International

Ruto Orders Tata Chemicals Out of Kenya, Turning a Century-Old Soda Ash Plant Into a 2027 Battleground

KAJIADO, Kenya 

President William Ruto told a rally in Kajiado County on Thursday that he has ordered Tata Chemicals Magadi, the Indian-owned soda ash producer that has worked the shores of Lake Magadi for more than a century, to leave the country, and that a replacement investor has already been lined up on…

Biya Is Home, but Cameroon's No. 2 Chair Is Still Empty — and That Is Now a Credit Risk

YAOUNDÉ, Cameroon 

Two weeks after President Paul Biya returned to Yaoundé from a 74-day absence in Europe that his office never fully explained, the constitutional machinery Cameroon built this year to manage his succession remains untouched: the vice presidency created by parliament in April is still…

"A Rule Older Than the Common Law": Maduro Asks a New York Judge to Throw Out the Case Against Him

New York 

Background 
In papers filed in Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, September 2, lawyers for Nicolás Maduro asked US District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein to dismiss the drug-trafficking indictment against the ousted Venezuelan president on the ground that he is immune from…

'Living on Borrowed Time': Rights Report Says Tunisia Has All But Closed the Civic Space Built After 2011

TUNIS

Fifteen years after Tunisians toppled Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and built what became the Arab world's most crowded landscape of independent associations, Human Rights Watch said Wednesday that the machinery of that civic life has been largely dismantled — not by a single decree, but by a slow accumulation…

Ten Years After Gabon's Post-Election Killings, the Files Are Open and the Questions Are Still Political

Libreville

Ten years ago tonight, security forces stormed the campaign headquarters of Gabonese opposition leader Jean Ping in Libreville, hours after President Ali Bongo Ondimba was declared the winner of a knife-edge election. A decade later, nobody has been convicted, the death toll has never been officially…

Twenty-Five Years On, the SCO Signs Its Bishkek Declaration — and Runs Into the Limits of Its Own Ambition

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan  

Background

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation was founded in June 2001 by China, Russia and four Central Asian republics as a modest instrument for settling post-Soviet border disputes and coordinating against what its charter calls the "three evils" of terrorism, separatism…