The former president of Kosovo, Hashim Thaci, and other prominent politicians who were leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) are now on trial at a special court in the Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity. As BalkanInsight explained, prosecutors say that Thaci and...
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For years, Fatah and Hamas have vied for control of Palestine. The largest faction in the late Yasser Arafat’s renowned Palestinian Liberation Organization, Fatah controls the occupied territories of the West Bank, where Palestinian officials uneasily cooperate with their Israeli counterparts in attempting to govern a...
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Security forces in Burkina Faso recently murdered a 16-year-old boy and others in Ouahigouya, a regional capital of the landlocked West African country. In a chilling report, the Associated Press detailed the teenage boy’s gruesome murder in the street, citing an 83-second video. Such episodes could...
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Russian blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, 40, had been a cheerleader for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. As Reuters reported, he could be scathing of what he saw as Russia’s incompetent military establishment. But he called for Russia to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy soon...
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Nicaraguan officials recently aired a prison interview with Catholic Bishop Rolando Álvarez, who in February was sentenced to more than 36 years in prison on charges of treason. Critics said the interview was staged to deflate criticism of the cleric’s conviction. Álvarez is now living in...
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When ethnic Hutu militants committed genocide against members of the minority ethnic Tutsi community in Rwanda in the mid-1990s, hotelier Paul Rusesabagina sought to give refuge to more than 1,000 people. His life story inspired the 2004 film “Hotel Rwanda,” a gripping tragedy that sought...
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French authorities last week closed the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre and other popular tourist sites as more than 740,000 workers staged strikes and demonstrations over President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise the legal retirement age by two years to 64 and require higher payments into...
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Civil unrest in Israel has prompted many observers to wonder if the same pro-democracy impulses that motivated Arab Spring activists more than a decade ago are now emerging in the Jewish state on the Mediterranean. The protests recently forced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pause...
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The presidential race in tiny Montenegro, a NATO member with close ties to Russian-ally Serbia, became a proxy political contest between the West and East as tensions in southeast Europe ratchet up amid the war in Ukraine. You could say the West won. On Sunday, Montenegro’s former...
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For the fifth time in a row, Finns are the happiest people in the world. According to the United Nations’ World Happiness Report, citizens of Finland demonstrate high levels of “eudaimonia,” a term the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle coined to describe “overall life satisfaction,” reflecting a...
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Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB) recently told European Union leaders that the banking sector on the continent was strong, reported Bloomberg. Yet on the same day Lagarde spoke, shares of Deutsche Bank plunged as traders worried that the massive German bank...
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Twenty years after the American invasion of Iraq, the booksellers of Mutanabbi Street are back again, reviving the popular Arabic saying, “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads.” Fighting in the streets kept the customers away from this otherwise well-frequented strip of booksellers during the...
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In what the BBC called a “twisted moral code,” Mexican mobsters affiliated with the Scorpions Group, a faction of the drug-running Gulf Cartel crime syndicate, recently forced five of their members to turn themselves in to police for murdering two of the four Americans they...
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The prime minister of Poland, Mateusz Morawiecki, is worried. He didn’t like the implications of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s recent three-day visit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “The Chinese president’s visit to Moscow makes us anxious,” Morawiecki said during a press conference in Warsaw with...
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Tunisian President Kais Saied has recently been claiming that migrants originating from sub-Saharan Africa were coming to his North African country as part of a conspiracy to alter its largely Arab-Muslim culture. His comments came as part of a wave of violence against sub-Saharan migrants...
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Almost 23 years ago, heavily armed federal agents wearing body armor seized five-year-old Elián González from his relatives’ home in Miami and returned him to his father, ultimately to be taken back to Cuba. The photo of the incident was a painful reminder of the fraught...
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Thai authorities sentenced a man to jail for two years for peddling calendars featuring rubber ducks in monarchic regalia because insulting the Thai king is illegal in the southeast Asian country. As the BBC noted, the rubber duck happens to be a symbol of the...
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It’s hard to say which is more remarkable about the recent peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran – the reconciliation between Sunni and Shiite Muslim powers who have been at odds over the future of the Middle East since at least the late 1980s,...
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Three years ago, people around the world began lockdowns that shuttered businesses, schools, government offices, and other institutions that had been the hallmarks of everyone’s lives. Now, after Covid vaccines and other measures have reduced – but not eliminated – fears surrounding the virus, the...
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Campaign signs festooned the streets of Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, in anticipation of parliamentary elections on March 19. The signs feature candidates pledging to reduce housing density in the Central Asian country’s cities, reduce prices amid worldwide inflation, expand energy networks, and improve...
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