SEOUL, South Korea — A South Korean court on Monday rejected an extradition request by the United States for a South Korean citizen convicted of running one of the world’s biggest child pornography websites on the dark web. The South Korean, Son Jong-woo, 24, completed an 18-month sentence in April for operating a child pornography […]
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HONG KONG — A former employee of the British Consulate in Hong Kong who said he was tortured by the authorities in mainland China last year has been given asylum in Britain. The disappearance last year of the consulate worker, Simon Cheng, during the height of pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong highlighted the issues that […]
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TAIPEI, Taiwan — China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has long tried to convince Taiwan that unification was a historical inevitability, alternately enticing the democratic island with economic incentives while bluntly warning that any move toward formal independence would be answered with military force. Now, the incentives are gone and the warnings seem more ominous following Mr. […]
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The sweeping new national security law that China imposed on Hong Kong, aimed at stamping out opposition to the ruling Communist Party in the former British colony, is as “devastating” as some critics feared, a human-rights activist said on Wednesday. Conceived in secrecy and passed on Tuesday without serious public input, the law sets up […]
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A year after protesters in Hong Kong jubilantly defied Chinese rule, the national leader, Xi Jinping, has opened a long-term counteroffensive in the territory, signing a new security law on Tuesday that sets obedience to Beijing above the former British colony’s civil freedoms. Conceived in secrecy and passed with intimidating speed, the law has ignited […]
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SYDNEY, Australia — The Australian authorities raided the home and office of a federal lawmaker on Friday as part of a sweeping investigation into allegations of a Chinese government plot to manipulate the politics and policy of Parliament. Shaoquett Moselmane, a Labor politician from a Sydney suburb, recently praised China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, for […]
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My favorite story in John Bolton’s book about the Trump Fun House — sorry, White House — was that President Trump appealed to China’s leader to buy more U.S. agricultural products to boost Trump’s farm vote and his re-election. Donald: Stop begging. Both Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have decided to vote for you. Don’t […]
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SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea’s printing shops have been working overtime to revive a favorite weapon of Cold War-era psychological warfare: sending millions of propaganda leaflets, cigarette butts and other trash to South Korea, the North’s official news agency said on Monday. North Korea has also prepared 3,000 balloons to carry the leaflets across […]
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NEW DELHI — Tensions between Indian and Chinese troops have simmered since early May in the remote, high Karakoram mountains that separate India’s northern Ladakh region from the alkaline desert of Aksai Chin, which is claimed by India but controlled by China and abuts its Xinjiang province. It is a forbidding landscape of cold deserts, […]
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Chinese officials said on Friday they had indicted two Canadians on charges of espionage, escalating Beijing’s punitive campaign against Canada over the arrest of a top executive of the Chinese technology giant Huawei. The two men, Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat, and Michael Spavor, a business consultant, were detained in 2018 as relations between China […]
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India broke his silence on Wednesday over the 20 Indian soldiers killed this week by Chinese forces along the nations’ disputed border, warning that his country was capable of “giving a befitting reply.” In a short televised speech, Mr. Modi said that “the sacrifice of our soldiers will not be […]
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The killing of 20 Indian soldiers at the hands of Chinese troops armed with rocks and wooden clubs along a disputed border high in the Himalayas was a startling culmination of years of skirmishes between military forces from both countries. But the burst of deadly violence — the first in the region in more than […]
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NEW DELHI — An Indian Army officer and two soldiers were killed by Chinese troops late Monday in clashes along the disputed India-China border, Indian officials said, raising tensions between the world’s two most populous nations. Preliminary reports on Tuesday indicated that the soldiers had not been shot, but had been killed in a rock-throwing […]
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JERUSALEM — In a watershed article in a leading Israeli newspaper, a top diplomat from the United Arab Emirates warned the Israeli public on Friday that unilateral annexation of West Bank territory would endanger Israel’s warming ties with Arab countries. Writing in Friday’s Yediot Ahronot, Yousef al-Otaiba, the Emirates’ ambassador to the United States, appealed […]
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WASHINGTON — Relief workers are broadly restricted from using United States funding to buy surgical masks, gloves and other protective medical gear to confront the coronavirus overseas, in order to keep that equipment available for health providers in America, according to regulations issued Tuesday by the United States Agency for International Development. The new rules […]
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China and India have stepped back from a tense confrontation along their shared border high in the Himalayas, pledging to resolve disputes over territory through diplomatic and military channels, India’s Foreign Ministry said on Sunday. The announcement came a day after military commanders from the two sides met near Chushul, a border village at the […]
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MOSCOW — Russia on Friday denounced a decision by the Czech Republic to expel two Russian diplomats over an alleged ricin poison plot that Czech officials now believe was a hoax engineered as part of internal quarrels in Moscow’s embassy in Prague. The Russian Embassy described the Czech order giving the diplomats 48 hours to […]
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A former Swedish ambassador to China went on trial on Friday in Stockholm, charged with overstepping the boundaries of her role by arranging what prosecutors said were secret back-room meetings over the fate of a detained Hong Kong bookseller who is a Swedish citizen. The charges against the diplomat, Anna Lindstedt, relate to meetings she […]
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China is in the midst of a fierce battle to salvage its reputation. Under fire for their part in the pandemic and reproached for their move to assert control over Hong Kong, the country’s officials are in firefighting mode. Their approach has two parts. First, sell the China story — emphasizing its success in the […]
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NEW DELHI — High in the Himalayas, an enormous fistfight erupted in early May between the soldiers of China and India. Brawls at 14,000 feet along their inhospitable and disputed frontier are not terribly unusual, but what happened next was. A few days later, Chinese troops confronted Indian soldiers again, this time at several other […]
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ImagePresident Xi Jinping of China reaching to vote in favor of new national security laws for Hong Kong during the National People’s Congress in Beijing on Thursday.Credit…Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press HONG KONG — I am the chairman and majority owner of Apple Daily, one of Hong Kong’s largest newspapers, and since the city’s return to China […]
Read More ImagePresident Xi Jinping of China reaching to vote in favor of new national security laws for Hong Kong during the National People’s Congress in Beijing on Thursday.Credit…Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press HONG KONG — I am the chairman and majority owner of Apple Daily, one of Hong Kong’s largest newspapers, and since the city’s return to China […]
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CAIRO — A string of victories by Turkish-backed forces in western Libya this week dealt a heavy blow to the ambitions of the aspiring strongman Khalifa Hifter and signaled the arrival of Turkey as a potentially decisive force among the foreign powers battling for supremacy in the Middle East’s biggest proxy war. Libyan fighters backed […]
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JERUSALEM — China’s ambassador to Israel, who took up his post in February, was found dead at his home on Sunday morning in a coastal suburb north of Tel Aviv, officials said. The ambassador, Du Wei, was found in his bed in Herzliya by an embassy worker, officials said. The cause of death of Mr. […]
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PARIS — A French-Iranian academic who has been detained in Iran for almost a year was sentenced on Saturday to six years in prison on national security charges, according to her lawyer. The academic, Fariba Adelkhah, was sentenced “to five years jail for gathering and conspiring against Iran’s national security,” the lawyer, Saeid Dehghan, told […]
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“Evil.” “Lunacy.” “Shameless.” “Sick and twisted.” China has hit back at American criticism over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic with an outpouring of vitriol as acrid as anything seen in decades. The bitter recriminations have plunged relations between China and the United States to a nadir, with warnings in both countries that the bad […]
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The two countries said on Friday — Thursday night, Washington time — that their top trade and financial officials had held talks via conference call, their first since the coronavirus pandemic ballooned in late January. Although President Trump had suggested this week that the White House would take a skeptical look at whether China was […]
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WASHINGTON — Four months after a mysterious new virus began its deadly march around the globe, the search for a vaccine has taken on an intensity never before seen in medical research, with huge implications for public health, the world economy and politics. Seven of the roughly 90 projects being pursued by governments, pharmaceutical makers, […]
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BERLIN — Germany on Thursday banned the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah from carrying out any activity on its soil and declared the group a terrorist organization, in a move, long sought by Israel and the United States, that deals a blow to its ability to operate in Europe. Interior Minister Horst Seehofer ordered raids on […]
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Ecuador is home to the highest per-capita death toll from Covid-19 in Latin America and the Caribbean. Its largest city and commercial hub, Guayaquil, has seen a five-fold increase in mortality rates, with reports of corpses abandoned in the streets. The country entered into a recession after the price of oil—Ecuador’s largest single revenue source—crashed […]
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Emergencies clarify. At an interpersonal level, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed our values and assumptions, the state of relationships, our judgments of responsibility and risk. Politically, it has thrown our social and economic priorities into painfully sharp relief. The language we use to make sense of this public health emergency is revealing, too. Pandemic rhetoric […]
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