ATHENS — It’s like something out of a crime novel. On an early December morning last year, after months spent staking out residences and tapping phones, Belgian police officers raided dozens of places across Brussels. Over the course of the next three days, in apartments and hotel rooms and offices, they seized laptops, cellphones and […]
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The essence of this kind of violent politics is that it happens at the local level, so I’ve also been reading about specific cities, and how their particular flavors of machine politics have sometimes opened up space for crime and corruption to flourish, encouraged state violence, or both. Longtime subscribers won’t be surprised that my […]
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Genaro García Luna, once the architect and public face of Mexico’s bloody war on its powerful criminal groups, was convicted on Tuesday in a New York courtroom of betraying his country and colleagues by taking millions of dollars in bribes from the violent drug cartels he was meant to be pursuing. The guilty verdict, which […]
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For miles around the small Turkish city of Erzin, the earth is shattered and buildings are razed, towns and cities turned into tombs of concrete by last week’s 7.8-magnitude earthquake. But Erzin still stands, an oasis of stability near the Mediterranean, where the question of why the city weathered the quake and a powerful aftershock […]
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But since then, the appetite for such prosecutions has vanished, largely because of the collapse of another Mexican corruption case in Brooklyn. In that one, Salvador Cienfuegos, Mexico’s former defense minister, was arrested in late 2020 in Los Angeles, and accused of bribery and drug trafficking. But weeks later, after intense pressure from Mexico, he […]
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With South Africa enduring daily power outages of up to 10 hours, President Cyril Ramaphosa declared a nationwide “state of disaster” on Thursday to address an electricity crisis so dire that day-old chicks are freezing to death, supermarket owners are rushing to sell meat before it spoils and many businesses have been forced to shut […]
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A former Mexican official convicted of drug trafficking testified in a New York court on Tuesday that he had been told that Felipe Calderón, the onetime president of Mexico, had instructed government officials to support the Sinaloa drug cartel as it battled its rivals. The accusation was made by Edgar Veytia, the former attorney general […]
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In Pakistan, the shoddy construction was mainly a function of poverty. In wealthier Mexico, which on paper had stringent building codes dating back to the aftermath of previous quakes, the reason tended to be government corruption. After the quake, it became impossible to ignore that privately built office towers and homes stood unscathed while government-built […]
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Yes, this is in part a consequence of anti-intellectual strains on the right and among right-wing media. And this conservative mistrust of higher education (and secondary education) is causing it to turn its back on free speech and instead resort to punitive legislation, such as Florida’s recently passed “Stop Woke Act,” which a federal court […]
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But E.U. membership would require meeting the bloc’s standards for overhauling the economy, reining in corruption and public debt, ensuring competitive and fair elections, and safeguarding the independence of the courts and the media, as well as changing laws and regulations to comply with 80,000 pages of rules on matters ranging from environmental protection to […]
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It is just over a decade since the steamy capital of South Sudan exploded in joy, with revelers singing and dancing through the night to mark the birth of their new nation as it split from its old enemy, Sudan. The new country was cheered on in 2011 by the American diplomats who had midwifed its […]
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KYIV, Ukraine — A leaked police video showing bundles of cash found in an official’s sofa. A tax inspector accused of fraud in issuing refunds. The dismissal of the chief of the customs service and his top deputy, as well as senior officials from a consumer protection agency and the forestry agency. And a search […]
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