Voltaire, International Newsletter is a weekly newsletter on international politics. It features 10 to 15 pages of contextualized, sourced news items. Its aim is to enable you to follow the decline of the unipolar world and the emergence of a multipolar system. The newsletter is published in several languages. Several foreign ministries from different countries…
Voltaire Network | 22 November 2024 • According to the New York Times of November 17, U.S. President Joe Biden has finally authorized the Pentagon to provide satellite data to Ukraine so that it can use U.S. ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) missiles against North Korean forces in Kursk (Russia). The United Kingdom immediately aligned…
SAADA, YEMEN — In explaining a much-lauded move, President Joe Biden said that the reason the United States was removing Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement from the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list was to avoid exacerbating the humanitarian situation in the war-torn country and to allow much-needed aid to reach local residents. Yet images of children with…
SANA’A, YEMEN — Seated next to his 13-year-old daughter Hakimah’s bed in al-Thawra Hospital, S. al-Hanishi watches a breaking news report on a small TV screen announcing that the president of the United States has announced an end to U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war on his country. But al-Hanishi took the news with skepticism.…
HODEIDA, YEMEN — Yemen’s oil is in thrall to a complex, intertwined network of elites that control the smuggling of fuel imports and new, thriving black markets. Starving Yemen of petroleum products has always been a conspicuous feature of Saudi Arabia’s nearly six-year-long war on the country, however, the most recent blockade is significantly more…
As the coronavirus pandemic has dominated the headlines for the past few months, it could be easy to miss the news that the Gaza Strip has quietly entered its fourteenth year under an Israeli blockade. The humanitarian ramifications of that blockade cannot be understated, with Israel controlling Gazans from the high seas, the air, and…
SANA’A, YEMEN — The streets of Sana’a have retained much of their character throughout the past six years of war. This, despite the ever-present threat of Saudi bombardment and the myriad viruses methodically working their way through the population, most recently COVID-19. The afternoon rush hour still brings out the buses, taxis and private vehicles…
Call it a ‘quarantine’, a ‘shelter-in-place’, a ‘lockdown’ or a ‘curfew’, we Palestinians have experienced them all, though not at all voluntarily. Personally, the first 23 years of my life were lived in virtual ‘lockdown’. My father’s ‘quarantine’ was experienced much earlier, as did his father’s ‘shelter-in-place’ before him. They both died and were buried…
SANA’A, YEMEN — Recent political developments have offered a glimmer of hope to some that the end of the humanitarian crisis in Yemen may be near. But a new report by the United Nations Development Programme shows that a recent tightening of the Saudi-led Coalition’s blockade against the country, and the fuel shortages it has…
Welcome to your second country, that was the greeting our Syrian hosts gave us when we arrived for the International Trade Union Forum for “solidarity with the workers and people of Syria against the economic blockade, imperialist interventions, and terrorism.” Throughout my short one-week stay, Syrians, on seeing I was a foreigner, would muster their…
HODEIDA, YEMEN — At least 7,000 civilians remain trapped in Southern Hodeida’s al-Durayhimi district by Saudi-led Coalition forces, in what has become a de facto eight-month siege amid Yemen’s broader humanitarian crisis. Conditions in al-Durayhimi are dire, as civilians endure an acute shortage of food and the spread of disease and epidemics. In June…
A Saudi-led coalition of states has been aggressively bombing Yemen and imposing an air and naval blockade of its ports for more than three years, leading U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to describe Yemen as “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” Guterres put the crisis in stark perspective, emphasizing the near complete lack of security for the Yemeni people. More than…
The UN estimates that nearly 20 million Yemenis could die of starvation by the end of this year. That’s about 70 percent of the entire population. That horrific number includes more than 2 million children who are already going hungry, including 500,000 who are suffering from severe malnutrition. The people of Yemen have found…
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL — Israel’s government has instructed the country’s military to prepare for a major military offensive against the Gaza Strip if the launching of “incendiary kites and balloons” over the Gaza-Israel border is not stopped by this Friday. If those objects continue to cross the border, Israel may decide it has “no choice”…
Voltaire, International Newsletter is a weekly newsletter on international politics. It features 10 to 15 pages of contextualized, sourced news items. Its aim is to enable you to follow the decline of the unipolar world and the emergence of a multipolar system. The newsletter is published in several languages. Several foreign ministries from different countries…
Voltaire Network | 22 November 2024 • According to the New York Times of November 17, U.S. President Joe Biden has finally authorized the Pentagon to provide satellite data to Ukraine so that it can use U.S. ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) missiles against North Korean forces in Kursk (Russia). The United Kingdom immediately aligned…
During his first term, President Trump decorated the Oval Office with a portrait of President Jackson. Almost all commentators do not understand what the re-elected President of the United States, Donald Trump, is doing because they wrongly interpret his actions through the prism of Republican or woke ideologies. However, Trump, who has successively frequented the…
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump wasted no time nominating potential cabinet members and other members of his second administration. Trump’s selections departed from how he chose cabinet members for his 2017-21 presidency. It is clear he and his advisers are specifically choosing hard-right personal “loyalists” and fascist-minded ideologues, while ignoring many GOP functionaries who joined his…
