WORLD NEWS
BBC World
Trump said he and Xi had "never gotten along better" as he hosted the Chinese president at the lavish White House event.
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WORLD NEWS
NPR News
A tech-heavy guest list, the fashion choices of those on it, who sat where and what was on the menu marked the softer — often and glitzier — details of diplomacy as Donald Trump threw a Thursday night state dinner hon...
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WORLD NEWS
NPR News
James Copenhaver, one of three campaign rally attendees shot in 2024 during an assassination attempt on then-candidate Donald Trump, has died in Pittsburgh, his lawyer said Thursday. He was 76.
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WORLD NEWS
BBC World
Xi’s first visit to Washington in a decade was a display of pomp and pageantry, with Trump offering his guest a two-month truce on the brewing tariff war.
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WORLD NEWS
BBC World
The BBC’s China correspondent Laura Bicker unpacks how the trip panned out for Beijing and Washington.
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WORLD NEWS
BBC World
After a major win at Toronto, Angh, a film from northeastern India, is now on a path towards the Oscars.
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WORLD NEWS
BBC World
Australia, which has strict social media restrictions and has proposed controls on algorithms and smart glasses, announced the breach at the UN.
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WORLD NEWS
BBC World
Australia criticised OpenAI for taking "too long" to tell them about the breach which happened in June.
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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.