🌍👀 The Week in Global Eyes 🌏👀
Description
Don’t forget: For global news updates in real time, just check the GLOBAL EYES page. You can find it by going to our home page—click the CG logo and you’ll be taken then. Then click on this tab:
For those of you who prefer your news in your inbox, voilà—here’s the past week in GLOBAL EYES.
NB: A reader told me it would be helpful to him if I organized these entries both chronologically and geographically. I want to make readers happy, so I tried, but quickly realized it’s impossible. (To grasp why, imagine I post five items in the morning, one in each geographic category. If in the evening I want to post another item, placing it in the relevant geographical category means not posting it in chronological order.) But from now on, I’ll organize entries by region whenever I update the blog, as I did yesterday, and I’ll also note the time at which I’m updating it.
I’m pleased to be able to respond to another reader request, however—that the date of posting be larger and more visible. (We aim to please. That one was easy.)
I’ll also be sending out the GLOBAL EYES newsletter twice a week, by popular demand. (“Popular demand” was “six votes.” But the result was clear. Those of you who respond to these polls have outsized power.)
🌐👁️ SUMMARY
In the Middle East, the peace between Israel and Hamas is sort-of holding, depending how you define “peace” and “sort-of.” The administration has dispatched JD Vance to Israel to warn Hamas and Netanyahu not to undermine the truce. Hamas is once again operating out of Gazan schools and hospitals, not merely ruling but auditing the aid agencies and taxing humanitarian shipments. The Palestinian Authority’s press reports that Hamas has repurposed clinics as interrogation centers and erected a bureaucracy to extort international assistance; when not busy with this, they’re briskly executing their rivals.
A ballistic missile streaked across Iran’s skies, possibly the Khorramshahr-5, a weapon with a 12,000-kilometer range—enough to drop a warhead on Manhattan. Seventy members of Iran’s parliament formally urged Supreme Leader Khamenei to authorize nuclear weapons “for deterrence.” Iran declared the JCPOA a dead letter, and the Quds Force appointed a new commander for its Palestine branch, tasked with recreating the “ring of fire” around Israel.
Faced with protests, led by Gen-Z, over the deaths of eight pregnant women in an ill-equipped hospital, the Moroccan government proposed a draft finance bill to fund health and education, a plan to ease the path of the young into politics, and campaign subsidies for younger candidates.
In Europe, Lecornu’s government survived one no-confidence vote after another, but not the scrutiny of the credit-rating agencies, and Nicolas Sarkozy, once an emblem of French dynamism, began serving time for his Libyan fundraising Schweinerei. To the south, Giorgia Meloni thanked Trump for “restoring Columbus Day,” even though it was never abolished. Washington returned the favor by proposing to impose a 92 percent tariff on Italian pasta. To the east, Germany’s Friedrich Merz warned the Bundestag that Europe risked becoming a “pawn between America and China.” In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s regime has been so hollowed out by inflation, emigration, and corruption that real wages collapsed by fifteen percent in a single year and birthrates are at their lowest since 1949. This hasn’t dimmed the Heritage Foundation’s enthusiasm for the Hungarian concept: It’s now flirting with Hungarian and Polish envoys who want to neuter the European Union entirely.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin spoke by phone, then promised to meet in Budapest to “end the war in Ukraine.” Trump had been hinting he would supply Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles, which would have crippled Russia’s refineries. Then came the phone call, and the idea evaporated. European diplomats went into collective cardiac arrest, and the Kremlin gloated in its press: “In the game of Trump tug-of-war, we’re in the lead again.” (The Budapest meeting, it
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