Almost 23 years ago, heavily armed federal agents wearing body armor seized five-year-old Elián González from his relatives’ home in Miami and returned him to his father, ultimately to be taken back to Cuba. The photo of the incident was a painful reminder of the fraught...
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Thai authorities sentenced a man to jail for two years for peddling calendars featuring rubber ducks in monarchic regalia because insulting the Thai king is illegal in the southeast Asian country. As the BBC noted, the rubber duck happens to be a symbol of the...
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It’s hard to say which is more remarkable about the recent peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran – the reconciliation between Sunni and Shiite Muslim powers who have been at odds over the future of the Middle East since at least the late 1980s,...
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Three years ago, people around the world began lockdowns that shuttered businesses, schools, government offices, and other institutions that had been the hallmarks of everyone’s lives. Now, after Covid vaccines and other measures have reduced – but not eliminated – fears surrounding the virus, the...
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Campaign signs festooned the streets of Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, in anticipation of parliamentary elections on March 19. The signs feature candidates pledging to reduce housing density in the Central Asian country’s cities, reduce prices amid worldwide inflation, expand energy networks, and improve...
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The civil war in Yemen kept a rusting supertanker off the coast of the Middle Eastern country from delivering one million barrels of oil. Now, in an extraordinary move, wrote Agence France-Presse, the United Nations has purchased a new tanker that will pump out the...
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A young man traveling on the train from Athens to the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki on Feb. 28 was having trouble speaking to his mother on the phone. “Mum, there are too many people on the train,” he said, according to Agence France-Presse. “I’ve...
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Officials in Ghana’s finance ministry recently said talks to restructure its debt to China were “highly cordial and fruitful” – but, however, not concluded. Ghana owes China almost $2 billion. As Reuters reported, while the West African country technically is in default because it has missed...
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Vietnamese lawmakers elected Vo Van Thuong as the Southeast Asian country’s new president in early March, almost two months after his predecessor, Nguyen Xuan Phuc, was ousted due to a string of corruption scandals stemming from the coronavirus pandemic. Officials allegedly bilked expatriate Vietnamese citizens seeking...
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Talks between Azerbaijani officials and the ethnic Armenian community in Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave that Azerbaijan recently seized from Armenia in a brief war in 2020, are “encouraging news,” the European Union’s special representative for the South Caucasus told Radio Free Europe recently. Even so, five people...
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The United Nations has appointed Ecuadoran diplomat Maria Isabel Salvador to help Haiti rebuild after a devastating earthquake in 2010, the dissolution of parliament in 2020, the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, and the subsequent explosion in crime, gang violence and the breakdown...
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Sudan’s military junta has been colluding with an affiliate of Russian military contractor the Wagner Group to plunder the strife-torn African nation’s gold, robbing impoverished Sudanese citizens of critical funds while bolstering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The European Union recently slapped sanctions on Wagner’s subsidiary in...
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In the 1960s, British leaders were in the final stages of dismantling the empire that their forebears had built over the preceding 400 years. Yet, as Africans, Indians, and others were establishing their new nations, Chagossians were losing control of their small island archipelago in...
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Hungarian objections to Finland and Sweden entering NATO might delay a vote of the allies on accepting the two Nordic countries into the pact. As Reuters reported, Finnish and Swedish leaders appealed to join NATO last year after Russia invaded Ukraine. Adding new members requires unanimity...
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Few countries have been more stalwart in their opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than Estonia. A former Soviet republic and current NATO member with a nearly 200-mile-long border with Russia, Estonia has for years been ringing alarm bells about Russian espionage, military provocations and other...
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When voters in Paraguay go to the polls on April 30, they will vote for every high office in the land – president, vice president, all 80 lawmakers in the Chamber of Deputies and all 45 senators, as well as every governor of the country’s...
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The Arab nations of the Persian Gulf are normalizing relations with Israel, loosening some of their harsh Islamic orthodoxies, and gradually transitioning their oil-dependent economies to a post-carbon future. These changes could herald a new era of openness and prosperity. Or they could turn out to...
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Move over, quiet quitting. Employees who are sick and tired of bosses calling them after the end of the business day and at weekends are pushing for laws to maintain boundaries between work and non-work time. In Kenya, for example, lawmakers have proposed a law that...
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Indian billionaire Gautam Adani used to claim that the success of his energy and port facilities conglomerate, the Adani Group, reflected the rising power of his massive country’s economy. Then, in January, the New York-based Hindenburg Research investment firm accused Adani of fraud and stock manipulation, and...
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As the US and Germany send advanced armored vehicles to help Ukraine’s cause, Russia has lost almost half of its battle tanks, reported the Guardian recently. Half of Russia’s airborne troops have died in the war between the two former Soviet republics, added Newsweek. Russian...
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