Evidence is piling up that the Damascus regime has used rape – of daughters in front of fathers, wives in front of husbands – as a targeted weapon.
Category: Geopolitics
Siberia provided 76% of Russian exports. And taxes on its mined resources account for over half the federal budget. As tension grows at the Ukraine border, some in Siberia want more control.
Outrage in China has followed the Kunming attack that killed 29, not just for the violence, but for the way the West has (and hasn’t) defined what happened. Making sense of the *T* word.
Tensions are running high in Simferopol, the capital of the region of Crimea. A Polish reporter tries to take the pulse of a people increasingly divided.
Whatever political and ethnic forces are at play, all sides must remember that Crimea’s finances and infrastructure are Ukrainian to the core.
As Chinese Premier Li Keqiang rolled out the country’s new ‘war on pollution,’ Le Monde paid a visit to the city that has registered the dirtiest air in China.
SEVASTOPOL — Tension is running high around the Ukrainian navy base in Sevastopol and around Belbek airport, with several spontaneous demonstrations breaking out. Meanwhile on the outskirts of the nearby city of Simferopol, says Vladislav Celeznevon, a Ukrainian Defense Ministry spokesman, military trucks without license plates are blocking in the perimeter of concrete military bases. […]
The singular tale of a young French-Malian who spent three years in the world’s jihad hot spots in an attempt to join al-Qaeda fighters. No one would take him.
Pressing news, random facts and other summings up of recent events in the world that counts.
MOSCOW — The U.S. government seems to believe that Russia has already established “complete operational control of the Crimean Peninsula.” American intelligence sources have cited no fewer than 6,000 Russian soldiers who were used to achieve this goal. (In a press conference Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin denied his country’s troops were currently occupying Crimea, […]
Europe and the U.S. must respond to Russian President Vladimir Putin with neither war nor capitulation. There is a third option: total isolation.
Categories
Verbatim: Hague, Maduro, Bowie
From Kiev to Caracas, what people are saying as the news turns…
A visit to an abandoned corner of Istanbul, where 40 families who fled Syria live in squalor.
The West has woken up to the gravity of the situation. But what real options are on the table?
-Opinion- ISTANBUL — On one hand, there is an investigation of an imaginary terrorist organization and the claim of a wiretapping list that includes some 7,000 people. On the other, there is the recording of a telephone conversation that has been spreading on YouTube, allegedly between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his son. The […]
From Poland to Western Europe and beyond, Ukrainian democracy needs cash to flourish. There may not be a third chance.
From tumult in Kiev to the two Koreas from space, nine photographs of key events moving the world.
-Commentary- OSLO — In Oslo, where snow falls abundantly, visibility is virtually nil. But what this white desert suggests is not melancholy à la Ibsen or a metaphysical Munch Scream. On the contrary, deep satisfaction and hope dominate here. In other words, unlike the French, Norwegians are happy people. They claim to feel no remorse, […]
In the capital of Ukraine’s Crimea region, where ethnic Russians and otherwise pro-Russian citizens hold sway, dissenters are holding a countermovement to the pro-EU Maiden protests.
The media criticism heaped on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has prevented an objective assessment of the protesters, who may not be quite as democratic as they’re portrayed.
-OpEd- MUNICH — When the Winter Olympics ended Sunday evening, the second part of the Ukrainian revolution began. Now the country’s cohesion and its chances of economic survival will be decided. After a dramatic week in Kiev, a civil war was avoided when the Ukraine Parliament removed the president from power. And now even Ukrainians […]
-OpEd- BERLIN — Among the rituals that North Korea’s young dictator Kim Jong-un has embraced is saber rattling. And in the run-up to annual military maneuvers between South Korea and the U.S., he was at it again. He threatened an “unimaginable holocaust” or “catastrophe” that would destroy inter-Korean relations if the traditional army operations went […]
In Eastern Ukraine, near the Russian border, the scene – and sentiments – and not exactly like those in Kiev.
The world was surprised, and very likely pleased, by this past weekend’s capture of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, head of the Sinaloa drug cartel and one of the world’s richest and most powerful drug traffickers. Pleased for good reason, because “Shorty” Guzmán, who was on the run for 13 years after a prison escape, is believed […]
-Analysis- PARIS — Is this 1989 all over again? One generation after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the protests in Ukraine instinctively bring to mind the revolutions that swept away the dying communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. The images of crowds, initially peaceful and festive in Kiev’s Independence Square, are similar to […]
Two French teenagers, aged 15 and 16, organized their journey in just a few days, via the Internet, to set off on Jihad in Syria. Once there, they were soon disillusioned.
Polls show most Americans want U.S. ties with Cuba normalized, even as the forces still hold strong among those who prefer the status quo. Time may have come for change.
MOSCOW — While the barricades in Kiev were still smoking, while the dead were being identified and the wounded were being treated, EU foreign ministers publicly declared for the first time that they held Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych responsible for the bloodshed. In Moscow, however, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov stuck to Russia’s traditional […]
KIEV — After a brief respite in clashes, the Ukraine capital exploded again Thursday, with scenes of urban warfare and photographs of corpses lining Kiev’s central square. Death tolls Thursday range from several dozen to more than 100 victims, according to various sources. Hundreds of injured were also reported as videos and testimonies of snipers […]
The battle at hand on the streets of Caracas and beyond may be more fractured than it first appears.
JERUSALEM — Three hundred kilometers by high-speed rail between the cities of Eilat and Ashdod, connecting the Red Sea coast to the Mediterranean: They call it the “Red-Med” Project. Financed by Beijing and launched from Jerusalem, China has revealed its strategy for “West Asia” — the term that the China Shipping Container Lines company uses […]
Stories making news, photographs turning heads…
-OpEd- The Western world felt safe in the illusion that nothing would happen in Ukraine until the end of the Sochi Olympic Games. But it woke up on Wednesday to terrifying images of the bloody battlefield of central Kiev, literally ablaze. After a three-month-long face-off between a pro-European opposition, which hasn’t weakened despite the cold […]
ALEPPO – It’s been three months since the Syrian government launched its offensive on this city’s opposition neighborhoods, using barrels packed with explosives. After a two-week lull during harsh winter weather, President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have reportedly resumed – and even increased the intensity – of the raids. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports that more than 400 people have been killed in the country’s largest city by these makeshift “barrel bombs” since the beginning of February, even as Geneva II peace talks were under way. Most rebel-held areas in Aleppo have turned into a no-man’s land as residents […]
The singular story of a Somali restaurateur who left the sweet life in the UK to return to his war-ravaged homeland, where he has survived multiple attacks on his restaurant.
A failure of the American peace initiative in the Middle East could cause a severe political crisis that will undermine both the economy and the stability of the Palestinian Authority.
The Chavez-Maduro regime has corrupted democracy and impoverished the nation in a perfect storm of political strong-arming, cheap oil, and public apathy. The time is now to react.
To understand the Maidan protesters in Kiev, just go to Prague, Warsaw and beyond. While other post-Soviet bloc economies have emerged, Ukrainians know too well that their leaders have failed them.
A boat filled with mostly Afghan immigrants was stopped and towed away by the Greece’s Coast Guard. But when the boat eventually sank, 11 people ended up dead. Survivors recount.