Hamas freed three more Israeli hostages on Saturday in a ceremony marked by some of the same provocative theatrics used by the Palestinian militants in previous releases. It was the sixth round of a tense series of hostage-for-prisoner exchanges that are part of a 42-day cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas that went into effect … Read more
Before she waded into the water to take a holy dip among the teeming throngs at the world’s largest religious gathering, Draupadi Devi reached into her blouse and handed her husband a small pouch to safeguard. Inside was a slip of paper with his phone number scrawled on it, so she would have it if … Read more
Around 10:30 p.m. on a Friday in late January, David Fernando, a pharmacist, was working behind a counter at a drugstore in São Paulo when a man walked up to him and flashed a gun. “He asked for money from the register and medications from the refrigerator,” Mr. Fernando said. These days, pharmacists in São … Read more
Six months after the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny died in a Russian prison above the Arctic Circle, Konstantin A. Kotov woke up to find his Moscow apartment under siege. After breaking down the door, Russian officers set about confiscating everything to do with Mr. Navalny, down to a campaign button from the activist’s 2018 … Read more
A few years ago, the translator Jeremy Tiang was browsing in a bookstore in Singapore when he came across an unusual book of stories. Written in Chinese under a pen name, the book, “Delicious Hunger,” drew on the author Hai Fan’s 13 years fighting in the jungles of Malaysia and southern Thailand as a guerrilla … Read more
The senior American diplomat slipped quietly into Belarus, a police state run by a strongman reviled for decades in the West, traveling by car across the border for meetings with President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko and the head of his KGB security apparatus. It was Mr. Lukashenko’s first meeting with a senior State Department official in … Read more
On Thursday morning, a 24-year-old Afghan refugee drove into a union demonstration in central Munich, injuring nearly 40 people. The police say they are investigating whether the driver, who confessed to a deliberate attack, acted alone. The attack happened just 10 days before federal elections that have been focused on migration, and the crash could … Read more
Paddling through choppy waters under cloudy skies, Adrián Simancas and his father were packrafting only a few yards from each other when something huge lunged, mouth open, from the waves below. A humpback whale appeared to gulp Mr. Simancas down, then rolled over into the waters of Chilean Patagonia. Moments later, Mr. Simancas bobbed back … Read more
President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an excerpt from an NBC interview published Friday night that Ukraine had a low chance of surviving Russia’s assault without U.S. support. In the excerpt from “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker,” Mr. Zelensky said: “Probably it will be very, very, very difficult. And of course, in all the difficult … Read more
The nonprofit groups track the imprisonment of Chinese political dissidents and the expansion of state censorship. They speak out for persecuted minority groups like the Uyghurs and Tibetans. And they help sustain attention on Beijing’s crackdown of freedoms in Hong Kong. The future of their work is now in question as Elon Musk’s government efficiency … Read more