Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed Friday that “the crisis in Ukraine” might have been prevented if Donald Trump was in power at the time, saying he was ready to talk with the new US president about the conflict. Trump has long claimed that the war in Ukraine would not have happened under his watch, but Friday marked the first time ...

Thirteen-year-old Zakariya Barbakh had spent most of his life shuffling between hospitals across Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Israel. Born without a lung, he had struggled to breathe. Doctors had predicted he would need a transplant if he were to reach adulthood. But the last 15 months of war in Gaza had made that impossible. When the ceasefire between ...

Hours after Donald Trump’s chilly inauguration in Washington, Taiwan’s parliament voted to freeze billions of dollars in defense spending, in a move some worry could frustrate the famously transactional president, who has already demanded Taipei pay “more” for US protection. The US is the main ally and arms supplier of Taiwan, a democratically ruled island and semiconductor powerhouse, which China’s ...

Theto Ngobeni was just 18 days old when doctors first inserted a shunt into the back of her head to drain excess fluid accumulating in her brain. She was born with a condition known as hydrocephalus, which doctors said was caused by a listeriosis infection that her mother contracted while pregnant. Now seven, Theto has already had six operations to ...

Taiwan plans to cull up to 120,000 green iguanas, with supporters urging humane methods to bring down the animal’s population, which is wreaking havoc on the island’s agricultural sector. Around 200,000 of the reptiles are believed to be in the island’s southern and central areas, which are heavily dependent on farming, according Chiu Kuo-hao of the Forestry and Nature Conservation ...

Micheál Martin became Ireland’s taoiseach (prime minister) for the second time in his political career on Thursday, a day later than planned. The Irish parliament descended into uproar on Wednesday, its first day back in session after weeks of political horse-trading and coalition-building, following the country’s general election in November. Wednesday’s order of business was scheduled to start with the ...

Italy’s high court has upheld the remaining conviction against American Amanda Knox, who was jailed and later acquitted of the 2007 murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher. Knox was convicted of slandering her former boss Patrick Lumumba by falsely accusing him of Kercher’s murder. Knox, 20 at the time, signed two statements prepared by police regarding her accusation against ...

The female Palestinian inmates were made to kneel in a line on a cold evening last Sunday on the grounds of Israel’s Ofer Prison in the occupied West Bank. “This is not a victory for you. We have destroyed and killed in Gaza, in Yemen, in Syria, in Iran. We killed (your) leadership,” one, Rula Hassanein, recalled hearing in a ...

A British teenager who murdered three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance event was jailed for at least 52 years on Thursday, for an atrocity prosecutors said was so violent it appeared he had tried to decapitate one of the victims. On Monday, Axel Rudakubana, 18, admitted carrying out the killings last July in the northern English town of ...

A Chinese man who carried out a knife attack in eastern China last June that wounded a Japanese woman and her child and killed a bus attendant trying to protect them has been sentenced to death, according to a Japanese official. A court in the Chinese city of Suzhou ruled that the 52-year-old unemployed man, surnamed Zhou, stabbed the trio ...