Even before global antidoping leaders confirmed this week that Russia would be banished from top-level international sport for four years, the athletes’ committee they consulted was expressing frustration that the punishment did not go far enough. That athletes’ group, led by Beckie Scott of Canada, an Olympic gold medalist in …
Read More »Romanian Springs Tap a Region’s Deep History
One morning in the small Transylvanian mountain resort of Baile Homorod, in Romania, travelers and residents gathered under the shade of a wooden canopy near three streams of sparkling spring water to fill up a row of empty bottles. This is no ordinary water. It flows from volcanic mountains nearby …
Read More »Live Updates: U.K. Votes in General Election
How does the election work? Britain’s voters head to the polls in their local areas on Thursday to cast ballots for members of Parliament in the second general election to be held since the country voted to leave the European Union. And while Brexit has dominated the agenda — with …
Read More »Election, Boris Johnson, Labour: Your Thursday Briefing (British Election Edition)
(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the sign-up.) Good morning. We’re focusing on today’s momentous British election, with help from our London newsroom. We also have news of the European Union’s climate politics and Aung San Suu Kyi’s testimony at The Hague. A polarized Britain votes in Brexit’s …
Read More »Photos of the U.K. in the Shadow of Brexit
Britain is dragging itself through its fifth major election in five years: a third general election, even though Parliaments are supposed to last for five years; and two referendums, one on Scottish independence, which lost, and the other on Brexit, which won. The Leave victory in June 2016 has defined …
Read More »They Came to Play Table Tennis. They Were Deported at Gunpoint in the Dark.
And to throttle movement still further, the Croatian government has employed a policy of violent nighttime deportations, seizing many migrants suspected of entering the country from Bosnia and forcing them back across the border without letting them apply for asylum. In interviews in Bosnia this week with dozens of migrants, …
Read More »With Many Dents to Its Image, Nobel Peace Prize Is Hit With a Few More
The Nobel Peace Prize has long been contentious, beginning with its origins in the will of Alfred Nobel, the 19th-century inventor of dynamite. But it is extraordinary that two winners are almost simultaneously battling accusations of behavior that is widely regarded as antithetical to the spirit and purpose of the …
Read More »Greta Thunberg Is Time Person of the Year for 2019
Time on Wednesday named the young climate activist Greta Thunberg as its person of the year, in a nod to the next generation’s surging prominence in worldwide efforts to prevent the worst effects of climate change. It was an irony, perhaps, that the designation, announced on television and online, is …
Read More »Overlooked No More: Bessie Coleman, Pioneering African-American Aviatrix
Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. Bessie Coleman was the first African-American woman to earn a pilot’s license, thrilling crowds by performing dangerous maneuvers in a rickety airplane and representing, literally, the heights that African-Americans could attain. …
Read More »Boris Johnson Tries On a New Campaign Persona: Disciplined
As he has throughout his career, Mr. Johnson still affects a carefree insouciance about the details. In Uttoxeter, he said he needed to wrap up his remarks because, “I now have to go,” pausing for several awkward seconds, as he looked around for a prompt from an aide, “somewhere else.” …
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