Worldcrunch
After four years in office and two months of denying his defeat to Joe Biden, U.S. President Donald Trump bids farewell this week to the White House. Whether this also means a final exit from the world stage remains to be seen — and one way to judge will be whether this is the last […]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/embed/SkCFjpB1RSo expand=1] The United States has been driving news photo agency feeds around the world since last week’s unprecedented scenes of a of pro-Trump mob storming the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C. This time, photographer Rod Lamkey captures a more peaceful moment: National Guard troops asleep in the central rotunda. Behind this photograph of […]
A dictator-in-waiting orchestrates a violent assault on the seat of government. Shots are fired. A stunned world watches what most agree is an attack on democracy itself, a rejection of what had long seemed self-evident: that a nation’s health and prosperity depend on an orderly transfer of power from one elected leader to another. Two […]
The raid of Congress by a crowd of Donald Trump supporters is the culmination of a tumultuous presidency that has deeply fractured the American political system.
China may be relieved to see their bitter adversary withdraw from power. But President Donald Trump was also Exhibit A for the Chinese regime to show the Western democratic system on the verge of collapse.
Reflections on an election from far away, but still so close.
More than ever, last week’s U.S. election was a global event. And as the four days of collective vote-counting finally culminated in a win for Joe Biden, the rest of the world seemed to react with a unanimous burst of hope for a clear change of direction. Yet already in the wee hours of November […]
PARIS — Watching the non-stop coverage of the U.S. election, a line from Shakespeare kept flicking at my mind. It’s a grim image from that tragic tale of love, hate and disinformation, Romeo and Juliet: “A plague o” both your houses! They have made worms’ meat of me.” Now, the graphic allegory was unfolding on […]
As the world waits for the final results of the 2020 U.S. election contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, newspaper front pages around the world capture the “uncertainty”, the “chaos’, the “tension”, the “suspense” and the “division” … USA The Washington Post The New York Times Chicago Tribune USA Today Daily News The Denver […]
-Essay- PARIS —The rendez-vous was for last January 21, on the anniversary of Louis XVI’s death. A friend had tipped me off that hundreds of French citizens gather each year in Paris to honor their last king and lament their fallen monarchy. Les Royalistes held mass for Louis and Marie-Antoinette, followed by pro-monarchy street protests. […]
A leader can, in good conscience, conceal dysfunctions, hide problems or mitigate difficulties. Telling white lies allows him to restore hope for his allies, and rekindle their desire to act. But what happens when it is the very definition of self-serving
Every U.S. election carries consequences beyond America’s borders. But Nov. 3 stands out for multiple reasons: a lethal pandemic has killed more than one million people across the world, once thriving economies are in tatters, U.S. isolationism has created an international power vacuum that is allowing right-wing autocrats to thrive across continents. And then, there’s […]
The uncertainty around President Trump’s condition since contracting COVID-19 is part of a pattern when powerful politicians fall ill.
Long before his sex scandal took over the front pages, every Swede knew Paolo Roberto. The son of an Italian father and Swedish mother, Roberto gained some notoriety in his teens as a street fighter, eventually earning a place on the police’s national list of “10 most dangerous youths’. After turning things around following a […]
-Essay- PARIS — I do my best not to get pulled into the rabbit hole of U.S. election coverage. It’s hard to imagine, at this point, how any poll or tweet or scandal could possibly affect the outcome. Can our global news site really find a new angle to help explain Donald Trump? Can anyone? […]
After more than two months headlines around the world focused on a single topic — COVID-19 — collective attention has turned to another story: the death of an unarmed black man George Floyd at the hands of four police officers in the American city of Minneapolis on May 25th, and the violent protests that followed […]
The coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated tensions between Beijing and Washington. It’s time that cooler heads prevail, and Germany has just the right person for the job.
Welcome to Monday, where the Myanmar generals are tightening their grip, new COVID variants are identified and a very ancient watering hole is discovered in Egypt. We also have a Die Welt piece on the dark side of the dream of moving out to the countryside. • COVID-19 latest: Researchers have identified seven new variants […]
President Trump’s scuppered impeachment may provide a cue to regional leaders working to undermine their own democracies.
In loudly rejecting President’s Trump threat to label Mexican drug gangs terrorists, Mexico’s government is covering its failure, if not reluctance, to tackle systemic corruption and its offspring, crime.
President Trump’s erratic strikes against the world’s trading regime require a collective response, as unilateral state reprisals cannot check an ‘arrogant’ U.S. administration.
The U.S. president has a history of strong-arming trading partners. But the move to tax things like French wine and Spanish olives is actually justified.
WASHINGTON — Next, more of the same, but with more entrenched division, a bitter crossfire of allegations and then, finally, a reckoning in the form of the 2020 presidential election. The long-awaited conclusion of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election is likely to harden congressional Republicans’ wall of support for President Trump, strengthen Democratic demands to hold Trump to account — and result in little change in public opinion, according to historians and politicians who have studied past national scandals. Mueller’s conclusion — he found no evidence of collusion with Russia but […]
And why he’ll never be the savior they’re looking for…
NEW YORK — The New York Times published an extraordinary column this afternoon by an anonymous contributor identified as a “senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure.” (In a tweet, and perhaps inadvertently, the Times also described its op-ed columnist as a man.) It’s readily apparent why the writer’s job would be threatened. His column describes a White House mired in subterfuge and scheming because President Donald Trump isn’t able or fit to carry out his duties. “The root of the problem is the president’s amorality,” […]
The President’s former lawyer pleads guilty on the same day his former campaign chairman is convicted of financial crimes. The hand of special counsel Robert S. Mueller is significantly strengthened. What happens now?
-OpEd- WASHINGTON — After many weeks of claiming, dishonestly, that European allies “owe us a tremendous amount of money for many years back” — in fact, Europeans spend far more money on European defense than does the United States — and after referring to NATO members as “delinquent” and worse, President Donald Trump appears to have handed America’s European allies an ultimatum: Pay up, spend 2 percent of gross domestic product on the military, do it fast — or the United States will pull out. We can “go it alone,” he told them, by some accounts. During the news conference […]
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump often seems as though he’s stuck in the “80s. But maybe the better comparison is to the 1680s, not the Reagan era. Consider his announcement Thursday of new tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from the European Union, Canada and Mexico. These countries not only supply about half of our imports of these metals; they are also among our closest allies. Astonishingly, the White House claims that alienating these important military allies is necessary “to protect America’s national security.” These trade policies, and the supposed rationale behind them, bear an uncanny resemblance to classical mercantilism. […]
Is the American in good faith? Why now? What’s next? Questions pile up in the wake of a decision that reverses 70 years of U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East.
Despite the growing list of powerful people toppled in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the biggest names in Washington are still dodging real scrutiny.
-Analysis- WASHINGTON, D.C. — A military confrontation with North Korea may now be “inevitable,” says Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) The United States is “done talking” about North Korea, tweets U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. President Trump threatens “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” then says maybe his language “wasn’t tough enough.” The North Koreans return verbal fire, talking of using “absolute force” to hit the U.S. territory of Guam and even “turn the U.S. mainland into the theater of a nuclear war.” In this moment of heated, belligerent rhetoric, planners in and out of government are diving […]
-Analysis- Last week, just a day after the abrupt dismissal of FBI Director James B. Comey set off the worst round of criticism Donald Trump’s young presidency, the next — and perhaps even more damaging — controversy was being ignited. The Washington Post is reporting that Trump allegedly revealed highly classified information to Russian Foreign […]
-Analysis- Having spent his whole life running a family business, Donald Trump is still adjusting to the strategic art of control required to effectively run the White House — and help lead the world. Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday, making him the shortest serving director since the 1920s. Comey had orbited in […]
A party is united behind an aging New York playboy with no fixed principles but an insatiable urge to be on the front page every single day.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — During his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump boasted that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” On the 100th day of his presidency, Trump invited Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who has said that he used to roam the streets on a motorcycle looking for criminals to kill, to the White House. A Duterte state visit to Washington or Mar-a-Lago would be a ghastly spectacle, given the way the Philippines have pursued a war on drugs even more literal than the one in the United […]
-Analysis- Buenos Aires, 2013. At the ripe age of 76, Jorge Mario Bergoglio seems destined to wind down an illustrious career in the Catholic hierarchy as the widely respected and mostly beloved Archbishop of the Argentine capital. But the Holy Spirit (and the College of Cardinals) was destined to intervene, sending the Jesuit prelate to […]
-Analysis- Fox News opted for the verb “slam” to describe the first significant comments about Iran from new U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. “Tillerson slams Iran nuclear deal as “failed approach,”” the conservative network headlined its story yesterday, following Tillerson’s remarks about the 2015 nuclear accord inked by President Obama. But there is another […]
WASHINGTON — It is either a turning point or a welcome aberration that President Trump found the cruelly extinguished lives of Syrian children to be compelling (or at least contributory) in his decision to use force in Syria. The nerve gas attack by the Bashar al-Assad regime, he said, “crossed a lot of lines for me . . . innocent children, innocent babies — babies, little babies.” Much of Trump’s appeal during his presidential campaign was based on dehumanization — the characterization of migrants as criminals and refugees as terrorist threats. This is the first instance I can recall of Trump showing […]
We all know Donald Trump is sensitive to what he sees on TV. But rather than displaying thin skin about comedy sketches aimed at him, the American president has now joined the wider world in reacting to this week’s images of a brutal chemical attack in Syria. And in this case, it may shape the […]
The headlines this morning provide two bits of far-flung hope for those still shaken by Brexit and Donald Trump: the new version of Trump’s travel ban applied to six majority-Muslim countries was blocked by a judge in Hawaii; meanwhile, halfway across the world, Geert Wilders’ far-right party suffered surprisingly disappointing results in Dutch parliamentary elections. […]