The World: Latest Stories

A woman showed up at the doorstep of a 92-year-old woman's home. She claimed to be the woman's long-lost granddaughter, abducted during the military dictatorship's Dirty War. A nation was enthralled.

To close out 2015 the World in Words wanted to leave you smiling. Here's one of our favorite interviews with Canadian comedian Sugar Sammy.

Pauline Black is founding member and lead singer of the 2-tone ska group, The Selecter. Fans of the band know that social and political messages are part the band's DNA. The Selecter wrote songs about cultural/racial diversity and inequality in the 1980s and today they're tackling many of the same topics, with urgency.

Thousands of homes have been evacuated from the flooding in northern England. But record amounts of rainfall are just one reason for the crisis. There's a political fight brewing over flood preparations.

Killeen, Texas has become a kind of Korean food capital, thanks to the many Korean-Americans who have settled there. It has a lot to do with the US Army base there.

There have been a number of violent mass shootings this year — in San Bernardino, in Charleston and countless others. Could we decrease the number by treating gun violence as a public health crisis?

Now that COP21 has wrapped up and the first ever binding agreement agreed to, the question becomes how do countries actually hit the targets they have set — targets that will need to increase in the coming years? One answer has a broad consensus: carbon pricing.

Virtual reality is no longer science fiction, and some people are wondering how this new technology is going to be used.

First, get out of bed. Yes, we are wired to hibernate, even during wimpy winters, writes Arun Rath. But working out and post-holiday socializing help us deal with a lack of sunlight.

If you're looking to not only find a good book, but also get a little smarter, try some of these options.

Thousands of scientists and engineers are hard at work at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, trying to discover the origins of the universe. Lately, however, a few teams of artists have joined them in their work.

On the greek island of Lesbos, the descendants of refugees are meeting a new generation of refugees.

They beat out Justin Bieber and Adele — doctors and nurses in a British hospital choir top the UK music charts.

As a child, the prospect of an overnight journey by train sounded exciting, but the reality of the situation soon sunk in — Norman had become one of the nearly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry interned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The North Pole is where we send letters to Santa Claus. But this was not always the case. The Turkish origins of St. Nick — and how he settled so far north.

Massachusetts imports mountains of salt from all over the world to melt its snow and ice. And they all wind up in a yard in Chelsea.

There's a lot of focus in this country on making community college more affordable. But living expenses — including transportation, rent and food — are still the biggest barrier between students and graduation.

A new book, “Cooking for Geeks” seeks to restore our lost knowledge of kitchen science, such as how to make sour cream and how to dissect the engineered components of chocolate.

A French Moroccan woman talks to French students about her son's murderer. And why they shouldn't follow in his path.

In response to protests over the release of a suspect in the Delhi gang rape, India's parliament will allow suspects as young as 16 to be tried as adults.

Two American reporters in East Africa put on their foreign correspondents' hats to cover the issue of race back home.

ISIS knows how to use the internet to lure young people.

China’s smog has gotten so bad some residents are buying bottled air from the Canadian mountains to breathe when they need a break.

Believe it or not, Christmas used to be illegal in Massachusetts. The Puritan fathers of America thought it was un-Christian, and prosecuted merry-making revellers for centuries. The truth behind America’s first ‘War on Christmas.

Luna Acharya Mulder has a rare window on the refugee psyche. She and her sisters grew up in New York but all of her cousins grew up in refugee camps in Nepal. Every summer, she went back and forth between two vastly different worlds.

We’re much closer to genetically modifying ourselves than you think. But professor Michael Bess warns that toying with our genetics could create a divide between the modified and unmodified.

Are we all actually living inside the matrix-like mind of a TV character named Tommy Westphall? We are, according to TV multiverse fans.

Despite a state-level effort to bar Syrian refugees, the mayor of Dallas, already home to thousands of refugees, is ready to keep welcoming Syrian refugees with open arms.

Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral and landed safely after completing its mission.

Washington and London are seen to be enabling the Saudi-led coalition to continue to bomb and blockade Yemen, in the throes of the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

"You're not going to separate us," Muslim bus-riders told Islamic militants who demanded the Muslims and Christians separate. The Muslims told the militants to kill us all, but we will not sacrifice our Christian colleagues.

After the Taliban fell from power in Afghanistan in the winter of 2001, the hunt for Osama bin Laden began in earnest. One American in particular led the search. He was CIA commander, Gary Berntsen, who had been tracking the al-Qaeda leader for years. In December 2001 he ordered a small group of special forces soldiers and Afghan fighters into the White Mountains close to Pakistan in the hope of cornering bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora.

The war against the Taliban continues. And some rural residents hope the group wins as they allow them to produce opium.

Norway’s neighbor to the east — Finland — will be celebrating its centennial in 2017. 100 years since independence. So, to mark the centennial, some friendly Norwegians have come up with the idea of giving Finland an unusual present: a mountain.

The Philippines largely escaped the global AIDS epidemic in the 80s and 90s. But now it has one of the fastest growing HIV epidemics in the world.

Nova Scotia hasn’t forgotten the generosity of the volunteers and doctors from Boston who rushed to the scene of the Halifax Explosion to help in 1917. And each Christmas, it sends a tall, sturdy thank-you southward.

No matter the court victory the victims of Daniel Holtzclaw won - and Bill Cosby's accusers hope to win - all of them have been scarred for life, writes Callie Crossley.

Most people agree that the Paris climate agreement is a good start toward curbing the worst impacts of climate change. But others worry too much self-congratulating will jeopardize the path toward stricter carbon cuts.

Russian president, Vladimir Putin, says Donald Trump is "bright and talented." Trump repaid the compliment, saying Putin is a strong, powerful leader. The blossoming bromance is no surprise to some.

A new trade agreement makes it harder for poorer countries to buy cheaper generic medications.

Graft is the norm in FIFA. And it just took down its president.

In South Korea, mastery of American English is a status symbol. Families send their kids to academies chosen for their American instructors. We hear from an English teacher from Ireland who was told by a Korean recruiter, "You don't speak English."

China’s economy is cooling off, but that hasn’t stopped globetrotting Chinese tourists from sightseeing. Chinese tourists are expected to soon be the largest group of overseas visitors to the US, and cities across the nation are trying to cash in.

The UN surveyed factors affecting gender equality in 151 countries, and found that US is coming up short. Part of the reason? Workplace inequality, but also a rise in the number of women dying from complications of childbirth.

Two satellites accidentally launched into the wrong orbit may help researchers test an aspect of Einstein's theory of general relativity.

These days, scientists are increasingly interested in thinking about multiple universes, but the idea of a multiverse is at least 2500 years old according to professor Mary-Jane Rubenstein and chair of religion at Wesleyan University.

A landscape artist in Scotland is trying to help us experience the multiverse with his work of landscape art, “The Crawick Multiverse”

More than 2,500 cops from as far away as New Hampshire and New York responded to the pursuit and search for the Boston Marathon bombers, and it wasn’t always clear who was in charge.

Community colleges often have abysmally low graduation rates. Could this be in part because we don’t hold community college students in high enough esteem?