the extradition of a number of people.
Tensions between Stockholm and Ankara have been running especially high for two weeks since a protest in which an effigy of Erdoğan was hanged from its feet in Stockholm.
Green Anole lizards were among the kinds scientists studied. This male green anole lizard flares his throat fan in a backyard. The male anole uses this technique to protect his territory and attract a mate. Bob Karp/ZUMA Press Wire/dpa
Alongside runs on hot chocolate and churros, cold-stunned iguanas dropping from trees are one of South Florida’s most iconic winter traditions.
When it gets cold, videos of the reptiles sprawled on the ground pop up all over social media, including during the recent Christmas cold snap that plunged temperatures into the 40s near Miami.
But ongoing research suggests Florida’s falling iguana phenomenon could be rarer in the future — both due to climbing global temperatures from unchecked climate change and a shift in cold hardiness in the lizards themselves. That’s right, the big lizards (cue the sci fi movie music) appear to be adapting.
That’s a bummer for anyone hoping that the latest prolonged dip into colder temperatures could help knock back the rapidly growing population of exotic reptiles that rank among the state’s most damaging invasive creatures.
Iguanas are more than a garden and landscape-chomping nuisance in South Florida. They can carry infectious bacteria like Salmonella, devour endangered plants and animals and undermine seawalls and canal banks. On at least one recent occasion, a rogue iguana in search of a snack also knocked out power to an entire city. It wasn’t the first time one had fried an electrical system.
When temperatures drop, cold-blooded reptiles like iguanas lose the ability to control their muscles, sending them raining down from the trees they call home or unable to respond to the pokes and prods from curious humans. Once they warm up, they typically snap out of their stupor. But prolonged exposure or freezing temperatures can be fatal and biologists have long pointed to frigid snaps as the only realistic hope for curbing the population boom. Recent research suggests it may need to get a lot colder than it did last week. How much and how long is a still-unanswered question.
James Stroud, a postdoctoral research associate at Washington University in St. Louis, found that most of South Florida’s most common lizard species are able to withstand slightly lower temperatures than they could even just four years earlier — a drop of about 2 degrees Fahrenheit, according to their 2020 paper published in the journal Biology Letters.
“What we saw is every one of these different types of lizards, they could now move at much colder temperatures than they did before,” he said.
For professional iguana hunter Steve Kavashansky, that checks out.
Speaking from Miami Beach, where his company, Iguana Busters, has one of several contracts to eradicate the invasive reptiles, Kavashansky said he’s getting fewer calls after a cold snap to deal with dead or stunned iguanas.
“Cooler weather that in years past would have stunned the iguanas, we’re not seeing that now,” he said. “We used to get calls all the time. Over the years we’ve seen those calls decrease because they’re getting acclimated.”
Kavashansky said he’s also heard reports of iguanas appearing as far north as Orlando, which could validate researchers’ theory that iguana populations may move north as they get used to slightly colder temperatures.
Stroud’s study found the magic number for all seven species they looked at was about 44 degrees Fahrenheit. At that point, most South Florida lizards freeze up.
Discovering that number involved packing lizards into an ice-filled cooler and monitoring their internal body temperature over the hour or so it took to cool them down. For the original 2020 study, the coolers were too small for iguanas, so they weren’t included, but Stroud said that they’ve since upgraded to iguana-sized coolers and folded the reptiles into their research.
After the lizards are revived in warmer temperatures, they’re tagged and released back into the wilds of Fairchild Botanical Garden so Stroud and his team can run similar tests on them in the future.
But because researchers didn’t kill them, they’re not sure exactly what kind of cold is lethal for lizards.
“That’s one of the biggest questions we don’t know. We don’t know if it’s prolonged exposure to these temperatures that’s more harmful or one big cold snap,” he said.
The other outstanding questions in Stroud’s ongoing research are how and why, exactly, are these lizards adapting to the cold?
Christian Cox, an assistant professor of evolutionary biology at Florida International University, said the explanation could fall into one of two categories or a combination of both.
One likely explanation could be acclimation, that the animals are simply learning to adapt to their environment and undergoing an individual change. Cox likened it to how people who move to higher altitude places like Denver get used to the environment in a few short months.
On the other hand, the population could be evolving. As cold snaps winnow down the parts of the population that can’t survive them, there’s a possibility that the newer generations are evolving a hardiness to cold that their ancestors didn’t have.
For instance, in South Florida’s last serious cold snap in 2010, where temperatures dropped so low that ice formed on shallow water south of Florida City, iguanas and other invasive reptiles like the Burmese python, died off in droves. But an FWC study found the python population recovered quickly, dashing hopes that cold weather alone could contain the problematic snake’s exponential growth.
“What’s happening in Florida is really interesting because we have a bunch of species here that have already adapted to a new climate,” he said. “They’ve already gone through a filter that has allowed some species to become really well-established and it’ll be interesting to see how they continue to shift or hit the evolutionary wall.”
Cox is currently watching another type of lizard — the Panamanian slender anole — do just that.
To find out, his team plopped a bunch of lizards on the small islands created when the Chagras River valley was flooded to form the Panama Canal. Cox said these hilltops — now islands — are hotter and dryer than the anole’s usual habitat deep in the rainforest. Those conditions mimic what the population might see as the world warms from climate change.
Five years later, “we’re definitely finding evidence of acclimation and definitely seeing the potential for evolutionary change,” he said.
When temperatures drop, cold-blooded reptiles like iguanas lose the ability to control their muscles, sending them raining down from the trees they call home or unable to respond to the pokes and prods from curious humans. Soeren Stache/dpa
Scientists suspect iguana populations may move north as they get used to slightly colder temperatures. Marcos Pin/dpa
Like no game before it, "The Last of Us" tackled complex social issues in a gripping post-apocalyptic narrative. It's no wonder the game's adaptation for HBO is now one of the most hotly awaited series of 2023. Sony/dpa
Sony's landmark 2013 game "The Last of Us" didn't make it easy on players. But the difficulty curve was more emotional than technical, for the game delivered the zombie genre at its most heady, grief-stricken and intimate.
How it started: Grim.
Joel, a down-on-his-luck single dad, can't catch a break. Then comes a viral outburst that has all of Texas going mad trying to avoid flesh eaters, which sends him and his daughter on the run. Full credits haven't even rolled before the child doesn't make it — shot dead on government orders.
While there's no shortage of violence in the video game space, "The Last of Us" did it differently. Action was treated as something to be avoided; Joel's trigger hand would wobble, a reluctant shot in a world in which each close kill would come with suffering. In a genre where action and story were often disconnected — serious cinematic scenes against cartoonish violence — "The Last of Us" wanted to keep it real. Camera angles were often closely cropped, framing enemies — and infected humans — not as obstacles but as tragedies.
And it worked. The game went on to sell about 20 million copies for Sony's PlayStation consoles and spawned both a limited-run comic and a hit sequel. Now, "The Last of Us" is a hotly anticipated HBO series starring Pedro Pascal as Joel, the latest in a long line of prestigious bleak TV.
But the hype preceding the HBO series, which premiered Sunday, has less to do with the checkered past of video game adaptations or the pedigree of the show's co-creator, "Chernobyl" architect Craig Mazin. No, it's because "The Last of Us" always felt like a mission statement, a game that wanted to prove that big-budget action shooters — "AAA games" in industry speak — could not only have a sense of gravitas but could advance the medium in narrative, gameplay and representation. "The Last of Us" raised moral quandaries about choice, or the lack thereof, in interactive entertainment, questioned masculinity in games and ultimately proved to the industry that a gay teenage girl could be a protagonist in a genre overrun with tired machismo.
"What 'The Last of Us' did for US games is it showed that we could handle tremendous complexity in a narrative structure about social issues," says Jennifer deWinter, a game scholar, author and dean at the Illinois Institute of Technology. "And in an action game, a game historically made for the 'hardcore player,' 'The Last of Us' starts helping us rethink what we can do in AAA games."
Neil Druckmann, the game's writer and the show's co-creator, still speaks proudly of the way "The Last of Us" pushed boundaries, whether that was in its diversity or simply in its willingness to nudge players to feel the extremities of anguish.
"You almost never showed a kid dying in a video game," Druckmann says when asked about the game's difficult opening moments. "That was such a taboo thing. ... One thing 'Grand Theft Auto' doesn't have are kids in that world. But if we're going to tell a story about the love a parent has for their child, we have to deal with the worst fear a parent has, which is any sort of harm coming to their child, and realize that through that opening sequence. Our approach was, as much as we can, let's treat it as grounded as possible and as realistic as possible."
To Druckmann, 44, the story was personal. He began developing what would become "The Last of Us" while a master's student at Carnegie Mellon University. Long before pitching it to Sony-owned development studio Naughty Dog, at the time known best for its "Indiana Jones"-inspired "Uncharted" series, Druckmann had tried to spin the story into a comic.
"It was always about the sacrifices my parents have made," Druckmann, an Israeli immigrant, says. "As I got older, and came closer to making it as a game, I started thinking about having my own kids and the fear of raising a kid and what could happen. While making the game, my daughter was born, and that added another layer of complexity to how I approached those characters. There's something about living some of the experience that your characters have, to imbue it with more authenticity.
"Obviously," Druckmann continues, "I've never murdered a person, so I don't quite have that experience."
'This was a game wehadn't played'
After its harrowing beginning, "The Last of Us" — both the game and the HBO series — jumps 20 years into the future, where an even more hardened Joel has failed to process his grief over losing his daughter. This is when he meets Ellie, a 14-year-old he's hired to smuggle halfway across the country. Played by Bella Ramsey in the series, Ellie is bitten but not turned, and is seen as a potential key to a vaccine: a cure, at long last, for a broken world. This is when "The Last of Us" begins to shine, as tension often comes from an underutilized gameplay tactic: conversation.
"The Last of Us" was the rare game that sought to avoid action, letting Ellie pester Joel with questions about what it was like to be alive before the apocalypse. Did he frequent coffee shops? Did he ever stay in a fancy hotel? What kind of music was on his old cassettes? Depending on how one played, there could be as much as two hours between action sequences. At the time of its release, no major big-budget action game had been as patient.
Those moments, says Druckmann, heightened the game's anxiety.
"The clock is ticking," he says. "The longer you stay away from those core loops, the more frustrated the player might get, so you can only do these deviations for so long before you have to come back. 'The Last of Us' is an action game, and a lot of that action is violent, so the more we get away from it, there's a certain tension that starts building."
It was all in the name of fostering intimacy, both in the game's quiet moments and its savage ones, says Bruce Straley, the game's director and one of its key world builders. One of Straley's central directorial objectives is for the player never to set down the controller — that is, to avoid long cinematic scenes in which the player has nothing to do. "The Last of Us" has its share of those, but by and large they're unexpectedly brief and often interrupted with opportunities to guide the character or to initiate an optional conversation.
"The goal was pretty evolutionary," Straley says. "As Neil and I were talking about the world and the characters, there was an energy in the room between us as to what type of experience this had the possibility of creating. ... This was a game we hadn't played that we wanted to play. The concept of creating a relationship between two characters that evolves over the course of the game — that's fully playable — and that got the players more involved with those characters than any other game had before, that was really exciting for us."
As Joel and Ellie traversed a ravaged America, "The Last of Us" started to feel less like something that belonged to the zombie genre and more like a game about unprocessed trauma. Druckmann and Straley have cited Cormac McCarthy's demanding, world-weary post-apocalyptic novel "The Road," and revolutionary Japanese game "Ico," in which a horned boy must protect a young woman named Yorda, among their influences.
In "The Last of Us," Joel starts to see the world through the eyes of Ellie, and Ellie, who has never been out of militarized zones, often finds the beauty in ruins. Ellie zeros in on life and survivors rather than America's horrors, and the game starts to become one of hope as control shifts between Joel and Ellie. It also becomes two distinct character studies, building to a conclusion in which Joel is confronted with the reality of what may happen to Ellie if she becomes a lab rat.
This further adds to the game's pressure. Unlike a TV series or film, in "The Last of Us" game we're often confined to Joel or Ellie's point of view, depending on which character we are navigating at the time. As we propel them forward through the narrative, we acknowledge that they may be making choices we disagree with, even as we're the ones leading them in and out of obstacles. This is the beauty of interactive entertainment: dialogue with those characters whom we are steering through the world.
"'The Last of Us,' when it first came out, game scholars were like, 'It's still centering the male gaze and blah blah,'" says deWinter. "But when you compare it to one of its influences, which was 'Ico,' when you play 'Ico,' Yorda is a lump you drag around. She doesn't do anything. Ellie does things. Then you get to play her. ... It's such a different relationship. It's not one perspective. It was so different from 'Ico' and it had the moral ambiguity of 'The Walking Dead.'"
The HBO series deviates from the game in multiple ways. For one, it can center entire episodes around smaller characters in the game, such as one that focuses on gay survivalist Bill (Nick Offerman), a character that Druckmann gives credit to Straley and Mazin for fleshing out, Straley in the game and Mazin in the series. And, freed from the need for a major action sequence at a regular cadence, it can heighten intimate moments that even the most patient of games had to leave out.
"There's this concept art that we had when we were working on the game made by Hyoung Nam that I have hanging in my house," Druckmann says. "It's Joel and Ellie sitting by a campfire and laughing, and it was something I always wanted to put in the game but there was never a good spot for it. Just to stop the journey and have them talk. We get to do that in a few points in the season. We get to explore the downbeats of these characters and we get to flesh them out in ways we couldn't in the game."
'They hated it'
"The Last of Us" was no sure bet. In fact, early reaction, as Druckmann recalls of one marketing focus group, was strongly negative.
"We had the concept for the story, and some concept art, and the way it works is you show it to some gamers that they poll, and they respond to it," he says. "They hated it. They're like, 'I have to escort a 14-year-old girl across the country? My sister is 14 and she's annoying. I don't want to play a game like that.' The benefit of working at PlayStation and Naughty Dog is that PlayStation has complete trust in us. At Naughty Dog, we could look at the marketing focus group and ignore it, but it would have been a challenge to get those people to try the game. I think now things are very different."
The studio support was always there, says Asad Qizilbash, the head of PlayStation Productions, who was working in Sony's marketing department when "The Last of Us" was released. "When they pitched it, I was absolutely enamored," Qizilbash says. "I remember we worked with Neil and everyone at Naughty Dog to do some research on how to best talk about this. Very early on, we were clear to not label this a zombie game. At that time, there was zombie fatigue, and it really wasn't. It was a heartfelt story that happened to be in a post-apocalyptic world."
That's not to say that the game wasn't violent. But it drew inspiration for that violence from award-winning literature and films as much as from its video game predecessors.
"I invited Neil to see 'No Country for Old Men,' and I remember walking out of the theater and telling him, breathlessly, 'I've never played a game that had that kind of tension in it before,'" Straley says. "The street fight in 'No Country' was one of the most intense fights I had seen on film, and I wondered if you could play something that had that level of groundedness to it, that intensity. There's something primal to having the controller in your hand and being in the world. Most fighting games at the time had pulled-out cameras where you saw hordes of 20-30 (non-playable characters) that you just plow through."
Straley's relationship with Sony and Naughty Dog has since become strained. Straley left Naughty Dog not long after the release of 2016's "Uncharted 4: A Thief's End," before HBO was involved in a "Last of Us" series, and is not credited on the HBO series. He is working these days on building his own studio, Wildflower Interactive. He says the lack of credit has made him think more about workers' rights in the video game space. "It's an argument for unionization that someone who was part of the co-creation of that world and those characters isn't getting a credit or a nickel for the work they put into it," he says. "Maybe we need unions in the video game industry to be able to protect creators." HBO and Sony declined to comment on the record.
Still, Straley remains a believer in the relevance of "The Last of Us." If anything, recent history has him thinking the game could have been even darker.
"We weren't real enough about the level of anxiety and tension that all of the characters would have had in that world," Straley says. "If you go back to those early days of the pandemic — we're not even talking about infected breaking through your front window and chewing your face off; this is just the news that there's the possibility that you could get horribly ill, possibly die from this virus — there's so much trauma from living through that, that I think the world of 'The Last of Us' would have had way more broken characters. I think people hold it together pretty well for the world that we put them in, compared to what I know about living through a pandemic."
What made "The Last of Us" a lasting success, however, is that it coupled the trauma with a certain optimism: "I'm an immigrant," says Druckmann, who grew up on the West Bank, "and to me, 'The Last of Us' is a love letter to what I love about this country.
"That's why you see such beautiful landscapes. It was important to me to express the beauty of what I see in this country. There's a lot to criticize about the United States, and we won't get into that in this interview, but America's superpower is this melting pot, in that everywhere you look you see a different person from a different walk of life — a different political spectrum, race, identity. I think there's something beautiful about that. I think 'The Last of Us,' for it to be authentic to take place in the United States, has to explore all those kinds of characters."
Critics appear cautiously optimistic that HBO's 2023 "The Last of Us" series could be the first adaptation of a game to live up to its original. HBO Max/dpa
Joel and Ellie have to cross a completely devastated country together in "The Last of Us". Sony Computer Entertainment/dpa
"The Last of Us Part 2" later brought back the same zombies turned into grotesque monsters by a mushroom infection. Sony Computer Entertainment/dpa
World Economic Forum chairman Klaus Schwab speaks in the Global Collaboration Village session at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2023 in Davos. Walter Duerst/World Economic Forum/dpa
One the greatest challenges facing humanity is the "deep societal fragmentation" tearing countries and peoples apart, said World Economic Forum chairman Klaus Schwab on Tuesday.
"At the beginning of this year we are confronted with unprecedented and multiple challenges," Schwab warned in his opening address to the hundreds of business and government leaders assembled at the elite conclave he founded in Davos, Switzerland.
The 84-year-old argued the global economy was undergoing a "deep transformation" due to the lasting scars of the Covid-19 pandemic and cautioned the world could be turning into "a messy patchwork of powers."
He said he hoped Davos could help halt the "trend toward increased fragmentation and confrontation."
After two years of Covid-19 disruptions, the annual meeting returned to its long-established January programme in the Swiss Alps after going online in 2021 and then holding an untraditional springtime slot last year.
The high-end ski resort of Davos has been turned into a sea of security checkpoints while police forces drawn from across Switzerland have flooded the streets and helicopters circle overhead.
The theme of the 53rd meeting is "Cooperation in a Fragmented World."
Highlights of Tuesday's programme include a speech by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and an address by Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska.
Julie Sweet (R), Chair and Chief Executive Officer of Accenture company, and World Economic Forum chairman Klaus Schwab speak in the Global Collaboration Village session at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2023 in Davos. Walter Duerst/World Economic Forum/dpa
The coffin of the former King of Greece, Constantine II, is carried in a procession to the Metropolitan Cathedral of Athens for the funeral service. Socrates Baltagiannis/dpa
Thousands of Greeks and almost all the royal houses of Europe and other members of the nobilty said farewell to Greece's deceased former king Constantine II in Athens on Monday.
Thousands of people gathered around the Orthodox cathedral in the centre of Athens to pay their last respects to the former king.
As the coffin was carried out of the cathedral after the funeral service, many people sang the Greek national anthem, as was broadcast on television.
The conservative government led by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis decided that, since the monarchy in Greece was abolished by referendum in 1974, Constantine II would be buried as a private citizen,
The flags were not flown at half-mast and there were no military honours as is customary at funerals of former heads of state in Greece.
Members of the nobilty from 11 countries attended the funeral service. The royal couples of Denmark, Spain, Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands were sighted. Britain was represented by King Charles III' sister, Princess Anne.
Numerous heirs to the throne as well as other nobles from Luxembourg, Monaco and members of former royal houses of Europe such as Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria also attended the funeral service, state radio reported.
Spanish royal mother Sofia and Spain's ex-king Juan Carlos also met at the funeral service. The two have become estranged after numerous financial scandals and extramarital affairs by Juan Carlos, who now lives in exile. As Greek television showed, the two barely exchanged a word on Monday and hardly looked at each other at all. They were last photographed together in mid-September 2022 at the funeral service of Britain's queen Elizabeth II.
Sofia is the sister of Constantine II, who married Juan Carlos in 1962.
For the conservative government in Athens, the funeral service and the burial were a political balancing act. Since parliamentary elections have to be held in Greece by July at the latest, Mitsotakis did not want to anger voters from the political centre, who do not want to know anything about the royal family. That is why Constantine II was buried as a private citizen.
At the same time, however, Mitsotakis allowed the funeral service to take place in Athens Cathedral, where all funerals of politically important personalities from the country take place. This satisfied at least some of the few remaining royalists in Greece.
The final burial was to take place at the summer palace of the former royal family in northern Athens. The graves of almost all of Constantine II's ancestors are located there.
Constantine II was the last king of Greece. When he ascended the throne in 1964 at the age of 23, he was one of the youngest monarchs in Europe.
The then inexperienced young man quickly became embroiled in disputes with the political leadership and made a politically fatal mistake when a military group staged a coup in Greece on April 21, 1967: he allowed himself to be photographed with the putschists and approved the formation of a military government by signature.
Many Greeks have never forgiven him for this. After the restoration of democracy, the monarchy in Greece was abolished in December 1974.
Constantine II died on January 10 at the age of 82. The former monarch's health had deteriorated abruptly after a stroke.
Prince Albert II of Monaco (R) arrives to attend the funeral of the former King of Greece, Constantine II, at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Athens. Socrates Baltagiannis/dpa
Philip and Matilda of Belgium arrive at the funeral of the former King of Greece, Constantine II, at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Athens. Raúl Terrel/EUROPA PRESS/dpa
King Felipe of Spain (L) and Queen Letizia arrive at the funeral of the former King of Greece, Constantine II, at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Athens. Raúl Terrel/EUROPA PRESS/dpa
Anne, Princess Royal of England (C) arrives at the funeral of the former King of Greece, Constantine II, at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Athens. Raúl Terrel/EUROPA PRESS/dpa
People watch as rescuers search for survivors at an apartment block hit by Russian rockets during a massive missile attack on Dnipro. -/Ukrinform/dpa
The Kremlin has rejected blame for dozens of civilian deaths after missiles attacks destroyed an apartment block in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro.
"Russia's armed forces are not attacking residential buildings or objects of civilian infrastructure," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday, according to the Russian state news agency.
The attack on Dnipro, in the Dnipropetrovsk region, was the largest of several Russian attacks over the weekend. At least 40 people were killed, including at least three children, Ukrainian authorities said as of noon on Monday.
Dozens more people remain missing in the rubble in sub-freezing weather.
Despite Moscow's claims that it has only attacking military targets, Russian shells have repeatedly killed many civilians throughout the Russian invasion which was first launched in February of last year.
Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, placed blame for the "tragedy" over the weekend on Ukraine's air defences and contended that comments from Ukrainian officials themselves supported that claim.
Peskov was apparently alluding to remarks by Oleksii Arestovych, an advisor in the Ukrainian presidential office, who said in a live online broadcast shortly after the attacks on Saturday that the missile "was shot down and fell on the entrance to the building."
Arestovych, however, later said he was only speculating about a potential version of events that had not yet been investigated.
The Ukrainian Air Force has stated that it was in no position to intercept missiles of the type that struck the apartment block.
Peskov on Monday also criticized Britain's announcement that it would provide Ukraine with 14 Challenger 2 main battle tanks for its war effort.
"We take it very negatively," Peskov said of the British decision.
Tens of thousands of people demonstrated in Tel Aviv against Israel's right-wing government under Benjamin Netanyahu.
The protests were mainly focused on legal reforms planned by Justice Minister Yariv Levin that will deliberately weaken the judicial system.
Saturday's demonstration was the largest so far against the new government that was sworn in at the end of December. Protests were also held in Haifa and Jerusalem.
The Tel Aviv rally, which drew some 80,000 people according to reports, began in the central square in front of the Habima National Theatre.
The demonstrators then marched through the streets chanting "democracy" and waving blue and white Israeli flags. One poster read, "the state is not your toy."
Netanyahu's government plans dramatic court reforms. Levin wants to make it possible for a majority in parliament to overrule the Supreme Court's decisions.
He also wants to change the composition of the body that appoints judges.
He has accused the Supreme Court of excessive interference in political decisions in the past.
On Thursday, Esther Hayut, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, warned of a "fatal blow" to judicial independence in an uncharacteristically sharply-worded speech.
She said the planned reforms would completely distort Israel's democratic identity. Levin accused her of siding with the opposition.
Israel's far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, announced a crackdown on demonstrators at the beginning of the week.
Several of the ministers in Netanyahu's new religiously conservative Cabinet are ultra-nationalists and the government is the most far-right Israel has ever had.
A police officer escorts an arrested supporter of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro after storming the government headquarters Palacio do Planalto. Angry Bolsonaro supporters had stormed yesterday the Congress, the Supreme Court and the Palacio do Planalto, the seat of government, causing significant damage to the buildings. Matheus Alves/dpa
More than 700 suspects are still in custody after radical supporters of far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro stormed Brazil's main government buildings on Sunday, and authorities are ramping up security measures to prevent further such riots.
The thousands of rioters who attacked Brazil's Congress, Supreme Court and presidential palace in Brasília refuse to acknowledge Bolsonaro's defeat to leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was sworn in as president a week ago.
The penitentiary administration of the capital district published the names of 763 arrested on Wednesday.
They had been detained both directly after the attacks and when a tent camp of Bolsonaro supporters was broken up outside the armed forces headquarters in the capital on Tuesday.
It was initially unclear whether the list that has now been published includes all the suspects who remain in custody.
In total, police had arrested at least 1,500 people. Several hundred people arrested directly during the riots were taken to various prisons, and around 1,200 Bolsonaro supporters from the protest camp were taken to the Federal Police Academy to have their personal details ascertained.
Afterwards, however, many people such as mothers of small children and elderly people were released.
Meanwhile authorities have ramped up security measures in Brasília to prevent potential further actions by Bolsonaro supporters.
"A repeat of the [January 8] events is out of the question," said the head of security in the capital district, Ricardo Cappelli, on Brazilian television on Wednesday.
In future, the entire police force would be mobilized in case of possible seditious acts, he said.
"The esplanade of the ministries is already closed to car traffic. There will be barriers, roadblocks and controls," Cappelli continued.
Bolsonaro supporters had called for a "mega-demonstration to regain power" in all state capitals of Brazil on Wednesday evening.
Meanwhile an overwhelming majority of Brazilians, 93%, condemn Sunday's attacks on the government sites in the capital, a survey by the Datafolha polling institute found.
Only 3% of those questioned supported the riots, according to the survey.
During the violence in Brasília, Bolsonaro's supporters ransacked the National Congress building before directing their rage toward the nearby Supreme Court and the presidential Planalto Palace. It took security forces several hours to regain control of the area.
Soldiers and security forces clear a camp of former Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro supporters in front of the army headquarters. Angry Bolsonaro supporters had stormed yesterday the Congress, the Supreme Court and the Palacio do Planalto, the seat of government, causing significant damage to the buildings. Marcello Casal/Agencia Brazil/dpa
A supporter of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro leaves a camp in front of the army headquarters. Angry Bolsonaro supporters had stormed yesterday the Congress, the Supreme Court and the Palacio do Planalto, the seat of government, causing significant damage to the buildings. Isabella Finholdt/dpa
Supporters of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro who refuse to believe he lost last year's election stormed the National Congress building and other government sites in the capital Brasília on Sunday.
They smashed the windows on the façade of the Congress building and stormed through the entrance hall, as shown on Brazilian television channels.
Hundreds of protesters had earlier advanced onto the grounds of the parliament, tearing down road blocks and pushing past police officers to finally reach the roof of the building.
Police used pepper spray and stun grenades but were unable to stop the rampage of the radical supporters of the former far-right leader. Some sat at the desks of parliament members.
"All vandals will be found and punished," left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has only been office for a week, said. "We will also find out who financed them."
By decree, Bolsonaro's successor ordered the federal government to take responsibility for public security in Brasília.
After the attack on Congress, Bolsonaro supporters moved to the Supreme Court. They broke windows there and entered the lobby, the news portal G1 reported. Later, they entered the Palácio do Planalto, the official workplace of the president, where they could be seen on television waving Brazilian flags running through hallways and offices.
The Supreme Court acted as a check on Bolsonaro's increasingly authoritarian rule during his four-year term and the judges were despised by his hardcore defenders.
Bolsonaro lost to Lula in the run-off election last October and left office at the turn of the year. He had never explicitly acknowledged his electoral defeat.
Radical Bolsonaro supporters had already protested repeatedly against Lula's victory after the election and called on the country's armed forces to stage a military coup.
Contrary to custom, Bolsonaro did not attend the inauguration of his successor Lula on New Year's Day and flew to the US with his family.
Lula was not in Brasília at the time of the attack. He had traveled to the city of Araraquara to get an update on the response to severe storms in the region.
"I condemn these anti-democratic acts, which must be urgently punished with the severity of the law," Senate President Rodrigo Pacheco wrote on Twitter.
"I spoke on the phone with the governor of the Federal District, Ibaneis Rocha, with whom I am in constant contact. The governor informed me that the entire police apparatus is focused on bringing the situation under control."
As blame began to be traded over the failure of law enforcement to prevent the pro-Bolsonaro riots, Rocha said on Twitter that the head of security for the capital, Anderson Torres, has been sacked.
"I have decided to dismiss the security minister of the Federal District and, at the same time, I have sent all the security forces to the streets to arrest and punish those responsible," Rocha wrote.
The head of Lula's ruling Workers' Party (PT) said Brasilia's governor was in part to blame for the attack.
"The government of the Federal District was irresponsible in the face of the invasion of Brasília and the National Congress," wrote Gleisi Hoffmann on Twitter "This was an announced crime against democracy, against the will of the voters and for other interests. The governor and his security minister, a supporter of Bolsonaro, are responsible for everything that is happening."
Supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro clash with police officers in the capital. Supporters of former Brazilian President Bolsonaro have stormed the Congress and Supreme Court. Matheus Alves./dpa
Supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro clash with law enforcement officers in the capital, who form a chain behind barriers and fire tear gas grenades at the demonstrators. Supporters of former Brazilian President Bolsonaro have stormed the Congress and Supreme Court. Matheus Alves/dpa
Supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro storm the Congress in the capital. Supporters of former Brazilian President Bolsonaro have stormed the Congress and Supreme Court. Matheus Alves./dpa
Whether or not you use it, TikTok is having an impact on your life. From which writers and artists are talked about to the way apps are designed, TikTok's non-aesthetic is everywhere. Jens Kalaene/dpa
If Franz Kafka were to reconceive "The Metamorphosis" for our era, he might decide to ditch the novella in favor of a series of surreal TikToks — Gregor Samsa as eyes and mouth green-screened onto a picture of a roach jacked from the web.
Kafka is long gone. But thankfully, we have Kendria Bland, a Mississippi comedian who does a semiregular bit on TikTok about the travails of a pack of domestic roaches who like to party behind the refrigerator and sneak Popeyes when the humans aren't around. One defiant arthropod, Roachkeishiana, refuses to scuttle when the lights come on and crafts a wig out of hair she finds in the bathtub. "You know how many times I got stepped on?" she says with a haughty hair toss. "I'm still here."
The skits bring together a complex array of sight gags while winking at the tropes of 'hood films and sensationalist talk shows. But the production values couldn't be more lo-fi: Bland plays every role with different wigs and uses TikTok's editing tools to green-screen herself twerking on a kitchen table and fighting a pair of beetles. The crude special effects won't win her an Oscar, but on TikTok, perfection takes a backseat to wit.
Bland's comedy represents TikTok's promise. The app, which presents short-form videos in a frantic endless scroll, is governed by (famously creepy) algorithms that deliver posts to those deemed likely to enjoy them — which is how a one-minute cockroach skit by a comedian in Vossburg, Mississippi, can draw 1.3 million likes and be shared almost 90,000 times, including by me. (I am here for all cucaracha content.)
Despite — or rather because of — its ubiquity, TikTok finds itself in the crosshairs. The app has long raised concerns for the ways its parent company, the Chinese tech firm ByteDance, may employ the mountains of data it harvests from its users. Just before Christmas, a report unearthed evidence that ByteDance employees — already criticized for suppressing content such as Black Lives Matter posts — had taken an even more Orwellian turn, using location data to track journalists. Some university campuses in the US have banned the app from their networks and numerous states prohibit it on government devices. And a newly signed federal law has extended the ban to all government devices.
The alarm over security hasn't put a damper on the app. TikTok couldn't be more popular — especially among teenagers. It has had more than 3 billion downloads globally and its engagement rates outdo Facebook and Instagram. It is relentlessly sticky — addictive, one might say. And whatever its fate, it has already transformed culture: reshaping language, turning dance moves into social currency and making video into something we watch vertically rather than horizontally. When Noodle, a TikTok-famous pug died last month, obituaries proliferated across news media. The last pop concert you went to? Its set may have been inspired by the aesthetics of TikTok.
What are those aesthetics? An app as acutely atomized as TikTok can make those a challenge to articulate. So I have borrowed the format of "Notes on Camp," in which the ultimate high-low interpreter, Susan Sontag, attempts to pin down the elusive sensibility that is camp. "Many things in the world have not been named," she writes in the opener, "and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described."
So with apologies to Sontag, here are my notes on TikTok:
1. The TikTok aesthetic is an anti-aesthetic.
Instagram, with its historically square frame and vaguely cursive font (formally known as Instagram Sans), is the "Live Laugh Love" pillow of the social media apps — evoking high gloss and photogenic meals. Facebook's dull-blue interface feels so bureaucratic that critic Joanne McNeil once wrote that it looked "as if a government body were running it."
TikTok's design, by contrast, is almost no design. On a phone, practically the entire window is handed over to video, with controls discreetly laid out around the right and bottom edges. There are no brightly colored frames. TikTok's logo rarely even comes into view — usually only appearing when a video is shared.
This design reduces the presence of any one person or brand. Handles and avatars of content creators are so minimal they almost elude legibility. I am a fan of numerous creators on TikTok. I'd be hard-pressed to name more than a few of them.
2. TikTok's non-aesthetic promotes a perceived informality.
If Instagram is the airbrushed influencer, TikTok is the friend you talk trash with at the end of the day. TikTokkers face the camera in bathrobes and hair bonnets while sitting in their cars or standing before their bathroom mirror. A common convention is for people to film themselves while tucked into bed.
I follow Shabaz Ali (@shabazsays) for his biting duets (these allow TikTok users to place their own video side by side with another). In his bits, Ali offers running commentary on videos that feature ostentatious displays of wealth — such as a poolside doghouse or a heated driveway. In each post he is lying down, wrapped in a fuzzy fleece blanket. If you happen to be sprawled on a couch while scrolling TikTok (which I overwhelmingly am), the sensation is of being on a video call together, sharing an eye roll over the worst rich people habits.
Except that you're not.
3. On TikTok, you don't follow people, you follow an algorithm. Or, rather, the algorithm follows you.
Unlike other apps, TikTok doesn't require you to follow anybody in order to view videos. In fact, the app undermines the practice, shooting videos straight to the For You Page (aka the FYP), which greets you every time you log on. That feed is driven not by your careful selections but by algorithms.
In 2020, TikTok offered a cursory explainer on this recommendation system, which is drawn from your device's settings as well as your habits. "A strong indicator of interest, such as whether a user finishes watching a longer video from beginning to end," the post explains, "would receive greater weight than a weak indicator, such as whether the video's viewer and creator are both in the same country."
Alex Zhu, the Chinese tech entrepreneur who devised TikTok's progenitor, the lip-syncing app Musical.ly, has likened these algorithms to a set of "invisible hands." But the New Yorker's Jia Tolentino has a better metaphor: "Some social algorithms are like bossy waiters: they solicit your preferences and then recommend a menu. TikTok orders you dinner by watching you look at food."
When you first land on TikTok, it is a fire hose of random content. But once the algorithm plugs its feelers into your brain, it starts feeding you videos suited to your sensibilities. I currently sit at a confluence of various socially useless Toks — among them, Latin American Meme-Tok, Awkward Christianity-Tok and Rudy Valencia-Tok (the unfolding story of an everyday cuate who appears to have been busted on the app for cheating on both his wife and his mistress, inspiring telenovela levels of plot deconstruction).
This hyperspecialization makes TikTok incredibly sticky. Imagine a TV channel geared to your most peculiar tastes. (There is, indeed, a whole corner of TikTok devoted to lampooning TikTok's habit-forming qualities.)
But it can also suck you into an algorithmic hole. Vox's Sara Morrison recently wrote about how TikTok's algorithm had pummeled her with videos related to trauma and death. "What I am getting is a glimpse at just how aggressive TikTok is when it comes to deciding what content it thinks users want to see and pushing it on them."
4. TikTok's megastars get the spotlight, but it's the randos who feed the addiction.
The big TikTok influencers with tens of millions of followers — such as Charli D'Amelio and Khaby Lame — are the ones who land media profiles and sponsorship deals. But ultimately TikTok's appeal rests on that endless scroll of content being shoveled into your lizard brain. That means lots of little posts from people whose content you've never seen before and are liable never to see again.
A good night on TikTok — my TikTok, at least — is a thoughtful armchair analysis of Netflix's "Harry & Meghan," a Korean grandma transforming leftover Costco chicken into a sumptuous kalguksu and an old man riding a cow along a major thoroughfare in California's Central Valley. On their own, these videos would never rise to the level of must-see anything. But in the aggregate, it becomes entertaining — like chatting with a group of witty (algorithmically selected) friends at a party: "You won't believe it, but on the way over here, I saw a guy riding a cow."
Naturally, this raises questions about the ways in which we all labor for free to generate content for social media companies. (That's a story for another time.) But it's also indicative of how a virtual nobody can become TikTok famous overnight. Put up a compelling post — say, a toddler dancing on a table at a mountaintop rave — and it will be dueted, parodied, imitated and shared ad infinitum, including by Ukrainiansoldiers on the front line.
5. TikTok prizes performance.
Kylie Jenner's posing might work as a still image on Instagram, but it feels like dead air on TikTok. The short-form video format favors action, which is why spoofs about the Kardashians are far more engaging to watch than the Kardashians themselves. (I'm a devotee of Yuri Lamasbella (@yurilamasbella), who, armed with a few wigs and a ring light, perfectly skewers their expressionless affect.)
Commentary, comedy, music, movement, dance, clever cuts, found footage, catchy audio and animals doing funny things are all grist. Sometimes it's a truly bizarre combination of all of the above, such as a surreal nine-second collage of tigers and a motorcycle racing through a cornfield with footage of Turkish TikTok influencer Yasin Cengiz — known for making his belly bounce when he dances — superimposed on top.
The manic nature of these short films — which began as 15-second videos when TikTok launched in 2016 and can now run to 10 minutes in length — feel like a return to the roots of cinema. Thomas Edison's early Kinetoscope films from the late 19th century, short looped films seen via a viewing cabinet, come to mind. These mini-movies featured boxing, acrobats and a body builder flexing his muscles — films full of frenzied physical activity to convey the radical nature of the new motion pictures.
Manic performance reads well on an app on which you have about six seconds to grab someone's attention. So does repetition. If a concept or visual gag gains traction, repeating it can extend the moment.
A man dancing in a public square in Asia set to Boney M.'s "Ma Rainey" becomes popular, so the account holder posts endless variations. Fijian TikTokker Shaheel Prasad (@shermont22) goes viral for his spoofs of runway models, strutting barefoot while bearing pieces of hardware as if they were haute couture, so he produces dozens of similar posts. "This is a trend that will be bound to end," he told the New York Times' Guy Trebay. "But meanwhile I will try to keep doing it as long as I can."
Repetition moves across accounts too. A popular tune — say, a remix of Busta Rhyme's "Touch It" or Armani White's "Billie Eilish" — can become a staple for videos featuring smash-cut wardrobe changes. Songs, settings, movements, dances and concepts are relentlessly rehashed, wringing a measure of soothing predictability from TikTok's general anarchy. It also creates a low barrier for entry: Users don't have to be original to achieve prominence; all they need is a clever spin on a trending hashtag.
Ultimately, the endless repetition can feel like a trap. I've seen some creators repeat concepts to the point of exhaustion. It brings to mind an early episode of "Black Mirror" in which Daniel Kaluuya plays a man in a technological dystopia: Suffering a break over the exploitative practices of a nameless entertainment state, he threatens to kill himself with a shard of glass during a live broadcast. This reckless act of candid expression proves so popular that he is condemned to repeat the act every night.
7. TikTok is an ouroboros of looking.
On Instagram, if you feel passionately about a post, you can leave a comment. On Twitter, you can retweet and add a comment. But TikTok is unique in its duet function, which has spawned a near-infinite array of reaction videos commenting alongside other posts — like a hall of mirrors, or that Greek snake of antiquity eating its own tail.
A staggering number of duets involve one person commenting on the kitchen prep of another. (TikTokker @chefreactions is a master in this category, a professional chef known for verbally dismembering hack recipes: "That looks as if E.T. ended in a tragic house fire.") And, of course, there's the duet train, in which one user pairs her video with another who pairs it with another and another — like a digital exquisite corpse. The format was employed to terrific effect on the sea shanty "Soon May the Wellerman Come," which went viral last year, allowing performers to add successive layers to the original song.
The duet is one of the most intriguing aspects of the app: a form of looking that is far more active than clicking "like." Even more intriguing: Many duets are very simple in nature, featuring one person quietly observing rather than offering a judgmental reaction. These calm expressions of looking rarely go viral. But there is something affirming about them.
It recalls a point once made by critic John Berger. "Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen," he wrote. "The eye of the other combines with our own eye to make it fully credible that we are part of the visible world."
8. TikTok is real life.
If all of this seems irrelevant because you aren't on TikTok, well, TikTok has found its way to you regardless.
The TikTok effect has sent Big Tech back to the drawing board on long-established apps. In July, a Google exec revealed at a conference that, according to internal studies, 40% of young people turn to TikTok or Instagram when looking for a basic service like lunch — not a search engine like Google. Since then, Google has made user reviews much more prominent on its maps and now delivers many more images, graphic text boxes and social media feeds in its results.
And the influence extends beyond the internet. TikTok has inserted new slang into the language and generated new works of theater. (Remember the fans of Pixar's "Ratatouille" who essentially crowdsourced a musical that wound up on a New York stage?) And the app is a juggernaut in the music industry, where new songs and old ones alike can become hits — like Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams," which became a cultural touchstone after being resuscitated by an Idaho skateboarder with a taste for cranberry juice in 2020. Now performers such as Megan Thee Stallion collaborate with TikTok to test the waters on singles releases.
But the TikTok effect goes beyond basic virality; its aesthetics manifest within the literal architecture of art.
Rosalía's Motomami tour featured a stripped-down set with three vertical screens that projected live images of the singer and her dancers. Green-screen effects were employed, showing the singer playing piano, for example, against a backdrop of rolling green hills. (Very TikTok.) The climax was the moment Rosalía launched into the hit "Bizcochito." The choreography begins with a familiar viral gesture of the singer standing with her hand on one hip, pretending to chew gum while looking annoyed.
When I attended her concert in October, this pantomime had been all over TikTok for weeks. When the sequence began, the crowd roared in response. Cellphones went up. And the young woman seated in front of me recorded the sequence and uploaded it to TikTok. TikTok came to life, then promptly became more content for TikTok.
To TikTok, we submit our gaze. And through the filter of the algorithm we find it projected back at us — broken down and commodified into bite-size morsels that might feel like the intimate dispatches of a thousand individuals but, in the end, are simply the output of an opaque, all-knowing machine.
Unknown vandals desecrated a Protestant cemetery in Jerusalem, damaging more than 30 gravestones, according to Israeli media reports.
Israeli radio reported considerable damage to the Zion cemetery on Wednesday, with gravestones damaged and crosses broken.
The Jerusalem Post, citing Jerusalem University College, reported that the perpetrators were two Jewish teenagers, saying the damage amounted to the equivalent of $99,700.
An Israeli police spokesman confirmed on Wednesday that an investigation was under way, but did not comment on the identity of the suspects.
A video shared on social media showed two figures throwing large stones at graves and overturning a cross.
The incident reportedly occurred on Sunday.
The cemetery, founded in 1848, also serves as a burial place for Jerusalem's German-speaking Protestant community. The German ambassador to Israel, Steffen Seibert, spoke on Twitter of "contemptible criminal behaviour" by the perpetrators. "I hope the police will investigate, find these guys and bring them to justice."
The desecrated graves included those of three Palestinian police officers and members of various Protestant congregations, according to media reports, including bishop Samuel Gobat, Jerusalem's second Protestant bishop. He had bought the land for the cemetery.
The cemetery has been desecrated before and there have been previous incidents of hostility towards Christians in Jerusalem.
A general view shows vandalized graves in a Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion. nknown vandals desecrated a Protestant cemetery in Jerusalem, damaging more than 30 gravestones, according to Israeli media reports. Saeed Qaq/APA Images via ZUMA Press Wire/dpa
A brought down cross lies in a Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion. nknown vandals desecrated a Protestant cemetery in Jerusalem, damaging more than 30 gravestones, according to Israeli media reports. Saeed Qaq/APA Images via ZUMA Press Wire/dpa
Brazilian President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is welcomed to the National Congress by the numerous heads of state and government officials during his inauguration ceremony. Jens Büttner/dpa
Veteran leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took the oath of office on Sunday as Brazil's first democratically elected president to win three terms, with more than a dozen heads of states in attendance.
"My message today is one of hope and reconstruction," Lula said in his inaugural speech. "Democracy was the big winner of this election."
In a break from custom, his predecessor, the far-right nationalist Jair Bolsonaro, did not hand over the presidential sash to Lula, after the Bolsonaro travelled to the US state of Florida with his family on Friday.
Before the ceremony, Lula drove through the capital Brasília in an open Rolls Royce with his wife Janja and new Vice President Geraldo Alckmin and his wife. A large music festival with over 40 artists was set to follow the swearing-in.
Lula led Brazil from 2003 to 2010, at a time when his government profited from the raw materials boom and was able to lift millions of people out of poverty through major social programmes.
However, there was also widespread corruption and Lula was also sentenced to a lengthy prison term for corruption and money laundering, though the sentence was later overturned.
He beat Bolsonaro in a run-off election in October.
During Bolsonaro's term in office, relations with other countries were tense, as deforestation of the rainforest increased unchecked and the government was accused of contempt for human rights.
World powers view Brazil under Lula as a potential strategic political and economic partner. Brazil's enormous natural resources and large agricultural economy make it a big power in Latin America.
Lula has announced plans to strengthen environmental and climate protection, plus measures to combat a resurgence of hunger amid the country's economic slowdown and high inflation.
But the 77-year-old faces major challenges to achieving his inclusive agenda, first and foremost of which is Brazil's highly polarized politics. Bolsonaro's allies control both chamber of Congress.
Brazilian President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is welcomed to the National Congress by the numerous heads of state and government officials during his inauguration ceremony. Jens Büttner/dpa
Brazilian President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (R) welcomes German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to the National Congress among numerous heads of state and other guests of honor during his inauguration ceremony. Jens Büttner/dpa
