Much has been written about the benefits and dangers of democracy. Some in Europe and the Americas fear that their democracy is under threat. Others say that is nonsense. Chinese leaders, meanwhile, view the US as a decadent democracy while celebrating their Communist Party-led version...
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Record floods have turned lowland farms in Pakistan into lakes, highlighting the fragility of an unstable developing nation in the era of climate change. “We are living on an island now,” farmer Muhammad Jaffar said in an interview with the New York Times. Jaffar’s cotton...
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On Monday, hundreds of thousands of Britons lined up and millions more tuned in to say farewell to their queen. It was a spectacle full of pageantry befitting the reverence reserved for this beloved monarch who died this month aged 96 after serving for 70...
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Over the years, liberal elites throughout Europe have fretted about the premiership of Silvio Berlusconi, the now 85-year-old media tycoon and conservative politician who has led Italy a few times since the 1990s and recently made a bid for the country’s presidency. These observers fear...
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In the first few weeks of September, Ukrainian forces retook more than 2,300 square miles of territory that Russia had occupied. In what the BBC called “a potential breakthrough in the war,” Ukraine had control over cities in the northeastern region of Kharkiv, driving back...
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Jean Blum, a resident of Berlin, Germany, usually uses natural gas to heat his home. But sometimes he uses wood in his stove. Now, as energy prices spike in Europe due to the efforts of Western governments to reduce their reliance on Russian gas and...
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“Medieval,” a new movie celebrating the military exploits of Czech national hero Jan Zizka, depicts peasants angry over rising living costs and other indignities, Variety wrote. Like any historical film, it is, in a sense, a commentary on today. The Czech people right now, coincidentally,...
Read full story →Tanks rolled and soldiers marched through the streets of the Brazilian capital of Brasilia recently. They were ostensibly celebrating the 200th anniversary of the South American country’s independence from Portugal. But the military parades on Sept. 7 had a different tone this year. In July, while...
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In the universe of Marvel Comics, Wakanda is a secret kingdom in sub-Saharan Africa ruled over by the benevolent, super-powered hero, the Black Panther. In the real world, there is not one but four centers of innovation in Africa that now, incidentally, are receiving boatloads...
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After World War II, British influence gave way to American power everywhere around the globe except the heartland of Eurasia. There, the Soviet Union held sway. Today, however, a new page is turning in the history of great empires. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of...
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A local politician in Sweden, Saida Hussein Moge, recently quit the ruling Social Democratic party after Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said she didn’t want Chinatowns, Somalitowns or Little Italys in the Nordic country. Moge is ethnically Somali. “The Social Democrats no longer stand for the...
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It was a time of lavish spending on ambitious projects. It was a time of brutal repression. In Saudi Arabia, it was business as usual. Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman recently unveiled plans for The Line, a 656-foot wide, 1,640-foot tall city that would...
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Death has two faces in Somalia these days. If famine doesn’t claim one’s life in the war-torn nation on the Horn of Africa, then Islamic militants might. Drought has brought Somalia to the precipice of its worst famine in 40 years. More than 7.1 million people,...
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Ecuador’s president, Guillermo Lasso, managed to drag his country out of the coronavirus pandemic. Now, however, he might be too embattled on two fronts to solve the other major problems facing his South American country. On the one hand, he is trying to put a lid...
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Just over six months after the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War, Sébastien Roblin at NBC News was thinking that Ukraine’s current counteroffensive to liberate the city of Kherson might prove to be the decisive gambit to bring about the beginning of the end of the...
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Technocrats, scientists, environmentalists, and other experts and policymakers love Chile’s proposed new constitution. As Nature detailed, the new founding document for the South American nation would “boost science, expand environmental protection and improve the nation’s education system.” Problem is, few Chileans feel the same way. The new...
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Indonesian officials are considering granting early release to Hisyam bin Alizein, also known as Umar Patek, the leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, an al-Qaida-linked terrorist group that killed 202 people in a bombing at a tourist spot in Bali in 2002. The officials felt that the murderer...
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Rather than hold elections in December as previously planned under a 2018 peace agreement that ended its almost five-year civil war, the government of South Sudan will hold elections in two years as a “transitional leadership” team makes supposedly necessary reforms. As Voice of America explained,...
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German officials this winter may keep open three nuclear power plants that they previously had planned to shut down as part of the Energiewende, or “energy turnaround” in German, that aims to transition Europe’s largest economy to renewable sources of energy. Former Chancellor Angela Merkel, a...
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Latvian authorities began dismantling a 262-foot-tall Soviet-era monument that commemorates the Allies’ victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. As Bloomberg reported, the move came after Russia launched a massive cyberattack against Estonia for taking down a similar monument for similar reasons – a...
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