As actor Ben Affleck chided the media, six weeks after Hurricane Alex struck America’s Gulf Coast in 2004, “one of the dangers of great tragedies like this is, once they fall away from the 24-hour news cycle, there’s a tendency to think: Well that’s dealt with.’”
But, of course, the trajectories of the lives and stories of the people and places that find themselves in the headlines continue after the world has looked away.
Such was the case with the dozens of subjects featured in The National's Newsmaker columns over the past year – and this is how the stories of five of them played out after the news spotlight moved on.
Bertrand Piccard
It was, appropriately enough, at the United Nations climate summit in Paris in November that the 62-year-old Swiss-born adventurer announced that sufficient funding had been secured to complete the globe-girdling flight of Solar Impulse 2, the sun-powered aircraft designed to demonstrate the potential of alternative energy.
With Piccard at the controls, Solar Impulse 2 took off from Abu Dhabi on March 9. Flying at an average speed of just over 33kph, it landed 13 hours later in Muscat, Oman, the first destination on a planned 35,000km journey that would bring the aircraft back to Abu Dhabi.
From a family of scientist-adventurers – in 1931 his grandfather floated in a balloon to a record 16,000 metres above Earth – Piccard, a trained psychiatrist, was no stranger to the challenges and, indeed, psychology of adventure. In 1999 he and a co-pilot, Brian Jones, made the first non-stop, round-the-world balloon fight, on board Breitling Orbiter 3. People said such things were impossible, Piccard has said, "and it's exactly why we try to do it".
But while Piccard and his team have broken assorted aviation records and promoted the promise of solar energy, the vast cost and troubled flight of Solar Impulse 2 have also demonstrated the scale of the hurdles hampering the search for a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels.
Fog delayed the flight on the third leg in India. Unfavourable crosswinds caused long delays in China. Then bad weather caused an unplanned landing in Japan in May, cutting short a planned first ocean crossing, to Hawaii.
When they finally got airborne again, it was in Hawaii – after almost 20,000km and 254 hours of flying time, but only eight of the planned 14 legs – that the adventure was put on hold, on July 3. Overheated by the five-day, 7,200km leg, the aircraft’s batteries were toast.
Undeterred, Piccard insisted the circumnavigation would resume in Hawaii in April 2016, and at the Paris climate talks his team announced they had raised the US$20 million (Dh73.5m) they needed for repairs, bringing the total cost of the project to $170m.
Ahead of Piccard next year lies a 4,000km crossing of the Pacific to the US west coast, followed by a crossing of the Atlantic and, depending on winds, either Europe or North Africa, before – with luck – a triumphant, if delayed return to Abu Dhabi.
While the batteries may have failed, Piccard’s enthusiasm for the challenge has remained fully charged. As he said shortly before leaving Abu Dhabi in March, “It’s not easy to be pioneers … because every single hour of your life you meet people who doubt you. But we used all those doubts, all the questions, for motivation.”
David Sweat and Richard Matt
An altogether different type of journey, motivated solely by self-interest, captivated the world in June, when convicted murderers David Sweat and Richard Matt broke out of a maximum-security prison in New York.
At first, attention focused on the Hollywood-style nature of their escape – the men left dummies in their beds to fool guards, cut through the steel walls of their cells and threaded their way through pipes and over hidden catwalks to freedom. They even left behind a “Have a nice day” note for prison staff.
As the pair remained on the run, however, sobering details of their lives and crimes emerged.
Matt, 48, had first fallen foul of the law at 14, when he was sent to a care home for stealing a boat.
Over the years he graduated to extremely serious crime, serving time for rape and assault before finally abducting and murdering a 76-year-old former employer against whom he held a grudge.
Sweat, 34, also had a troubled childhood. His life of petty crime escalated until, following a raid on a gun store in 2002, he murdered a police officer, first shooting him and then running him over with a pickup truck.
The pair’s freedom, and a manhunt, which cost $23m, lasted three weeks. Matt, armed with a shotgun, was shot dead by a Swat team 30km south of the Canadian border on June 26. Sweat had two more days of freedom. Shot and wounded, he is serving out his life sentence in another prison.
Later, it emerged that the two men had ruined other lives in their bid for freedom. In September, Joyce Mitchell, a 51-year-old married prison worker who had been seduced by the attention the two men had paid her, was jailed for seven years for aiding their escape.
Sundar Pichai
Born in Chennai, in south India, in 1972 to a family with no television and no telephone, Sundar Pichai’s appointment as chief executive of California-based Google, in August, was a comment not only on how far he had come, but also on how rapidly information technology has transformed the world.
Joining Google in 2004, Pichai quickly made his mark across the company’s portfolio. “If you use any Google product,” noted The Verge website in May this year, “chances are Pichai had some say in how it was created.”
Among Pichai’s achievements for Google is Chrome, launched in 2008 and now the world’s most popular smartphone browser.
Appropriately for a man who scaled the heights from humble beginnings in India, Pichai returned to the country in December for the first time since his elevation, brimming with plans to connect the world’s unconnected, ranging from free Wi-Fi at train stations to Project Loon, an ambitiously innovative scheme to bring internet to the rural masses via a network of balloons.
He is also laying the groundwork for others to follow in his steps. Google plans to train two million Android developers in India, in partnership with universities and the National Skill Development Corporation of India.
Paris
It has been a tough year for Paris, but predictions that the terrorist attacks in November would tarnish the city’s appeal have, inevitably, proved wide of the mark.
On January 17, 12 people were killed and 22 wounded in a series of terror attacks by Al Qaeda on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and other targets in and around the French capital.
November’s suicide bombings and shootings, claimed by ISIL as retaliation for interference in Syria and Iraq, killed 130 people.
But those who feared Paris’s days as the City of Light were numbered had forgotten that her spirit was forged in the fires of extreme suffering. Paris has seen and survived it all – from the horrors of the French Revolution to two world wars and the long years between 1958 and 1998, when terrorism was an almost constant companion.
The attack this year has, of course, destroyed or forever blighted the lives of the dead and injured and their families – only on December 21, over a month after the November attacks, was the funeral of one British victim finally held in the UK.
Yet the life of the city goes on, as it always has. First, the climate talks, which ran from the end of November to December 12, pushed terrorism out of the headlines, and now Paris is a city dressed for Christmas. Its streets are decorated, its monuments lit and the windows of department stores filled with animated displays. In almost every arrondissement, children ride on free merry-go-rounds, a big wheel turns on the Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Élysées is reinvented as a Christmas village.
On December 21, Paris’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, announced the city’s plans for New Year’s Eve, the focus of which would be the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Élysées. The celebrations, she said, would be “symbolic”, aimed at “sending out a message: Paris is standing and the Parisians continue to live.”
J J Abrams
Back in 2011, nobody, perhaps J J Abrams included, could have predicted the meteoric rise of the man who was then a prolific if undistinguished writer-producer.
If his career had ended last year, Abrams's last hoorah would have been the mediocre TV series Person of Interest. In fact, his CV reads like a "best of" of worst television shows, with highlights including Fringe, Alcatraz and Lost, which after six years of infuriating twists finally surrendered all pretence that it was going somewhere in 2010.
There were some brighter moments – the 2006 and 2011 contributions to the Mission: Impossible franchise among them, the first as writer, the second as producer.
But it was with two blockbusters, both released this year, that Abrams secured his seat in Hollywood's hall of fame – MI's Rogue Nation, which he produced, followed by Star Wars: The Force Awakens, on which he is credited as both director and co-writer.
Not bad, for a man who has made only five films.
His future is still star-studded with a Star Trek Beyond, shot partially in Dubai and now in post-production, due for release next year.
But when that CV is finally signed off, it seems certain that The Force Awakens, an affectionate reunion of cast and deft uniting of themes from Star Wars past, will take its place as one of the high-water marks of his career. Praise for The Force Awakens, many scenes for which were shot in Abu Dhabi, has been almost universal, and the box office agrees, with the film bringing in a record $250m (918m) in its opening weekend. The secret of Abrams's success? Nostalgia, partly. But, as he told Wired magazine, for all its CGI spacecraft, lightsabres and explosions, at its heart, Star Wars is a simple, timeless story "about a young man and a young woman" – a story for all time and not just for "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away".
weekend@thenational.ae
