Month: January 2024

LONDON — 2024 will pose a major test of democratic rule as an estimated 4 billion people in more than 50 nations — almost half the world’s population — are set to vote in national elections, with the outcomes likely to shape global politics for years or decades to come. Bangladesh began 2024 with the first major election of the year as Sheikh Hasina won a fifth term as prime minister Saturday. Opposition parties boycotted the vote over complaints that it was neither free nor fair. A crucial presidential election is due to take place on the self-governing island of Taiwan …

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The coming year will be a major test of democratic rule as an estimated 4 billion people in more than 50 nations — almost half the world’s population — are set to vote in elections. As Henry Ridgwell reports, the outcomes will likely shape global politics for many years to come. …

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PARIS — Emmanuel Macron appointed 34-year-old Education Minister Gabriel Attal as his new prime minister on Tuesday, as the French President seeks to breathe new life into his second mandate ahead of European parliament elections. The move will not necessarily lead to any major political shift, but signals a desire for Macron to try to move beyond last year’s unpopular pension and immigration reforms and improve his centrist party’s chances in the June EU ballot. Opinion polls show Macron’s camp trailing far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s party by around eight to ten percentage points. Attal, a close Macron ally who became …

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MOSCOW — Russia has detained and brought drug-related charges against U.S. citizen Robert Woodland, who was apprehended by law enforcement earlier this month, a Moscow court said Tuesday. Moscow is holding several American nationals on espionage and other charges, as tensions between Russia and the United States balloon over the conflict in Ukraine. “On January 6, the Ostankinsky District Court of Moscow ordered Robert Romanov Woodland to be placed in detention for a period of two months, until March 5, 2024,” the court said on social media. He is accused of the “illegal acquisition, storage, transportation, manufacture, processing” of drugs and …

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KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine has exported 15 million metric tons of cargo through its Black Sea shipping corridor, including 10 million tons of agricultural goods, Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said Tuesday. Ukraine launched the corridor hugging the western Black Sea coast near Romania and Bulgaria in August shortly after Russia withdrew from a 2022 U.N.-brokered Black Sea grain export deal and threatened to treat all vessels as potential military targets. “Over the five months of the corridor’s operation, 469 new vessels have called at our Ukrainian ports for loading,” Kubrakov said in a statement. He said that currently, 39 ships …

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KYIV, UKRAINE — Ukraine’s new draft legislation on military mobilization will not conscript women or introduce a lottery, a lawmaker said late Monday, a day before the parliament’s security committee was due to vote on what to do with the bill. “I can definitely say that there will be no lottery for conscription, no mobilization of women,” Deputy Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence Yehor Chernev told Ukraine’s public broadcaster. “There will be no unconstitutional positions.” Tens of thousands of men volunteered to fight for Ukraine in the first months after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February …

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OTTAWA — Canada, Britain, Sweden and Ukraine on Monday formally complained to the U.N. aviation council in their bid to hold Iran accountable for the downing of a Ukrainian passenger airliner in January 2020 that killed 176 people, they said on Monday. Most of the dead were citizens from the four nations, which created a coordination group that seeks to hold Iran to account. “Today we have jointly initiated dispute-settlement proceedings before the International Civil Aviation Organization against the Islamic Republic of Iran for using weapons against a civil aircraft in flight,” they said in a statement. Last June the four …

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BEIJING — China says it has detained an individual accused of collecting state secrets on behalf of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency MI6. The Ministry of State Security posted on social media Monday that Britain had been cooperating since 2015 with the person, who it said was a citizen of a third nation and had the surname Huang. The ministry said Huang had received training in intelligence gathering, was provided with equipment and had collected numerous state secrets on repeated visits to China. No further information on the intelligence gathered was given, nor did the ministry say when he or she had …

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