Waving Bye-Bye

Shortly before Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi hosted world leaders for the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP27) in the Egyptian city of Sharm el-Sheikh, he delivered a scornful message to his constituents. He asked them to stop having so many kids. El-Sissi has...

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Out With the Old

The president of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, appears to be enacting a series of reforms that promise to reorganize the country’s politics and its economy as former Soviet republics navigate the instability following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On the political front, Al Jazeera wrote, Tokayev called a...

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No Country for Old Men

Will the biggest group of young voters in Malaysian history decide whether or not a nonagenarian will become the Southeast Asian country’s prime minister? That’s the lingering question in Malaysia these days following a recent announcement by the country’s 97-year-old former prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, that he...

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Remaking the Wall

Chinese Communist Party Congresses are usually scripted affairs that befit totalitarian states. Delegates are expected to reach decisions that leaders have already prescribed. Surprises are discouraged. So the bizarre episode where a functionary escorted the 79-year-old former president of China, Hu Jintao, out of the 20th Congress...

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Beaten, Not Broken

Mercenaries from the Russian military contracting firm the Wagner Group held their ground around the eastern Ukrainian town of Bakhmut last week. They kept attacking even as Ukrainians pushed back other Russian forces. As Forbes wrote, the Wagner fighters’ arguably foolhardy bravery might have been...

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A Furry Election

In November 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic was still raging, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen faced an agonizing decision. Covid-19 had been detected in some of the 17 million minks in the Nordic country’s massive fur industry. As Bloomberg reported, scientists were telling her that...

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Back Again

When Israeli voters cast their ballots for parliament on Nov. 1, they will arguably be making the most important political choice in a generation, argued Times of Israel columnist David Horovitz recently. Specifically, Horovitz rang alarm bells about the far-right Religious Zionism party, which aims,...

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Blood and Soil

The Tanzanian government describes the transfer of ethnic Maasai people from their traditional homelands as “voluntary relocation.” The Maasai call it “eviction,” Le Monde reported. The truth is far more complicated, especially after the regional East African Court of Justice recently ruled that the government legally...

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Turning to the World

Algeria’s authoritarian rulers have a mixed relationship with globalization. After winning independence from France in a bloody war that ran from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, Algeria championed decolonization and the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War. After a civil war in the 1990s that...

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