APIA: 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 the one-time Pacific island colony Thursday.
The British monarch is on an 11-day tour of Australia and Samoa, both independent Commonwealth states — 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 narcotic kava brew.
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 dried bark.
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.
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 visited the village of Moata’a where Charles was made “Tui Taumeasina” or high chief.
“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.”
Tamapua raised the issue of climate change and showed the king and queen around the local mangroves.
“The high tides is just chewing away on our reef and where the mangroves are,” he told AFP, adding that food sources and communities were being washed away or inundated.
“Our community relies on the mangrove area for mud crab and fishes, but since, the tide has risen over the past 20 years by about two or three meters (up to 10 feet).”
The king is also in Samoa for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, and will address a leaders’ banquet on Friday.
The legacy of empire looms large at the meeting.
Commonwealth leaders will select a new secretary-general nominated from an African country — in line with regional rotations of the position.
All three likely candidates have called publicly for reparations for slavery and colonialism.
One of the three, Joshua Setipa from Lesotho, told AFP that the resolution could include non-traditional forms of payment such as climate financing.
“We can find a solution that will begin to address some injustices of the past and put them in the context happening around us today,” he said.
Climate change features heavily on the agenda.
Tuvalu, Vanuatu and Fiji have backed calls for a “fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty” — essentially calling for Australia, Britain and Canada to do more to lower emissions.
Pacific leaders argue the trio of “big countries” have historically accounted for over 60 percent of the 56-nation Commonwealth’s emissions from fossil fuels.
Vanuatu’s special envoy for climate change Ralph Regenvanu called on other nations to join the treaty.
“As a Commonwealth family, we look to those that dominate fossil fuel production in the Commonwealth to stop the expansion of fossil fuels in order to protect what we love and hold dear here in the Pacific,” he said.
Australia’s foreign minister Penny Wong said her gas and mineral-rich nation was working to be cleaner.
“We know we have a lot of work to do, and I’ve been upfront with every partner in the Pacific,” she said.
Pacific island nations — once seen as the embodiment of palm-fringed paradise — are now among the most climate-threatened areas of the planet.

SEOUL:When Kim Ye-ji first tried shooting at age 12 she could not lift the gun. Now, she is the world’s most Internet-famous Olympic shooter, thanks to her steel nerves — and Elon Musk.
Kim, 32, won silver in the women’s 10m air pistol at this summer’s Paris Olympics and captured the Internet’s attention with her nonchalant cool. But she told AFP that she fell into her sport by accident.
When her middle school teacher asked for volunteers to try shooting, Kim did not raise her hand but was selected anyway. Despite being too small to hoist the pistol, she was hooked.
“I thought it looked cool,” Kim, dressed in an oversized black suit and heels after a commercial photoshoot, told AFP at a shooting range in Seoul. Her visit to the venue prompted gasps of excitement from other young Koreans at the firing line.
Her parents strongly opposed her taking up shooting, but “for three days, I didn’t eat and just cried, begging to be allowed,” Kim said. Eventually, they relented.
“I didn’t have a clear goal when it came to my studies. But with shooting... I knew I had to be the best,” she said.
She has dedicated her life to shooting ever since. In Paris, she said she had a “single goal — winning a medal.”
She was not using social media at the time, viewing it as “toxic” and a distraction from training, so she was initially unaware when videos of her shooting started going viral.
At a photo session with other medalists in Paris, where journalists told her she had “a lot of Brazilian fans” and asked her to greet them in Portuguese, she started to realize something had happened.
“I didn’t think of myself as special, and I still don’t,” she told AFP.
“There are many other medalists with lots of fans, and I just see myself as one of them.”


The video that launched Kim to stardom shows her in an all-black uniform, a backwards baseball cap and wire-rimmed shooting glasses while taking aim and firing. After breaking the world record she barely reacts, glancing at her score calmly as the crowd applauds.
The clip, which was actually taken from a competition in May 2024, triggered an Internet frenzy, with people hailing her “main character” energy, and Elon Musk calling for her to be cast in an action movie, “no acting required.”
Videos of her Olympic performance quickly went viral, but the preternatural calm which captivated the Internet’s attention is simply how she shoots, she said.
“I wasn’t initially good at concentrating,” she said, but she was advised to keep her gaze ultra-focused at the firing line.
She found this “helped me concentrate, and to calm my nerves.”
She said she is a “naturally restless person,” but when she shoots “my arm is not just my arm anymore; it’s all part of the gun.”
“When holding the gun, everything must be perfectly fixed in place. Nothing should move — wrist, hand, or any other part. I think of it all as part of the gun.”


When Kim returned to South Korea after the Olympics, she was inundated with interview requests, invited to model for brands like Louis Vuitton, and even appear in a short movie — as an assassin — with Indian actress Anushka Sen.
She says she is “grateful and happy” for the attention, particularly as it has boosted interest in the sport she loves, and that her family has helped her stay humble.
“My father told me: ‘I think people are overreacting a bit when you just won silver’,” she says laughing, adding that her six-year-old daughter also likes to cheekily point out her mum “didn’t win gold.”
Kim says she sees no conflict between her life as an elite shooter and a fledgling celebrity. She still trains five days a week, fitting in photo shoots and interviews in her spare time.
She is now focused on winning gold at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics and believes she is only just hitting her sporting prime.
“In terms of shooting, it’s less about age and more about individual skill,” she said, plus preparation and effort.
“This year and last have been my best seasons, and if I continue to work hard, I think I’ll keep performing well,” she said, adding that she hopes to compete until she is 50 years old.
Since the viral videos, “people refer to me as ‘shooter Kim Ye-ji’ rather than just ‘Kim Ye-ji’,” she said.
“I want to continue my work so that the word ‘shooter’ will always be remembered.”