Global Headlines Express | Trump's Helsinki Summit Stirs Controversy Again, and France Is Accused of Using Football Success to Mask Deeper Tensions

Global Headlines is a new QDaily column launched in 2018, currently in a trial run. It is still dedicated to helping you know more.

What the Agenda-Setters Are Talking About

The Conversation: Success of French football team masks underlying tensions over race and class

Beneath the glow of Les Bleus' victory, one question still clings to the national team: the part race and class play in picking the squad.

Talking recently about the 1998 title, Zidane said, "It has nothing to do with faith or the color of your skin or mine — we didn't care about any of that. We enjoyed that moment together." On the surface, both the 1998 side — a cross-cultural team of "Black, white and Arab" players lifting the trophy for the first time — and this year's title, won by a squad that is 78 percent immigrant-background under the lead of Mbappé and others, seem to tell a story of successful racial integration at home, and of a country where anyone can climb to the top. (Zidane grew up in La Castellance, Marseille's notorious, violence-ridden estate; twenty years later, 19-year-old Mbappé, of Cameroonian and Algerian descent, fought his way out of the chaotic Bondy district of Paris.)

Some see Les Bleus' win as a return to the pleasures of a multicultural, multiracial, high-tolerance France. Others question the way politics, racial integration and football have been stirred together. Race and class have shaped France's team selection for decades; Zidane and Mbappé are only the two bookends of a decades-long argument.

Even before the 1998 title, Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front (FN), claimed that the "foreigners" in the squad could not even sing the national anthem. In 2010, when France went out in the group stage at the World Cup in South Africa, the story behind the scenes was that manager Raymond Domenech had wrecked his relationship with the players and that captain Evra had clashed with the fitness coach. Yet nobody questioned how badly the two white coaches had run the team. It was the players who were pushed in front of the guns, their loyalty to France called into doubt.

Unlike the usual complaint that players are paid too much, these attacks tend to take a nastier, more racist tone. The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut went so far as to abuse the team as "made up of thieves with a gangster mentality." That was more than a jab at some players' class origins — many grew up in France's crime-ridden suburbs — it also carried a racial charge, because those neighborhoods are usually associated with Black and Arab youth. Le Pen has also declared that the trouble with the national team is that "the players carry another nationality in their hearts."

Since then the cloud over French selection has never lifted. Some have accused the national team of running an unofficial "quota" to limit Black and Arab players, and investigations have found that racial stereotyping has not gone away: the limits on players of color come from a belief that white athletes read the game better and play more for the team than their faster, stronger teammates of color. Real Madrid's Karim Benzema, left out of the squad again, accused the manager of racial bias as far back as 2016.

What followed the 2010 World Cup showed people this: once times get hard, even those standing at the summit of French football will be pushed to the front and looked over with suspicion, purely because of their race and class. And the suburbs they were born in are, twenty years on, still full of trouble — violence, crime and drugs — with no sign of improvement. Les Bleus are riding the peak of a "Black-white-Arab" multicultural revival, but French society is still troubled by more complicated forms of racial discrimination.

24-Hour Newsmakers

Trump and Putin hold their first summit in Helsinki. The two agreed that "Russia did not interfere in the U.S. presidential election."

The two presidents held talks on the 16th, including a two-hour closed-door one-on-one. Putin insisted Russia had never interfered in a U.S. election, and afterwards Trump backed him up: "President Putin says it's not Russia. I don't see any reason why it would be." He said both countries were to blame for the breakdown in relations, and that the "Russiagate" investigation launched by special counsel Mueller was a disaster for the nation. (The FBI concluded in 2016 that Russia had changed the course of the election through a series of state-approved cyberattacks and planted fake news.)

The two also discussed Syria, Iran, Ukraine and arms control. Putin described the meeting as "frank and effective," while Trump called it "a pretty constructive dialogue," saying relations between the two countries "couldn't be worse" before they met, but that everything had now changed.

A president joining with a foreign power against his own country's investigators drew anger at home. House Speaker Paul Ryan said Trump should make clear that Russia is not an ally: "There is no moral equivalence between the two, and Russia is hostile to our most basic principles and ideals." Senior Senator John McCain called it a "disgraceful performance" by a U.S. president, saying "no prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant." Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Trump's actions "made our adversary stronger and weakened our own defenses, and those of our allies ... put himself before his country."

Trump replied on Twitter that he has great confidence in U.S. intelligence agencies, but added, "I also recognize that in order to build a brighter future, we cannot exclusively focus on the past — as the world's two largest nuclear powers, we must get along."

Analysts say the meeting was settled the moment the two men met. By agreeing to meet Putin at all, Trump had already handed him a win. Putin came practiced and professional, presenting Russia as America's equal in nuclear weapons, as an energy supplier and as a key player in the Middle East, while Trump seemed absorbed in attacking his critics at home. He refused to believe the evidence from his own intelligence agencies, and was visibly pleased by Putin's "assurances."

What Else Happened in the World

French World Cup celebrations turn violent. France won the World Cup again after twenty years, and a huge party on the Champs-Élysées welcomed the national team home, but some troublemakers clashed with police and smashed up shops along the avenue. 292 people were arrested nationwide, with crowds clashing with police in Paris, Lyon, Marseille and elsewhere.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said Monday that Europe can no longer rely on Trump and the White House. After Trump told Theresa May that "the EU is a foe," Germany's foreign minister said Europe must adjust its relationship with the United States, cannot rely entirely on the White House, and should further strengthen unity among European countries. "Europe cannot divide itself."

The IMF warned Trump that a trade war could cost the global economy $430 billion.

Wimbledon cleaners say their pay is so low they have had to take food from bins. Their employer, the AELTC (All England Lawn Tennis Club), pays the cleaning crew £11.50 a day for a 15-hour shift with only one hour of break; because of the pay and the lack of any common space, the cleaners have had to look for food in bins and rest crouched in corridors.

Babies sold by the Missionaries of Charity have been rescued. Indian police confirmed that four babies sold by Mother Teresa's charity have been rescued — three had price tags on them, and one was given away free.

Thousands of Amazon workers in Germany joined action in Spain, Poland and elsewhere, striking to demand better working conditions.

Someone Said

"This isn't just Musk calling a British rescuer in Thailand a pedophile. He called him that only because he couldn't imagine any other reason for a white man to be in Thailand. That assumption is plainly wrong. Sometimes white men visit Thailand to show off their useless submarines."

Twitter user @KumainNanjiani on Musk calling the cave rescuer a "pedophile."

British diver Vern Unsworth is a cave-diving expert who spent six years studying the cave system and pinpointed the trapped students during the Thai rescue. After he told an interviewer that Musk's mini-submarine was "stiff and clumsy, couldn't get through the cave, no use at all, and its designer had no idea about the caves ... the whole thing was his PR stunt," Musk called him a "pedo guy" on Twitter, adding "bet ya he is" and "I never saw this so-called British expert anywhere near the cave."

Onlookers were briefly puzzled by the "pedophile" insult, but people soon pointed out it probably came from the fact that the Briton lives in Thailand, a country known for its "sex tourism" business and its large number of child sex workers. "The comment says something about how Musk sees Thailand — if he thinks the only reason a foreigner would live there is to have sex with the children there."

"It's not hard to imagine that if The Dark Knight, a film we love so much, came out today, it wouldn't get anything like the praise it got back then."

For The Dark Knight's 10th anniversary, The Hollywood Reporter ran The Dark Knight's Complicated Legacy, on what the film did to the superhero genre and to the film business as a whole — it is a film that takes itself seriously, that built deep, complicated characters and reminded audiences that Batman is not one fixed image; it shows order and chaos at once, a film built on rules that it then breaks completely; it caught the American mood of its time, and its political echoes still draw you in. In 2008, when everything looked so unfair, the Joker seemed to hold more answers than anyone, and ten years later many of his lines still land hard.

Plenty of later blockbusters tried to copy the style and failed badly, because they fell into the trap Nolan worked hard to avoid: shooting at the studio's direction, rather than having a real reason to go "dark."

The article argues that the film is a lesson, an invitation to "change" — about breaking convention, redefining the canon and letting in some anarchy. But today's audiences and filmmakers seem to have forgotten the very things that made it so great: it was a real film, not the display of one static trademark; nor did people take any lesson in invention from it — that comic-book characters can be reshaped, that they can take many forms, with variants running between reality and fantasy, light and dark. So its sequel, The Dark Knight Rises, was criticized because its Batman "didn't act the way he did in Nolan's universe"; and Batman v Superman, which inherited its mantle, was blamed too, even though it came closest to Nolan's films in reflecting today's political and philosophical swamp, and its clearly drawn characters showed no trace of imitation.

"Ten years later, people already have expectations of what a superhero movie should look like, how it should be shot and work, and how it should use its most popular characters and source material. Even as superhero movies keep multiplying, we have been boxed in, able to see only the success of movies that are 'sure to work' ... It's not hard to imagine that if The Dark Knight, a film we love so much, came out today, it wouldn't get anything like the praise it got back then."

Things You Might Also Be Interested In

Madagascar has faster internet than the U.K., France and Canada — but only for a small share of its people.

British analytics firm Cable collected average internet speed data from more than 200 countries. Madagascar, one of the world's poorest countries, came out with the fastest average speed in Africa: 24.9 Mbps, twice the global average and ahead of some rich countries including Canada, France and the U.K., ranking 22nd in the world.

That speed comes down to the 10,000-kilometer Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy), which runs from Sudan to South Africa. In 2014, Madagascar's largest internet provider, Malagasy Telecom, signed a contract with Hong Kong Telecom's international operations arm that turned the high speed into reality. But the whole country does not get to enjoy this technical advantage — of its 25 million people, only 13 percent have electricity and 2.1 percent can get online, and there are 2.75 IP addresses for every 1,000 people, against a global average of 558.

Madagascar is the only country in the world, free of war, that has grown poorer since it won independence in 1960. Last year national income worked out at $400 a head, far below the sub-Saharan figure of $1,454, and one child in two suffers stunted growth from malnutrition.

A bad marriage hurts as much as tobacco and alcohol.

Psychologists at the University of Nevada and the University of Michigan followed 373 heterosexual couples for 16 years and concluded that disagreements over various issues — children, money, family, leisure — have a negative effect on a couple's health. Health was measured through the couples' own reports, covering sleep quality, headaches, anxiety and the like. The researchers observed that couples who agreed with each other got more health benefits, but only early in the relationship; as the years went on, that positive effect disappeared.

Conflict between spouses sets off physically damaging responses — inflammation, changes in appetite, more stress hormones — which in turn affect heart function, the immune system and much else. Earlier studies have found that married couples are healthier than divorced, single or widowed people — better off psychologically, less prone to illness, even quicker to heal — but this study challenges the idea that "marriage is good for your health." "Experiencing a run of conflict in this kind of relationship does a lot of damage to your health, just like tobacco and alcohol. It's not that getting a marriage certificate is good for your health — what matters is what spouses do for each other inside the marriage."

On This Day in History

July 17, 1912: The French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré dies.

July 17, 1935: Nie Er drowns in Japan.

July 17, 1942: The Battle of Stalingrad begins.

July 17, 1945: The Potsdam Conference opens.

July 17, 2000: Two leaders of Aum Shinrikyo, the cult behind the Tokyo subway sarin attack, are sentenced to death.

July 17, 2014: Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 is shot down on the Ukraine-Russia border, killing 298 people.

Cover image from a BBC video.