Notes from the World

In July 1979, the 43 year dictatorship of the Somoza family in Nicaragua was brought to an end when Anastasio Somoza Debayle was overthrown by a rebel army led by the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, the FSLN or Sandinistas, as they were widely known. In the 47 years since then, Nicaragua has experienced a civil war throughout the 1980s which pitted the Sandinista government against rebel...

Thus far, 2026 has been a very difficult year for LGBTQ rights in Africa. Homosexuality is illegal in 31 countries on the African continent, representing half of the continent’s states, and in recent years, the adoption of anti-LGBTQ laws has increased dramatically. Last month, Ghana’s parliament passed what it called the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill which reinforces an existing pena...

When Ecuador’s centre-right president Guillermo Lasso dissolved the country’s National Assembly amid a second impeachment proceeding against him in May 2023, he triggered a general election in which he did not run but which would choose his replacement. Throughout the early part of the campaign, polls often showed what seemed to be a scramble for the presidency among three contenders: Luisa Gonzál...

Juan Forero is the South America bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. Based in Bogotá, Colombia, he worked for both the New York Times and National Public Radio before joining the Journal, and he has been reporting on Latin America for more than 20 years. He joined us on Notes From the World today to discuss the state of Venezuela - now five months after the seizure of Venezuela’s then-presid...

Since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, immigration policy in the United States has undergone profound changes. Masked, anonymous agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), both operating under the purview of the United States Department of Homeland Security, have roamed U.S. cities and towns, shattering car wind...

As large as Western Europe or the United States east of the Mississippi River, the Democratic Republic of Congo remains a place where Africa’s greatest potential and most wrenching tragedies are frequently lived out. Its first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, was kidnapped and killed with the connivance of former colonial ruler Belgium in 1961, and for more than three decades afterwards, Congo - f...

Luis Moreno was born in New York City and graduated with a BA in History from Fordham University and an MA in Education at Kean College before joining the foreign service. In a long and varied career he held, among other posts, the role of refugee coordinator and the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Haiti; the narcotics affairs director at the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá, Colombia from 19...

(Cover Image: Footage of an 8 January 2026 protest in Bandar-e Anzali, northern Iran, shared via Telegram.) On 28 February of this year, the United States and Israel launched attacks against the Islamic Republic of Iran, a military operation that has been ongoing for three weeks at the time of this broadcast. The assault has brought a large swathe of the Middle East into conflict, with Iran launch...

Today on Notes from the World, we are joined by José de Cordoba, the longtime Mexico City correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. We have a wide-ranging discussion about the significance of the recent killing of Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) leader Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes aka El Mencho, how Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is faring a year and a half into her term and ho...

Carrie Gibson is the author of three works of history: Empire’s Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean From Columbus to the Present Day (2014), El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America (2019) and the subject of our conversation today, The Great Resistance: The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas (2026). Prior to gaining a PhD in history at the University of Cambri...

Last month, in Florida’s Manatee County along the state’s western Gulf Coast, the Seattle-based marine terminal services company SSA Marine Inc. announced that it intended to partner with a Tampa, Florida-based holding company, Slip Knott LLC, to build an enormous new cruise port adjacent to the county’s Sunshine Skyway Bridge. The patch of land in question is lushly festooned with seagrass covera...

A constitutional lawyer by training, Filip Reyntjens first set foot in Rwanda in July 1976 to help run a project at the Law School at the National University in Butare. Over the last 50 years, he has provided observers of the Great Lakes Region of Africa with thought-provoking observations and analysis of the region and especially of Rwanda itself, one of its most significant countries. The author...

In the early morning hours, of 3 January, a United States military operation spirited Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores out of Caracas following an assault that left dozens dead, including at least 32 Cubans that the Cuban government later said were members of the Cuban armed forces and intelligence agencies. According to the Venezuelan government’s own tally sheets and co...

Michaël Brun is a Haitian DJ and record producer known for blending electronic music with traditional Haitian styles of song. His debut EP, Gravity, was released in 2013. Since then he has released two full length albums, Lokal on the Kid Coconut label and Fami Vol. 1 with Astralwerks. He became the first Haitian to play Miami’s Ultra Music Festival in 2014, and created, along with J Balvin, the s...

Philippe Pujol is a French journalist and writer based in Marseille. After starting out in science journalism, he eventually covered crime for the daily newspaper La Marseillaise. In 2014, he won the Albert Londres Prize for his series of articles “Quartiers Shit,” about the northern districts of Marseille. He is the author of several books, including French deconnection : au cœur des trafics, La...

Since 2020, the Sahel region of Africa has been buffeted by a series of coups that upended the democratically-elected governments of the region and replaced them with military rulers. First in Mali, which saw the presidency of Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta overthrown in August 2020, and which then witnessed a subsequent May 2021 coup that saw General Assimi Goïta seize power; then in Burkina Faso in Janu...

Late last month, the city of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur State in western Sudan, fell to the legions of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), one of the two competing sides in the civil war that has torn Sudan apart since April 2023. During and after the capture of the city, reports proliferated of gross human rights abuses and mass summary executions by RSF forces, a number of which the figh...

For this special Halloween edition of Notes from the World, we are joined by David J. Goodwin, a historian, writer, past Frederick Lewis Allen Room scholar at the New York Public Library and the author of Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham, a biography of the horror writer’s New York years. His first book, Left Bank of the Hudson: Jersey City and the Artists of 111 1st Street, received th...

Howard W. French is a Professor at Columbia Journalism School who spent the bulk of his reporting career as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times working in Latin America, Africa and Asia. He is the author of several books, including A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World and his new book and the s...

Linas Koyala is CEO of the Geopolitics and Security Studies Center in Vilnius, Lithuania, and Associate Professor of Partnership at Vilnius University’s Institute of International Relations and Political Science. He is also a Millennium Fellow at the Atlantic Council and Non-Resident Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He joined us to discuss the current situation in the Baltics, the...

ldefonso Ortiz is an award-winning journalist with Breitbart Texas who has reported on Mexican drug cartels and public corruption along the U.S.-Mexico border and in Mexico itself for over 15 years. He is a regular guest on radio and television newscasts including on Telemundo, Univision, CNN and the BBC. He joined us to discuss the situation in the Rio Grande Valley and Mexico's Tamaulipas and th...

Adam Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942, and in his youth worked as a writer and editor for Ramparts magazine and became a co-founder of the magazine Mother Jones. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, the Atlantic, the New York Times, and many other publications. He is the author of numerous books, most of which are united by dual themes of a granular examination of auth...

Kettly Mars is a Haitian novelist and poet who was born in Port-au-Prince in 1958, one year after the ascent to power of François Duvalier, who would rule the country for the next 14 years. Her work confronts some of the most difficult issues present in Haitian society, from the complicated dynamics that exist between a dictatorship’s adherents and its victims, the gulf between rural and urban soc...

Murhaf Jouejati is the founder of Syria Consult and emeritus Distinguished Visiting Professor of Middle East Studies and Global Affairs at the United States Naval Academy. He previously taught at the National Defense University's Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies and George Washington University, where he served as the director of the Middle East Studies Program at the Elliott Scho...

Amy Booth is managing editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, an English-language online newspaper, and co-founder of the Pirate Wire newsletter. She has been working in Argentina since 2018 and her work on politics, social affairs and human rights has also appeared in the BBC, the Guardian, VICE, and many other outlets. She joins us today on Notes from the World to discuss the presidency of Argentina’...