Study Kit

By: BEN HUBBARD BEIRUT, Lebanon — Even two steps away from the Saudi throne, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the 31-year-old son of the king, had already pushed the titanic state oil company toward a public offering, loosened some social restrictions that rankled young people and waded into a costly war in Yemen with no plans for how to end it. …

By: SARAH MASLIN NIR and HANNAH ALANI During the months of snarled traffic, choked sidewalks and tightened police checkpoints that clogged the streets of Manhattan around Trump Tower after the building’s best-known resident was elected president, Charelric Lenglain noticed a dismaying change in the foot traffic to his nearby salon. Namely, hardly anyone came for a haircut. This spring, Mr. …

By: Michael Safi A serious rift has emerged within the decades-old insurgency against Indian rule in Kashmir, with a top militant commander vowing to establish a Islamic system in the disputed Himalayan region and repudiating the goal of an independent nation. Zakir Musa, the commander of Kashmir’s largest anti-India militia, has explicitly distanced himself from the 70-year-old independence movement in …

By: MARK LANDLER and GARDINER HARRIS WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Tuesday that China had not succeeded in getting North Korea to curb its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, an extraordinary admission of failure in his strategy for dealing with the rogue regime of Kim Jong-un. Mr. Trump’s statement — delivered in an almost cavalier tweet, given how ardently …

By: DAVID FRENCH As ISIS crumbles, the chances for conflict with the Assad regime increase. There was always going to be a reckoning. When President Obama began the American war against ISIS in 2014 — a belated and necessary step to stop ISIS’s blitzkrieg across Iraq — there was a lingering question: Then what? If and when we defeat ISIS …

By: MICHAEL R. GORDON and IVAN NECHEPURENKO WASHINGTON — Long-running tensions between the United States and Russia erupted publicly on Monday as Moscow condemned the American military’s downing of a Syrian warplane and threatened to target aircraft flown by the United States and its allies west of the Euphrates. The Russians also said they had suspended their use of a …

By: Zahid Hussain THE decision by the Trump administration to bolster the presence of US troops in Afghanistan raises questions about America’s getting into the third phase of its Afghan war. The number of additional troops is likely to be 3,000 to 5,000 in addition to the 8,800 or so American soldiers already engaged in the war that is in …

By: Parvez Hasan PAKISTAN’S annual GDP growth rate has touched five per cent in 2016-17 after almost a decade. However, it is noteworthy that Pakistan was one of the high economic performers among developing countries over 1960-1990 and had a much higher economic growth than either India or Bangladesh. Sadly, this is no longer true. Pakistan’s economic growth was over …

By: MICHAEL D. SHEAR and NOAH WEILAND WASHINGTON — A member of President Trump’s legal team said on Sunday that the president was not under investigation by the special counsel looking into Russia’s election-year meddling, contradicting Mr. Trump’s assertion in a Friday morning tweet that he is a subject of the widening inquiry. The denial on Sunday by Jay Sekulow, …

By: MARK LANDLER and MICHAEL R. GORDON WASHINGTON — When President Trump made his first major decision on the war in Afghanistan, he did not announce it in a nationally televised address from the White House or a speech at West Point. Instead, the Pentagon issued a news release late one afternoon last week confirming that the president had given …