Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro has been hospitalized after experiencing “severe abdominal pain,” his son Carlos said on X on Friday.

Carlos Bolsonaro said his father was assessed for adhesions in the area of his abdomen where he was stabbed in 2018 and was sedated for tests at a hospital in Santa Cruz.

He is now “awake and lucid,” Carlos said, and being flown by helicopter to a hospital with more resources in Natal, the capital of Brazil’s northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte.

“Once again, I ask everyone to pray and hope that everything goes well. Soon, doctors will provide more details about what is happening,” Carlos said.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Ecuadorians will head to the polls on Sunday in a runoff presidential election, choosing between a conservative incumbent or a leftist lawyer as the country struggles with a cocaine-fueled security crisis.

President Daniel Noboa is vying for a full four years in office after winning a special election in 2023 to complete his predecessor’s term. He will be running against Luisa González, the protégé of Ecuador’s left-wing former President Rafael Correa.

The first round of voting in February ended with a near tie between both candidates. Whoever wins Sunday’s vote will have to steward a country suffering under surging violence and organized crime.

Here’s what you should know:

An unending crimewave

Once an island of peace in an otherwise turbulent region, the surging drug trade in recent years has caused Ecuador to have the highest homicide rate in Latin America in 2023, according to InSight Crime.

The rate dropped slightly in 2024, but the violence continues as criminal groups have adapted and fragmented in the wake of a government crackdown.

Noboa has sought to quell the problem with force, adopting a “mano dura,” or firm-handed, approach to fighting crime.

Soon after Noboa took office in 2023, the country suffered back-to-back emergencies: a notorious gang leader escaped from prison; days later, a band of gunmen stormed a major TV station and took the staff hostage.

To stamp out the crime wave, Noboa has openly solicited the help of foreign governments and companies, especially from the United States. In March, Noboa raised eyebrows when he announced a “strategic alliance” to fight organized crime with Erik Prince, the founder of the controversial private defense contractor formerly known as Blackwater.

The presence of the US in Ecuador is a point of contention between Noboa and González, who opposes foreign intervention in the country’s security issues.

Along with the crime wave, Ecuadoreans are struggling with a battered economy. Isabel Chiriboga, a Latin America expert at the non-partisan think tank Atlantic Council, wrote in February that the next president will have to steward an economy “teetering on the brink of collapse.”

A hardline approach to crime

Noboa, the American-born, Harvard-educated son of one of Ecuador’s richest businessmen, became president after a surprise victory in 2023, where he beat González in the second round.

Throughout his first term, critics say Noboa has violated political norms, shocking Latin America when he ordered security forces to storm the Mexican embassy to arrest Jorge Glas, a former vice president under Correa accused of corruption. The breach of diplomatic protocol led Mexico to break off relations with Ecuador.

“Noboa thinks that he can govern like he managed his companies,” said Jean Paul Pinto, an Ecuadorean political analyst based in Quito. “He thinks that in the same way that he gives orders inside his companies, he can do the same with the state. And that’s not true.”

Noboa has strained against the legal limits of his office, initiating and winning a referendum to expand his security powers in April 2024. A key part of his security strategy was deploying the military to Ecuador’s prisons, which criminal groups in the country have controlled for years with virtual impunity.

Critics say the president’s approach is brutal, with little to show for it. “We have seen no sign that (Noboa) has a long-term plan,” said James Bargent, a journalist at InSight Crime who has studied Ecuador’s prison crisis.

“What we’ve seen over the last year is just using force on its own is not effective. It’s not broken this cycle of violence,” Bargent concluded.

As to the economy, Noboa has leaned heavily into economic proposals like cash payments and debt forgiveness for farmers affected by natural disasters.

“Now you’re seeing (Noboa) really engaged in some tactics usually more associated with the populist left,” said Will Freeman, a Latin America fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s classic economic populism.”

A former president’s protégé

González has grounded her campaign to “Revitalize Ecuador,” centering a return to the high social spending of Correa’s presidency.

Under González, “we’ll have more social policies for the poorest people in Ecuador,” predicted Pinto. “In the time of Correa, we had a strong state, with a lot of ministers.”

A charismatic socialist now in exile in Belgium, Correa remains a popular figure in Ecuador’s politics despite allegations of corruption during his presidency. In 2020, an Ecuadorean court sentenced the former president to eight years in prison for bribery in absentia, a charge he has repeatedly denied.

“I’m the president of my party,” González said, “I’m the one leading my campaign – it’s my government plan, and my plans for the public. So who will rule? It’ll be Luisa (González).”

The country has seen several nationwide power cuts linked to the El Niño phenomenon drying up rivers that fuel its hydroelectric power plants. In response, González has called for greater government intervention in Ecuador’s power grid.

As for the country’s biggest political issue, a González government may take a more diplomatic approach to dealing with the gangs, Pinto said. “Luisa is going to make a preventative effort,” Pinto said. “I think that she’s going to negotiate with criminal groups to obtain a more peaceful country.”

González has publicly denied that she would negotiate with criminals. Her party’s plan states her government would strive to create a “new model” of security based on “prevention, violence reduction and coexistence.”

The leftist politician is completely against bringing in muscle from abroad to tackle Ecuador’s crime crisis, and has proposed reestablishing the Ecuadorean Ministry of Justice, which was dismantled in 2018. She’s also set on eliminating the agency that manages the country’s dysfunctional prisons.

Freeman, however, thinks that González may be just as hardline as Noboa, pointing to her mentor’s tenure in office.

“Correa was almost a proto-Bukele,” Freeman pointed out, referring to the authoritarian president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele. “He (Correa) doubled the prison population. He built massive, massive prisons around the country and filled them with petty criminals. I think that it could be pretty mano dura under González as well, even if she’s not saying that.”

A possible fight ahead

After the election moved to a runoff in February, both candidates claimed, without evidence, that the vote was possibly fraudulent. Freeman and Pinto both worry that without a significant-enough margin of victory, there’s a possibility that neither candidate will concede.

“If Luisa loses on Sunday, there are going to be a lot of strikes,” Pinto said. “Especially in the coastal cities” where González’s supporters are concentrated.

“Noboa has said, ‘I will only concede if there are no signs of fraud,’” said Freeman. “He did even say during the first round that he thought there was fraud. It sort of feels like he’s rhetorically preparing the ground not to concede in the case of a very close outcome.”

Doctors in Argentina were already on high alert when a pregnant Russian woman showed up at the hospital on March 21 with two other women to give birth. Hospital staff in the Patagonian city of Bariloche had seen them before – four days earlier, they struggled to answer questions about where they lived and how they were related. The 22-year-old mother-to-be looked nervous and malnourished, and her companions didn’t let her speak, according to police reports and Argentina’s prosecutor.

The women accompanying her implored doctors to document the baby’s last name as Rudnev – the name of a notorious alleged cult leader opera­ting in the country – whom they insisted was the father, according to a prosecutor’s report.

A week later, Argentine police located Konstantin Rudnev at one of the city’s airports and arrested him – part of a wave of arrests that day of over a dozen Russian nationals believed to be associated with his group. The two women accompanying the expectant mother to the hospital were also arrested in a raid of their shared home.

According to Argentina prosecutor Fernando Arrigo, the pregnant woman may have been a victim of Rudnev’s Ashram Shambala, an organization described by Russian authorities as a cult.

Neither Rudnev nor his associates have been charged with a crime yet in Argentina, where criminal probes start with arrest and investigation before formal allegations. Arrigo’s office says it is examining the possibility that the mother and her infant were coerced into a scheme for Rudnev to obtain Argentine citizenship by having a child born in the country.

His office is officially investigating 21 Russian nationals in the country who are accused of “being part of a criminal organization that, for the purposes of sex trafficking and slavery, recruited a 22-year-old woman brought from Russia.”

Asked about the investigation and the claim that Rudnev is a cult leader, his lawyers in Argentina declined to comment.

The alien ‘guru’ of Ashram Shambala

Mechanical engineering graduate-turned-religious leader, Rudnev founded the Ashram Shambala religious group in 1989. According to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti, he told followers that he was an “alien from Sirius,” a messiah sent to Earth to save people.

The sect once had a presence in 18 regions of Russia, including Moscow and St. Petersburg, and up to 30,000 members. Many of them cut off contact with their families and joined the group, where they worshipped their founder.

Rudnev spread his philosophy and recruited followers through yoga classes, Russian authorities investigating the case told RIA Novosti. His book “The Way of the Fool” ridiculed the idea of starting a family, the desire to have children, study, and work, and extolled blind submission to his wishes, RIA reported.

Russian authorities had previously tried to bring Rudnev to trial, but the cases never made it to court because his followers refused to testify. Those followers, according to Russian judicial sources, said they joined the sect voluntarily and had no intention of leaving, RIA Novosti reported at the time.

In 2013, a district court in Siberia sentenced Rudnev to 11 years in prison for rape, violent sexual acts, illegal drug trafficking, and for creating a religious group that violates the citizens’ rights, according to RIA.

As police arrested Rudnev and eight others at the Bariloche airport on March 28th, he tried unsuccessfully attempted to harm himself, the prosecutor’s report said.

Investigators said all the women arrested along with Rudnev and one other man that day showed “signs of malnutrition” similar to those that put hospital staff in Bariloche on alert.

A search of their cell phones revealed “food rations and purchases of various products were authorized, and mandatory fasting was ordered as a form of punishment,” according to Arrigo.

Authorities also found on some of the travelers and their homes more than a hundred cocaine pills, a satellite phone, a dozen cell phones, nearly $1,000 worth of Argentine pesos and other currencies and two pickup trucks. Properties rented by the suspected Ashram Shambala members were all found to have blacked-out windows and mattresses on the floor, according to the prosecutor’s report.

Former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol moved back on Friday with his wife and their 11 dogs and cats to their apartment in an upscale district of Seoul, close to the prosecutors’ office where the impeached leader worked before entering politics.

Yoon and his wife Kim Keon Hee, known for their love of pets, are beginning a new life after he was impeached for a failed attempt to impose martial law and removed from office.

Under Yoon, South Korea passed a bill to ban the eating and selling of dog meat in the country. The number of pets they own grew from four dogs and three cats at the start of his presidency, and now include a retriever that is a retired service dog adopted by Yoon in 2022.

The couple’s 164 sq meter apartment is located in a complex in the glitzy “Gangnam” area south of the Han river, and some neighbors have raised concerns about the return of a man who so polarized the nation during his stint in office.

As many as 50 presidential security service personnel will be deployed to guard the couple, who are entitled to protection for at least five years, according to South Korean media reports.

The three 37-story towers that make up the Acrovista complex are home to more than 750 households. Previously, South Korean presidents have moved into detached houses after leaving office, which have afforded much greater privacy.

The security arrangement in the crowded residential property where they will now live is believed to have been one of the reasons that delayed their move back to the private home by a week after he was stripped of the presidency.

Some neighbors have also fretted about their complex becoming a magnet for crowds of supporters and critics the couple might attract, local media reported, though others posted a welcome banner at the building entrance.

Yoon said he had to declare martial law to raise the alarm about his opponents’ unrelenting obstruction of political process that paralyzed government.

The Acrovista complex is built on the site of the country’s worst human-caused disaster – the collapse of a major department store in 1995 that killed 502 people and injured nearly 1,000 others.

A small group of reservists from Israel’s elite military intelligence unit joined a call for an immediate return of the hostages in Gaza even if it requires an immediate end to the war, in a sign of a growing protest movement after more than 18 months of war.

The public letter, with more than 250 signatories, says the war “is currently mainly serving political and personal interests and not security interests.”

“The continuation of the war doesn’t contribute to any of the declared objectives, and will lead to the death of hostages, (Israel Defense Forces) soldiers, and of innocents,” the authors wrote.

The letter was written by reservists and retirees from Israel’s elite Unit 8200, the biggest military intelligence unit. It also criticizes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stated plans to defeat Hamas and return the remaining 59 hostages held in Gaza.

To continue governing, the prime minister requires the support of coalition partners from far-right parties who have threatened to quit the government should the war end.

“The government didn’t take responsibility for the catastrophe, and doesn’t admit that it has no plan or solution for the crisis,” the authors wrote. “We join the call of the air crews to all Israeli citizens to take action and demand, everywhere and in any way, the return of the hostages now and the cessation of the fighting.”

The new public protest comes a day after hundreds of air force retirees and reservists published a similar letter in major newspapers in Israel, saying “the war mainly serves political and personal interests and not security interests.”

Israel has a relatively small standing military, but a much larger reserve corps upon which it relies during an extended conflict. A growing protest movement within the reserves could potentially affect the Israeli military’s ability to conduct an extended campaign in Gaza.

While the two letters criticized the continuation of the war, the signatories have not refused to serve.

Within hours of the first letter’s release on Thursday, the Israeli military announced that it had fired the air force reservists who had signed the letter and was analyzing the signatures to see how many more were still in the military. An IDF official said most of the signatories are not active reservists.

The commander of the Israel Air Force, Maj. Gen. Tomer Bar, criticized the letter in his own missive published Friday.

“The messages which appear in the proclamation express a lack of trust and damage the cohesion within the force,” Bar wrote. “Such publication has no place during wartime as IDF soldiers and commanders are risking their lives.”

‘Funded by foreign money’

Netanyahu slammed the new protest letter and attempted to cast the authors as a tiny minority.

“They were written by a small group of bad apples, operated by organizations funded by foreign money, which have one goal – topping the right-wing government,” Netanyahu said in a statement, without providing any evidence of his claims of foreign influence.

But Netanyahu’s statement acknowledged that the protest letters were coming from multiple parts of the military, and mentioned a potential similar letter from the navy. “Once again those same letters: one time on behalf of pilots, another time on behalf of navy graduates, and other times under different names,” he said.

The prime minister tried to downplay the significance of the letters despite recent polls showing that nearly 70% of the Israeli public supports an end to the war in order to free the remaining hostages.

“This isn’t a trend. This isn’t an influx. This is a small group of retired personnel, who are loud, anarchist and disconnected,” he said.

The move to clamp down on the public protest appeared aimed at stemming increasingly vocal discontent among reservists and preventing a repeat of 2023, when waves of reservists said they would refuse to serve in protest of Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul efforts.

Nearly all of those reservists ultimately answered call-ups they received after Israel was attacked on October 7, but that wartime unity has begun to falter as the war has dragged on.

“Women and dried pollock need to be beaten every three days for better taste” – so goes an old saying that was common in South Korea in the 1960s when Choi Mal-ja was growing up in a small city in the country’s southeast.

Back then, male violence against women was widely accepted. So when Choi bit off part of the tongue of a man who allegedly tried to rape her, it was she who was labeled the aggressor and jailed for grievous bodily harm.

At the time, Choi was 18 and living at home with her family. Now 78, she’s trying to clear her name in the hope that vindication will pave the way for other victims of sexual crime in South Korea, one of the world’s most advanced economies but one where society remains deeply patriarchal.

After Choi’s push for a retrial was rejected by courts in the city of Busan, she took her case to the Supreme Court. The top court ruled in her favor, sending the case back to Busan, where evidence will be called in coming months.

Experts say the verdict could rewrite the legal precedent set by her original trial, with far-reaching consequences for other women.

“The court must admit the fact that its unfair ruling has turned one person’s life upside down, and take responsibility with just judgement now,” Choi wrote.

‘Like I’d been hit with a hammer’

One spring evening in 1964, Choi, then a teenager, stopped to help a man who was asking for directions in Gimhae, South Gyeongsang province.

After walking with him for a few meters, Choi gave him further directions and turned around to go back home, but he tackled her to the ground.

“I was feeling woozy, like I’d been hit on the head with a hammer,” Choi told a local TV show in 2020.

Choi lost consciousness for a short while, but she remembers the man climbing on top of her and trying to force his tongue inside her mouth. She was only able to escape by biting 1.5cm (0.6 inch) of his tongue off, she said.

More than two weeks later, the man, who is not named in court documents, and his friends forced their way into Choi’s house and threatened to kill her father for what Choi had done.

Ignoring her claims of sexual assault, the man sued Choi for grievous bodily harm, leading her to sue him for attempted rape, trespassing and intimidation.

The police deemed Choi’s argument of self-defense reasonable; however, prosecutors in Busan thought otherwise.

They dropped the attempted rape charge against her assailant and accused Choi of grievous bodily harm, according to court documents.

In 1965, Choi was sentenced to 10 months in prison and two years of probation, a harsher punishment than that of the aggressor, who was sentenced to six months of prison and one year of probation for trespassing and threatening.

“It didn’t take a long time for the victim of a sexual crime to be turned into a perpetrator, nor did it take the strength of many people,” Choi wrote in a letter to the Supreme Court last year, as part of her application for a retrial.

Choi also claimed that her rights were infringed upon during the investigation and trial process, during which she and her supporters say she was handcuffed at one point and later made to undergo a test to prove her virginity, the result of which was made public.

No word for domestic violence

Until recent times, the social norm in South Korea was for women to support the men in their family. For example, when the country was developing rapidly after the 1950-53 Korean War, daughters were commonly sent to work at factories to financially support their brothers’ education.

And until the 1980s, South Korea was so focused on rebuilding from the devastation of the war and Japan’s brutal occupation before that, that fighting for women’s rights was considered “a luxury,” according to Chung.

In 1983 the Korea Women’s Hot-Line counseling center opened to campaign against “all institutions, customs and conventions that impose inhumane lives on women,” and establish a “just and peaceful family and society,” according to its statement.

At the time, there was no word for domestic violence.

“This is the 1980s. So, imagine what Choi Mal-ja had to go through for her case, in the 1960s,” said Kim.

According to Choi’s testimonies, prosecutors and judges asked her during the investigation and trial whether she would like to marry the aggressor to conclude the case.

Becoming his wife, so the theory went, might make amends for his injuries, as no other woman would want to marry a man with half a tongue.

Wang Mi-yang, the president of the Korea Women Lawyers Association, said the 1965 ruling reflected the “social prejudice and distorted views on victims of sexual violence that remained deeply rooted in our society.”

Ending decades of silence

Anti-sexual violence movements flourished in the 1990s and even included campaigns seeking justice for “comfort women,” a euphemism for the victims of sexual slavery enforced by the Japanese military in Korea during and before World War II.

For many years, “comfort women” kept their trauma secret to avoid shame and humiliation, but they finally spoke out, becoming what Chung calls South Korea’s “first MeToo movement.”

“These people lived 70 years, unable to talk about what they’ve experienced, because they would get blamed… but them revealing themselves to the world means society has changed that much,” Chung said.

The global #MeToo movement properly took hold in South Korea in 2018, holding powerful men to account and pushing the government to enforce harsher punishments for crimes of sexual violence.

Changing attitudes motivated Choi Mal-ja to seek a retrial.

“The girl’s life, which couldn’t even blossom, was forever unfair and in resentment… the country must compensate for my human rights,” Choi wrote in her letter to the Supreme Court.

Kim, from the Korea Women’s Hot-Line counseling center, said while there’s still work to be done, attitudes toward victims of sexual violence have changed dramatically.

“The perception that the sexual aggressor is at fault, not the victim, that women are more vulnerable to sexual crimes, and it’s the government’s responsibility to punish the perpetrator and protect the victim is so widely spread out among the people now,” she said.

Protests in solidarity

With the help of the Korea Women’s Hot-Line, Choi requested a retrial in 2020, but the court denied her application, calling the original ruling “inevitable” due to the “circumstances of the time.”

Choi condemned that decision as “truly embarrassing.”

“I was so tired, having come such a long way, that I wanted to lay everything down,” she wrote in her letter last year to the Supreme Court.

But she persisted, driven by the thought of “women of future generations.”

A petition by the Korea Women’s Hot-Line gathered more than 15,000 signatures and Choi started a one-person relay protest in front of the Supreme Court for a month to pressure the highest court to annul the original decision to deny a retrial.

In total, 42 people including Choi took part, swapping out after each day of protest, to show their solidarity with her cause.

The Supreme Court granted her request, calling Choi’s testimonies about unfair treatment during investigation by the prosecutors “consistent” and “credible,” adding that there was no evidence that contradicted her claims.

“Every drop of water pierced the rock. When I heard the news, I shouted hooray!” Choi said in a live-streamed press conference after the Supreme Court’s ruling in December.

The retrial will be held at the Busan District Court, which originally dismissed Choi’s retrial application in 2021.

The right to self-defense

Choi’s long fight for justice is well known in South Korea.

Her case is even cited in the Criminal Procedure Act textbook – used to educate generations of student lawyers – as an example of using excessive force in defense.

A successful retrial could expand the definition of self-defense and set new protections for future victims of sexual violence, said Kim from the Korea Women’s Hot-Line.

“I think it will become a very important case in getting women’s rights to defense, their responses against domestic or sexual violence, acknowledged more widely,” she said.

In 2017, a woman was found guilty of grievous bodily harm, like Choi, for biting the tongue of a man who allegedly tried to rape her.

The Incheon District Court partially acknowledged the man’s fault, but sentenced the woman to six months of imprisonment and two years on probation, citing the severity of the injury and “the failure to reach a settlement.”

Kim said there’s still a perception among investigators and the courts that victims are responsible for sexual violence, particularly in cases involving “the victim going to the aggressor’s house, drinking together or going to a place where they’re left alone.”

According to police statistics, more than 22,000 rapes and indecent assaults occurred in 2023 in South Korea.

It’s unclear how many victims were charged after trying to defend themselves.

Kim said there were still “many cases of women’s right to defense not being recognized.”

In her letter to the Supreme Court, Choi said old, victim-blaming beliefs must change if women’s rights are to improve in South Korea.

“I believe that women will only be able to protect themselves from sexual abuse and make a world without sexual violence when the court indisputably redefines victim and perpetrator, recognizes self-defense, and changes the outdated law,” she wrote.

The United Nations’ emergency and disaster response agency will reduce its global workforce by 20% and scale back operations in nine countries, as it confronts a severe funding crisis and escalating global needs, it announced on Friday.

In sobering letter to staff shared on the agency’s website, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) head Tom Fletcher outlined “brutal cuts” driven by a nearly $60 million funding shortfall for 2025, compounded by rising humanitarian demands.

OCHA will withdraw or adjust operations in Cameroon, Colombia, Eritrea, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkey, and Zimbabwe, and aim to prioritize “dynamic and full responses” in remaining locations where it operates.

OCHA plans to lay off approximately 500 staff members from its workforce of about 2,600 employees across over 60 countries with a more concentrated presence in fewer locations, according to Najwa Mekki, Director of Communications at OCHA citing a separate letter Fletcher wrote.

The cuts follow months of austerity measures, including a hiring freeze and travel restrictions, which saved $3.7 million.

“The humanitarian community was already underfunded, overstretched and literally, under attack. Now, we face a wave of brutal cuts,” Fletcher wrote, emphasizing that the reductions stem from financial constraints rather than diminished needs.

Fletcher stressed the agency’s pivot toward a “lighter, faster” model focused on core priorities: crisis response, sector reform, and humanitarian leadership. The moves align with the UN’s broader “Humanitarian Reset” – a ten-point plan agreed upon in February by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) – and Secretary-General António Guterres’ UN80 reform initiative.

Fletcher defended the decisions, insisting OCHA must “coordinate, not replicate” efforts to preserve lifesaving work. “We believe passionately in what we do,” Fletcher wrote, “but we cannot continue to do it all.”

Does America want its friends back?

After three months of insulting, tariffing and even threatening to annex some of its best allies, the Trump administration suddenly needs some help.

The US President has now escalated a full-on trade clash with China that he doesn’t seem to know how to win. So the administration is rushing to work out how to build leverage against Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is in no mood to cede to Trump’s bullying.

But there’s one thing that might work. It would bring to bear America’s strength and global power and could perhaps build pressure on Beijing to act on consistent US complaints about market access, theft of intellectual property, industrial espionage and other issues. There’s only one problem: This approach would conflict with Trump’s “America first” mantra.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pointed out on Fox Business this week that US allies such as Japan, South Korea and India would soon be in trade talks with Washington, as would Vietnam.

“Everyone is coming to the table, and basically China is surrounded,” he said. Bessent added that a topic of talks should be a joint goal: “How do we get China to rebalance? That is the big win here.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked on Friday why American allies would help it counter China when Trump was treating friends and foes alike. She replied: “You’ll have to talk to our allies who are reaching out to us. The phones are ringing off of the hooks. They have made it very clear they need the United States of America, they need our markets, they need our consumer base.”

But everything that Trump has done since he arrived back in the Oval Office has been designed to destroy groups of like-minded democracies. Several times this week, he dissed the European Union. “I always say it was formed to really do damage to the United States in trade,” he said.

He’s not the only Europe hater. Vice President JD Vance revealed his distaste for the continent at the Munich Security forum and also in a group chat of officials about air strikes in Yemen.

Trump’s spite in the Western hemisphere is also an issue.

A unified North American trading powerhouse has long been seen as a potential bulwark against China. But Trump has repeatedly threatened to take over Canada and has targeted Mexico with some of his toughest tariffs. New Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has warned that his country’s traditional relationship with Washington is over.

Still, the idea of building an allied front to try to modify China’s trade practices is such a good idea, it’s a wonder no one thought of it before.

They did. And Trump shut it down.

On the first day of his first term in 2017, Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a group of 12 nations including allies like Mexico, Canada, Japan, and Australia, as well as Japan that did not include China. The president also shut down a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership that would have linked the world’s two largest markets.

The question now is whether Trump has so alienated America’s friends that they won’t take his calls.

An explosion occurred outside the offices of Hellenic Train in Athens, Greek police said on Friday, adding there were no immediate reports of injuries.

Police cordoned off the area after two Greek media organizations received warning calls that an explosive device would go off within 35 minutes, police officials said. A suspicious-looking bag was spotted outside the building which was evacuated.

An investigation is under way. A police official said the cause was likely a makeshift bomb.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Hellenic Train is a unit of Italy’s Ferrovie dello Stato IPO-FERRO.MI, which operates passenger and freight routes in Greece.

A deadly 2023 train crash, Greece’s worst rail disaster, killed 57 people, mostly students, and injured dozens.

Many Greeks view the crash as emblematic of the neglect of the country’s railways in recent decades and also of a persistent failure by the state to address safety concerns. The crash has prompted angry protests, fueled further by a lack of trust in institutions.