Biden-Trump: a choice by default?
This Thursday evening, June 27, a highly anticipated debate was held: the first debate between Joe Biden, the current President of the United States, and Donald Trump, the Republican candidate and former tenant of the White House. The first time that the two adversaries found themselves facing each other since 2020.
Live on CNN, in a room without an audience, Joe Biden and Donald Trump clashed on many subjects that in principle guide a campaign: inflation, immigration, health system, abortion, etc.; but in reality, what seemed to interest the spectators of this debate was elsewhere: which of the two candidates will be the most convincing and will make people forget their advanced age for one and their criminal affairs for the other?
Because for several months, the age of the two presidential candidates has been at the heart of the debates: isn’t Joe Biden, 81, too old to run for a second term? He who we are used to seeing stumble and hesitate. Donald Trump, 78, assures us: he is in great shape. This is what he was saying again yesterday to his opponent: ‘I did two cognitive tests’, everything is fine, he assures us. Enough to make us (almost) forget the criminal convictions that weigh on him.
Will Joe Biden be able to convince despite his hesitations and speech difficulties? As for Donald Trump, will he manage to make people forget his previous record and his convictions?
Assange free: good news for freedom of information?
We all remember this image: Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, on the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He had found refuge there in June 2012 when the United Kingdom had tried to extradite him to Sweden, where he was at the heart of a rape and sexual assault case. Sweden, the country he had chosen for its protection of journalists’ sources as he was preparing to release revelations – kept top secret – on the way in which the United States was waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had then been confined for 7 years thanks to the international convention guaranteeing the inviolability of embassies. But after 7 years of enjoying refugee status on Ecuadorian soil in London, Ecuador suddenly no longer wanted him. Now delivered to the United Kingdom – we are now in 2019 – Assange is taken to the high-security prison of Bemarsh in London. From then on, a fight began for Assange and his lawyers to prevent his extradition to the United States where he faces nearly 175 years in prison for “espionage”. But finally, after several years of internment and legal battles, the Australian whistleblower who has become a symbol of the protection of whistleblowers in a democracy, was released on June 25, 2024. He arrived this Wednesday, June 26, in the Northern Mariana Islands, the American territory closest to Australia, where he is expected to plead guilty to “conspiracy to obtain and disclose information relating to national defense” in exchange for regaining his freedom. He should be able to return to Australia, his country of origin, shortly. But is this release good or bad news for the protection of journalists and their sources? Are we witnessing, with Assange’s judgment, a regression or a step forward in the field of whistleblowers? And then, another question, are democratic states right to protect their defense secrets at the risk of endangering the freedom of journalists?
For the last show of the season, we asked our guests to choose a work that had an impact on them this year. Here are their choices:
Magali Lafourcade : Impunity by Hélène Devynck, Seuil, 2022 (Points, 2023),
Thierry Pech : Translate Hitler by Olivier Mannoni, Éditions Héloïse D’Ormesson, 2022
Sylvie Kauffmann: The future is being played out in Kyiv by Karl Schlögel, Gallimard, 2024.
Thomas Gomart : After climate change, thinking about history by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gallimard, 2023
