It’s déjà vu all over again for voters in Israel, who will go to the polls for the third time in less than a year on March 2. Previous elections in April and September 2019 were inconclusive, as no party was able to form a majority coalition in the Knesset, Israel’s legislature. Will Israeli voters, fed up with all the political wrangling, produce a different result next month? And how might recent developments, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s indictment on corruption charges and the unveiling of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Israel-Palestine peace plan, affect the outcome? For this week’s interview [...]
At first glance, the Nile valley at Wad Ramli, an hour’s drive north of Khartoum, looks as lush and fertile as ever. Date palms sag, heavy with fruit along the banks. Neat rows of barley await harvesting in the heat. With thousands of miles of unbroken desert to the west and many hundreds to the east, this narrow, green strip—at points only 200 meters wide—still closely resembles the life-giving refuge from a hostile environment that it has been for millennia. But ask the farmers, fishermen or anyone else who depends on the river for their livelihood, and they’ll tell you [...]
In three weeks, Iranians will go to the polls to choose a new parliament. For President Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate and ardent supporter of the now-moribund international agreement curbing Iran’s nuclear program, the parliamentary vote on Feb. 21 could be the first note in his political swan song. With some 90 percent of Iran’s reform candidates disqualified in a decision issued by the hard-line Guardian Council this week and reformists threatening an election boycott, it seems highly unlikely that Iran’s pro-reform bloc will be able to stitch together much of a showing at the polls. That’s bad news for [...]
