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If there was one winner it was Turkey, which, along with China and other energy-hungry developing nations, has been exploiting the East-West rift to gain long-term energy supplies at bargain prices. Mr. Putin noted that on Monday during a news conference in Ankara with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan

“If Europe does not want this to be realized, then it will not be realized,” he said of the pipeline during the news conference, which was televised live across Russia during prime time. He said it would be “ridiculous” to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the pipeline to bring it to Europe through Bulgaria only to have to abandon it because of political differences.

“We believe that it does not coincide with Europe’s economic interests and harms our cooperation,” Mr. Putin added. “But such is the decision of our European friends. They are, in the end, customers. It is their choice.”

In addition to food, Russia and Turkey have found other avenues for economic cooperation. Russia is finishing plans to start construction on Turkey’s first nuclear power plant.

At an emergency meeting Sunday, members of the U.N. Security Council "strongly condemned" the launch and reaffirmed that "a clear threat to international peace and security continues to exist

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the launch is "deeply deplorable" and in violation of Security Council resolutions "despite the united plea of the international community against such an act.

With tensions high, South Korea fired warning shots Monday morning after a North Korean patrol boat crossed the maritime border between North and South Korea, South Korea's Defense Ministry said. The North Korean boat withdrew about 20 minutes later, the ministry said.Such incidents are not uncommon, CNN's Paula Hancocks reports. But the timing of this one -- so soon after North Korea's rocket launch -- will likely bring additional scrutiny to the incident, she said.

The Kwangmyongsong carrier rocket blasted off from the Sohae launch facility at 9 a.m Sunday (7:30 p.m. ET Saturday), entering orbit nine minutes and 46 seconds after liftoff, North Korea's state news agency KCNA reported.

money was supposed to be used to help train and support poor Kenyan athletes who dream of running their way out of poverty.

immediately sucked out of the federation’s bank account by a handful of Kenyan officials and kept off the books.

does not appear to be under investigation by the United States authorities.

all three Kenyan athletics officials accused of taking money from Nike have been suspended

For more than 20 years, Nike Inc. has been paying the Kenyan national runners’ association millions of dollars in exchange for the Kenyans wearing Nike’s signature swoosh, superb advertising in the running world.

Ethiopian runners, who also excel at middle- and long-distance races, have a sponsorship agreement with Adidas, but an official there said their contract contained no commitment bonus

In a sworn statement provided to Kenyan investigators, the former assistant said the $500,000 commitment bonus was “bribe money from Nike” so that the top officials could pay back the $200,000 from the scuttled deal with the Chinese company and then make even more by agreeing to sign up again with Nike.

Nearly every day there seems to be allegations of some new scandal: a government ministry buying plastic pens for $85 apiece, a Supreme Court judge taking a $2 million bribe, questions about what exactly happened to the proceeds of a multibillion-dollar bond deal.

Kenyan athletes were so outraged when they learned in November that hundreds of thousands of dollars from Nike had been stolen by their bigwigs that they staged a protest at their headquarters in Nairobi, with elite athletes camped out in the grass and holding up signs that read “blood sucers.” (Some of the runners never finished school.) Advertisement Continue reading the main story

But those complaints may have been a ruse by Kenyan officials to get out of the Nike contract so they could receive a bribe from another company, said a member of the executive board of Kenya’s track and field federation, known as Athletics Kenya.

The sports-marketing agent who made the payment, Papa Massata Diack, was recently banned for life by the International Association of Athletics Federations, a global governing body for track and field.

After they received a letter from a Nike lawyer saying there were no legal grounds to terminate the contract, the Kenyan officials abruptly changed course.

They negotiated a new contract in which Nike agreed to pay Athletics Kenya an annual sponsorship fee of $1.3 million to $1.5 million — plus $100,000 honorariums each year and a one-time $500,000 “commitment bonus.”

Nike executives refused to discuss the contract, issuing a short statement that the money paid to Athletics Kenya was supposed to support the athletes. It said that Nike conducted business with integrity and that “we are cooperating with the local authorities in their investigation,” a point the Kenyan detectives dispute.

Western nations have threatened sanctions, and the United States government has been especially vocal about corruption, with White House officials unveiling a 29-point plan to root it out.

He said corruption in the athletics federation was so ingrained and so brazen that officials routinely extorted money from athletes who failed drug tests. He also said the organization’s chairman, Isaiah Kiplagat, had asked Nike to wire the bonus directly to his personal account, a request that Nike refused.

Within days, according to bank records, the $500,000 was withdrawn by Athletics Kenya’s top officials. There were no major track and field activities going on at the time, and the board member and the former administrative assistant said just about all of the money had been concealed from Athletics Kenya’s executive committee, including $200,000 sent to a bank account in Hong Kong.

Analysts said this case was especially tricky because it did not appear to fall under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the American law that covers crimes involving American companies and foreign government officials.

The Kenyan running association, while it receives some government money, is not a Kenyan government agency.

He noted that sports federations, like Athletics Kenya and FIFA, international soccer’s governing body, which is embroiled in its own corruption saga, often fell between the cracks of the rules that governed businesses, public agencies and traditional nonprofit organizations, even though sports federations have qualities of all three.

A widely cited 2006 report estimated that 18% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions were attributable to cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, pigs and poultry. However, analysis performed by Goodland, with co-writer Jeff Anhang, an environmental specialist at the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation, found that figure to now more accurately be 51%.

a molecule of CO2 exhaled by livestock is no more natural than one from an auto tailpipe.

Today, tens of billions more livestock are exhaling CO2 than in preindustrial days, while Earth’s photosynthetic capacity (its capacity to keep carbon out of the atmosphere by absorbing it in plant mass) has declined sharply as forest has been cleared.

One way in which this will be particularly troublesome for livestock producers will be that crops grown for feed will be refocused on biofuel sources.

For years, Ms. Winfrey has helped make countless little-known brands wildly successful by endorsing them through one of the media ventures that made her a billionaire. But this is the first time she has made such an investment in a public company.

This year, Weight Watchers announced plans to cut roughly $100 million in additional costs and laid off the president of its North American business.After 10 straight quarters of declining sales, the stock had slumped 73 percent, to $6.79 on Friday.

Only one analyst out of eight had encouraged investors to buy shares of Weight Watchers. But that did not stop Ms. Winfrey.

Her successful endorsement of products through her annual list of favorite things so often produced skyrocketing sales and popularity that the result was called the “Oprah Effect.” Spanx, an undergarment used to make women look slimmer, was on the list in 2000, giving the then-unknown product national fame and helping turn its founder, Sara Blakely, into a billionaire.

Ms. Winfrey is expected to bring some major gravitas to Weight Watchers’ marketing department. She agreed to offer her name and face to Weight Watchers and no other weight-loss products for five years with the option to renew afterward, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company already has a picture of Ms. Winfrey on its website home page.But it is unclear whether Ms. Winfrey’s backing can help Weight Watchers expand outside of its core demographic and attract younger users, according to R. J. Hottovy, an analyst at Morningstar.

The company agreed to issue Ms. Winfrey 6.4 million shares of common stock for $43.2 million, with the option to purchase an additional 3.5 million shares, the regulatory filing showed.

“They come to the house and take the children and accuse them of being spies,” stated another source. “If the mom cries and gets upset at them, they accuse of her [sic] being a spy too and take her to the jail and later kill her.”

However, the forces insisted the area is not 100% safe. They withdrew 635 residents to nearby Habbaniyah, but there are many areas that still contain terrorists. The officials arrested 12 alleged militants who attempted to escape by blending in with the civilians.

Terrorism expert Michael Pregent said it is normal for the Islamic State to execute fighters who lose valuable territories. They did the same thing when militants lost Tikrit.

“They continue to lose territory, we’ve seen a growing number of defections and a rise in the number of alleged internal spies – many of whom they have killed mercilessly without demonstrating significant evidence of internal espionage,” said Clint Watts, Fox fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, adding: ISIS pattern of internal killings looks remarkably similar to al Shabaab’s decline in Somalia. As Shabaab lost ground and defectors increased, internal killings and harsher punishments were meted out across the terror group further accelerating the loss of local popular support.

On Friday, as the authorities heightened security and anti-terror forces conducted raids, Jokowi visited the site of the attack and approvingly noted that things had returned to “normal.”

First, notice the subdued yet serious way Jokowi describes the impact of the attacks: They disrupted public security. They disturbed the peace. The government’s response is characterized as a policing matter.

He focuses on counteracting the primary goal of terrorism—to terrorize the broader population, to mess with people’s heads.

Then there’s what Jokowi omits: He does not declare that Indonesia is at war with the Islamic State, radical Islam, or terrorism. He does not suggest the future of Indonesia is at stake. He does not sound alarms.

“We condemn actions that disrupt public security and disturb the peace of the people and sow terror,” Mr. Joko said

Linger on Hollande’s words, and they become less reassuring than they first appear: France must destroy terrorism and its otherworldly practitioners, he seems to be saying, because otherwise terrorism could destroy the Republic and endanger the world.

But Indonesia arguably has as much to fear from such a terrorist attack as France does, if not more. Indonesia has the world’s largest Muslim population, and ISIS is aggressively trying to recruit supporters there.

And yet Jokowi, a Muslim himself, advocates combining military might with a “soft approach” to Islamic extremism that leverages religious and cultural forces.

This involves working with moderate Islamic organizations in Indonesia on educational and public-awareness campaigns about Islam and the ways it can be perverted, and addressing socioeconomic sources of terrorism.

Asked about ISIS and how he’d assess the current terrorist threat in Indonesia, he responded, “I think [the threat is] more or less declining.” (Jokowi is more alarmist and hardline about other criminal activities in the country, such as drug trafficking.)

Mayor Joko Widodo told us that he continues to work on efforts to deradicalize militants and others in Solo. Widodo said he holds constant meetings with the Solo public to educate them on the threat posed by terrorists and extremists. (

Jokowi’s approach isn’t necessarily the “right” one, or the one he’d adopt if Indonesia were to experience an attack on the scale of Paris’s. But it serves as a reminder that there’s more than one way to respond to terrorism—that societal resilience can be emphasized just as much as military resolve, that the threat of terrorism can be scoped and contextualized alongside the various other threats a country faces.

Persian Gulf has been used throughout history, in maps, documents and diplomacy, from the ancient Persians, whose empire dominated the region, to the Greeks and the British.

The push to call it the Arabian Gulf gathered steam during the Pan-Arab nationalist movement of the late 1950s, propelled by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, the historian Lawrence G. Potter wrote in the “The Persian Gulf in History.” In the 1960s, Arab countries made Arabian Gulf compulsory, and the Gulf Cooperation Council uses it.

“It’s deeply emotional; it’s not simply semantic,” said Frederic Wehrey, an expert on gulf politics at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Google Maps shows both terms, with Arabian Gulf in parentheses. But Google will show either Arabian or Persian Gulf to local users, depending on geolocation and language settings.

Our postwar statesmen were neither weak nor incompetent. They were the architects of the greatest foreign policy triumph in U.S. history.

o successful was this policy that Americans now—most of whom weren’t alive to witness the enormity of these wars—see peace, unity, prosperity and stability as Europe’s natural state. This is an illusion. For centuries, Europe was the fulcrum of global violence. With the age of global exploration, it became the globe’s primary exporter of violence

The U.S. military was always an integral part of the plan to unite and rebuild Europe from the rubble. Since World War II, U.S. troops have been deployed in Eurasia to ensure the continent cannot be dominated by a single power capable of monopolizing its resources and turning them against the U.S. The United States has built overwhelmingly massive military assets there to deter local arms races before they begin, and it has simultaneously assured those under U.S. protection that there is no need to begin local arms races, for their safety is guaranteed.

Only America, and massive power as the U.S. exercised it, could have pacified and unified Europe under its aegis. No other continental country possessed half the world’s GDP. No other country had enough distance from Europe to be trusted, to a large extent, by all parties and indifferent to its regional jealousies. No other country had a strategic, moral and economic vision for Europe that its inhabitants could be persuaded gladly to share

The founders of these institutions fully intended them to be the foundations of a United States of Europe, much like the United States of America. Profound economic interdependence, they believed, would make further European wars impossible.

At the same time, the United States built an open, global order upon an architecture of specific institutions: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the International Court of Justice. This order is in many respects an empire—a Pax Americana—but it is more humane than any empire that preceded it, with institutions that are intended to benefit all parties.

Through the application of economic, diplomatic and military force majeure, the United States suppressed Europe’s internal security competition. This is why postwar Europe ceased to be the world’s leading exporter of violence and became, instead, the world’s leading exporter of luxury sedans.

American grand strategy rests upon the credibility of its promise to protect American allies; this credibility rests, in turn, upon U.S. willingness to display its commitment.

The Soviet Union’s criticism of the Marshall Plan and other American involvement in Europe was eerily similar to the language Russia’s now uses in its campaign to undermine NATO and the EU. The vocabulary and tropes of Russian propaganda are widely echoed, wittingly or unwittingly, by far-right, far-left and other antiliberal politicians, parties and movements throughout the West

The loudest exponent of the idea that the U.S. is getting rolled, that the European Union was “created to destroy us,” and that multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization assault the “sovereignty” of the nations concerned is, unfortunately, the president of the United States.

It’s hard to understate how foolish and reckless these notions are. History can be shoved down the memory hole, for a time, but reality is never so cooperative.

The Second World War proved not only that isolationism and American-Firstism were fantasies, but exceptionally childish and dangerous ones, at that. In the age of hyperglobalized trade, international air travel, the internet, nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles, these fantasies are even more childish and dangerous. The U.S. may be on another continent, but it is not on another planet.

It is true that the U.S. spends more on its military, in absolute dollars and as a percentage of GDP, than any European country. That was always part of the deal. The U.S. is a global superpower. It can fight a war anywhere in the world, invade any country at will, and (at least in theory) fight multiple simultaneous major wars—even in space. Of course this costs more. It is in America’s advantage to be the only power on the planet that can do this.

Conversely, it is not remotely in America’s advantage for other countries to spend as much money on their militaries as we do

Trump’s refusal to deter our shared enemies and protect our allies risks provoking a regional European arms race—exactly what the U.S. has sought to avoid for 74 years

Above all, Trump’s overt support for sordid, Kremlin-backed actors who seek to undermine Europe’s unity is unfathomable: How could it be in Europe’s interest, or in ours, for the American president to lend the United States’ prestige and support to Europe’s Nazis, neo-Nazis, doctrinal Marxists, populists, authoritarians, and ethnic supremacists, particularly since all of them are ideologically hostile to the United States?

Should the unraveling of the order the U.S. built proceed at this pace, the world will soon be neither peaceful nor prosperous. Nor will the effects be confined to regions distant from the United States. America will feel them gradually, and then, probably, overnight—in the form of a devastating, sudden shock.

The American-led world order, undergirded by the ideal of liberal democracy, has been highly imperfect. But it has been the closest thing to Utopia our fallen and benighted species has ever seen. Its benefits are not just economic, although those benefits are immense. Its benefits must be measured in wars not fought, lives not squandered

the time has passed when tech companies can simply build tools, write algorithms and amass data without regard to who uses the technology and for what purpose.

Nearly a decade ago, Cisco Systems was sued in federal court on behalf of 11 members of the Falun Gong organization, who claimed that the company built a nationwide video surveillance and “forced conversion” profiling system for the Chinese government that was tailored to help Beijing crack down on the group

According to Cisco’s own marketing materials, the video analyzer — which would now be marketed as artificial intelligence — was the “only product capable of recognizing over 90 percent of Falun Gong pictorial information.”

The failure to punish Cisco set a precedent for American companies to build artificial intelligence for foreign governments to use for political oppression

Thermo Fisher, sold DNA analyzers to aid in the current large-scale domestic surveillance and internment of hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, in the region of Xinjiang.

Mr. Yang defended Yahoo’s human rights commitments and emphasized the importance of the Chinese market. Google used a similar defense for Dragonfly last year.

Tech companies are spending record amounts on lobbying and quietly fighting to limit employees’ legal protections for organizing. North American legislators would be wise to answer the call from human rights organizations and research institutions by guaranteeing explicit whistle-blower protections similar to those recently passed by the European Union

Ideally, they would vocally support an instrument that legally binds businesses — via international human rights law — to uphold human rights.

The important relationships between Vox and the European far right, as well as the American alt-right, are happening elsewhere.

there have been multiple contacts between Vox and the other far-right parties of Europe. In 2017, Abascal met Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, as Vox’s Twitter account recorded; on the eve of the election, he tweeted his thanks to Matteo Salvini, the Italian far-right leader, for his support. Abascal and Espinosa both went to Warsaw recently to meet the leaders of the nativist, anti-pluralist Polish ruling party, and Espinosa showed up at the Conservative Political Action Conference in the D.C. area, as well.

these are issues that belong to the realm of identity politics, not economics. Espinosa characterized all of them as arguments with “the left

the nationalist parties, rooted in their own particular histories, are often in conflict with one another almost by definition.

The European far right has now found a set of issues it can unite around. Opposition to immigration, especially Muslim immigration, is one of them; promotion of a socially conservative worldview is another.

dislike of same-sex civil unions or African taxi drivers is something that even Austrians and Italians who disagree about the location of their border can share.

Alto Data Analytics. Alto, which specializes in applying artificial intelligence to the analysis of public data, such as that found on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other public sources, recently produced some elegant, colored network maps of the Spanish online conversation, with the goal of identifying disinformation campaigns seeking to distort digital conversations

three outlying, polarized conversations — “echo chambers,” whose members are mostly talking and listening only to one another: the Catalan secessionist conversation, the far-left conversation and the Vox conversation. 

the largest number of “abnormal, high-activity users” — bots, or else real people who post constantly and probably professionally — were also found within these three communities, especially the Vox community, which accounted for more than half of them

uncovered a network of nearly 3,000 “abnormal, high-activity users” that had pumped out nearly 4½ million pro-Vox and anti-Islamic messages on Twitter in the past year

For the past couple of years, it has focused on immigration scare stories, gradually increasing their emotional intensity

all of it aligns with messages being put out by Vox.

a week before Spain’s polling day, the network was tweeting images of what its members described as a riot in a “Muslim neighborhood in France.” In fact, the clip showed a scene from recent anti-government riots in Algeria.

Vox supporters, especially the “abnormal, high-activity users,” are very likely to post and tweet content and material from a very particular groups of sources: a set of conspiratorial websites, mostly set up at least a year ago, sometimes run by a single person, which post large quantities of highly partisan articles and headlines.

he Alto team had found exactly the same kinds of websites in Italy and Brazil, in the months before those countries’ elections in 2018

the websites began putting out partisan material — in Italy, about immigration; in Brazil, about corruption and feminism — during the year before the vote.

they served to feed and amplify partisan themes even before they were really part of mainstream politics.

In Spain, there are a half-dozen such sites, some quite professional and some clearly amateu

One of the more obscure sites has exactly the same style and layout as a pro-Bolsonaro Brazilian site, almost as though both had been designed by the same person

The owner of digitalSevilla — according to El Pais, a 24-year-old with no journalism experience — is producing headlines that compare the Andalusian socialist party leader to “the evil lady in Game of Thrones” and, at times, has had more readership than established newspapers

They function not unlike Infowars, Breitbart, the infamous partisan sites that operated from Macedonia during the U.S. presidential campaign

all of which produced hypercharged, conspiratorial, partisan news and outraged headlines that could then be pumped into hypercharged, conspiratorial echo chambers.

he Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Though the pact received relatively little mainstream media attention, in the lead-up to that gathering, and in its wake, Alto found nearly 50,000 Twitter users tweeting conspiracy theories about the pact

Much like the Spanish network that promotes Vox, these users were promoting material from extremist and conspiratorial websites, using identical images, linking and retweeting one another across borders.

A similar international network went into high gear after the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue tracked thousands of posts from people claiming to have seen Muslims “celebrating” the fire, as well as from people posting rumors and pictures that purported to prove there had been arson

These same kinds of memes and images then rippled through Vox’s WhatsApp and Telegram fan groups. These included, for example, an English-language meme showing Paris “before Macron,” with Notre Dame burning, and “after Macron” with a mosque in its place, as well as a news video, which, in fact, had been made about another incident, talking about arrests and gas bombs found in a nearby car. It was a perfect example of the alt-right, the far right and Vox all messaging the same thing, at the same time, in multiple languages, attempting to create the same emotions across Europe, North America and beyond.

CitizenGo is part of a larger network of European organizations dedicated to what they call “restoring the natural order”: rolling back gay rights, restricting abortion and contraception, promoting an explicitly Christian agenda. They put together mailing lists and keep in touch with their supporters; the organization claims to reach 9 million people.

OpenDemocracy has additionally identified a dozen other U.S.-based organizations that now fund or assist conservative activists in Europe

she now runs into CitizenGo, and its language, around the world. Among other things, it has popularized the expression “gender ideology” — a term the Christian right invented, and that has come to describe a whole group of issues, from domestic violence laws to gay rights — in Africa and Latin America, as well as Europe.

In Spain, CitizenGo has made itself famous by painting buses with provocative slogans — one carried the hashtag #feminazis and an image of Adolf Hitler wearing lipstick — and driving them around Spanish cities.

It’s a pattern we know from U.S. politics. Just as it is possible in the United States to support super PACs that then pay for advertising around issues linked to particular candidates, so is it now possible for Americans, Russians or the Princess von Thurn und Taxis to donate to CitizenGo — and, thus, to support Vox.

as most Europeans probably don’t realize — outsiders who want to fund the European far right have been able to do so for some time. OpenDemocracy’s most recent report quotes Arsuaga, the head of CitizenGo, advising a reporter that money given to his group could “indirectly” support Vox, since “we actually currently totally align.”

“Make Spain Great Again,” he explained, “was a kind of provocation. . . . It was just intended to make the left a little bit more angry.”

The number of actual Spanish Muslims is relatively low — most immigration to Spain is from Latin America — and the number of actual U.S. Muslims is, relatively, even lower. But the idea that Christian civilization needs to redefine itself against the Islamic enemy has, of course, a special historic echo in Spain

“We are entering into a period of time when politics is becoming something different, politics is warfare by another means — we don’t want to be killed, we have to survive. . . . I think politics now is winner-takes-all. This is not just a phenomenon in Spain.

As Aznar, the former prime minister, said, the party is a “consequence,” though it is not only a consequence of Catalan separatism. It’s also a consequence of Trumpism, of the conspiracy websites, of the international alt-right/far-right online campaign, and especially of a social conservative backlash that has been building across the continent for years.

The nationalists, the anti-globalists, the people who are skeptical of international laws and international organizations — they, too, now work together, across borders, for common causes. They share the same contacts. They tap money from the same funders. They are learning from one another’s mistakes, copying one another’s language. And, together, they think they will eventually win.

The famed Chinese pilgrim to India Fa Hsien (Faxien), noted that Gupta law was exceptionally generous; crimes were punished only with fines.

The surviving architecture includes palaces and purpose-built temples for both Hindu and Buddhist religions, such as the Parvati Temple at Nachna Kuthara and the Dashavatara temple at Deogarh in Madhya Pradesh.

The emperors also founded free hospitals for their citizens, as well as monasteries and universities.

Aryabhata's incredibly accurate calculation of pi as 3.1416, and his equally amazing calculation that the solar year is 365.358 days long.

In part, this was due to the common people's dislike of the meddlesome and unwieldy bureaucracy.

As with the collapses of other classical political systems, the Gupta Empire crumbled under both internal and external pressures.

Internally, the Gupta Dynasty grew weak from a number of succession disputes. As the emperors lost power, regional lords gained increasing autonomy. In a sprawling empire with weak leadership, it was easy for rebellions in Gujarat or Bengal to break out, and difficult for the Gupta emperors to put such uprisings down.

By 500, many regional princes were declaring their independence and refusing to pay taxes to the central Gupta state. These included the Maukhari Dynasty, who ruled over Uttar Pradesh and Magadha.

By the later Gupta era, the government was having trouble collecting enough taxes to fund both its hugely complex bureaucracy, and constant wars against foreign invaders like the Pushyamitras and the Huns.

Chandragupta's son, Samudragupta (ruled 335–380 CE), was a brilliant warrior and statesman, sometimes called the "Napoleon of India."

Even those who felt a personal loyalty to the Gupta Emperor generally disliked his government and were happy to avoid paying for it if they could.

In addition to internal disputes, the Gupta Empire faced constant threats of invasion from the north. The cost of fighting off these invasions drained the Gupta treasury, and the government had difficulty refilling the coffers. Among the most troublesome of the invaders were the White Huns (or Hunas), who had conquered much of the northwestern section of Gupta territory by 500 CE.

the U.S. had to drop its more stringent demands, the news agency reported, including an oil embargo on North Korea—which would dramatically weaken the Kim Jong Un regime

a financial and travel ban on the North Korean leader, and the ability to inspect any ships suspected of carrying illicit goods to or from North Korea.

Those demands were unacceptable to China and Russia, both veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council

At issue was Pyongyang’s claim on September 3 that  it had successfully tested a hydrogen bomb that could be fitted onto a long-range missile

China and Russia have their own preferred approaches to the crisis, and they’re not always compatible with what the United States wants

China, which fears a destabilized North Korea, is Pyongyang’s main political and economic benefactor

the Freedom Party served in a government coalition with the People’s Party from 2000 to 2005.

delivering solutions, so people trust him, that he has the power and also the courage to change something.”

the message seems to resonate with young People’s Party supporters.

The International Olympic Committee and International Paralympic Committee said they fully respect and accept the move.

There's widespread skepticism in Japan about holding the games. As NPR's Anthony Kuhn reported in January, public opinion is turning against the Olympics.

Overseas fans who purchased tickets for the upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games will receive a refund.

There were no detailed figures for ticket purchases from abroad, but Hidenori Suzuki, the organizing committee's deputy executive director of marketing, told the Associated Press that international sales represent 10-20% of the overall total.

Before last year's postponement, Tokyo organizers said they had sold roughly 4.5 million Olympic tickets to residents of Japan, with 970,000 for the Paralympics.

costs jumped by 22% to around $15.5 billion, according to some estimates, which would make Tokyo the priciest games on record.

Delaying the Olympics also affected the bottom line of organizers.

Japan, which has a population of 126 million, has handled the pandemic better than many other countries, with 8,700 deaths attributed to COVID-19.

Still, to call it a pandemic felt momentous and weighty.

A couple of days later, WHO adopted the same language.

WHO had been sounding the alarm steadily for nearly six weeks, since January 30, 2020, when the director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, declared the situation a "public health emergency of international concern" -- the highest level of health alert under international law. The definition is "an extraordinary event that may constitute a public health risk to other countries through international spread of disease and may require an international coordinated response."

While every country has responded to the emerging threat in its own way, some countries took the early warnings more seriously, she said.

"It wasn't about rich or poor countries. It was about experience. It was about those countries that knew the threat that this was; they heeded our warnings," said Van Kerkhove. That experience came from dealing with previous infectious outbreaks, such as SARS, MERS and Ebola. And those countries quickly implemented strong public health measures, mobilized community health workers, contact tracers and lab technicians. Van Kerkhove points to places like South Korea, Japan and Nigeria -- all of which managed to keep transmission of this novel virus relatively under control.

The US has more than 29 million total reported cases and more than half a million deaths. South Korea? Fewer than 100,000 cases and less than 2,000 deaths. You can't dismiss that as the US having a higher population than South Korea, because when you look at the per capita deaths per 100,000 population, the US has more than 161 compared with South Korea's 3.2.

How did they do it? By being strategic and leveraging the tools they had at their disposal, Van Kerkhove said. "They looked at the situation that they were in. They enhanced their cluster investigation. ... They ramped up their screening capacity, their testing capacity. They used quarantine effectively and they brought that outbreak under control. But at one point in time, it seemed almost impossible -- and they turned it around," she said.

But that's changing, thanks to COVAX, a global initiative that promotes equitable access for developing nations to Covid-19 vaccines. Led by the WHO and other organizations, COVAX delivered 20 million vaccine doses to 20 countries last week during the first week of distribution, according to WHO Director-General Tedros. An additional 14.4 million vaccine doses are slated to go out this week to an another 31 countries.

"I have glimmers of hope in many countries around the world," Van Kerkhove said, pointing to places such as Australia, New Zealand, China and Japan. "I see societies that are opened up. I see sporting events that are happening. I see a resilient community that is living their life, that has driven transmission down in some situations to zero."

But making fighting corruption a policy priority won’t be easy. It’s a topic that cuts across numerous fields and government agencies, requiring bureaucratic savvy to coordinate initiatives. And America’s own corruption issues — from concerns about the role money plays in U.S. politics to lingering questions about whether Trump profited off the presidency — could undercut its voice.

“Governments can’t keep ignoring those grievances,” said Abigail Bellows, a scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “No one country can deal with it alone. It’s something that countries need to work together on.

Biden has pledged to host an international “Summit for Democracy” in the coming months, and the need to fight corruption is expected to be a major theme during that gathering. Alongside the summit, Biden is expected to issue a presidential policy directive that establishes fighting corruption as a core national security interest, a promise he made in an essay laying out his foreign policy agenda during the 2020 presidential campaign.

In a recent “interim strategic guidance” document outlining basic principles of its future National Security Strategy, the Biden administration blamed corruption for an array of ills, arguing, for example, that, tax havens and illicit financing “contribute to income inequality, fund terrorism, and generate pernicious foreign influence.”

It’s critical that the administration not fall into longstanding U.S. habits of viewing corruption as simply a law enforcement issue or one that affects only developing or failed states, analysts and activists said.

“We are key enablers of the problem globally,” said Trevor Sutton, a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress. “You need to have a concerted strategy among democracies to deal with this issue.”

Among the Republicans who backed cracking down on anonymous shell companies was Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, one of the most hawkish voices in Congress. He warned that “criminals and terrorists are exploiting our financial system using shell companies that hide their identities.”

Activists say the Biden administration needs to beef up the staffing in certain government divisions if it wants its anti-corruption agenda to go beyond rhetoric and have a meaningful impact.

One hurdle facing the Biden administration as it pushes an anti-corruption agenda on the global front is America’s own perceived flaws, from longstanding concerns about “dark money” in U.S. politics to the machinations of the lobbying and influence industries.

Blinken recently launched the “International Anticorruption Champions Award” to recognize anti-corruption crusaders around the world. (Planning for the prize began during the Trump administration, a State Department spokesperson said.)

Zelensky, though, has his own links to Kolomoyskyy. The Ukrainian president is a former comedian who gained popularity in part because of coverage by a media outlet owned by the mogul.