Doctors in Argentina were already on high alert when a pregnant Russian woman showed up at the hospital on March 21 with two other women to give birth. Hospital staff in the Patagonian city of Bariloche had seen them before – four days earlier, they struggled to answer questions about where they lived and how they were related. The 22-year-old ...

Does America want its friends back? After three months of insulting, tariffing and even threatening to annex some of its best allies, the Trump administration suddenly needs some help. The US President has now escalated a full-on trade clash with China that he doesn’t seem to know how to win. So the administration is rushing to work out how to ...

The United Nations’ emergency and disaster response agency will reduce its global workforce by 20% and scale back operations in nine countries, as it confronts a severe funding crisis and escalating global needs, it announced on Friday. In sobering letter to staff shared on the agency’s website, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) head Tom Fletcher outlined ...

“Women and dried pollock need to be beaten every three days for better taste” – so goes an old saying that was common in South Korea in the 1960s when Choi Mal-ja was growing up in a small city in the country’s southeast. Back then, male violence against women was widely accepted. So when Choi bit off part of the ...

Survival guides, stockpiling and mass evacuation drills. Europe is scrambling to prepare its citizens for the growing threat of conflict arriving on its doorstep. Several European nations have been offering sobering guidance in recent months – envisioning garages and subway stations transformed into bunkers and promoting psychological resilience. One overarching message is the need for a change in the population’s ...

An explosion occurred outside the offices of Hellenic Train in Athens, Greek police said on Friday, adding there were no immediate reports of injuries. Police cordoned off the area after two Greek media organizations received warning calls that an explosive device would go off within 35 minutes, police officials said. A suspicious-looking bag was spotted outside the building which was ...

Voters in oil-rich Gabon headed to polling stations on Saturday in a presidential election that the country’s military rulers hoped would legitimize their grip on power. It’s the first election since a 2023 military coup ended a political dynasty that lasted over 50 years. Analysts have predicted an overwhelming victory for the interim president who led the coup. Some 920,000 ...

New York state’s top financial regulator struck a $40 million settlement Thursday with Block Inc., the parent of Cash App, the popular money transmission service, after having found the company had “serious compliance deficiencies” related to its anti-money laundering program and transaction monitoring processes. The deficiencies at Block, some involving cryptocurrencies, “created a high-risk environment vulnerable to exploitation by criminal actors,” ...

Israel has released a Palestinian man who was controversially arrested at the age of 13, after he spent nearly a decade in jail. “Ahmad has completed his 10-year sentence and he is a free person now,” Zabarqa said. “The Israeli authorities have imposed restriction on the family as far as holding a welcome ceremony for Ahmad or talking to the ...

When discussions began over releasing Israeli hostages shortly after the October 7 attack by Hamas, the negotiators tasked to strike a deal were mostly intelligence and security professionals. But in February, Israel made an important change that those now involved say has had a profound slowing effect on the discussions to resurrect the broken ceasefire: The file was taken over ...