In The News

Sudan’s Protesters Expect Civilian Rule: Economist

June 3, 2019
Sudanese protestors have railed against internal turnover in government power, as in Awad Ibn Auf, former vice president and defense chief who briefly replaced the recently ousted Omar al-Bashir following his official resignation. Like his predecessor, Auf has long been the subject of international scrutiny for complicity in the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region underway since 2003. “Faced with a...

The Mueller Statement

May 30, 2019
After release of the Mueller report in April, Donald Trump and his supporters insisted that the 400+ pages cleared him of collusion. Both branches of Congress continue investigations, while the White House resists subpoenas and interviews, maintaining the “case is closed.” So representatives are conflicted about whether to launch impeachment proceedings. Special Counsel Robert Mueller presented...

No Revolution in the EU: Deutsche Welle

Bernd Riegert May 28, 2019
The European Union is a mix of diverse nations, languages and political systems that integrated for trade, economic, social and security policies and remains fragmented, as shown by the 2019 European Parliament elections. More than 50 percent of the electorate voted and two thirds chose pro-European parties. Some of the far-right populist parties did well in individual nations like France, Italy...

The Strache Recordings: Spiegel Online

Maik Baumgärtner, Vera Deleja-Hotko, Martin Knobbe, Walter Mayr, Alexandra Rojkov and Wolf Wiedmann-Schmidt May 23, 2019
Democracy depends on the rule of law and transparency. Politicians with extreme ideologies, who reject critical inquiries of journalism and education in the name of tradition, are ready to disrupt democratic norms to achieve money and power. A meeting secretly recorded in 2017 suggests Heinz-Christian Strache and three other Austrians plotted to ensure government contracts for a woman claiming to...

How Trump Thinks He Can Outsmart Putin: Atlantic

Peter Nicholas and Kathy Gilsinan May 21, 2019
Former and current members of US President Donald Trump’s inner circle are not doves when it comes to Russia. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has had harsh words for the Russian president and his influence in Venezuela, for instance. The command in chief himself, however, stands alone in his outwardly manifested trust in Vladimir Putin. Trump supporters explain this “good-cop, bad-cop” scheme is...

Trump and Kushner Accounts: New York Times

David Enrich May 20, 2019
Deutsche Bank employees flagged transactions of the Trump Foundation and other entities controlled by Donald Trump and Jared Kushner in 2016 and 2017 and prepared suspicious-activity reports for federal review. “But executives at Deutsche Bank, which has lent billions of dollars to the Trump and Kushner companies, rejected their employees’ advice,” reports David Enrich for the New York Times....

Trump Plan to Release Immigrants: Washington Post

Isaac Stanley-Becker May 17, 2019
UPDATE: The acting chief of the US Department of Homeland Security says the agency will not relocate migrants to Florida. Far-right policies on trade, foreign aid, family planning, climate change and global security from the United States and other developed nations disrupt economies of developing nations and spur immigration. The US president tries harsh measures to deter immigration and spur...