11: Marine Le Pen wasn’t the only rightwing Euroskeptic who took an L on Sunday — Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša’s SDS Party lost by 11 points to the Freedom Movement, an upstart green party, which won 34% of the vote. Janša, like Le Pen, noted that his party still got more votes than ever before.
2 trillion: Global military spending topped $2 trillion for the first time last year. Nearly two-thirds of that came from the US, China, India, UK, and Russia. Washington’s world-leading $800 billion tab dipped slightly from 2020 but still outstripped the next nine countries combined.
273 million: Speaking of the arms trade, Germany and France reportedly made a combined 273 million Euros selling arms to Russia, flouting an embargo that the EU slapped on the Kremlin after Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Critics say some of those weapons are now being used in Ukraine.
50: Another US culture war battle begins this week as the US Supreme Court takes up the a case of a public high school football coach praying with his players at the 50-yard line after games. Coach Kennedy says it’s a matter of his private religious freedom, but the school board feared it would be seen as an inappropriate endorsement of one religion over others. The justices will decide.
Even as Israel grows increasingly isolated on the world stage, there is one region where a whole swath of newly-elected leaders can't seem to get enough of the Jewish State: Latin America.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has deployed 500 troops to Milan and tightened nationwide anti-rioting laws in an effort to quell unrest that has gripped the city since the weekend.
President Trump has changed course on Ukraine before. We all remember the Oval Office pyrotechnics (and the reconciliation). But his latest turn toward Russia could prove harder to reverse.
South Sudan is accusing neighboring Sudan of launching a drone strike that killed at least 73 people at a market in Abyei, a disputed, oil-rich region of roughly 4,000 square miles claimed by both countries.