World roundup: August 21 2024

Stories from Lebanon, the Philippines, Venezuela, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

August 21, 1415: Portuguese forces under King John I and his son Henrique, the future “Prince Henry the Navigator,” capture the city of Ceuta from the Moroccan Marinid dynasty. Ceuta was the first possession in what would become the Portuguese Empire and served as a staging ground for the Portuguese to capture several other cities around the northwest African coast. It’s a Spanish city today—Madrid kept it after the 16th-17th century Iberian Union broke apart.

August 21, 1791: Slaves in Saint-Domingue attend a Vodou ceremony in the evening and afterward begin a mass uprising. This insurrection marked the start of the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave revolt in the Americas. Haiti won its independence from France, effective on January 1, 1804. The impact of the revolution on slavery in the Americas continues to be a matter of scholarly debate, but at the time the uprising so terrified US slaveholders that the Jefferson administration imposed an embargo on Haiti that remained in place until 1862.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Two days ago, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced to the world that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed to a US-drafted “bridging proposal” that, the Biden administration claimed, would satisfy the demands of all parties involved in negotiating a Gaza ceasefire. On Wednesday his boss, Joe Biden, had to call Netanyahu to beg him to “be more flexible” about his ceasefire demands, after the “bridging proposal” turned out to satisfy nobody other than Netanyahu. Leaving Hamas aside, the plan now on the table is reportedly unacceptable to the Egyptian government, which objects to Netanyahu’s demand for an indefinite Israeli military presence along the Egypt-Gaza border. The Biden administration can’t expect Egyptian officials to pressure Hamas to accept a deal that those officials themselves have rejected.