Overview
The Eastern Mediterranean has always been an area of important political and cultural developments, dense migration, but also a hotspot of international tensions. The past decades have been no different: the region remains a bridge for trade between Europe and Asia, whereas geopolitics have divided the island of Cyprus, and more migrants crossed the waters to escape hardship.
Russia has warned the US and UK not to “tempt fate” in the Black Sea – only one place where there are naval tensions.
On June 21, the US Sixth Fleet announced it would participate in the Sea Breeze exercise that will take place from June 28 to July 10. Washington says that “this year’s iteration has the largest number of participating nations in the exercise’s history, with 32 countries from six continents providing 5,000 troops, 32 ships, 40 aircraft and 18 special operations and dive teams scheduled to participate.”
Meanwhile, federal debt is projected to rise to $23 trillion — nearly 103 percent of GDP, the report said.
The US economy is recovering faster than previously predicted, but the government will see a deficit over $3 trillion again this year, the Congressional Budget Office said Thursday.
Approximately 2.31 million people joined the CPC in the first half of this year, the statement added.
The Communist Party of China (CPC) has 95.148 million members as of June 5, the Organization Department of the CPC Central Committee announced on Wednesday.
Some 3,500 U.S. troops and 7,000 NATO soldiers will withdraw from Afghan territory before September 11, 2021.
The Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) spokesperson Fawad Aman confirmed that all U.S. troops and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces departed from the Bagram Airfield on Thursday.
A conversation with Professor Jytte Klausen about her new book, ‘Western Jihadism: A Thirty Year History’, which charts the development of Al-Qaeda’s growth in the West.
In forensic and compelling detail, Professor Jytte Klausen shows how Islamist terrorism in Europe and North America has been driven, not by local grievances of Western Muslims, but by the strategic priorities of the international Salafi-jihadist revolutionary movement. That movement has adapted to Western repertoires of protest: agitating for armed insurrection and religious revivalism in the name of a warped version of Islam.
Slovenia „nu este un stat membru de mâna a doua” în Uniunea Europeană, a declarat vineri premierul sloven Janez Jansa, în urma unui incident cu Frans Timmermans, vicepreşedinte executiv al Comisiei Europene, petrecut în ziua precedentă la lansarea preşedinţiei slovene a Consiliului UE, relatează AFP și Agerpres.
On June 9, following a closed-door meeting, the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) issued a public statement that the Igbo-dominated southeast should be allowed to secede from the Federal Republic of Nigeria if it was necessary to avoid a civil war. NEF spokesman Hakeem Baba-Ahmed said “the Forum has arrived at the difficult conclusion that if support for secession among the Igbo is as widespread as it is being made to look, and Igbo leadership appears to be in support of it, then the country should be advised not to stand in the way.” His statement continued that secession was not in the best interest of the Igbos or of Nigerians. Rather, all should work to rebuild Nigeria. But, blocking secession “will not help a country already burdened with failures on its knees to fight another war to keep the Igbo in Nigeria.” The statement also suggested that northerners subject to harassment in the southeast should return to the north. There was no reference to secessionist sentiment in Yorubaland, in southwest Nigeria, to which former President Olusegun Obasanjo has referred. The former president said that Yoruba secession, too, would be unwise, but that maintaining unity should not come “at any cost.”
Violations of democratic norms by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban are nothing new, but the explosion of anger in Europe against the anti-LGBTQ law just approved by the Hungarian parliament, dominated by Orban’s Fidesz Party, suggests Orban has crossed a critical red line.
Our colleague Odai Al Zoubi wrote the following on his Facebook page: “The real tragedy for the Syrians in Denmark is that not being expelled back to Syria means that they will remain imprisoned in Denmark, under the mercy of a fascist, ignorant and chauvinistic group of politicians. The Syrians in Denmark’s tragedy is not their expulsion to Syria; it is their lives in Denmark!”