July, 2021

• 3 July

  Stanisic and Simatovic, Belgrade’s Security Strongmen

  Former Serbian state security officials Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic will hear the judgment in The Hague this week in their retrial for masterminding the most notorious Serb combat units that fought in the Croatian and Bosnian wars. “Milosevic’s men on the ground” was the most common description of these …

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• 3 July

  DEMOCRACY DIGEST: V4 DRAGGED INTO HUNGARY’S EU GAY RIGHTS SPAT

  Hungary began the week at odds with the EU and ended the week even more so, dragging in its Central European neighbours along the way. EU leaders began a two-day summit on June 24 in Brussels having to deal with the fallout from Hungary’s recently passed anti-LGBT legislation – a …

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• 3 July

  Biden-Erdogan Meeting Suggests No Quick Fixes in U.S.-Turkish Relations

  Real rapprochement between the US and Turkey may have to wait the result of Turkish presidential and parliamentary elections in 2023. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had his first face-to-face meeting with US President Joe Biden on June 14 on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Brussels. Since Washington …

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• 3 July

  ALBANIAN CRIME STORY: HOSTAGE TO THE COCAINE SUPPLY CHAIN

  What a kidnapping in Albania reveals about Europe’s growing cocaine habit. There are two ways of interpreting the fact that the annual recorded seizures of cocaine in Europe have been hitting all-time highs every year for the last three years. The record-breaking hauls may, on the one hand, be taken …

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• 3 July

  Jordan king in talks with Abbas ahead of Biden summit

  Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas held talks on Wednesday with King Abdullah before the Jordanian monarch’s key visit to Washington. The king will be the first Arab leader to meet at the White House with President Joe Biden and his team. Two Jordanian army helicopters flew to Ramallah to transport Abbas …

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• 2 July

  American Muslim groups urge suspension of US aid to Egypt

  

  The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the largest coalition of major national, regional, and local Muslim organizations, Monday sent a letter to Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken calling on the Biden administration and Congress to demand that “the Egyptian government halt its plans to conduct a mass execution …

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• 2 July

  The “Iran Deal” Soon to Be Resuscitated

  

  Raisi’s election, “engineered to guarantee his victory,” looks suspiciously like a ploy by Iran’s Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei to terrify the American negotiators into capitulating to Iran’s demands even faster and more recklessly, to avoid negotiating with an opponent more uncompromising than the one with whom they are negotiating at …

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• 2 July

  The Palestinian Police State

  

  These [Palestinian] leaders have turned the Palestinian Authority-controlled areas of the West Bank into a police state where political opponents are beaten to death, arrested, tortured and intimidated. The crackdown was almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media in the West — until the death of Banat. It was ignored …

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• 2 July

  La Hongrie accusée par Bruxelles: «L’opposition entre les deux Europe est plus affirmée que jamais»

  

  La Commission européenne prévoit d’engager une procédure pour sanctionner la Hongrie après l’adoption d’une loi interdisant la «promotion» de l’homosexualité auprès des mineurs. L’essayiste Max-Erwann Gastineau voit dans cette controverse à l’échelle européenne un nouvel épisode d’une guerre culturelle. Une fois de plus, la Hongrie est le grand théâtre de …

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• 2 July

  China’s Crucial Decade

  

  For the past four decades, a narrative has taken hold among policymakers and the general public alike suggesting that China’s rise will continue indefinitely, even when mathematics and demographics suggest otherwise. Between the 1980s and the turn of the millennium, this notion was fueled by China’s astonishing double-digit growth. In …

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