Before President Barack Obama was sworn into office in 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu called the Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas out of the blue and asked for a lesson in what was essentially a foreign tongue: the language of Democrats. “I speak Republican and you speak Democratic, and I need the intermediary,” …
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan entered this year facing a knot of political problems with little precedent in his two decades at the summit of power in Turkey. Voters were angry about persistently high inflation. His political party’s popularity had sunk. And his opponents had coalesced around the mayor of Istanbul, …
President Trump’s intensifying conflict with the federal courts is unusually aggressive compared with similar disputes in other countries, according to scholars. Unlike leaders who subverted or restructured the courts, Mr. Trump is acting as if judges were already too weak to constrain his power. “Honest to god, I’ve never seen …
A federal judge in Washington denied a request by the Trump administration to cancel a hearing for Monday evening where he planned to press lawyers about whether officials have violated his order barring the deportation of any detained noncitizens — including several suspected Venezuelan gang members — with little or …
When Son Jun-ho, a key midfielder for South Korea’s World Cup soccer team, signed with a Chinese club, he was an indication of China’s ambition to dominate the world’s most popular sport. But after Chinese police officers detained him two years later, accusing him of bribery and match-fixing, he became …
The Trump administration has blocked key parts of the federal government’s apparatus for funding biomedical research, effectively halting progress on much of the country’s future work on illnesses like cancer and addiction despite a federal judge’s order to release grant money. The blockage, outlined in internal government memos, stems from …
The clubby insular world of corporate law has entered the culture war. First, Elon Musk started railing against Delaware, which for more than a century has been known as the home of corporate law, after the Delaware Chancery Court chancellor, Kathaleen McCormick, rejected his lofty pay package last year. Eventually …
In mid-2023, TikTok had just eluded an effort in Congress to ban the video app, the latest Houdini-like escape for the young tech company. For several years, during both Republican and Democratic administrations, lawmakers and officials had trained their sights on the app, saying its Chinese ownership posed a national …
There is arguably no statesman who cuts such a striking political resemblance to Donald J. Trump than Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president. The two men built their brash political brands on insulting rivals, attacking the press, doubting science and vowing to unroot political elites. When they were each running for …