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TODAY IN HISTORY
April 27, 1960: The Togolese Republic declares its independence from France. Commemorated annually as Independence Day in Togo.
April 27, 1961: The Republic of Sierra Leone gains its independence from the United Kingdom as the result of negotiations that had taken place the previous year. Commemorated annually as Independence Day in Sierra Leone.
April 27, 1978: The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, with the support of the Soviet Union, undertakes a coup against Afghan President Mohammed Daoud Khan that is known as the “Saur Revolution.” PDPA leader Nur Muhammad Taraki assumed the presidency after Khan’s execution on April 28, and mismanaged things so badly that his own party ousted and executed him in September 1979. That incident led directly to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and, with few and very brief exceptions, Afghanistan has been in a state of war ever since.
INTERNATIONAL
In today’s global news:
Worldometer is tracking COVID-19 cases and fatalities.
The New York Times is tracking global vaccine distribution.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
Human Rights Watch on Thursday accused Turkish border guards have been mistreating Syrian asylum seekers, torturing and even shooting at them to the tune of “hundreds of deaths and injuries recorded in recent years.” Among its data, HRW cited a Syrian Observatory for Human Rights tally of at least 11 deaths and 20 injuries caused by Turkish guards so far this year.
The Tunisian government appointed a new ambassador to Syria on Thursday, furthering the process of reintegrating Bashar al-Assad’s government back into the Arab world. Tunisia and Syria agreed earlier this month to normalize the relations they severed amid the Syrian civil war.
TURKEY
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made a virtual appearance at a ceremony to open Turkey’s first nuclear power plant on Thursday, partly to dispel health rumors that have cropped up since he withdrew from several campaign events earlier this week. Those cancellations saw Turkey’s conspiracy-driven political scene to go into overdrive, culminating in speculation (rejected by Turkish authorities) that Erdoğan had suffered a heart attack. Though he didn’t exactly look hale and hearty in his video appearance he did at least make the appearance, which at the very least (barring any sort of special effects trickery) means he’s still alive.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Israeli security forces killed a Palestinian man in the West Bank on Thursday after he allegedly attempted to ram his car into a crowd of people and then attacked a police officer with a knife. The man seems to have been a Palestinian security officer of some sort, but details beyond that are sparse.
IRAN
The Iranian Navy apparently seized an oil tanker, the Advantage Sweet, in the Gulf of Oman on Thursday. As you might expect, this drew a sharp response from the US Navy, whose Fifth Fleet headquarters demanded that the Iranians “immediately release” the vessel. The Iranians say they seized the ship after it collided with an Iranian vessel, in an incident that caused multiple injuries and has left two people missing. Following the collision, an Iranian court issued a seizure order.
Elsewhere, the Biden administration on Thursday blacklisted the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Intelligence Organization, along with its leader and three other officials, over the detention of US nationals in Iran. The Iranian government is currently imprisoning three US-Iranian dual nationals and may hold a fourth US national, former FBI agent Robert Levinson, though it’s believed he died a few years ago. The sanctions were imposed under the 2020 “Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act.” The entire IRGC is already under US sanction for a variety of grievances so I’m not sure what more Thursday’s designation could do in a practical sense.
ASIA
INDIA
Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh held what sounds like a somewhat testy meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Li Shangfu, on Thursday to discuss the two countries’ longstanding border dispute. According to the Indian government, Singh told Li that Chinese violations of past border agreements had “eroded the entire basis of bilateral relations.” Chinese and Indian forces are still on alert in the Ladakh region after a significant border clash back in 2020, as the two sides have failed to come to an agreement to mutually stand down.

CHINA
US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan delivered a speech on Thursday that seems to have been intended to ease US allies’ concerns about the Biden administration’s trade policies toward China:
Since taking office more than two years ago, the Biden administration has unleashed a spate of moves targeting China’s technology sector, including by ramping up semiconductor export controls and effectively blacklisting dozens of Chinese companies by adding them to the U.S. Commerce Department’s Entity List, which requires these firms to secure a special license to purchase U.S. technologies. Concerned about supply chain vulnerabilities, Washington has also intensified efforts to carve out new critical mineral supplies that fall outside Beijing’s orbit.
In his speech at the Washington-based Brookings Institution on Thursday, Sullivan stressed that these moves were motivated by “straightforward” national security concerns, designed to hit only the most high-level, advanced forms of technology exports. The Biden administration is seeking to “manage competition responsibly” and cooperate when possible in areas such as food security and the climate, he added.
“Our export controls will remain narrowly focused on technology that could tilt the military balance,” Sullivan said. “We are simply ensuring that U.S. and allied technology is not used against us. We are not cutting off trade.”
European governments in particular have seemed less than thrilled about the idea of being forced by the US into adversarial economic relationships with China, but these concerns extend to other US allies like South Korea. The administration’s actions to this point have spoken a lot louder than its words, however, and those actions certainly haven’t seemed “narrowly focused” thus far.
OCEANIA
PAPUA NEW GUINEA
Papua New Guinean Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko revealed on Thursday that Joe Biden will become the first US president (probably, official records only go back but so far) to visit that country next month when he stops by briefly during an Asia-Pacific tour. Papua New Guinea is one of the new focal points of US-Chinese competition and it’s probable that Biden’s visit will include the formalization of a US-PNG defense cooperation agreement.
AFRICA
SUDAN
The Sudanese military and the “Rapid Support Forces” agreed on Thursday to extend their ceasefire for at least another 72 hours, and then to celebrate they pounded one another with air and artillery strikes across Khartoum. As previously it seems the US and Saudi Arabia spearheaded an international effort to secure the extension. I haven’t seen any further indication about peace talks—the Intergovernmental Authority on Development regional bloc is trying to broker negotiations in South Sudan but most international effort seems to be on simply maintaining the ceasefire, which admittedly has not halted the fighting but does seem to be lowering the intensity enough to allow civilians to get out of harm’s way.
Thursday saw troubling reports of new violence in Darfur, specifically around the city of Geneina in West Darfur state. This new fighting is not between the military and RSF but primarily between the Arab and Masalit communities, who are frequently at odds with one another but have more impunity than usual now that the Sudanese state’s security forces are battling one another. Arab tribes have reportedly taken advantage of the security vacuum to attack non-Arab populations in the region.
BURKINA FASO
Unspecified attackers struck a military unit in Burkina Faso’s Est region on Thursday, killing at least 33 soldiers and wounding another 12. Burkinabè authorities say that 40 attackers, or “terrorists” as they put it, were also killed.
NIGERIA
Unspecified gunmen killed at least 14 people on Thursday in an attack in the Apa district of Nigeria’s Benue State. There doesn’t seem to be any indication as to who the attackers were, but Benue frequently sees violence between farmers and herders, and as a result these sorts of incidents are often blamed on the predominantly Fulani herding community.
ETHIOPIA
A senior official in Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party was killed in an apparently targeted attack in the Amhara region on Thursday. Here too the identity of the attackers is unclear, but Abiy referred to them as “violent extremists” and Amhara officials mentioned “irregular forces.” Given the recent anti-government unrest in Amhara it’s difficult not to at least speculate that this attack may be connected to that movement.
Elsewhere, and this probably comes as no great surprise, a new report from the group World Weather Attribution finds that the ongoing brutal drought in the Horn of Africa, which has impacted some 20 million people across Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, and Uganda, was made possible by climate change. Rising temperatures have increased water evaporation and changing weather patterns have contributed to several consecutive failed rainy seasons.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
In addition to the IRGC (see above), the Biden administration on Thursday imposed new sanctions on Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) under the “Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act.” Also like the IRGC, the FSB was already under US sanctions so it’s unclear whether Thursday’s action will have any practical effect. Russia is holding at least two US nationals, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. Coincidentally, Russian officials said on Thursday that they had denied the US embassy a requested consular visit with Gershkovich. To justify the denial, they cited the US State Department’s refusal to issue visas to Russian reporters who were supposed to accompany Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to the United Nations earlier this week.
UKRAINE
The Russian military reportedly stepped up its efforts to cut off the remaining supply lines into Bakhmut on Thursday, apparently without success. The Russians control most of the city but its Ukrainian defenders are still not making any move to withdraw. Reuters is reporting Russian airstrikes on cities across Ukraine early Friday morning, but this story was just developing as I was wrapping up tonight’s roundup so I don’t have any details beyond that.
AMERICAS
ARGENTINA
The Argentine government is reportedly planning to start paying for Chinese imports in yuan, rather than dollars. The goal is to preserve the country’s shrinking supply of the US currency, but it dovetails nicely with Beijing’s interest in getting away from the dollar as a means of conducting global commerce. The Brazilian government has also agreed to start using the yuan (and its own real) for transactions with China, so this may be the start of a Latin American trend.
MEXICO
The US Treasury Department blacklisted several members and associates of Mexico’s Jalisco New Generation cartel on Thursday, not over the cartel’s fentanyl trade but over their role in a time share scam that targeted elderly US citizens. Apparently they’ve been able to bilk around $39.6 million by charging would-be timeshare sellers phony fees and taxes.
UNITED STATES
Finally, TomDispatch’s Stan Cox highlights the xenophonic far-right’s sudden “interest” in environmental issues:
It’s not often that conservative lobbyists beat the drum for increased environmental oversight and regulation. But that’s what happened this month when the far-right Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), through its legal arm, filed a brief in federal court demanding that the Department of Homeland Security conduct an extensive environmental impact study examining, of all things, immigration policy.
In a press release, the group laid out its reasoning: “Clearly, DHS desperately wants to avoid the impossible task of explaining, in detail, why adding millions of illegal aliens to our population does not harm the environment, or why the harm it does cause is somehow ‘worth it.’”
Ostensibly green rationales for ever harsher immigration policies are hardly a new phenomenon. U.S. and European anti-immigrant movements have long used the real need for environmental protection as an excuse for demanding ever harsher treatment of immigrants. Now, with drought, flooding, storms, and other manifestations of climate disruption swelling the ranks of people seeking refuge outside their home countries, far-rightists are dialing up their evocations of nature to push ever greater cruelty toward immigrants.
The pervasive theme in such circles is that, in an already overpopulated America, more millions of dark-skinned immigrants, having supposedly wreaked ecological destruction in their own countries in the Global South, are now crossing our borders in ever larger numbers. They will, so the thinking goes, despoil this country’s environment, too — and the only way to stop them is by using ever more violent means. The extremists peddling such propaganda are coming to be known these days as “ecofascists.” Above all else, they insist, the United States must maintain white control over “our” country — you know, the lands that our ancestors stole from Native peoples who actually knew how to live in harmony with nature.
In the process, such white supremacists are, without the slightest sense of irony, increasingly adopting the language of environmentalism to push both grotesque anti-immigrant bigotry and a broader, genuinely unnerving far-right agenda.