China Keeps Building Stadiums in Africa. But at What Cost?

The Alassane Ouattara stadium rises like a piece of sculpture from the dusty brown earth north of Ivory Coast’s largest city, its undulating roof and white columns towering over the empty landscape like a spaceship that has dropped onto a uninhabited planet. On Sunday, the three-and-a-half-year-old stadium will host its signature moment, when the national soccer teams of Ivory Coast and Nigeria compete in the final of Africa’s biggest sporting event, in front of tens of thousands of fans chanting and cheering in a stadium financed and built by China.…

Where Did All the Hong Kong Neon Go?

It was never just about the neon, that Cubist, consumerist razzle-dazzle cantilevered over Hong Kong’s streets announcing pawnbrokers and mooncake bakers, saunas and shark’s fin soup shops. It was never just about the signs, shining on teahouses offering the finest Iron Goddess of Mercy brew and on hotels paid for by the hour, or on Chinese medicine emporiums bursting with wooden drawers of seahorses and on mahjong parlors clickety-clacking with manicured nails hitting hard tiles. Because while the government’s crackdown on the neon signs stems from safety and environmental concerns,…

12 African Artists Leading a Culture Renaissance Around the World

In one of his famed self-portraits, Omar Victor Diop, a Senegalese photographer and artist, wears a three-piece suit and an extravagant paisley bow tie, preparing to blow a yellow, plastic whistle. The elaborately staged photograph evokes the memory of Frederick Douglass, the one-time fugitive slave who in the 19th century rose to become a leading abolitionist, activist, writer and orator, as well as the first African American to be nominated for vice president of the United States. Diop is no stranger to portraying the aches and hopes of Black people…

As Pandas Leave D.C., Is Panda Diplomacy Over?

The two adult pandas, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, and their 3-year-old cub, Xiao Qi Ji, are scheduled to be loaded into crates that day and driven in trucks to a FedEx Boeing 777 called the Panda Express. They will then be flown 19 hours from Dulles International Airport to China, where they will join about 150 other pandas in a lush nature preserve in the misty mountains of Sichuan Province. And with that, an era of panda diplomacy will end, at least for now. It began when Patricia Nixon,…

Inside the Hunt for U.F.O.s at the End of the World

DEADHORSE, Alaska — Really? That’s it? The United States military is capable of many things, but finding the remnants of an unidentified flying object scattered across a blinding expanse of Arctic ice in minus-30-degree weather using six available hours of daylight is not one of them. The search for a downed U.F.O. began and ended near this oil-camp town at the frozen edge of the world, where Navy pilots flying P-8 Poseidons finally gave up on Friday, ending their mission with no answers. Hours later and some 500 miles away,…

China’s Mad Dash Into a Strategic Island Nation Breeds Resentment

Down a dirt road outside the Solomon Islands’ capital city, past Chinese construction projects and shops where Chinese merchants sell snacks, a tribal chief tried to explain what it feels like to have a rising superpower suddenly take an interest in a poor, forgotten place desperate for development. “At first,” said the chief, Peter Kosemu, 50, as he sat in the shade on Guadalcanal, the largest of the Solomon Islands, “most people just wanted to see what was going on.” He and many others have watched China rush headlong into…

This Is What Shanghai’s Covid Outbreak Looks Like

Shanghai is being gripped by China’s massive Covid wave, leading to a surge in hospitalizations and crowded funeral homes. Local health officials said last week that up to 70 percent of the city’s 26 million residents had been infected, and they expressed confidence that its outbreak had peaked. But many of the city’s hospitals are still overcrowded, particularly with older people. Funeral homes have been inundated with mourners. Infections soared across China late last year, and the government abruptly lifted its strict, but ultimately futile, Covid restrictions in early December.…

Photos from China’s Latest Covid-19 Lockdowns

Less than a month after softening pandemic restrictions, China has reinstated some “zero-Covid” policies in an effort to control a new wave of infections surging across the country. Covid-19 cases have climbed almost every day since late October, and China recently recorded its first coronavirus-related death in months. In response, officials have closed businesses, resumed citywide lockdowns and reinstated frequent testing requirements. China stands alone as the only major country still going to extreme lengths to eradicate Covid-19 infections, raising questions about when, if ever, its economy might fully reopen.…