The Biden administration is using every tool at its disposal to paint a rosy picture of Afghanistan as a terrorist-free state as the two-year anniversary of its disastrous withdrawal approaches. But a coalition of Afghan generals, diplomats and civil servants is writing to Congress to explain that in reality, “today’s Afghanistan under the Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies, is again the greatest terrorist safe haven in the world.
We may never understand the series of events and decisions that led Yevgeny Prigozhin to stage an armed rebellion against Russian president Vladimir Putin’s administration with his Wagner Group private military company, or PMC. Prigozhin was opposed to the planned forcible incorporation of Wagner into the Russian armed forces. He also came to be a sharp critic of the fabricated rationale for Russia’s war on Ukraine and the sloppy way it was being waged by its generals, who are more focused on politics than on defeating Kyiv.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, has tonight halted his march on Moscow, in return for assurances from the Kremlin on his men’s safety. Alexander Lukashenko, Belarusian president, brokered the agreement. Prigozhin has just released the following statement on Telegram: We marched out on June 23 on the Justice March. In one day, we got within 200 kilometers of Moscow. During this time we did not spill a single drop of blood of our fighters. Now comes the moment when blood may be spilled. Therefore, understanding the responsibility that Russian blood will be spilled on one side, we are turning our columns around and retreating in the opposite direction to the field camps.
The leader of Russia’s Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, claimed Friday that Russian forces targeted his private military company, with “many victims.” The attack occurred after Prigozhin produced a video where he lambasted the Russian military brass for peddling falsehoods about the war to the Russian public and to President Putin. “The ministry of defense is trying to deceive the public and the president and spin the story that there was insane levels of aggression from the Ukrainian side,” said Prigozhin according to The Guardian, “and that they were going to attack us together with the whole NATO block.” “When Zelensky became president,” he added, “he was ready for agreements. All that needed to be done was to get off Mount Olympus and negotiate with him.
War has a stronger appetite than any of the countries that wage it. Aggressors, defenders, small states and superpowers are all on the menu. Take the war in Ukraine, for example. The war really started in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and fomented secession in the Donbas. America slapped Moscow back with sanctions. This was virtue-signaling. Sanctions might sting Vladimir Putin and his cronies, but how could they change Russia’s interest in Crimea? The peninsula is Russia’s gateway to the Mediterranean. Sanctions can’t alter geography. Ukraine had a friend in Vice President Joe Biden, and it had his son Hunter on a Ukrainian oil company’s payroll. Then disaster struck — the Bidens were gone and Donald Trump became president.
Do you have a favorite Habsburg? Mine is Maximilian I, the first and last ruler of the Second Mexican Empire. Americans may be vaguely aware of him because a defeat of his French allies is commemorated annually on Cinco de Mayo. His struggles echo the experience of many unlucky rulers supported by fickle foreign patrons: Abandoned by the French and besieged by belligerent locals, the ill-fated emperor stubbornly refused to abandon a throne he hadn’t much wanted in the first place. His last words to the firing squad were, “Aim well, muchachos.
Poland’s Third Republic entered the world in 1989, after a dark period of occupation and oppression at the hands first of the Nazis and then the Soviets. As democracy was taking its first tentative steps in Warsaw, the USSR still had two years left to live and Germany was not yet unified. Yet somehow, over the next thirty-four years, Poland went from a poor post-communist state to a rapidly rising economic powerhouse and serious geopolitical force. Nothing about this rise was inevitable. Human agency, unforeseen events and providence play into every historical development — and Poland’s remarkable progress is no exception. It took leadership, will and luck. A central desire of the Polish people since long before 1989 has been to become a part of the West’s vision of Europe.
Remember “Free Tibet?” The Tibetan Freedom Concert, a series of music festivals that began in 1996, featured such impressive acts as the Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins, Rage Against the Machine, U2 and A Tribe Called Quest. An entire generation of young Americans — enchanted with “the other” of Tibetan Buddhism — had no qualms condemning what they believed to be an authoritarian Chinese regime. And why not? The People’s Republic of China, however much they fumed over international denunciations of the Tibetans, seemed weak, and incapable of silencing the Western entertainment industry’s indignation. These days, not so much. The NBA apologizes for players or coaches who criticize Beijing’s actions in Hong Kong.
The most surprising part about Boris Johnson's honors list, which allows him to approve lifetime peerages and other awards for his allies, is that he has included his hairdresser. That's right, the famous blonde mop isn’t just something that he wakes up with, but rather an intentional look crafted by House of Commons hairdresser Kelly Jo Dodge, who is set to get a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) from the former UK prime minister. Johnson is standing down as a Member of Parliament after receiving a report into "Partygate" scandal. The honors announcement, needless to say, has turned heads. It was approved by British prime minister Rishi Sunak on Friday, along with almost forty honors and seven peerages.
Is the hazy stuff out there smoke billowing down from Québec, or hot air emitted from smoggy-brained politicians and journalists? Chuck Schumer told the Senate on Wednesday that the smoke drifting over the Eastern Seaboard was caused by climate change. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez said it showed the urgency of going greener faster. Proof of carbon pollution, lectured the Canadian minister of the environment. A stark reminder of climate change, intoned Biden. Every news organization and weather app out there suddenly became experts on a new hazard — not smoke or fire, well-known phenomenons that have been extensively documented throughout history — but a new threat, both more nebulous and more ominous: “air quality.
Earlier this year, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote a provocative piece making the case that there are two kinds of people in the world: “Those who believe the defining challenge of the twenty-first century will be climate change, and those who know it will be the birth dearth, the population bust, the old age of the world.” Douthat made this bold claim not just because he believes the population bust is the more important of the two challenges, but because, in his view, it is being comparatively neglected due to all the attention paid to irrepressible climate doomsayers.
Latavia McGee crossed the US border with three friends on March 3. The North Carolina resident was looking for the Mexican clinic for her tummy-tuck operation when she came under gunfire. Two of the group, McGee's cousin Shaeed Woodard and friend Zindell Brown, jumped out of the back of their vehicle and tried to flee but were cut down by bullets. The third friend, Eric Williams, stepped out the driver's side and was shot in the leg. The gunmen, who worked for the drug-trafficking mafia known as the Gulf Cartel, ran over, loaded the Americans onto a pickup truck and then held them in vehicles and stash houses for days. Woodard and Brown wouldn't make it through the kidnapping; McGee watched them die from their wounds.
China keeps buying property in the United States. Concern over this trend has been simmering for years, yet leading Democrats and left-wing media outlets dismiss it as harmless because, they say, China doesn’t own very much land in the grand scheme of things or compared to other nations. Also — racism. “No, China isn’t gobbling up America’s farms,” Bloomberg’s editorial board assured us in February as lawmakers across the country were introducing bills to prevent Chinese investors from buying more US land. (The Texas Senate passed such a bill last month, and Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a series of such bills into law last week.
With the end of Title 42, Donald Trump’s helpful bequest to Joe Biden of a means to exclude asylum-seekers on grounds of a health emergency that has long since passed, the administration is bracing for scenes of alien hordes thronging the border. But if there’s one picture the Biden administration least wants to see again, it’s that striking image from September 2021 of a mounted border patrolman appearing to whip a cowering Haitian migrant with his reins. Then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki reported at the time that Biden found the photo “horrific” and “horrible,” adding “that’s not who the Biden administration is.” That same month, the US deported over 6,000 Haitians, flown with shackled hands and feet to a country many of them had left years before.
Cockburn gave up on love after his last affair, but as of this week there could be hope again. Sanna Marin, Finland's thirty-something, fun-loving, partying prime minister announced Wednesday that she is divorcing her husband Markus Räikönnen after nineteen years as a couple. His loss is our gain. On Instagram Marin wrote: "Together we've filed for divorce. We're grateful for the nineteen years together and for our beloved daughter.” "We're still best friends, close to each other and loving parents. Going forward we will still spend time together as a family and with each other. We wish you will respect our privacy. We won't comment further on this.
Lviv, Ukraine Deep in a forested park, hundreds of people — men, women, children — in traditional embroidered clothes danced, clapped, and sang in a wild circle around fiddle-playing musicians. It was war, but it was also Easter, celebrated then according to the old calendar by the Greek Catholics of Lviv. In that forest grove on a chilly afternoon, I stood next to Linda Netsch, a professor at Harvard Law, who had just arrived by train to give wartime guest lectures at Lviv’s Ukrainian Catholic University. “Now I know why Russia cannot defeat Ukraine,” she told me as she pointed at the crowd of people dancing on the chilly grey afternoon while a friend poured me a whiskey. “It’s this. This is real power.
Mexico’s president, the increasingly authoritarian and erratic leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, aka AMLO, visited Veracruz this past Friday to commemorate the 1914 American occupation of that city. In his remarks was a startling declaration: the Mexican state and military, under his leadership, will defend Mexico’s criminal cartels from the Americans. “There is talk in the United States,” said AMLO, “of intervening and confronting organized crime, drug traffickers, treating them as terrorists and that for this reason they will come to 'help' us, to 'support' us to confront organized crime... we do not accept any intervention... if they did, it will not be only the sailors and soldiers who will defend Mexico, all Mexicans will defend Mexico.
Over the weekend, US special forces evacuated American embassy personnel from Sudan in a nearly day-long operation. The evacuation came as the African country descended into near civil war on April 15 when the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces took their disagreements to the battlefield. US forces managed to get all of the personnel — along with a number of foreign individuals — out of the country safely, flying about 800 miles from Khartoum back to Djibouti in three heavy-lift helicopters. The decision to leave an embassy is not an easy one, and is typically reserved for only the most severe circumstances (Kyiv in early 2022, for example).
Reports of the death of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency are greatly exaggerated. Fortunately for America, while the dollar is by no means unsinkable, it will not be toppled anytime soon. Threats exist, but rather than coming from abroad, to paraphrase Lincoln, they spring up among us. How the US manages its economy will largely be the determinant factor in the dollar’s continued supremacy. Currently, the dollar makes up about 58 percent of foreign currency reserves worldwide, well ahead of its competitors. The next closest currency is the euro at 20 percent, and then the yen and pound sterling, both at about 5 percent — China’s renminbi is at a paltry 3 percent (just ahead of a real powerhouse, the Canadian dollar).
After over three years of incessant scheming, moaning and making specious accusations of racism against her in-laws, Meghan Markle’s PR team are insisting she has "moved on." In a statement press secretary Ashley Hansen claimed: “The Duchess of Sussex is going about her life in the present, not thinking about correspondence from two years ago related to conversations from four years ago. “Any suggestion otherwise is false and frankly ridiculous. We encourage tabloid media and various royal correspondents to stop the exhausting circus that they alone are creating.” It’s important to add here that the statement was first posted by the Sussexes’ personal cheerleader and royal reporter Omid Scobie.
