Headlines

In their presidential primary, France’s Socialists tack to the left and Benoît Hamon beats Manuel Valls with promises of a universal basic income 

Manuel Valls was the favourite to win the first round of the Socialist presidential primary. But last night the centrist former prime minister finished second

Paris, Jan.22.─ As France prepares for its presidential election this spring, the unexpected is becoming routine. Few predicted that the socially conservative François Fillon would emerge as the Republican party’s candidate, until he came from behind to win the primary in November. In December François Hollande decided not to seek re-election—the first incumbent president not to do so since the birth of the fifth republic.

Now comes January’s surprise. Polls suggested that Manuel Valls, a centrist who served as prime minister until last month, was the front-runner in the first round of the Socialist presidential primary on January 22nd. Instead he finished second; first place went to Benoît Hamon, a figure from the party’s left wing.

The Kurdish "peshmerga" carried for years the heaviest burden of the fight against the IS with practically no military support. However, they advanced boldly and steadily from the North and Northeast on Mosul, while the Iraqi army is taking months to recapture Mosul with a very scant allied military support. The current situation of prolonged war results from the hasty and announced withdrawal of coalition troops prematurely initiated in 2011 when total victory against islamist forces was already in sight.  

Jan. 12.─ Iraqui and Western coalition commanders had promised a rapid victory in Mosul when they launched an offensive to retake the city from Islamic State (IS) in October. But the battle for Iraq’s second city has lasted three months, and Iraq’s prime minister says it will continue for at least as long again.

IS fighters initially put up stronger resistance than expected. After stalling in December, Iraq’s army has made rapid gains in the eastern half of the city over the past ten days. IS leaders have retreated to the west, blowing up the remaining bridges over the Tigris river as they left. But as the Iraqi army consolidates its hold on Mosul’s east, the siege of the west will intensify. A fresh assault across the river is not planned until early March. What is the scene on the ground—and how are the 1.1m civilians left in the divided city coping?

Worrying experiments with a new form of social control   

When communism crumbled in the Soviet Union, 25 years ago this week, the Chinese Communist Party seemed to many to be heading irreversibly downwards. Yes, the tanks had left Tiananmen Square after crushing a revolt in 1989, but the war appeared lost. Even China’s breakneck growth, which took off a year after the Soviet collapse, looked likely only to tear the party further from its ideological bedrock. In 1998 President Bill Clinton intimated that he foresaw an inevitable democratic trajectory. He told his Chinese counterpart, Jiang Zemin, that China was “on the wrong side of history”.

Yet, while the West has suffered from the financial crisis and the fallout after a failed attempt to implant democracy in the Middle East, China’s Communist Party has clung on to its monopoly of power. Its leaders behave as if China will never have to undergo the democratic transformation that every rich country has passed through on the way to prosperity. Instead they seem to believe that the party can keep control—and some officials are betting that the way to do so lies in a new form of digital dictatorship.

A party apart

"We can say, we have said, repeatedly over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party," Assange declared in an interview.

Assange says he is "1,000% confident" that Russia was NOT the source for hacked Democratic emails which were published by WikiLeaks

London, Jan.3.─ WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has said Barack Obama is 'trying to delegitimize the Trump administration' by claiming the Russian government hacked Democrats' emails during the bitter presidential election.

Assange, whose interview with Sean Hannity will air on Fox News tonight [Jan.3], also reiterated his claims that Russia was not the source of the hacks.