In Melbourne, masked men set fire to a storied synagogue. In Sydney, a synagogue was defaced with red swastikas spray painted along the fence, while a day care center was torched and scrawled with antisemitic slurs under the cover of night. A rash of antisemitic attacks in recent weeks has rattled the Jewish community in […]

The North Korean soldiers fighting for Moscow in Russia’s Kursk region are assigned their own patches of land to assault. Unlike their Russian counterparts, they advance with almost no armored vehicles in support. When they attack, they do not pause to regroup or retreat, as the Russians often do when they start taking heavy losses, […]

When two longtime business partners established a subsidiary 50 years ago to make zinc out of an industrial complex set up by South Korea’s government, they settled on an unusual division of power. The new venture, Korea Zinc, would be managed by the Choi family. The existing parent company, Young Poong, would be run by […]

A year ago, India was bouncing back from a recession caused by Covid-19 with a spring in its step. The country had overtaken China as the most populous country, and its leaders were declaring India the world’s fastest-growing major economy. This was music to the ears of foreign investors, and to India’s prime minister, Narendra […]

Bimla Bissell, the indispensable and well-connected social secretary to four American ambassadors to India who was a kind of unofficial ambassador herself, a shrewd local guide to the culture and complexities of a sprawling country, died on Jan. 9 at her home in Delhi. She was 92. The cause was complications of diabetes, her daughter, […]

In one of its final acts, the Biden administration secured the release of two Americans held in Afghanistan in a prisoner swap for a Taliban member imprisoned in the United States on narcotics charges. The Taliban government freed Ryan Corbett and William Wallace McKenty in exchange for Khan Mohammed, who was released from a U.S. […]

An executive order signed by President Trump on Monday that suspends refugee admissions to the United States puts at risk thousands of citizens of Afghanistan who helped the American mission during the war there, the president of a California-based resettlement group said. The order would affect not only scores of Afghans who are now in […]

Trump took office, vowing ‘America’s decline is over’ Donald Trump completed his remarkable return to power yesterday as he was sworn in as the 47th U.S. president. “The golden age of America begins right now,” Trump declared in his Inaugural Address delivered at the Capitol, shortly after he took the oath of office. Much as […]

TikTok got an apparent reprieve from being forced to shut down, but Americans on Monday were still using and downloading Xiaohongshu, the Chinese social media app that surged in popularity last week in anticipation of TikTok’s closure. TikTok, owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance, went dark in the United States ahead of a federal […]

The long ride from the international airport to the city of Yogyakarta on the Indonesian island of Java at least has the virtue of easing a jet-lagged traveler through a liminal zone of rice-paddy plains and jungle hills. Then the buzzy metropolis closes round, and everything is all business and hot tropical urban disarray. Streets […]