Day: January 2, 2021

CAIRO — Sunset is when the Nile blinks to life in Cairo, the party boats twinkling like Vegas, the couples on the Qasr el-Nil bridge lingering in the breeze, the riverside cafes clinking with commerce long past most cities’ bedtimes.

By 6 a.m., when the rest have gone home, the rowers come out to a Cairo few others know: no traffic, no crowds, little chaos. Even the birds are audible this time of morning, when the city’s battalions of car horns offer only groggy competition and winter fog pales the five-star hotels along the shore. In the boat, the oar

JERUSALEM — Preventive diplomacy, by its nature, does not often lead to splashy headlines for the practitioner.

In his nearly six years as the top United Nations envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Nickolay E. Mladenov worked quietly behind the scenes to help keep the Gaza Strip from boiling over, preserve the possibility of a two-state solution and build support for Israeli-Arab normalization as a vastly preferable alternative to the Israeli annexation of West Bank land.

But he did notch at least one achievement that qualifies as eye-catching: He earned the respect of just about everyone he dealt with, many of

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has abruptly sent the aircraft carrier Nimitz home from the Middle East and Africa over the objections of top military advisers, marking a reversal of a weekslong muscle-flexing strategy aimed at deterring Iran from attacking American troops and diplomats in the Persian Gulf.

Officials said on Friday that the acting defense secretary, Christopher C. Miller, had ordered the redeployment of the ship in part as a “de-escalatory” signal to Tehran to avoid stumbling into a crisis in President Trump’s waning days in office. American intelligence reports indicate that Iran and its proxies may be preparing a