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Hong Kong transformed in a year. Starting in June 2019, the city convulsed with protests over a controversial extradition bill. That expanded into a pro-democracy movement that sought to push back against China’s efforts to further erode the city-state’s already tenuous autonomy, and the freedoms that went with it. By June 2020, the power of […]

Twelve of the richest European soccer teams came up with an ingenious scheme to make even more money: Instead of taking part in a longstanding tournament with poorer and mostly weaker teams, they would create their own exclusive “Super League” to attract global interest, prestige, and cash. There was just one problem: Fans hated the […]

This story is one in our six-part series The Pandemic Playbook. Explore all the stories here. Last summer in Berlin, Christine Wagner could safely do something Covid-19 prevented much of the world’s population from doing: go to a movie theater. The possibility of strangers sitting together, indoors, for hours, taking off masks to eat popcorn […]

The protests erupted Sunday in San Antonio de los Baños, a town outside Cuba’s capital city, Havana. They spread from there, with demonstrations bursting out across the country, from the streets of Havana to the countryside. They became the largest anti-government protests to happen in the country in decades — a remarkable show of resistance […]

President Joe Biden’s pick to be the third-highest civilian leader at the Pentagon is already facing a tough confirmation challenge a week before his hearing — and it’s mostly because he staunchly supports the Iran nuclear deal. A spokesperson for Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told me […]

This story is one in our six-part series The Pandemic Playbook. Explore all the stories here. DAEGU, South Korea — Jo Hye-min stepped off the train and into a situation she had only seen in movies: a completely, and eerily, empty station. It was February 2020, when the threat posed by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 […]

For decades, South Africa was under apartheid: A series of laws divided people by race. Then, in the 1990s, those laws were dismantled. But many of the barriers they created continue to divide South Africans by skin color — determining their quality of life, access to jobs, and wealth. Racial division was built into the […]

The United States has an aggressive new commitment for fighting climate change: cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent relative to 2005 levels in less than a decade. The announcement came at the White House’s Earth Day summit on Thursday, where 40 world leaders met virtually to discuss and announce their new […]

The greatest challenger to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule is a man whose name the dictator won’t say and whom he has tried to kill: Alexei Navalny. Having defiantly returned to Russia after surviving a brazen assassination attempt only to be immediately detained and thrown in jail upon arrival, the opposition leader and anti-corruption crusader […]

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 […]