Today in The Overview we’re tracking young people’s shifting political leanings, and remembering when “60 Minutes” released disturbing photos showing torture at Abu Ghraib 20 years ago. Plus: Germany just made it easier for people to legally change their name and gender.
|
|
|
|
Photo: Lee Jin-man / AP
|
|
1. Young men across the globe are ‘fertile ground’ for the far-right, and it’s affecting elections
Young women across the globe are becoming more liberal, while young men are not, according to an international survey of 300,000 people aged 18 to 70 released Friday.
The report — which surveyed people between 2014 and 2023 across 20 countries, including the U.S., Russia, South Korea, and parts of the European Union — found that both young men and women feel a growing sense of hopelessness, but their responses to despair are different.
The “radical right increasingly finds fertile ground among young men,” according to Glocalities, the research agency that conducted the survey.
This has already affected elections across the globe. For example, in South Korea’s 2022 presidential election, 58.7% of men in their 20s voted for conservative president Yoon Suk Yeol — who was ultimately elected by 0.73 percentage points — while 58% of women in their 20s voted for the opposing candidate.
The survey also found that young Americans are generally more conservative than their EU counterparts and feel more despair, Martijn Lampert, Glocalities’ head of research, told Reuters.
Young women are still overwhelmingly the most liberal group in the U.S. compared to any other group. By contrast, young American men were the only group out of any in the U.S. and EU to get more conservative since 2014.
|
|
2. 20 years after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, a civil lawsuit will play out in court
A hooded man standing on a box holding electrical wires. A female soldier holding a leash attached to a naked prisoner. Another soldier smiling and giving a thumbs-up over the body of a man tortured to death.
Twenty years ago this month, CBS News’ “60 Minutes” broadcast graphic photographs showing U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib detention center — images that would imprint themselves on the collective American consciousness.
Now, for the first time, a U.S. jury will hear from some of the survivors.
In a civil lawsuit trial set to begin Monday, three men who were held in Abu Ghraib are claiming that military contractor CACI was responsible for setting the conditions that made their torture possible. CACI says that the U.S. military is responsible.
One of the men allegedly endured electric shocks and was dragged by a rope around his neck. Another, a former Al Jazeera reporter, said he was forced to wear women’s underwear, threatened with dogs, and made to assume stress positions that caused him to vomit black liquid.
The abuses at Abu Ghraib — which at its peak held an estimated 8,000 Iraqi detainees — took place in the last three months of 2003, a half year after the U.S. invaded Iraq. The leaked photographs put on crude display the “enhanced interrogation techniques” the military used during the United States’ so-called war on terror.
Eleven U.S. soldiers were ultimately convicted of crimes related to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, while senior officials like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — who was found to have personally authorized torture at the facility — were never convicted.
A 2004 Red Cross investigation showed that 70% to 90% of Iraqis detained by the U.S. were innocent.
|
|
3. US officials predict Iran will strike Israel in next few days
Iran is expected to launch an attack on Israel soon, in retaliation for an Israeli bombing on the Iranian consulate in Syria earlier this month, U.S. and Iranian officials said Friday.
The intelligence information comes a day after the U.S. State Department issued warnings to its employees in Israel, prohibiting them from traveling outside the Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Beersheba metropolitan areas.
Iran has repeatedly vowed revenge against Israel for the April 1 strike on its embassy in Damascus, in which three generals and four other officers were killed.
Though the new intelligence does not indicate Iranian attacks on the U.S. are imminent, FBI director Christopher Wray warned Congress Thursday that violence on American soil cannot be ruled out.
“Our most immediate concern has been that individuals or small groups will draw twisted inspiration from the events in the Middle East to carry out attacks here at home,” Wray said. “But now increasingly concerning is the potential for a coordinated attack here in the homeland, akin to the ISIS-K attack we saw at the Russia concert hall a couple weeks ago.”
In other Middle East news:
|
|
In other news
- Russia ordered evacuations in the southern city of Orenburg on Friday due to flooding in the region — including in neighboring Kazakhstan, where 100,000 people have evacuated in the past week. [The Moscow Times]
- Nearly 55 million people in West and Central Africa will struggle to feed themselves in the coming months, said a group of U.N. humanitarian agencies on Friday. [Reuters]
- Three new companies will start making the cholera vaccine, as the global supply reaches a dangerous low amid an outbreak of the disease in parts of Africa and the Middle East. [The New York Times]
- Germany approved legislation on Friday that will make it easier for transgender, intersex, and nonbinary people to legally change their name and gender. The law, set to take effect Nov. 1, does away with the outdated requirement that people first be assessed by two experts on “transsexualism.” [Associated Press]
|
|
|
Say that again
“Justice was done! No more impunity for killers of environmental defenders,” the nonprofit environmental organization DAR wrote on the social network X on Thursday after a Peruvian court sentenced five men to 28 years in prison for the 2014 murder of four Indigenous Amazon land defenders. [Le Monde]
|
|
My journey from Russian dissident to Canadian activist
Maria Kartasheva shares her tumultuous citizenship journey: “I expected this kind of treatment from Russia. I didn’t expect this kind of treatment from Canada.”
|
|
What we’re listening to
I wasn’t listening to a ton of global music in 2004 — repeated spins of Animal Collective’s “Sung Tongs” got in the way of that — but one of my favorite albums released in the U.S. that year is the self-titled LP from Swedish indie pop darlings The Concretes.
With its classic girl-group vocals, the whole thing is so sweet and love-sick. Start with “Warm Night” and swoon away.
—Laura Adamczyk, staff writer
Thanks for reading. We’ll see you Monday.
|
|
|
Hope O’Dell contributed reporting and writing to today’s newsletter.
|
|
Was this newsletter forwarded to you?
Sign up here to receive The Overview for free.
|
|
|
|
|
