‘The Atlantic Is Definitely On Fire’: Unusually Hot Ocean Sparks Up Early Hurricane Season

BY ALEX HARRIS

MIAMI, FL (MIAMI HERALD)--The Atlantic Ocean is hot right now. Hotter than it’s supposed to be for this time of year, and hot enough to worry scientists — particularly ones who monitor hurricanes.

Those higher-than-normal temperatures help explain why the National Hurricane Center’s tracking map on Tuesday looked a lot more like a snapshot from August than June. It shows two brewing systems east of the Lesser Antilles, including one that has already reached tropical storm strength, Bret. Named storms in June are rare and past ones have typically popped in the Gulf of Mexico or near the Atlantic coast.

That hot water is the prime suspect for the early season activity, but not the only one.

“There’s no doubt it’s related to the extra heat down there,” said Jeff Berardelli, chief meteorologist for WFLA in Tampa Bay. “We typically wouldn’t have water temperatures that are above the critical thresholds across wide swaths of the tropical Atlantic this early in the season.”

Some spots in the Atlantic are so unseasonably hot, they’re now running at temperatures usually seen in September — which is three, long hot summer months ahead.

Ben Noll, a meteorologist with the National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research in New Zealand, tweeted a map showing those spots, which include large swaths of the main development region, where Atlantic hurricanes usually form from waves rolling off the coast of Africa.

On average, the tropical Atlantic is running about two degrees Celsius hotter than normal, or about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, according to NOAA satellite data. And it happened fast.

Micheal Fischer, an assistant scientist with the University of Miami-NOAA Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies, said that between April to June, the region (including the eastern Caribbean) warmed about 1.6 degrees Celsius. In a normal year, he said, it warms about 1 degree in that same time.

“That’s greater than anything we’ve seen over the last 40 years,” he said. “The Atlantic is definitely on fire.”

Many spots have flashed past an important benchmark that usually doesn’t happen until later in the season — 26.5 degrees Celsius, the threshold scientists use to determine whether water is warm enough to support a tropical storm or hurricane.

Kim Wood, an associate professor of meteorology at Mississippi State University, called the rate of rising sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic “mind-boggling.”

“We need a lot more than warm ocean water for [tropical cyclones] to form, and 26.5°C isn’t a hard-and-fast threshold, but seeing [sea surface temperatures] already exceed that value for so much of this region is... unusual, as many others have noted,” Wood tweeted.

And those pockets of abnormally hot water are already occupied. On Tuesday, the hurricane center was tracking both Tropical Storm Bret as well as another tropical wave close behind it. Hurricane models also had begun to hint at a third wave that could follow.

Why is it so hot?

The latest storm to form, Bret, is weird in several ways. For one, it’s way early.

Typically, the front half of hurricane season features storms that form in the Caribbean and spiral north. That flips around in late July or early August, when conditions line up for that infamous conveyor belt of tropical waves off Africa’s west coast. Some of those strengthen into tropical storms or hurricanes as they head west across the warming Atlantic.

Bret actually formed further to the east than any other early season named storm. Since 1850, only four previous storms have churned up east of the chain of Caribbean islands known as the Lesser Antilles in June.

Forecasters said the abnormally hot waters of the Atlantic could have definitely helped make that possible, but they aren’t the only factor.

“It’s a key ingredient but it’s not the only thing going on,” Fischer said.

Saharan Dust also tends to tamp down the tropics in the early summer. That cloud of loose dirt that floats off the west coast of Africa in the early summer typically slows or shuts down storm formation, blocking the sun and helping keep ocean waters cool. There’s less of that dust than usual this month.

There also are weaker than usual trade winds. Typically this time of year, a high-pressure system sits between Bermuda in the Azores, with a clockwise flow of air around it that helps cool the waters of the Atlantic.

“It’s fair to say the Atlantic has been unusually hospitable to tropical cyclone development this year,” Fischer said.

Uncertain season ahead

Despite the unseasonably hot waters, early forecasts from NOAA and others have called for a near-average hurricane season. That’s because of another massive weather phenomenon that is known to curtail storm activity — El Niño.

El Niño officially began earlier this month, and years with this weather pattern usually see fewer storms form in the Atlantic and more storm-shredding wind shear in the eastern Caribbean. That works directly against the storm-intensifying power of hotter oceans, leaving scientists with a lot of uncertainty about what this season may hold.

“We’re really in uncharted waters,” Fischer said.

And all of that is on top of the steadily building impact of climate change, which has already warmed tropical oceans by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1900s.

On Tuesday, NOAA noted that the ocean last month broke heat records, making it “ virtually certain ” that 2023 would end up in the top ten hottest years on record.

“This year shows us the potential of climate change,” Berardelli said. “When you take climate change and then on top of it you add natural factors that just happen to line up to create warm temperatures, you’re reaching extremes you’ve never reached in modern history.’

©2023 Miami Herald. Visit at miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The Migration Driven By Developed Countries

BY EROMO EGBEJULE

LAGOS (THE ATLANTIC)--Migration can be driven both by a richer country’s doing, as well as a poorer one’s undoing. LAGOS—About a year ago, Dolapo Oni appeared to have it all. He was the head of energy research for a pan-African bank in Nigeria’s biggest city, had a healthy (and growing) amount of savings and investments, and ran an e-commerce business on the side. He even liked his local gym.

Then he resigned and moved with his family to Canada, eventually getting a job as an investment associate in a wealth-management firm in Calgary. His previous employer in Lagos promoted someone to replace him soon after, but, like Oni, he quit and moved to Calgary. This time, rather than search for another replacement, the bank disbanded the energy-research team.

In some ways, Oni’s story (and that of his successor in Lagos) is not unusual: a skilled professional leaves a job at home in search of work in wealthier parts of the world, betting that the short-term instability of uprooting an established life will be worth it in the long term. The Onis are part of an ongoing exodus of middle-class Nigerians to Canada in particular—Nigeria ranks in the top 10 in terms of the number of skilled workers leaving for Canada over the past four years. The sparsely populated North American country has long been a favored destination of immigrants around the world because it offers economic opportunities, a strong social safety net, and a diverse population.

More recently, the Nigeria-to-Canada route has had another driver, one that is propelled both by Ottawa’s doing and Abuja’s undoing—whereas the political and economic situation in Nigeria has not improved, many of these immigrants have mostly been drawn by a tweak to Canadian immigration rules.

In 2015, Canada implemented a new system for taking in skilled immigrants, using a points-based calculation in which applicants are scored on the basis of their age, work experience, education level, and language skills. It aims to prioritize those who are most skilled and ease their entry into the country, while encouraging applicants to settle in less populated parts of Canada. Australia and New Zealand use similar systems, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, fresh off an electoral victory in December, has said he wants to implement one, too.

Canada’s, however, is the most advanced. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the country has “the most elaborate and longest-standing skilled labour migration system” of its member states, and 60 percent of its foreign-born population is “highly educated”—the highest proportion in the organization.

Now Canada is expanding its effort: the immigration minister, Ahmed Hussen—who himself moved to Canada in 1993 as a refugee from Somalia—announced in 2018 that the country wanted to attract more than 1 million people from 2019 to 2021, equivalent to nearly 3 percent of the overall population.

The transparency of the system—Canadian-government websites outline how many points are awarded for specific skills, experience, or other criteria—lets potential immigrants see whether they could make the cut. Oni told me that once he had decided to emigrate, he had wanted to move to Britain, Canada, or the U.S., in that order, but prioritized Canada because the visa terms were less stringent (and added that he was dissuaded from the U.S. because of persistent reports of gun violence and police shootings of black men).

Here in Nigeria, to say that the middle class has caught Canada fever would be an understatement. The subject of moving overseas has become a conversational icebreaker in Lagos, Port Harcourt, and Abuja. (The best place to have a heart attack in Toronto, one joke here goes, is in a taxi—because the driver is likely an immigrant doctor.) An entire economic system has emerged to help applicants navigate the bureaucracy: Online marketplaces are well stocked with used furniture and cars being sold by those making the move. In terms of emotional support, family WhatsApp groups are filled with relocation tips and prayers for those applying. When I started taking French lessons a couple of years ago (to help navigate West Africa, not to move to Canada), many of my classmates had signed up in order to garner additional points to bolster their applications, and to improve their chances of securing a job in Quebec, where French is the dominant language. All of this reached a crescendo in April 2019, when a news website claimed that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had asked Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari to send 1 million Nigerians to Canada. The story, which was false, went viral.

In effect, then, thanks to a tweak to an immigration system in a richer country, a developing one has suffered serious consequences, losing skilled professionals—many of whom are highly educated and would be expected to make outsize contributions to a state’s economy, tax income, and society more broadly. In Nigeria, the conveyor belt of young talent that is supposed to replace those who are emigrating is whirring slowly, and the impact is apparent: The country’s educational institutions groan under the weight of frequent strikes by underpaid staff protesting poor funding and outdated infrastructure; medical procedures are regularly delayed because of a shortage of specialists; and companies—like Oni’s bank—are closing down entire departments to cope with staff exits.

Middle-class Nigerians, much like citizens of other developing countries, argue that they are leaving to give their families more options and greater security rather than waiting for their own country to realize its potential. It is a familiar story—what is now Africa’s largest economy is no stranger to the departure of its best talents. In the 1970s and ’80s, skilled and semi-skilled Nigerians left the country, mostly for the United States, Britain, and elsewhere in Europe, fleeing the rule of successive military juntas and economic mismanagement. A 2010 report by the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank, found that by the late 1970s, about 30,000 Nigerian professionals had graduated from universities and colleges in the United Kingdom but never returned to Africa; by the mid-’80s, 10,000 Nigerians were in the United States, many of them highly skilled. That brain drain had a knock-on effect, opening a route for these immigrants’ relatives to leave Nigeria as well.

Nigerians today face similar challenges. Though the country is now a democracy, it is still smarting from a 15-month recession in the early years of Buhari’s presidency. Insecurity is also rife: Northeastern Nigeria is grappling with a decade-long insurgency, while a kidnapping epidemic is under way in the northwest and the Niger Delta.

The Nigerian government itself appears unperturbed by the outbound migration of its professionals: The labor minister, Chris Ngige, told journalists last year that the country was exporting its best minds because it had a surplus of talent and, in any case, “when they go abroad, they earn money and send [it] back home here.”

“Canada gets skilled workers who are productive and contribute more to economic activities than they consume,” Nonso Obikili, the chief economist at Nigeria’s BusinessDay newspaper, told me. And he reiterated that Nigerians abroad were sending remittances to relatives back home, a crucial source of revenue for the country. “All these skilled workers are not totally cutting off links with Nigeria.”

The Next Recession Will Destroy Millennials

Millennials are already in debt and without savings. After the next downturn, they’ll be in even bigger trouble. Image: Max Whittaker

BY ANNIE LOWREY

THE ATLANTIC

The trade war is dragging on. The yield curve is inverting. Investors are fleeing to safety. Global growth is slowing. The stock market is dipping. The millennials are screwed.

Recessions are never good for anyone. A sputtering economy means miserable financial, emotional, and physical-health consequences for everyone from infants to retirees. But the next one—if it happens, when it starts happening — stands to hit this much-maligned generation particularly hard. For adults between the ages of 22 and 38, after all, the last recession never really ended.

Millennials got bodied in the downturn, have struggled in the recovery, and are now left more vulnerable than other, older age cohorts. As they pitch toward middle age, they are failing to make it to the middle class, and are likely to be the first generation in modern economic history to end up worse off than their parents. The next downturn might make sure of it, stalling their careers and sucking away their wages right as the millennials enter their prime earning years.

It was the last downturn — the once-a-century Great Recession — that set them on this doddering economic course. The millennials graduated into the worst jobs market in 80 years. That did not just mean a few years of high unemployment, or a couple years living in their parents’ basements. It meant a full decade of lost wages. The generation unlucky enough to enter the labor market in a recession suffers “significant” earnings losses that take years and years to rebound, studies show, something that hard data now back up. As of 2014, millennial men were earning no more than generation X men were when they were the same age, and 10 percent less than baby boomers — despite the economy being far bigger and the country far richer. Millennial women were earning less than gen X women.

Kids of the 1980s and 1990s have had a new, huge, financially catastrophic demand on their meager post-recession earnings, too: a trillion dollars of educational debt. About a quarter of gen Xers who went to college took out loans to do so, compared with half of millennials. And millennials ended up taking out double the amount that gen Xers did. No wonder, given that the cost of tuition has gone up more than 100 percent since 2001, even after accounting for inflation.

The toxic combination of lower earnings and higher student-loan balances — combined with tight credit in the recovery years — has led to millennials getting shut out of the housing market, and thus losing a seminal way to build wealth. The generation’s homeownership rate is a full 8 percentage points lower than that of the Gen Xers or the baby boomers when they were the same age; the median age of home-buyers has risen all the way to 46, the oldest it has been since the National Association of Realtors started keeping records four decades ago.

As a result, millennials have not benefited from the dramatic rebound in housing prices that has occurred since the financial collapse and the foreclosure crisis. Millennials have also been forced to shell out hundreds of billions of dollars in rent as housing costs have skyrocketed in many urban areas. This represents a large generational transfer of wealth from the young to the old. Boomers own the houses and bar municipalities from building more of them, thus benefiting from rising prices and soaking up endless rent checks forked over by younger and poorer families.

Cost pressures have also made it difficult or impossible for millennials to save or invest. The share of Americans under the age of 35 who own stocks has meandered down from 55 percent in 2001 to 37 percent in 2018, in part because employers are less likely to offer retirement-savings plans and in part because millennials have nothing left over at the end of the month to put away. Virtually all members of the cohort are “not saving adequately,” experts warn, and two-thirds of millennials have zero retirement savings. This means that millennials have benefited not a bit from the decade-long boom in stock prices, as their parents and grandparents have.

Millennials are worth less on paper than members of older generations are, and are worth less on paper than members of older generations were at the same point in their lives. The net worth of your average millennial household is 40 percent lower than for gen X households in 2001 and 20 percent lower than for baby boomers’ households at the end of the 1980s.

Could the millennials make up this lost ground? Perhaps, if wage growth suddenly and dramatically accelerates, urban cores start to build millions of new homes, and Congress announces a student-loan debt jubilee. But financial experts consider it unlikely. Millennials missed out on the big asset boom that occurred between 2010 and the present, and “appreciation is unlikely to be as rapid in the near future as it was during the recent period,” argue economists at the Federal Reserve. “With the baby boomers occupying most of the top jobs and much of the housing, millennials are doing less well than their parents,” concluded Credit Suisse. “We expect only a minority of high achievers and those in high-demand sectors such as technology or finance to effectively overcome the ‘millennial disadvantage.’”

The next recession — this year, next year, whenever it comes — will likely make that millennial disadvantage even worse. Already, millennials have put off saving and buying homes, as well as getting married and having babies, because of their crummy jobs and weighty student loans. A downturn that leads to higher unemployment and lower wages will force millennials to wait even longer to start accumulating wealth, making it far harder for them to accumulate any wealth at all. (Compound interest is magic, after all.) Their trajectory, already terrible, might get even worse.

And millennial suffering won’t just hurt millennials. There is accumulating evidence that the economy is more sclerotic and slower-growing than it might be if the millennials were able to buy homes, have families, start businesses, and spend like other generations — if the young were not existing just to pump up asset values for the old. Which reminds me — there’s one generation that might fare even worse than millennials: Generation Z.

Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers economic policy.

BOOK REVIEW: Edna O’Brien’s Lonely Girls

BY TERRENCE RAFFERTY

THE ATLANTIC

The setting of her new novel is terror-ridden Nigeria, a world away from her native Ireland, but the psychic territory is familiar.

The novel is short and spare, and its title, Girl, sounds abstract, even generic. The setting of the story is unspecified, though it’s clear enough. It’s Nigeria, and more or less now, during the reign of terror of the Islamist insurgency group Boko Haram, here referred to simply as the Jihadis. The girl of the title, however, does have a name, Maryam, and so do many of the other suffering girls and boys and men and women whose stories are told in passing in this mournful book—people rousted from their homes or, like Maryam, from their schools; people captured or set wandering in an unforgiving landscape. Their oppressors and even their putative saviors in the government and the army remain anonymous. The beleaguered and the beset-upon are the ones who count in Girl, as always in the stories Edna O’Brien has been telling for the past six decades. “We were at the rim of existence and we knew it,” Maryam says at one point, and that scary place, where a girl is alone with herself and a dubious future, has ever been O’Brien’s favored territory—her unnameable home.

When she made her sensational debut as a novelist, with The Country Girls (1960), O’Brien was telling the story of girls much like herself, growing up in the beauty and superstition and stifling piety of Ireland’s west country and trying to fight their way to another sort of life. That novel, which was a wee bit franker about the sexual longings of nice Irish Catholic girls than her countrymen were used to, was promptly banned in Ireland, as were its two sequels—The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964)—and, for good measure, her next three novels as well. (Years later, she discovered that her own mother had redacted her personal copy of The Country Girls, blacking out offending words and phrases.) Like her contemporary Philip Roth, who later became a fast friend, O’Brien wrote about the messiness of sex and the paradoxes of cultural identity in ways that seemed to get under people’s skin, in language so luxuriant and intimate that you couldn’t deny the power of the feelings being described. And like Roth, she never quite cast off the whiff of scandal that clung to her earliest fiction. She learned, as he did, to wear it with a certain bemused pride.

O’Brien scandalizes by other means now. Her two most recent novels, The Little Red Chairs (2015) and Girl, find her taking on subjects that a writer of her years and stature might sensibly avoid as too grim: Serbian war crimes in The Little Red Chairs, and now the barbarities of Boko Haram. In Girl she even makes the daring choice to tell this terrible tale in the protagonist’s own words—an 88-year-old Irish woman speaking in the voice of a barely pubescent Nigerian girl. (Maryam isn’t quite sure how old she is.)

That choice feels natural because, despite the obvious contrasts in circumstances, this girl isn’t so different from O’Brien’s young Irish heroines. She lives in a world that’s testing her, daring her to survive. And she survives, in part, by the act of writing about her ordeals. In a scrupulously hidden diary, she enters the stark details of what she endures, records the nightmares she has while sleeping and awake. “From dream to waking and back again,” she writes. “I cannot tell the difference.” Her matter-of-factness is heartbreaking, as she describes a brutal kidnapping, genital mutilation, repeated rapes, a forced marriage, a painful childbirth, a terrified flight through the forest, the puzzling remoteness of family and friends and officials, the anguish of believing that her baby is dead—and, ever present, chaos, hunger, fear, and self-doubt. The story her furtive diary entries tell has a stunned, muted tone, the flat affect of someone in shock.

This is Maryam’s voice, in Girl’s first sentences: “I was a girl once, but not any more. I smell. Blood dried and crusted all over me, and my wrapper in shreds. My insides, a morass. Hurtled through this forest that I saw, that first awful night, when I and my friends were snatched from the school.” It’s the deadened, illusionless voice of innocence abruptly lost, quickened here and there by little verbal sparks like morass and hurtled, signal flares of the soul. O’Brien has often written about women who are victims, but her women, even the very young ones like Maryam, are never only victims. They’re always fighting, often with no weapon but language, to keep hold of themselves and find a way home.

Girl isn’t the book to read for the history of Boko Haram and its long assault on the peaceful citizens of Nigeria, or for a nuanced analysis of the country’s volatile politics. Scott MacEachern’s Searching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in Central Africa (2018) does those jobs admirably, and The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria (2016), by the Nigerian novelist Helon Habila, supplies more detail about the 2014 schoolgirl abductions on which O’Brien’s novel is loosely based. Girl is the book to read for the sights and sounds and, yes, smells of some Nigerians’ harrowing experiences, and for a general sense of what it’s like to live in a world of radical, deadly unpredictability. Everything in Girl seems to happen suddenly, out of the blue or in the darkness of deep night. The novel hurtles, as its heroine is hurtled, from one thing to another and another and another, with deranging, near-hallucinatory speed.

The random-seeming quality of the storytelling is something new for O’Brien, whose usual pace is more measured and contemplative. The effect is disorienting, and it’s meant to be. I can’t think of another writer who so late in her career has so thoroughly reimagined herself and the practice of her art. She appears to have decided that the only way to do justice to her subject is this helter-skelter narrative style, in which events have no apparent logic, dreams and realit, and other voices, telling different stories or reciting learned myths and legends, keep bobbing up in the choppy course of Maryam’s tale.

We hear, in his own words, how a little boy named John-John was captured by the Jihadis; in her own words, how a schoolmate of Maryam’s made her escape; how an “oldish” man named Daran found his way to a crowded refugee camp; how the grandfather of a pilgrim called Esau slew a bull; and many other snatches of story, song, and even scripture, all recorded by the wandering girl Maryam as they were told to her. The rhythm of Girl is intermittent and fearsomely strong; reading this novel is like riding the rapids.

And that, it seems to me, is what living in one of the world’s too-numerous war-ravaged places must be like. The violence is awful, but just as awful, in a way, is the day-to-day accommodation to relentless illogic and unreason—the creeping sense, at every moment, of certain disruption and displacement, sudden exile and loss. Girl captures that sort of existential dread as well as any war novel I know. Early on, Maryam describes the day of her kidnapping: “We enter dense jungle, trees of all kinds, meshed together, taking us into their vile embrace. Nature had gone amok here.” That feeling of wrongness in nature is entirely new to her. Later, we learn that she had won a prize at school for an essay about trees, which did not seem then to embrace her vilely. Quite the contrary: “In our country we depend on trees for our lives,” she wrote.

For shelter in rain and for shade in sun. For food of many kinds. They are our second home … But the most important aspect of the tree is the Tree Spirit. Ancestors who have died live there and govern lives. They ward off evil. If these sacred trees are harmed or lopped or burnt, ancestors get very angry and sometimes take revenge. Crops fail and people go hungry. “Don’t step on the spirits,” my brother Yusuf would say when we did spells in there, tiptoeing over the bony roots that wound and knitted together. It was always at evening time. Birds did not roost there, but at certain times sang some song that was both inexplicably sweet and melancholy.

She dreams of this essay, at a moment when the very trees—her second home—have turned alien to her, malign. And when she wakes, in the Jihadis’ camp, she tells her diary: “I will never get out. I am here forever. I am asking God to please give me no more dreams. Make me blank. Empty me of all that was.”

This is a vision of hell: a girl, hardly begun in her life, wishing to be emptied of all that was. O’Brien has always been singularly alert to that sort of bleak emotion, especially when the despair is visited upon the young. It’s no more of a stretch for her to imagine the feelings of a Nigerian teenager than it was for her 16 years ago to find her way into the mind of another girl undone by war, in her play Iphigenia, adapted from Euripides. Is the experience of a contemporary African girl really less accessible to a European writer of the 21st century than the Trojan War and the worldview of the ancient Greeks? Iphigenia discovers in the course of the play that her father, King Agamemnon, means to sacrifice her in order to appease the gods and, he hopes, reverse the flagging fortunes of the restive military he commands. That’s a girl whose world has turned on her. Iphigenia naturally pleads with her father at first: “Do not destroy me before my time … I love the light … do not despatch me down to the netherworld … hell is dark and creepy and I have no friends there … I am your child … I basked in your love.” But by the inevitable end, she’s telling her mother, “One must not love life too much.” She’s been emptied.

War does that to people, and war, O’Brien knows, is a constant in history. Not all conflicts are the same, but their effects on the human spirit have a terrible sameness. It would be a shame if her attempt to assume the voice of an African girl were to be seen only, or even primarily, as an act of cultural appropriation. O’Brien’s understanding of, and sympathy for, girls in trouble transcends culture—the place she’s made for them in her fiction is practically a country of its own. But if Girl earns her a scolding from some quarters, or even stirs up a bit of a scandal, that’s something she has spent her whole long career learning to live with. She’ll survive, in that room of her own where the words come to her, out on the rim with all her lonely girls.

Four More Years Of Censoring Culture In Egypt

BY EDMUND BOWER

Cairo-based artist Chanel Arif uses humans and their surroundings as her canvas. Image via The Atlantic.

CAIRO (THE ATLANTIC)--One evening last month, Russian belly-dancer Eicatrina Andreeva was performing at a floating nightclub on the Nile River. Toward the end of her act, her manager noticed a middle-aged man in a leather jacket who stood out against the touristy crowd. “I knew he was a cop straight away,” the manager said. “I begged him, ‘Please, just let her finish her set. Give her 15 minutes.’” The policeman obliged. When Andreeva stepped offstage, she was taken to jail.

Her four-day detention and subsequent fine were based on accusations of “inciting debauchery” after a video of a previous performance—during which she wore a revealing outfit—went viral. (This charge was later conflated with irregularities in her work permit.) Now free and still in Cairo, Andreeva may have got off lightly. Her manager, who asked not to be named for fear of attracting unwanted government attention, said that in his line of work there’s always been tension with the authorities, but that “it’s increasing these days.”

The current president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is seeking reelection this week in a race he’s nearly guaranteed to win. Since he took power from the Muslim Brotherhood in a coup in 2013, the number of journalists and activists in jail has spiked as dissent against his regime has been roundly crushed; many of Sisi’s would-be presidential challengers are now in detention or awaiting trial. But the president hasn’t stopped at stamping out voices critical of him—he’s gone after apolitical liberal expression, too. Egypt has witnessed a crackdown on the arts, including dance, music, comedy, and theater. “There has been an increase in repression and attempts to essentially clamp down on free expression,” said James Lynch, the deputy director of Transparency International, an organization that has tracked Sisi’s career since before his first election in 2014.

Artists like Andreeva are being swept up in the assault. Although this was not unheard of under former president Hosni Mubarak, the Sisi regime goes after a wider array of people on the fringes of mainstream society. It has launched campaigns against LGBT people, atheists, and the country’s Shia and Baha’i minority communities. The current president is a lot more focused than his predecessor on currying favor with the masses—including religious supporters of his ousted Muslim Brotherhood rivals.

In a religious country like Egypt, the state has political points to gain by showing off its conservative credentials. So, whereas locking up popular artists on apparently flimsy pretexts may seem like a bad move in an election year, Timothy Kaldas, a fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, said it’s quite the opposite: Such arrests are part of a concerted effort on behalf of the Sisi regime to play a more active role in policing liberal society. “Doing this allows them to make that statement: ‘Just because we’re not Brotherhood, doesn’t mean we don’t care about our traditions or our values,’” Kaldas explained.

Having seized power in the wake of a second popular revolution, the military-led government under Sisi is wary of the Egyptian population in a way the Mubarak regime wasn’t. “Everyone knew that everyone hated Mubarak in 2011,” Kaldas said, “but people figured it didn’t matter.” It turned out that it did—Mubarak was overthrown in a popular uprising that year. “What happened in 2011 gave people in the state the impression that it could matter that everyone hates you. And so Sisi would prefer to avoid that. I think there’s more pressure to show off.”

Yet the turmoil of the post-revolutionary period hasn’t exactly created the conditions for a happy population. Sisi is ending his first term with Egypt suffering from double-digit inflation, a hugely devalued currency, and sky-high unemployment and poverty levels. Faced with this intimidating list of economic problems, the state seems to have focused even more effort on the low-hanging fruit of policing liberal society, as Kaldas put it, “to show you’re doing something. It will make headlines and it’s something that the people will talk about instead of inflation for a bit.”

But while such actions no doubt serve to reassure the country’s more conservative elements, it’s too cynical to see this as just playing to the gallery. Despite its fervent opposition to Islamist rule in Egypt, the military-led government in Cairo is itself far from secular. “I don’t think there’s any reason to think that military rule is much less conservative than the Islamists,” said Kaldas. Sisi is overtly pious, with a subtle mark on his forehead from frequent praying face-down on the ground. Indeed, it was arguably Sisi’s religiosity that led the Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi to first assign him to the prominent post of defense minister. “Your average person in the Armed Forces or the security apparatus has a pretty conventional patriarchal and conservative view when it comes to religion,” said Kaldas.

Ever since he became president, Sisi signaled that this is how things would be under his administration. Shortly after Sisi took office, Bassem Youssef, the nation’s foremost satirical TV host, often referred to as the Jon Stewart of Egypt, announced the end of his nightly show. Youssef, who had previously been reluctantly permitted to broadcast his show under Morsi, cited concerns for his family’s safety, telling reporters at the time: “The present climate in Egypt is not suitable for a political satire program.”

Since then it’s become clear that other comedians face censorship in Egypt, too. Last month saw the cancellation of Saturday Night Live Arabia, an Egyptian sketch show based on the American version, but purged of all political references. Egypt’s media-regulation body accused it of violating “ethical and professional criteria” through repeated “sexual phrases and insinuations.” The creators of the show declined to comment for this story.

Singers have also become targets. A famous Egyptian singer who goes by the name Sherine made headlines late last year after a recording emerged of her joking about one her songs, “Have You Drunk From the Nile?” in which she questioned the wisdom of drinking from a river that has historically suffered from water-borne parasites. “Drink Evian instead,” she said with a laugh to a group of fans in the United Arab Emirates. In February, these comments earned her a six-month prison stretch for insulting the country and, according to the court, “spreading fake news.”

In December, a lesser-known performer, Shyma, was sentenced to two years for her music video “I Have Issues,” in which she appears eating fruit suggestively. Another singer was picked up in January after releasing a song titled after a play on words with an Arabic profanity. Both stand accused of “inciting debauchery and immorality.”

And this month, hours before the opening performance of “Before the Revolution,” a play intended to be showcased as part of Cairo’s Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival, director Ahmed al-Attar called off the show in the face of government censorship. His decision followed the arrest of six people earlier this month for a play that was deemed to be insulting to the security forces.

With the Sisi regime all but certain to take power for another four years this week, the future for liberal artistic expression in Egypt looks bleak. For many Egyptians trying to maintain their culture, everyday life is marked by the need to watch over one’s shoulder for who may be listening in. “Nobody’s safe anymore,” Andreeva’s manager said. “Nobody.”

Nigeria Police Raid Stops 32 Pregnant Teens From Selling Their Babies

By Uri Friedman, The Atlantic Wire
Image: Reuters
Nigerian police are informing journalists that they've raided a "baby farm" in the southern city of Aba, rescuing four babies and arresting a doctor who authorities believe buys babies for $160 to $190 (males command higher prices) and illegally sells them to childless couples for up to $6,400, according to the AP. Reuters adds that the babies may also be sold to witch doctors who use the body parts of infants in rituals or sent to Europe--especially the U.K.--where they are used in welfare fraud schemes. The doctor claims he was simply placing unwanted babies in orphanages.

The news outlets reporting the raid aren't in agreement about the role played by the 32 pregnant teenage girls--some as young as 15--who were at the Heda clinic when police arrived. The AP, for example, notes that the girls were "arrested" and may face charges for "planning to sell their babies," and Reuters adds that some girls said they were directed to the clinic by friends who had been there before. But the BBC (and other outlets), citing a Nigerian police chief, claims the girls were "rescued" after being locked up at the clinic and forced to produce babies, noting that "desperate teenagers with unplanned pregnancies are sometimes lured to clinics." The BBC also provides some context for the raid. In Nigeria, where UNICEF estimates at least 10 children are sold daily, baby-trafficking is illegal, but it's very rare for traffickers to be caught and prosecuted.