Global affairs, politics, and the stories shaping nations.
Gloria Steinem died this week at 92, leaving behind a career that carried her from a childhood trailer home to the center of American feminism, and a piece of advice about money that she never stopped repeating.
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Hawaii's junior senator moved fast and methodically to secure the votes to succeed Dick Durbin as Senate Democratic whip, and the maneuvering has already made him the person to watch for the party's top job down the line.
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Harvard University's prolonged confrontation with the Trump administration is proving costly even as the school notches victories in court, according to NYT US. Despite winning key legal rulings agai…
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A brutal air war with Iran and years of arming Ukraine have hollowed out Western stocks of Patriot and THAAD interceptors, and the factories racing to refill them need years, not months.
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The drones over the Baltics and the sabotage across Europe are not random harassment. They are a patient probe of the alliance's nerve, and the West is being asked a question it would rather not hear, whether its promise of mutual defence still means anything.
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Larry Sabato has spent his career reading the moods of the American electorate. His verdict on the present is bleak, that the country is more bitterly partisan than at any point in over a hundred years, and that the usual mechanisms for cooling it down may no longer work.
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Five years after the Taliban swept back to power, the guns have fallen silent across a country that knew almost nothing but war for two generations. The calm is real. So is the price, and it is being extracted above all from Afghan women.
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In a pointed address in Sydney, Penny Wong argued that a nation which turns against its own diversity cannot hope to prosper in the region around it. The warning was aimed at the hard right at home, and at the company Australia keeps abroad.
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Richard Moore ran Britain's foreign intelligence service through five of the most unsettled years in living memory. His parting message is that in an age of China, Russia and artificial intelligence, the West's rarest asset is not technology but the trust it can build with its friends.
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Arab oil states are racing to lay pipelines that skirt the Strait of Hormuz, and the effort is understandable. Yet steel and sand will not solve a problem that is ultimately about Iran, and the cheaper insurance is a bargain the Gulf has so far been unwilling to strike.
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Islamabad has asked Washington for a currency backstop worth up to 10 billion dollars, and the timing is no accident. Having played peacemaker between America and Iran, Pakistan is now presenting the bill, though the money may come with strings that reach all the way to Beijing.
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As the planet heats, air conditioning is turning from a comfort into a necessity, and into a source of leverage. Whoever controls the machines, the refrigerants and the electricity behind them will hold quiet power over how billions endure a warming world.
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Hundreds of blue hulled trawlers sit at anchor in contested waters, catching almost nothing. They are Beijing's quietest weapon in the South China Sea, and the reason the region keeps sliding closer to a confrontation nobody has declared.
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Britain has its seventh prime minister in a decade, and he arrives without a single vote cast in his name. Andy Burnham inherits a party level with Reform in the polls and a country that has stopped listening. His honeymoon will be short.
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Hunger is spreading through the towns closest to the fighting, yet the convoys sent to relieve it are now being hunted by drones. Aid workers describe a slow squeeze in which delivering food has become an act of nerve.
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The president has run through his choices for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and every path left to him carries a price. Fees on shipping look like extortion to allies, a naval campaign risks American lives, and diplomacy keeps collapsing under Iranian fire.
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The peninsula Moscow seized in 2014 was meant to be an unsinkable base for its war on Ukraine. A campaign of drones and missiles has turned that prize into a liability.
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President Volodymyr Zelensky says he will replace Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko as part of a broad government shake up, framing the changes as a reset for a country deep into its war with Russia.
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As the United States turns 250, the fashionable talk is of decline. But a superpower barely a few generations old still holds the tools to shape the century, if it can avoid wounding itself.
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Oleg Deripaska, one of Russia's richest men, has become an unlikely critic of the Kremlin's economic course. His alarms say as much about the country's condition as about his own ambitions.
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An oyster farmer and Marine veteran was supposed to be the party's answer to the age of the outsider. His implosion in Maine has left Democrats scrambling and rethinking how they choose their fighters.
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Washington is thinning its forces in Europe and shifting its gaze to Asia. That leaves the alliance racing to work out whether Europeans can hold the eastern flank on their own.
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Iran has opened a week of state funeral rites for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader killed in a wartime strike in February, drawing vast crowds in Tehran and delegations from more than 100 nations.
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Another Supreme Court term ends with the presidency stronger than it began. A run of rulings has steadily widened what a president can do, and narrowed who can stop him.
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Washington is forcing Chinese firms out of the United States while quietly working to hold on to the very technology they brought. It is a tricky balance, keep the know-how, lose the owner.
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After months of strikes and stalemate, Iran and its adversaries have reached a thin agreement that halts the bombing and lets the oil flow again. It buys calm, but it settles almost nothing.
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The most powerful earthquake to strike Venezuela in roughly a hundred years has hit a nation hollowed out by years of crisis. The disaster is testing a state that was struggling to function even before the ground shook.
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In 1956 a botched war over the Suez Canal quietly ended Britain's reign as the world's banker. Ray Dalio thinks today's stalemate with Iran, set against a mountain of debt, could mark a similar turn for the United States.
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Cheap data and a new wave of AI tools are reaching the villages where most Indians still live. The result is a quiet revolution in how farmers earn, families bank, and a billion people get online.
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More than four years of war and sanctions have left deep cracks in Russia's economy, from raging inflation to a drained workforce. Yet the long predicted collapse keeps refusing to arrive.
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Even as its economy matures and its population ages, China puts in hours that the rich world long ago abandoned. The grind has powered its rise, but the same culture of overwork is starting to exact a heavy price.
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After decades of stagnation, the return of inflation and rising interest rates has revived the profits of Japan's biggest lenders. The good times are real, yet the same forces lifting them could just as easily turn.
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Higher oil and gas prices, driven by fear of disruption in the Gulf, have lifted the fortunes of Norway's state energy champion. The boost is real, the timing is awkward, and the long game is far from settled.
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