The AIR MAIL Diary

A truly international publication, AIR MAIL understands that this era’s strange, sometimes silly, often appalling news isn’t all pouring out of Washington, D.C., even though it can sometimes seem that way. The AIR MAIL Diary prefers to look further afield, rounding up the strange, silly, and appalling news that other countries are quite capable of manufacturing for themselves. Drawn from publications scattered across the planet, the Diary should prove the point that, when it comes to glib, secondhand global reporting, we can proudly hold our own.

We’ll be looking far and wide. For instance, AIR MAIL learned that, in Japan, 59-year-old Kazuyoshi Miura (“King Kazu”) became the world’s oldest professional soccer player when he signed with Fukushima United. And that closer to home, in New York City’s purely nominal borough of Staten Island, public talk of secession surfaced as soon as Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor. Sometimes the headlines alone tell you all you need to know (and maybe more): “Police Hunt for Pokémon Raiders Who Stole £10K of Trading Cards in ‘Heartbreaking’ New Year’s Day Burglary” (the Daily Mail), or—stop the presses!—“K-Pop Stars BTS to Reunite with March Album and World Tour After Military Service” (South China Morning Post).

But now, on to some bigger stories …

France’s decision to award citizenship to an expat American-British-Lebanese couple has drawn accusations of a “double standard” from several quarters, including from within President Emmanuel Macron’s government. Under new immigration rules, “applicants will need a certificate showing they have a level of French that could get them into a French university,” noted Le Monde. While one-half of the couple, Amal Clooney, is fluent, the other half, George Clooney, “has admitted that his French remains poor despite hundreds of lessons.”

The decision drew the attention of one hardly anonymous Truth Social commenter (think: loutish), who posted that the couple, “two of the worst political prognosticators of all time, have officially become citizens of France”—the same France, incidentally, that has displayed an “absolutely horrendous handling of immigration.” Oh, and by the way? “Clooney got more publicity for politics than he did for his very few, and totally mediocre, movies.” In fact, “he wasn’t a movie star at all, he was just an average guy.”

Overtourism still plagues this bucolic small town on the island of Hokkaido, in northern Japan, even though last year it cut down a row of popular, photo-op-ready white-birch trees in an effort to make it a less appealing destination. “But busloads of sightseers have continued to descend,” reported Japan Today. “Visitors often trespassed into surrounding farm fields to take photos and the area was jammed at times with as many as a dozen tour buses.” Biei, whose population is about 9,000, had approximately 2.7 million visitors in 2024, about the same as Jamaica.

A fan of the Democratic Republic of the Congo soccer team has stolen the show at the Africa Cup of Nations tournament in Morocco by standing stock-still in the stands for all of Congo’s matches, both here and in Tangier. Michel Koka Mboladinga, dressed “in a suit, glasses, and a neat hairstyle … raises his arm in the same pose as Patrice Lumumba’s statue in Kinshasa,” said Morocco World News. (Lumumba, who was assassinated in 1961, was Congo’s first prime minister.) In tribute, Mboladinga, who happens to bear a remarkable resemblance to Lumumba, remains motionless throughout the 90-minute contests—and into stoppage time, when applicable. The AFCON tournament reaches the quarter-final stage this weekend, but Congo didn’t quite make it, which presumably means the new social-media star Mboladinga will be taking a seat as well.

The nengajo—traditional Japanese New Year’s postcards—continue to fall out of favor. According to Japan Post, the cards, which can include personal wishes, resolutions, and gift-lottery numbers, and are delivered on the first of the year to family, friends, and business acquaintances, dropped in volume this year for the 17th straight time, to 363 million. “Some fear this tradition may soon disappear altogether,” said The Japan Times. “More and more people have been purchasing stamps and stickers that read nengajō-jimai, which essentially announce the sender is opting out”—the custom likely a victim of the Digital Age and a rise in postal rates. Still, a little perspective: the most recent postcard-mailing statistic available for the United States, which has nearly three times Japan’s population, was almost identical: 368 million.

Brigitte Bardot’s afterlife got off to an appropriately complicated start as the film star’s funeral here drew Marine Le Pen (who had enjoyed her support, and called her “free, untamable, whole”) but not Emmanuel Macron (who didn’t, and sent a wreath). More generally, her death divided France. Possibly because Bardot repeatedly made it all too clear that, for instance, she loved baby seals but didn’t love migrants. “What I remember most is what she did for animals,” Euronews quoted one supporter at the funeral. “She had a real sensitivity, a small streak of racism too, but it wasn’t malicious.”

George Kalogerakis, a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL, worked at Spy, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times, where he was deputy op-ed editor. He is a co-author of Spy: The Funny Years and a co-editor of Disunion: A History of the Civil War