The Washington Post

Este archivo solo abarca los artículos del periódico incorporados a este sitio a partir del 1 de noviembre de 2006.

Nota informativa: The Washington Post es un periódico publicado en Washington D.C. (EE.UU.). Fue fundado en 1877. Tiene implementado un «muro de pago» por lo que es necesario suscribirse para tener acceso a todos sus contenidos. Más información en su página de suscripción.

An aerial view of the Volkswagen car factory in Wolfsburg, Germany, in November 2021. (Michael Sohn/AP)

EuropaUnión EuropeaEconomía,

For the first time ever, German car giant Volkswagen is considering factory closures in its home country. It’s hard to overstate just how gloomy this news feels in Germany. Volkswagen AG is Europe’s largest car manufacturer and helps uphold Germany’s status as a global economic powerhouse. Employees, politicians and company bosses are rightly demanding resolute action to save these jobs.

How to do so is not immediately obvious. Volkswagen’s troubles did not begin yesterday but are the result of a long series of bad decisions — both at the European Union level and in Germany. And these troubles are a stand-in for a larger crisis facing Germany as a whole: the slow death of its industry, which has in turn helped push many voters into the arms of far-right political parties.…  Seguir leyendo »

A student waves Bangladesh's national flag, during a protest to demand accountability and trial against the country's ousted prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, near Dhaka University in the capital on Aug. 12. (Luis Tato/AFP/Getty Images)

MundoAsia,

We had violated curfew to join the protest at Shahbag, the Bangladeshi equivalent of Tahrir Square. Injured friends we left behind bade tearful goodbyes, not knowing whether it would be the last time we’d meet. Police opened fire on our group of 20-some students, teachers and journalists. Three were hit, and as they were taken to the hospital, my partner and I happened upon a brave rickshaw driver who agreed to take us on to Shahbag. As we wound our way through the narrow back streets of Dhaka, news of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s resignation reached the square. Soldiers stowed their guns and jubilant youth clambered aboard their armored vehicles, leading the crowds in triumphant cheers.…  Seguir leyendo »

Leading anti-government protester Kasmuel McOure attends a demonstration in Nairobi on Aug. 8. (Thomas Mukoya/Reuters)

MundoÁfrica,

Morara Kebaso Snr is a Kenyan who describes himself in his online profile as “A Dangerously Intelligent Lawyer. Bishop of Merciless Peace & Chief Registrar of Broken Promises”. He is a campaigner against corruption and has attracted more than 137,000 followers on X by traveling around the country and posting videos of “white elephant” projects to show how public funds are being wasted or pilfered.

“It’s a big joke!” Kebaso exclaims in one video, as he stands along a mostly dirt track that he can straddle with his feet and explains how nearly $2 million was paid to the contractor to build a major road.…  Seguir leyendo »

A photo provided by the Russian Defense Ministry shows a Yars intercontinental ballistic missile being launched during a military drill. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service/AP)

MundoOriente Próximo,

Nuclear proliferation is about to go critical.

Last week, the House Intelligence Committee chairman volunteered that Iran could declare itself a nuclear weapons state by the end of the year. And earlier this month, the U.S. intelligence community warned that Iran has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.’’ How quickly? Experts now say 12 weeks or less.

The mullahs might alert us or stay mum. Either way, the next president’s challenge won’t be how to prevent Iran from going nuclear but deciding what to do after it gets nuclear weapons.…  Seguir leyendo »

Afghan women wait to receive food rations distributed by a humanitarian aid group in Kabul on May 23, 2023. (Ebrahim Noroozi/AP)

MundoOriente Próximo

Three years have passed since the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the takeover of the country by the Taliban. The botched exit wasn’t merely a logistical disaster but a greater failure of strategic vision: Little was done to ensure that the investments of more than 2 trillion dollars and tens of thousands of lives over 20 years to build a stable, democratic Afghanistan were safeguarded.

Forty million Afghans were simply abandoned to an uncertain future — and millions have since fled the country as a result. Years of hard-won progress have been undone as women’s roles in Afghan society, media and politics have been diminished.…  Seguir leyendo »

Protective suits for handling viruses hang at U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command at Fort Detrick in Frederick on March 19, 2020. (Andrew Harnik/AP)

InternacionalSalud Pública

In 2004, an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome flared up at the National Institute of Virology in Beijing. Two researchers, while tinkering with a lethal coronavirus, caught the SARS bug themselves. This wasn’t the virus behind covid-19 but an earlier, deadlier strain that had sparked an epidemic in 2002 before it was snuffed out — only to reemerge from the Beijing lab. The infection spread to at least nine people before it was finally contained.

For those who still dismiss the possibility that the coronavirus causing covid-19 sprang from a Chinese laboratory, history has already offered ample reasons to worry about lab safety.…  Seguir leyendo »

A module is assembled at the international nuclear fusion project Iter in France on Jan. 5, 2023. (Nicolas Tucat/AFP/Getty Images)

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

The quest for fusion power — replicating on Earth the same nuclear process that powers the sun and stars — has seen a remarkable surge of interest in the past five years, as reflected by more than $6 billion in private capital and strategic governmental initiatives. At the same time, significant advances in fusion research at national laboratories and facilities worldwide confirm the potential of fusion as a clean, safe and virtually limitless energy source.

Achieving the production of commercial fusion has become a global race. Private companies are touting new techniques and even promising to deliver commercial fusion within a few years.…  Seguir leyendo »

Why elite women’s sports need to be based on sex, not gender

ReflexionesSocial,

After an ugly controversy erupted at the Paris Olympics, the critical question in elite women’s sport still needs an answer: Who should get to participate in the female category?

At the Games, two formerly obscure boxers found themselves at the center of a global firestorm over whether genetic tests should bar them from the women’s division, even though the International Olympic Committee required a passport, not testing to participate. Olympic officials confirmed that the two athletes are not transgender, but sidestepped the question whether they have an XY disorder of sexual development, or XY DSD.

However the facts in their cases resolve, it’s clear that sports authorities need to agree to a consistent standard.…  Seguir leyendo »

A poster of Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at right, and slain Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is seen in Tehran on Saturday. (Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images)

MundoOriente Próximo

With Israel and Iran on the edge of a devastating regional war that neither country seems to want, the United States is playing a risky game of brinkmanship — massing a military force to defend Israel and, if it fails, perhaps join in an attack on Iran.

For Biden administration officials who have tried for months to de-escalate the conflict in Gaza, it’s a scary moment. “Multiple red indicator lights are now flashing”, writes Norman Roule, a former top CIA expert on Iran. “I’ve never seen the region so fragile and on the cusp of so many conflicts”.

Wars often result from a fundamental conflict of national interests.…  Seguir leyendo »

The amphibious assault ship USS Bataan travels through the Red Sea in August 2023. (Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Riley Gasdia/U.S. Navy/AP) (Mass Communications Specialist 3rd Class Riley Gasdia/AP)

MundoAmérica,

Since the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis, China has grown in economic and military might. It now has the world’s largest navy and the world’s largest shipbuilding industry and is flexing its muscle. All that has been clear in the way it has harassed and bullied its Indo-Pacific neighbors, from the Philippines to Japan to Taiwan.

Meanwhile, over the same period, chronic maintenance and repair delays, cost overruns, extended sea tours, and construction backlogs have led to an atrophied American fleet and a broken naval industrial base.

There is a smart way out of this mess that will strengthen our defenses and alliances, but it will require Congress and the U.S.…  Seguir leyendo »

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer visits a mosque in Solihull, England, on Thursday. (Joe Giddens/AP)

Europa

Britain is witnessing a breakdown of order with few obvious parallels in its history. There have been moments of resemblance, of course: the London riots of 2011 and the “skinhead terror” of the early ’70s. The clashes between Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts and the coalitions of antifascists in the ’30s. Yet none of these comparisons feels quite right. What we are seeing here is something more modern and more frightening.

A more apposite comparison, I think, is the period of state failure that marked the tumultuous period in British life between the imposition of direct rule in Northern Ireland in 1972 and the miners’ strike of 1984.…  Seguir leyendo »

Demonstrators with Kenyan flags join an anti-government rally in Nairobi on July 16. (Str/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

MundoÁfrica

This started out as a stellar year for the country. In May, President William Ruto was feted with a star-studded state dinner at the White House, the first in 16 years for an African head of state. President Biden named Kenya “a major non-NATO ally”. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund were bullish on its prospects. The country was stepping onto the global stage by leading an international security mission to Haiti.

Ruto had emerged as America’s favorite African leader — as South Africa pursued an increasingly anti-Western, pro-Russian foreign policy; Niger’s democratically elected president was put under house arrest after a coup; and other countries were passing draconian anti-gay laws.…  Seguir leyendo »

Port Phillip Bay on March 20, 2013, in Melbourne, Australia. (Vince Caligiuri/Getty Images)

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

The written word has long been assumed to be superior to oral traditions — more sophisticated, reliable. This premise has contributed to to many of the darkest episodes in human history — a pretext for violence, dispossession, assimilation and genocide. But the idea that only writing can preserve information over time is no less problematic. Though written records reach back only a few millennia, there is good reason to believe many Australian Indigenous cultures have oral traditions that preserve memories of lands that vanished beneath the sea as much as 12,000 years ago.

To understand how this can be, we need to go back 20,000 years ago, to when the Earth was just emerging from the last glacial maximum.…  Seguir leyendo »

Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in Iran on Wednesday, in 2018 in Gaza City. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)

MundoOriente Próximo

The United States is a superpower. Yet for nine months it has been unable to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. Now, with the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Wednesday, the blood feud between the two appeared to deepen, with American peacemakers standing on the sidelines.

Israel didn’t comment on the death of Haniyeh in Tehran, but it didn’t need to. Since the Israel-Gaza war began, it’s been clear that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would take unilateral measures, regardless of American advice, to repay Hamas for its ghastly Oct. 7 attack on Israel. His goal isn’t making peace with Hamas, but destroying it.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica,

That was fast! On Sunday, after President Biden announced he would not run for a second term, Vice President Harris declared her intention to “earn and win” the Democratic nomination. In less than 24 hours, she had apparently secured all the delegates needed to lock up the nomination.

Which raises a question: Why did no one challenge her? After all, Harris is undeniably vulnerable. She ran a catastrophic campaign for president four years ago, flaming out before even reaching the Iowa caucuses. Her public approval has hovered around that of Biden, who is himself one of the most unpopular presidents in 70 years.…  Seguir leyendo »

Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado leaves the Santuario Nacional de Nuestra Señora de Coromoto in Guanare, Venezuela, on July 17. (Andrea Hernández Briceño for The Washington Post)

MundoAmérica, ,

When Venezuelan populists talk about stopping migration from their country by addressing root causes, they are referring to widespread poverty. And they often blame the United States and its policies for this.

What these populists do not say is that the actual root cause of poverty has been a lack of democracy and freedom. The Biden administration has the opportunity to correct the populists’ narrative this week — because something extraordinary is happening in Venezuela.

María Corina Machado, a courageous leader with a long history in the opposition, has managed to organize a real movement which, in the upcoming elections, stands to beat the regime that has been in power for a quarter of a century.…  Seguir leyendo »

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv on July 13. (Nir Elias/Pool/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

MundoOriente Próximo

As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was preparing his Wednesday speech to Congress, his top diplomatic emissary was quietly exploring, with the United Arab Emirates and United States, some innovative proposals for “the day after” in Gaza.

The diplomats have discussed a role for a “reformed” Palestinian Authority in inviting Arab, European and developing-world countries to provide forces under a “stabilization mandate” in Gaza. They also discussed a list of possible new PA leaders, topped by former prime minister Salam Fayyad.

Given Netanyahu’s past denunciation of the PA and his refusal to offer detailed day-after plans, these discussions are potentially significant. But as with every other aspect of the Gaza tragedy, the effort could raise false hopes that a breakthrough is near — when the reality on the ground remains brutal combat.…  Seguir leyendo »

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen sit in a F-16 fighter jet at Skrydstrup Air Base in Vojens, Denmark, on Aug. 20, 2023. (Ritzau Scanpix/Reuters)

Europa, , ,

Russia has been leveraging Western fears of escalation by carving out sanctuary space in its sovereign territory to launch offensive strikes into Ukraine. Its military assets remain partly shielded while Ukraine’s remain exposed. Perhaps now Europe and the United States can offset that advantage by creating sanctuary space for Ukrainian forces in NATO countries.

The concept of territorial sovereignty is central to this war. Thus far, the war has raged primarily in sovereign Ukraine and its Russian-occupied territories.

On July 8, Russia launched a barrage of some 40 missiles that hit targets in five Ukrainian cities, including a hospital that treats children with cancer in Kyiv.…  Seguir leyendo »

Children walk through rubble from a destroyed home following an Israeli airstrike in Al Nusairat refugee camp on Tuesday. (Mohammed Saber/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

MundoOriente Próximo

It’s an iron law of Middle East conflict that the closer you get to a cease-fire, the more last-minute disputes arise. That appears to be happening now with the Biden administration’s push for a truce in Gaza.

Israel on Monday “affirmed its full support for the deal as outlined by President Biden and endorsed by the UN Security Council, G7, and countries around the world”, according to a White House readout of a meeting that included Ron Dermer, who is perhaps the closest adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Hamas, too, is said by U.S. officials to have accepted the plan by agreeing in early July to drop its demand for a guarantee that the initial cease-fire would mean a permanent cessation of hostilities.…  Seguir leyendo »

President Biden at a news conference during NATO's 75th-anniversary summit in Washington on Thursday. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

MundoAmérica,

He was called “Der Alte” (“the old one”) by people mourning the death of Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first chancellor. Adenauer had been out of office for almost three years when I arrived in West Germany during the summer of 1966 to serve at the U.S. Embassy in Bonn. But I witnessed his state funeral the following year in Cologne and saw leaders from more than 100 countries, including U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, gather to honor the man considered the father of West Germany.

Most observers would agree that Adenauer’s seniority and depth of experience had been strengths in developing partnerships with the United States and other Western allies.…  Seguir leyendo »