whlw: no. 253

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Now without further ado, here's what happened last week,
Sham

what happened last week

Last week, Japan hired a ‘minister of loneliness’ to help people who are now home alone because of the coronavirus pandemic. His name is Tetsushi Sakamoto. 

Why?
Because suicides in Japan just went up for the first time in 11 years. There were 20,919 suicides in 2020. Most of them were women. 

Why this matters: Japan has the highest suicide rate in the G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, United States) with 14.9 suicides per 100,000 people.

Why do so many people in Japan commit suicide?
There are a few reasons. They have the oldest population in the world, lots of people are single and live alone (the government says, ‘by 2040, most people in Japan will live alone’) and they have a really intense work culture and work really long hours.

Did you know?
There’s a Japanese word for people who die alone: Kodokushi. And for people who totally withdraw from society (shut-ins, hermits): Hikikomori. (Right now, it’s estimated there are 1.15 million hikikomori aged 15-64 in Japan.)

Last week, scientists were looking for one big black hole when they suddenly found a whole bunch of smaller ones instead, 7,800 light-years away. In other words, really f***ing far away.

• Did you know that one light-year is 9.4 trillion km long and it would take humans over 225 million years to walk that distance?

What the heck is a black hole and how did they find them?
According to NASA, they’re places where the pull of gravity is so, so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape it. This can happen sometimes when a star collapses or is dying. This is how they kind of look like (gives me Eye of Sauron vibes, tbh). The scientists were only able to find them by using the Hubble Space Telescope (it's a super powerful piece of technology that can take pictures of deep space). 

Why this matters: Whenever scientists discover new black holes, they get closer to understanding them. We still don't know much about them. Scientists (like Stephen Hawking) have been trying to figure out black holes for a long time. Like what happens when you go inside one? No one really knows but you’ll probably disappear... forever. So, this is really exciting news.

In other space-related news, the spacecraft Hope, from the United Arab Emirates, and Tianwen-1, from China, both reached Mars orbit. This is huge news for both countries.

Btw, Simi wrote this while listening to the soundtrack of ‘Interstellar,’ a movie about a guy (Matthew McConaughey) who goes through a black hole to cross time and space.

The situation in this Middle Eastern country is looking pretty bad right now. Last week, the United Nations said that 2.3 million children in Yemen, younger than five years old, are going to starve this year. 400,000 of them could die of hunger. 1.2 million pregnant or breastfeeding women are also likely to starve.

Why this matters: Experts call the situation in Yemen right now the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world. 

Why is the situation in Yemen so bad?
Since 2014, the Middle Eastern country (home to around 29 million people) has been in a war. Yemen’s government has been fighting a rebel group called the Houthis for years. It really got bad in 2015, which is when Saudi Arabia decided to get involved because they think Iran is backing the Houthis, and they didn’t like that. Nobody is giving up.

Unfortunately, it's getting harder for non-profit organizations to help. Thousands have been killed and millions have lost their homes. It’s also totally destroying their already poor economy and it’s making access to healthy food and clean water impossible. 

• Need more context? Watch this explainer by Al Jazeera for more context (around 3 mins).

Is there any hope?
The United States had decided to label the Houthis ‘terrorists’ (just before Trump wrapped up his time as U.S. president) and aid groups said it made things like food and fuel harder to bring into the country. But last week, that changed. The country’s new president Joe Biden took away that label so that money and food could reach those who desperately need it right now (read: millions of people).

• Decolonize your feed and follow freelance journalist Ahmad Algohbary on Twitter.
• You can donate resources to Yemen Hope Relief. (it's Algohbary's!)

Archaeologists discovered a really, reaaaaally old beer production site in North Abydos, Sohag, southern Egypt. The country believes that it might be 'the oldest high-production brewery in the world' as it is probably more than 5,000 years old.

How do they know it's a brewery?
Well, they found 40 clay pots in two rows. 'They probably used them to mix grain and water together.' Studies show that it is here where around 22,400 liters of beer were produced at the same time for the country's earliest kings. But don't get too orientalist on me: Beer is not new in Egypt. 

The bigger context
In the same week, archaeologists also found a couple of around 2,000-year-old mummies with golden amulets in their mouths (back then, they hoped that the amulets will help them speak in the afterlife). 'We hope this will make people want to come for a visit,' the government says. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, tourism went down; they expected 15 million people to come, only around 13 million showed up.

What now?
The court that freed her was like, 'she can go home now, yes. But is she commits any crimes within the next three years or travels outside of Saudi Arabia within the next five years, we will have to arrest her again.'

Angola officially has a new law and it says 'women and women, men and men can now hook up with one another okay <3'. Also, 'nobody is allowed to discriminate against anyone based on who they are sexually attracted to. If you do, you'll have to go to jail for up to two years.' 

Why this matters: This is a great step forward in the fight against discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community in Angola. Elsewhere on the African continent, things aren't looking too good. In 2019, Uganda's president Yoweri Museveni said 'queer people are terrorists', Nigeria's police last year attacked queer Nigerians who were peacefully protesting police violence against the community and the government of Tunisia was like, 'no to marriage equality'.

Sex between women+women and men+men was banned before?
Yes. It's a law that comes from the time when Portugal colonized Angola (the country became independent in 1975). The country's parliament actually passed the new law in January 2019, but was not signed into law by Angola's president João Lourenço until November 2020. And last week, it finally came into effect.

On a funny note

Luxury French fashion house Louis Vuitton put out new menswear (for US$1,340) that was described by the brand as being influenced by, and paying tribute to, Jamaica's national flag. Only it didn't look like the Jamaican flag at all. 

Louis Vuitton didn't notice until Twitter user @pam_boy did – in a tweet that has since been liked more than 3,200 times. The whole escalated so quickly that even Cedella Marley, the daughter of Bob and Rita Marley, also commented on it on Instagram.

This just reminds me of the time when Spotify (Have I told you that I am the host of a Spotify Original podcast?) went public in the New York Stock Exchange. And the stock exchange put up the (wrong) Swiss flag instead of a Swedish flag.