By now, you will have already seen the endless stream of scenes from the violent breach of the Capitol building on Wednesday by extremist supporters of President Donald Trump. There was the guy belaying down the wall from the Senate gallery, and the police with guns drawn in congressional chambers. There was the guy strolling through the halls of Congress with a huge Confederate flag. This is the new iconography of America’s 240-year experiment with democracy. Expect to see more of it. Only moments before those scenes unfolded, the good gentleman from Kentucky, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, struck [...]
More than 340 schoolboys were abducted from their boarding school in northwestern Nigeria last month, apparently by armed criminal gangs affiliated with the extremist group Boko Haram. Though the boys were freed and reunited with their families a week later, the incident was a worrying sign that Boko Haram is expanding beyond its traditional base in northeastern Nigeria. According to Bulama Bukarti, a Nigerian analyst at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and a non-resident senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Boko Haram’s resurgence suggests the need for a more holistic, transnational approach to countering [...]
Nigeria’s ongoing battle with the violent extremist group Boko Haram took a worrying turn last month, when more than 300 young schoolboys were abducted from their boarding school in Katsina state, in northwestern Nigeria. Thankfully, the students were freed and reunited with their families a week later. But the attack carried chilling echoes of another mass abduction from 2014, when 276 female students were kidnapped from their school in the northeastern town of Chibok. More than 100 of those girls are still missing. While Boko Haram has taken credit for last month’s raid, experts and Nigerian officials say the true [...]
