The World: Latest Stories

In 2020, we leaned on pop culture more than ever for moments of levity, distraction — and sometimes even clarity — during a chaotic year. Looking back, here are some of the pop culture moments that stuck with us.

BBC Africa reporter Andrew Harding speculates on the reasons why Africa's overall COVID-19 fatality rates have been so low compared to the rest of the world.

The war in Nagorno-Karabakh has been a huge setback for Armenia's nascent wine industry. As the country mobilized for war, grapes wilted on the vine.

After returning to his native United States during the pandemic, an International Space Station astronaut reflects on his NASA journey, international geopolitics and climate science.

Reporter Leo Hornak produced his first traditional holiday dessert filled with fruit, alcohol and centuries of British history. Britons love to serve up the dish — even if they don't actually like it.

Pope Francis's teachings about the moral urgency of the climate crisis are being spread from the Vatican all around the world by the Global Catholic Climate Movement.

All over Europe, the coronavirus restrictions have hit people hard. So much so that many Europeans are saying that Christmas is "canceled" this year.

More than 50,000 Ethiopian refugees have fled the conflict in Tigray. With heightened insecurity at the Sudan-Ethiopia border, many refugees are reluctant to return home, despite the reassurance of a return to normal.

Cihuapactli Collective, a group based in Phoenix, provides food packages to immigrant communities full of Indigenous products that connect and heal families with ancestral nutrition.

In an interview with The World’s Latin America correspondent, Jorge Valencia, the well-known pop singer talks about how the environment shapes his music.

Marlene Herrera’s parents split up when she was young, and she divides her time between their households. While her father’s side supported Trump, her mother’s side mostly rooted for Biden.

Charging foreigners for an encounter with these giant lizards is a niche industry in Indonesia’s Flores Island and its environs. This is the natural habitat of the Komodo dragon.

The Latinx Therapists Action Network, with a presence in 20 US states, works with therapists committed to supporting immigrant communities and the movements allied with them.

For several years, Beijing repeatedly denied allegations of genocide. But some recent developments suggest 2021 may see a breakthrough in the Uighurs’ long struggle for justice, with help from a new group of international lawmakers.

The global market for meat alternatives, which includes cultured and imitation meats, is currently at about $14 billion. But environmentalists doubt some of the claimed benefits.

LGBTQ and feminist activists have spearheaded a movement to use the letter “e” to diverge from the binary structure of masculine "o" or feminine "a" in Spanish. But the Royal Spanish Academy, the leading authority on Spanish grammar and vocabulary, has yet to recognize the need for this shift.

Syria's Ali Ferzat and Egypt's Mohamed Anwar radically departed from long-established rules about how to depict their leaders. Their images served as a catalyst for massive uprisings that swept across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011.

Though historians debate whether Washington could have been more assertive in responding to Middle East uprisings a decade ago, some observers believe former President Barack Obama let down the revolutionaries.

As verdicts were announced in a trial centered around the January 2015 Paris terror attacks, Lassana Bathily — who was praised for saving about 15 people in a kosher supermarket — says he still struggles with the word hero: “I prefer the term good citizen. A good citizen who simply acted quickly in the moment.”

The revolts a decade ago were among the first major protests in the age of omnipresent mobile phones, with social-network revolutions powered by Twitter and Facebook.

“One day, I hope all Tunisians live in dignity. That’s what my brother wished for,” said Leila Bouazizi, sister of the Tunisian fruit seller who set himself on fire on Dec. 17, 2010.

Navigating economic survival while trying to minimize harm to public health has been difficult for many in the tourism sector as COVID-19 cases continue to soar.

Egypt has gone from a human rights success story to a place where thousands have been detained or executed — and human rights activists have gone underground.

This year, Jane Austen fans are drawing parallels between the novelist's 18th-century life of limited freedoms and the pandemic of 2020.

Libyan American poet Khaled Mattawa penned "Now That We Have Tasted Hope" in 2011, on the heels of an uprising in Libya that led to the ousting of President Muammar Gaddafi. Looking back, the poem's message of hope still resonates.

"There is no doubt that the US is an outlier when it comes to its use of capital punishment," says Delphine Lourtau, executive director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide.

The Trump administration thwarted an investigation specifically into the US. But that didn’t deter those who believe an independent inquiry is necessary.

Israel is considered a world leader in medical clowning. When the pandemic hit back in March, one clown knew she could help COVID-19 patients at her hospital — no matter their ages.

Franco Belgian cellist Camille Thomas is performing solo at some of Paris' most striking art venues during France's second COVID-19 lockdown.

Remote learning has been hard for millions of students worldwide, but for the ones living half a world away from school in the US and Canada, the time zone differences and isolation have taken an added toll.

The youngest casualties of the civil war are not from fighting. Malnutrition kills some children and stunts the growth of others. A new film profiles the work of doctors and nurses who treat them.

The Danish parliament voted this month to stop issuing new leases for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea and end oil production by 2050, making Denmark the first major-oil producing country in the world to decide to phase out production.

With Sting's blessing, Benin-born musician Shirazee flipped his 1988 hit "Englishman in New York," to "African in New York." Host Marco Werman speaks to Shirazee about his inspiration for the song.

Climate negotiators are still considering how best to drastically cut carbon emissions to meet the ambitious targets of the landmark accord, a half-decade on.

Brayan Guevara, a 20-year-old first-time Afro Latino voter in North Carolina, is an independent who ultimately decided to support Democratic candidate Joe Biden. He said the election validated that “my voice matters.”

In South America's biggest country, a populist president has taken an ideological stand against help from Beijing in ending the pandemic. But Brazilian scientists want to put public health and science over politics.

For the most part, the mistakes are unintentional. They're largely the result of automated translation by products such as Google Translate.

About 20,000 African migrants have reached the Spanish archipelago this year, half of whom arrived in the last two months alone. More than 500 have died attempting the journey.

Hundreds of arrest warrants have been issued against military personnel and civilians suspected of being involved with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, but ordinary Tigrayans have claimed they too are being targeted.

Some national security experts expressed concerns about the balance of civilian-military power if the Pentagon is led by a retired general. The World spoke to Rosa Brooks, the co-founder of the Leadership Council for Women.

Photographer Obinna Obioma transforms the iconic "Ghana Must Go" bag into a powerful narrative about migration, nostalgia and longing for home.

David McAdams, an economist at Duke University, has been thinking a lot about the nearly 200-year-old concept lately — and how it applies to efforts to end the coronavirus pandemic.

The Trump administration is expected to finish some 450 miles of border wall by the end of the year, and Indigenous groups on both sides of the border are looking to the future.

This year, a bumper crop of mushrooms is rewarding locals with plenty to eat and sell to restaurants, which is helping some families navigate an economic downturn during the pandemic. But mushroom-foraging tours have suffered.

Although rebuilding has started here, for some, too much has been lost.

It’s a weird, weird world.

Leopoldo López, in exile in Spain, is speaking out against the Venezuelan National Assembly elections being held Sunday by the government of President Nicolás Maduro.

The coronavirus pandemic comes with a heavy psychological toll. So, Cristina Mattioli, a bar owner in Rome, banned talking about it to encourage her customers to focus on more positive things.

"No Road Back Home,” by Abduqadir Jalalidin, a detained Uighur poet, bears witness to the suffering of Uighurs detained in Chinese so-called “reeducation” camps.

We may have left office jobs in the prepandemic world.