Gitter is joining Matrix
529 by BubuIIC | 89 comments on Hacker News.
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Kentucky AG's office moves to delay release of grand-jury records in Breonna Taylor case
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Biden defends son, says Hunter overcame 'drug problem' after Trump raises family controversies
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Trump tells Biden radical left will 'have you wrapped around their finger' as clash over law and order takes center stage
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Presidential debate gets personal as Biden calls Trump a ‘clown,’ Trump tells Biden he’s not ‘smart’
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President Trump, Joe Biden clash over Supreme Court nomination. Join the debate now.
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Presidential debate: Trump, Biden clash over Barrett Supreme Court nomination, ObamaCare in first showdown
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President Trump and Joe Biden square off for historic debate in Cleveland, 9 pm ET on Fox News Channel
09/29/20 5:51 PM
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New world news from Time: Trump vs. Biden: Facing Off on Taming a ‘Rising China’
As President, Donald Trump has cast China as a global villain: a malevolent actor that all but launched a worldwide pandemic on an unsuspecting world, robbed Americans of their jobs and stole U.S. business secrets. He has made the Chinese Communist Party a catch-all enemy that pulls puppet-like strings to make international organizations like the World Health Organization work at cross-purposes with Washington, all charges Beijing vigorously denies.
At the same time, Trump has presented himself to the world—and to U.S. voters—as the only person capable of pummeling Beijing into submission, chiefly through a landmark trade deal. Democrats, the President and his allies say, are the willing patsies who bow to Beijing, as when former Vice President-turned-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden sought closer ties to the growing superpower in his multiple visits there. “A rising China is a positive, positive development, not only for China but for America and the world writ large,” Biden said in 2011 after returning to the U.S. from one such trip.
It’s a black-and-white narrative that will be argued on stage Tuesday night during the first Presidential debate in Cleveland, Ohio, with each man’s record and the COVID-19 pandemic on the debate docket. China will loom large for its role as Trump’s designated fall guy for the virus that has killed more than 200,000 Americans, for its economy, which is thriving despite the pandemic, and for its military, which could surpass America’s in size and strength by 2049.
Biden heads for the debate stage buoyed by an August Fox News poll that shows more Americans trust him over Trump to handle China. He is sure to point out Trump’s swings between painting China as an existential threat to the U.S. and effusive praise for Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
But many Trump supporters, if not most Americans, have become accustomed to Trump’s praise of strongmen in public, which in this case has given way to a barrage of insults, slamming Xi for letting the “Wuhan virus” spread. And Trump’s arguments that the Obama Administration was fooled by China could be persuasive on live television, says Michael Green, an Asia specialist from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The Trump Administration’s line,” says Green, a former Bush official who has backed Biden, “is that everybody was duped by China.” Green says that is “ridiculous and wrong…but it’s a pretty easy line to use in a debate.”
It will be tricky for Biden to counter these charges in clear terms to the American people. During his early years as Vice President, Washington and key allies like the U.K. were still hopeful of working with China, guardedly optimistic that Chinese Communist Party leaders could be carrot-pulled into more free-market, human-rights and democracy-oriented behavior.
The last year has seen China double down in a different direction. Its crackdown on Hong Kong demonstrators culminated in enacting a National Security Law on the region, decades ahead of the city’s agreed return to Chinese rule, and it has continued its crackdown on Muslim Uighurs, with hundreds of thousands reportedly sent to re-education camps.
The Trump Administration has accused Chinese leaders of being slow to tell the world how easily COVID-19 was spreading from person to person, and slow to admit a WHO team trying to investigate the outbreak. The Administration criticized China for releasing a DNA map of the virus without also sharing actual physical samples, which could help determine whether it jumped from animals or originated in a Chinese weapons lab, a popular but unsubstantiated theory among some in the GOP that is ridiculed by Chinese officials.
The Trump Administration has pursued a go-it-alone policy of using economic pain to bring Beijing to the negotiating table, aiming to check unfair trading practices and China’s aggressive militarization in the South China Sea. The Administration has slapped hundreds of billions of tariffs on Chinese goods, and imposed sanctions against alleged Chinese hackers accused of stealing U.S. intellectual property. The U.S. has also sanctioned Chinese officials who have cracked down on Hong Kong and the country’s Muslim Uighur minority.
The tough talk led to the January signing of the first phase of a trade deal, which keeps U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods largely intact, with the threat of more if China doesn’t follow through, and requires Beijing to buy upwards of $200 million in U.S. goods and services over the next two years. As of August, China has only bought $56.1 billion in U.S. goods, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and with Trump skewering Beijing verbally at every opportunity, doesn’t appear to be working to step up spending.
Meanwhile, China’s global exports rose this summer, mainly because of its dominance of personal protective equipment manufacturing and work-from-home technology, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, while the U.S. trade deficit with China has grown. The U.S.-China trade war had already cost 300,000 jobs since it started in early 2018, according to Moody Analytics, even before the coronavirus wreaked havoc on the U.S. job market.
Biden’s own approach to China, as outlined in his public comments so far, sounds like a Trump-lite trade policy with a side of wishful thinking that Beijing can still be coaxed back to better behavior by a concerted scolding by Washington and its allies. He told the Council on Foreign Relations he would double down on Trump’s sanctions over the Hong Kong security law and its detention of up to a million minority Uighurs, but he told NPR that he would lift tariffs on Chinese imports and work through international trade bodies like the WTO to bring Beijing to heel.
Biden claims a key tool to counter China would be to super-charge those measures in cooperation with allies, in part by renegotiating the Trump-abandoned Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, an acronym that by itself can cause eyes to glaze, to band Pacific economies against Beijing. As Biden wrote in Foreign Affairs, “The most effective way to meet that challenge is to build a united front of U.S. allies and partners to confront China’s abusive behaviors and human rights violations, even as we seek to cooperate with Beijing on issues where our interests converge.”
Explaining that on stage on Tuesday would be a wonky turn likely lost on any popular audience, who may not remember that it was combined allied economic action against Iran that brought it to the negotiating table for the Iran nuclear deal, an argument that would draw scorn from most Republicans.
Trump, for his part, will likely argue that if a tougher tack had been taken sooner, it might have clipped Beijing’s wings—though some current and former U.S. military and intelligence officers will tell you China was always heading this way, citing hawkish books like The Hundred-Year Marathon, which relies on Chinese documents and defectors to claim, controversially, that China intends to replace the U.S. as a global superpower by 2049.
Trump has already previewed a debate attack to come on Biden’s son Hunter, who Trump has claimed made more than a billion dollars in an investment deal with the Bank of China, less than two weeks after flying there on his father’s plane in 2013, a charge that multiple fact-checks have found false. Hunter Biden’s spokesperson George Mesires tells TIME that he has “never made any money” from BHR Partners, the company he founded that struck the deal, “either from his former role as a director, or on account of his equity investment, which he is actively seeking to divest.”
Then and Now
When Biden served as Vice President, he helped launch Obama’s 2009 “U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue.” At the time, it seemed that Washington and Beijing could work together toward common good in the service of mutual interests. Those early efforts arguably produced tangible results, as when both countries signed up to the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016, together representing 40% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. “We are moving the world significantly towards the goal we have set,” Obama said of the nations’ cooperation. China also “tightened its controls on weapons sold to Iran” in response to U.S. pressure, according to a Brookings Institution review, and the countries worked together to keep North Korea in check.
“There was very broad bipartisan support for a strategy towards China… that mixed engagement with China, and counterbalancing China by keeping our defenses strong, pushing on human rights, and especially working with allies, like Japan, and Australia,” says Green, the former Bush NSC official.
The mood soured, however, by the second Obama/Biden term, with the Obama Administration decrying thousands of cyberattacks a day on the U.S. government by Chinese military hackers, and later arresting a Chinese national for the theft of millions of government employees’ personal records from the Office of Personnel Management by a secretive Chinese military hacking unit, leading to a bilateral anti-hacking pact that the Trump Administration later accused the Chinese of violating.
Obama and Biden also negotiated the TPP—which Trump swiftly pulled out of after his inauguration in 2017—to gather together 12 regional Pacific economies, representing 40% of the world’s trade, into a single trading market to offset China’s economic bullying. And Obama’s military challenged China’s construction of an artificial island and military base in the South China Sea with its own “presence patrols” of U.S. Naval vessels steaming through sea channels in international waters that China was trying to claim for its own.
All of the Obama Administration’s efforts were eventually swallowed up and erased, like the wakes of those U.S. Naval ships, in part by Trump’s TPP departure, but mostly by the steady waves of a strategically planned and clinically executed Chinese campaign to widen its economic influence, build its military might, and become a diplomatic superpower that cannot be ignored on any major international issue.
The U.S. public hasn’t paid much heed to China’s long-game, but the COVID-19 crisis has caused more Americans to see China negatively, according to a Pew Research Service poll released in July. It’s against that backdrop that Biden will have to explain to information-overwhelmed American viewers why he once entertained the notion that China’s Communist Party could be reasoned with, and how his policies would produce a different result than the steadily increasing cold war between Beijing and Washington.
China-focused political economist Derek Scissors, of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, believes both candidates are weak on China. He says the first phase of the President’s trade deal is a “failure,” with U.S. exports to China “far behind schedule,” U.S. portfolio investment in China soaring, Beijing’s hack-and-grab theft of U.S. intellectual property continuing, and Trump’s sanctions having little effect on Chinese tech companies’ predatory behavior.
On the other hand, Biden’s China record is one of “wishful thinking,” Scissors says, mostly focused on global climate change initiatives. “The Obama Administration was paralyzed by hope for meaningful Chinese cooperation, instead getting an increasingly nasty dictatorship,” he says. “Biden’s move away from that approach is unconvincing so far.”
Retired Amb. Joseph DeTrani, former CIA director of East Asia Operations, says both candidates behaved appropriately for the China they faced at the time. In Biden’s engagement with China as a Senator during the 1980s and 1990s “bilateral relations were solid,” he says, so cooperative moves like championing Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organization were appropriate. When tensions later rose, the Obama Administration announced its “pivot” to East Asia, concerned about China’s behavior in the South and East China Seas and its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, which ostensibly aimed to improve China’s physical access to markets by building roads, bridges and ports globally, but instead often trapped countries in debt-ridden deals that forced them to forfeit ownership of the projects to the Chinese.
DeTrani says Trump can argue that he, rather than his predecessors, acted against Beijing’s predatory trade practices, including “a very unfavorable historical trade imbalance with China, something previous administrations ignored.” He points out that Trump’s position hardened when it became clear China hadn’t shared data on the pandemic “in a timely way,” and with its crackdown on Hong Kong, the proliferation of Uighur reeducation camps and other human rights abuses.
With China’s military growing, already outpacing the U.S. Navy, and its still-expanding economy keeping it on track to eclipse U.S. power in the next decade, according to the Australia-based Lowy Institute, the next U.S. president will be facing a formidable adversary that no recent American leader has managed to check.
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Disney to layoff 28,000 employees as COVID-19 continues to hammer theme parks
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Disney to layoff 28,000 employees as COVID-19 continues to hammer theme parks
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Declassified docs show Obama admin briefed on claims Clinton drummed up Russia controversy to vilify Trump, distract from emails
09/29/20 2:35 PM
Declassified docs show Obama admin briefed on claims Clinton drummed up Russia controversy to vilify Trump, distract from emails
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Biden releases 2019 tax returns, calls for Trump to release his
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Biden releases 2019 tax returns, calls for Trump to release his
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New world news from Time: Trump Says China Wants Him to Lose the U.S. Presidential Election. The Truth Is More Complex
On Sept. 21, Donald Trump addressed an election rally in Dayton, Ohio. “If Mr. Biden wins, China wins,” he told the crowd. “If we win, Ohio wins and most importantly, in all fairness, America wins.”
It’s a familiar theme. After a year scarred by the COVID-19 pandemic — which has claimed more than 200,000 American lives while eviscerating a supercharged economy — as well as nationwide protests against racial injustice, the U.S. president has sought to reframe the Nov. 3 election around the looming threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“If I don’t win the election, China will own the United States,” Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Aug. 11. “You’re going to have to learn to speak Chinese.”
The president also says that China wants him to lose. “China will do anything they can to have me lose this race,” he told the Reuters news agency back in April.
To be sure, Trump has launched a trade war that hiked tariffs on over $300 billion of Chinese exports, sanctioned top Chinese officials over human rights abuses and sought to ban Chinese tech firms from the U.S. market. He’s even rolled out Chinese dissidents during his stump speeches. But it’s still unclear that China is dead against another four years of the Trump presidency.
Indeed, “Many ordinary Chinese people want Trump to win, because they think Trump has destroyed the American system and its alliances,” says Wang Yiwei, director of the Institute of International Affairs at Renmin University in Beijing. “So if Trump continues to do that, there may be opportunities for China.”
Where China stands on the U.S. election
With U.S. officials alleging that China is interfering in the electoral process, Beijing is wary of being perceived to favor one candidate or the other. Aside from a prosaic biography issued by state news agency Xinhua upon his securing the Democratic nomination, Trump’s rival Joe Biden remains largely unmentioned.
“American domestic dynamics are well beyond what we can predict or influence,” China’s ambassador to the U.S., Cui Tiankai, told an online foreign policy seminar hosted by the Brookings Institution on Aug. 13. “We have no intention or interest in getting involved.”
Trump’s frequent broadsides against Chinese interests — deporting Chinese students with military links, banning social media platform TikTok, closing China’s consulate in Houston — all receive rebukes. But Beijing’s foreign policy wonks appear divided over which candidate represents the greater threat and state media instead jibes at the process in general.
“The central theme of their election coverage is that the U.S. election is really just about money, while bringing up the unfairness of the electoral college system, the disproportionate value of a swing state, and so on,” says Oriana Skylar Mastro, a China specialist at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. “They are very careful not to suggest a strong preference for Trump or Biden.”
Read more: What happens next with the U.S.-China rivalry
Still, it is telling that Trump has earned a sardonic nickname among Chinese netizens. Chuan Jianguo, or “Build-the-Country Trump,” parrots a common honorific for CCP grandees, implying that Trump’s blundering is actually a boon for the Chinese state.
It’s a view echoed by Hu Xijin, the strident editor of the Communist Party mouthpiece Global Times: “I strongly urge American people to reelect Trump because his team has many crazy members like [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo,” he tweeted June 24. “They help China strengthen solidarity and cohesion in a special way. It’s crucial to China’s rise. As a [CCP] member, I thank them.”
Still, China is not a monolith and contrasting views exist. Many elite, well-educated Chinese — who typically studied in or have relatives in the West, and vacation in the likes of L.A. and New York — are aghast at the rifts between the two superpowers. They hope a Biden victory can, at the very least, restore beneficial cultural, educational and other programs.
“Trump has not just damaged the U.S. reputation but also the West’s image in China,” says Wang. (The feeling seems mutual, with a Pew Research Center survey published in July finding 73% of Americans had a negative view of China, the highest since the question was first asked 15 years ago.) “He makes the world more complex and unpredictable.”
What a Biden presidency would mean for China
Xi Jinping described Biden in 2013 as “my old friend” — a huge honor in CCP-speak. Biden was one of the first U.S. senators to visit China in April 1979, meeting reformist leader Deng Xiaoping just three months after Beijing and Washington established official ties. He also used to talk up his more recent exchanges with China’s current leader.
“I’ve spent more time in private meetings with Xi Jinping than any world leader,” Biden told a Council on Foreign Relations gathering in 2018, adding that the encounters amounted to “twenty-five hours of private dinners.”
But there’s little sign that this former advocate of engagement is still amicable to Beijing. At a recent Democratic primary debate, Biden denounced Xi as a “thug” who has one million ethnic Uighur Muslims in “concentration camps.”
Read more: Tough talk between the U.S. and China is making a diplomatic resolution harder than ever
That said, a Biden win would likely see Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric replaced by reengagement with international institutions, policy conducted according to a strategic plan, and efforts to build some kind of rapport with Beijing on issues of mutual concern.
In January, Biden wrote about his desire to forge a coalition of countries to isolate China and persuade it into better practices. “When we join together with fellow democracies, our strength more than doubles,” Biden said. “China can’t afford to ignore more than half the global economy.”
This may cause more sleepless nights for Politburo members than four more years of Trump, whose policies have actually helped China according to some analysts. A return to traditional, coherent, alliance-based diplomacy might not serve Beijing’s strategic goals as well.
What could happen to China relations if Trump wins
There are many avowed China hawks at Trump’s top table — Secretary of State Pompeo, Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger, White House trade advisor Peter Navarro among others — who firmly believe the CCP to be an existential menace. Trump has also proved he’s willing to use issues that touch raw nerves with the leadership in Beijing, such as the detention camps in western Xinjiang province, political freedoms in Hong Kong and the status of self-ruling Taiwan.
This confrontational approach, says Mastro, “targets a lot of Chinese domestic policies, which really goes at the heart of what they consider their internal security and the legitimacy of the party.”
But to believe the tell-all book by former national security advisor John Bolton, Trump is prepared to compromise on every one of these issues. He also ignores others, so far expressing little interest in holding China to account on labor rights, religious freedom, human rights, climate change and other bugbears that mired Beijing’s relations with the George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama White Houses.
And while Trump may have started aggressively contesting Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea by increasing freedom-of-navigation sorties through the contested waterway, such missions were almost completely neglected early in his term as he sought Chinese help to rein in North Korea. Neither have the missions led to any attempt at wider coalition building in Southeast Asia.
Some believe that if he got a fresh mandate, and in a final term, Trump might even be inclined to tone down the bombast and come to some understanding with China.
“Without the burden of reelection, maybe he can negotiate with China more pragmatically,” says Renmin University’s Wang. “And we can finally make a deal.”
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Several states are reporting 911 dispatch outages.
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Several states are reporting 911 dispatch outages.
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House Democrats release $2.2T COVID-19 economic aid bill ahead of White House call
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EXCLUSIVE: Inside the White House's plan to deploy 'knife fighters' to defend Amy Coney Barrett
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EXCLUSIVE: Inside the White House's plan to deploy 'knife fighters' to defend Amy Coney Barrett
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Biden calls on Senate to hold off confirming Amy Coney Barrett, Trump says there is 'tremendous amount of time' ahead of electio
09/27/20 9:39 AM
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New best story on Hacker News: Ask HN: How to learn sales?
Ask HN: How to learn sales?
507 by northpoleescape | 144 comments on Hacker News.
First time entrepreneur here. I am creating a product that will solve address a large potential. The more I think about it and read about startup, I am finding that a key to early and often success is Sales. I am been engineer by choice and engineering manager by profession. I have never done sales. I understand you learn by doing similar to driving. I am a bit talkative but sometime I have hard time not getting bogged down by emotions. How do I get started? Can you share books, videos, tutorials, prior recorded sales call references? Where can I learn about metrics to track? Any ideas?
507 by northpoleescape | 144 comments on Hacker News.
First time entrepreneur here. I am creating a product that will solve address a large potential. The more I think about it and read about startup, I am finding that a key to early and often success is Sales. I am been engineer by choice and engineering manager by profession. I have never done sales. I understand you learn by doing similar to driving. I am a bit talkative but sometime I have hard time not getting bogged down by emotions. How do I get started? Can you share books, videos, tutorials, prior recorded sales call references? Where can I learn about metrics to track? Any ideas?
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WATCH NOW: 'Fox & Friends' co-host Pete Hegseth's exclusive interview with Trump on nomination of Amy Coney Barrett
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President Trump officially nominates Judge Amy Coney Barrett
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President Trump announces nomination to Supreme Court, live on Fox News Channel
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Sources: Judge Amy Coney Barrett will be President Trump's Supreme Court nominee
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Trump $500B plan to aid Black communities designates KKK, Antifa as 'terrorist organizations'
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Florida Gov. DeSantis lifts major COVID-era restrictions on restaurants, other businesses
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Breonna Taylor's family demands Kentucky AG release grand jury transcripts, lawyer says
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New world news from Time: The First Black Miss World Looks Back on Her Tumultuous Win 50 Years Later
When Jennifer Hosten first arrived in the U.K. from Grenada for the 1970 Miss World contest, she had no idea there would be such a media frenzy around the competition—and its participants. She quickly realized that she would have to do the best she could to stand out. “Women from small countries, and particularly women of color, like myself, really were not expected to be more than a number in the contest,” she tells TIME, looking back 50 years later.
But Hosten not only stood out—she went on to take home the top honors, becoming the first Black woman to win the international beauty pageant since it was established in 1951. But that wasn’t the only thing that made the 1970 competition, which took place in London’s Royal Albert Hall, different from years past. It also featured two contestants from South Africa at the height of apartheid: Pearl Janssen, a Black woman who came in second in the competition behind Hosten, and Jillian Jessup, a white woman. And it was disrupted on the night of the competition by British women’s liberation protesters.
Those events, as well as Hosten’s experience, are the subject of a new film by director Philippa Lowthorpe, Misbehaviour, starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Hosten and Keira Knightley and Jessie Buckley as real-life feminist activists Sally Alexander and Jo Robinson. The contest was watched by more than 22 million people in the U.K., and more than 100 million people worldwide, and has since been considered a touchstone in the women’s liberation movement in the U.K.. Just four months later, in March 1971, thousands of women, men and children took part in the movement’s first major demonstration in London.
‘Very pragmatic expectations’
Hosten grew up under British rule in Grenada, then a colonial island in the West Indies, which gained independence in 1974. In her autobiography published earlier this year, Miss World 1970: How I Entered a Pageant and Wound Up Making History, Hosten describes how she worked as an airline attendant and had an interest in broadcast journalism as a young woman, before a friend encouraged her to enter the Miss Grenada competition, which was a stepping stone to the Miss World contest.
But not everyone had such favorable views of Miss World. “That competition is one big fat celebration of oppression,” says Buckley’s character Jo Robinson in the film, as the British feminist activists prepare to protest the contest on the grounds that it was antiquated, sexist and objectified women. Hosten says she was familiar with the women’s liberation movement and shared an affinity on one level with the protesters around the universal struggles that women still face today, such as equal pay and opportunities.
But looking back, their actions around the contest were hard to understand; Hosten, who was 23 at the time, saw her participation in the contest as her own choice, not one that was being made for her, nor one that was exploitative. “I saw [the contest] as an opportunity, to travel, to represent Grenada, and to make some money if I won. I had some very pragmatic expectations. I saw it less as objectification, but I think that some of the experiences during the contest made us think that way for sure,” she says. “When I first arrived, it wasn’t my thought that I was being exploited. If I had thought that, I wouldn’t have taken part.”
The contest also took place against the political backdrop of the Vietnam War, and one of the prizes for the newly crowned Miss World was a tour of Vietnam with Bob Hope to entertain U.S. troops, which Hosten did later in 1970. There was also the fact that Pearl Janssen, the Black representative from South Africa (who was given the title Miss Africa South), “had been sent almost as a totem from her country,” says Hosten. For Hosten, that should have been the issue for the women’s liberation movement to focus on instead, and she says the protesters never reached out to the contestants to explain what they were trying to do.
‘A huge step forward’
The night of the competition saw the women’s liberation protesters, including Alexander and Robinson, sneak into the Royal Albert Hall venue incognito, with flour, vegetables and flyers in their handbags, ready to launch the protest when all the Miss World contestants were on-stage. In an interview earlier this year, the women said that their intention was to criticize the contest organizers, not the contestants, and that staging the protest that way would have maximum impact on the night. Yet the protesters became infuriated when host Bob Hope started telling misogynistic jokes, and they decided to launch the protest early while Hope was doing his bit, putting a pause to the proceedings for about 15 minutes. “It was a shock when we looked through the curtain and saw what was going on,” says Hosten. “Our initial reaction was wondering whether the contest was going to continue, or whether that would be the end and if all our preparations had been for nothing.”
It was another shock when the event regrouped and Hosten was announced the winner. “I was happy that I had reached the finals, but then I was elated to win,” she says. She was awakened the next day by a loud knock at the door from the housekeeper, who said that she wanted to see what Miss World looked like without make-up on. Hosten had immediately become a superstar, but pride was quickly dampened by the media’s reaction. “I had expected the newspapers to say, Grenada has won, or something quite flattering. Instead, the headline said, Miss World is Black, and is she the most beautiful girl in the world?” Less than positive headlines over Hosten’s win and Janssen’s second place, and lamentations that competition favorite Miss Sweden hadn’t won, dominated in the immediate aftermath. “That was rather sad, because that took away quite a lot from the feeling of elation that I would have felt otherwise,” says Hosten.
But the impact of the win would have longer-lasting impacts, says Mbatha-Raw, the actor who plays Hosten in Misbehaviour. “Looking at representations of beauty at the time, there weren’t really many opportunities for women of color to be perceived as a beauty icon. That’s really changed in leaps and bounds, and in not just beauty,” she says. “It is symbolic optically in terms of what little girls can look at, and see who gets to win, who gets to be center-stage, and who gets to be celebrated in that way. For Jennifer to win the competition, that was a huge step forward for Grenada, for Jennifer on a personal level, and for women of color as a whole at that time.”
‘We have much further to go’
Looking back on old diaries from the 1970 competition prompted Hosten to write her autobiography. “I thought it was important to show that my life didn’t end at the end of my year as Miss World,” she says. The competition really was a springboard for Hosten to move onto other adventures; after traveling with Hope and fulfilling her duties as Miss World on an international tour, she later became a senior diplomat for Grenada, worked in international development, started her own business, and trained as a psychotherapist. Although the experience of winning Miss World helped shape her, she says, it didn’t define her. “I have made an effort throughout my life to define my own life, and to show that women can do all sorts of things.”
In 2010, Jennifer received a call from the BBC, asking if she would participate in a radio broadcast interviewing all the key participants of the 1970 pageant, including Alexander and Robinson. It was the first time she had met the activists, and while she writes that she found them intense during the interview, “despite decades of being placed in opposition to one another in the narrative that resulted from the 1970 pageant, we found we had more in common than expected.” It was that reunion program that caught the attention of producers, and led to the making of Misbehaviour.
This year marks not only half a century since Hosten’s historic win, but also the first time that Miss World, Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA are all women of color. While there’s still much to be debated about the purpose of pageants in the first place, Hosten says the current state of the contests feels bittersweet. “Women should not just be thinking of ways in which physical beauty can benefit them. There are many other ways in which women can shine.” And there’s plenty of room for improvement in terms of representation, as well. “The fact that we’re still talking about [women of color winning pageants] as if it’s an anomaly tells me that we have much further to go,” she says.
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New world news from Time: Will Saudi Arabia Be Next to Normalize Relations with Israel? Don’t Hold Your Breath, Experts Say
The grainy video clip began trending on Arabic-language Twitter on Sept 16. It showed a famous speech by Saudi Arabia’s late King Faisal, who in 1973 embargoed the Kingdom’s oil exports in a bid to punish the U.S. and other nations who had supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War. “If all Arabs agreed to accept the existence of Israel and divide Palestine, we will never join them,” Faisal says in the video, his head covered by a white keffiyeh and his voice cracking with emotion. Standing directly behind him is Saudi Arabia’s current ruler, King Salman.
Almost a half-century later, the House of Saud may have to decide whether to make good on that promise. Buoyant after the UAE and Bahrain signed a historic peace pact with Israel, President Trump suggested on Sept. 15 that up to nine other countries would soon join the “Abraham Accords.” Trump had spoken with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, he told reporters at the White House, and he believed the world’s largest oil exporter would recognize Israel, “at the right time.”
Experts doubt that’s anytime soon. For all its regional adventurism, the UAE is considered peripheral to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, while it is seen as central to the legitimacy of Saudi Arabia’s kings. But the rise of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, often known by his initials MBS, adds an element of uncertainty to the Kingdom’s traditionally conservative conduct.
Widely viewed as its de-facto ruler, the Crown Prince has spearheaded a number of radical foreign policy moves—including the war in Yemen and the Gulf blockade of Qatar. Still, on relations with Israel, “there’s such a disconnect between the ideas of the Crown Prince and his advisors and the rest of Saudi Arabia that it’s going to be very difficult to push through in the short to mid-term,” says a former advisor to Saudi Arabia’s government, who asked to remain anonymous in order to be able to speak freely.
Here’s what to know about the state of Israel–Saudi Arabia relations, why MBS is pushing for them to change, and how the issue speaks to deeper fissures in Saudi Arabia’s society:
Why would Saudi Arabia making peace with Israel be such a big deal?
Saudi Arabia’s Al Saud tribe is the custodian of Mecca and Medina, Islam’s two holiest cities, and the global seat of the ultra-conservative Wahabist ideology. Although Jordan acts as the custodian of Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, Saudi monarchs are also deeply vested in Sunni Islam’s third holiest site. Support for Palestinian statehood is woven into Saudi Arabia’s own identity as a state, and normalization of relations with Israel would carry far greater weight than other Gulf nations.
So experts say under the current regime there’s little chance of Trump’s prediction coming to pass. “Saudi Arabia will not pursue full diplomatic relations with Israel while King Salman is in power,” says Kristin Smith Diwan, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Insitute in Washington (AGSIW).
But the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Israel is definitely warming. Backchannel diplomacy has been an open secret for years; like Israel, Saudi Arabia is concerned about waning U.S. influence in the region, and wants America to remain committed to pressuring its archrival Iran. Their bilateral co-operation on security strategy has seeded commercial relationships too—such as Israel’s sale of spyware to Gulf leaders who used it to hack dissidents’ phones. As recently as July, a delegation headed by a retired Saudi General that included Saudi academics and business people visited Israel.
While other Gulf nations normalize relations, the Kingdom has made some concessions. Earlier this month, it agreed to open its airspace to flights traveling between Israel and the UAE, a move Trump’s special advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner claimed showed that “countries are starting to let go of old conflicts and move in the direction of peace.”
More significant still is Bahrain’s last-minute signing of the accord—which would not have occurred without the blessing of its much larger neighbor. “The sudden turnaround in the Bahraini position only happened after the Emiratis got specific assurances from MBS that the King of Saudi Arabia wouldn’t get upset with them going ahead with the Emirati plan,” the former Saudi government advisor tells TIME.
Says Smith Diwan, “there is a real generational divide within the ruling family regarding views toward Israel and the Palestinians, and the weight of Jerusalem to Saudi Islamic legitimacy.”
Why does Mohammed Bin Salman want a closer relationship with Israel?
The commercial incentives are clear. MBS’s Vision 2030—a plan designed to wean the Kingdom from its near-total dependence on oil—relies heavily on inward investment into Saudi Arabia. Central to the Crown Prince’s plans is the development of the Kingdom’s Red Sea Coastline through high-end tourism ventures and a new “smart city” called NEOM. Israel, which also has a Red Sea coastline and is a leader in tech innovation and desalination, would seem an ideal partner.
But making peace with Israel would also help repair MBS’s tarnished image in the U.S. His attempts to cast himself as a modernizing reformer have been undermined by his brutal crackdowns on dissent—including his jailing of activists that fought for those changes. The war in Yemen, the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, has further damaged the Crown Prince’s reputation. President Trump claimed to have “saved his ass” from Congress over the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Bob Woodward writes in his new book.
Saudi Arabia normalizing relations would repay Trump with a pre-election gift—but it would also be consistent with his stated plan to change Saudi Arabia by “shock” therapy rather than by increments, says Yasmine Farouk, a Saudi foreign policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “What would be more of an electric shock than having public relations with Israel?”
Although Farouk agrees a peace accord is unlikely in the short term, she says MBS may be inclined towards action. “This is how he’s going to shock society, this is how he’s going to shock the religious establishment. This is how he’s going to shock the U.S.—because this is the U.S.’s definition of moderation and of a “new” Saudi Arabia.”
What has Saudi Arabia’s media said about the deal?
The messaging has been mixed. According to Saudi’s state-run press agency, King Salman told Trump on their call that Saudi Arabia would not pursue normalization until there is a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Saudi’s Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan, meanwhile, offered a guarded assessment. The move “could be viewed as positive,” he said, a possible reference to the freeze the deal puts on Israeli plans to annex portions of Palestinian territory.
That’s consistent with the Kingdom’s official line. After the UAE’s August announcement of its intention to sign a pact with Israel, the foreign minister told reporters in Berlin that anything was possible but “peace must be achieved with the Palestinians” before the Kingdom would contemplate similar actions.
Media outlets, lobbyists, and clerics considered closer to MBS have adopted a different tone. Salman al-Ansari, the founder and president of the Washington-based Saudi Public Relations Affairs Committee, for example, has been effusive in his praise for the White House’s dealmaking, on Twitter crediting Trump and King Salman for paving the way for a “tsunami of peace” in the Middle East. In a sermon broadcast on state television on Sept 5, the Imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca Abdulrahman al-Sudais urged Muslims to avoid “passionate emotions and fiery enthusiasm” towards Jews.
“One can see an intentional Saudi policy of widening permissible views toward Israel and encouraging greater religious tolerance towards Jews using Saudi media and religious figures,” says the AGSIW’s Smith Diwan. “It appears to be an intentional policy championed by personalities close to MBS to prepare the Saudi public for future warming of ties.”
How have people in the Gulf responded to the Abraham Accords?
While Arab leaders clamped down on dissent towards the UAE–Israel pact in places like Jordan and Israel, Bahrain’s signing of the Abraham Accord has already proved contentious. Since then, nightly protests have broken out in the tiny Persian Gulf state, which hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet and was the only Gulf state to experience significant unrest as popular uprisings broke out against the region’s autocratic leaders in 2010 and 2011. Placards held aloft by demonstrators in Bahrain carried slogans like “normalization is treason,” Reuters reports.
That sentiment has found echoes on Saudi social media. On Sept 16, the Arabic-language hashtag “normalization is betrayal” trended, as did the hashtag “Gulfis_Against_Normalisation.” Then there was the much-shared video of King Faisal: a symbol of the Kingdom’s traditional policy towards the Israelis and Palestinians.
Although there are limits to how far one can read public sentiment based on Saudi Arabia’s social media, space notoriously compromised by armies of bots, experts say it appears to be largely critical. “Right now the Saudi public is uneasy with these changes,” says AGSIW’s Smith Diwan. “But as the Saudi leadership exerts pervasive control over public discourse, one can expect views to change.”
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