Today’s Headlines and Commentary
Petro Poroshenko, the pro-Europe chocolate tycoon, was declared the victor in Ukraine's presidential election on Sunday, reports the Wall Street Journal.
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Petro Poroshenko, the pro-Europe chocolate tycoon, was declared the victor in Ukraine's presidential election on Sunday, reports the Wall Street Journal. The Associated Press writes that Ukraine's president-elect launched airstrikes against pro-Russian militants occupying a major airport in East Ukraine shortly thereafter; the New York Times reported last night that the military claimed to have succeeded in evicting the separatists from the airport in Donetsk, but that it remained unclear whether the government had taken full control. President Obama congratulated Ukraine on its elections on Sunday and used the occasion to criticize Russian-backed separatist groups for seeking to disenfranchise entire regions of the country, writes Politico.
President Obama made a surprise appearance in Afghanistan this weekend and indicated that the U.S. will maintain a limited role in the country after its major combat mission comes to a close at the end of the year. Here's the AP. President Obama is expected to set out his vision for the U.S.'s role in the world after withdrawing from Afghanistan in a commencement speech at West Point on Wednesday, says the Guardian; the speculation is that he will announce how many troops will be left in the country at the end of the year.
The Times has a front-page story on U.S. Special Operations troops forming elite counterterrorism units in Libya, Niger, Mauritania and Mali, with the goal of building homegrown African counterterrorism teams able to combat organizations like Boko Haram.
On Sunday, the White House accidentally disclosed the name of the top CIA official in Afghanistan. The information was included on a list of officials taking part in the President's Afghanistan trip, which was itself distributed to news organizations, according to the Washington Post.
Over the weekend the Times Editorial Board wrote an op-ed criticizing the Obama administration's "understandable" but "pointless and perhaps counterproductive" decision to indict five members of the Chinese People's Liberation Army for fraud.
The political establishment is reeling in the wake of weekend elections for the European Parliament---the "populist insurgency" includes xenophobes, racists and neo-Nazis, reports the Times. The Times also notes that the new European Parliament is nonetheless expected to reach an agreement on new privacy rules. These would limit the kinds of information sent overseas and impose multimillion-dollar fines on companies that misuse Europeans' data.
This weekend members of the House and Senate armed services committees rejected many of the Obama administration's proposals for slimming down the military budget, reports the Washington Post.
Two men gunned down a U.S. doctor in Pakistan in Monday's early hours, killing him in front of his family during his visit to the country. Voice of America reports.
Belgium authorities are hunting for a man who gunned down three people in the Jewish Museum of Belgium on Saturday, reports the WSJ, and treating the triple homicide as an act of terrorism.
Nigeria's defense chief announced on Monday that the country's military has located the nearly 300 schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram. But the military nevertheless fears that using force to free the kidnapped youth could result in deaths. The AP has more.
Last week the U.S. deployed 80 service members to Nigeria to oversee drones in the search for the abducted schoolgirls. Why are regulations still holding back the deployment of rescue drones in the U.S.? NBC wants to know.
Jeremy Carp has an op-ed in Al Jazeera America on why secret legal justifications, like those in drone memos written by David Barron and soon to be declassified by the Obama administration, are bad for American democracy. And see the Times debate on whether the NSA reform bill recently passed---and scaled back---by the House offers sufficient privacy protections.
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Jane Chong is former deputy managing editor of Lawfare. She served as a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and is a graduate of Yale Law School and Duke University.
