In Morocco’s largest protest since 2011, more than 20,000 demonstrators, primarily youth, rallied in Tangier on Saturday, decrying the exorbitant cost of water and electricity. Although mass gatherings are scarce in Morocco, where the king holds a tight grip on power, the past three weeks have been punctuated by demonstrations over utilities prices, with protests spreading to other major cities in recent days. Protesters lashed out against Amendis, a subsidiary of the French utility company Veolia Environnement, which has serviced the relatively impoverished northern cities of Tangier and Tetouan since 2002. “Amendis, go home, Tangier is not yours,” demonstrators chanted, [...]
The war in Afghanistan has been both a boon and curse for neighboring Central Asia. The conflict placed this sparsely populated region, long disconnected from the globalization taking place around its borders, on the front lines of the international community’s 15-year effort to stabilize Afghanistan. Central Asia became a staging point for coalition military forces, a transit corridor, a donor as well as a recipient of aid and at times a pawn in a larger strategic competition playing out between the United States and Russia. The region also found itself on the receiving end of Afghanistan’s noxious exports: extremism, drugs [...]
Miguel Rodriguez can’t quite believe what he’s planning to do on Dec. 6. A father of six, the 47-year-old farmer in Venezuela’s central state of Aragua has voted for the late Hugo Chavez, or for Chavez’s followers and initiatives, in all 17 elections since Chavez was first elected president in 1998. But Rodriguez is breaking his streak this year, abandoning Chavez’s anointed successor, President Nicolas Maduro, and vowing to vote for Chavez’s opponents in the Dec. 6 congressional elections. “I believed in Chavez and the revolution,” says Rodriguez, looking over his fields, which now lay fallow. “But now there is [...]
