Author: Reporter

In the days since Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in his criminal hush money trial, Republicans who view the case as politically motivated have coalesced around a new rallying cry: Prosecute the left. Candidates, officeholders, and members of the former president’s family have amplified Trump’s calls for retribution against political enemies and urged their fellow Republicans to start charging Democrats with crimes. “Time for Red State AGs and DAs to get busy,” Representative Mike Collins of Georgia wrote on the social platform X, formerly Twitter, after a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty. Influential conservative activist Charlie Kirk...

Dam Chan Nguyen saves dead and dying computers. When he first started working two decades ago in Nhat Tao market, Ho Chi Minh City’s biggest informal recycling market, he usually salvaged computers with bulky monitors and heavy processors. Now he works mostly with laptops and the occasional MacBook. But the central tenet of his work has not changed, nothing goes to waste. What can be fixed is fixed. What can be salvaged gets re-used elsewhere. What is left is sold as scrap. “We utilize everything possible,” he said. The shop he works at is one of many in a...

There is one thing that distinguishes 60-year-old Vo Van Van’s rice fields from a mosaic of thousands of other emerald fields across Long An province in southern Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, it is not entirely flooded. That and the giant drone, its wingspan similar to that of an eagle, chuffing high above as it rains organic fertilizer onto the knee-high rice seedlings billowing below. Using less water and using a drone to fertilize are new techniques that Van is trying and Vietnam hopes will help solve a paradox at the heart of growing rice: The finicky crop is not just...

Straw hats, cross-body bags, and collapsible chairs: These are just some of the essentials Muslims bring to the Hajj pilgrimage. Spiritually, the five-day Hajj is awe-inspiring for the faithful, an experience they say brings them closer to God and to the entire Muslim world. Physically, it is grueling. Pilgrims walk outdoors for hours in broiling heat around holy sites in Mecca and the surrounding desert. They are caught in unimaginable and overwhelming crowds, all trying to get to the same place. Barriers directing the traffic mean that if you miss your turn, you might walk hours more to get...

For the first time in over a decade, 270 Syrians traveled on a direct flight from Damascus to Saudi Arabia for the annual Islamic Hajj pilgrimage on May 28, the Syrian Transportation Ministry said. The development is part of an ongoing thaw in relations between Damascus and Riyadh, which days ago appointed Saudi Arabia’s first ambassador to war-torn Syria since severing ties in 2012. Syria was readmitted to the 22-member Arab League in 2023, after it had been suspended from the group for more than a decade over President Bashar Assad’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protesters in 2011. Most...