Trouble-torn Burma is heading for the first general elections since the military coup of February 2021 that ousted a democratically elected government. The seating of a new parliament will mark the re-opening of the bicameral body which was suspended when the military junta seized power. However, several prominent political parties will be barred from the three-phase polling to start on December 28—including Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, which won the last general elections held in November 2020. The new elections, with only parties approved by the military junta participating, are rejected by the opposition as a “sham.” And there will be no voting in the nearly half of the country now under the control of the armed resistance loyal to the rebel parallel government, CounterVortex correspondent Nava Thakuria speaks to opposition activists in clandestinity, who demand that the world reject the junta’s controlled elections.

Birthright citizenship in the United States was never a bureaucratic detail or an immigration loophole. It was a direct assault on white supremacy’s original theory of the nation—that Black presence was permissible only as labor, never as belonging. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment sought to end that theory for good. That amendment did not just welcome formerly enslaved Black people into the civic body; it attempted to inoculate the Constitution itself against the return of caste. Yet white supremacy, in every generation, finds new ways to renegotiate the boundaries of who counts as fully American. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the consolidated case challenging lower-court rulings that struck down Trump’s attempt to repeal birthright citizenship. This signals that the highest court in the land is willing to consider whether whiteness may once again serve as the gatekeeper of America’s future. Timothy Benston of The Black Eye Substack writes that if this administration and this Court seek to restore whiteness as the measure of full belonging, they must face resistance equal to the enormity of that threat.

This week, President Donald Trump pardoned a man federal prosecutors described as the architect of a “narco-state” who moved 400 tons of cocaine to United States shores. In September, the US military began killing people on Caribbean vessels based on unproven suspicions they were doing the same thing on a far smaller scale. The strikes have drawn allegations of war crimes; the contradiction has drawn bipartisan scrutiny. In an explainer for JURIST, Ingrid Burke Friedman examines the White House legal justifications for the air-strikes, and the response from international law experts. She also dissects the politics behind the divergent approaches to the pardoned Honduran ex-president Juan Orlando Hernández and the incumbent Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro—who faces trafficking charges in the US, and a destabilization campaign.