Luis Manuel Pérez waiting for tourists to hire him for a ride around Havana, Cuba in 2024. The Trump administration, which has tightened the U.S. chokehold on Cuba by cutting off foreign oil, is betting that this is the Cuban communist revolution’s last year. (Jorge Luis Baños/The New York Times) By FRANCES ROBLES and VJOSA ISAI By the second week of Debbie Sutherland’s vacation to Cuba last month, there were ominous signs of trouble. Gasoline was being rationed, excursions w

By DAVID E. SANGER President Donald Trump on Thursday said he should have a role in choosing Iran’s new leader, and that Mojtaba Khamenei, a son of the former leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who appeared to be the leading candidate to succeed his father, was an “unacceptable” choice. Trump’s comments, in interviews with Reuters and Axios, were the most explicit he has been yet about his vision of an American role in creating a new government in Tehran. They made clear that Trum

People walk past a damaged building after U.S.-Israeli airstrikes in Tehran, March 3, 2026. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine has offered to share his country’s expertise in defending against Iranian-designed drones. (Arash Khamooshi/The New York Times) By CASSANDRA VINOGRAD The crisis in the Middle East has started to reverberate in Ukraine, putting peace talks with Russia on hold and raising fears in Kyiv of diminished military support. After the United States and Is

Members of the Ecuadorean Navy during a raid on a suspected drug gang in Guayaquil, Ecuador, on Oct. 18, 2025. As Washington made combating fentanyl a priority, cocaine trafficking has surged. Nowhere have the ripples been felt like in Ecuador, where criminal groups have run rampant. (Daniele Volpe/The New York Times) By ERIC SCHMITT and LUIS FERRÉ-SADURNÍ The United States and Ecuador have launched joint military operations against “designated terrorist organizations” in the

By JASON HOROWITZ For more than a year, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain has positioned himself as the leader of Europe’s left-wing resistance to President Donald Trump. As Trump scaled up deportations, Sánchez gave migrants a pathway to residency. As the president championed American tech companies, Sánchez sought to restrict them. And this past weekend, Sánchez refused to let American warplanes use Spain as a launchpad for strikes on Iran, leading Trump to threaten to

Men pray in Tehran on Wednesday, March 4, 2026, at the site of a police station that was destroyed by a U.S.-Israeli airstrike. The U.S. military has hit more than 2,000 targets, a barrage that appears to have severely degraded Iran’s ability to fight back by firing missiles at Israel, U.S. bases or other American allies in the region. (Arash Khamooshi/The New York Times) By GREG JAFFE A devastating air campaign is pounding the Iranian military and leaving it nearly incapable

President Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba addresses the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York on Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2018. (Chang W. Lee/The New York Times) By LUIS FERRÉ-SADURNÍ and DAVID C. ADAMS President Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba called on Monday for an “urgent” transformation of the country’s economic model, according to Cuban state media, as Cuba confronts an oil blockade by the Trump administration that has deepened a humanitarian crisis on the is

By AARON BOXERMAN and CHRISTINA GOLDBAUM Israel said Tuesday that its military had seized areas of southern Lebanon as part of its escalating conflict with Hezbollah as the Iran-backed armed group fired small volleys of drones at the country in a second day of fighting. Israeli forces “moved forward and took over strategic areas” in Lebanon while ordering nearby Lebanese towns to evacuate, expanding the Israeli military’s zone of control close to Israel’s northern border, sai

Sens. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), right, and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) confer behind a sheet of paper during testimony from Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Tuesday, March 3, 2026. (Eric Lee/The New York Times) By JIM TANKERSLEY, SHAWN McCREESH, ANTON TROIANOVSKI and JOE RENNISON President Donald Trump said Tuesday that officials the United States had eyed as potential new

By MALACHY BROWNE, EPHRAT LIVNI and SANAM MAHOOZI At least 175 people, most of them likely children, were killed Saturday in a strike on a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran, health officials and Iranian state media said. The search for survivors in the rubble of the Shajarah Tayyebeh school in the southern town of Minab ended Sunday, according to Mohammad Radmehr, the governor of Minab, Iranian state media reported. It appeared to be the deadliest attack in the ongoin