Belgium

Rescuing Belgium’s potato industry might easily be a matter of national pride, given the country’s long claim of being the real birthplace of what Americans have the temerity to call French fries

Protesters in cities across the world staged rallies Friday demanding leaders take tougher action against climate change, days before the latest global conference, which this year takes place in Madrid. The rallies kicked off in Australia, where people affected by recent devastating wildfires joined young environmentalists protesting against the government’s pro-coal stance. Janet Reynolds said she had come to the...

The bodies of 16 of the 39 Vietnamese who died when human traffickers carried them by truck to England last month were repatriated to their homeland on Wednesday and have been taken to their families. The bodies arrived on a flight that landed in Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital, the news website VNExpress reported. The website published photos of ambulances that transported...

Police in Vietnam have arrested eight more suspects in connection with the deaths of 39 Vietnamese nationals found dead inside a refrigerated truck container in southeastern England. Police said the eight were arrested Sunday on charges of organizing people smuggling overseas as the sprawling international investigation into what appears to be a people-smuggling tragedy continues. They did not give any...

All 39 people found dead in a refrigerated container truck in England last week were Vietnamese nationals, British police said, as three more people were arrested in Ireland and Vietnam in the sprawling international investigation into what appears to be a people-smuggling tragedy. British detectives initially said the victims discovered near the southeast port of Purfleet on Oct. 23 were...

One family received a final text from their daughter saying she couldn’t breathe and was dying. Another grieving family set up a makeshift altar for their missing daughter who paid $10,000 in hopes of pursuing a career as a nail technician in Britain. A desperate father is searching for his son, who frequently calls home but hasn’t since last week....

Essex police have a man in custody after 39 people were found dead in the back of a truck in Southeastern England on Wednesday.

Frayed U.S. relations with Turkey over its incursion in Syria raise a sensitive question rarely discussed in public: Should the United States remove the nuclear bombs it has long stored at a Turkish air base? It’s a tricky matter for several reasons, including the fact that by longstanding policy, the U.S. government does not publicly acknowledge locations of nuclear weapons...

While the U.S. scrambles to crack down on vaping, Britain has embraced electronic cigarettes as a powerful tool to help smokers kick the habit. The Royal College of Physicians explicitly tells doctors to promote e-cigarettes “as widely as possible” to people trying to quit. Public Health England’s advice is that vaping carries a small fraction of the risk of smoking....

Google is restarting a practice in which human contractors listen to and transcribe some voice commands people give to the company’s artificial intelligence system, Assistant. But this time Google is taking steps to make sure people know what they are agreeing to.

The heat wave that smashed high temperature records in five European countries a week ago is now over Greenland, accelerating the melting of the island’s ice sheet and causing massive ice loss in the Arctic. Greenland, the world’s largest island, is a semi-autonomous Danish territory between the Atlantic and Arctic oceans that has 82% of its surface covered in ice....

The skies over Paris were yellow, ignited by a glorious golden sunset. The partying fans’ shirts were yellow, Colombians making themselves at home on the Champs-Elysees. But the yellow that counted most was the iconic jersey that fit so snugly on the slim shoulders of Egan Bernal. His crowning Sunday as the Tour de France’s youngest post-World War II champion,...

Even ice cream, Italian gelato or Popsicles couldn’t help this time. Temperature records that had stood for decades or even just hours fell minute by minute Thursday afternoon and Europeans and tourists alike jumped into fountains, lakes, rivers or the sea to escape a suffocating heat wave rising up from the Sahara. On a day that no one on the...

Throughout June and July, hundreds of wildfires have flared across the Arctic Circle in Alaska, Siberia and Greenland, sending clouds of harmful carbon dioxide emissions into the air. Fires are common in the Northern regions of Alaska between May and October, but not above these areas where there are fewer trees, according to Nancy French of the school of Forest...

Yukiya Amano, the Japanese diplomat who led the International Atomic Energy Agency for a decade and was extensively involved in negotiations over Iran’s controversial nuclear program, has died at 72, the agency announced Monday. Amano, who had wide experience in disarmament, non-proliferation diplomacy and nuclear energy, had been chief of the key U.N. agency that regulates nuclear issues worldwide since...

A man who bought $15 worth of Godiva chocolates says the company should give him $74,000 because they falsely claimed the sweets were made in Belgium.

Iran seized a British-flagged oil tanker Friday and briefly detained a second vessel in the Strait of Hormuz, intensifying tensions in the strategic waterway that has become a flashpoint between Tehran and the West. The seizing of the British tanker marked perhaps the most significant escalation since tensions between Iran and the West began rising in May. At that time,...

The auto industry is always rife with rumors, but one particular topic has kept the rumor mill working overtime for decades. And it’s finally come true. On Thursday, General Motors finally ended what has been one of the biggest mysteries in the auto industry, posting a link on its website and on social media announcing the “next generation Corvette reveal...

Facebook may be close to putting a Federal Trade Commission investigation behind it. But it faces a variety of other probes in Europe and the U.S., some of which could present it with even bigger headaches. While the $5 billion fine from the FTC, which Facebook has been expecting, is by far the largest the agency has levied on a...

A figure of a roaring lion, about the size of a loaf of bread, is the latest step in the fight to preserve culture from conflict. The sculpture is a replica of a colossal 3,000-year-old statue from the Temple of Ishtar in Nimrud, in what’s now Iraq. The stone statue was one of many artifacts from the Mosul Museum destroyed...