IVP606 - July 2025

“ To be clear, even if it is a step forward, the position of the EU foreign ministers is not a guarantee.”

Last week, the nation’s attention focused on two dead Americans, two men who couldn’t be more different, two men who seem to embody the nation’s divided politics, culture, and morality. One was John Lewis, the African American civil rights leader and legislator who died five years ago. The other was Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy socialite and convicted pedophile who provided elite businessmen and politicians access to underage girls.

Sitting in number 10 Downing Street after the government’s debacle and U turn over the welfare, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney must have thought: these people are so ungrateful.
“Here they are taking a wrecking ball to Reeves and Kendall’s project to save £5 billion with welfare cuts. But I made these MPs. I ensured nearly every left wing candidate had been eliminated early from any selection process. My team assiduously sifted through thousands of social (…)

A Riga-based social-centre project called “Maiznica” is facing repression from state security services and the expulsion of one of their members from the country. In this press release from the Collective they aim to spread the news to a wider audience.

Whatever is the origin of the recent bloody clashes in the Suwayda Governorate—whether they were merely the result of the chaos prevailing in post-Assad Syria, or a manoeuvre by Israel in order to escalate its hypocritical intervention in the region, or a manoeuvre by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) to extend its control over southern Syria—what is unmistakable is that the first factor, the prevailing chaos, provided the conditions for the explosion.

11 July marked the 30th anniversary of the genocide in July 1995 of over 8,000 largely Bosniak men and male children by Bosnian Serb forces under the command of Ratko Mladic. They were buried in mass graves. Many thousand more fled into the forest and embarked on a harrowing journey lasting up to 7 days before reaching the eastern Bosnia village of Nezuk. What led up to the massacre and how it has been treated compared to two other wars: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians..

Jeannette Jara swept the country, displacing the former Concertación and Frente Amplio (Broad Front or FA) parties. If she were to win the November 16, 2025 presidential elections, it would be a milestone that would run counter to the current political climate in Latin America.

Since 1 June 2025, nearly 450,000 Afghans have left Iranian territory. This estimate, provided by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), is staggering. For the whole of 2025, the number rises to 906,326 according to the UN agency.

A few months ago, President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again or MAGA movement seemed to be a solid monolith from Republican Party legislators at the top to rank-and-file activists at its base. Today MAGA is riven with fissures caused by personal rivalries, and the increasingly visible incompetence of cabinet members, and while MAGA is not yet splitting or crumbling, it is clearly cracking.

A wave of bloody repression hit the demonstrations on 26, 27 and 28 June. It was sparked by the arrest of a young rapper who was critical of the regime. Faced with a dynastic government locked in by the army, Togo’s young people are expressing a desire for change that the regime is trying to extinguish with terror.