James Kamau Ndungu told only a few friends that he was heading to Russia. He told them he had been promised a job as a day laborer there. He was 32, unemployed in Kenya and needed the work. Last June, Mr. Kamau sent a photo to his friends from Istanbul Airport, saying he was in…
Five children were injured in Austria when a “wartime relic” beneath their campfire exploded, the police said on Sunday. The object was under the firepit when it exploded about 8 p.m. local time Saturday, according to a police statement. The accident happened in the Freistadt district, an area in the northern state of Upper Austria,…
Following in an unmarked car, the police took immediate interest in a dark gray minivan with foreign license plates. The stop-start driving was suspicious. So was the driver’s frantic texting on his cellphone. When he finally drove up to the sludge-clogged terminal entrance of Tromso airport in Norway, he picked up two passengers. “As soon…
A humpback whale that was stranded for weeks off the coast of Germany was released on Saturday in the North Sea, the culmination of an elaborate and costly rescue effort that transfixed the nation. The 40-foot whale, affectionately nicknamed Timmy by the German news media, swam free after the fifth and by far the most…
The Pentagon announced on Friday that it would pull 5,000 troops from Germany, a U.S. ally that has found itself at odds with President Trump. That would reduce one of the world’s largest overseas deployments of American troops, but tens of thousands would remain. Germany hosts more than 36,000 active-duty personnel, according to the U.S….
As President Trump fired off a series of social media posts criticizing Germany this past week, including a threat to pull some American troops from the country, German leaders showed no public signs that they believed the president was serious. That now appears to have been a miscalculation — one of several that German leaders…
No one does high drama — the agony and the ecstasy, the deepest blacks and brightest whites, the crispest lines and most lucent objects — like the Spanish Catholic Baroque painters. There is a painting of Christ on the cross so exquisitely rendered, so realistically modeled in light and shade, it was said by an…
Grace Reynolds eased the car smoothly away from traffic lights, overtook a stopped double-decker bus, then deftly navigated a street narrowed by vehicles parked on either side. During her lesson in north London in March, Ms. Reynolds, 29, drove well enough to pass a test for her driver’s license, according to her instructor, Dean Batchelor,…
Pentagon officials said on Friday that they were pulling 5,000 troops from Germany and would redeploy them to the United States and other posts overseas. The Defense Department is also canceling a plan developed under the Biden administration to place a missile-equipped artillery unit in Europe. The moves will return U.S. forces in Europe to…
Oups! (That’s French for “oops.”) That’s probably what the driver in training thought — or maybe even shouted, perhaps along with some saltier phrases — after piloting a public bus straight into the River Seine on Thursday. Dozens of rescue workers arrived in Juvisy-sur-Orge, a commuter town near Paris, after the driver veered the bus…
