Media Coverage

The Taliban have ordered female Afghan TV presenters and other women on screen to cover their faces while on air. Media outlets were told of the decree on Wednesday, a religious police spokesman told BBC Pashto. The ruling comes two weeks after all women were ordered to wear a face veil in public...

Ethiopia and the World Bank have signed a pact for a grant of $300m to assist reconstruction and recovery in conflict-hit areas, the finance ministry said. Fighting that erupted in the northern region of Tigray in November 2020, and spilled over into neighboring Afar and Amhara last year, has eased...

Amid relentless bombing, Inna Levchenko opened School 21 in Chernihiv as a shelter to frightened families. They painted the word “children” in big, bold letters on the windows, hoping that Russian forces would see it and spare them. The bombs fell anyway. Though she didn’t know it yet, 70 children...

Iran-backed Hezbollah and its allies have lost their majority in Lebanon’s parliament after the country’s general election results were announced. The Shia party’s allies suffered losses across the country, according to results released by the Interior Ministry on Tuesday. The pro-Hezbollah bloc...

Sri Lanka’s governing party on Tuesday defeated a move in Parliament to urgently debate a motion that would censure President Gotabaya Rajapaksa for the nation’s worst economic crisis, which the prime minister said has left only enough gasoline for one day. It was unclear when the motion will be...

President Umaro Sissoco Embalo has dissolved Guinea-Bissau’s parliament and said early parliamentary elections would be held this year to resolve a long-running political crisis. Tensions between parliament and the presidency have gripped the West African state for months. Embalo cited “persistent...

Many women in the Afghan capital are delaying a return to fully covering their faces in public in defiance of orders from Islamist Taliban rulers, others are staying at home, and some have been wearing COVID-19 face masks anyway. The Taliban, who swept back to power as the government collapsed, on...

It was August 9, 2017. Two youths, aged 24 and 22, were returning from work to their home in Mathare, one of Nairobi’s largest slums. Victor worked in construction and Bernard as a tailor. A massive protest had erupted at the time, against alleged fraud in Kenya’s general elections and had made its...

The Gulf Clan drug cartel shut down dozens of towns in northern Colombia for four days in reaction to its leader being extradited to the U.S. for trial. It warned that anyone who disobeyed the stay-at-home order risked being shot or having their vehicle burned. Businesses closed, schools stayed shut...

The son of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos and the daughter of outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte are the new leaders of the Philippines, an alliance that ushers in six years of governance that has some human rights activists concerned about the course their country may take with the pair in...