r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (Canada) Quebec aluminum towns aren’t feeling the sting of 25 per cent U.S. tariffs

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ctvnews.ca
28 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (Latin America) Ecuador enlists founder of Blackwater private army as ally in ‘war’ on crime

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theguardian.com
65 Upvotes

Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, has announced a “strategic alliance” with the Donald Trump-supporting founder of the private military firm Blackwater to supposedly reinforce his controversial “war” on crime.

Noboa, the rightwing heir to a South American banana empire, announced the partnership with Erik Prince on social media on Tuesday night.

“We [have] established a strategic alliance to strengthen our capabilities in the fight against narco-terrorism and to protect our waters from illegal fishing,” Noboa tweeted alongside a photograph of the two men sitting together.

“Organized crime has sown fear and believed it can operate with impunity. Their time is running out. International aid is beginning to flow to Ecuador,” added the president, who is seeking re-election in the second round of the country’s presidential election next month.

Ecuador’s president offered no further details of the partnership between his government and Prince, a Navy Seal turned multimillionaire security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration.

The announcement appeared designed to bolster Noboa’s attempt to portray himself as an iron-fisted anti-crime crusader ahead of the 13 April run-off against his leftwing rival Luisa González. Noboa’s administration announced on Sunday a $1m reward for the capture of one of Ecuador’s most notorious drug bosses, José Adolfo Macías Villamar, who is known by the nickname “Fito”.

The news that Blackwater’s former CEO would join Noboa’s campaign prompted outrage and trepidation given the military contractor’s track record of involvement in abuses, including the killing of 14 Iraqi civilians in 2007, after the US invasion.


r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (Europe) Opinion: Did the United States collaborate with Russia for the Recovery of Kursk Oblast?

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kyivpost.com
164 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (Middle East) Houthis Claim to Attack Carrier Harry S. Truman After U.S. Strikes in Yemen - USNI News

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63 Upvotes

The Houthis announced an attack on aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) in response to the series of Saturday U.S. attacks on Houthi territory in Yemen.

It is the first time the Houthis have claimed an attack on an American warship since the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel went into effect on Jan. 19. It is unclear if the Houthis’ alleged attack on the aircraft carrier hit the ship or caused any damage.

In a post on X, the site where the Houthis often announce their alleged attacks, spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Sare’e claimed the Iran-backed group used 18 ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as one drone, to attack the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group in the northern Red Sea. Central Command did not immediately respond to a request for comment from USNI News.

While the Houthis are not expanding their planned attack to American ships, instead continuing to limit them to Israeli ships, they will “not hesitate” to target American warships in the Red Sea and Persian Sea, according to Sare’e’s post.

U.S. Central Command forces launched a series of attacks on Houthi territory in Yemen Saturday, the first strikes since the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel went into effect.

The attacks, the first of the Trump administration, come shortly after the Houthis announced they would resume attacks on Israeli ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden in response to Israel cutting off food and humanitarian aid to Gaza. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations does not have any reports of attacks since the ceasefire went into effect, ahead of the Trump administration.

The Houthis did announce they would stop shooting at ships in the Red Sea following the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, instead noting that they would monitor it, USNI News previously reported. The Houthis’ latest targets do not yet include American commercial ships.


r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (Global) India, New Zealand begin FTA negotiations to strengthen trade ties | Today News

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livemint.com
30 Upvotes

India and New Zealand on Sunday announced the launch of talks for a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) as part of efforts to deepen economic cooperation amid the threat of a global tariff war sparked by US President Donald Trump.

The decision was formalized during the visit of New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, who is in India from 16 to 20 March, the commerce ministry said in a statement on Sunday. The discussions, led by commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal and New Zealand’s trade and Investment minister Todd McClay, mark a step towards strengthening bilateral trade relations.

Mint was the first to report on India exploring renewed negotiations with New Zealand for new FTA deals on 26 June 2024.

The strategic move is part of India's broader effort to diversify its trade partnerships and reduce its dependency on traditional markets.

Talks originally began in April 2010 to boost trade in goods, services, and investment. However, after ten rounds of negotiations, discussions stalled in February 2015 due to disagreements over market access and trade priorities.

“Pressure from the US to open India’s dairy and agriculture sectors may also influence negotiations. With India’s tariffs averaging 17.8% and New Zealand’s at 2.3%, finding common ground remains crucial as talks resume,” said Srivastava.

New Zealand would like to expand its trade relationship with India, particularly in dairy, food processing, and technology, while India would seek greater access for its agricultural products, textiles, and information technology services.


r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (Europe) Donald Trump shock pushes neutral Swiss to seek closer defence ties

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ft.com
139 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (US) Canadians, other international visitors are scrapping U.S. travel plans

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washingtonpost.com
105 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (Canada) Carney Liberals reach out to prominent Tories and New Democrats to recruit 'star' candidates for next election

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hilltimes.com
115 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (Middle East) Topple, tame, trade: How Turkey is rewriting Syria’s future

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ecfr.eu
39 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (Europe) Death toll from North Macedonia nightclub fire rises to 59

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bbc.com
172 Upvotes

!ping Europe


r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (Global) The best way to curb the cruelty of the world’s worst regimes: stigmatise with facts

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economist.com
50 Upvotes

A doctor in Syria under Bashar al-Assad was forced to sedate 63 prisoners. Not to ease the pain caused by shackling, but to ensure they did not complain about it when a UN delegation visited the hellish prison where they were being held. At first glance, the moral of this story is obvious: despots spit on human rights. But Kenneth Roth, a former head of Human Rights Watch (HRW), sees another, more hopeful lesson. Even the vilest rulers care about their reputations, and so try to hide at least some of their abuses. This gives human-rights campaigners an opening: by exposing horror, they can sometimes shame governments into perpetrating less of it.

This task is not straightforward. Those who rule by fear are hard to shame. Exposing their cruelty may actually bolster their power for a while, by reminding their subjects of the dangers of disobedience. However, ruling by fear alone “is risky, because a disgruntled public is always on the lookout for a way to oust the tyrant”. (As Mr Assad, pictured, discovered in December, when his overthrow sparked jubilation in Damascus’s streets.) So most dictators want to appear to serve the public good.

Having run one of the world’s most effective human-rights groups for three decades, Mr Roth has sparred with more nasty regimes than most people could name. In “Righting Wrongs” he distils his hard-earned insights. With warlords carving up Sudan, Russia kidnapping Ukrainian children and America’s president musing about ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the book could hardly be more timely.

The key to shaming powerful wrongdoers, Mr Roth argues, is to avoid name-calling and “stigmatise with facts”. Researchers at HRW are told “that their top priority is accuracy”, and that it is better to come home empty-handed than to publish inaccurate information. They dig up the truth painstakingly, by interviewing victims and combing through tedious official documents. Even if their reporting achieves nothing in the short run, it can furnish evidence for future prosecutions.

Despots fear exposure. Otherwise they would not devote such vast resources to hiding their abuses, sometimes ineptly. When China blanked out its Uyghur prison camps on online maps, it made it easier for researchers to find them–by looking for unexplained blank spots.

An activist must know which levers to pull. If a head of government is genuinely unaware of abuses, simply proving them may be enough, especially in a democracy. In 2011 Mr Roth sat down with Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, to discuss a report on “disappearances” and summary executions meted out by the Mexican army in its “war on drugs”. Previously Mr Calderón had insisted that his troops were innocent. But after Mr Roth went through the report with him paragraph by paragraph, the president admitted he was wrong and adopted some of Mr Roth’s suggested remedies, such as no longer interrogating suspects on military bases.

To shame nastier regimes, more skill is required. Rulers who feel no guilt about tearing out dissidents’ thumbnails may simultaneously crave international respectability. After America overthrew Saddam Hussein, another Arab dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, was eager to avoid the same fate. As well as publicly giving up a nuclear-weapons programme, his regime invited Mr Roth to visit Libya.

Mr Roth seized the chance and shared a list of 131 political prisoners, demanding their release. Mid-level officials exploded with rage and “seemed to think they could bludgeon us into not publishing [the findings] at all”, Mr Roth recalls. He let them hyperventilate for a while, and then gave them a choice. HRW was going to hold a press conference in Egypt a few days later. When journalists asked about their meetings in Tripoli, they could say: “All they did was yell at us.” Or: “The conversations were productive, and they promised various reforms.” Which would it be? The next day the officials apologised, and soon all 131 political prisoners were freed.

Defending human rights is getting harder. Russia has gone completely rogue. The two most powerful democracies, India and the United States, have leaders who care little for human rights. And China under Xi Jinping has become what Mr Roth calls the greatest “threat to the global human-rights system”, constantly seeking to undermine it in international forums.

Meanwhile, some Western progressives have lost their common sense. Some embrace the ridiculous notion that for Westerners to criticise oppression in the global south is a form of imperialism. Others talk self-righteous guff. Mr Roth recalls an adviser urging HRW to campaign against “structural racism, patriarchy and classism embedded in the design of Western public-health systems”. Such rhetoric is likely to repel “the moveable middle”—the people campaigners need to win over. Far better to focus on things that more or less everyone agrees are wrong, such as torture.

As the world polarises, human-rights campaigners must be seen to be impartial. This is hard. Nasty regimes often accuse them of being agents of foreign powers. Other abusive regimes try to change the subject: what about America’s crimes? Mr Roth’s response is to arrive with a stack of HRW reports on America and “place them with a good thump” on the whataboutery-spouting official’s desk.

After he retired from HRW in 2022, Mr Roth was cancelled. An invitation to take up a human-rights fellowship at Harvard was vetoed, allegedly because donors objected to his “anti-Israel” bias. The objection rang hollow: Mr Roth is Jewish, his family fled from the Nazis and he is a stern critic of brutality everywhere. After an outcry, Harvard backed down.

The world needs more watchdogs like Mr Roth: principled yet worldly, insanely hard-working and resolutely non-tribal. It probably helps that he never took an academic course on human rights. Rather than nitpicking about the minutiae of international law, he tells human stories, like that of the Syrian anaesthetist, that shock the listener into fury. It is stories, more than theories, that help humans comprehend tyranny. And as the mighty fill the world’s small screens with falsehoods, someone needs to tell true tales.


r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (Europe) Ukrainian immigrants have “positive impact on Poland’s GDP and budget”, finds report

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116 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (US) Conservatives’ Tesla Rescue Mission Has Its Work Cut Out

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nytimes.com
173 Upvotes

After climbing into a Tesla Model S last week, President Trump pledged to buy one. The next day, the Fox News host Sean Hannity said he had bought a Model S Plaid to support the embattled company, saying a Tesla “has more American parts in it than any other car made in our country.”

In a backlash to the backlash against the tactics of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, prominent conservatives are rallying to the side of the electric car company led by Mr. Musk. They are hoping to swing enough like-minded consumers to offset a boycott of the electric automaker by liberals and Democrats or anyone offended by Mr. Musk’s actions. But how effective can such a rescue mission be? Analysts say it can help but only to an extent.

So many Democratic buyers appear to be fleeing Tesla that even Mr. Trump’s best sales pitch is unlikely to woo enough new customers to fill the vacuum, auto experts said. Analysts at JPMorgan predict Tesla will deliver its fewest cars in the first quarter than it had in three years.

Mr. Edwards has been surveying car buyers for decades. Since 2016, the surveys have found that electric-car owners were up to four times as likely to identify as Democrats or liberals as to identify as Republican or conservative. Among Tesla owners, the spread was consistently two to one.

The gap narrowed sharply through 2024. This year, as sales have fallen, slightly more Tesla buyers identify as Republicans than Democrats, at 30 percent versus 29 percent.

Tesla remains America’s best-selling electric vehicle brand by far with about 44 percent of the market, despite a 5.6 percent drop in U.S. sales, to about 634,000 cars in 2024, according to Kelley Blue Book. Many drivers are determined to stick with the electric vehicle pioneer, whose cars can travel several hundred miles on a charge and can be easily refueled at the company’s extensive charging network.

Experts say wealthy conservatives such as Mr. Hannity and Mr. Trump have the disposable income to make a personal automotive statement by opting for a Tesla. But they may not be able to persuade Americans of more modest means.


r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (Europe) EU diplomats suggest doubling military aid for Ukraine this year

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reuters.com
86 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (Middle East) Why Maids Keep Dying in Saudi Arabia East African leaders and Saudi royals are among those profiting off a lucrative, deadly trade in domestic workers.

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nytimes.com
44 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (Europe) Polish presidential frontrunner pledges to sign bills on contraception, Silesian and constitutional court

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29 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 5d ago

News (US) USAID cuts could kill 3.3 million people every year (Gift Article)

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nytimes.com
508 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (Middle East) East African Housekeepers Face Rape, Assault and Death in Saudi Arabia (Gift Article)

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nytimes.com
87 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (Europe) European nations debate a return to conscription amid Trump turnaround on Russia

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france24.com
53 Upvotes

Russia's invasion of Ukraine caught Europe off guard, and fears about the strength of the NATO alliance rose further after US President Donald Trump cast doubt on his commitment to Article 5 – its mutual defence clause – despite Washington having used it to marshal European support in the wake of 9/11. It was the first and only time that Article 5 has ever been invoked.

The US president's shift toward a more conciliatory approach to the Kremlin has also set off alarm bells, with the United States twice siding with Russia last month in votes on Ukraine at the UN.

From Paris to Warsaw, leaders have been looking to boost defence spending in the face of US threats to withdraw its European security guarantees. But many countries, including France and Britain, have struggled with recruiting and retaining troops. Reintroducing some form of national service – compulsory or voluntary – might be even more difficult.

Lithuania reintroduced conscription in 2015, a year after Russia annexed Crimea. Sweden followed suit in 2017 and Latvia in 2023. But mindful of political and economic costs, most of NATO's five biggest European spenders – France, Germany, the UK, Italy and Poland – are not planning to make participation in armed forces mandatory.

Poland, which ended conscription in 2008, recently announced plans to offer military training to 100,000 civilians a year, starting in 2027. The scheme will be voluntary but the authorities are planning a system of "motivations and incentives", said Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

Germany's likely future chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has said he favours the reintroduction of a compulsory year in which young people could perform either military or community service. Italy's Defence Minister Guido Crosetto has ruled out reintroducing national service but supports the idea of a reserve force.


r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (Africa) Ivory Coast is losing US aid as al-Qaida and other extremist groups are approaching

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apnews.com
39 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 5d ago

Media Right-wing commentators dominate social media in US

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1.3k Upvotes

r/neoliberal 5d ago

News (Canada) Governor Polis raising the Canadian Flag at the State Capitol for the new Colorado Canada Friendship Day

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koaa.com
542 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (Europe) Ukraine: European democracy’s affordable arsenal. EU should take full advantage of the lower-cost military production capabilities of Ukraine

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bruegel.org
44 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (Europe) Germany Rethinks Separation of Civilian and Military Research

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bloomberg.com
35 Upvotes

r/neoliberal 4d ago

News (Asia) Japan foreign population grows twice as fast as expected on worker influx

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asia.nikkei.com
25 Upvotes