Angela Merkel pleads with her countrymen. By Natasha Frost Good morning. We’re covering rising numbers of cases of the coronavirus in Germany, the prospect of a Facebook breakup and the nearly 50,000 displaced Ethiopians. Merkel calls for stricter lockdown measures Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany on Wednesday pleaded with Germans to meet fewer people and […]

Want to get The Morning by email? Here’s the sign-up. Today’s the day for The Times’s annual look at The Year in Pictures. Dean Baquet, The Times’s executive editor, believes that 2020 will go down as a signature year in history, alongside years like 1968, 1945 and 1865. “It will long be remembered and studied […]

To the Editor: Re “Should Trump Be Prosecuted?” (Op-Ed, Nov. 28): Andrew Weissman makes a compelling case that the next attorney general should prosecute Donald Trump for crimes he may have committed as president. He is right to say that nobody, and especially not the president, is above the law. But it would still be […]

This month’s conversation in our series on how various religious traditions deal with death is with Leor Halevi, a historian of Islam, and a professor of history and law at Vanderbilt University. His work explores the interrelationship between religious laws and social practices in both medieval and modern contexts. His books include “Muhammad’s Grave: Death […]

This month’s conversation in our series on how various religious traditions deal with death is with Leor Halevi, a historian of Islam, and a professor of history and law at Vanderbilt University. His work explores the interrelationship between religious laws and social practices in both medieval and modern contexts. His books include “Muhammad’s Grave: Death […]

President-elect Joe Biden has made it clear that his preferred method for dealing with Iran is to find a way back to the nuclear deal the Obama administration concluded in 2015, while bargaining for an extension to some of its key provisions. “If Iran returns to strict compliance,” Biden wrote in a September op-ed for […]

President Trump’s continuing attempts to overturn an election he lost decisively more than a month ago is, like so much of what he’s done in office, shocking but not surprising. Who imagined that he would go quietly? What some people may not have been fully prepared for is the way Trump’s party as a whole […]

President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to put democracy back on the agenda after four years of President Trump’s unapologetic coddling of dictators. Mr. Biden has promised to host a gathering of the world’s democracies to demonstrate his commitment to democratic values both abroad and at home. But will Mr. Biden go beyond rhetoric and gestures […]

This is an article from Turning Points, a special section that explores what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. Turning Point: On Jan. 31, Britain formally left the European Union after nearly 50 years as a member. Four years after the Brexit referendum, do we yet understand the meaning of […]

BERLIN (Reuters) – Buyout group EQT is selling facilities manager Apleona, a former unit of industrial services group Bilfinger, to fund management company PAI Partners for about 1.6 billion euros ($1.94 billion), it said on Sunday. EQT, which bought the company at a valuation of 1.4 billion euros in 2016, said the transaction was expected […]