Norwegian officials recently warned their citizens to avoid Hvaldimir, a beluga whale that swims around the coast wearing a harness that can mount cameras. As CNN explained, the officials suspect that the Russian military trained the cute white cetacean to act as a spy. “The harness...
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Apartheid, or legal segregation based on race, ended in South Africa almost 30 years ago. Yet anyone walking around Johannesburg could be forgiven for believing the hateful policy was still in place, according to Catalyst, a free-market-oriented news publication. The deeply segregated city is only...
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A judge in El Salvador recently sentenced the former president of the country, Mauricio Funes, to 14 years in prison for negotiating with gangs when he was in office between 2009 and 2014, a period when the country suffered some of the highest murder rates...
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Kosovo declared independence in 2008, around a decade after NATO bombed Serbian forces who were brutalizing the ethnic Albanian communities in the formerly Serb region. It’s one of the final chapters of the tragic, bloody breakup of communist Yugoslavia in the 1990s. But ethnic Serbians living...
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Farmers in the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau are planting their maize, millet, and sorghum in anticipation of the June rainy season. Among them are the women known as “seed keepers” in the Bijagos archipelago of islands on the country’s Atlantic coast. As the Guardian reported,...
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Men from remote mountain regions have been among the majority of the more than 12,000 Albanians who have migrated to Britain in the past year. They ventured from their homes in the Balkans to the West European country due to “a lack of work or...
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In a final decision, Cambodia’s Constitutional Council recently rejected the claims of opposition politicians with the Candlelight Party who said they should be allowed to stand for election in July. They had been disqualified because of incorrectly submitted registration papers, officials said. The council’s decision means the...
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Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva recently called for the richest countries in the world to help Haiti, the violence-wracked, impoverished, politically unstable nation in the Caribbean. “In Haiti, we need to act quickly to alleviate the suffering of a population torn apart by tragedy,”...
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Twenty-three years ago, respected Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen penned an op-ed in the New York Times describing the remilitarization of Russian life. She described rules and regulations to funnel boys into the service, the boosting of military spending by 50 percent, and military detachments “adopting”...
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Aficionados of Spanish history will likely know that the fascists won the country’s civil war in the 1930s. Socialists took over in the 1980s and 90s, from 2004 until 2011, and again in 2018 when Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party...
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Voters in Mauritania cast ballots in parliamentary and local government elections on May 13 and will do so again on May 27. The two rounds of voting are the first since President Mohamed Ould Ghazouani assumed power four years ago. They will become a mandate...
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Since the US exited Afghanistan nearly two years ago, the leader of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, Hibatullah Akhundzada, has embraced the titles of “commander of the faithful” and “scholar of the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad.” His word is literally law....
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American and Chinese officials held more than eight hours of “candid” and “constructive” talks in Vienna two weeks ago. Among the breakthroughs, the Associated Press reported, was when White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told senior Chinese foreign policy adviser Wang Yi that the...
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Government troops and foreign fighters – allegedly soldiers affiliated with the Wagner Group, the Russian military contractor – massacred at least 500 people in the town of Moura in Mali in late March last year, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Around...
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Eight years ago, at the peak of the migration crisis in Europe, around one million Syrian refugees fleeing their country’s bloody war traveled to Greece for safety and economic opportunities. Four years ago, conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis defeated leftist Alexis Tsipras on a pledge...
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Timor-Leste, or East Timor, depends on an oil-funded sovereign wealth fund to finance 80 percent of its public spending. Now officials forecast they will deplete the fund in the next decade, raising serious questions about how the Southeast Asian nation will survive in the future,...
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The civil war in Sudan has claimed hundreds of lives and forced more than 160,000 people to flee to Chad, South Sudan, Egypt, and Ethiopia since it began in mid-April, according to the New York Times. International observers are now wondering if the war-torn African nation...
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The Arab League recently welcomed Syria back into the fold after suspending the country’s membership 12 years ago, when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad launched his crackdown on rebels wanting to bring an end to his tyrannical rule. Around half a million people have died and...
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Venezuelan voters are supposed to go to the polls sometime next year to elect a new government. It’s not actually certain that a ballot will be held, however. That said, as Americas Quarterly wrote, even if an election is held, “chavismo” – or the legacy...
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Turkish politicians have been appealing to voters in the Mediterranean city of Mersin in the run-up to the country’s presidential elections on May 14. Mersin is the capital of a swing province whose residents could decide the seemingly tight race between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who...
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