Todd Heisler/The New York Times “Today, it’s impossible to hide anything. It’s getting harder and harder for politicians to lie,” Sergei Kolesnikov said. SERGEI KOLESNIKOV is a soft-spoken biophysicist who once thought he would spend his career toiling in placid obscurity inside a secret Soviet military institute.
GENEVA — Gone are the days when diplomats and bankers could stroll around Geneva without worrying about having their briefcases stolen. Reported cases of property theft — including everything from wallets to cars — rose 23 percent in 2011, to about 61,000. But in fact, the belongings of the Geneva ...
LONDON — The hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers took a new turn on Thursday when a lawmaker said police investigations had spread to the flagship Times of London. The revelation came a day after lawyers said an e-mail referring to “a nightmare scenario” of legal repercussions from widespread ...
LONDON — He is a 29-year-old air force pilot assigned to a six-week mission flying an air-sea rescue helicopter, and his commanders have insisted that his is a “normal operational deployment” and have asked local people and the news media to pay him no special attention. But anonymity seems likely ...
PARIS — In 1965, Marcel Barbu, a jeweler and philanthropist, ran for the French presidency as “the candidate of battered dogs.” In 2002, Pierre Rabhi, a farmer and philosopher of Algerian descent, built himself as the candidate of “peaceful insurrection.” Coluche, a well-known comedian, called for “the lazy, the filthy, ...
PARIS — President Nicolas Sarkozy, insisting that he was acting as a head of state — not a presidential candidate — announced Sunday that he would raise consumer taxes to make French companies more competitive and reduce the national budget deficit. He said he would increase the basic consumption tax ...
Greece once again appears on the verge of reaching a deal with its private sector creditors on how much of a loss they would be willing to accept on their bond holdings. The latest progress comes in the wake of two days of talks in Athens between Greece’s political leadership ...
DAVOS, SWITZERLAND — When a few thousand of the world’s leaders in business, politics, culture and social action gather in the shadow of the Magic Mountain, you get a bird’s-eye view of how we interpret and deal with contemporary life. For many of us, that life can seem extraordinarily accelerated. ...
GRANTHAM, England — It is a poignant story, and the sparse audiences at the Reel Cinema, a few blocks from the handsome 18th-century facades of the town center, tell it as well as anything else. Only on afternoons when the cinema offers retirees half-price tickets has there been much of ...
PARIS — The founder of a French company that made hundreds of thousands of breast implants from industrial-grade silicon, causing anxiety among women around the world, was arrested early on Thursday in southern France, the authorities said. Jean-Claude Mas was arrested in a dawn raid on the home of his ...
Gordon Welters for The New York Times Germans gathered in Potsdam on Tuesday to mark the 300th birthday of Frederick the Great, a Prussian king who many say embodied values respected in today’s Germany.
Tourists at the Acropolis. The Greek government will make monuments and archaeological sites available for about $1,300 a day for a photo session and about $2,000 a day for filming. ATHENS — This is what it has come to in Greece: the Acropolis, the quintessential symbol of Greek culture and ...
PARIS — Thérèse Delpech, one of France’s leading foreign policy analysts and intellectual historians, died on Wednesday at her apartment in Paris. She was 63. The cause was a stroke, said Bruno Racine, a close friend and the head of the French National Library. She had been ill for some ...
GIGLIO, Italy — A week after the Costa Concordia luxury liner ran aground off the island of Giglio in Tuscany, bodies were still being retrieved from the wreck that is threatening the protected environment here. Raising the death toll to 12 people, a woman’s body, still wearing a life jacket, ...
Newsha Tavakolian for The New York Times Work at a natural gas site in Assaluyeh, Iran, has slowed as international sanctions have forced foreign companies to pull out. PARIS — The European Union moved closer to imposing a phased oil embargo on Iran and some form of narrow sanctions against ...
GIGLIO, Italy — For the third time since the Costa Concordia cruise liner foundered off this Italian island a week ago, rescuers suspended operations Friday after the vessel shifted on the rocky seabed in choppy seas, deepening concerns about the potentially disastrous pollutants lurking in its bowels that prompted the ...
BRUSSELS — Accused of undermining fundamental democratic principles, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, beat a tactical retreat on Wednesday. He offered to change details of controversial new laws, but he rejected claims that his country was sliding toward authoritarianism. In an appearance before the European Parliament, Mr. Orban sought to ...
