The Globalist - David Cassels' Current World Issue Blog

President  Donald Trump  has signed into law a bill that ends the government shutdown, and provides congressional negotiators with additional time to hammer out an immigration reform package capable of passing both the House and Senate. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees are expected to return to work on Tuesday morning, after spending the day Monday on furlough. The bill funds the government for 17 days, and it funds the popular CHIP children's insurance program for six years. It does not include a permanent fix for the Obama-era DACA program, which Senate Democrats had originally demanded. Negotiations over the bill took place almost entirely in the Senate, where on Friday night, Majority Leader  Mitch McConnell  had been unable to reach the 60 vote threshold required to keep the government open. But on Monday morning, the first official day of government employee furloughs, McConnell said he intends to bring DACA and other immigration issues up ...

A new report released by the international watchdog organisation Freedom House has raised concerns about Tunisia's democratic backslide. Data analysed by the NGO from 195 countries over the past year showed that Tunisia was still the only free country in the Arab world, but the North African state saw its political rights rating decreased from two to three, the report said on Tuesday. "Municipal elections were once again postponed, leaving unelected councils in place seven years after the revolution, and figures associated with the old regime increased their influence over the vulnerable political system, for example by securing passage of a new amnesty law despite strong public opposition," said the document titled "Freedom in the World 2018". "The extension of a two-year-old state of emergency also signaled the erosion of democratic order in Tunisia." Tunisia managed to reach the status of a free country in just four years after the ...

A Turkey-based TV station has released audio recordings it said were of an Egyptian intelligence officer asking influential hosts in Egypt to persuade their viewers to accept a US decision to recogniseJerusalem as Israel's capital. The recordings in Arabic, aired by Mekameleen TV late on Sunday, were first reported on by the New York Times and appeared to contradict Egypt's public condemnation of the US move. Mekameleen TV is an Istanbul-based free-to-air satellite television channel, run mostly by exiled Egyptians. In the audio recordings, a man the Times identified as Captain Ashraf el-Kholi, tells the hosts that war with Israel was not in Egypt's national interest, and asked them to play down opposition to US President Donald Trump's move. Egypt's State Information Service has denied the Times' January 6 report in a statement, saying its stance on Jerusalem remains unchanged. Egypt's positions "are conveyed by the president, the ...