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,” …
The United States is ending its financial support for family planning programs in developing countries, cutting nearly 50 million women off from access to contraception. This policy change has attracted little attention amid the wholesale dismantling of American foreign aid, but it stands to have enormous implications, including more maternal …
China, Russia and India have dispatched emergency teams and supplies to earthquake-ravaged Myanmar. So have Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam. The United States, the richest country in the world and once its most generous provider of foreign aid, has sent nothing. Even as President Trump was dismantling the U.S. Agency for …
When she finds it hard to focus, Nilab jots down her worries on slips of paper and pins them to her wall, a strategy she picked up in a seminar on mental health at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul. She makes a mental note to deal with the …
“How old do you think these chickens are?” Levy Phiri asked the crowd, after scooping four multicolored birds out of a crate and setting them down in the courtyard outside the primary school in Kambvumbe, a village in Zambia’s rural Eastern Province. The roughly 200 people who came out in …
Years before President Trump returned to the White House, his budget chief, Russell T. Vought, began mapping out a plan to shrink the federal government. In Mr. Vought’s design, spending would be slashed by about $9 trillion over the next decade. Entire federal programs — from housing vouchers to student …
In her first briefing as White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt said she was “committed to telling the truth from this podium every single day.” Moments later she announced that the new administration had blocked a $50 million contract for condoms in Gaza. “That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer …
President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia are expected to speak on Tuesday as Washington pushes for a cease-fire in Ukraine. Mr. Trump said the topics would include power plants and “dividing up” Ukrainian assets. The call will be the first known conversation between the two leaders since …
Two days before last Christmas, Dr. Pierre S. Prince took an exciting new job as director of Haiti’s largest public hospital, which the United States spent tens of millions of dollars renovating and is so deep in gang territory that it has been closed for a year. Dr. Prince, a …
Unable to calm student-led protests that just kept growing, Serbia’s strongman leader, Aleksandar Vucic, reached for some tried-and-tested scapegoats, unleashing his media attack dogs on foreign-financed groups that have nettled him for years. But what started as a familiar ritual of intimidation against groups that document issues like corruption, human …