Politics

Whom do you suppose wrote this: “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false”?  The one person I can assure you did not write it is its supposed author, former president Joseph R. Biden, who by the way is suffering from metastatic prostate cancer.  Moreover, pace Biden’s suggestions, it is clear that he did not sign many of the myriad “pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations” issued over his name.

If you tuned in to the first New York City Democratic mayoral primary debate hoping for vision, leadership, even a halfway compelling reason to stay in the city – you were sorely disappointed. What we got instead was two hours of political karaoke: forgettable performances, familiar refrains and not a single candidate who looked remotely prepared to lead America’s largest city out of the hole it’s in. The media crowned former governor Andrew Cuomo the winner, but that says more about the sad state of the field than it does about Cuomo’s abilities. He barely had to try. Like a career politician coasting on name recognition and reflexes, he sleepwalked through the evening while eight other candidates took turns lobbing stale criticisms his way. They all missed.

Two years after the fiery death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the warlord behind Russia’s Wagner Group, the global shadow war waged by mercenaries and contractors still rages on. And now one of the most well-known names in the mercenary world is back in the headlines: Erik Prince. The founder of Blackwater and longtime ally of President Donald Trump, is on the ground in Haiti, where he has signed a deal with the government to take on the armed gangs that have brought the capital to the brink of collapse.Prince sold Blackwater in 2010 after its contractors opened fire on civilians in Iraq and it now operates under a different name.

The BBC’s response to recent White House criticism over its Gaza coverage highlights the Corporation’s vulnerability on the question of impartiality in conflict reporting. What began as a public rebuke by Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, over a disputed report quickly developed into a broader interrogation of the BBC’s editorial assumptions and its long-standing handling of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, defended the Corporation and accused the Trump administration of dishonesty. Responding to Leavitt’s remarks, he said, “To be quite frank, the Trump administration does not have a good record when it comes to telling the truth itself. She’s making a political point, basically.

Elon Musk’s departure from Washington was celebrated by many in the media. In the space of just a few years they had transformed him from a “Yay Science!” rocket-building Tony Stark stand-in doing awkward cameos on Rick and Morty into a crazed inhuman boogeyman, whose cars must be keyed, firebombed or layered with bumper stickers saying, “I bought this before Elon was a Nazi.” (Before you say that’s an exaggeration, there’s literally a Tesla with that sticker in my neighborhood – you can buy them on Etsy.

American divisions over politics look positively civil compared to the polarization that has gripped South Korea over the last few years. During the 2022 elections, Yoon Suk-yeol of the conservative People Power party (PPP) narrowly won the presidency over his liberal opponent Lee Jae-myung from the Democratic Party by a razor thin 0.73 percent. But Yoon hastened the demise of his own presidency when on December 3, 2024, he made the poor decision to declare martial law over baseless accusations that the National Assembly’s progressive opposition were collaborating with North Korea. Martial law lasted for only a few hours after both parties unanimously voted to lift the decree.