Category: Europe
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Eighteen years before her sister’s escape by sea, Sheikha Shamsa ran from her family’s Surrey estate and spent weeks living quietly in England. She was found in Cambridge in August 2000. A British court later found she was abducted. She has not been seen in public since.
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Yesterday’s eclipse crossed Greenland, Iceland, Portugal and Spain. Baily’s beads, the diamond ring and totality — what each stage was, and what to do if your eyes hurt today.
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Princess Haya bint Hussein of Jordan fled Dubai for London in 2019 with her two children. The custody battle that followed produced findings of intimidation, a phone-hacking ruling involving Pegasus spyware, and the largest financial award ever made by an English divorce court.
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Pope Leo XIV has named eight new members to the Vatican’s Council for the Economy, half of them laypeople. Why who watches the Vatican’s money is a question with a long history.
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Russia’s Supreme Court has barred the liberal Yabloko party from September’s election. Why a rival party brought the case, and why excluding a party that can’t win still matters.
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Pope Leo XIV has replaced Vatican City’s constitution three years after the last rewrite. The difference between the Holy See and the Vatican state, and why the change matters.
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A total solar eclipse crosses Greenland, Iceland, Portugal and northern Spain on 12 August. Why it happens, what you’ll see — and how to watch without damaging your eyes.
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Why refineries, not oil fields, are the target — and the counterintuitive result: strikes on refining can cut a country’s fuel supply while increasing its crude exports.
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Thirteen people, including a child, were killed in a Ukrainian drone attack on a refinery in Tatarstan. Why refineries are targeted, what “dual-use” means, and why we count all the dead.
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A three-year-old boy and his grandparents were killed by a drone strike in Ukraine. Why casualty lists in this war fall so heavily on the very young and the elderly.