Vietnam defied the experts and sealed its border to keep Covid-19 out. It worked.
This story is one in our six-part series The Pandemic Playbook. Explore all the stories here. Every January or February, Le The Linh and his wife pack their children into their car and drive 80 miles to visit family in Haiphong, a port city east of Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, for Lunar New Year. But this…
Ben Rhodes is worried about Joe Biden’s climate change and China policies
Since leaving government at the end of the Obama administration, former Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes has spent the last four years calling for Democrats to put climate change at the center of US foreign policy. He and his colleagues at National Security Action, a now-closed progressive foreign policy group filled with former Obama…
“Dying by blood or by hunger”: The war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, explained
The bodies of the two brothers were left for more than a day. Their families knew they were there, but the soldiers wouldn’t let them collect the bodies. The soldiers left behind witnesses, though: two boys, barely teens, tied to a tree nearby, after the soldiers forced them to spend the night on the ground,…
Why Biden’s statement recognizing the Armenian genocide is a big deal
President Joe Biden became the first US president to formally refer to atrocities committed against Armenians as a “genocide” on Saturday, 106 years after the 1915 start of an eight-year-long campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by the Ottoman Empire that left between 1 million and 1.5 million Armenians dead. Previous presidents have refrained from…
Israel’s Iron Dome, explained by an expert
By now, you’ve probably seen the videos: dark skies, illuminated by exploding balls of light, like alien spaceships doing battle or a terrifying fireworks display, scored by air raid sirens. This is the view of Israel’s Iron Dome, the aerial defense system the country uses to intercept incoming short-range rockets. The intensifying conflict this week…
The US should give away its vaccine doses. Now.
The contrast is growing more galling by the day. In the US, more than half of adults have received at least one vaccine dose, Covid-19 transmission is the lowest it’s been in 11 months, and many Americans are partying and traveling and reveling in their new vaccinated status. Meanwhile, thousands of unvaccinated people in less…
Israel’s unraveling
Bat Yam is an Israeli seaside suburb, nestled just south of Tel Aviv. It’s primarily known for its pretty beachfront. On Wednesday night, Bat Yam erupted in violence. A mob of Jewish extremists surrounded a man they presumed was an Arab and pummeled him mercilessly. Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster, aired live footage of the unnamed…
The political crisis in Tunisia, explained by an expert
Tunisia’s president has pushed the country’s fledgling democracy into crisis. Over the weekend, President Kais Saied fired the country’s prime minister and suspended Parliament in what his political opponents have called a coup. But he says the move was justified after thousands of Tunisians took to the streets in recent days to protest the government’s…
The biggest threat to democracy isn’t coming from China. It’s coming from within.
One of the emerging tenets of the Biden presidency is that the United States and China are locked in ideological conflict over the fate of democracy. In March, during his first press conference as president, he declared that “this is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies.” In April,…
Biden’s immigration policy is hampering Haiti’s recovery from back-to-back crises
Already grappling with coronavirus, a political crisis stemming from President Jovenel Moïse’s assassination last month and resulting gang violence, Haiti was hit with a two-punch 7.2-magnitude earthquake and tropical depression this week, leaving almost 2,000 dead and thousands more injured or missing. Thousands are without shelter because some 83,000 homes have been destroyed. International aid…