Globe Trot: Uganda's 30-year president set for another term

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UGANDA: Opposition leader Kizza Besigye was arrested for a third time in a week as voting in the country’s presidential election got underway. Initial results gave entrenched President Yoweri Museveni an early lead in a contest overshadowed by persistent claims of vote-rigging.

A journalist in Kampala told me the government shut down Facebook and other social media outlets and said “there is a huge sense of injustice,” with polling stations staying open late in places Museveni was favored to win, and polling materials failing to reach places the opposition held leads. Power corrupts. Museveni helped topple the deadly Idi Amin regime but, at age 72, has been in office 30 years. He once gave a speech decrying African rulers who “begin to live like little kings and dictators,” and widely touted forgiveness, humility, and love as “the only practical solution to healing a nation’s wounds and bringing unity.”

MIDDLE EAST: Surviving among the wreckage of war is the subject of WORLD’s annual cities coverage.

SYRIA: A crucial meeting today to implement a ceasefire among Syria’s warring factions has been canceled, according to Russian officials. U.S. diplomats say it has been delayed.

A key rebel leader says the United States, contrary to acting as the stated ally of rebel groups fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has dithered in Geneva while Russia unleashed “an unprecedented scorched-earth campaign” against Aleppo and nearby rebel-held areas.

LIBYA: Overnight the United States launched airstrikes against ISIS-affiliated targets in Libya, killing between 20 and 40 terrorists (depending on your source) at a training camp. Most of the reports are coming from Pentagon sources, and it’s unclear why the U.S. military launched strikes in north Africa with Syria on the brink—apart from fear of another Benghazi-like attack:

“...the US government has become increasingly concerned about the Islamic State’s ability to plot attacks in the West and against American interests from its base of operations on the Mediterranean coast. It is possible that Chouchane was involved in such plotting, but that has not been confirmed.”

EUROPE … AND SOUTH CAROLINA: A trusted European commentator and pro-life activist wrote me this morning to say Europeans “keep being astonished” that so many evangelicals support Donald Trump.

“It’s encouraging that there is such a broad ‘freedom of religion’ that makes it possible for Christians to have such different opinions,” he said, “but also worrying … because Christianity has become so superficial, that it mixes up being rude with being assertive.” He concluded: “We pray that the Lord may guide the American people into choosing the right person. Two things are sure, God knows what the U.S. needs and no one will sit in the White House without God having allowed him to do so.”

I’M READING Laurus, a novel by Russian writer Eugene Vodolazkin.

Mindy Belz

Mindy, a former senior editor for WORLD Magazine, wrote the publication’s first cover story in 1986. She has covered wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Africa, and the Balkans and is author of They Say We Are Infidels: On the Run From ISIS With Persecuted Christians in the Middle East. Mindy resides in Asheville, N.C.

@MindyBelz