The World: Latest Stories

You may not envy what dung beetles and carrion beetles dine on, but you live in a world that they help keep clean.

We know that one of the first migrant groups, known as the Clovis people, lived here around 13,000 years ago. Beyond that, however, many details about these early Americans are still hazy.

Northern right whales were hunted to near extinction, but they seem to be hanging on after being protected by the Endangered Species Act. After 13 sudden deaths, scientists wonder whether they face a new man-made threat: climate disruption.

At the Aging Aircraft Lab, planes are taken apart piece by piece to learn more about the ravages of time on various aircraft designs — from cracking, to corrosion, to metal fatigue.

"Maybe a little bit less of tweeting about the NFL and more of a humane attitude towards what is being lived here on the island right now."

The Spanish government is taking extreme measures to make sure the vote doesn't happen — but Catalans are pushing back with some tactics of their own.

There have been questions about the speed with which the Trump administration has moved to deploy the US military after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico. "It feels a little bit slow," says one former US Navy admiral.

Ukraine-born Eugene Hutz is the lead singer of the band Gogol Bordello. Although the band is based in New York and Hutz himself has lived there for years, identity and Ukraine help define the band.

Farmers reckon with the environmental costs of an annual Thanksgiving tradition.

On Sept. 7, a massive earthquake off of Mexico's southern coast damaged buildings. And then a powerful aftershock a few weeks later finished some of them off. People in the region just want the earth to stop shaking.

Communal detention in Sittwe, Myanmar, might not fit the classic model of detention camps, but author Andrea Pitzer says the Rohingya-only enclaves are just as inhumane.

Doctors and nurses use gallows humor to get through the day. But when is laughter in medicine OK, and when does it cross the line?

Kurt Andersen and Mary Harris, the host of Only Human, check out something called laughter yoga.

The neuroscientist Sophie Scott says modern science is missing a big part of human experience by ignoring laughter.

How does laughter yoga make you feel? And can laughing improve your health?

Comedian Chris Gethard says comedy helped him when he was suffering from depression—but it wasn’t until he got help that his career took off.

When northern Peru's agricultural region was hit by back-to-back extreme weather events, fruit production normally bound for the US was decimated.

Fifteen months into Lyndon Johnson's presidency, the country still knew little about the Vietnam War. This changed in February 1966, when Sen. William Fulbright began the first televised, public hearings into the administration's handling of the conflict.

Chicago is home to more than 1,000 Rohingya Muslims who have settled there in the last five years. And from over 8,000 miles away from Myanmar, they want their voices to be heard.

The United States will reduce the number of refugees it is prepared to welcome for resettlement to only 45,000 over the next year — just over half the figure for 2016, officials said Wednesday.

Tuesday was a historic day for women in Saudi Arabia. The kingdom's leader issued a decree that will allow women to drive. It's the culmination of a battle they had fought so hard for, for years.

Recovery efforts by FEMA and other US federal government agencies are only getting started. And they're going to take a very long time to complete.

The US tax code is notoriously dysfunctional. Meanwhile, countries from New Zealand to Estonia have devised equitable, effective tax structures.

Women in domestic violence shelters are among the most vulnerable during natural disasters. Without a network of friends and family, they often find themselves wondering how to get out of a storm's path.

Nearly all of the island's 3.4 million residents have seen direct impacts from the storm.

When Twitter comedian and author Jonny Sun began to write his book, "everyone's a aliebn when ur a aliebn too," he had to write down the rules of the cutesy grammar of the language he invented.

As the death toll rises, engineers inspect buildings that may yet topple with another quake.

What happens if the US starts to stumble toward nuclear war?

North Korean officials say a tweet by President Donald Trump on Saturday was a "clear declaration of war." But Twitter says it won't be taking down Trump's tweet because of its "newsworthiness."

Wesley Bocxe famously documented Mexico's deadly 1985 earthquake. But 32 years later to the day, another massive earthquake toppled his home.

Everything people post on Facebook actually lives somewhere in real life — like a small town in central Oregon decimated by the loss of manufacturing industries.

Journalist Mary Kay Magistad grew up thinking about the Vietnam War, and it helped launch her career as an international correspondent. The former World China correspondent and host of Whose Century Is It? talks about how Vietnam shaped her.

About 154,000 people are eligible to renew their status for two more years. But not everyone thinks it's worth it.

Muslim Americans are responding to President Donald Trump's Travel Ban 3.0. And they're saying that despite the inclusion of two non-Muslim countries, it's a Muslim ban.

In Cold War Yugoslavia, Mexican mariachi music found a devoted audience.

Angela Merkel won, but a far-right party will be at the forefront of German politics for the first time since WWII.

A German far-right party won parliamentary seats after campaigning against policies that welcomed refugees. One of those refugees, Ahmad Wali Temory, hopes to preserve the policies that brought Afghans like him to the country.

People are running out of supplies, and it's unclear whether help is on the way.

Ricardo Rosselló, Puerto Rico's governor, called for more aid from the Trump administration on Sunday night and compared the crisis to the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Sandy.

“It’s crazy that those four words were so impactful,” says Lesego Legobane. “I didn’t even dream of getting 10 retweets.”

Everyone gets chicken, and the chicken get antibiotics.

Researchers examining soil cores from an early Roman harbor found correlations between layers of lead and the city’s economic growth.

With its silky fur and bandit-masked face, the black-footed ferret cuts a cute, if lethal figure on the American plains. It’s also the star of a great comeback story.

Hurricanes Harvey and Irma have focused attention on the problems with US flood disaster programs.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday announced a plan aimed at "protecting election integrity." The announcement comes just two weeks after the company revealed that a Russian company purchased roughly $100,000 in political advertisements during the 2016 US presidential campaign.

Alfredo Richner and his family were in Puerto Rico when Hurricane Maria came barreling through.

With so much destruction from this season's hurricanes in the Caribbean, there are going to be a lot of people on the move, looking to start their lives in new places. Casually, we often call these people "climate refugees." But the term is problematic.

Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un have engaged in the sort of rhetorical rumble that wouldn't sound out of place in the world of professional wrestling. But these two nuclear-armed national leaders might be more similar than most people realize.

This is the untold story of Los Angeles’ Filipino Tiki bartenders.

In an April 1965 address to the nation, President Lyndon Johnson laid out his argument for expanding US involvement in Vietnam. From archival audio, we now know that Johnson had believed for at least a year that the conflict was a disaster in the making. Why did he continue to push for escalation in a war he didn't think was worth fighting?