Weekly Geopolitical events
By Keating Smith, Staff Writer
Africa: (Sierra Leone) National elections in West Africa’s Sierra Leone have been plagued with fraud, resulting in ten per cent of votes being set aside in the country’s tightly disputed election. This is the third ballot vote Sierra Leone has conducted since a decade of civil war in the 1990s, which killed more than 50,000 people.
Latin & South America: (Argentina) Argentina will appeal against a US ruling ordering the country to pay $1.3 billion USD to foreign creditors holding bonds that it defaulted on over a decade ago. Argentina has until mid-December to reimburse the hedge funds, which shunned two exchanges of defaulted debt in 2005 and 2010. Economy Minister Hernan Lorenzino vetoed the decision, calling it “illegitimate to pay [for] vulture funds.”
Asia- Central & South: (Kazakhstan) Vladimir Kozlov, the leader of the Alga party in Kazakhstan, has been accused of plotting to overthrow the government and faces seven and a half years in prison. The United States has criticized the ruling upheld by a court as an “apparent use of the criminal system to silence opposition voices.”
Asia- Pacific: (Indonesia) Indonesia’s tobacco lobby has pressured the government to boycott the WHO’s Tobacco Summit taking place in South Korea this Month. Cigarette sales contribute to one-tenth of Indonesia’s GNP and a third of Indonesia’s 240 million people population are reported tobacco users.
Middle East: (Israel) In preparation for a ground assault on the embattled Gaza Strip, dozens of IDF reservists have inquired into their sperm being frozen through Cryopreservation by a non- profit organization based in Tel Aviv. The New Family Organization has asked the Israel Defense Forces to cooperate by advising soldiers about signing a biological will to which the IDF did not agree.
