Abba on new album Voyage: We don't need to prove anything

The advance of the Taliban across Afghanistan represents a betrayal and catastrophic failure by the US, UK and Nato, says Rory Stewart, a former UK International Development Secretary. He told BBC World News that Western involvement in Afghanistan had involved around 2,500 troops supporting Afghan forces and air support. That support had confined the Taliban…

On 4 August 2020, Lebanon’s capital was rocked by a catastrophic blast as hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate exploded in the port, killing at least 200 people and injuring thousands. An investigation is underway but has not yet been made public. The country’s ambassador to the UK, Rami Mortada, told BBC World News that…

The number of cases are under control but more clean drinking water is needed, a charity says.

The US diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics was not about lecturing China but about “standing up for human rights”, the US climate envoy has said. John Kerry told Stephen Sackur, of BBC News’s Hardtalk programme, that addressing climate change was so important, it should be kept separate from other areas where there is…

Sweeping changes to Hong Kong’s electoral rules were “not a good sign” and have turned democratic progress “back to square one”, Lo Kin-hei of the Democratic Party said. “These kind of changes… made today is turning Hong Kong back for 20-odd years. “In the past 20 years there was some sort of progress in the…

The presence of far-right candidates will mean that the stakes will be very high in next year’s French presidential election, the country’s finance minister has said. Bruno Le Maire told BBC Hardtalk’s Stephen Sackur that the country had “questions about our own identity” and the kind of role it could play on the international stage…