South Korea’s Covid-19 success story started with failure
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…
Why South Africa is still so segregated
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…
5 things to know about the new US climate commitment
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…
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…
Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident challenging Putin, explained
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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…