The greatest challenger to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule is a man whose name the dictator won’t say and whom he has tried to kill: Alexei Navalny. Having defiantly returned to Russia after surviving a brazen assassination attempt only to be immediately detained and thrown in jail upon arrival, the opposition leader and anti-corruption crusader Read more about Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident challenging Putin, explained[…]

This story is one in our six-part series The Pandemic Playbook. Explore all the stories here. Every January or February, Le The Linh and his wife pack their children into their car and drive 80 miles to visit family in Haiphong, a port city east of Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, for Lunar New Year. But this Read more about Vietnam defied the experts and sealed its border to keep Covid-19 out. It worked.[…]

Since leaving government at the end of the Obama administration, former Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes has spent the last four years calling for Democrats to put climate change at the center of US foreign policy. He and his colleagues at National Security Action, a now-closed progressive foreign policy group filled with former Obama Read more about Ben Rhodes is worried about Joe Biden’s climate change and China policies[…]

The bodies of the two brothers were left for more than a day. Their families knew they were there, but the soldiers wouldn’t let them collect the bodies. The soldiers left behind witnesses, though: two boys, barely teens, tied to a tree nearby, after the soldiers forced them to spend the night on the ground, Read more about “Dying by blood or by hunger”: The war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, explained[…]

President Joe Biden became the first US president to formally refer to atrocities committed against Armenians as a “genocide” on Saturday, 106 years after the 1915 start of an eight-year-long campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by the Ottoman Empire that left between 1 million and 1.5 million Armenians dead. Previous presidents have refrained from Read more about Why Biden’s statement recognizing the Armenian genocide is a big deal[…]

By now, you’ve probably seen the videos: dark skies, illuminated by exploding balls of light, like alien spaceships doing battle or a terrifying fireworks display, scored by air raid sirens. This is the view of Israel’s Iron Dome, the aerial defense system the country uses to intercept incoming short-range rockets. The intensifying conflict this week Read more about Israel’s Iron Dome, explained by an expert[…]

The contrast is growing more galling by the day. In the US, more than half of adults have received at least one vaccine dose, Covid-19 transmission is the lowest it’s been in 11 months, and many Americans are partying and traveling and reveling in their new vaccinated status. Meanwhile, thousands of unvaccinated people in less Read more about The US should give away its vaccine doses. Now.[…]

During last week’s European championship soccer match between Germany and Hungary, the rainbow was everywhere on the German side. The German goalie wore a rainbow armband; the team’s fans donned rainbow wigs and waved rainbow flags. All of this was directed at the opposing side: The Germans were protesting a new Hungarian law banning LGBTQ Read more about How hatred of gay people became a key plank in Hungary’s authoritarian turn[…]

Tunisia’s president has pushed the country’s fledgling democracy into crisis. Over the weekend, President Kais Saied fired the country’s prime minister and suspended Parliament in what his political opponents have called a coup. But he says the move was justified after thousands of Tunisians took to the streets in recent days to protest the government’s Read more about The political crisis in Tunisia, explained by an expert[…]

One of the emerging tenets of the Biden presidency is that the United States and China are locked in ideological conflict over the fate of democracy. In March, during his first press conference as president, he declared that “this is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies.” In April, Read more about The biggest threat to democracy isn’t coming from China. It’s coming from within.[…]