Making A Difference

Sans Frontiers

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World Tour

UK A lone attacker went on a stabbing spree in a busy park in the southern English city of Reading, killing three and injuring three more—the deadliest terror attack to strike Britain since 2017’s London Bridge attack. A 25-year-old suspect arrested in connection with the attack was named across the British press as Khairi Saadallah, a Libyan refugee resident.

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S. Korea Activists have launched thousands of leaflets by balloon across the border with North Korea after the North abruptly resumed its belligerence. N. Korea had blown up an inter-Korean liaison office and threatened to nullify 2018 agreements aimed at lowering frontline military tension. The North is trying to apply pressure on Seoul and Washington amid stalled nuclear diplomacy.

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England Archaeologists have discovered a prehistoric monument under the earth near Stonehenge that could shed light on the origins of the mystical stone circle in southwestern England. The site has 20 huge shafts, over 32 feet in diameter and 16-foot deep, forming a circle over 2 km in diameter. Around 4,500 years old, they could mark the boundary of a sacred area in the larger Neolithic settlement of Durrington Walls.

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Amid nationwide anti-racism agitation, protestors take out a Trump likeness during the US president’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma

Foreign Hand

President Donald Trump has vowed to pull thousands of American troops from Germany—a move that fits a pattern of disruptive moves against allies that have cast doubt everywhere about the future of partnering with the US. Trump has consistently dismissed the conventional view that a far-flung US military presence, while costly, pays off in the long run by ensuring stability for global trade. Germany, as the country that once faced the Soviet bloc, has long been the centrepiece of American defence strategy in Europe through NATO, has lately been the focus of Trump’s ire. He has asserted that the Germans, and NATO, had long shortchanged the US on trade and defence, declaring that “until they pay” more for their own defence, he will reduce US troops. But fellow Republicans say a reduced US commitment to Europe’s defence would encourage Russian aggression and opportunism.

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Trump is supported by some who see declining value in the NATO alliance. Ted Galen Carpenter, a foreign policy expert at the CATO Institute, wrote in The National Interest that cutting US troop levels in Germany carries little strategic risk. “The Red Army is not poised to pour through the Fulda Gap in Germany and try to sweep to the Atlantic,” Carpenter wrote, referring to a Cold War nightmare scenario that prompted the US to station over 3,00,000 troops in Germany for a time. “Today’s Russia is a pale shadow of the USSR in terms of population, economic output, and military power.”

Trump has taken a friendlier approach to Poland, which has lobbied for a bigger US troop presence as a bulwark against potential Russian aggression. The Poles floated the idea of flattering Trump by offering to pay the cost of establishing a ‘Fort Trump’ as a permanent US base, an idea that went nowhere.

People recall newspaper ads Trump bought in 1987 to urge Washington to stop paying to defend wealthy countries like Japan. He also has argued for a faster withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan—the kind of antagonism toward allies that bothered Trump’s first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, so much that he quit in December 2018, when he was upset by Trump’s decision—later amended—to remove all US troops from Syria, abandoning their Kurdish partners.

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Trump has also created a rift with South Korea over sharing the cost of hosting the approximately 28,000 US troops based there. Last year, the US stunned Seoul by demanding a five-fold increase in S. Korea’s share of the cost, to $5 billion, over which they remain at loggerheads.

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