Press Review: Sleepless in Tokyo, Europe’s Immigration Overhaul Lands With a Thud, Russia Uncorks Its Whines

As if the back-and-forth between Jerusalem and Tehran this week wasn’t alarming enough, Japan appears to be facing a looming crisis because its industrious people are chronically overtired. Tokyo’s health ministry says the Japanese need to get more bed rest. Yet a leading sleep expert, Masashi Yanagisawa, said a plan is needed to avoid, as the South China Morning Post put it, “catastrophic consequences on society.”Japanese adults sleep an average of seven hours and 22 minutes a night, which is the least of 33 countries included in an OECD study from 2021. By some estimates nearly 40 percent of Japanese get on average less than six hours of sleep a night, and the sight of people dozing on public transport is common. Sleep deprivation not only makes many normally even-tempered citizens grumpy, but it could be costing Japan nearly 3 percent of its annual GDP.Meanwhile at Brussels, no one seems to be losing sleep over an overhaul of illegal immigration procedures. Despite the predictable self-congratulatory pronouncements of top Eurocrats, in practice nothing much will change for now. In 2023 nearly 300,000 illegal migrants came to Europe, many of them in makeshift boats that European officials failed to deter from making it across the Mediterranean. Nearly 4,000 refugees died last year — or remain missing — during their attempts. Ahead of European parliamentary elections in June, there is no hotter issue than that of illegal immigration — neither inflation nor the war in Ukraine elicit the same kind of reaction. So the Associated Press reports that European Union lawmakers approved Wednesday a revamp of the bloc’s immigration laws in the hope of ending “years of division over how to manage the entry of thousands of people without authorization and deprive the far right of a vote-winning campaign issue ahead of June elections.” By endorsing a pact on migration and asylum on Wednesday, what the European Parliament essentially did was formalize the sharing of responsibility for processing illegal arrivals across members of the EU bloc. In other words, if another boat full of African refugees lands at a tiny Italian island like Lampedusa, it will fall not just to Rome but also ostensibly to Berlin and Budapest to co-manage the mayhem. That was enough for the president of the European parliament, Roberta Metsola, to state on X: “A balance between solidarity and responsibility. History made.” That got Prime Minister Orban to write on X, “The Migration Pact is another nail in the coffin of the European Union. Unity is dead, secure borders are no more.” He added that Hungary will “never give in to the mass migration frenzy.” Europe needs a change in Brussels to “#StopMigration.”While illegal immigration has tapered off since 2015, when more than a million refugees fled Syria and Iraq and collapsed the EU’s outmoded asylum system, it is by no means abating. Countries like Italy and Greece but also France remain on the frontlines.It is a volatile topic in Germany, too. In a televised debate on Thursday, a top candidate from the far-right AfD party, Björn Höcke, said that he “doesn’t want any more Islamic immigration.” Mr. Höcke, who will be running in Thuringia’s upcoming regional elections, specified: “Above all, we should stop immigration from the Islamic culture. We are no longer allowed to accept people of Muslim faith in Germany.”His reasoning is that “Islam has a cultural area where it can develop … but this cultural area cannot be Europe.” That drew a withering response from his opponent, Thuringia’s Christian Democrat state leader, Mario Voigt, but it is worth recalling that in October the mainstream German newspaper BILD published a 50-point anti-migration manifesto including such items as “anyone who considers our constitution and our legal system a collection of non-binding recommendations should leave Germany as soon as possible.”As for countries relegated to pariah status by dint of invading their neighbors but still clinging to fragments of credibility on the international scene, enter Russia. Moscow has jumped into the fray over Middle Eastern tensions and along with Germany is “urging restraint” amid the threat from Iran, as the Times of Israel reported Friday. The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters that it was “very important for everybody to exercise restraint in order not to destabilize the region, which is already not gifted with stability or predictability.”One thing the Russians aren’t whining about this week is wine — but they seem to like it a lot. The Russian business website RBC reports that Moscow just nationalized the country’s largest winemaker, which is not a big surprise considering that the state seized its billionaire owner’s business assets earlier this year. Last year the wine factory in question, Kuban Vino, produced more than 90 million bottles of “quiet and sparkling grape wines.” Non-grape wine in Russia is still called vodka, one presumes.

Press Review: Sleepless in Tokyo, Europe’s Immigration Overhaul Lands With a Thud, Russia Uncorks Its Whines

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