Nicaragua will stop holding elections to prevent foreign-backed interference, the country’s long-serving strongman leader Daniel Ortega announced last week. “The days when parties backed by the Yankees and the Somocistas would return to power are over — never again,” said the 80-year-old president in a speech to commemorate the Sandinista revolution, which overthrew the U.S.-backed Anastasio ⁠Somoza dictatorship in 1979.

Who’s Ortega?
A key figure in the Sandinista revolution, Ortega has served as president since 2007. His government has transformed Nicaragua into an “authoritarian state,” said the U.N. Human Rights Council. He has cemented control over virtually all branches of government and crushed political opposition, with hundreds killed and many more imprisoned following mass anti-government protests in 2018. 

Why has he canceled elections?
Nicaragua’s last elections, in 2021, were “widely disputed” after Ortega “detained opponents and business leaders and criminalized dissent,” said Reuters. Voters had been due to go to the polls again next year, but Ortega has declared there “won’t be any more elections here” for the country’s internal enemies to “try to seize the government and seize power.”

Nicaragua has become a “full-fledged, family-run dictatorship,” said Tiziano Breda, a senior analyst at the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data nonprofit, to Reuters. Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, who is co-president, are “evidently afraid of the idea that the slightest political opening could create the conditions for dissent to manifest.”

What has the reaction been?
Despite proscribing the Ortega government as a dictatorship, the Trump administration has remained remarkably quiet on the potential for Venezuela-style regime change. There are a “range of explanations” for this, said Nahal Toosi at Politico. The Ortega regime is “making smart moves on battling drug trafficking” and “benefiting from a lack of natural resources” for President Donald Trump to “covet.”

“The lesson from Nicaragua is: Don’t matter too much, don’t embarrass Washington and don’t become a domestic political issue,” said Juan Gonzalez, a former Latin America aide to Joe Biden. For an administration that “doesn’t care about democracy or human rights, that’s an effective survival strategy.”

While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) may be at the center of numerous controversies, one of the most recent has gone international: The agency has agreed to a five-year contract with Canadian tech conglomerate Thomson Reuters to obtain information on alleged voter and immigration fraud. Many are wary of the two parties working together.

‘Let ICE continuously monitor’
While Thomson Reuters is best known for its eponymous news agency Reuters, its data broker division has deals with several U.S. government organizations. The latest ICE contract, valued at $25 million per year, directs Thomson Reuters to assist with the “screening and vetting of individuals and entities for immigration, criminal and national security risks,” according to the contract document in the Federal Register. Thomson Reuters will also assist with identifying “violations of U.S. immigration and customs laws.”

The contract means ICE will now have access to the company’s “databases of personal data — which includes peoples’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, ethnicity, social media posts and geolocation information,” said 404 Media. By signing the document, Thomson Reuters will be “able to let ICE continuously monitor millions of people and entities of interest.” 

‘My blood ran cold’
There has been significant opposition to Thomson Reuters’ partnering with ICE, including in Canada where the company is based. “My blood ran cold when I read about this development,” Canadian New Democratic Party Leader Avi Lewis said to The Guardian. “Complicity between Canadian corporations and ICE should absolutely be illegal.”

ICE has been working with Thomson Reuters since at least 2015. But the new contract is the first to state that the “software will be used to support the Trump administration’s objectives of addressing supposed ‘voter fraud,’” said The Guardian. The company has denied any wrongdoing with the deal. 

Prior to the contract being signed, 200 Thomson Reuters employees wrote a letter asking the company not to renew its agreement with ICE. “We have experienced our neighbors, friends and family members undergoing arrests and detention, intimidation and harassment,” said the letter obtained by The New York Times. “We question if our investigative products and services are being used in accordance with our mission and values.”

Boats cruise past a “bathtub ring” of mineral-stained rocks left by higher water levels in Lake Mead, Nevada. This month, the combined waters of Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the country’s two biggest reservoirs, fell to unprecedentedly low levels, threatening water and power shortages for seven states and Mexico.
Ethan Miller / Getty Images

Politics is the art of human beings solving problems without killing each other. Sometimes those efforts fail, never more memorably than in these classic political thrillers. They run the gamut from true storytelling to entirely fictional yet still believable nail-biting stories.

‘The Conversation’ (1974)
Arriving the same year that a wiretapping scandal brought down the administration of President Richard Nixon, director Francis Ford Coppola’s quietly devastating thriller (pictured above) follows a surveillance wizard hired to record a, yes, conversation. Coppola’s haunting masterpiece is a “chillingly prescient and masterfully crafted character study with themes that echo louder than ever in our hyper-surveilled world,” said Andy Punter at InSession Film. (Prime Video)

‘Argo’ (2012)
Ben Affleck directs and stars in this zippy thriller about the clandestine efforts to exfiltrate six American diplomats who managed to escape before they became hostages at the U.S. embassy during the Iranian Revolution. Affleck “displays a fearlessness when it comes to mixing genre” in this “part-comic, part-thriller narrative” whose mostly-but-not-entirely-true twists and turns “ensure your nails are down to the quick by the end credits,” said Amber Wilkinson at Eye for Film. (Prime Video)

‘Official Secrets’ (2019)
The combination of arrogance and doctored intelligence that led the United States and its allies into the 2003 Iraq War is almost made for Hollywood. This film turns a “historical footnote with potent resonance” into a “compelling tale of injustice on an individual and global level,” said Peter Travers at Rolling Stone. (Netflix)