Dozens of people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo after torrential rains flooded the capital, Kinshasa, in the last few days, and destroyed hundreds of homes. The Ndjili River running through the megacity of 17 million people, one of the largest on the continent, burst its banks and submerged major roads, including Lumumba…
Before President Barack Obama was sworn into office in 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu called the Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas out of the blue and asked for a lesson in what was essentially a foreign tongue: the language of Democrats. “I speak Republican and you speak Democratic, and I need the intermediary,” said Mr. Netanyahu, who was…
His father was marched to a forest and killed, like so many victims of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Before he was led away, the father told his young son, Uon Chhin, to stand up and speak the truth, even if it might compromise his liberty. Decades later, Mr. Uon Chhin became a journalist during…
An 800-mile rail corridor stretching from Angola’s northern border to the Atlantic Ocean was former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s signature project in Africa, meant to counter Chinese influence and reshape America’s engagement with the continent. When President Trump came into office this year, he quickly moved to dismantle decades of American aid to Africa,…
The United States is ending its financial support for family planning programs in developing countries, cutting nearly 50 million women off from access to contraception. This policy change has attracted little attention amid the wholesale dismantling of American foreign aid, but it stands to have enormous implications, including more maternal deaths and an overall increase…
Three days after Myanmar’s worst earthquake in more than a century ravaged the remote, war-torn city of Sagaing, razing monasteries and apartment buildings, help was still just starting to trickle in. The city’s 300,000 residents had been left to largely fend for themselves after the 7.7-magnitude quake struck, damaging roads and prompting the authorities to…
China, Russia and India have dispatched emergency teams and supplies to earthquake-ravaged Myanmar. So have Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam. The United States, the richest country in the world and once its most generous provider of foreign aid, has sent nothing. Even as President Trump was dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, he said that…
Myo Zaw and his team of volunteer rescue workers were the first to arrive at the site where a three-story house had collapsed in Mandalay, a little after 8 p.m. on Saturday. They were digging through the rubble with their bare hands when they heard the voice of a girl. It was faint but clear….
When she finds it hard to focus, Nilab jots down her worries on slips of paper and pins them to her wall, a strategy she picked up in a seminar on mental health at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul. She makes a mental note to deal with the issues at a scheduled time…
When President Joseph R. Biden Jr. convened democracy summits at the White House in 2021 and 2023, he pointedly disinvited President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a man he had once described an “autocrat” who deserved to be driven from office by voters. On Tuesday, President Trump offered a much rosier assessment of the Turkish…