The World: Latest Stories

Elections throughout Latin America have been rigged for almost a decade, according to a hacker who is making alarming allegations about smear tactics and election rigging.

China's state news agency, Xinhua, apparently decreed a ban on April Fools' Day this year calling it "inconsistent with core socialist values." This hasn't hampered Chinese netizens from joking about the ban on joking.

Preliminary evidence suggests the seafaring Vikings may have ventured farther south into North America than previously thought.

In northern Mexico, there's a place called Copper Canyon. It cuts six slits into the Earth and hidden between the cliffs and valleys is where an American concert pianist has decided to settle with his one-ton grand piano.

President Obama is hosting his fourth and final biennial nuclear security summit. Since coming to office he has made it a priority to keep nuclear materials around the world out of the hands of terrorists. But experts say there’s still a ways to go.

A new book looks at the Spanish Civil War through the eyes of Americans who took up arms to fight there. Many viewed the conflict as a preluder to World War II.

The lifting of US sanctions on Iran may mean people in the US can finally buy Iranian pistachios. But Israelis yearning for a Persian pistachio are still out of luck.

"As I was watching, the largest of the whales started swimming directly at me, at which point I got very scared because I know that they are the only animal which could, and indeed have swallowed a human being, and it's not nice way to go.“

Even as the weather becomes increasingly unpredictable and extreme events become increasingly frequent, it’s still considered scientifically incorrect to blame global warning for any one event. But a new report says it is now possible to estimate the influence of climate change on some types of extreme events, such as heat waves, drought and heavy precipitation.

Necessity led to Cuba's move into development of vaccines for hepatitis B and lung cancer, as well as innovative treatments for diabetes.

Donald Trump said women should be punished for abortion. In El Salvador, they are.

But he probably won't be — despite the country's top court ruling that Jacob Zuma breached the constitution.

He decided on a path in music by way of poetry — then the beat kicked in. Now he's a rising star and just signed by Def Jam. We caught up with Toronto's Jahkoy after his set at the 2016 SXSW in Austin, Texas.

Under apartheid, millions of black and mixed-race South Africans were forced to leave their homes and move to barren land, away from white South Africans. Now, some families of color living in Cape Town fear the history of forced evictions is about to repeat itself, this time under a democratically elected government.

“If you think about 'Fiddler on the Roof' for example, there’s no scene where Tevye and his family are sitting around eating pastrami sandwiches,” says Merwin. “This was like the caviar of eastern European Jewish life.”

"It's about equal rights," says Hope Solo.

David Trinidad and his wife Ivonne had just recently started using Fitbits, when Ivonne said that hers was malfunctioning. The device was showing an unusually high resting heart rate and recorded 10 hours in one day in what it called the “fat burning zone,” even though she had not been particularly active. But her Fitbit wasn't broken — she was pregnant.

Since 9/11, colleges and universities have been launching programs dedicated to terrorism studies. Despite increased demand, colleges are still clamoring to find faculty well-versed in the history, language and culture of violent extremism.

President Dilma Rousseff’s biggest coalition partner just dumped her, and the party’s already planning sweeping changes if it takes power.

Here's why backing out of major US trade agreements like NAFTA might not be such a good idea for US workers.

A new street art campaign in Malaysia shows the prime minister as a evil clown. It's a protest against a corruption scandal involving the prime minister and the police crackdown on dissidents in Kuala Lumpur.

Otto Skorzeny was one of the most successful and audacious commanders of special operations forces in World War II. He was also a diehard Nazi. So historians are astonished to learn this week that — after the war — Skorzeny was recruited by the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad.

A new film explores what it was like to be a high school friend of convicted Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

A pair of ophthalmologists discuss why you probably don’t need to exercise your eyes and five other commonly-believed myths about the eye.

Molenbeek in Brussels was the home to some of the Paris attackers. It's a largely immigrant and Muslim district and now some residents complain it's being portrayed as a den of terrorists. Reporter Adeline Sire went on a tour with a Molenbeek city councilor who wants the world to see a different face of Molenbeek.

Syria's security forces scored a big victory after they re-claimed the ancient city of Palmyra this week. They couldn't have done it without the backing of Russian airpower. Russia's involvement has helped strengthen Syrian President Bashar Assad ... but to what degree?

Cellebrite, a company headquartered in a Tel Aviv-suburb might have helped the FBI hack into the San Bernardino attacker's iPhone.

"The ban wouldn't be good for anyone," says the owner of one of the largest seafood importers in Sweden.

After attacks in Paris and Brussels, security has hardly been a bigger concern in Europe. And soon France will be hosting the soccer tournament Euro 2016, with stadiums jammed with hundreds of thousands of fans.

Rebeca Lane gets inspiration from women who defy patriarchal norms, and her current tour is meant to help others do the same.

Saudi Arabia presents a picture of wealth and stability in the Middle East. But filmmaker James Jones has captured a different side of the kingdom. Through secret interviews and a network of Saudi activists armed with hidden cameras, he shows a government deeply concerned about security. And people who fear persecution by authorities.

Archaeologists have uncovered what might be the oldest battlefield in the world, in a boggy valley in northern Germany. The remains of hundreds of slain warriors and their armor and weapons have been recovered. The researchers say the find is changing everything that history knows about society and warfare in Bronze Age Europe.

It's a new dawn for computing. Scientists are hoping quantum computers will be able to help us better understand some of the universe’s biggest problems.

How do you defeat graffiti? Given that graffiti is an Italian word meaning "scratches," it figures that Italians would come up with a solution, a virtual solution anyway.

Some of the city's archaeological gems suffered serious damage under ISIS's 10-month grip.

Carrie Rodriguez is a Texan, but with deep roots to Mexican pop music through her great-aunt, Eva Garza. Rodriguez pays tribute to her great-aunt and adds her own contemporary twists to classic ranchera's on her new album, "Lola."

Some of the suspects in the Brussels and the Paris attacks were Belgian, of Moroccan descent. And that's something that Abdel Lahrour can't understand. He's Belgian, born in Morocco. And he's proud of his Belgian identity. This weekend, he took his sons to a vigil for the victims of the Brussels attacks, trying to make sense of it all.

Polar adventurers keep breaking records. But can they be trusted?

Studies have shown that Donald Trump gets "free media" on broadcast television to the tune of nearly $2 billion since his campaign began. And he's allowed to do things — like phone interviews — other candidates never can do.

American tourists are expected to flock to Cuba once travel restrictions are lifted. That may be bad news for this "accidental Eden."

Recently published studies point to an exciting new development in ocular stem cell therapy.

Much of the city of Fort Lauderdale, in south Florida, sits just two feet above sea level and already floods multiple times a year. Yet developers are cashing in on new housing near the sea, and there seems to be no shortage of buyers. Will this someday give new meaning to the phrase ‘burying one’s head in the sand’?

Fighting fungal diseases that have killed millions of frogs and other amphibians has become an urgent priority for scientists worldwide. Now, some new research suggests that natural soil bacteria might provide protection from these devastating diseases.

A dairy expert unlocks the mysteries of processed cheese as well as the secrets to the perfect, delicious, creamy homemade macaroni and cheese sauce

Environmental campaigns often court trouble when they oppose global companies that want to extract lucrative resources, and there’s no more extreme example than the Niger Delta, where oil companies have drilled since the 1950s.

It likely wasn't the catastrophe some media outlets initially reported, but the disappearance in Antarctica of a large colony of Adelie penguins may be a sign that a changing climate means difficult conditions ahead for some of the world's ice creatures.

Thousands of angry shepherds recently stormed the parliament in Bucharest, the Romanian capital. It was a protest against a measure that would regulate, get this, sheepdogs.

A social media firestorm in Canada has followed the acquittal of former CBC radio star Jian Ghomeshi in the first of two sexual assault trials.

Jews celebrated the holiday of Purim this week, marking the survival of the Jewish people from an attempt by the Persian Empire to destroy them. But the holiday is controversial for some.