Chinese universities send students home in an effort to prevent more protests

The U.S. State Department says Secretary Antony Blinken has postponed his trip to Beijing amid concerns about a Chinese surveillance balloon flying over U.S. airspace. The Pentagon said Thursday it had "very high confidence" that the high-altitude surveillance balloon came from China and is being used to collect information from sensitive sites.

Sometimes gifts just appear in the sky. An alleged Chinese spy balloon seen floating about 11 miles above Montana this week could just be one for the Biden administration. Or it could make fraught bilateral relations between Washington and Beijing even worse. The discovery of what the Pentagon labeled a...

BEIJING — China said Friday it is looking into reports that a Chinese spy balloon has been flying in U.S. airspace and urged calm, adding that it has "no intention of violating the territory and airspace of any sovereign country." Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning also said she had...

MANILA, Philippines — The U.S. will expand its presence in Southeast Asia with access to more bases in the Philippines, the two countries announced Thursday. "American commitment to the defense of the Philippines is ironclad. Our alliance makes both of our democracies more secure and helps uphold a free and open Indo-Pacific," U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said during a press conference on Thursday afternoon in Manila.

The U.S. military shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina on Saturday afternoon, the Pentagon said. "On Wednesday, President Biden gave his authorization to take down the surveillance balloon as soon as the mission could be accomplished without undue risk to American lives under the balloon's path," U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said in a statement.

As infighting continues in the Biden administration over the future of TikTok, the video streaming giant is marshaling its resources toward one goal: convincing the public it is a safe platform. The company recently launched a full-fledged charm offensive that has included rapid-fire meetings in Washington with TikTok CEO Shou...

CANBERRA, Australia — Australia is removing the British monarchy from its bank notes. The nation's central bank said Thursday its new $5 bill would feature an Indigenous design rather than an image of King Charles III. But the king is still expected to appear on coins. The bank said...

WASHINGTON — The U.S. is tracking a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that has been spotted over U.S. airspace for a couple days, but the Pentagon decided not to shoot it down due to risks of harm for people on the ground, officials said Thursday. A senior defense official told...

KYIV, Ukraine — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel traveled to Kyiv for an annual EU-Ukraine summit. Ukrainian and European Union leaders have been meeting regularly for these summits since the 1990s, but this is the first time a summit is taking place with Ukraine as an official candidate to join the EU.

LAGOS, Nigeria — Pope Francis has arrived in South Sudan, on the second leg of a trip to Africa he has called "a pilgrimage of peace." South Sudan is the world's youngest country with a large Catholic population, and has suffered violent conflict since the end of its civil war. The pope hopes his visit can revive its peace process.

LAGOS, Nigeria — An estimated million people attended an open mass by Pope Francis in Kinshasa on the second day of a landmark trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. A sea of people sang "viva papa," as Pope Francis arrived in his pope mobile, to an open Mass he held at the main airport in the capital Kinshasa.

This is part of a special series where NPR looks back at our coverage of major news stories in the past. Listen to the full audio story to hear excerpts from Colin Powell's U.N. speech and more of NPR's archival audio. There wasn't just one moment that led to the...

The film Let It Be Morning centers on the story of Sami, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who thinks he's made it, working at a tech company in Jerusalem, living a double life with his Jewish Israeli mistress. But when he heads to his family's village for a wedding he...

This winter's COVID-19 surge in the U.S. appears to be fading without hitting nearly as hard as many had feared. "I think the worst of the winter resurgence is over," says Dr. David Rubin, who's been tracking the pandemic at the PolicyLab at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. No one expected...

After the U.S. Supreme Court's decision that ended the constitutional right to abortion, Zahra Ayubi started to notice a theme among some critics of the historic shift. "They'll draw analogies between abortion bans in the United States and Muslim conservatism," Ayubi, a professor of Islamic Ethics at Dartmouth College, said of some of the commentary she saw on TV and on social media. Critiques ranged from attempts at humor to outright Islamophobia.

Close to a year since the invasion of Ukraine, activists aligned with Russia are pushing pro-Kremlin messages in Africa using a coordinated French-language network spanning Facebook, YouTube, Telegram and other online channels. The network, dubbed "Russosphere," is connected to a far-right Belgian political activist who was involved in overseeing contested...

SAN FRANCISO — A jury on Friday decided Elon Musk didn't defraud investors with his 2018 tweets about electric automaker Tesla in a proposed deal that quickly unraveled and raised questions about whether the billionaire had misled investors. The nine-member jury reached its verdict after less that two hours...

"So we're just gonna go in a freezer," says Tulio de Oliveira. We're at the institute that he directs, the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation at Stellenbosch University near Cape Town, South Africa. And he's taking me to a cold storage room chilled to 20 degrees below freezing. He...

Brazil's former president Jair Bolsonaro has applied for a six-month visa to remain in the U.S. as his home country continues to investigate whether he's partially responsible for an attack on Brasilia's capital buildings last month. Bolsonaro left Brazil for Florida on Dec. 30, two days before the inauguration of...

When Russia invaded Ukraine, choreographer Alexei Ratmansky was in Moscow working with both the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky, historically two of the most revered ballet companies in the world. "My wife called me at 5:00 am from New York and said: Kyiv has been bombed," he remembers. He and his...