Georgian lawmakers voted in a far-right former soccer star as the country’s next president on Saturday, amid mounting popular anger over the government’s halt to EU accession talks. Mikheil Kavelashvili, 53, is a former MP for the ruling Georgian Dream party and played for the English soccer team Manchester City during the 1990s. He was the only candidate in the ...
The bruised and battered bodies inside the morgue of Mujtahid Hospital are hard to look at — tangible evidence of the brutal regime of toppled Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. But crowds of desperate people wait to see them, hoping finally for an answer to what happened to a loved one. “Where are they?” pleads one woman. “My mother, she’s been ...
Nine years ago, the UN established 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which included ending poverty and hunger. Yet last year, nearly 750 million people faced hunger — an increase of around 152 million compared to 2019. The G20 Leaders’ Summit in November marked the launch of the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty, an initiative aiming to eradicate hunger and ...
In the days following the fall of President Bashar al-Assad, Syrians have crowded his regime’s notorious detention facilities in a desperate search for loved ones who were jailed or forcibly disappeared. Thousands of prisoners have now been freed, many after decades of incarceration in brutal conditions. Yet many more of the missing have yet to be found, and hopes are ...
A former Chinese soccer star and coach of the country’s national men’s team has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for corruption, state media reported on Friday. Li Tie, 47, who played for the English Premier League Everton alongside Wayne Rooney in the early 2000s, is the biggest name to fall foul of a sweeping crackdown on rampant graft ...
Russia launched a new widespread attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure overnight, forcing the country to implement emergency power outages, Ukrainian authorities said on Friday. “The enemy continues its terror. Once again, the energy sector across Ukraine is under massive attack,” Ukrainian energy minister German Halushchenko said on his official Facebook page. The extent of the damage had yet to be ...
In the months before Iranian ballistic missiles struck the Nevatim Airbase in October, Iran dispatched spies to film and photograph the site in southern Israel, according to Israeli authorities. The alleged operatives were neither highly trained nor seemed especially suspicious to the people who knew them in their day-to-day lives. Many of them appeared to struggle financially. And yet, Israeli ...
The sentence was made on the grounds that the crime was a “major sexual infringement,” Judge Tetsuro Sato of Naha District Court said on Friday, according to public broadcaster NHK. “The girl’s testimony that she told her age by gestures and other means is sufficiently credible from the security camera footage,” the judge said. “The defendant was aware that the ...
Not many children can say they took their first steps on board a yacht in the Arctic’s northwest passage. But Tom can. He spent three of the first four years of his life at sea, with his parents Ghislain Bardout and Emmanuelle Périé-Bardout — ocean explorers and founders of Under The Pole, an organization on a mission to document the ...
France’s embattled President Emmanuel Macron has appointed Francois Bayrou as prime minister, he announced on Friday, as he seeks to calm a political crisis that has left his authority dwindling by the day. Macron’s office made the announcement a week after the former office holder Michel Barnier lost a vote of no confidence, forcing him to submit his resignation. But ...