A British couple who had been on a motorcycle tour around the world were detained in Iran, Britain’s foreign office said on Saturday. The couple, Craig and Lindsay Foreman, were last heard from on social media in early January. But this week, Iranian state media reported that two British nationals had been detained on suspicion … Read more
The American vice president visited a concentration camp on Thursday afternoon. He laid a wreath at the foot of a statue, made the sign of the cross and paused before a memorial wall where in multiple tongues, including German and English, the words “Never Again” were written. JD Vance told reporters he had read about … Read more
Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany on Saturday accused Vice President JD Vance of unacceptably interfering in his country’s imminent elections on behalf of a party that has played down the atrocities committed by the Nazis 80 years ago. A day after Mr. Vance stunned the Munich Security Conference by telling German leaders to drop their … 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
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
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
Vice President JD Vance’s defense of a divisive far-right political party in Germany was the latest jarring example of his willingness to embrace a provocative political issue and showed how hard-line immigration policy has emerged as the thread tightly knitting together a global patchwork of populist movements. The thrust of Mr. Vance’s speech on Friday … Read more
Eleanor Maguire, a cognitive neuroscientist whose research on the human hippocampus — especially those belonging to London taxi drivers — transformed the understanding of memory, revealing that a key structure in the brain can be strengthened like a muscle, died on Jan. 4 in London. She was 54. Her death, at a hospice facility, was … Read more
Five technicians secured by wires worked near the curved top of an arched steel structure that loomed the equivalent of 40 stories high, trying to extinguish the last bits of smoldering insulation left by a drone strike. It was snowing; the temperature was below freezing; the steel was covered with ice. The hole from the … Read more
The top foreign policy official for the European Union had a blunt assessment on Friday of the Trump administration’s apparent willingness to give Russia’s leader, Vladimir V. Putin, much of what he wants in Ukraine, even before negotiations to end the three-year war begin. “It’s appeasement,” the official, Kaja Kallas, declared at the Munich Security … Read more