The World: Latest Stories

To English speakers, the word, "peanut" isn't especially funny. But saying "peanut" in Serbian, "kikiriki," puts a smile on your face; Serbs consider it the funniest word in their language. But why is that the case? Psycholinguists have discovered some clues, as Patrick Cox reports.This story originally aired on June 30, 2023.

Ukrainian comic Anton Tymoshenko is based in Kyiv, and since the start of the war, he's begun performing in both Ukrainian and English. Amid a groundswell of comedy in Ukraine, Tymoshenko has managed to cross over to reach a global, English-speaking audience. He says that for him, comedy is a way to process the war - it's also a defense mechanism, and sometimes a distraction. Reporter Daniel Ofman has the story. (This story originally aired March 11th.)This story originally aired on March 11, 2025.

Sam Kissajukian's 300 Paintings" is an exhilarating one-man show and art exhibition. It's also a humorous meditation on life as a creative person with bipolar disorder. The Australian former standup comic speaks with The World's Host Carolyn Beeler about his diagnosis and the six-month manic episode that changed his life.This story originally aired on Oct. 23, 2025.

Learnmore Jonasi, from a small village in Zimbabwe, is making a name for himself on the US comedy scene. And yes, his first name really is Learnmore. Host Carol Hills speaks with the comedian.This story originally aired on Dec. 6, 2024.

With the former dictator, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, gone, comedians in Syria see new opportunities for social critique, served with laughs. They have been putting together shows at cafes and clubs across Damascus. The World's Shirin Jaafari reports on how these comedians are telling jokes that were unthinkable under the former regime.This story originally aired on May 30, 2025.

The Riyadh Comedy Festival this fall attracted top talent from the West. But it was no laughing matter for critics of the Saudi regime, who argued the festival helped Saudi Arabia whitewash its notorious human rights abuses. Host Marco Werman spoke with Abdullah Alaoudh, senior director on Countering Authoritarianism at the Middle Democracy East Center in Washington, about the event.This story originally aired on Oct. 2, 2025.

There are plenty of jokes. And lots of laughs. But these Chinese-language open mic events are not just about stand-up comedy. The get-togethers are also place for activists to meet, get some group therapy and share pointed views on life back home in China. The World's Matthew Bell has our story.This story originally aired on July 4, 2025.

Vir Das is incredibly popular in India. Now, he's making a bigger and bigger name for himself outside the country, too. Reporter Sushmita Pathak was in the audience this fall when he performed during a residency at the Lincoln Center in New York City.This story originally aired on Nov. 5, 2025.

Irish politicians have afforded Santa Claus extra special powers. Parliament, last week, ensured that the country's airspace will be officially opened for St. Nick's flight to distribute toys to the boys and girls of Ireland. Hosts Marco Werman and Carolyn Beeler have more.

You've got to try the local cuisine - that's the advice given to any traveler headed beyond their own borders. Food can be one of the most visceral and memorable aspects of any trip away from home. National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek has been on a continuous trip away from home for almost 13 years. That means a lot of different types of eating. He tells Host Marco Werman about some of his most memorable meals.

Hosts Carolyn Beeler and Marco Werman catch you up on global headlines you may have missed.

As the world's largest companies are pouring billions of dollars into AI, they are also scouring the planet to find spots where they can set up supercomputing data centers. One of the latest projects from chip-making titan NVIDIA is a proposed $500 million AI factory in Armenia. Shant Shahrigian has the story.

The ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine has drawn, not only opinions and attempted interventions from around the world, but thousands of fighters from other countries have been sent over to fight - some against their will. Seventeen South African men say they were lured overseas under false promises and are now heading to a front line they never signed up for. From Johannesburg, Elna Schutz explains.

In Ukraine, the season of hope and light is being observed, even amid the war. Maia Mihaluk, a Christian ministry leader and Kyiv resident speaks with The World's Host Carolyn Beeler about last night's massive attack on Ukraine and how her family is coming together to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.

Muslim Kashmiri artisans who create hand-painted papier-mache Christmas ornaments exported to markets across the world are suffering. These workshops rely heavily on the holiday season, but this season, the US has levied a nearly 50% tax on goods from India and Indian-administered Kashmir. From Srinagar, Syed Shahriyar reports.

The Trump Administration has recalled nearly 30 ambassadors and senior embassy officials from their posts. The recalls mostly affected people serving in countries in Africa and Asia. The World's Host Marco Werman speaks with former US Ambassador Nick Burns about what this means for US foreign policy.

Journalist Julia Ioffe didn't think the long line of women doctors and scientists in her family was unusual. In Soviet Russia, educated, accomplished women were the norm. But also normal were the burdens of running the home, caring for children and healing a broken country - generation after generation. Ioffe explores how the promise of the Russian revolution failed women in her new book, Motherland: A Feminist History of Russia from Revolution to Autocracy." She spoke with Host Marco Werman.

Tensions are mounting off Venezuela's coast, as US warships and aircraft continue to shadow and seize more oil tankers in the Caribbean. This weekend, the US Coast Guard pursued a third vessel, the Panamanian-flagged Bella 1. Jorge Pinon, a fellow at the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin speaks with The World's Host Marco Werman about why the US oil blockade on Venezuela is sending shockwaves through Havana.

The Iranian capital of Tehran is one of the worst cities in the world for air quality. The World's host Carolyn Beeler speaks with Kaveh Madani, director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, about the factors contributing to air pollution in Iran.

On Sunday, US President Donald Trump named Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry to be the envoy to the semi-autonomous territory of Greenland. Landry reiterated the president's claim that control of Greenland is a national security priority for the US. Greenland is a territory of Denmark, which is a NATO ally of the US. The World's Host Marco Werman has more.

Rock climbing became an Olympic sport in 2020. And since then, it's seen a surge of interest all around the world. Last month, Colombia held the Panamerican Cup: a championship for South, Central and North America. Reporter Stan Alcorn went to the Colombian city of Armenia to see it happen.

The sport of darts got a major boost a few years ago when one player - 16 year old Luke Littler - made headlines for being the youngest person to make it to the finals of the World Championships. But this year, all eyes are on David Munyua, a full-time veterinarian who is the first player from Kenya to make it to the tournament. Hosts Marco Werman and Carolyn Beeler have the story.

From lollipops and fois gras containing toxic additives to deceitful labelling and packaging, food companies are out to make a buck off harried Christmas shoppers. In France, an NGO called FoodWatch calls out some of those producers each year, and gets more than a few to change their ways. The World's Gerry Hadden reports from Barcelona.

Just a decade ago, the population of the Lesser Antillean iguana on the small, private island of Prickly Pear East Cay was zero. But scientists from nearby Anguilla wanted to save the species from extinction. Now, they're seeing the effort pay off, as Host Carolyn Beeler explains.

Opposition from farmers in Europe has caused a last-minute delay to a major free trade agreement 25 years in the making. The deal between the EU and Mercosur countries in South America was due to be signed this weekend, but will now be postponed to mid-January. The World's Host Carolyn Beeler speaks with Nicolas Saldias, an analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit.

For the first time in decades, foreigners in Saudi Arabia can legally buy alcohol at certain stores. High-end hotels are advertising job openings for bartenders and drink specialists, in a move that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. This comes as the Kingdom is set to host the men's World Cup in 2034 and it tries to entice tourists to visit. It also wants to shift its economy away from oil. The World's Shirin Jaafari reports.

A century-old archive of klezmer tunes was retrieved by Ukrainian and Japanese graduate students from the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, brought to New York and is now being digitized and notated. These tunes - about 1,400 of them - enlarge the klezmer repertoire four-fold. They haven't been heard in 100 years, and in the last couple of years have been recorded by klezmer artists from around the world. Jon Kalish reports.

"The Odyssey - From Vietnam to America" is a tribute to the refugees who fled Vietnam in the aftermath of that war. The refugees became known as "boat people," as they risked everything to sail in small, overcrowded boats in search of freedom. Musician Van-Anh Vanessa Vo spoke to many survivors and included their voices in her work. Vanessa Vo recently spoke to Host Carolyn Beeler.

Australia's government has vowed to tighten firearms laws, toughen hate-speech measures and curtail immigration in the wake of Sunday's massacre at a Jewish Hanukkah festival. Daniel Lo Surdo, a reporter at the Sydney Morning Herald speaks with The World's Host Carolyn Beeler about the simmering anger among victims' families.

The European Union agreed this morning to provide Ukraine with a $105 billion interest-free loan to cover vital economic and military needs. European leaders had hoped to use frozen Russian assets, but that was cancelled at the last minute due to pushback from Belgium. Host Carolyn Beeler has more.

This week saw two shootings in the US that made national and international headlines. The first was at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Two days later, Nuno Loureiro, a Portuguese immigrant and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was found shot dead at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. A suspect in both shootings was found dead in a New Hampshire storage facility. He was a former student at Brown and also a Portuguese citizen. It's a developing story and being watched closely in Portugal, as journalist Sofia Neves, a reporter at the Portuguese daily paper PUBLICO, tells The World's Host Carolyn Beeler.

Thousands of marines stationed at bases from California to Arizona recently gathered at Camp Pendleton in southern California for the annual Steel Knight exercise. Instead of just military maneuvers, the troops used scenarios from past military mistakes, like the evacuation of Kabul in 2021. The drills took place in what the Marines call K-2 Combat Town, a simulated urban area. Andrew Dyer of KPBS reports.

Heng Guan is a Chinese citizen from central China. In 2020, he read about mass detentions and other human rights abuses against Uyghurs in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, and he decided to go see for himself. The video he put on social media in 2021 provided valuable confirmation of widespread human rights abuses in Xinjiang, which the US government said amounted to genocide that very same year. Now, Guan is in ICE detention, facing the possibility of being deported to Uganda. Human rights advocates say this would put Guan in grave danger and that his case for asylum is a textbook example of why the US created this pathway to citizenship in the first place. The World's Matthew Bell reports.

In Denmark, there seems to be a porridge for every occasion. A quintessential part of the local Christmas diet is a rice porridge called risengrod. The dish hearkens back to a time when rice was a luxury in the Scandinavian country, says restaurateur Lasse Andersen. Last Christmas, Andersen took The World's Joshua Coe behind the counter at one of his porridge bars in Copenhagen to show him how to cook this Danish classic.This story originally aired on Dec. 23, 2024.

Residents of the Malian capital, Bamako, have seen more gas reaching the pumps recently, after a weeks-long blockade by an al Qaeda-affiliated group called JNIM had brought the city to a near stand-still. But the threat to Mali's military junta continues, as The World's Gerry Hadden reports.

Eleven members of the Nigerian Air Force were released from detention yesterday in Burkina Faso, in West Africa. Their aircraft made an emergency landing there more than a week ago, and a Nigerian delegation had to negotiate with Burkina Faso's military junta to get the personnel released. Host Marco Werman has more.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced a $35 billion natural gas deal with Egypt. American company Chevron is part of the deal and it is the largest in Israel's history. It comes at a time when there's a tenuous ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza. Long before the current conflict in Gaza, Israeli strikes on infrastructure, control over fuel and precarious grid access made electricity a flashpoint. From the podcast Lawless Planet, Zach Goldbaum reports on how energy became another weapon of war and what it means when power can be switched off at a moment's notice.You can hear the full episode at wondery.com/links/lawless-planet.

European leaders are locked in talks in Brussels over how the EU will fund future support for Ukraine, with the outcome of the summit seen as critical to Kyiv's ability to sustain its war effort. One of the most divisive issues is whether to use billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets to help finance Ukraine's military and economic needs. The World's Europe Correspondent Orla Barry joins Host Marco Werman with the latest.

From the Great Lakes in the US to the glacial-melt waters of Switzerland, quagga mussels have wreaked havoc on local ecosystems. Now, they've been reported in Northern Ireland. Bastiaan Ibelings is a microbial ecologist at the University of Geneva. He tells The World's Host Marco Werman that the pesky mollusks have transformed Lake Geneva over the past decade. He joins Marco from a small village near Martigny, Switzerland.

After more than a year of street protests against the Guggenheim's plan to bring art into nature," the museum's board of trustees voted last night to kill the project. Guggenheim Urdaibai" would have seen buildings, walkways and installations go up inside one of northern Spain's most important migratory bird stopover points. The World's Gerry Hadden reports.

In the last of a three-part series about a software tool used to secretly track people, reporter Michael Montgomery explains what the company First Wap has been up to over the past 10 years. Its software tool runs on a vast trove of data that includes information about lots of regular people, but that data drops off in 2015. His reporting stems from a collaboration between Reveal, Lighthouse Reports and 12 other newsrooms around the globe.

Pads and tampons are prohibitively expensive in Pakistan, where the taxes and duties on the products can be up to 40% of the cost. They are even excluded from the list of essential goods that are exempt from taxes, such as milk and cheese. Mahnoor Omer is a lawyer taking the government to court over the taxes. She speaks with The World's Host Carolyn Beeler from Islamabad.

In Yemen, the forces of The Transitional Council said they were moving to take yet another southern province this week. In a civil war that has dragged on for over a decade, the separatist faction backed by the United Arab Emirates has seized much of Yemen's south, and has defied Saudi Arabia-led efforts to deescalate. Host Marco Werman learns more from Abdulghani Al-Iryani. He's a senior researcher with the Sana'a Center for Strategic Studies.

Skate Canada, the national governing body for figure skating in the country, says it will no longer hold major events in Alberta, after the province passed legislation banning transgender athletes in women's sports. "Skate Canada has determined that we are unable to host events in the province while maintaining our national standards for safe and inclusive sport," it said in a statement. Alberta officials criticized the decision, saying they support the province's "Fairness and Safety in Sport Act," also known as Bill 29, which came into effect on Sept. 1. The legislation permits only athletes assigned female at birth to compete in women's sports.

Some people go to thrift stores primarily to find a good deal. Other people go to find older, vintage items they wouldn't find anywhere else. But there's no way anyone expected to find something quite this old at Thrifty Boutique in Chilliwack, British Columbia, about 60 miles outside of Vancouver in Canada. The World's Bianca Hillier reports on the possibly ancient artifacts.

EU-US relations remain tense after Washington's new national security strategy slammed the European Union's migration policies, warning that the bloc risks civilizational erasure." Most European leaders dismissed the critique. One warning, though, did strike a chord with some in the EU: that excessive regulation is holding back the bloc's economy. The World's Europe Correspondent Orla Barry has more.

Most of the population in Gaza is living in tents, because most buildings in the Palestinian enclave were damaged or destroyed during two years of war with Israel. In recent days, powerful winds and heavy rains have damaged tent encampments and brought some severe flooding. Several buildings have collapsed. One baby froze to death. Hosts Marco Werman and Carolyn Beeler have the details.

The 1994 sinking of the ferry Estonia is up there with the Titanic as one of the worst maritime disasters in history. This week, a Swedish-Estonian-Finnish investigative team said the shipwreck, which led to the deaths of more than 800 people, was caused by a structural failure. Their report is a bid to put to rest 30 years of controversy surrounding the cause of the sinking, as Kristjan Tabri tells Host Marco Werman. He's a professor of marine technology at the Tallinn University of Technology.

Lighthouse Reports stumbled on a new, secret software being used to track people all over the world. It is easy to understand why some of them were being surveilled - journalists, politicians, the rich and famous. But sometimes, the software has been used by individuals to track and harass random people. REVEAL's Michael Montgomery has the second story in our three-part series.

Prosecutors in Serbia have charged a government minister there with abuse of office and falsifying of documents, in an apparent attempt to pave the way for a real estate project. That high-rise development is meant to be financed by a company linked to Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump's son-in-law. Hosts Marco Werman and Carolyn Beeler explain the charges, and the connections.