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Election Watch
U.S. President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden participate in their first 2020 presidential campaign debate held on the campus of the Cleveland Clinic at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S., September 29, 2020.
It’s on. We don't mean the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson boxing “match” but an even higher profile smackdown that might not be a whole lot more substantive: President Joe Biden and Donald Trump have agreed to two head-to-head presidential debates.
The first will be hosted by CNN on June 27 – making it the earliest presidential debate in modern history. The second will be run by ABC on Sept. 10. Neither will have a live audience.
Biden had earlier kiboshed any debates hosted by the nonpartisan debate commission, which has run them since the 1980s. Those live-audience faceoffs typically take place in September, after early voting begins.
Why are they doing this? Biden, trailing Trump in the polls, hopes to make his famously erratic opponent sweat, says Clayton Allen, a US expert at Eurasia Group. “He’s betting that Trump, stressed by the criminal trial and maybe facing a guilty verdict, will implode, or look bad in the spotlight.”
Trump, meanwhile, is hoping that in the heat of debate, Biden will have one (or more) of those moments where he looks old, unsteady, or confused. In short, says Allen, he’s betting on “Biden falling asleep.”
One guy might look crazy, the other might look senile – American democracy is truly a city on a hill!
Hard Numbers: Segregation is back, Thai activist dies in jail, French “Fly” freed, New US arms sale to Israel
Students at Martin Van Buren High School in Queens
19.8: Over the past three decades, the share of US public schools where 90% of the students are non-white has nearly tripled to 19.8%, according to a UCLA report. Experts say the rise of charter schools and expansion of school choice is partly to blame for this de facto segregation. The data, crunched by the UCLA Civil Rights Project, come on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the landmark Brown vs. Boardof Education case in which the US Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation at schools.
110: A young Thai activist jailed for demanding reform of the country’s uncriticizable monarchy has died after a 110-day hunger strike. Twenty-eight year old Netiporn “Bung” Sanesangkhom had been jailed under Thailand’s severe lèse-majesté laws after asking people’s opinion of the monarchy in public spaces in 2022.
2: A manhunt is underway in France after two masked gunmen ambushed a prison van and freed a notorious drug dealer nicknamed “The Fly.” The incident is the latest in a trend of rising narco-related crime in Europe, as authorities seize record volumes of cocaine entering the EU while rival gangs fight for turf and clientele. Of course, when it comes to jailbreaks, the cinema-obsessed French gangster Rédoine Faïd remains the master of the craft.
1 billion: The Biden administration reportedly told lawmakers it’s moving forward with a new sale of roughly $1 billion worth of arms to Israel, including tactical vehicles and ammunition. This news comes as the administration continues to butt heads with Israel over the Rafah operation, and just days after President Joe Biden put a hold on a shipment of bombs to the Jewish state as concerns rise over the mounting death toll amid the war with Hamas in Gaza.
Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden, shares his perspective on European politics from Arizona, US.
What's the outcome and the likely result of the North Macedonia parliamentary election?
A new government, more nationalist, more rightists coming in. And the problem with that is that North Macedonia has made a number of concessions in order to make its EU path possible. First concessions through Greece in terms of the names and the number of concessions through France and a number of concessions through Bulgaria on minority and related issues. And the new government has got to say no to a lot of these things. And that further complicates the EU process, which is highly regrettable because the country in substance really deserves to move forward on that process.
What was the result of Xi Jinping's much celebrated tour of Europe?
Well, the tour was really restricted to France, where he had the usual talks with President Macron and I think Macron was an alliance, was an alliance had the right words concerning what China is doing in terms of supporting Ukraine, which is supporting Russia in its war against Ukraine, which is creating problems in the relationship to Europe, whether it's sorted out any of the economic issues remains to be seen. And then, of course, he went on to Serbia and to Hungary, which are much more China-friendly countries and much publicity and new agreements of different sorts. But if you to talk about the overall relationship between China and Europe, the European Union, I don't think much was changed by this particular trip.
Hard Numbers: Devastating floods, COVID reporter released, Catalonia votes, Swiss contestant wins Eurovision
Municipality workers remove debris from the streets after flooding in Sheikh Jalal district, Baghlan province, Afghanistan May 12, 2024.
315: At least 315 people in northern Afghanistan have died in severe floods that also injured over 1,600 others, wiped out thousands of homes, and devastated livestock herds that feed the region. Aid agencies expect chaos. It’s been a bad month for floods worldwide — similar inundations in southern Brazil and Kenya have killed hundreds in recent weeks.
4: Lawyer and journalist Zhang Zhan has been released from prison in China four years after being detained for her reporting on the government’s draconian response to the COVID-19 outbreak. In jail, Zhang’s health suffered severely, with her weight dropping to below 90 lbs at one point. Her former lawyer says Zhang will either be returned home or sent somewhere to do a few months of “soft prison” time while cloistered from the rest of the world.
9: Candidates from nine parties competed for seats in local elections in the wealthy, independence-leaning Spanish region of Catalonia on Sunday, and the Socialist candidate supported by Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is expected to squeak out a win. If no party wins a majority outright, the Socialists will likely need to hammer together a coalition to maintain control.
2: Students walked out on two major commencement speakers this weekend. Dozens of Duke graduates turned their backs on comedian Jerry Seinfeld, and Virginia Commonwealth University grads gave the same treatment to Gov. Glenn Youngkin. In addition to the walkouts, several more campuses saw major demonstrations surrounding their commencement activities.
Participants in a rally to mark an attack on an SPD politician stand on Pohlandplatz. After the brutal attack on the SPD politician Ecke, a 17-year-old turned himself in to the police.
Last week, the top European Parliament candidate of the governing Social Democrat Party was beaten unconscious in the eastern city of Dresden while campaigning. A Green Party operative was assaulted there as well. Several teens with ties to far-right ideologies are suspected in both cases.
Statistics show rising violence against German politicians. In 2023, there were nearly 2,800 physical or verbal attacks, twice as many as in 2019, when a neo-Nazi assassination of conservative lawmaker Walter Lübcke stunned the country.
Last year’s violence included about 500 attacks on politicians from the far-right Alternative for Deutschland, or AFD, and more than 1,200 on members of the center-left Green Party.
Why now? The problem has deep roots, according to Jan Techau, a Berlin-based Europe expert at Eurasia Group. Establishment parties’ long-standing failure to address big issues like immigration, schooling, or the economy, he says, opened the way for more radical and violent forces on both the left and right. “What we see is an overall more charged, political atmosphere where this kind of violence becomes more legitimate.”Former U.S. President Donald Trump walks amid his trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments, at Manhattan Criminal Court on May 7, 2024, in New York City, U.S. Trump has been charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records, which prosecutors say was an effort to hide a potential sex scandal, both before and after the 2016 presidential election. Trump is the first former U.S. president to face trial on criminal charges.
American cable news has been riveted for weeks by the courtroom spectacle of former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump. That was even before Stormy Daniels, the famous porn star at the center of the so-called “hush-money” trial, took the stand on Tuesday to offer provocative details about an encounter with Trump that he insists never happened.
But this trial’s most consequential questions of the moment are …
- Will Judge Juan Merchan finally jail Trump for repeatedly defying a gag order that blocks the former president from speaking publicly about potential witnesses and most people associated with the court and the prosecutor’s office?
- What happens if Merchan does order Trump into detention?
On Monday, the judge fined Trump for the tenth time, this time for a Truth Social post complaining about his lawyer’s lack of time to prepare for a witness – in this case, the aforementioned adult entertainer. Merchan warned that, “Going forward, this court will have to consider a jail sanction.”
Trump removed the offending post, but how long will he resist the temptation to again violate the judge’s order?
If Merchan does give the confinement order, Trump will likely be held in a room, with security protection, within the courthouse itself. He may well be released after just a few hours.
If this happens, we’ll be watching to see whether Trump is chastened by the experience or becomes more defiant – and what Judge Merchan will do if Trump violates the order again.
North Macedonia heads to the polls on Wednesday in a vote overshadowed by one big issue: disputes with neighbors that could derail the tiny Balkan republic’s fledgling EU membership bid.
North Macedonia heads to the polls on Wednesday in a vote overshadowed by one big issue: disputes with neighbors that could derail the tiny Balkan republic’s fledgling EU membership bid.
The governing, center-left Social Democratic Union of Macedonia will likely lose power to a center-right coalition with a nine-word name that we’ll just call by its acronym VMRO-DPMNE.
While economic woes and corruption are key voter concerns, VMRO-DPMNE has also rallied support by striking a nationalist tone – namely by rejecting long-standing demands from neighboring Bulgaria that North Macedonia recognize its own, small Bulgarian minority.
Bulgaria, already an EU member, has threatened to freeze North Macedonia’s accession bid unless its demands are met.
VMRO-DMRE has also stoked an old dispute with Greece by publicly calling the country “Macedonia.” In 2019, Greece got North Macedonia to add “North” to its name, because of Athens’ view that “Macedonia” proper is a region of Greece. That agreement opened the way for North Macedonia to join NATO and begin EU talks.
But progress has been slow, raising popular frustrations and fueling VMRO-DPMNE’s resurgence. If VMRO-DPMNE takes power, as expected, the situation will heat up further, particularly as Bulgaria heads toward its own elections next month.
Latest
Trump vs. Biden: Let’s get ready to rumble
Trump flirts with detention
North Macedonia’s election stokes Balkan beefs
