World roundup: January 31 2025
Stories from Lebanon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Belgium, and elsewhere
TODAY IN HISTORY
January 31, 314: Sylvester I takes up the position of Bishop of Rome, aka Pope. He was officially the 33rd person to take that office, skipping over a handful of “antipopes” along the way. There are major gaps in the historical record around Sylvester’s actual pontificate, but later Catholic teaching imbued it with significant meaning in terms of the nature of the papal office. With Emperor Constantine I shifting the center of Roman power to the east, Sylvester is supposed to have been the recipient of the “Donation of Constantine,” an ~8th century forgery in which the emperor (grateful after Sylvester supposedly cured him of leprosy) is made to declare that the papacy held supreme authority over both the Church and all worldly rulers, as well as direct authority over the western portions of the empire. Needless to say this never really happened, but subsequent popes loved to pretend that it did and that makes Sylvester’s reign historically significant.
January 31, 1865: The US Congress passes the 13th amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery. President Abraham Lincoln signed it the following day, and the amendment was then submitted to the states for ratification, reaching the required three-fourths threshold in December. Several states took longer to ratify the amendment, including Mississippi, whose leaders finally decided that slavery ought to be illegal in, ah, 1995. I guess they just really needed some time to think about it.
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
The US military’s Central Command claimed late Thursday that it had killed a “senior operative” in the al-Qaeda linked Hurras al-Din organization in an airstrike in northwestern Syria. Hurras al-Din had announced its own dissolution the previous day but clearly the US military hasn’t gotten the memo.
Elsewhere, the new Syrian government has apparently wasted no time implementing “shock doctrine” style economic policy, including plans for mass public sector firings and privatization. Some of this approach is intended to excise the corruption of the previous government, including the removing of some 400,000 “ghost employees” from public sector payrolls. But the rest seems ideological and, as such, has raised questions about national priorities and the authority under which an admittedly interim government can make sweeping decisions about the structure of the Syrian economy. It seems peculiar, for example, to focus on creating a favorable environment for foreign investment at a time when Western sanctions limit investors and must be addressed politically. Syrian officials say they intend to avoid the errors of the “shock doctrine” as experienced in post-Cold War Europe, but we’ll see.
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