The World: Latest Stories

Native wildflowers are springing up at the New England Wild Flower Society’s Garden in the Woods near Boston. But climate change, aggressive invasive species and insects are stressing some iconic plants.

"You're different, you're the same. You are my old friend and you are my new friend and none of the rest of it just makes any difference."

The richest families in Florence have kept their grip on wealth — and presumably the prestige and power that accompanies it — for 600 years.

Mexico holds mid-term elections on June 5, and more independent candidates are on the ballots. Pedro Kumamoto pioneered this political shift, defeating candidates from entrenched parties and raising small donations given by people fed up with politics as usual.

As the climate changes and oceans rise, seaside communities are contemplating how to deal with it. In San Francisco, one idea is to bring back wetlands that were paved over decades ago. Next week, voters will be asked to pay for it.

She put herself through school picking watermelons and cleaning hotels. Now, she's a researcher at a university lab in California, studying what happens in the human heart just before sudden cardiac death.

It was once the home to thousands of Olympic athletes — now Vancouver's Olympic Village is home to a couple of the city's urban beavers.

Are Ivy League schools showing bias against Asian Americans?

Government officials say Flint's tap water is finally safe enough for showering and washing hands — which is a step forward, but still not safe enough for drinking.

In France, the rain is causing major problems. But ongoing strikes may be an ever bigger problem.

The operation to remove tigers from a notorious temple run by Buddhist monks is ongoing, and the grim discoveries are piling up.

"We actually never think of Muslims as funny and ... I'm trying to just subtly change that."

A machine used to swap top secret messages between Hitler and his generals has been found languishing in a shed in England. Now it's been put back together and will be shown to Bletchley Park veterans who helped to crack it in World War II.

Where does privacy end and accountability to society begin? The Panama Papers are only the latest massive data dump to add fuel to the fire of that debate. Smari McCarthy, a long-time information activist and innovator, and cofounder of Iceland's Pirate Party, helped process the Panama Papers, as chief technology officer for the Organized Crime & Corruption Reporting Project. He argues that in a world of increasingly concentrated power and wealth, more transparency and direct democracy are needed to right the balance.

There’s a lot of buzz in the news about King Tut’s cosmic dagger. The truth is less fanciful, but arguably more interesting.

A new investigation finds that toxic electronic waste from the US is still being shipped to unsafe recyclers and dumps overseas, despite efforts to clean up the industry. Ken Christensen reports from Hong Kong.

Followers and fans of a Twitter parody account called @DarthPutinKGB were outraged to find out it was suspended on Tuesday. They took on Twitter, criticizing the platform for what they saw as bowing to pressure from Russian authorities. The account has now been restored.

The fighting began in Ukraine more than two years ago. But the Ukrainian government is only beginning to get a handle on the internally displaced. Estimates of Ukraine’s internally displaced vary. The government has registered 1.7 million IDPs but the true number could be higher.

Migrant domestic workers in Lebanon were dying of unnatural causes at a rate of one per week, according to one report. Most of the deaths were attributed to suicide — many of the victims falling from buildings apparently trying to escape their employers.

It was no idle prank. The cafe's owners say an ultranationalist neo-Nazi group was responsible.

While a crackdown on newly arrived migrants, most of whom are Central Americans, worries many immigrants here without papers, extreme violence back home convinces them to take the risk and continue heading north.

Trumpeter Arturo Sandoval once spent three months in jail in Cuba for listening to jazz over Voice of America.

When do military advisers become combatants? After Delil Souleiman's photos, many are wondering again about the US role in Syria.

A 16-year-old says she was drugged and gang raped by at least 30 men. A video on social media shows men seeming to brag about the assault. The case has caused an uproar in Brazil.

In 1990, Jihad Al-Mohammed moved to Sidon in southern Lebanon looking for work and a place to live. He didn't notice that the abandoned building he moved into had Hebrew letters on the wall.

Thousands of words used or created by Roald Dahl are being brought together in a new dictionary — as part of celebrations to mark the centenary of the writer's birth.

Upon arrival in Edmonton, Canada, to help battle the Alberta wildfires, 300 South African firefighters broke into song and dance.

The job of defense minister is seen as Israel's second-most powerful post. And now it's in the hands of a man often described as "impulsive" and "ultranationalist." Avigdor Lieberman was sworn in on Monday.

When Zika detonates inside a patient, it opens the person up to all sorts of other maladies, like the debilitating Guillain-Barré Syndrome. This reporter had it before the Zika outbreak.

Migrants arriving on Europe's shores increasingly include those who were forced aboard unsafe boats, says Joel Millman of the International Organization for Migration.

They were expecting 2,500 Swedish volunteers to answer phone calls from foreigners curious about their country. They got 30,000.

The fence is going up at the neighborhood mosque. Two churches that help minorities were firebombed. A small explosive went off at the supermarket, in the "ethnic" aisle. Even before a wall on America's southern border, walls are under construction.

Why do people condemn? Does it make them feel relatively good in comparison? That's part of it, says a Yale doctoral candidate.

Memorial Day is about remembering the 1.2 million people who’ve died in US wars going back almost 250 years. It’s also a time when people say to veterans, “Thank you for your service.”

Overcrowded onto rubber vessels that capsize or sink, many of the drowned had never been on a boat before.

It happened in one day. Daniel Torres was interviewed for citizenship and took the oath in San Diego — years after he served in Iraq. He was brought to the US as a child and, he says, wanted to do something for his country when he enlisted with a fake birth certificate.

Hissène Habré, the former ruler of Chad, has been convicted of crimes against humanity. The verdict is the culmination of 25 years of effort from victims of the dictator's regime to bring him to justice.

German submarines sank about 50 ships in the Gulf of Mexico during World War II. Here's the story of Ray Downs and his family, who survived one of those attacks.

So, who does it belong to? "Everyone and no one, really," says the 25-year-old crooner from New Zealand.

A tea tent at a refugee camp on Lesbos provided comfort and support to volunteers and refugees. Sadly, it closed in March following a deal between Turkey and the EU.

As the pre-trial resumed Monday, the proceeding has almost become a forum to debate how America deals with what the Bush administration called "enhanced interrogation techniques" — what most authorities now call "torture."

An art therapy program born out of the Veterans Administration in Boston has proven to be so successful among vets suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder that it will soon be rolled out nationwide.

The boom in natural gas brought new businesses and jobs to many communities in the US, including some in western Pennsylvania. But now oversupply linked to a mild winter means some of those businesses are going bust and the jobs are disappearing.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, doesn’t shy away from sharing his sense of urgency about the dangers of climate change. In fact, Whitehouse has shared his views 135 times on the Senate floor, as part of his Time to Wake Up series of speeches.

Back in the 1960s and 70s, thousands of idealistic young people left the city and went back to the land, looking to live sustainably and often communally. Now a new book captures that idealism.

For decades Bill Cosby was not only an American icon but a global one. In apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, "The Cosby Show" was in fact the most popular TV program among white South Africans.

We asked US veterans what they think of Obama's trips to Hiroshima and Vietnam and how World War II and the Vietnam War have shaped their worldview. Here's what they told us.

Lesbos became the epicenter of a massive, and dramatic, human migration. But the boats aren't really landing any more, and the island is looking for tourists to help them rebuild their economy.

There’s a popular dish in Hiroshima called okonomiyaki. It’s informally called the Japanese pancake. But it’s unlike any pancake you’ve had before.

Native American tribal leaders urged a Paris auction house to cancel its Memorial Day sale of ceremonial shields, masks, and objects taken from tribes. The sellers moved ahead with the auction of all but one item.