Worldcrunch
Politics has always been associated with image. This is especially true in Latin America, where white men in suits have dominated the field for years. But a new generation of women are shaking up politics — as well as how female politicians are expected to dress.
Those who supported Turkey’s opposition in the recent national elections are suffering a particular syndrome since the victory of incumbent President Erdogan. They could seek advice from supporters of Hillary Clinton, or even Al Gore.
War is upon us. But many in the West have sleepwalked through two decades of rising tensions with Russia. The situation in Ukraine can only be understood in the context of Vladimir Putin’s view on Boris Yeltsin, NATO’s eastward expansion, wars in the Balkans and Iraq, and beyond.
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, […]
From Malmö to Mumbai to Melbourne, news junkies will spend the next 24 hours scrutinizing voting patterns coming out of places like Youngstown, Ohio, and Pensacola, Florida. Those Swedes, Indians and Aussies in the know can identify such bellwether localities in battleground states that the pundits say will decide whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton […]
While markets have already expressed short-term preferences for the respective U.S. presidential candidates, the long-term impact is harder to gauge.
4:34 p.m. and 7 seconds. That’s the time thousands of French women are expected to walk out of their jobs today, and call it a year. Led by the feminist group Les Glorieuses, an estimated 4,500 people will be protesting the fact that “at 4:34pm (and 7 seconds) on November 7, women will effectively be […]
-OpEd- WASHINGTON — Donald Trump showed a bit more self-control in the third and final presidential debate Wednesday night than he had in the previous two. His back and forth with Hillary Clinton was more substantive, thanks in part to firm guidance from moderator Chris Wallace. But all of that was overshadowed by Trump’s breathtaking […]
-Analysis- WASHINGTON — Donald Trump is not really running a campaign for president anymore. Instead, he is involved in an extended revenge plot or is simply following the politics of grievance to its natural, unseemly end. See, campaigns have a message. They have strategy and tactics. They show restraint and coordination. Trump, in the 10 days since the release of a hot-mic tape of him making lewd and sexually suggestive comments about women, has done none of those things. Literally none. The Washington Post”s Jose Del Real counted more than 20 different messages from Trump during a five-minute span of […]
The town in Indiana of Terre Haute is a mix of organized labor and university students, traditional values and growing immigrant communities. It has picked the president the last 15 elections.
PARIS — With all its historical warts, the United States has managed to hold on to its status as a model of a robust democracy. But the spectacle of Donald Trump’s run for the White House is reminding the world just how fragile democracies can be. Trump has used his campaign for the presidency to […]
Beyond the Middle America stump speeches and coast-to-coast pancake breakfast stops, a U.S. presidential elections is also very much a global event. All the talk of the decline of the economic, political and cultural might of the American empire starts sounding a bit premature every four years, as November approaches. So this morning, it’s no […]
The two presidential candidates are at that age when “things start happening …” says President Obama’s former personal physician.
France’s former President Nicolas Sarkozy announced his bid to become the Republican party’s candidate in next year’s presidential election. He did so despite his previous claim that he wouldn’t run again. (See our Extra! feature for more) Sarkozy will focus on tax and budget cuts, stopping economic migrants and “organizing Islam,” according to French newspaper […]
TIME, Aug. 22 Cuban illustrator Edel Rodriguez turned up the heat on Donald Trump in TIME magazine“s latest issue. In a cover story entitled “Inside Donald Trump’s Meltdown,” the New York-based magazine explores the Republican candidate’s disastrous summer, marred by public blunders and controversial remarks.
SPOTLIGHT: HOW LOW WILL TRUMP GO? Waking up in European Central Time to the morning headlines means two things right now: Rio Olympic results and Donald Trump’s new low. We’ve been trying to digest the latest installment of the latter after the Republican nominee in his inimitable, er, offhanded way, said yesterday in North Carolina […]
SPOTLIGHT: REAL LIFE ARMAGEDDON? The stuff of disaster films, an asteroid could strike Earth causing death and destruction in the next 200 years. Asteroid 101955 Bennu is currently barreling through space at 63,000 mph and is expected to slip through the moon and Earth in 2135. But a “return trip” later that century could see […]
-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 […]
-OpEd- WASHINGTON — The Republican Party came to life as the bastion of “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men.” It was a reformist party dedicated to stopping the spread of slavery and to fighting a “Slave Power” its founders saw as undermining free institutions. The new political organization grew out of the old Whigs and reflected the faith that Henry Clay and his admirer Abraham Lincoln had in the federal government’s ability to invest in fostering economic growth and expanding educational opportunity. Its partisans embodied what John C. Calhoun, slavery’s chief ideological defender, described disdainfully as “the national […]
Now that two of the world’s five biggest economies – Germany and Britain – are headed by women, and the biggest one of all, the U.S., has a woman front-runner in its presidential election, the glass ceiling in politics can probably be declared broken, and it’s time to consider what kind of change this brings to the world. The overall statistics of female leadership do not look particularly encouraging. There are fewer women heads of government today than there were last year. Not even 5% of government leaders are women. Yet they are winning where it matters: If there were […]
i, July 12 Tuesday’s edition of the British daily the i features new Conservative Party leader Theresa May, with the headline “May Day.” Outgoing Prime Minister David Cameron is expected to present his resignation to the Queen on Wednesday, which will make Theresa May will the UK’s new leader. On Monday, Andrea Leadsom, the final […]
Signing a petition challenging Donald Trump’s right to run for U.S. president is one bad good idea. A novelist who lived through Balkan tragedies knows this well.
The worst mass shooting in recent U.S. history has proven to be a litmus test for the two top candidates in the race to the White House. When a gunman pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group opened fire at a gay club in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people and wounding 53 last weekend, the […]
SPOTLIGHT: HILLARY HISTORY Hillary Clinton has held a long list of impressive titles: U.S. first lady, senator, secretary of state. And now she’s added another one to the list — Democratic Party nominee for the Oval Office. By virtually every count now, Clinton is set to be the first female candidate of a major party […]
A millennial explains why her peers aren’t excited about the likely first female major-party nominee for U.S. president
-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 […]
CLINTON AND TRUMP WIN CRUCIAL NEW YORK VOTE Frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have moved significantly closer to winning their parties’ nomination after the two candidates clinched resounding victories in the New York primary. With final ballots tallied early Wednesday, Clinton got close to 58% of the vote in the Democratic race, while Trump […]
Though her victory in New York nearly assures a path to the Democratic nominee, the stature of the former Secretary of State has been weakened in her battle with Bernie Sanders. How does she adjust for November?
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 […]
It’s not just Donald Trump …
As he rewrites America’s political and media playbook, Donald Trump has also now moved swiftly to the center of the worldwide stage. Wins this week in seven of the 11 states holding primaries put the flamboyant billionaire one big step closer to the Republican nomination — and the world’s newspapers and magazines are dedicating ample […]
CONCORD — On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, Hillary Clinton’s quest to become the country’s first female president has encountered an unexpected problem: She is having trouble persuading women, young and old, to rally behind her cause. The latest sign came Sunday, when a new CNN-WMUR survey here showed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders beating Clinton among women by eight percentage points — which represents a big shift from the results last week in the Iowa caucuses, where Clinton won women by 11 points. The survey followed unintentionally problematic comments over the weekend by Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem, […]
Donald Trump travels to Las Vegas to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Trump International Casino, a day after calling The Wall Street Journal “garbage propaganda directed by an immigrant named Rupert Murdoch, who at 85 should be in a nursing home.” The man bringing together Trump and Putin is Silvio Berlusconi. That’s how […]
PARIS TERROR ATTACKERS NAMED As Paris continues to mourn its dead, five of the seven dead ISIS terrorists responsible for Friday night’s attacks have been identified, Twitter”>Le Figaro reports. Four of them were French citizens: Omar Ismaïl Mostefaï, 29, who blew himself up at the Bataclan concert venue, where close to 90 people were killed; […]
WASHINGTON — The 2016 presidential campaign has been peculiarly disconnected from the real world of problems, crises and governing. It took the catastrophe in Paris to narrow the gap — and even a monstrous terrorist attack may not shake the trajectory of a contest that operates within a logic of its own. The inevitable distance between politicking and the business of running a government is especially wide this year because of the strange configuration of the Republican field. Donald Trump and Ben Carson in particular have detached themselves from anything resembling normal politics, and sometimes from reality itself. Moreover, the […]
GOP BENGHAZI HEARING FAILS TO RILE CLINTON Photo: Ron Sachs/CNP/ZUMA Democrat presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton kept her composure throughout an 11-hour congressional special hearing set up by the Republican majority Thursday on the deadly Benghazi attack that killed the U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens and three colleagues on Sept. 11, 2012. […]
EU UNVEILS “BOLD” MIGRANT QUOTA PLAN In his first State of the European Union speech, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker unveiled a plan to deal with the ongoing migrant crisis and urged EU member states to take “bold, determined action.” Among his proposals were the emergency relocation of 120,000 migrants now in Italy, Greece and […]
A Latin American take on the rise of the Republican frontrunner finds a similar freedom with the facts and exploitation of the dispirited working class as the late Venezuelan strongman.
CHINA DEVALUES YUAN AGAIN China’s central bank stunned global markets by cutting the yuan’s value against the dollar for a second day in a row, this time by 1.6% after deciding on a 1.9% devaluation Tuesday. It’s yet more evidence that the country’s economy may be in a worse state than the government claims. As […]
HILLARY’S IN, AND THE WORLD REACTS Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Sunday announcement that she’s running in the 2016 presidential race, her second bid to become the first female U.S. president, drew news coverage from around the world, with one German newspaper even using the English headline, “The Very First Lady.” Via a short video on her […]