Record-breaking numbers of Chinese military planes probed the airspace near Taiwan over the weekend, prompting Taiwanese fighter jets to scramble and adding muscle to Beijing’s warnings that it could ultimately use force to take hold of the island. The sorties by nearly 80 People’s Liberation Army aircraft on Friday and Saturday, as China observed its […]
PARIS — On a recent afternoon, the Rue de Rivoli looked like this: Cyclists blowing through red lights in two directions. Delivery bike riders fixating on their cellphones. Electric scooters careening across lanes. Jaywalkers and nervous pedestrians scrambling as if in a video game. Sarah Famery, a 20-year resident of the Marais neighborhood, braced for […]
MOSCOW — Mikheil Saakashvili, a former president of Georgia and once a prominent figure in the politics of post-Soviet countries, was arrested on Friday on charges he called politically motivated after returning secretly to Georgia following eight years in exile. Mr. Saakashvili’s return, like much of his tenure in power, had the trappings of high-stakes […]
VILNIUS, Lithuania — It was never a secret that China tightly controls what its people can read and write on their cellphones. But it came as a shock to officials in Lithuania when they discovered that a popular Chinese-made handset sold in the Baltic nation had a hidden though dormant feature: a censorship registry of […]
There is a high risk of a surge in new coronavirus cases and deaths in European countries with insufficient vaccination coverage if they relax Covid-19 restrictions in the next few weeks, according to a new report by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control. So far, just over 62 percent of the total population […]
KABUL, Afghanistan — The health care system in Afghanistan is on the brink of collapse, international aid groups warned this week, threatening to deepen the country’s humanitarian crisis just as temperatures begin dropping. Thousands of health care facilities have run out of essential medicines. Afghan doctors have not been paid in two months, with no […]
The Pan American Health Organization has struck a deal with the Chinese manufacturer Sinovac to buy millions of Covid-19 vaccines for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean as part of an effort to make more shots available in a region where access has been highly unequal. The agency, part of the World Health Organization, […]
The world’s top central bankers acknowledged that inflation, which has spiked higher across many advanced economies this year, could remain elevated for some time — and that though they still expect it to fade as pandemic-related supply disruptions calm, they are carefully watching to make sure that hot price pressures do not become more permanent. […]
TOKYO — If popularity were the deciding factor, there would be a clear front-runner to become the next prime minister of Japan. Polls have found that the public favors Taro Kono, the cabinet minister overseeing Japan’s coronavirus vaccine rollout, by at least two to one in the race to lead the governing Liberal Democratic Party […]
TEHRAN — Amir, an engineering master’s student standing outside Tehran University, had thought about going into digital marketing, but worried that Iran’s government would restrict Instagram, as it had other apps. He had considered founding a start-up, but foresaw American sanctions and raging inflation blocking his way. Every time he tried to plan, it seemed […]
