Articles in English

A courtroom drawing depicts Michael R. Dreeben, counselor to special counsel Jack Smith, arguing before the Supreme Court on April 25. (Dana Verkouteren/AP)

MundoAmérica

One aspect of special counsel Jack Smith’s arguments to the Supreme Court last week in Trump v. United States has not gotten enough attention: his claim that the Justice Department has independent power to confer immunity on the president. Adopting this argument would be a disaster for the presidency.

Smith was represented at the Supreme Court by Michael R. Dreeben, who served as a deputy solicitor general in the Justice Department for 24 years. In that role, Dreeben had primary responsibility for overseeing the department’s criminal docket before the Supreme Court. Dreeben thus spent nearly a quarter-century as the top advocate at the Supreme Court for federal prosecutorial interests.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

Our decision to resume feeding in Gaza is both the hardest and the simplest one we could make.

Hardest because barely a month has passed since Israeli forces killed seven of our World Central Kitchen family, despite knowing their location, movements and the nature of their essential work. Our colleagues risked everything to feed people they did not know.

Yet it’s a simple decision for us because the need is so great. We cannot stand by while so many people are so desperate for the essentials of life. Food is a universal human right, and we will not cease until those basic human rights are respected.…  Seguir leyendo »

Russian Volunteer Corps fighters near Ukraine’s border with Russia, May 2023. Viacheslav Ratynskyi / Reuters

Europa, , ,

The day after Russia’s presidential election in March, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a surprising speech. Having eliminated all viable political opposition, he had just sailed to victory by the highest margin in post-Soviet Russian history, garnering 88 percent of the vote. Yet rather than embracing his triumph—and his fresh mandate for a fifth term in office—he warned of an apparently grave threat facing the country: Russian defectors who have been joining the enemy in Russia’s two-year-old war in Ukraine.

Although their forces remain small, these Ukrainian-based Russian rebels have recently claimed responsibility for several attacks on Russian soil. In a speech delivered at his campaign headquarters, Putin compared these fighters to vlasovstsy, the name given to the Soviet soldiers who defected to the Nazi side during World War II—part of a movement that was considered one of the worst episodes of treason in Soviet history.…  Seguir leyendo »

Israeli soldiers patrolling Gazan-Israeli border, April 2024. Amir Cohen / Reuters

MundoOriente Próximo

Until last month, the war between Iran and Israel was largely fought in the shadows. The Iranians decided to take it out of the shadows, openly attacking Israeli territory directly, from Iranian soil, for the first time in the Islamic Republic’s history. Some observers have argued that Iran’s April 13 drone and missile assault on Israel was a symbolic gesture. Yet given the quantity of drones and missiles fired at Israel and their payloads, Iran clearly meant to inflict serious damage.

Israel’s defenses were nearly flawless, but it did not repel Iran’s attack entirely on its own. Just as Iran’s assault was unprecedented, so was the direct military intervention of the United States and a number of its allies, including some Arab states.…  Seguir leyendo »

Donald Trump giving a statement after the eighth day of his trial for falsifying business records, New York City, April 26, 2024

MundoAmérica,

On April 25 the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. United States, on whether a former president enjoys immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while in office. The Court did not need to accept the case; it could easily have passed on former President Donald Trump’s extraordinary claims of blanket immunity and allowed his trial on federal felony charges for attempting to overthrow the 2020 election to go forward. But since a federal grand jury in Washington indicted him over the election, the Court has done everything possible, as I argued recently in these pages, to delay the case from being brought to trial: first by refusing to rule expeditiously on the immunity motions back in December, then by taking the case in February, then by setting oral arguments for the very last day on its schedule.…  Seguir leyendo »

Pedro Sánchez, leader of the Socialist Party (PSOE), and his wife Maria Begoña Gómez. Photograph: Pablo Blázquez Domínguez/Getty Images

EspañaAspectos Generales

Pedro Sánchez has built a reputation as a successful political gambler, but suspending public duties and threatening to resign, as he did last week, was a political bombshell. It was so extraordinary it led to five days of national puzzlement and the wildest speculation over his motives: from mental health to true love and all kinds of shenanigans associated with the dark arts of politics in between. His announcement that he would not, after all, be resigning, came as another surprise, even to some of his political allies.

The timing of this apparently self-inflicted political turmoil adds to its oddity. The centre-left socialist prime minister spent months putting together a fragile parliamentary majority after a close election in July 2023.…  Seguir leyendo »

Justin Trudeau Is No Match for a Polarized World

MundoAmérica

Political careers often end in failure — a cliché that exists because it too often happens to be true. Justin Trudeau, one of the world’s great progressive leaders, may be heading toward that moment. In a recent interview he acknowledged that every day he considers leaving his “crazy job” as Canada’s prime minister. Increasingly, the question is not if he will leave but how soon and how deep his failure will be when he goes.

At stake is something that matters more than one politician’s career: Canada’s contemporary liberal and multicultural society, which just happens to be the legacy of the prime minister’s father and predecessor, Pierre Trudeau.…  Seguir leyendo »

British Labour opposition leader Keir Starmer speaking in Bristol, United Kingdom, January 2024. Toby Melville / Reuters

Europa

The United Kingdom is likely to hold a general election in the fall, and the outlook appears dire for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Conservative Party. In December 2019, the Conservatives were reelected with an 80-seat majority in the House of Commons on the strength of campaign promises to “get Brexit done” and “level up” those parts of the country that had not broadly shared in the benefits of economic growth and investment. However, the illegal Downing Street parties during COVID-19 lockdowns, former Prime Minister Liz Truss’s fiscal meltdowns, and the creeping costs of Brexit have demolished what had seemed an unassailable lead.…  Seguir leyendo »

This Isn’t the China I Remember

MundoAsia

In 1979 my mother pulled out a Band-Aid in a Nanjing hospital. The nurses clustered around it, amazed. “The West has everything!” they said.

We were on a family visit to China, where my Shanghai relatives were similarly wowed by our excellent teeth and ample body fat, not to mention our descriptions of American dishwashers, refrigerators and air-conditioning. And with the general awe came V.I.P. treatment. Hosts broke out bottles of expensive orange soda that they freely mixed with expensive warm beer. We could not escape drinking this any more than we could escape our government-assigned “guide”, whose job was to strictly monitor visitors like us.…  Seguir leyendo »

War Unbound

InternacionalOrden Mundial

Hamas’s attack on Israel and Israel’s response to it have been a disaster for civilians. In its October 7 massacre, Hamas sought out unarmed Israeli civilians, including women, children, and the elderly, killing close to 1,200 people and taking around 240 hostages. Israel’s subsequent air and ground campaign in Gaza has, as of March 2024, killed more than 30,000 people, an estimated two-thirds of whom were women and children. The Israeli offensive has also displaced some two million people (more than 85 percent of the population of Gaza), left more than a million people at risk of starvation, and damaged or destroyed some 150,000 civilian buildings.…  Seguir leyendo »

Why the Military Can’t Trust AI

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In 2022, OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT, a chatbot that uses large language models to mimic human conversations and to answer users’ questions. The chatbot’s extraordinary abilities sparked a debate about how LLMs might be used to perform other tasks—including fighting a war. Although for some, including the Global Legal Action Network, LLMs and other generative AI technologies hold the promise of more discriminate and therefore ethical uses of force, others, such as advisers from the International Committee of the Red Cross, have warned that these technologies could remove human decision-making from the most vital questions of life and death.

The U.S. Department of Defense is now seriously investigating what LLMs can do for the military.…  Seguir leyendo »

A broken glass box at the looted Kherson Regional Museum after the Russian withdrawal from the city on Dec. 22, 2022. Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images

Europa, , , ,

Anyone who wants to understand Russian history should ignore Russian President Vladimir Putin. But anyone who wants to understand Putin’s strategic aims should pay close attention to his reading of history. The Russian president’s long lectures and essays on Kyivan Rus and World War II are not random tangents but rather the centerpieces driving his regime’s aggression against Ukraine. The Kremlin’s efforts to impose its reading of history on Ukrainians living under occupation reveal the driving motives of this war, as well as its continued objectives.

Against the backdrop of the uncounted—and uncountable—civilian deaths, mass deportations, and domicide across the occupied territories of Ukraine, it might seem trivial to focus on historical memory.…  Seguir leyendo »

Abdoulaye Bathily, UN Special Representative for Libya and Head of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL), gives a press conference in Tripoli on 11 March 2023. Photo by MAHMUD TURKIA/AFP via Getty Images.

MundoÁfrica

UN Special Representative to Libya Abdoulaye Bathily has resigned after 18 months in post, leaving behind a political process best described as moribund.

Most international policymakers seem to believe Libyan rivals must initiate the deal to break the current impasse. The UN has taken the view that progress is not possible without the approval of key powerbrokers and their international backers.

On the other hand, many Libyan actors believe the only realistic chance of breaking the status quo is through an internationally mandated process. After all, the last two ‘unity’ governments have been created through UN mediation – in 2015-16 and 2020-21 respectively – while an attempt to produce a government through Libyan institutions alone has served only to produce a parallel government and reintroduce administrative division.…  Seguir leyendo »

Supporters of Ukraine rally in Washington DC after the Senate passed a foreign aid bill on April 23, 2024. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

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The new $61 billion US aid package for Ukraine, approved by Congress on 23 April, will improve Ukraine’s battlefield position – allowing stocks of ammunition from US bases in Poland and Germany to be shipped quickly to existing Ukrainian forces, and newly mobilized troops to be equipped.

Critics of Ukraine’s mobilization law, recently passed by the parliament in Kyiv, argued it made little sense to draft more men if there were no weapons to arm them: now that concern can be discarded.

The US package includes weapons Ukraine has long sought and which can make a significant difference in the war, like long-range ATACMS missiles.…  Seguir leyendo »

Police officers on patrol, Port-au-Prince, April 25, 2023. Richard Perrin/AFP/Getty Images

MundoAmérica

On Thursday, Ariel Henry formally resigned as prime minister of Haiti. Few were grateful for his service. Over thirty-two months, the longest premiership since 1987, Henry presided over a country where life grew steadily worse. For the past five years armed groups had terrorized the capital, Port-au-Prince; in January they intensified their assault. On February 29 they united forces and launched a full-scale uprising: they engineered two prison breaks and freed some 4,700 prisoners, engaged in firefights with the outgunned national police, shut down the airport, torched commissariats, and attacked banks and private homes.

When the uprising began Henry was away in Nairobi finalizing the terms of a foreign intervention, blessed by the United Nations and brokered by the United States.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

On April 9th, on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr holiday, the Indonesian Air Force conducted an airdrop of humanitarian aid in Gaza. In practical terms, this aid was just a drop in the ocean of horror and deprivation to which Gaza has been reduced lately. However, this gesture carried great symbolic value for the people of Indonesia and for me as their president-elect: it was a message of shared grief and pain, of solidarity and support, to our brothers and sisters in Gaza.

Over the past six months we have watched in horror as Gaza and its people have been subjected to a harsh campaign of collective punishment, in violation of international laws and norms.…  Seguir leyendo »

Like Germany’s president, I love a good kebab. Cosying up to autocrats like Erdoğan, less so

Europa,

“Nazis eat döner kebabs in secret”, must be one of the dumbest slogans I have seen at German protests against the far right. Yes, the popularity of the kebab in Germany has become something of a symbol of labour migration from Turkey after the second world war. And yes, Nazis get hungry, too. So what? If the consumption of ethnic-minority food was really an obstacle to the ideology of white supremacy, Germans would either be starved out by now or they wouldn’t vote for Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Neither of these is the case: the kebab is the second most popular fast food among Germans, and according to polls, the AfD their second most popular political party.…  Seguir leyendo »

Pro-Israel activists counterdemonstrate at a Pro-Palestinian rally in New York on Oct. 13. (Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)

MundoOriente Próximo

The Biden administration must do whatever it can to protect the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. It must also do whatever it can to protect Israelis. That means both pausing military assistance to the Israeli government until Palestinian civilians in Gaza have sufficient food, water, medicine and shelter to survive the war, and guaranteeing the Israeli people that the United States and its allies will do all they can to protect them from further attack.

The key to this dual policy is focusing on the lives of the people on both sides rather than on supporting or withdrawing support for a state.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Axis of Upheaval

InternacionalOrden Mundial

In the early morning of January 2, Russian forces launched a massive missile attack on the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv that killed at least five civilians, injured more than 100, and damaged infrastructure. The incident was notable not just for the harm it caused but also because it showed that Russia was not alone in its fight. The Russian attack that day was carried out with weapons fitted with technology from China, missiles from North Korea, and drones from Iran. Over the past two years, all three countries have become critical enablers of Moscow’s war machine in Ukraine.

Since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, Moscow has deployed more than 3,700 Iranian-designed drones.…  Seguir leyendo »

Old military vehicles arrive for a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon, Portugal, 25 April 2024. Photograph: Antonio Pedro Santos/EPA

EuropaUnión Europea

Fifty years ago, on 25 April 1974, a military-led movement in Portugal took down the rightwing authoritarian regime that had governed the country for 41 years. The Carnation Revolution, named after the flowers people offered soldiers on the streets, led the country to democracy and an era of immense social progress – reducing infant mortality and illiteracy rates, for example, which were comparatively very high in 1974. By 1986, Portugal had made enough strides to be able to join the European Communities, now the EU.

I was born in the early 1990s, but even in my generation 25 April is a hallowed anniversary for many.…  Seguir leyendo »