WORLD NEWS
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Lindsay Clancy's lawyer is arguing that there wasn't enough evidence to prove she killed her three children. It's a striking turn after a lengthy trial that focused more on her mental state than on whether she took th...
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BBC World
Jonathan McKinsey's in-laws, who are both 77 years old, face multiple charges including first-degree murder.
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BBC World
Clancy's defence lawyer wants her to be cleared of murdering her three children in 2023 but prosecutors say the state proved guilt.
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The sudden change was precipitated because of Chinese displeasure over one document that the U.S. had planned to show.
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Her appointment by the king makes her only the second woman to lead a government in the Arab world.
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Origin Genomics aims to prove that the potential benefits of its technology for editing disease-causing genes in human embryos outweigh the risks.
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The company that runs the Eiffel Tower said the removal of female staff during the visit earlier this month was "unacceptable".
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BBC World
The ban is part of a number of proposals that must be approved in parliament within 30 days.
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BBC World
Crowds cheered on Ben Dancer as completed his challenge and he has now gone to hospital for a check-up
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About World News
What lands on this page
World News carries international stories that are not confined to one region and stories from regions without a dedicated page here, which in practice means Africa and Latin America alongside genuinely global subjects. Those global subjects include migration, pandemics, climate negotiations, food and energy supply, and the multilateral institutions handling them. The organizing idea is interdependence: these are stories where an event in one country produces consequences somewhere it has no obvious connection to, which is precisely the sort of thing regional pages are structurally poor at carrying.
The institutions that recur
A limited cast of organizations appears throughout international coverage and it helps to know what each can actually do. The United Nations provides a forum and runs humanitarian agencies; its Security Council can authorize binding measures but only when its permanent members do not veto. International financial institutions lend to countries in difficulty on conditions that are frequently the real story. International courts hear cases between states and, separately, prosecute individuals, but their jurisdiction depends on treaties states have chosen to join. Regional bodies vary enormously in whether their decisions bind members at all.
Reading a crisis from a distance
Early casualty figures and displacement estimates are provisional and usually revised substantially, and the sources issuing them frequently have a stake in the number. Famine, genocide and refugee status are legal or technical terms with formal definitions and consequences, not synonyms for severity, so their use in a headline is worth checking against whether the determining body has actually made a finding. Attention is also a poor guide to scale: a crisis with easy access, resident correspondents and geopolitical relevance is covered far more heavily than a larger one without those, which is a fact about newsrooms rather than about suffering.
Development is a contested word
Much international coverage sorts countries into categories that carry assumptions worth examining. Terms such as developing, emerging and low income are defined by particular institutions using particular thresholds, usually income per head, and they flatten enormous variation within and between the countries they group. Aid, concessional lending and debt relief come with conditions, and the argument about whether those conditions help or constrain is genuine and long-running. Countries that were once aid recipients are now lenders themselves, which has made the older categories less descriptive than they were when coined.