Worldcrunch
The leaders of three big Latin American powers, Colombia, Brazil and Mexico, have shown they believe keeping a fellow socialist in power is more important than respecting the votes of millions of ordinary Venezuelans who chose freedom over socialism.
Several women have announced their candidacy in Algeria’s presidential election, on Sept. 7, which will potentially mark a new chapter in the North African county, five years after peaceful protests forced President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to resign after two decades in office.
The West will be weakened should the United States turn its back on its alliances, but does the isolationist Donald Trump understand what that could mean for U.S. strength and security?
Ukraine wants to bring back young men who have fled abroad as soldiers. Does a man have to fight for his country? Four young Ukrainians living abroad talk about their fears.
Following the death of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition is in a serious crisis, and must look at the fundamental mistakes it’s made the past two years, including calls for destroying the nation and desecrating the flag. It’s not clear what impact the prisoner swap could have, but activist Timofey Martynenko says it’s time to have a pro-Russia, anti-dictator opposition.
In the release of 26 people from seven countries, freedom for those unjustly imprisoned is great news. But this case, which included the freeing of the Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich and Radio Free Europe journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, could also set up an international precedent: journalists can be used as geopolitical bargaining chips.
Foreign condemnations and sanctions will not force Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro to abandon power after losing the recent presidential elections. The army could, but with a security system designed by Cuban advisers, it is firmly under regime control.
The killing of Ismail Haniyeh was not merely the assassination of Hamas’ political leader; it ended the life of a figure who could bring consensus to the Palestinian cause.
A series of strikes occurred just days after Netanyahu returned from the United States, which will have difficulty denying a role in the targeting of three capitals in the region in 24 hours, and may spark a much wider war in the Middle East.
Tehran claims the visiting Hamas leader was struck down in the capital with a “high-tech” missile or drone, so his killing could not be attributed to another security lapse on the ground against the chief suspect, Israel.
The crushing weight of Chinese loans to socialist Venezuela may yet become the biggest, if less publicized, obstacle to the restoration of liberal democracy there, if its power-drunk president were ever to abandon power as he once again appears unwilling to do after a highly contested election.
Scenes of violence against Syrian refugees are no longer unusual in Turkey, a country marked by rising nationalism amid a deepening economic crisis.
Corruption, human rights violations, and alliances with totalitarian regimes are all good reasons why the West should be paying attention to Venezuela ahead of the country’s presidential elections on July 28, writes Venezuelan journalist Miguel Henrique Otero in Nicaragua’s Confidencial newspaper.
Alexey Sokolov is being tried for showing the logo of Facebook, which Russia has classified as an extremist organization. But his human rights activism and opposition to the regime show how the social media is used by the regime to persecute opponents.
Venezuela’s Bolivarian regime has been trampling on democracy, by degree, for 25 years while deftly managing international opinion to avoid too much backlash. Now, with Maduro defying fair elections, there may be no turning back.
The former U.S. president and Republican nominee Donald Trump is threatening to revive his choice policies of curbing immigration and trade, and nobody would suffer as a result quite as much as the hundreds of millions of Latin Americans who may be forced to turn toward China and the Global South.
The Olympic Games in Paris will be the first in history with a video surveillance system linked to massive databases, algorithms developed by artificial intelligence and facial recognition. With bonafide security fears, as shown by Friday’s attack on rail lines, this new form of individual and collective control also raises real civil liberty concerns.
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have starkly different communication styles, starting with laughter v scowls. Would a Harris victory in November usher in a new era of more feminine form of political communication? asks Italian writer Nicoletta Verna.
With wars around the world arousing political strife and affecting the personal lives of many athletes, it seems the Paris 2024 Games could be overrun by geopolitics. Polish journalist Radoslaw Leniarski, an 11-time Olympic Games correspondent, explains what is, and isn’t, different this time.
Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro joins a long line of dictators whose fall from grace is marked by a period of incessant corruption, isolation, and a disconnection from reality.
Some Palestinians believe the Israel-Hamas in Gaza war has turned into a war of attrition. But it is, in reality, one of extermination. And the people of Gaza are no longer hiding their criticism with the international community that for nine months has failed to stop the war.
In Kazakhstan, prison sentences are regularly handed down for separatist activity. Yet the defendants in such cases are overwhelmingly “online separatists” — people far removed from politics and activism. Who are they and why does the state consider them such a threat?
In the Arab world, it is a regional sport to blast the biases and prejudice of Western media. But voices criticizing the performance of Arab media are rare. That is a serious problem, for multiple reasons.
Antonio, Ibrain, Victoria, Lizeth, Xiomara and Zaira. All six have etched in their memory the people they were able to help and those they couldn’t while crossing the Darién Gap, one of the most dangerous points on the Central American migration route to the United States.
As the vice president is now virtually assured to face Donald Trump on November 5, questions arise on what her election to U.S. president would mean for the rest of the world.
The Muslim Brotherhood called for anti-government protests on July 12, yet again failing to understand what is really on Egyptians’ minds and overestimating their readiness of taking to the street against the government of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.
The current unprecedented political crises in France and the United States — two very different systems and political cultures — have points in common, notably that partisan issues are still taking precedence over the need to rethink the democratic system and its practices.
Rodents in the trenches are making life difficult for both Russian and Ukrainian soldiers on both sides, and leading authorities and activists send house cats to the front lines.
U.S. President Joe Biden has announced his withdrawal from November’s presidential election after weeks of pressure from fellow Democrats. Newspapers from around the world have reacted to the news, bidding au revoir to the Democratic leader on their front pages.
Disappointed by poor gains over the past three years in Ukraine, Russia’s pro-war Z community is blaming a new scapegoat. Russian writer and historian Ivan Philippov explains why a society that just wants to live and to work is now their main enemy.
While the West is hoping president-elect Masoud Pezeshkian will lead to a détente even lukewarm entente with Iran, a closer look shows Tehran is not fundamentally changing its ways, and continuing to fan crises in across the Middle East.
What we are witnessing is the struggle of a people against their oppressors. This electoral process, although flawed, could become a milestone for Venezuelans to regain their freedom — and it is one that should concern everyone who believes in democracy.
Everywhere stars rise to power as charismatic demagogues and risk-takers, but these very qualities breed in them an implacable desire to control all power and push away all they see as worthy replacements.
The positions of ultra-conservative Christian and Islamic Salafism supporters are almost identical on cultural, social and legal issues, such as their position on private and public freedoms. That often starts with women’s freedoms.
Africans account for 43% of all rejected Schengen visa applications for non-Europeans. In light of this inequalities, it is time for the African Union to react and propose a symbolic but powerful alternative: the “Addis Ababa” visa.
Asia and above all China, have shown how the size of a market can drive state relations, and nowhere is this truer than in the Mercosur bloc’s increasing dependence on Asian exports. But regional integration in South America is stalling, as Argentina and Brazil are in another nasty spat.
Natalia Viana, editor-in-chief of Agência Pública, draws a comparison between Trump and Bolsonaro, who survived an assassination attempt in 2018. The path to victory for the Democrats is narrowing with every passing day.
The recent images showing a wounded Palestinian tied to the hood of an Israeli military vehicle is not an isolated incident. Despite the accumulation of evidence indicating the Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, the country’s politicians and officials continue to claim that their army is the world’s most moral.
Egyptian author Alaa Khaled observes crowds of Sudanese refugees walking to and from the nearby UNHCR office, prompting him to imagine the story of each individual and to try to understand the root causes of the current civil war and of the eternal Darfur crisis.
It is far too soon to tell whether Donald Trump’s attempted murder will have a decisive impact on the results of the U.S. presidential elections, but his backers will certainly milk the incident for all it’s worth.