World

Yesterday Argentina banned all sales of airline tickets to, from, or within Argentina until September 1. Other South American countries have banned commercial flights, but Argentina’s ban extends furthest into the future. For more,...

Five weeks after launching an aggressive nationwide lockdown to combat the coronavirus pandemic—coupled with one of the most robust economic relief packages of any country—New Zealand's government on Monday announced that the new coronavirus...

Media outlets in Japan and Taiwan are reporting that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has died. This has not been confirmed by the North Korean government or by sources in South Korea. Earlier in...

There may only be one news story at the focus of the world’s attention at the moment, but there are events happening around the planet that, in any other circumstance, would have raised some serious...

Global speculation spiked further Saturday over the health condition and whereabouts of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un after his lack of public appearances touched off a fake social media hashtag—an all-caps #KIMJONGUNDEAD—that proceeded...

Thanks to the lack of people, tourism and boat traffic in and around Italy, wildlife that typically kept away appears to have returned.  As one Twitter uses says, “Here's an unexpected side effect of...

A group of economists and policy experts on Wednesday called on President Donald Trump to immediately lift the United States' crippling sanctions against Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries, warning that the economic warfare—in...

Donald Trump’s racism is not going over well in this new coronavirus-sensitized world in which we now live. We all know now that he’s had an epiphany and decided to take covid-19 seriously, but before that he was calling it the “Wuhan virus” and on March 2 he took the step of expelling 60 Chinese journalists as part of the “tit for tat statecraft that has become a hallmark of the strategic rivalry between the United States and China, encompassing trade, military and cybersecurity confrontations, tensions over human rights and the coronavirus epidemic.” So today, China addressed that issue and struck back in kind. New York Times: China instructed American journalists “whose press credentials are due to expire before the end of 2020” to “notify the Department of Information of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs within four calendar days starting from today and hand back their press cards within ten calendar days.” It went on to specify that the American journalists now working in China “will not be allowed to continue working as journalists in the People’s Republic of China, including its Hong Kong and Macao Special Administrative Regions.” […] In a translated statement, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman said the decisions “are entirely necessary and reciprocal countermeasures that China is compelled to take in response to the unreasonable oppression the Chinese media organizations experience in the U.S. They are legitimate and justified self-defense in every sense. What the U.S. has done is exclusively targeting Chinese media organizations, and hence driven by a Cold War mentality and ideological bias.” That observation is spot on. The Trump administration’s “foreign policy” was determined from the get-go, with the Musliim Ban by two ideologues, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, without substantial government experience, let alone executive. That sent the tone for the entire regime and the most recent Wuhan virus insults have not helped Chinese-U.S. relations one whit. Relations between the two superpowers are declining and it would appear that in the face of global recession and the potential for millions of deaths, that other countries have had enough of Trump’s bullshit and are now going to fight back. At least that is a legitimate knee jerk response to China’s actions today. The Times said that this story would be updated as it developed.  

Authorized by President Donald Trump, U.S. forces late Thursday carried out a wave of airstrikes across Iraq purportedly targeting an Iran-linked militia that the Pentagon claims was behind a rocket attack that killed two...

Before humans began hunting whales, scientists believe that there were around 250,000 blue whales in the Southern Hemisphere. By 1967, when a ban on hunting the blue whale was introduced, that number was down to around 1,500....