Author: Reporter

When Yevgeny Prigozhin launched his armed rebellion that challenged the Kremlin, Western officials predicted Russian President Vladimir Putin would seek vengeance against the mercenary leader. Two months to the day after the action that Putin labeled a “stab in the back” and “treason,” those forecasts seem to have come true, in ruthless and menacing fashion. Although authorities have not yet confirmed the deaths of Prigozhin and his top lieutenants from the Wagner private military contractor in the August 23 plane crash northwest of Moscow, it sent an immediate chill through Russian official circles. Even amid the uncertainty, the message...

NATO allies located along the alliance’s eastern front are growing increasingly worried about the presence of Russia-linked Wagner group mercenaries in Belarus, where some have been deployed since a short-lived mutiny in Russia in June. Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia — members of NATO and the European Union which border Belarus — had already been on alert since large numbers of migrants and refugees began arriving at their borders from Belarus two years ago. They have accused Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko, an ally of Russia, of opening the migration route in an act of “hybrid warfare” aimed at creating instability...

A camera clicks. In a fraction of a second, the shutter opens and then closes, freezing forever the image in front of it. When the camera shutter blinked inside a jail in downtown Atlanta on August 24, it both created and documented a tiny inflection point in American life. Captured for posterity, there was a former president of the United States, for the first time in history, under arrest and captured in the sort of frame more commonly associated with drug dealers or drunken drivers. The trappings of power gone, for that split second. Left behind: an enduring image...

It was born in the break, all those decades ago — that moment when a song’s vocals dropped, instruments quieted down and the beat took the stage. It was then that hip-hop came into the world, taking the moment and reinventing it. Something new, coming out of something familiar. At the hands of the DJs playing the albums, that break moment became something more: a composition in itself, repeated in an endless loop, back and forth between the turntables. The MCs got in on it, speaking their own clever rhymes and wordplay over it. So did the dancers, the...