Bolivia’s beaming president, as pictured (right) on Wednesday’s front page of Tarija-based daily El País, has good reason to smile: He’s just been cleared to seek reelection indefinitely. Evo Morales, 58, was first elected in 2005 following a period of upheaval that saw four presidents come and go in less than five years. Once in […]
Tag: elections
PARIS — In the final days of the recent French presidential campaign, one confrontation looked like it might turn the tables in favor of underdog Marine Le Pen. Angry workers facing the closing of a Whirlpool plant in the northern city of Amiens cursed and whistled at visiting frontrunner Emmanuel Macron, accusing him of being […]
-Analysis- Some new presidents wait three months until they make their first overseas trip. Not Emmanuel Macron. Following in the footsteps of his predecessors Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, the freshly-elected, 39-year-old French president headed to Berlin today, just 24 hours after his inauguration. A stronger, more united Europe sits at the top of Macron’s […]
-OpEd- LONDON — Who can blame UK Prime Minister Theresa May for calling an election now, as her own Conservative party mandarins have been urging? Her party enjoys a 21-percentage-point lead in the polls. The opposition Labour Party is weak and divided, and the economy has yet to register the expected wobbles in the wake of last year’s vote to leave the European Union. What better time to crush the opposition and beef up the Conservatives’ 17-seat majority? Yet her decision is as strategically flawed as it is tactically clever. First, she risks losing credibility. Having promised not to get […]
After Trump and Brexit surprise victories with the support of disenchanted voters, the populist right-wing candidate in France is feeling supremely confident.
Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolás Maduro has brought his country to the lowest socio-economic levels in its history. His clinging to power is a dangerous thing.
Monday’s edition of Die Tageszeitung features a front page that, at best, we can call overly creative. The Berlin daily’s editors unlikely photoshopped mash-up is a blend of two big stories from over the weekend : the death Saturday of rock’n’roll legend Chuck Berry at the age of 90, and the unanimous selection Sunday of […]
The northern state of Punjab is known as India’s bread basket. But in recent years, it has become a fertile ground not just for crops, but also drug abuse.
Categories
A New World Disorder
PARIS — Put any two Americans abroad (of a particular political bent — or not?) in the same room, and they’ll try at first to avoid the elephant in said room. It won’t last. The time has come to count down the days and hours to Friday’s inauguration of a bad-New-York-joke-turned-leader-of-the-free-world. An old Colorado friend […]
Just hours before outgoing U.S. President Barack Obama’s emotional farewell address in Chicago, another head of state was taking center stage down in steamy Central America to let just the opposite be known: He’s still very much here, with no plans to leave power anytime soon. Daniel Ortega, the long-serving leader of Nicaragua, first came […]
-OpEd- When President Yahya Jammeh accepted electoral defeat in the tiny west African nation of Gambia two weeks ago, voters and democracy advocates alike cheered. Jammeh, who once claimed a “billion-year” mandate and has been in power for 22 years, was finally vacating his throne. But the celebrations were premature. A week later, Jammeh decided […]
-Analysis- BERLIN — Europe’s leaders were jubilant when Alexander Van der Bellen won the Austrian election Sunday. The bitter pill came later with confirmation that Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, a strong supporter of the European Union, had lost the constitutional referendum he’d staked his reputation on — and would resign. Italy was one of […]
–OpEd- BERLIN — It’s been said that house guests are like dead fish: After three days they start to smell. When it comes to government officials, it usually takes a little longer. Americans make a president clear out of the White House after eight years, at the latest. That’s smart. Heads of government in Germany […]
WASHINGTON — To put it bluntly, the media missed the story. In the end, a huge number of American voters wanted something different. And although these voters shouted and screamed it, most journalists just weren’t listening. They didn’t get it. They didn’t get that the huge, enthusiastic crowds at Donald Trump’s rallies would really translate into that many votes. They couldn’t believe that the America they knew could embrace someone who mocked a disabled man, bragged about sexually assaulting women, and spouted misogyny, racism and anti-Semitism. It would be too horrible. So, therefore, according to some kind of magical thinking, […]
Trump’s victory reminds this Chilean writer of some of the worst moments of the past half-century, including 1973 army coup in Chile and the 9/11 terror attacks.
The navy blue Porsche, casual clothes and sparkling eyes of Fady Chamoun scream: “American Dream.” He came from Lebanon in 1972 to study engineering at the University of Michigan and stayed after the outbreak of civil war in 1975 in his homeland. He wouldn’t trade the life he’s built in Cleveland for anything. Over the […]
Categories
Transatlantic Terror Lessons
New York is again testing the limits of its status as “the city that never sleeps.” A week after marking the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks at Ground Zero, an explosion a bit farther uptown Saturday injured 29 people. And now, even as the investigation continues into that attack in the Chelsea […]
Categories
Tech Giants With Feet Of Clay
It was the week two U.S. tech giants saw their seemingly unstoppable sprint toward global domination hit a wall. First, on Tuesday, Apple was ordered to pay up 13 billion euros in back taxes after the European Union ruled that a series of sweetheart tax deals made with the Irish government were illegal. That’s a […]
Trump is supported by 1 in 5 younger voters, an astonishing and consequential collapse for the GOP.
CASABLANCA — Morocco is no stranger to the jihadist violence afflicting other Muslim countries: In 2003, a suicide bombing killed 33 people in the country’s largest city, Casablanca, while a 2011 attack killed 17 in Marrakesh. But unlike most of its neighbors, Morocco has a detailed policy to reform rather than destroy followers of Salafism, […]
Politicians are hiding behind complacent language instead of facing the challenges that their constituents are fired up about.
-OpEd- The Democratic National Convention will feature plenty of well-earned criticism of Donald Trump’s isolationist, revisionist, immoral and self-contradicting foreign policy agenda. But if Hillary Clinton wants to win the argument, she must also convince voters that the world is not in the catastrophic state that Trump would have them believe. Foreign policy was always going to be a big part of the 2016 presidential election, as far as the Clinton campaign was concerned. Its candidate spent four years as secretary of state and is running on her record of service. What the Clinton team did not anticipate is that […]
Philippine Daily Inquirer, June 30th The Philippine Daily Inquirer issue Thursday features an epic montage of Rodrigo “Rudy” Duterte with the headline “Have no fear, Rudy is here.” The controversial 71 year-old former prosecutor and Davao City mayor was sworn in Thursday as the 16th President of the Philippines, succeeding Benigno Aquino III. Taking the […]
ROME —Virginia Raggi, a 37-year-old insurgent newcomer, has scored a resounding victory over the candidate from Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s ruling party to become the first woman mayor of Italian capital Rome. Raggi, a member of the upstart anti-establishment 5-Star Movement founded by Italian comedian Beppe Grillo, defeated Democratic Party candidate Roberto Giachetti in the […]
SPOTLIGHT: SOCCER & THE STATE OF FRANCE “Everything I know about morality and the obligations of men, I owe it to soccer,” French philosopher Albert Camus once said. And there’s definitely more than sports at play in the Euro 2016 soccer championship that kicks off tonight in France: There are heightened security fears around the […]
SPOTLIGHT: THE MEANING OF MUHAMMAD ALI Today marks the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Later this week, the man who for decades was the world’s most famous Muslim, and arguably its most famous person of any religion or race, will be laid to rest in an Islamic ceremony in the heartland of […]
-OpEd- WASHINGTON — What word comes to mind when you see the name Donald Trump? For some people, it might be “anger,” since he provokes it and stokes it. For others, it might be “ignorance,” since he knows so little and, like many unburdened by knowledge, is untroubled by facts. Some might say “fear,” since it would take some scary police tactics to push 11 million people over the border to Mexico. For me, none of those words suffices. I would say “betrayal.” It is the word that comes to mind almost on a nightly basis when I see some […]
DETROIT — To reach the heart of the matter in Michigan on a late-winter evening, navigate out of downtown Detroit and drive 20 miles north on Interstate 94, and continue for seven miles, the darkening way lit by the flickering yellowish glow of American commerce, until you reach yet another strip mall at the corner of Schoenherr Road. There, in a storefront headquarters stuck between Buy Buy Baby and Long Tall Sally, members of the Macomb County Republican Party emerge from the cold to watch their presidential candidates debate again on television. In the vast suburban landscape above Detroit, Macomb […]
PARIS — Generational and gender debates rumbling inside the U.S. Democratic primary are setting off sparks as far away as Mexico and Australia. In an open letter to young women backing Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the Sydney Morning Herald‘s Julie Szego scolds such millenials for suffering from wide-eyed naïveté. “From the ‘safe spaces’ on […]
A tiny African tribe, the Hadza continue hunter-gatherer lives on the edge of the sedentary world. They recognize no official leaders, but vote in national elections for the most practical reasons.
Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa insists he will retire from politics when his term ends. Yet he has spent the past year lobbying to end presidential term limits, which a loyal parliament has now granted. Does he have a hidden agenda to remain in power?
Government transparency is considered something of a Scandinavian specialty. And Taiwan? After having ranked 36th in 2013 and 11th last year, the Asian island nation has shot to the top of this year’s Global Open Data Index, the China Times reports. It is the first time a non-European country has topped the annual ranking from […]
El Universal, Dec. 7, 2015 CARACAS — Venezuelans congratulated themselves for what several officials described as an “exemplary” election, without violence or widespread accusations of fraud. The ballot Sunday saw the liberal opposition to President Nicolas Maduro took 99 of 167 parliamentary seats in a provisional vote count, with the ruling, socialist PSUV party winning […]
As Venezuela’s government becomes nervous about possible defeat in parliamentary elections Sunday, its threatening rhetoric shows signs it might refuse to acknowledge a loss at the polls. Then, all bets are off.
Argentina’s next president, the center-right Mauricio Macri, must be deft in reforming the economy of a society that has moved beyond a developmental stage, to one that sees itself as “at risk.”
The increasing “unreliability” of voters in a digital age are consistently knocking polling experts off their mark.
OPPOSITION LOOKS TO WIN BIG IN MYANMAR Photo: Jack Kurtz/ZUMA The National League for Democracy (NLD) opposition party led by Aung San Suu Kyi is on the verge of a sweeping victory in Myanmar, where party officials say they expect to win at least 70% of parliamentary seats, The Myanmar Times reports. Yesterday’s historic election […]
-Analysis- ISTANBUL — Why did those who gave 60% of the vote to opposition parties in the June 7 parliamentary elections turn to the ruling AKP on Sunday? The message to the various forces of the opposition was clear: “You couldn’t find a ruling coalition with 60% of the vote. You made a mess of […]
Zaman, Nov. 2, 2015 “Alone in power,” writes Turkish daily Zaman on its Monday front page, after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) swept back to victory in Sunday’s parliamentary elections. In a defeat for political moderates, secularists and Kurds, the AKP will return to governing the country alone after winning […]
EU, BALKANS NEGOTIATE REFUGEE PLAN Leaders agreed yesterday at a summit of eight EU countries along with Serbia, Macedonia and Albania to create 100,000 places for migrants in the Balkans and Greece as part of German-led efforts to find “a more reasonable way of dealing with the problem,” Chancellor Angela Merkel said. 500,000 Indonesia’s disaster […]