The outgoing Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte will become the next NATO secretary general, the alliance said Wednesday. His appointment comes after Romanian President Klaus Iohannis – his only rival for the position – announced last week that he had withdrawn from the running. The term of current secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, runs out on October 1. Rutte will inherit ...
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange walked free for the first time in 12 years after a US judge signed off on his unexpected plea deal on Wednesday morning. Assange walked out of the courtroom as a free man into the bright Saipan sunshine, raising one hand to a gaggle of the world’s press before departing by car for the airport where ...
The trial of Evan Gershkovich, the first American journalist to be arrested on espionage charges in Russia since the Cold War, began Wednesday morning in a closed hearing that has been condemned by his newspaper and the United States. Gershkovich, 32, was arrested while reporting for the Wall Street Journal, which he joined in January 2022, just weeks before Russia ...
Beside a desk scattered with soldering pieces, loose wires and electronic parts, Choi’s computer screen tracks wind conditions and the GPS location of some unlikely parcels: massive “smart” balloons he has sent floating into North Korea. For many years, South Korean activists and North Korean defectors have sent balloons to the North, loaded with propaganda material criticizing dictator Kim Jong ...
Five Americans have been arrested in Turks and Caicos over the past six months under gun control laws that make bringing firearms or ammunition into the territory without prior permission from police a crime. Michael Lee Evans, of Texas; Sharitta Grier, of Florida; Bryan Hagerich, of Pennsylvania; Ryan Tyler Watson, of Oklahoma; and Tyler Wenrich, of Virginia, were all accused ...
A high risk of famine persists in Gaza and the situation “remains catastrophic” as the war between Israel and Hamas continues, according to a report released Tuesday by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). Nearly half a million are projected to face catastrophic levels of hunger, the most severe level on the IPC scale where people “experience an extreme lack of ...
Pollsters were surprised by the burst of populism in 2016, but many now think they shouldn’t have been. In the United States and United Kingdom, swaths of voters in deprived regions – places “left behind” by globalization – were given the chance to stick it to the system, and they took it. Why was anyone surprised? Pollsters have now been ...
Israel’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered the government to draft ultra-Orthodox Jews into the military, delivering a blow to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that has the potential to unravel his ruling coalition. The court also ordered the government to withdraw funding from any religious schools, or yeshivas, whose students do not comply with draft notices. “At this time there is ...
A Japanese woman and her child were among three people stabbed by a man on Monday in front of a school bus at a bus stop in eastern China, according to Japanese authorities. The mother and child did not suffer life-threatening injuries and were taken to hospital to receive care, the official said. The Japanese consulate in nearby Shanghai said ...
China’s Chang’e-6 lunar module returned to Earth Tuesday, successfully completing its historic mission to collect the first ever samples from the far side of the moon in a major step forward for the country’s ambitious space program. The reentry module “successfully landed” in a designated zone in China’s northern Inner Mongolia region just after 2 p.m. local time, according to ...