The World: Latest Stories

The attack in Paris on Friday has left many people asking, could it happen here? Former Assistant Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, Juliette Kayyem, answers with a qualified "yes." But she also points out that US surveillance is currently more intensive than most European nations, making such an attack more difficult to pull off.

Many Lebanese speak a full-on mix of Arabic, French and English. Calling this linguistic melange a "mother tongue" started out as a joke, but now it's become a part of Lebanon's national identity — even if it means that sometimes people don't understand what they are saying.

Our human ancestors have been laying their dead to rest for thousands of years. The departed were usually laid in the earth or on a funeral pyre. Today, earth and fire are still the most commonly used methods. But now a new paradigm is on offer.

Australian academic Susan Carland was tired of all the hate she receives online so she decided to donate $1 every time someone sends her a hate tweet. For Carland, it's about changing the toxicity to positivity.

Reporter Rhitu Chatterjee attended the University of Missouri from 2003-07. She never experience any hate. Everything was good for her. But the same couldn't be said for her peers.

The so-called Islamic State has lost control of a key town on the main road between the territory it occupies in Iraq and Syria. The town of Sinjar, in Iraq, fell Friday to a coalition of Kurdish and other militias, backed by US airpower. 'Liberated' Sinjar looks like a ghost town.

Adel Termos acted decisively during a Beirut bombing on Thursday, with little regard for his own safety.

Student protesters in South Africa are chalking up another victory in their "decolonization" campaign. Stellenbosch University, once a bastion of apartheid ideology, has agreed to stop teaching in Afrikaans and switch to English as the main language of instruction.

We bring you rare funk and soul music from Brazilian music, courtesy of a Boston-based record collector who dug through a lot of crates of records to find just the right tracks.

FIFA has cleared five men as candidates to lead the organization. The world soccer body says all five passed a thorough 'integrity check.' But all of them are also tainted by their past associations with an organization saddled by years of corruption allegations.

Over the years, Jose Garcia's life has collided with some of Chicago's biggest school reform efforts, including a recent teacher training effort that has him teaching at his old high school. Will he make it?

He’s a plainspoken outsider and a former neurosurgeon. Ben Carson has lurched to the front of the pack in the race to be the GOP’s presidential nominee. But his foreign policy ideas are raising questions.

The activist group Syria is Being Silently Slaughtered thought they were safe in Turkey. Then one of their members was beheaded.

Kurdish and other militias have launched an offensive, backed by US air power, against ISIS in northern Iraq. The goal is the strategic town of Sinjar.

The US and the rest of the world failed to forge an ambitious plan to tackle the climate crisis six years ago in Copenhagen. Since then the crisis has only gotten worse, but going into the next global climate summit in Paris, President Obama's top science adviser John Holdren is hopeful that world leaders are finally ready to step up to the challenge of avoiding catastrophic climate change.

The Kremlin says that Russian television accidentally showed secret plans for a devastating nuclear torpedo system. Others aren't so sure.

Kenyans are overwhelmingly against gay rights. Patrick Gathara thinks his cartoons could help change that attitude. So he draws cartoons and writes about gay rights, even those it makes his readers really angry.

WBEZ’s Becky Vevea spent the last year following Jose Garcia, a young Chicagoan who went off to college and was recruited back to teach at his high school.

The pro-separatist parties that control the government of Catalonia are pushing decisively for a split from Spain. But opinion polls show the Catalan public split pretty much down the middle on the issue. And Spain's prime minister says he simply won't allow the country's break up.

Geographical maps are pretty sweet. Nautical maps are rad. But transit maps? Well transit maps are the coolest maps because they help fight climate change.

The Veterans Administration was all over the news last year, with a scandal over wait times and a subsequent cover-up. Reforms were promised. And so when we asked our online community of veterans what we should focus on this Veterans Day, many asked for an update on the VA.

The picturesque town of Crickhowell in Wales does not have a reputation for global finance and accounting. But recently a group of independent shopkeepers decided to take an unusual step: create the town's own "offshore" tax haven as a political protest.

It's been 70 years since the end of World War II. Author and historian James Holland says we've got the story of what happened all wrong.

What happens for the families in China who secretly had second children before the policy change?

A Chinese billionaire who got his start as a taxi cab driver stunned the art world again this week. With a swipe of his credit card, Liu Yiqian purchased a famed painting of a "reclining nude" by the Italian master Modigliani.

Isaura Ramirez came home from serving in Iraq only to battle depression. She turned a corner when her husband enrolled her in a comedy class.

Some charter schools in Chicago are trying to lure the best and brightest students back into teaching in their old schools. But what does it take to build a teacher?

Architects and utility companies have long focused on ways to seal buildings up and homes to make them more energy efficient. But new research demonstrates that good ventilation is crucial for our cognitive abilities and is easily achievable.

Thieves in eastern France used the cover of night to break in to a Napiot dairy farm. No one was harmed, but the thieves made off with 100 wheels of valuable Comté cheese.

So Vladimir Putin's pumped-up, drugged-out Olympians may get stripped of their 2012 medals. That won't undo the damage, says high jumper Erik Kynard, Jr. He may get a gold medal, years later, but says: "I won’t be able to go back to the podium and do a victory lap.”

Jews and Muslims both claim the burial site of Abraham in Hebron as their own. It's the Palestinian conflict in a nutshell.

It was supposed to be a beautiful night. Family and friends had gathered to celebrate their union. But their lives changed in seconds. Two suicide bombers attacked their wedding.

Imam Alyas Karmani is both a western trained psychologist and an Imam. For Muslims around the world he offers advice and guidance on otherwise taboo sexual topics.

The women who have served beside their fellow soldiers are still pretty much invisible in the public eye.

If you were out and about in Moscow's Lubyanka Square early Monday, you might have seen an unusual sight. A Russian performance artist set fire to the door to Russian's security agency, the FSB.

An unprecedented number of nations currently lack US ambassadors. A couple of dozen nominations are currently held up in the Senate. And that impacts US policy and credibility.

An Israeli resident laments, "Hatred in Jerusalem has been more popularized, more endemic, than any time that I can remember in the 43 years that I've been living here."

ISIS and al-Qaeda have ratcheted up their online squabbling as they jockey for leadership of the global jihadist movement, trading insults like school kids.

There are plenty of women rabbis in the US, but they come from the more liberal side of Jewish tradition. In the Orthodox world, women's ordination is starting be a thing. And it's controversial.

The University of Missouri has had a difficult semester, with African-American student leaders called racial slurs, a swastika of feces left in a dorm and other incidents student say have led to a culture where they don't feel safe.

The investigation into what brought down the Russian plane over the Sinai peninsula in Egypt continues. But there is a growing consensus that the plane was brought down by militants sympathizing with the terrorist group, ISIS. In the Sinai peninsula, there's considerable support for the extremist group.

For the first time in decades, the Burmese people went to the polls to vote. Now that social media isn't banned, they can share their experiences — one selfie at a time.

When a Tel Aviv neighbor left a racist note about him, Ziyad Abul Hawa posted a photo of it on his Facebook page. Now he's fielding media requests.

​The Kepler telescope picked up a “swarm” of movement near Star KIC 8462852. Some scientists are exploring whether or not this might be evidence of alien life.

IEEE Spectrum has been researching some of the US government's biggest IT project fails in hopes of understanding just why the government has such a dismal technology track record.

A physicist at Harvard has a new theory as to what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The presidential race is heating up across America, but north of the border a new face from a fabled political dynasty just romped into power with a landslide win that signals considerable change. Gone is the oil-friendly Stephen Harper and taking over as prime minister is Justin Trudeau, son of popular leader Pierre Trudeau, of the left-leaning Liberal Party. What does this mean for controversial energy projects in Canada and the US?