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King Charles Sips Narcotic Kava Drink, Becomes Samoan 'High Chief'

24 October 2024, Samoa, Moata'a: Britain's King Charles III and Queen Camilla during a traditional 'ava ceremonial welcome during a visit to Moata'a Church Hall in Samoa, on day five of the royal visit to Australia and Samoa. Photo: Victoria Jones/PA Wire/dpa
24 October 2024, Samoa, Moata'a: Britain's King Charles III and Queen Camilla during a traditional 'ava ceremonial welcome during a visit to Moata'a Church Hall in Samoa, on day five of the royal visit to Australia and Samoa. Photo: Victoria Jones/PA Wire/dpa
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King Charles Sips Narcotic Kava Drink, Becomes Samoan 'High Chief'

24 October 2024, Samoa, Moata'a: Britain's King Charles III and Queen Camilla during a traditional 'ava ceremonial welcome during a visit to Moata'a Church Hall in Samoa, on day five of the royal visit to Australia and Samoa. Photo: Victoria Jones/PA Wire/dpa
24 October 2024, Samoa, Moata'a: Britain's King Charles III and Queen Camilla during a traditional 'ava ceremonial welcome during a visit to Moata'a Church Hall in Samoa, on day five of the royal visit to Australia and Samoa. Photo: Victoria Jones/PA Wire/dpa

King Charles III took part in a traditional kava-drinking ceremony before a line of bare-chested, heavily tattooed Samoans and was declared a "high chief" of his Pacific island realm on Thursday.

The British monarch is on an 11-day tour of Australia and Samoa, independent nations where he is still head of state -- the first major foreign trip since his cancer diagnosis earlier this year.

Wearing a white safari-style suit, the 75-year-old king sat at the head of a carved timber longhouse where he was presented with a polished half-coconut filled with a mildly narcotic kava brew, AFP reported.

The peppery, slightly intoxicating root drink is a key part of Pacific culture and is known locally as "ava.”

The kava roots were paraded around the marquee, prepared by the chief's daughter and filtered through a sieve made of the dried bark of a fau tree.

Once ready, a Samoan man screamed as he decanted the drink, which was finally presented to the king.

Charles uttered the words: "May God Bless this ava" before lifting it to his lips. The ceremony concluded with claps.

Charles's wife, Queen Camilla sat beside him, fanning herself to ease the stiffing tropical humidity.

Many Samoans are excited to host the king -- his first-ever visit to the Pacific Island nation that was once a British colony.

The royal couple later visited the village of Moata'a where Charles was made "Tui Taumeasina" or high chief.

According to local legend, the area around Moata'a is where the coconut originated.

"Everyone has taken to our heart and is looking forward to welcoming the king," local chief Lenatai Victor Tamapua told AFP ahead of the visit.

"We feel honored that he has chosen to be welcomed here in our village. So as a gift, we would like to bestow him a title."

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Varieties

In Beirut, a Photographer's Frozen Moments Slow Down Time and Allow the Contemplation of Destruction

A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
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In Beirut, a Photographer's Frozen Moments Slow Down Time and Allow the Contemplation of Destruction

A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)

We watch video after video, consuming the world on our handheld devices in bites of two minutes, one minute, 30 seconds, 15. We turn to moving pictures — “film” — because it comes the closest to approximating the world that we see and experience. This is, after all, 2024, and video in our pocket — ours, others', everyone's — has become our birthright.
But sometimes — even in this era of live video always rolling, always recording, always capturing — sometimes the frozen moment can enter the eye like nothing else. And in the process, it can tell a larger story that echoes long after the moment was captured. That's what happened this past week in Beirut, through the camera lens of Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein and the photographs he captured.
When Hussein set up his camera outside an evacuated Beirut apartment building Tuesday after Israel announced it would be targeted as part of military operations against Hezbollah, he had one goal in mind — only one. "All I thought of," he says, “was photographing the missile while it was coming down.”
He found a safe spot. He ensured a good angle. He wasn't stressed, he said; like many photographers who work in such environments, he had been in situations like this one before. He was ready.
When the attack came — a bomb, not a missile in the end — Hussein swung into action. And, unsurprisingly for a professional who has been doing this work for two decades, he did exactly what he set out to do.
Time slowed down
The sequence of images he made bursts with the explosive energy of its subject matter.
In one frame, the bomb hangs there, a weird and obtrusive interloper in the scene. It is not yet noticed by anyone around it, ready to bring its destruction to a building that, in moments, will no longer exist. The building's balconies, a split-second from nonexistence, are devoid of people as the bomb finds its mark.
These are the kind of moments that video, rolling at the speed of life or even in slow motion, cannot capture in the same way. A photo holds us in the scene, stops time, invites a viewer to take the most chaotic of events and break it down, looking around and noticing things in a strangely silent way that actual life could not.
In another frame, one that happened micro moments after the first, the building is in the process of exploding. Let's repeat that for effect, since even as recently as a couple generations ago photographs like this were rare: in the process of exploding.
Pieces of building are shooting out in all directions, in high velocity — in real life. But in the image they are frozen, outward bound, hanging in space awaiting the next seconds of their dissolution — just like the bomb that displaced them was doing milliseconds before. And in that, a contemplation of the destruction — and the people it was visited upon — becomes possible.
Tech gives us new prisms to see the world
The technology to grab so many images in the course of little more than one second — and do it in such clarity and high resolution — is barely a generation old.
So to see these “stills,” as journalists call them, come together to paint a picture of an event is a combination of artistry, intrepidity and technology — an exercise in freezing time, and in giving people the opportunity to contemplate for minutes, even hours, what took place in mere seconds. This holds true for positive things that the camera captures — and for visitations of violence like this one as well.
Photography is random access. We, the viewers of it, choose how to see it, process it, digest it. We go backward and forward in time, at will. We control the pace and the speed at which dizzying images hurtle at us. And in that process, something unusual for this era emerges: a bit of time to think.
That, among many other things, is the enduring power of the still image in a moving-picture world — and the power of what Bilal Hussein captured on that clear, sunny day in Beirut.