By ANDREW JACOBS NAIROBI, Kenya — China’s investment prowess and construction know-how is widely on display in this long-congested African capital. A $200 million ring road is being built and financed by Beijing. The international airport is undergoing a $208 million expansion supported by the Chinese, whose loans also paid for a working-class housing complex that residents have nicknamed the Great Wall apa ...

By LYDIA POLGREEN MARIKANA, South Africa — The police fired on machete-wielding workers engaged in a wildcat strike at a platinum mine here on Thursday, leaving a field strewed with bodies and a deepening fault line between the governing African National Congress and a nation that, 18 years after the end of apartheid, is increasingly impatient with deep poverty, rampant unemployment and yawning inequality. ...

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS HOUSTON — The United States is increasing its dependence on oil from Saudi Arabia, raising its imports from the kingdom by more than 20 percent this year, even as fears of military conflict in the tinderbox Persian Gulf region grow. The increase in Saudi oil exports to the United States began slowly last summer and has picked up pace this year. Until then, the United States had decreased ...

By ISABEL KERSHNER JERUSALEM — Shimon Peres, Israel’s president and elder statesman, spoke out Thursday against the prospect of a lone Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, a message that contradicts the hawkish, go-it-alone line emanating from the offices of Israel’s prime minister and defense minister. The president’s comments came amid a wave of speculation in Israel and abroad that Prime ...

A new Alawite state could redraw the map of the Middle East. by Michael J. Totten An Arab country that’s pro-Western and has a non-Muslim majority? Though it sounds like something that could exist only in an alternate universe, there’s a chance that such a state could emerge from the ongoing conflict in Syria. Alawites make up only 12 percent of the Syrian population, but they overwhelmingly dominate the re ...

By THE NEW YORK TIMES For Sikhs in the United States, India and elsewhere, the killing of six people at a gurudwara, or Sikh temple, in Wisconsin on Sunday afternoon has brought grief and sorrow but also concern that the rampage might be the latest example of a hate crime against Sikhs on American soil in the decade since the 9/11 attacks. The police have not yet offered a motive for Sunday’s attack, which ...

ANOTHER BLOODY incident in the Sinai peninsula has underlined the reality that one of the Middle East’s most sensitive pieces of territory has become a lawless haven for Islamic jihadists. According to Egyptian and Israeli authorities, a group of militants stormed an Egyptian checkpoint in the town of Rafah, on the border with the Gaza Strip; they killed 16 police and border guards and commandeered two vehi ...

by Ted Galen Carpenter As the Syrian civil war becomes increasingly chaotic and bloody, some experts caution that the conflict is not a simple morality play featuring an evil regime versus noble, freedom-loving rebels. Instead, it is a complex struggle involving several ethnic and religious factions. The regional context for the Syrian conflict is at least as complex, reflecting both a triangular geopolitic ...