(LONDON) — Britain’s Prince Andrew faced further disgrace Tuesday as charitable partners and educational institutions began to distance themselves from him amid unfavorable fallout from an interview on his friendship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Like most senior members of the royal family, Andrew is patron for charities and other civic endeavors, lending his name and the backing of the monarchy to the good works of all manner of institutions. But supporters of undertakings connected to Andrew are now reconsidering whether they want to be associated with him after his effort to draw a line under the Epstein scandal backfired so disastrously.

Andrew, the second son of Queen Elizabeth II, granted a no-holds barred interview to BBC’s Newsnight program to end years of speculation about his friendship with the tainted financier, who died in prison last summer while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. Andrew’s failure to show empathy for the young women exploited by Epstein ea..

A military siege is like a chokehold on an entire people.

I was a teenager when I lived through a long curfew in Kashmir in the 1990s when the rebellion against Indian rule was at its peak. After decades of betrayals, broken promises, and pent-up resentment, Kashmiris had risen up in arms. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Kashmiris marched through the streets in a mass eruption. India rushed in thousands of troops, turning the idyll of Kashmir into a dystopian garrison overnight. Everyone began to call the valley “a beautiful prison.”

The long war in and over Kashmir began soon after the Partition of British India in 1947. At the time, the future of the independent state of Kashmir was left undecided; in 1948, after India and Pakistan had fought their first war over Kashmir, it was agreed that a U.N.-mandated referendum would be held to allow Kashmiris a say in whether they joined India or Pakistan. That promise has yet to be honored. In 1987, a state election was rigged to prevent ..

Russia‘s new Vostochny space center, a pet project of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has lost at least 11 billion rubles ($172 million) through theft and top officials have been jailed, the Kremlin has confirmed.

Earlier this week, Russia’s investigative committee (SK) said 58 people have been sentenced to jail for crimes of embezzlement, swindling and abusing official powers. The longest sentence of 11 and a half years was handed to Yuri Khrizman, former head of the company that carried out the space center’s construction, who alone inflicted a loss of 5.2 billion rubles ($81 million) on the state budget. He and several other construction managers, including his son Mikhail, were jailed in February 2018. SK says it is currently handling 12 more criminal cases linked to embezzlement in the project.

For years, Moscow has tried to reboot the industry that was a source of great pride in Soviet times. The Vostochny space center, located in Russia’s far east, some 500 miles north of Vl..

On Monday, the Trump Administration broke with decades of U.S. precedent to redefine America’s policy on Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Since President Trump took office in 2016, he has overturned long-held U.S. positions on several of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’s most contentious issues, to the dismay of the Palestinian leadership. The White House’s latest announcement—that the U.S. will no longer consider Israeli settlements in the West Bank to be illegal under international law—is likely to further inflame those tensions. Here’s what to know.

What is Washington’s new policy on Israeli settlements in the West Bank?
“After carefully studying all sides of the legal debate,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters on Monday, “the United States has concluded that the establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not, per se, inconsistent with international law.” Pompeo added that “calling the establishment of civilian settlements inconsistent with ..