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“When retired members of the military, especially senior officers, broadcast wild conspiracies, America’s trust in its military is somewhat eroded,” said Herbert. “But when those conspiracies contend that the current government of the United States is illegitimate, those primal fears of a standing army ready to turn its guns inward and topple our government are justifiably awakened. In short, these people are doing great harm to the legitimacy and efficacy of our military.”

Though bogus, their claims and similar ones propagated by others have had major impact, inspiring Trump followers who participated in the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and providing rhetorical fuel for continued efforts to discredit Joe Biden’s victory. Despite no evidence to support the claims, nearly 6 in 10 Republicans believe the election was stolen, a Reuters/Ipsos poll in October found.

Reuters found that some of the military veterans’ theories have been referenced in hostile messages to local election officials

Urgent necessities of a domestic nature have determined the timing of Operation Peace Spring that Turkey launched Oct. 9 along the Syrian border east of the Euphrates against the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), which has been building a self-rule in the region thanks to US protection and military support.

the operation came in the wake of the local elections earlier this year in which the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) suffered major losses. The economic crisis bruising Turkey proved a major factor in the party’s debacles in big cities in the March 31 polls and the June 23 rerun of the mayoral vote in Istanbul, giving impetus to rupture trends within the AKP.

Ankara is greatly concerned over the prospect of a new refugee influx from Idlib that would further entangle Turkey’s Syrian refugee problem. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had warned in September that Turkey cannot tolerate another refugee wave atop the 3.6 million Syrians it is already hosting

There’s an undeniable voyeuristic frisson of seeing a man who once commanded a superpower hawking pizza

BBDO Chairman Philip Dusenberry insisted that the agency’s advertisements be cinematic in their quality. The Gorbachev production lived up to that standard. Informed estimates put the commercial’s budget in the low millions of dollars. Darbyshire, who wrote the script in English, went through three translators to get the right level of idiomatic Russian. To capture the beautiful establishing shots of Red Square and its domed churches, the crew hefted the film cameras high atop the Kremlin itself. And somehow the production managed to get the whole square shut down for the entire shoot.

In 1991, the heads of the former Soviet republics had voted to give Gorbachev a pension of 4,000 rubles per month—but it was not indexed to inflation. By 1994, according to Meduza, his pension was worth less than $2 a month.

A 2017 Pew Research Center poll found that most Americans disagree only whether the United States is the best country in the world (29 percent) or one of the best (56 percent). Only 14 percent of Americans agree instead that there are other, better countries.

U.S. reluctance, or inability, to learn from other countries is making life worse for its citizens than it has to be—not just in the big ways, such as the disasters of American health care and student debt, but in the little, everyday ones, too

the United States proves so resistant to learning from other countries. Using terms that officials since have echoed repeatedly, then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described the United States and its role by saying, “We are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall, and we see further than other countries into the future.”

Johnson has long promised that a more vigorous negotiating position than that of his predecessor, Theresa May, would push the EU into offering last-minute concessions on the terms of Britain’s scheduled exit from the union. But according to a senior official source in the U.K. Foreign Office, under Johnson’s administration the U.K.’s Brexit negotiating team has in reality been “completely hollowed out” with “key people reassigned.” Despite Johnson’s promises of new proposals to solve the nearly intractable problem of the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, in the run-up to a crunch EU summit on Oct. 17, the Johnson team has “nothing remotely new on the table,” the official told Foreign Policy.

While negotiations on May’s withdrawal agreement were going at full tilt in late 2018, the Foreign Office negotiating team numbered over 90 people. With the replacement of May’s top negotiator, Olly Robbins, with David Frost in June, that team has been largely disbanded, with most negotiators transferred to other departments. Frost still holds twice-weekly meetings in Brussels—but “our team is basically being sent [to Brussels] to pretend to negotiate, run down the clock,” says the Foreign Office official. “It’s pretty embarrassing. These are serious people being asked to [participate in] a charade.”

May’s withdrawal agreement—which was humiliatingly rejected by historic majorities in Parliament last winter—took nearly three years to thrash out. Johnson’s timetable would have required the details of a new deal to be drafted and for Parliament to pass it between the summit on Oct. 17 and the scheduled Brexit deadline of Oct. 31.

The new coalition appears to have largely seized the agenda and changed the narrative: in recent weeks Italy has softened its stance towards NGO ships asking to disembark the migrants rescued in the Mediterranean, and has cut a temporary deal with other EU members for the relocation of the asylum seekers picked up at sea – an agreement that the government has touted as “historic”, stressing that the adoption of a less adversarial attitude towards Europe than Salvini's is already bearing fruit

The game is not over, and his mid-summer move may still pay off. The new, fragile ruling coalition, whose two main members have despised and insulted each other for years, has been put under further strain by another sudden, tectonic shift in Italy's political landscape.As it turned out, Salvini was not the only one in a mood for political gambling. Mid-September, barely two weeks after the new cabinet had been sworn in, prominent PD member Matteo Renzi announced he was leaving the party to found his own, Italia Viva (Italy Alive). Although Renzi said he (and the roughly 40 MPs and Senators who joined him) would keep supporting the government, the split marks a watershed moment in the history of the Italian centre-left.

Renzi, a charismatic and influential politician whose stint as Prime Minister came to an abrupt end after he lost a constitutional referendum in December 2016, has long been accused by the left of being too centrist, pro-business and socially conservative, and of steering the party away from its social-democratic roots. His reluctance to clearly label himself as left-wing has become somewhat legendary, just like his flair for hot-air rhetoric.

Back in 2015 António Costa’s Socialist Party was handed the chance to govern as a minority administration after a deep and prolonged period of austerity overseen by the centre-right. As ever in these circumstances there are two options. Either you play hard ball, and in effect blackmail other parties to support you (under the threat of being accused of otherwise bringing the government down and another election). Or, you build a positive and constructive accord for a lasting agreement. It is politics as imposition or negotiation.Costa and his party chose the latter. It wasn’t a coalition deal they struck with the radical left Bloc and the Communist Party, with places in Government, but a deal over policies and priorities. All parties kept their own identities, worked together where they could on policy agreements, and still disagreed in public when necessary.

Now, although only a handful of seats short of an outright majority, the Socialists will again have to negotiate to form a stable government – with Costa saying that is what voters want, and many in Portugal having hoped for exactly this outcome rather than majority control.

Given the polls, the best Labour can hope for is a hung parliament in which it is the biggest party or can command a majority working with others. Then the party will have to decide – to impose or negotiate?

The Oct. 13 landslide victory for outsider presidential candidate Kais Saied was historic by any measure. After an unpredictable contest in which voters appeared determined to purge traditional parties and public figures that have dominated the post-Arab Spring landscape, Tunisian politics has entered a new era –– though exactly what comes next is anyone’s guess.

Riding a wave of revolt that was driven by an unorthodox coalition of students, anti-corruption voters and conservatives, Saied rose from relative obscurity little more than a year ago to best an original field of 27 candidates and seize the highest political office in the land.

everybody has their own interpretation of the 61-year-old professor’s message.  “Some accuse me of being a Salafist, others of being a radical leftist,” the candidate said critically during the Oct. 11 presidential debate. “But I have always been an independent and will die an independent.”

The SWAPO party received more than 56 percent of the votes for the national assembly, significantly less than during the last elections when the party, which has been in power since independence in 1990, won 80 percent of the vote

Independent candidate Itula Panduleni Filemon Bango finished second, with just more than 29 percent of the vote. Disaffection, especially among Namibia's jobless youth, drove support for former Swapo member and dentist Itula, 62, who ran as an independent candidate.

Geingob's win comes days after allegations of corruption and money laundering in the Namibian fishing industry led to the resignation and arrest of two government ministers in the wake of a joint investigation by Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit, the Icelandic State Broadcaster RUV, and the Icelandic magazine Stundin.

Analysis of results by the Electoral Reform Society shows the Conservatives would have won 77 fewer seats under the regional list proportional representation method of voting. While Labour would have won 10 more seats and the Greens another 11, the Liberal Democrats would have been the biggest beneficiaries by taking 59 more seats.

“No government should be able to win a big majority on a minority of the vote,” Darren Hughes, chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society. “Something is very clearly wrong.” He added: “Westminster’s voting system is warping our politics beyond recognition and we’re all paying the price. “Under proportional voting systems, seats would more closely match votes, and we could end the scourge of millions feeling unrepresented and ignored.”

More than 860,000 people voted for the Greens and just over 640,0000 cast their ballots for the Brexit Party. But the Greens will only have one MP in Caroline Lucas, while Nigel Farage’s party did not win a single seat.

Johnson’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, has long had the civil service in his sights. If his reform agenda is about competence, capacity and accountability that could be good news. If it means civil servants are cowed into not challenging ministers on the implications of their plans, it will be bad. The risk is that we end up with Americanisation – with a politically appointed top layer deterring good professionals from staying. Worse still would be the Trumpification of the civil service – with key posts unfilled or filled by people who are wholly unqualified.

The roots of all this turmoil lie in the casual approach to constitutional matters that allowed David Cameron to legislate for a referendum as a stratagem to solve a problem within his own party. His memoir suggests that he toyed with the possibility of setting a minimum threshold leave would have to reach in order to win – if he had gone ahead with this, remain would have carried the day. Unlike other countries that use referendums more often and more wisely, the UK has an ad hoc approach to them that has meant since 2016 we have been grappling with how to reconcile representative with direct democracy, an issue finally resolved – though obviously not to everyone’s satisfaction – by the 2019 election

Brexit and the election have brought into focus the fragility of the final pillar on which our reputation for stable government rests, the union itself. They have given the SNP a pretext to reopen the independence question, apparently settled in 2014, and have tilted opinion in Northern Ireland, making the prospect of a border poll more likely. Both nations voted to remain in 2016, but the UK system – unlike in formal federations – did not assign that any constitutional significance

a new Pew Research Center survey finds that views about national identity in the U.S., France, Germany and the UK have become less restrictive and more inclusive in recent years. Compared with 2016 – when a wave of immigration to Europe and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the U.S. made immigration and diversity a major issue on both sides of the Atlantic – fewer now believe that to truly be American, French, German or British, a person must be born in the country, must be a Christian, has to embrace national customs, or has to speak the dominant language

Outside of France, more people say it’s a bigger problem for their country today to not see discrimination where it really does exist than for people to see discrimination where it really is not present.

a large majority think Muslims face discrimination.

Though divisive and polarizing rhetoric has long been a campaign staple for Erdogan, the ruling party’s current election campaign has featured unprecedented levels of homophobic narrative ahead of presidential and parliamentary polls on May 14.  Earlier in the day, Erdogan wrote on Twitter that LGBTQ movement is “the strongest current threatening the future of Western nations.” 

Over the past two months, Erdogan and his government officials have galvanized homophobic sentiments among their conservative voter base.Speaking at a campaign event last week, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu went so far as to claim that LGBTQ “also includes marriage between animals and humans.” 

While Turkey is a constitutionally secular country where homosexuality has never been criminalized, discrimination and violence against LGBTQ individuals are rampant.