President Joe Biden’s pick to be the third-highest civilian leader at the Pentagon is already facing a tough confirmation challenge a week before his hearing — and it’s mostly because he staunchly supports the Iran nuclear deal. A spokesperson for Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told me … Continue reading "GOP opposition to the Iran deal is threatening to sink a Biden Pentagon nominee"

President Joe Biden on Thursday launched military airstrikes against two Iranian-backed militias in Syria in retaliation for a recent spate of aggressions, including a rocket attack in Iraq last week that injured US troops and killed a Filipino contractor. In the strike, Biden’s first known military action since taking office, the US hit seven targets … Continue reading "Biden launched airstrikes against Iran-backed militias in Syria to “send a message”"

Ghana just received its first Covid-19 vaccine doses from Covax, the global initiative created to help ensure all countries have vaccine access. A total of 600,000 doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine arrived in Ghana’s capital Accra on Wednesday. It is the official start of a long worldwide immunization campaign. Ghana is the first country to … Continue reading "Ghana is the first country to receive vaccines from the global Covax initiative"

The United States has an aggressive new commitment for fighting climate change: cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent relative to 2005 levels in less than a decade. The announcement came at the White House’s Earth Day summit on Thursday, where 40 world leaders met virtually to discuss and announce their new … Continue reading "5 things to know about the new US climate commitment"

The greatest challenger to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule is a man whose name the dictator won’t say and whom he has tried to kill: Alexei Navalny. Having defiantly returned to Russia after surviving a brazen assassination attempt only to be immediately detained and thrown in jail upon arrival, the opposition leader and anti-corruption crusader … Continue reading "Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident challenging Putin, explained"

This story is one in our six-part series The Pandemic Playbook. Explore all the stories here. Every January or February, Le The Linh and his wife pack their children into their car and drive 80 miles to visit family in Haiphong, a port city east of Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, for Lunar New Year. But this … Continue reading "Vietnam defied the experts and sealed its border to keep Covid-19 out. It worked."

Since leaving government at the end of the Obama administration, former Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes has spent the last four years calling for Democrats to put climate change at the center of US foreign policy. He and his colleagues at National Security Action, a now-closed progressive foreign policy group filled with former Obama … Continue reading "Ben Rhodes is worried about Joe Biden’s climate change and China policies"

The bodies of the two brothers were left for more than a day. Their families knew they were there, but the soldiers wouldn’t let them collect the bodies. The soldiers left behind witnesses, though: two boys, barely teens, tied to a tree nearby, after the soldiers forced them to spend the night on the ground, … Continue reading "“Dying by blood or by hunger”: The war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, explained"

President Joe Biden became the first US president to formally refer to atrocities committed against Armenians as a “genocide” on Saturday, 106 years after the 1915 start of an eight-year-long campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by the Ottoman Empire that left between 1 million and 1.5 million Armenians dead. Previous presidents have refrained from … Continue reading "Why Biden’s statement recognizing the Armenian genocide is a big deal"

By now, you’ve probably seen the videos: dark skies, illuminated by exploding balls of light, like alien spaceships doing battle or a terrifying fireworks display, scored by air raid sirens. This is the view of Israel’s Iron Dome, the aerial defense system the country uses to intercept incoming short-range rockets. The intensifying conflict this week … Continue reading "Israel’s Iron Dome, explained by an expert"