World roundup: January 24 2025

Stories from Iraq, Sudan, Denmark, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

January 24, 41: The Roman Praetorian Guard assassinates the sitting emperor, Caligula, for…well, a bunch of reasons, including the regular ridicule he heaped upon the Guard’s commander, his (alleged) plans to move the imperial capital to Alexandria, and his, shall we say, grandiose sense of self. With no real plan in place for succession, another Guard faction smuggled Caligula’s uncle, Claudius, out of the city and he was subsequently proclaimed emperor. Claudius turned out to be a competent emperor, and modern historians tend to put him in the “good” (or sometimes even “very good”) tier when ranking Roman rulers. His reputation definitely benefits by comparison with both his predecessor and his successor (Nero).

17th century Italian painter Lazzaro Baldi’s The Assassination of the Emperor Caligula (Wikimedia Commons)

January 24, 1984: Apple begins selling a new computer it calls the “Macintosh.” After some early struggles related to its relatively low performance combined with a relatively high price, and then a mid-life crisis related to essentially the same things, I would have to say the product turned out to be fairly successful. The Macintosh, or “Mac,” is credited with driving the move toward the graphical user interface and it still accounts for a significant, though probably decreasing, portion of Apple’s revenue.

MIDDLE EAST

SYRIA

European Union foreign ministers are scheduled to meet on Monday and, probably, agree to some sort of plan to ease the bloc’s sanctions on Syria. This will no doubt come as welcome news to the Syrian government, which has inherited a collapsed economy that is still under punitive Western restrictions with any significant influx of Gulf investment likely months away at best. That said, whatever emerges on Monday is likely to be tentative and easily reversed, reflecting concerns over the jihadist roots of Syria’s new leadership. According to an “EU diplomat” who spoke to AFP, the bloc does have “a consensus on suspending sanctions in the energy and transport sectors” but probably not much beyond that, and I think the use of “suspending” rather than “lifting” is important to note.