Elena Marsh

The worst shaking fell on small towns of the Azuero Peninsula, roughly 160 to 200 km from the capital and the canal. The official toll is low so far, but a USGS loss model and cut-off communities suggest it is provisional.

Four Treasury licenses soften the sanctions on the court's 900 staff, but only one has an end date, and it falls 180 days out. Banks and vendors outside the U.S. are the exposed layer.

Quebec's Parti Québécois won 59 of 127 seats with 28.02% of the vote, a record-low share for a governing party, yet 2022 was the more distorted election. The riding arithmetic shows how close the PQ came to a majority and what the seat count does and does not say about reform and independence.

There was no October 5, 1582, in much of Catholic Europe. Here is why the days vanished, why Britain lost 11 in 1752, and why your software may show either gap or none.

The harvest explanation is about half right. Canada's Thanksgiving moved around for decades before a collision with Remembrance Day and a 1957 proclamation pinned it to October.

More than a million Australians got a please-explain letter after last year's election, with fines starting at $20 and climbing to $330 in court. Here's how that compares with Belgium, Brazil and Singapore, three of the roughly twenty other countries that still make voting the law.

Nine countries currently run on two or more capital cities. The reasons range from a 19th-century civil war to a government that simply got too crowded.

Buy the same sneakers in three countries and you'll get three different numbers on the box. None of them are wrong. The systems just never agreed to merge.

From the Philippines to Norway to Mexico, the date a country celebrates freedom is often not the date it actually became free. It's the date the story became worth telling.

Six reserved UN seats belong to the Holy See, which can speak and ratify treaties but has never asked for a vote, a choice traced to a wary 1944 letter from Washington.

Interpol issues Red Notices, but it has no police of its own. What happens after one goes out, arrest, extradition or nothing at all, depends entirely on the laws of whichever country the fugitive is standing in.

The UN's opening date isn't chosen fresh each year. It's the output of a decades-old scheduling formula, and this year's session carries an unusually high-stakes agenda.

Treasury's “economic D-Day” sounds dramatic, but the sanctions tool behind it — leverage over dollar-clearing banks — is the same one Washington has used against Iran for years.

Ukraine's railways run on a 180-year-old Russian-empire gauge that doesn't match Europe's. A new line at the Slovak border shows what it takes to close the gap.

Salty, tidal-looking, and bigger than Germany, the Caspian fails the classic sea test on a technicality. Five countries spent 20 years fighting over what to call it instead.

As Iran and Oman close in on a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the real story is why Washington and Tehran still can't talk to each other directly, and why Muscat always ends up in the room.

A ferry caught fire off Madura Island on Aug. 2, killing five and leaving dozens missing -- 17 days after another boat sank off Sulawesi with 78 aboard.

Nepal's clocks sit exactly fifteen minutes ahead of India's, on purpose. The quarter-hour offset is both a mountain-based calculation and a quiet assertion of independence.

A Crown dependency older than the treaties that tried to define it: why the Isle of Man was never part of Britain and only ever had a narrow trade-only relationship with the EU.

No country owns Antarctica, so nobody had the authority to draw its time zones — the job fell instead to whichever nation flies in a base's supplies, and in one case, to a database volunteer's best guess.