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The attack on oil facilities in Saudi Arabia last month cut the country’s oil production in half, leading to a 20 percent spike in the price of oil and exposing the surprising vulnerability of the Saudi oil industry, which is vital to the global energy supply. It was all apparently the work of a handful of drones and cruise missiles. It was just the latest incident, but certainly the most high-stakes geopolitically, of what is usually referred to as “suspected drone activity.” Interruptions to commercial aircraft have become increasingly frequent, when planes must be diverted to another location because a […]

Voters in Canada will go to the polls on Oct. 21 to decide whether Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should be returned to power. Trudeau swept into office following a decisive victory in the 2015 federal elections, but his popularity has declined precipitously since then as a result of several high-profile scandals. This year’s election is widely seen as a toss-up, with polls showing Trudeau’s Liberal Party running neck-and-neck with the main opposition Conservative Party, led by Andrew Scheer. In an email interview with WPR, Christopher Sands, director of the Center for Canadian Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced […]

Seven thousand indigenous languages are spoken around the world today, and four in 10 of them are in danger of going extinct, a recent United Nations study warned. After its release in August, U.N. experts called for a series of steps, including new laws and international commitments, to reverse what they described as the “historic destruction” of indigenous languages. Researchers like the linguist Frank Seifart of Berlin’s Leibniz Center for General Linguistics, whose work includes a study of Carabayo, a language of indigenous people in the Colombian Amazon, have found that older speakers of a range of indigenous languages are […]

There is no shortage of high-stakes, bitter political battles across the globe today. Few, though, can compete with the drama unfolding now in Peru, where a standoff between the president and the opposition-controlled Congress has suddenly erupted into an unprecedented constitutional crisis. On Monday, President Martin Vizcarra dissolved Congress, and Congress responded by suspending Vizcarra on the grounds of his “permanent moral incapacity,” swearing in Vice President Mercedes Araoz as his replacement. No one is quite sure which move was legal. If the president’s dissolution of Congress is valid, then the Congress was not entitled to remove Vizcarra. If the […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. “There is no force that can shake the foundation of this great nation. No force can stop the Chinese people and Chinese nation forging ahead,” President Xi Jinping said Tuesday in a speech marking the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. The Communist Party hoped this year’s milestone celebration would showcase a unified country on the path to a “great rejuvenation.” Instead, observers around the world were treated to a much more complicated split-screen image: A giant […]

For more than a week, Indonesia has been rocked by massive student-led demonstrations against a new law that weakens the authority of the country’s Corruption Eradication Commission and a new draft criminal code being considered in parliament. Violent clashes with the police have resulted in the deaths of two protesters and more than 200 injuries so far. The unrest threatens to overshadow President Joko Widodo’s second inauguration ceremony later this month. Jokowi, as he is widely known in Indonesia, comfortably won reelection in April. In an email interview with WPR, Yohanes Sulaiman, a lecturer in the school of government at […]

In 1987, a 40-year-old mother of five named Tita Comodas received a strange request. Comodas, a resident of a sprawling slum district in Manila, had just been asked by an acquaintance if a young American journalist named Jason DeParle could rent space in her already cramped dwelling. She somewhat reluctantly agreed, and DeParle stayed for eight months, kicking off what became a lifelong friendship. For this week’s interview on Trend Lines, WPR’s Elliot Waldman is joined by DeParle, now a senior writer at The New York Times, for a discussion on his new book, “A Good Provider Is One Who […]

The Organization of American States took a new step late last month that it hopes could lead to an end to the ongoing crisis in Venezuela—but that others fear may spark an armed conflict between Venezuela and its neighbor, Colombia. On Sept. 23, the OAS voted to take punitive actions against as-yet-unspecified members of President Nicolas Maduro’s government through a somewhat obscure mechanism: the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, also known as the Rio Treaty, or the TIAR by its Spanish acronym. The TIAR is a mutual defense treaty among 19 states in the Western Hemisphere. Signed in 1947, it […]

Is President Emmanuel Macron turning France into the new indispensable nation of European and global politics? Or is he doomed to demonstrate that France is neither necessary nor sufficient to solve the world’s problems? After a string of successes in European Union politics in the late spring and summer, Macron has positioned himself at the center of diplomacy over the Iran nuclear deal and thawing Europe’s ties with Russia. It remains to be seen, however, whether he can actually achieve his objectives. Macron has already gone through a few boom and bust cycles since winning the French presidency in his […]

The first round of Tunisia’s presidential election underlined a critical fact about the country’s fraught democratic transition: Tunisians have had enough of their post-revolution politicians. This was made clear not only by the number of people who skipped the mid-September vote altogether, but by the choices made by those who opted to have a say. This year’s shortened electoral calendar, in which Tunisians will elect a new parliament between two rounds of presidential voting, was drawn up after the unexpected death of 92-year-old President Beji Caid Essebsi in July. The Independent High Authority for Elections brought the presidential vote forward […]

CHIQUIRINES, Guatemala—In August, Abner Lopez Macario, a 30-year-old farmer and father of two, found himself out of luck and back in Chiquirines, a town in the muggy coastal lands of Guatemala surrounded by sprawling banana plantations. Far from being a bittersweet return after years abroad, Lopez Macario’s homecoming was an admission of defeat. Three months earlier, after a 20-day trek through Mexico guided by a migrant-smuggler, he, his wife and his two sons made it all the way to the border of the United States in the back of a truck. Upon reaching El Paso, Texas, they had sought out […]

A momentous week in which the House of Representatives opened an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump overshadowed the announcement in New York that the United States and Japan had reached agreement on a mini trade deal. While its economic impact will be limited, the deal’s implications for the global trading system could be more significant—and not in a good way. The Trump White House is trumpeting the new U.S.-Japan deal as “phenomenal” and a big win for American farmers, but how big is it really? And is it enough for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to sell at home? […]