French prosecutors requested a seven-year prison sentence against former President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday, in a trial over accusations that his 2007 campaign received illegal financing from the Libyan government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Such a sentence would be unprecedented in modern French history for a former president. Mr. Sarkozy, a conservative politician who led … Read more
One week after the Turkish government arrested the mayor of Istanbul, who is the top rival to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the political opposition on Wednesday pressed new tactics to fight what it called an assault on the country’s democracy. The arrest has set off nightly demonstrations that have drawn hundreds of thousands of antigovernment … Read more
South Korea on Wednesday admitted for the first time that in its rush to send children to American and European homes decades ago, its adoption agencies committed widespread malpractices, including falsifying documents, to make them more adoptable. The findings by South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a government agency, which said children were sent away … Read more
Eighteen months ago, in the aftermath of Hamas’s attack on Israel, Israelis suspended their internal conflicts to form a united military front against a shared external threat. Now, that semblance of common cause has been cast aside. Beyond its borders, Israel has resumed fighting on four fronts — in Gaza, Lebanon, the occupied West Bank … Read more
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan entered this year facing a knot of political problems with little precedent in his two decades at the summit of power in Turkey. Voters were angry about persistently high inflation. His political party’s popularity had sunk. And his opponents had coalesced around the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, who made it … Read more
As families of victims mourned the loss of loved ones and kept an anxious vigil in hospitals on Monday, the authorities in North Macedonia said they were investigating possible official misconduct in the case of a deadly inferno that killed at least 59 people over the weekend. Officials said that Club Pulse, the nightclub where … Read more