In Afghanistan, Follow the White High-Tops and You’ll Find the Taliban

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan — The unassuming white leather high-top sneakers with green-and-yellow trim are a best seller for a roughly half-dozen shoe vendors in a sprawling bazaar in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

But they are not in demand because they’re the latest fashion trend. For many Afghans, the sneakers evoke only one emotion: fear.

That’s because they’re beloved by Taliban fighters as a status symbol even as they have become a gruesome marker of an unending war, the sneakers’ white silhouette often cutting across Afghanistan’s battlefields of dirt, sand and blood.

Called Cheetahs, the sneakers are produced by Servis Shoes,

Biden’s Promise of Immigration Reform Raises Hopes in Latin America

Advocates also want the Biden administration to cancel a measure that allows border authorities to quickly expel migrants when they cross the border, including those seeking asylum. Trump administration officials had argued this was needed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in detention centers.

Aides to Mr. Biden have said he eventually intends to abolish some if not all of these rules and will resume processing asylum seekers at ports of entry along the border. But they have cautioned that the process will begin slowly.

Still, migrants and their advocates said they hope that the administration will move quickly …

E.U. Vaccine Shortages Snowball Into a Crisis


Nurses preparing vaccines at a nursing home in Spain last week.
Credit…Manu Brabo/Getty Images

The European Union has been besieged by problems since it approved its first coronavirus vaccine in December and rushed to begin a vast immunization campaign, but now its woes have snowballed into a full-blown crisis.

With the pain of supply shortages being felt across Europe, Spain on Wednesday became the first E.U. country to partly suspend immunizations for lack of doses. It announced that it would suspend the vaccination program in Madrid for two weeks, and warned that Catalonia

What We Learned From Apple’s New Privacy Labels

We all know that apps collect our data. Yet one of the few ways to find out what an app does with our information involves reading a privacy policy.

Let’s be real: Nobody does that.

So late last year, Apple introduced a new requirement for all software developers that publish apps through its App Store. Apps must now include so-called privacy labels, which list the types of data being collected in an easily scannable format. The labels resemble a nutrition marker on food packaging.

These labels, which began appearing in the App Store in December, are the latest attempt by

Navalny Allies and Offices Targeted in Raids as Kremlin Turns Up Pressure

MOSCOW — Police officers raided the apartments and offices of the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny and of his allies on Wednesday, increasing pressure on the Kremlin’s loudest critic ahead of more protests planned this weekend in his support.

The raids signaled that the authorities are gearing up for a new legal strike against Mr. Navalny’s team after demonstrations last weekend drew tens of thousands of Russians to the streets of more than 100 cities. At least some of Wednesday’s raids involved allegations that coronavirus restrictions had been violated at the rallies, Mr. Navalny’s allies said.

Mr. Navalny himself remains

Why India’s Farmer are Protesting

At least one protester was killed and 300 police officers were injured after tens of thousands of farmers, many driving tractors, took to the streets of New Delhi on Tuesday to call for the repeal of contentious new agriculture laws.

After months of sustained but peaceful demonstrations on the city’s outskirts, the farmers upstaged the city’s national Republic Day holiday, clashing with the police, destroying barricades and storming the Red Fort, a 400-year-old landmark. In addition to the police officers, many protesters were injured as well.

On Wednesday, the day after the chaos, the farmers had returned to their camps

The Secrets of Instagram Growth-Hacking

Mr. Williams said that a “large global team supports our partners in a variety of verticals,” doing similar sorts of outreach across Instagram, but did not disclose how many people work on this team, or how many similar meetings are held during any given period of time. Ms. Reichenbach was told she got the meeting because this team noticed some of her successful Reels. “Very popular” Instagrammers, Mr. Williams said, might have “high-touch” relationships with company representatives.

“This isn’t a secret,” Mr. Williams said. “This is the same type of thing that we talk about to our broad open presentations” …

Biden and Putin Agree to Extend Nuclear Treaty

Michael McFaul, a former United States ambassador to Russia, said on Tuesday that the White House was right “to engage Putin on issues of mutual interest like the New Start treaty extension,” while raising Russia’s “belligerent foreign policy actions” and speaking “bluntly about human rights violations inside Russia.”

“The challenge, of course, is implementing all three of these policy ambitions simultaneously,” said Mr. McFaul, now the director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. “Navalny and his team, for instance, has called upon the West to sanction not just a handful of obscure Russian intelligence officers …

Day of Celebration or Mourning? Australia Grapples With Its National Holiday

MELBOURNE, Australia — Those who celebrate Australia Day, the country’s national holiday, associate it with barbecues and pool parties. But for those who protest against it, it is a reminder of the continent’s brutal colonization.

On Tuesday, tens of thousands of people marched through Australia’s major cities in opposition to the holiday, which they instead refer to as Invasion Day. It is a blunt reframing of the legacy of the arrival of the British 233 years ago, which set in motion centuries of oppression of Indigenous people.

Year upon year, these protests have grown and gained political traction, and Tuesday’s

In Israel, Infections Drop Sharply After One Shot of Vaccine

JERUSALEM — Israel, which leads the world in vaccinating its population against the coronavirus, has produced some encouraging news: Early results show a significant drop in infection after just one shot of a two-dose vaccine, and better than expected results after both doses.

Public health experts caution that the data, based on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, is preliminary and has not been subjected to clinical trials. Even so, Dr. Anat Ekka Zohar, vice president of Maccabi Health Services, one of the Israeli health maintenance organizations that released the data, called it “very encouraging.”

In the first early report, Clalit, Israel’s largest