Global affairs, politics, and the stories shaping nations.
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.
4 min read
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.
5 min read
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.
4 min read
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.
5 min read
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.
4 min read
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.
4 min read
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.
4 min read
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.
3 min read
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.
4 min read
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.
4 min read
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.
4 min read
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.
4 min read
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.
4 min read
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.
6 min read
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.
6 min read
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.
6 min read
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.
6 min read
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.
6 min read
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.
6 min read
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.
5 min read
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.
5 min read
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.
5 min read
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.
5 min read