World News

Slovenia’s liberal Prime Minister Robert Golob said on Friday that he intends to call a consultative referendum on the country’s NATO membership, following a surprise defeat in parliament over a related measure on defence spending.

"There are only two ways: either we remain in NATO and pay membership, or we leave the alliance – everything else is populist deceit of the citizens of Slovenia," Golob said, according to a government statement.

His referendum is expected to be formally tabled next week.

Golob’s gambit comes as part of a damage control effort in response to a successful initiative by The Left party, a junior partner in his centre-left coalition, pushing for a consultative referendum on increasing defence expenditure.

Inside the guarded bubble of the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, there are signs of a problem. Next to the security carousels, a large sign, replicated all over the hallways, says: “In response to the ongoing UN budget crisis, we have had to reduce operating hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.” During the past two years, corridors and meeting rooms of the Palais des Nations have been occasionally kept in the dark, central heating and elevators cut to save on the very inflated Swiss electricity bills. Back in December 2023, the UN’s liquidity crisis got so dire that the Palais was shut down for three whole weeks. Ahead of a security meeting, a source told me a Russian delegate once joked in front of a dead elevator that they should turn the power off for Americans but not for him: His country had already paid its yearly contribution to the UN.

The much delayed, years-long renovation of the UN buildings, which has overrun its budget by as much as 118 million CHF ($144 million), adds a layer of uncertainty to the otherwise neatly sophisticated decor. Construction gear lies in the grass. A sign about Building E, the building where the main conference rooms are, states, nostalgically, that it was once the world’s largest glass window. (The world’s largest glass window is now in China, according to the Guinness Book of World Records). Behind the rain-soaked foliage of the gardens, a peacock wails. Peacocks were offered as a gift to the UN by India’s permanent mission in the 1980s and, as a result, the UN gardens are full of them. They are still being fed by Geneva’s municipal staff.

The World Health Assembly brings together the representatives of 194 states every year in May. It is one of the year’s highlights for the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN agency dedicated to health. Inside Building E, the atmosphere is busy, focused, even expectant. It is May 20, the second day of the assembly, and a much anticipated-session is taking place in Room XX — also known as the Human Rights and Alliance of Civilizations Room. Member states are discussing whether or not they will approve measures proposed by the WHO’s director, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, to shrink down its core budget for 2026-27 to $4.2 billion from $5.3 billion and to increase membership fees by 20 percent to try to fill the anticipated budget gap of more than $1.7 billion due in part to a lack of U.S. contributions. The fees vary from one country to another, proportional to GDP. In a drastic move aimed at showing member states the reforms will not spare anyone, the WHO would reduce the number of its departments from 76 to 34 and, in June 2025, the senior leadership team in Geneva from 12 to seven directors. “The hard truth is that we need to reduce salary expenditures by 25 percent,” Ghebreyesus said at a member state briefing in late April.

Under the colorful stalactites dripping from the round ceiling of Room XX, a sculpture by Spanish artist Miquel Barceló representing multiculturalism and tolerance, the room was full and attentive. First Qatar, then Senegal, Togo, Spain, Colombia, Brazil, China, Lebanon and the U.K. spoke for three minutes each, the time allotted to member states. Member states unanimously agreed on the budget cuts.

The UN has been knee-deep in a liquidity crisis since 2023, with more member states paying late each year and some of them not paying at all, leaving the organization’s cash reserves exhausted. China regularly pays late. Afghanistan, Bolivia and Venezuela are in arrears. In 2023 only 82.3 percent of the budget had been collected, leaving $859 million in unpaid contributions. So when the United States, which owes the UN approximately $1.5 billion in arrears for the regular UN budget and about $1.2 billion for the peacekeeping budget, announced in January that it was cutting nearly all its foreign aid, the effect was devastating. The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) scaled back its operations in nine countries. The World Food Program had to cut back food assistance for tens of millions of people. The UN’s Population Fund (UNFPA) terminated 48 grants, halting maternal health care, protection from violence and other lifesaving services for women and girls. In Afghanistan alone, the WHO closed 200 health facilities, meaning that 1.84 million people lost access to essential health care and vaccination programs. Twenty-seven countries in Africa and Asia face crippling breakdowns in tuberculosis diagnosis and treatment. The global network of 700 measles and rubella labs is at risk of collapse, malaria diagnoses and deliveries of bed nets and medicines have been delayed, the polio and mpox programs are unable to function as before.

Poland’s main opposition party, the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS), has proposed an entry ban for people from certain countries in the Middle East and Africa. It says this would help stop Germany’s practice of sending migrants who have illegally crossed the border back to Poland.

The proposal comes amid renewed debate over how to tackle migration, with the Polish government on Tuesday announcing the reintroduction of controls on Poland’s borders with Germany and Lithuania in an effort to prevent the “uncontrolled flow of migrants”.

After Prime Minister Donald Tusk had announced the border controls, the head of PiS’s parliamentary caucus, Mariusz Błaszczak, said that the government’s actions were “too little, too late”.

“This crisis has been going on for months,” he continued. “This issue requires far-reaching action.”

Błaszczak said that PiS would submit a bill to parliament introducing a temporary ban on entry to Poland for third-country nationals from “specific countries outside Europe…whose citizens illegally cross borders”.

Previously, on Monday, PiS party leader Jarosław Kaczyński had called for an “immediate ban on entry to the territory of Poland for people from the Middle East and North Africa”.

PiS has not yet specified which Middle Eastern and African countries would be included in its proposed ban. It says they would be selected based on analysis of data showing which nationalities most often cross borders illegally or are transferred to Poland from Germany.

A government information campaign discouraging people from trying to illegally enter Poland was recently launched in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan and Egypt, countries from which Poland has identified the largest numbers of people crossing the border from Belarus.

Since 2021, tens of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers – mainly from Asia and Africa – have tried to enter Poland from Belarus, with the encouragement and assistance of the Belarusian authorities.

In response, Poland has heavily fortified its eastern border with physical barriers and electronic monitoring. The government also recently banned asylum claims by people crossing from Belarus. Those measures have led to a dramatic decline in the numbers entering via that route.

In his remarks on Tuesday, Błaszczak made clear, however, that PiS’s proposed entry ban was designed to address the issue that has recently caused most controversy, which is Germany’s policy of sending back to Poland thousands of migrants who crossed the Polish-German border illegally.

Many of those sent back are Ukrainians. Others are non-Europeans, often from Asia and Africa, who have either claimed asylum in Poland – and therefore must remain there while their applications are processed – or have simply passed through it after entering the EU irregularly.

“After the introduction of this [proposed] law, Polish border guards will be able to prevent citizens of these countries from entering our territory,” said Błaszczak. “So those who are today being transferred from Germany by the German authorities, or who are trying to cross from Germany to the Polish side, will not be able to do so.”

The migrant returns carried out by Germany take place under a combination of EU regulations, bilateral agreements with Poland, and the border controls that Berlin reintroduced in 2023. Earlier this year, Tusk declared that Poland may stop adhering to such agreements.

However, some Poles have sought to take matters into their own hands, organising self-declared “citizen patrols” – some of them hundreds strong – at the German border to monitor and prevent migrant returns.

Błaszczak said that PiS politicians will be visiting the German border to make clear that “we support the border defence movement”, which he described as “Polish patriots who took matters into their own hands when Donald Tusk’s state abdicated [its responsibilities]”.

He also pledged that the party “will provide support to those who are persecuted by the current authorities of our country” for undertaking such actions, reports the Polish Press Agency (PAP).

Earlier this week, Tusk and interior minister Tomasz Siemoniak criticised the actions of the citizen patrols, saying that they are disrupting the work of border officers and spreading false claims about the number and types of migrants being transferred by Germany.

Evidence gathered by Amnesty International demonstrates how over a month since the introduction of its militarized aid distribution system, Israel has continued to use starvation of civilians as a weapon of war against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip and to deliberately impose conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as part of its ongoing genocide.

Heartbreaking testimonies gathered from medical staff, parents of children hospitalized for malnutrition and displaced Palestinians struggling to survive paint a horrifying picture of acute levels of starvation and desperation in Gaza. Their accounts provide further evidence of the catastrophic suffering caused by Israel’s ongoing restrictions on life-saving aid and its deadly militarized aid scheme coupled with mass forced displacement, relentless bombardment and destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure.

“While the eyes of the world were diverted to the recent hostilities between Israel and Iran, Israel’s genocide has continued unabated in Gaza, including through the infliction of conditions of life that have created a deadly mix of hunger and disease pushing the population past breaking point,” said Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International.

In the month following Israel’s imposition of a militarized “‘aid” scheme run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), hundreds of Palestinians have been killed and thousands injured either near militarized distribution sites or en route to humanitarian aid convoys.

The chamber of Poland’s Supreme Court tasked with overseeing elections – but whose legitimacy is rejected by the Polish government and European courts – has passed a resolution validating the result of last month’s presidential vote in Poland, which was won by conservative opposition candidate Karol Nawrocki.

The decision was widely expected but has been mired in controversy over allegations of the miscounting of votes as well as questions over the status of the chamber itself, which was created by the former ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party that supported Nawrocki’s presidential candidacy.

In its decision, the chamber of extraordinary oversight and public affairs noted that, while it had confirmed 21 cases of irregularities during the election, “the identified violations did not affect the result”, in the words of judge Maria Szczepaniec.

The Supreme Court’s decision now paves the way for Nawrocki to be sworn into office in August, when he will replace outgoing President Andrzej Duda, whose second and final term is ending.

Poland’s presidential election run-off took place on 1 June. Nawrocki, the candidate supported by the national-conservative PiS, won 50.9% of the vote, defeating Rafał Trzaskowski – deputy leader of the centrist Civic Platform (PO), Poland’s main ruling party – who received 49.1%.

Subsequently, the Supreme Court had 30 days to consider complaints filed regarding the election (of which there were over 53,000 in total) and to confirm the validity of the result. As it met today to discuss the issue, supporters and opponents of Nawrocki gathered outside the court.

Some figures associated with the ruling coalition have suggested that, regardless of what happened today, next month’s swearing-in ceremony should not go forward due to question marks over vote-counting and the legality of the oversight chamber.

However, last week, the speaker of parliament, Szymon Hołownia, whose role it is to call the assembly at which the new president will be sworn in, said that, despite doubts over the chamber’s legality, he would accept its decision and swear in Nawrocki if the election was declared valid.

The oversight chamber was established under the former government that was led by PiS, which is now Poland’s main opposition party.

The chamber has been deemed illegitimate by both Polish and European courts due to being staffed entirely by judges nominated by the National Council of the Judiciary (KRS) after it was also overhauled by PiS in a manner that rendered it no longer independent of political influence.

The current government – a broad coalition ranging from left to centre-right that replaced PiS in office in December 2023 – also regards the chamber as unlawful and has tried to remove its power to validate the presidential election result. That effort was vetoed by PiS-aligned President Duda.

Last week, a group of 28 Supreme Court judges from other chambers jointly signed a letter declaring that the oversight chamber is illegitimate and therefore cannot issue a valid ruling. Even two judges from the chamber itself have questioned its legitimacy (and they today issued opinions dissenting from the main resolution).

On Monday, Adam Bodnar, the justice minister and prosecutor general, made a last-ditch appeal to the Supreme Court to transfer the decision on the validity of the election to another, legal, chamber. However, that request was denied.

Today, when Bodnar appeared before the oversight chamber, Szczepaniec pointed out that, after the 2023 parliamentary elections at which the current government came to power – and when Bodnar was himself elected to the Senate – he had not protested against the same chamber validating those results.

PiS has argued that the ruling coalition is only now disputing the legitimacy of the chamber because its candidate lost the presidential election. When Tusk’s coalition won the 2023 elections – as well as local and European elections in 2024 – it did not mount such protests, they note.

Speaking before the chamber today, Bodnar also accused it of dismissing almost 50,000 complaints about the presidential election without properly considering them.

As a result, “we still do not know what the election result is”, said Bodnar’s deputy, Jacek Bilewicz.

He emphasised that they were not “trying to reverse the election result, but we are of the opinion that the Supreme Court did not take all actions [necessary] to bring us close to [knowing] the actual result”.

In response, Szczepaniec noted that the complaints to which Bodnar was referring – which were based on templates shared by members of the ruling coalition, who had encouraged Poles to file protests – were “identical in content and do not concern the protesting party’s own specific and real interest”.

“The Supreme Court, after reviewing each protest, observes that the number of protests filed does not increase the weight of the single allegations included in them,” said Szczepaniec. “In such a case, the effect of scale is irrelevant.”

The oversight chamber’s decision to confirm the validity of the election was supported by the head of the National Electoral Commission (PKW), Sylwester Marciniak, who was appointed when PiS was in power.

Speaking before the chamber, Marciniak noted the PKW “did not find any violations of electoral law that could have influenced the voting results and the election outcome”, reports news website Wirtualna Polska.

Aujourd’hui, ce monde qu’on voulait changer, on dit, et on n’a pas tort, qu’il est surtout en marche, vers une forme de fascisme, ou plus précisément de techno-fascisme.

Dans les années 70, un des refrains préférés de la rhétorique gauchiste c’était la « fascisation du pouvoir ». Crier à la fascisation, c’était une des activités préférées, notamment, des maoïstes de la Gauche prolétarienne, qui voulaient rejouer la geste de la Résistance en se baptisant les « Nouveaux Partisans ». Ça a donné une fort belle chanson chantée par Dominique Grange. Mais l’imaginaire de la Résistance tel que la portaient cette chanson et le gauchisme en général, il faut bien reconnaître qu’il a été totalement impuissant, aussi bien à empêcher l’essor de l’extrême-droite, qu’à saisir les transformations du capitalisme, dans les formes du travail et dans les rapports sociaux en général, et donc cet imaginaire-là, hormis simplement comme leçon de courage, il n’a en aucune manière été un outil de lutte efficace.

Protest against student arrest, barricades in Belgrade

Berlin-based advocates are one step closer to creating a car-free zone in their city that's bigger than the entirety of Manhattan.

A decision on Wednesday by the Berlin Constitutional Court allows a long-stalled initiative by the advocacy group Volksentscheid Berlin Autofrei ("Ballot Measure for an Auto-Free Berlin) to continue gathering signatures for a referendum to create a zone in the center of the German capital that would be free of almost all private automobiles.

The group's efforts had already reached the initial, 50,000-signature threshold before a series of procedural impediments threw a wrench in their effort. Wednesday's court decision pushes the long-delayed process forward, beginning with a debate at the Berlin House of Representatives, followed by another round of signature collection that would allow the referendum to take place in 2026, the group said.

The "ban" would still allow up to 12 uses of a private automobile per year per person. It would also include exceptions for rental vehicles, people with disabilities, and service vehicles like delivery vans and garbage trucks.

Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets of Budapest in defiance of the Hungarian government’s ban on Pride, heeding a call by the city’s mayor to “come calmly and boldly to stand together for freedom, dignity and equal rights”.

Jubilant crowds packed into the city’s streets on Saturday, waving Pride flags and signs that mocked the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, as their peaceful procession inched forward at a snail’s pace.

Organisers estimated that a record number of people turned up, far outstripping the expected turnout of 35,000-40,000 people.

“We believe there are 180,000 to 200,000 people attending,” the president of Pride, Viktória Radványi told AFP. “It is hard to estimate because there have never been so many people at Budapest Pride.”

Not sure about the inconsistency of whether periods go inside or outside the quote marks, but outside of that ... Orbán misjudged here.

NEW YORK (AP) — Europeans still aren’t buying Teslas with figures out Wednesday showing sales plunged for a fifth month in a row in May, a blow to investors who had hoped anger toward Elon Musk would have faded by now.

Tesla sales fell 28% last month in 30 European countries even as the overall market for electric vehicles expanded sharply, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association. The poor showing comes after Tesla’s billionaire CEO had promised a “major rebound” was coming last month, adding to a recent buying frenzy among investors.

Along with the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Denmark constitute the Danish Realm, a political arrangement united under the Danish monarch, King Frederik. Greenlanders hold Danish citizenship, many are of mixed Inuit and Danish heritage, and approximately 17,000 live in Denmark. What the Danish government doesn’t like to admit is that Denmark enjoys geopolitical advantages from the arrangement. Retaining Greenland as a territory makes Denmark one of eight members of the Arctic Council and the third largest territory within NATO. And though Greenland retains full control of its natural resources, Denmark is responsible for its foreign policy; the economic potential of any mineral deposits, as well as the emerging trade routes in the Arctic, will likely elevate Denmark’s geopolitical influence in the region and its standing on the world stage.

And yet, until President Donald Trump’s first suggestion, in 2019, that the U.S. wanted to purchase Greenland from Denmark, the island didn’t much figure much in the Danish news cycle. At the time, Trump’s comments were dismissed in Danish media as a bad joke. Now Trump’s rhetoric of the “absolute necessity” of taking Greenland has put the Danish government in the awkward position of defending its territorial possession of a former colony that is laying the groundwork for independence. In doing so, Trump has forced Denmark to reckon with a past that many Danes would prefer to ignore. As a Danish friend who spent four years in Greenland recently told me, “Never before have there been so many Danish journalists in Greenland as there are now.”

There is no English equivalent for the word the women of Yakel use to describe the shame they feel when they are unable to carry out their customary duties. It is not exactly embarrassment. It is not simply sorrow. It is something deeper — a rupture between the self and the sacred. For generations, the women of Yakel, a kastom (custom) village on the island of Tanna in the Republic of Vanuatu in the South Pacific, have borne the responsibility for the ritual of Nahunu. Nahunu entails the preparation of food and drink for the Imalul, or the spiritual center of the village, where the people go to commune with their ancestors. This responsibility, though heavy, is not a burden. It is a birthright. A form of spiritual service. To perform it is to be in right relationship — with the land, with one another, and with the ancestral realm. To fail is to feel adrift, untethered from a deeper order, like a reed cut from a reed bed.

And yet, through no fault of their own, they are failing. The gardens that once grew nearby have been blighted by landslides and battered by storms — disasters now far more frequent and intense due to climate change. The women report having to climb down one side of a steep mountain, cross a frequently flooded ravine, and climb back up the other side to reach the arable lands where their relocated gardens are planted — a journey that can take an entire day. Often they do not make it back before sunset. Often they return empty-handed. On those days, the ritual is missed, the spiritual connection is broken, and the women grow increasingly distressed. Meanwhile, hunger has grown so severe that families have been forced to eat the animals once reserved for sacred ceremonies, deepening the destruction of customary life. With every missed or incomplete ceremony, the feeling of alienation grows. For the women in particular, this combination of extreme physical labor and emotional strain has led to strokes and premature death.

Yam is so much more than a crop in Yakel. It is ceremony, calendar, covenant. It is ancestor. It organizes everything from governance to the seasons themselves. Yam ceremonies mark when children come of age, when marriages occur, when the dead are honored. The loss of the yam is thus not merely a loss of a foodstuff but a collapse of Indigenous methods of timekeeping, storytelling, and social coherence. Its absence disrupts all manner of communal life. Its absence means certain ceremonies cannot be performed, including the Toka, the four-day dance by which the community chooses a high chief.

In Yakel, there has not been a single successful yam harvest in four years.

I'll refrain from making a Popeye joke, given the seriousness of the situation.

Soldiers in the Israeli military have told the Israeli news outlet Haaretz that aid distribution centers in Gaza have become “a killing field,” with military leadership ordering soldiers to fire on unarmed Palestinians.

Massacres at aid distribution sites have become a common occurrence in recent weeks as the Israeli military ever so slightly loosened its blockade against humanitarian aid into Gaza, and tasked itself with aid management under the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The Palestinian Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas, estimates that 549 have been killed and several thousands injured near aid sites since late May, when the foundation first began operations. The United Nations estimated that least 410 had been killed at aid sites over a similar time frame.

Soldiers and officers in the Israeli Defense Forces who spoke to Haaretz paint a bleak picture of the scene, indicating the killings are the result of IDF policies targeting civilians in violation of international law.

As always, let's keep this civil and on-topic.