Since May 14, it has been legal for an adult man to rape a girl in Afghanistan. On that day, the Taliban enacted Decree No. 18, or the “Code on Judicial Separation of Spouses,” a regulation that legalizes child marriage without even requiring a performance of supposed consent from the girl; her silence is enough.
© Ebrahim Noroozi (AP)
Bad Bunny performs today, June 1, at Metropolitano Stadium. He played on May 30 and 31, and will return on June 2, 3, and so on, for a total of 10 shows. In the entertainment industry, this is known as a musical residency — a series of concerts an artist stages in the same venue over a short period of time. There’s no exact number that defines one, but one of the core ideas behind the concept is impact: the more shows, the better.
With just a few days to go before the start of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the world’s largest sporting event faces the question of what role U.S. immigration authorities will play. Now, a new poll by The Washington Post and the University of Maryland has found that most Americans would prefer they play no role at all.
© David Dee Delgado (REUTERS)
What do medieval monasteries in Emilia-Romagna have in common with a local bank founded in 1910? Both made food preservation part of their daily work. In their own ways and in their own eras, monks and bankers have pursued the same goal in the same place: to profit from a singular product — a cheese capable of staying in good condition for years and increasing in value as it ages. This food, which ensured monastic survival in the 12th century, is now part of Italy’s gastronomic heritage and lies at the heart of a financial model that is so peculiar it has even been studied by Harvard Business School.
© Pietro Gerboni (Consorcio del Parmigiano Reggiano)
Sleep is no longer what it used to be. Or at least that is the widespread feeling. For years, there have been warnings about a silent pandemic of insomnia. The problem is no longer seen as an individual or medical issue, but as a social phenomenon linked to long working hours, digital hyperconnection, anxiety, and hectic lifestyles.
© Blake Eligh
María Emely Delgado crossed paths with Carmen Navas several times this year: at the offices of the NGO Foro Penal, at the Public Ministry, and once at the El Rodeo prison on the outskirts of Caracas. Delgado is 63 years old, Navas was 82. Both were looking for their sons, who disappeared after being arbitrarily detained. Carmen Navas died 10 days after finding her son Víctor Hugo in a cemetery. She had spent 16 months searching for him. María Emely has still not found Jorgen. “You have to be in these shoes to know what this is like,” says the retired teacher, who has been wearing them for almost two years. “Her son had been missing for less time than mine; with Jorgen I’m now coming up on 22 months without news of him.”
© Ronald Peña R (EFE)
Ndaba Mandela was a child when he first met his grandfather, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and leading anti-apartheid activist in South Africa Nelson Mandela, and he grew up at his side. Born in Soweto (Johannesburg) 43 years ago, he is now a political scientist who promotes his grandfather’s legacy as president of the Mandela Institute for Humanity, and was in Spain on Monday to support the Alliance for the Future of Education, an initiative to renew the focus on learning in particularly challenging times.
The Cuban community in Spain is encountering particular difficulties obtaining copies of their criminal records, a requirement to be eligible for the mass migrant legalization program announced by the Spanish government earlier this year. A perfect storm has left Cubans anxious about whether the documents requested from their country will arrive in time to apply for a residence and work permit in Spain. To the hardships already facing the Caribbean nation — including routine power outages that affect offices and agencies — is added the backlog that the consulate had already been experiencing since an earlier naturalization process opened for children and grandchildren of Spaniards. This has given rise, say some members of the Cuban community, to an underground business selling appointments at the Spanish mission in Havana for anywhere between €200 and €500.
© GIANLUCA BATTISTA
Just two months after civil war erupted in Sudan, in June 2023, a video circulated on social media showing paramilitary fighters inside a laboratory at the National Museum of Sudan, located in the heart of the country’s capital, Khartoum. While fierce fighting with the army continued outside the compound, the footage showed a group of men claiming that the corpses around them were victims of the regime.
© Giles Clarke (Getty Images)
Taiwanese politician Cheng Li-wun, who is notably tall, can be heard approaching with the click of her heels and long strides down the corridor of the headquarters of the Kuomintang (KMT), the main opposition party in Taiwan. In April, during a visit to Beijing, she looked the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, in the eye. In the photograph that captured their meeting in the Great Hall of the People they are not smiling; neither do they appear distant. Their expressions are neutral, perhaps waiting to see how the coming years unfold.
Abelardo de la Espriella’s unexpected victory over Iván Cepeda on Sunday, in the first round of Colombia’s presidential election, shows that right‑wing voters are now almost entirely united behind the penal lawyer, while left‑wing voters are fully consolidated behind the senator. The 653,000‑vote margin the far-right candidate held over the senator seems small in an election where 24 million people cast a vote and more than 3 million voted for other candidates. The challenge for the runoff would appear to be persuading those voters — but given the candidates’ profiles and recent history, the path necessarily also runs through the mobilization of people who did not go to the polls on Sunday.
Romania has been deeply shaken by the unprecedented incident that occurred in the early hours of last Friday, when a Russian drone carrying 30 kilograms of explosives crashed into a 10-story apartment block in Galați. The city lies just 15 miles from the Ukrainian port of Reni, one of the neighboring country’s key grain-export facilities and a reason why Russia attacks almost nightly. But on this occasion the drone’s impact crossed boundaries not previously seen in this European Union country. The unmanned aircraft exploded, injuring a woman and her 14-year-old son, who lived on the building’s top floor; the block stands in the nerve center of this town of about 250,000 people on the banks of the Danube.
© EFE
Colombia swung to the far right this Sunday, voting overwhelmingly for a candidate who won the support of 10 million citizens, Abelardo de la Espriella, the top vote-getter in the presidential first round. The criminal defense lawyer, who has never held elected office and once defended Alex Saab, Nicolás Maduro’s alleged front man in Venezuela, promises a shake-up of individual and collective rights: from putting God back into schools to pulling Colombia out of the United Nations. He still needs to mobilize votes for a runoff on June 21 against a left that represents the continuity of Gustavo Petro’s government. De la Espriella will be carried forward by very local banners, such as anti-Petrista sentiment, and by very global ones, like promises already voiced by far-right leaders around the world. Political leaders ranging from President Javier Milei of Argentina to Santiago Abascal, head of the hard-right Vox party in Spain, have already celebrated De la Espriella’s first-round victory.
Since his return to the White House, Donald Trump has put into practice that old maxim that it’s better to ask for forgiveness than for permission — except that the president of the United States never apologizes. The order issued on Friday by a federal judge in Washington to remove the Republican’s name from the Kennedy Center (KC), the capital’s major center of music and opera that Trump renamed without permission, has left the cultural institution in a state of uncertainty after more than a year of political meddling from the White House.
© Kevin Lamarque (REUTERS)
When Mangue Banzima arrived in New York at 17 from an African country — he prefers not to say which — the only thing that made him feel at home was the Knicks. He remembers wearing sneakers as a child like those of his idol Patrick Ewing. And when he arrived in the United States, he found a city where his basketball team was everywhere. Banzima’s arrival in New York coincided with something no Knicks fan will ever forget: they had just reached the NBA Finals, where they lost to the San Antonio Spurs. That was in 1999. It has not happened since in 27 years — until now, when the New Yorkers have finally qualified to compete for the famed ring, for which they will face the Spurs again. After so many disappointments, the success of a team used to failure has infected the whole city with euphoria.
© David Richard (IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect)
California voters on Tuesday are set to choose the candidates who will compete in November for the governor’s office and 52 seats in Congress, in primary elections that are seen as a barometer of how a stronghold of progressive policies is responding to President Donald Trump’s second term. Attention is focused on the gubernatorial race to fill the vacancy left by Democrat Gavin Newsom, one of Trump’s most vocal critics and who continues to send signals of a possible presidential bid.
© AP / REUTERS
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