Group items tagged

News Share this:FacebookTwitterGoogleFacebook MessengerWhatsAppEmailCopy Trump’s hard-line approach clashes with Tillerson on Qatar

President Trump on Friday demanded that Qatar stop funding terrorism, striking a hard line against the tiny emirate just hours after his State Department had urged other Gulf nations to end their blockade of the besieged country. “The nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has been a funder of terrorism at a very high level. The time has come to call on Qatar to end its funding,” Trump said at the White House. “Hopefully it will be the beginning of the end of funding terrorism. It will, therefore, be the beginning of the end to terrorism. No more funding.”

In 1996 the political scientist Samuel Huntington offered several strong claims about the post-Cold War world.

Global politics was becoming not just “multipolar” but “multicivilizational,” he argued, with competing powers modernizing along different cultural lines, not simply converging with the liberal West.

“The balance of power among civilizations” was shifting, and the West was entering a period of relative decline.

Clashes broke out between protesters and police in Hong Kong on Sunday, cutting short a rally after thousands had gathered at a park to call for electoral reforms and a boycott of the Chinese Communist Party. Police fired tear gas near the park, known as Chater Garden, after some protesters attacked men whom they believed to be plainclothes officers, in a return to the violence that has roiled the Chinese territory off and on for months.

“We want real universal suffrage,” the protesters chanted. “Disband the police force, free Hong Kong!”

Frictions between democracy-minded Hong Kongers and the Communist Party-ruled central government in Beijing came to a head last June, when proposed extradition legislation sparked months of mass demonstrations.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych has warned that the country's stability is threatened by continuing clashes between police and anti-government protesters in the capital Kiev.

The authorities say police have the right to use firearms in self-defence.

"now, when peaceful actions are turning into mass unrest, accompanied by riots and arson attacks, the use of violence, I am convinced that such phenomena are a threat not only to Kiev but to the whole of Ukraine".

U.S. and Russian military officials signed a memorandum of understanding on Tuesday that includes steps their pilots should take to avoid an inadvertent clash over Syria as they carry out separate air strikes against militant groups, the Pentagon said.

issue of aircraft safety started after Russia began bombing targets in Syria last month. Moscow says it is attacking Islamic State, but many of its air strikes have hit territory held by other rebel groups fighting against Russia's Syrian ally, President Bashar al-Assad.

“The U.S. and Russia will form a working group to discuss any implementation issues that follow," Cook said during a press briefing.

In Bristol, an English college town where the pubs are usually packed with students, there were fiery clashes between the police and protesters.

In Kassel, a German city known for its ambitious contemporary art festival, the police unleashed pepper spray and water cannons on anti-lockdown marchers.

From Spain and Denmark to Austria and Romania, frustrated people are lashing out at the restrictions on their daily lives.

Thousands of people protested Saturday in several cities across England and Wales against a sweeping crime and policing bill, with some in London clashing with the police in scenes that may further fuel a raging national debate over law enforcement tactics in Britain.

In London, protesters peacefully marched from Hyde Park in central London to Parliament Square, but the gathering gave way to scuffles with officers in the evening, and 26 demonstrators were detained, the police said.

“After reviewing a huge body of evidence — rather than a snapshot on social media — we found that there are some things the Met could have done better,” the leader of the inspection team, Matt Parr, said of the Metropolitan Police.

A confrontation between Iraqi insurgents and government forces in the western city of Falluja edged closer to the capital on Sunday, after clashes between militants and the army left at least 14 people dead in the Abu Ghraib district in Baghdad Province, according to security officials.

killing at least 14 civilians.

Instead of using the military, Mr. Maliki appeared to be leaning on Sunni tribal leaders to expel the militants themselves, and has been providing them with weapons and money for that purpose.

A senior rebel commander said around 15 fighters and civilians had been killed as a result of clashes between Ukrainian government forces and separatists near rebel-controlled Donetsk on Wednesday, separatist press service DAN reporte

"At the moment around fifteen people have been killed, these are the Donetsk People's Republic's losses," rebel military official Vladimir Kononov was quoted as telling journalists in Donetsk. The report could not be independently verified.

Earlier, Ukraine's defense minister said an attempt by pro-Russian separatists to advance on Ukrainian troop positions near the town of Maryinka west of Donetsk had been halted for now. Rebels denied launching an offensive.

Saudi Arabia Charges Iran With ‘Act of War,’ Raising Threat of Military Clash

Saudi Arabia charged Monday that a missile fired at its capital from Yemen over the weekend was an “act of war” by Iran, in the sharpest escalation in nearly three decades of mounting hostility between the two regional rivals.

“We see this as an act of war,” the Saudi foreign minister, Adel Jubair, said in an interview on CNN. “Iran cannot lob missiles at Saudi cities and towns and expect us not to take steps.”

“They had not seen this type of demand for a print product of The New York Times, they said, since 2008, when people wanted copies of Obama's historic presidency edition,” Hannah-Jones told me. “I know when I talk to people, they have said that they feel like they are understanding the architecture of their country in a way that they had not.”

For Nikole Hannah-Jones, the reporter who conceived of the project, the response has been deeply gratifying.

When The New York Times Magazine published its 1619 Project in August, people lined up on the street in New York City to get copies. Since then, the project—a historical analysis of how slavery shaped American political, social, and economic institutions—has spawned a podcast, a high-school curriculum, and an upcoming book

Protests surged in cities around the world for May Day as demonstrators called for better working protections and other causes. They come as COVID-19 and a stumbling economy continues to disrupt the world.

May 1 marks International Labor Day which commemorates laborers and the working class. Marches and demonstrations typically occur every year in many countries, but took on a new meaning after a year of lockdowns affecting many workers' livelihoods.

In Paris, at least 17,000 people gathered, many of them to oppose a change in government unemployment benefits.

let’s assume that he expects some of those consequences, expects a more isolated future. What might be his reasoning for choosing it?

Here is one speculation: He may believe that the age of American-led globalization is ending no matter what, that after the pandemic certain walls will stay up everywhere, and that the goal for the next 50 years is to consolidate what you can — resources, talent, people, territory — inside your own civilizational walls.

In this vision the future is neither liberal world-empire nor a renewed Cold War between competing universalisms. Rather it’s a world divided into some version of what Bruno Maçães has called “civilization-states,” culturally-cohesive great powers that aspire, not to world domination, but to become universes unto themselves — each, perhaps, under its own nuclear umbrella.

In religion, Elizabeth skillfully maintained peace in England while much of Europe was embroiled in religious wars. She did this by grafting moderate Protestant theology onto Catholic style ritual and organization.  She also blunted the ferocity of the religiously radical Puritans (Calvinists) by incorporating many of them into the hierarchy of the Church of England.  However, this put many Puritans into positions of authority where they could demand more sweeping reforms beyond the Queen's lukewarm Protestantism.  In addition, many of these Puritans were also members of the gentry (lower nobles) and middle classes who controlled the House of Commons in Parliament and voted on taxes.  Thus the issues of religion and money became even more tangled.

Religious wars, which threatened everyone's peace and security, and inflation, which made maintaining armies too expensive for rebellious nobles, also combined to help with the rise of absolutism in Europe.  This rising tide of absolutism would influence the Stuart kings of England to try to establish absolutism in their own realm in spite of popular opinion.  A less skillful and diplomatic ruler than Elizabeth would have trouble dealing with these new forces rising up in England.  Such an undiplomatic ruler succeeded Elizabeth in the person of James I (1603-1625).

While Elizabeth had so skillfully kept the issues of money and religion in check, James' absolutist beliefs and abrasive personality brought them to the surface.  As far as religion went, James fought the largely Puritan Parliament to keep the Church of England's Catholic style ritual, decorations, and hierarchy of clergy, over which he as king had control.  In money matters, king and Parliament clashed over James' growing requests for money to support his lavish lifestyle.  He also angered the middle class by raising customs duties, one of his main sources of revenue, to keep pace with inflation.  While James and Parliament never completely broke with one another over these issues, their constant squabbling did set the stage for the revolution that was to follow.

How Should Culture Affect Foreign Policy?

Think of all the arguments about the so-called Sunni-Shia divide, the alleged millennia of conflict between these two Islamic sects that purportedly shape politics in the Middle East today, or the “clash of civilizations” that Samuel Huntington first wrote about in Foreign Affairs in 1993.

It strikes me that it is worth asking if the dynamic interaction between Western cultural preconceptions of the region and Middle Eastern predispositions is a reasonable explanation for Washington’s failures in the Arab world.

Mr. Tong considers himself a moderate. During the booming 1990s, he once cast a ballot for Bill Clinton. He says he does not agree with Mr. Trump’s remarks about immigrants and Mexicans.

Trump — who famously said in January that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters” — remains confident that what would be fatal breaches of political etiquette in most elections will only cement his reputation as a fearless truth-teller.

The more outrageous the comments, the more some voters will conclude that Trump is the candidate who would break some china and get things done, said Mark Burnett, who produced “The Apprentice,” Trump’s popular TV reality show. “People want to hear the unvarnished, that same style that he showed on ‘The Apprentice,’ ” Burnett said in an interview earlier this year, “the ability to speak his mind clearly and not tone down his voice in a politically correct, TV way.”

he number of people displaced by fighting between Muslim and Christian militias and vigilantes in the Central African Republic has more than doubled in the past month, and increasing violence is making it harder to deliver humanitarian relief, the United Nations warned on Frida

More than 935,000 people have been driven from their homes in the clashes between Christian militias and the mainly Muslim Seleka rebel group that overthrew President François Bozizé in March, up from around 400,000 at the start of December, said Babar Baloch, a spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency.

relief supplies have reached about 23,000 people

The sotni, as the units are called, take their name from a traditional form of Cossack cavalry division. Activists estimate at least 32 such groups are in Kiev now, with more forming all the time.

Mr. Chontorog said that he had been in the square many times as a protester, but that after the violence on Thursday wanted to commit himself to the fight, which meant following orders from the commander of his hundred.

Thursday, a few antigovernment protesters could be seen carrying weapons. But with reports that the police have killed more than 70 demonstrators, most of the gunfire clearly came from the other side of the barricades. The interior minister reported that 29 police officers had been taken to the hospital and 67 had been captured by the protesters.