Former President Donald Trump is bronzed, rested and politically bloodthirsty. Having spent months in semi-retirement after his election loss in 2020, Trump is set this weekend to kick off a series of political events. Aides and confidants say the goal is to boost his standing in anticipation of a possible future run and to scratch that never-soothed itch he has for publicity. But it’s also to exact some revenge. On Saturday, Trump will hold a Make America Great Again rally outside Cleveland, Ohio in support of longtime aide-turned-Republican congressional candidate Max Miller, who is vying for the seat held by…

Last week the Biden administration released a National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, the first such U.S. document on that specific subject.  Like most “strategy” documents on other topics that any administration releases, it is less a true strategy that shapes operational decisions inside the government than it is a public statement of objectives and principles.  It nonetheless is a welcome official confirmation of the reality of where most terrorist threats against the United States come from today.  That reality differs from the common perception, which has prevailed in the two decades since the 9/11 attacks, that counterterrorism is mainly a…

In Indonesia, the power systems face a wide range of issues that make commitments to lowering carbon emissions and transitioning to renewables all the more challenging. Find out how PLN, Indonesia’s state electricity company, is managing the power supply that fuels the largest economy in Southeast Asia and why flexibility is so vital to the power systems. Solving both old and new challenges with more flexible power generation technology In this episode of Rethinking Energy in Southeast Asia, Febron Siregar, Sales Director at Wärtsilä Energy talks with Dr. Zainal Arifin, Executive Vice President of Engineering and Technology at Indonesia’s state energy company,…

Say what you like about the Peronist government’s foreign policy, but it would be hard to deny that it is idealistic. The people behind it are far less interested in securing material advantages for Argentina than in scoring points in what for them is an overwhelmingly important debate. In their world, abstractions count for far more than the bread-and-butter issues lesser beings go on about in the naïve belief that people will take them more seriously than promises to replace the existing universe with something radically different. What they most want is to win an argument which began many years…

Most recently seen in public (via e-mail, anyway) hawking a conspiracy theory that Italian satellites stole the 2020 election for President Joe Biden, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows actually has a terrible new project: working with Stephen Miller on an effort called America First Legal, which should really be called Whites First Legal. On behalf of white Texans who run at least one of the 25 restaurants in the Lost Cajun chain, they recently succeeded in getting a federal judge to stop the Small Business Administration’s disbursement of restaurant Covid relief funds that prioritized businesses owned by women,…