When Donald J. Trump was first in the White House trying to strike a trade deal with China, Beijing tried to curry favor with the American president by banning all variants of the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl. Now, as China and the United States are deadlocked in a bitter trade war that has roiled the…
The first poem I memorized was “Pinkle Purr” by A.A. Milne. I was around seven years old when I encountered it and was immediately enchanted. It’s a children’s poem, four stanzas, all with the same hypnotic AA/BB/AA rhyme scheme. It’s a poem about a kitten, Pinkle Purr, and his mother, Tattoo, and their changing relationship…
In the days surrounding Pope Francis’ death, Cardinal Pietro Parolin was everywhere. The No. 2 figure in the Vatican, he visited Francis in the hospital, and then helped seal the papal apartments after the pope died. He welcomed cardinals he knew from around the world to the pope’s funeral, talking to former President Joseph R….
Sirens blaring, a truckful of armed men trailing in its wake, the black sport utility vehicle that sliced sharklike through the Syrian town of Ashrafieh Sahnaya on Friday morning was impossible to miss. Government forces had retaken control from the armed groups that turned the town into a sectarian battlefield for two days this week,…
The cardinals who have traveled to Rome to elect the next pope at a conclave next week sometimes look as ideologically polarized as many secular voters around the globe. At first glance, they appear to split along the kinds of left-right lines that characterize political contests elsewhere. Many conservative Roman Catholic Church leaders disagreed with…
Major science groups said Friday that they would publish work for the country’s flagship report on climate change, a project that the Trump administration threw into limbo by dismissing hundreds of scientists who had been working on it. The American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society said they would publish work originally meant for…
Paramilitary forces killed more than 100 civilians in an attack on a city in southern Sudan on Thursday, according to an association of doctors, in the latest accusation of a large-scale atrocity of the country’s civil war. Communication with people in the city, Nahud, was largely cut off starting on Thursday, and the group’s claim…
After more than three years of war, President Trump proposed a peace plan for Russia and Ukraine in late April that would have the United States recognize Moscow’s 2014 takeover of the Crimean peninsula. Michael D. Shear, a former White House correspondent for The New York Times in London, explains how the proposal, which Ukraine…
For months, Elvira Kaipova had not heard from her son Rafael, a Russian soldier deployed in Ukraine. Military officials responded to her repeated questions about his whereabouts by saying he was on active duty and therefore incommunicado. Then, late last November, two days after they again made that assertion, she learned that he’d gone missing…
The walls surrounding Ghana’s national cathedral are aging plywood. Its spires are yellow construction cranes, which have not moved in years. It frequently reverberates with singing — the singing of a choir of frogs that moves in whenever the cathedral’s half-finished foundations fill with rainwater. Ghana’s former president, Nana Akufo-Addo, spent around $58 million of…
