Press play to listen to this article
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are strange bedfellows — sometimes close strategic partners, but sometimes bitter regional adversaries.
For now, the Turkish leader is casting himself as a middleman, as he visited the Dolmabahçe Palace on the Bosphorus waterfront last week to personally welcome Ukrainian and Russian negotiators gathering for peace talks.
In assuming this role, Erdoğan is treading a delicate tightrope. The relationship between Turkey and
Volodymyr Zelensky has today made an emotional appeal for Ukraine to be admitted to the EU as his people were killed in an increasingly bloody onslaught by Russia, raising a one-fisted salute and declaring ‘glory to Ukraine’ as the European parliament gave him a long round of applause.
The Ukrainian president – who has become a symbol of courage, composure and defiance in recent days – addressed parliamentarians in Brussels via video-link from Kyiv, which is currently facing down a
Near the height of the war against the Islamic State in Syria, a sudden riot of explosions rocked the country’s largest dam, a towering, 18-story structure on the Euphrates River that held back a 25-mile-long reservoir above a valley where hundreds of thousands of people lived.
The Tabqa Dam was a strategic linchpin and the Islamic State controlled it. The explosions on March 26, 2017, knocked dam workers to the ground and everything went dark. Witnesses say one bomb punched
Press play to listen to this article
VAN, Turkey — A squad of fully armed Turkish officers is gathered outside an old abandoned house on a recent night in November. They’ve called in reporters to document what’s about to happen — a raid on a “shock house” where it’s believed Afghans are squatting after crossing into the country illegally.
The neighbors are watching the scene unfold, peering out through windows, standing on balconies. The whole procedure appears familiar to them.
Press play to listen to this article
PISKY, Ukraine — Machine gun fire pulsed in the distance as Elgard, a 23-year-old junior lieutenant in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, walked a muddy road lined with bombed-out houses in this wrecked, abandoned village on the edge of Donetsk, the regional capital held by pro-Russian separatists.
Clutching his Kalashnikov at the ready, Elgard, who goes by the call signal “Svan,” pivoted instinctively at an intersection and scanned for danger in the direction of
Press play to listen to this article
BERLIN — In an age of us-versus-them politics, soon-to-be ex-German Chancellor Angela Merkel might be the only prominent international leader the global demos can actually agree on.
From Poland to Peru, clear majorities profess a favorable view of the East German physicist-turned-politician, whose 16-year tenure running Europe’s largest country draws to a close next week.
In contrast to her best-known contemporaries, who span ex-U.S. president George W. Bush to Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and
In late 2020, Facebook researchers came to a sobering conclusion. The company’s efforts to curb hate speech in the Arabic world were not working.
In a 59-page memo circulated internally just before New Year’s Eve, engineers detailed the grim numbers.
Only 6 percent of Arabic-language hate content was detected on Instagram before it made its way onto the photo-sharing platform owned by Facebook. That compared with a 40 percent takedown rate on Facebook.
Ads attacking women and the LGBTQ community
Press play to listen to this article
As EU leaders prepare to meet their Western Balkan counterparts on Wednesday, they might want to ask the European Commission’s point man for an impartial view of the region’s efforts to meet democratic standards and one day join the bloc.
Then again, they might not.
According to more than a dozen officials from multiple institutions and an analysis of internal documents, European Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi has overseen a push to play down concerns
But Lang had supplied the wrong address, so Gaschl spied on a random office of people waiting for lunch. The CIJA has no affiliation with The Hague Institute. It isn’t even based in the Netherlands.
Austria’s Justice Ministry agreed that the CIJA’s dossier amounted to “sufficient” ground for an investigation—as long as the B.V.T. confirmed that Khaled al-Halabi, the Vienna resident, was the man in the file. (After three weeks with no update, the judge who had attended the
