Just days ago, Vladimir Putin seemed on the verge of the unthinkable in Ukraine, having massed 130,000 troops on the border. Embassies withdrew staff from Kyiv, and Washington warned of an immediate threat. Now, the Russian leader is sagely supporting diplomatic engagement. Official footage shows…

Apocalyptic scenes open “The Ministry for the Future,” the latest novel by science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson. India is hit with a calamitous heatwave — one so sweltering, with humidity so high, that bodies struggle to sweat, and therefore to survive. Thousands die in the sun-heated waters…

Director Adam McKay’s climate satire “Don’t Look Up” isn’t exactly subtle. The hair is big, the parody obvious, the targets as plentiful as the star-studded cast competing for space — and the planet is about to explode. The whole enterprise is a monument to anger and frustration, which may…

Protests that began in western Kazakhstan over a sharp rise in fuel costs have turned into days of upheaval, with demonstrators storming government buildings and the airport in Almaty, the country’s largest. That’s bad enough for President Vladimir Putin, who is wary of unrest on Russia’s fringes…

On Dec. 25, 1991, unable to overcome the blow dealt by a hardline coup months earlier and by independence movements in Soviet republics, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned. The last Soviet leader wanted to reform communism, not replace it, but he was unable to contain the centrifugal forces his reforms had…

Partial returns suggest Honduras has voted overwhelmingly in favor of its first alternation of power in over a decade, breaking the hold of a ruling party that presided over human rights abuses, democratic erosion and high-profile cocaine-trafficking scandals. A peaceful transfer would be rare good…

In retrospect, the autism warning signs were all there. A calm, easy baby from birth, around the age of two my middle son appeared to stall. He had a magpie eye for complicated words and entire Peppa Pig episodes, repetitions I now recognize as echolalia. He had no interest in role-playing games…

It’s not often that we get a preview of global catastrophe, and yet Covid-19 has offered us just that: a cataclysm that affected the entire planet, cost too many lives, battered economies and hit the poorest disproportionately hard. Unimpeded, a warming planet will do all that and more. Like the…

The Asian Development Bank and a handful of financial institutions will take an ambitious proposal to end Southeast Asia’s coal addiction to the COP26 climate talks. They want to speed up the shift away from the dirtiest fossil fuel by buying out coal-fired power plants and closing them early,…

A friend in need is, as Beijing well knows, a friend indeed. In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, as the West turned inward, China sent African nations protective equipment and test kits, enlisting support from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. co-founder Jack Ma. Beijing promised vaccines and…