Tech and Tradition

NEED TO KNOW Tech and Tradition PARAGUAY [map url="https://mcusercontent.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/291fcd24-256f-0205-0aa7-99c26470231c.png"] Cryptocurrency miners whose servers generate their digital product have flocked to Paraguay to take advantage of the landlocked South American country’s low taxes and cheap electricity. But as power shortages continue to plague the capital of Asunción, many of these crypto...

Read full story →

Tilting at Windmills

NEED TO KNOW Tilting at Windmills AZERBAIJAN [map url="https://mcusercontent.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/dbbddbae-1c4a-9c7c-f083-79143015dc33.png"] Vafa Nagi is running for a seat in parliament as an independent in Azerbaijan’s parliamentary elections Sept. 1. “I have no chance to win,” she told Radio Free Europe. Around the world, opposition candidates like Nagi, a former journalist, often boycott elections...

Read full story →

Mob Rule

NEED TO KNOW Mob Rule ISRAEL/ WEST BANK [map url="https://mcusercontent.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/55f0c4f0-b3c4-e36d-0508-3a9e97283f17.png"] When Moawya Ali saw dozens of armed and masked Israeli settlers rushing toward his house in the West Bank town of Jit on Aug. 15, he grabbed his five children and took them to a nearby house for safety. When he...

Read full story →

The Price of Stardom

NEED TO KNOW The Price of Stardom ALBANIA [map url="https://mcusercontent.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/800ce11d-fb5a-8818-b885-cf149c9e5025.png"] “Impossibly blue skies, a wild and dramatic coast, and warm Mediterranean waters lapping at your feet – welcome to Albania,” gushed Condé Nast Traveler this month. Come, experience the Maldives for £25 ($32) and get that “Bora Bora feeling” enticed...

Read full story →

When the War Ends

NEED TO KNOW When the War Ends ETHIOPIA [map url="https://mcusercontent.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/a92e5842-0dc5-6ff6-ee91-6ebc335dec58.png"] Alemetu, pregnant, was trying desperately to fall asleep when the men from the rebel Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) came for her. Held hostage for four weeks in an abandoned school in Ethiopia’s Oromia region, she was beaten with a horsewhip...

Read full story →

The Judicial Wall

NEED TO KNOW The Judicial Wall THAILAND [map url="https://mcusercontent.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/2402d0e7-e99d-f2a5-7e19-773f27db9466.png"] The ruling party in Thailand’s parliament, Pheu Thai, recently nominated Paetongtarn Shinawatra, the 37-year-old daughter of billionaire former premier Thaksin Shinawatra, as the Southeast Asian country’s next prime minister. Usually, such an announcement would signal a resolution to political instability and...

Read full story →

Punch Drunk

NEED TO KNOW Punch Drunk ISRAEL/ LEBANON [map url="https://mcusercontent.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/b30a5a08-84e8-376b-e80a-eff0993be114.png"] Smoke billowed from the streets of Khiam in southern Lebanon recently after Israeli military forces shelled the area in response to the Iran-backed militant group and political party Hezbollah launching missiles into northern Israel. In Dahieh, a densely populated residential and...

Read full story →

Common Ground

NEED TO KNOW Common Ground TANZANIA [map url="https://mcusercontent.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/f2554b58-7524-1a48-202e-140719a07af1.png"] Architects in Tanzania are using three-dimensional printers to construct housing and other buildings, also using soil rather than artificial materials – the production of which emit greenhouse gases that cause climate change. The builders hope to construct a village called New Hope...

Read full story →

Blinis in Buenos Aires

NEED TO KNOW Blinis in Buenos Aires RUSSIA [map url="https://mcusercontent.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/989f50dc-b625-45fc-b227-955fe993f545.png"] Russian émigrés are buying apartments, beauty salons, restaurants, and other assets in Argentina and Brazil. They’ve brought popular Russian pastimes with them, too, noted the Wall Street Journal, like smoking tobacco from hookahs and eating beef shish kabobs rather...

Read full story →

Ganamos

NEED TO KNOW Ganamos VENEZUELA [map url="https://mcusercontent.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/d79e9c71-a431-5182-dcdd-2f3c65026880.png"] Tens of thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets around the world over the weekend, demanding that authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro recognize the results of last month’s election they say he lost. In the capital Caracas and other cities across Venezuela, in the...

Read full story →

Getting Rich, Right

NEED TO KNOW Getting Rich, Right GUYANA [map url="https://mcusercontent.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/e90aa670-d4c1-59cf-7f80-e9a728dcecc3.png"] Past efforts at reforming the constitution of Guyana have yielded little change. Now, however, as the small South American nation prepares to dole out the benefits from new oil drilling, advocates say the recently empaneled Constitution Reform Commission must create a...

Read full story →

Flipping the Script

NEED TO KNOW Flipping the Script RUSSIA-UKRAINE [map url="https://mcusercontent.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/58cb2c25-272d-3084-4995-06c00b6e444c.png"] Top Ukrainian commander Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi boasted this week that his troops now control almost 400 square miles of Russian territory in the Kursk border region, capturing 28 villages and forcing more than 100,000 Russians to flee. “Russia brought war to...

Read full story →

Atoll Power

NEED TO KNOW Atoll Power KIRIBATI [map url="https://mcusercontent.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/9dae539b-011f-16cb-1078-f5416b010637.png"] Around 1,300 miles south of the American state of Hawaii, Kiribati is a country of 115,000 people living on 150 square miles of atolls that stretch across more than 1.3 million square miles of the South Pacific. This strategic location blessed...

Read full story →

‘Mother’ of Change

NEED TO KNOW ‘Mother’ of Change ITALY [map url="https://mcusercontent.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/1d0451b2-7f9a-d2e0-7330-2b957ccfbb51.png"] Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni calls her plan to change the structure of governance in the country the “mother of all reforms.” Her critics call it a naked bid to seize power for the prime minister’s office and government, and...

Read full story →

The Tyranny of Doubt

NEED TO KNOW The Tyranny of Doubt MALAWI [map url="https://mcusercontent.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/87290663-ce6f-a91e-8a1b-ae0d9b187ea9.png"] In March last year, Cyclone Freddy ripped through Malawi and southeast Africa, killing 679 people, displacing almost 660,000, and causing property damage totaling more than $500 million. Thirty-nine-year-old mother Gladys Austin was one of those hundreds of thousands who had...

Read full story →

Human Shields

NEED TO KNOW Human Shields RUSSIA [map url="https://mcusercontent.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/989f50dc-b625-45fc-b227-955fe993f545.png"] The return of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former US Marine Paul Whelan and other foreign prisoners in Russian custody in the biggest prisoner swap since the Cold War ended the latest round of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s so-called “hostage...

Read full story →

Playing Chicken

NEED TO KNOW Playing Chicken MIDDLE EAST [map url="https://mcusercontent.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/7d5d13a4-f151-0ed2-ad36-8136fa782109.png"] Iranian leaders recently warned commercial airlines and others to avoid Iranian airspace as the country appeared poised to launch a war against Israel. The warning came as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Group of Seven foreign ministers that...

Read full story →

Nothing to Lose

NEED TO KNOW Nothing to Lose KENYA [map url="https://mcusercontent.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/6a6f20fb-6a89-3416-50d9-989b3f051e12.png"] In late June, Kenyan President William Ruto blinked. After winning the 2022 general election on his plans to reform the economy, he scuttled planned tax hikes and conceded that he was reversing his position in the wake of protests by...

Read full story →

‘The People’s War’

NEED TO KNOW ‘The People’s War’ BANGLADESH [map url="https://mcusercontent.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/b7de63f5-7c9c-8a5a-21d9-09f6627b8cf2.png"] On July 16, two police officers clashing with student protesters at Begum Rokeya University in the northwestern Bangladeshi city of Rangpur allegedly fired 12-gauge shotguns into the chest of 25-year-old student protest organizer Abu Sayed. The birdshot in the shotguns,...

Read full story →

Pull Harder

NEED TO KNOW Pull Harder GREECE [map url="https://mcusercontent.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/1af41250-c849-a5ef-523d-c57cb452726c.png"] Greece recently adopted a six-day working week to maintain its workforce as its population ages, but also to clamp down on tax evasion stemming from undeclared work. Under the new law – which only applies to industries that operate 24 hours a...

Read full story →
Loading new posts...
No more posts