Former President Jacob Zuma is "showing the middle finger" to South Africa after it emerged he met one of the Indian businessmen allegedly at the heart of a huge corruption scandal. A photograph of Zuma and Ajay Gupta in an Indian temple was shared by Indian media this week.

On the eve of America's 250th birthday, NPR's Michel Martin asks House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York about the Democratic Party's midterm future.

Foreign dignitaries from China, Russia, Pakistan and elsewhere are set to pay respects to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Friday as days of ceremonies get underway.

Lately I've been reading a lot about early Christian martyrs and the late Roman Empire. No, really.

Ukraine's long-range strikes hit targets in Russia as observers suggest 1.4 million Russian soldiers have been killed since the war began.

Americans have celebrated Thomas Paine's Common Sense for generations. What gets lost in the fanfare is how common sense is not some eternal repository of political wisdom, but something continually reshaped by democratic debate, argument, and persuasion.

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We begin our July Fourth special broadcast with the words of Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery around 1818, Douglass became a key leader of the abolitionist movement. On July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, Douglass gave one of his most famous speeches, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" He was addressing the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. The late actor James Earl Jones read the historic address during a performance of Voices of a People's History of the United States, which was co-edited by Howard Zinn.

Lam Wing-kee, who defied China by selling material critical of Beijing, passed away after battling lung cancer.

July 4th events for America's milestone birthday are being threatened by a brutal heat wave. And, Russia has struck Ukraine's capital, killing several people in what it calls retaliatory attacks.

“Are we in the Soviet Union now?” asked one Russian, stunned and frustrated by the waits at the pumps.

Several heads of state and other government officials will gather in Tehran for supreme leader's state funeral.

For generations, historians have downplayed the American Revolution as a squabble between elites. But the revolution unleashed egalitarian forces its architects could neither control nor contain.