World roundup: May 15 2023

Stories from Turkey, Thailand, Sudan, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

May 15, 1811: Paraguay’s May 14 Revolution, a military coup against Governor Bernardo de Velasco, succeeds in forcing him to create a three man governing junta including himself and two military appointees. The junta was the first in a series of governments that increasingly substituted local rule for colonial control from Spain. Although it was a very long road from here to Paraguay’s formal declaration of independence in 1842, May 14 and 15 are commemorated as Independence Day (well, “days”) in Paraguay today.

May 15, 1940: Brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald open a small restaurant called “McDonald’s Bar-B-Que” in San Bernardino, California, serving mostly, as the name says, barbecue. A few years later they streamlined the operation to focus on their most popular item, hamburgers. Since as far as I know there are no McDonald’s Bar-B-Que restaurants in existence anymore, I can only assume this disruptive change was the death-knell for their company, and it just goes to show you that innovation isn’t always a panacea. That’s today’s business tip.

May 15, 1948: The Arab-Israeli War begins. On a related note this is also “Nakba Day” (Dhikra al-Nakba or “Remembrance of the Catastrophe”), which marks the displacement/expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians from the territory of the state of Israel in the period leading up to and during the war.

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

TURKEY

At least some of the dust has cleared and the picture is coming into focus heading into Turkey’s May 28 presidential runoff. Specifically, that picture suggests that it would take a near-miracle for challenger Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu to defeat incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The most recent first round vote count has Erdoğan at 49.4 percent of the vote and Kılıçdaroğlu at 44.96, giving the former a much bigger cushion in the head-to-head match-up. There may still be votes to count by the time anyone reads this but most likely not enough to substantially alter that margin. Nationalist third-party candidate Sinan Oğan took 5.2 percent, and if his voters wind up being the decisive swing bloc in the runoff, that favors Erdoğan because a) Oğan’s voters have more in common with Erdoğan and b) Erdoğan only needs a small portion of them while Kılıçdaroğlu needs virtually all of them. You could add a point c), which is that Erdoğan also benefits from every Oğan voter who decides not to vote in the runoff at all, whereas Kılıçdaroğlu needs them all to turn out for him.