In The News

Catalan separatists – including a party leader, former speaker of the Catalan parliament, former ministers and cabinet members – were sentenced to 9 to 13 years in prison by the Spanish Supreme Court for an attempt to break from Spain in October 2017. “The court has found that there were “undeniable acts of violence” in Catalonia in the fall of 2017, but that these were not severe enough to...

The United Nations is running a deficit of $230 million and has stopped hiring, slashed travel and cancelled meetings due to funding shortages resulting from members failing to pay annual dues in a timely way. “The organization uses factors including a country’s economic size and wealth to assess its ‘capacity to pay’ and determine its annual bill,” reports David Bosco for the Washington Post. US...

Exit polls project Kais Saied as the decisive winner of Tunisia’s presidential race by 70 percent. Tunisia triggered a wave of protests in 2011, what became known as the Arab Spring: It was the first country to remove its dictatorial ruler and the only one to sustain the transition to democracy. Saied’s campaign, operating with little funding promised a return to the values of the 2011 Arab...