EU leaders will have to learn how to stand up to the bully in the White House. Editor’s Note: Trump’s demands that Denmark surrender control of Greenland to the United States is one of his more surprising moves, even by the standards of the new administration. The Carnegie Endowment’s Sophia Besch and European Council on Foreign...
Militaries that have taken power in Africa’s Sahel region – notably Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger – have put pressure on western mining firms for a fairer distribution of revenue from the lucrative mining sector. Gold is one of the resources at the heart of these tensions. West Africa has been a renowned gold mining...
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has long been a key player in global development, offering assistance in health, education, economic growth, and governance. While its mission is well-intended, USAID has faced growing criticism over inefficiencies, waste, unintended consequences, and the political nature of foreign aid. Given these concerns, dismantling USAID and reimagining...
The transatlantic slave trade was one of the most devastating and inhumane processes in human history. It is the subject of many studies, but the individual life histories of the arrival and survival of enslaved people in foreign lands remain largely untold. A lawsuit filed against a slaver in 1589 in Antioquia (a province in...
In a once-sleepy Ukrainian village north of Kyiv, Mykola Moroz, nicknamed Kolia, answered his doorbell in the early months after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion to find two Russian soldiers and their commander ready to take him into custody. As Kolia’s wife watched in horror, they put a bag over her husband’s head and dragged him...
Handcuffed and squatting on the floor, Abdullah Zahra saw smoke rising from his cellmate’s flesh as his torturers gave him electric shocks. Then it was Zahra’s turn. They hanged the 20-year-old university student from his wrists until his toes barely touched the floor and electrocuted and beat him for two hours. They made his father watch...
Hundreds of punctured shells from the Cambrian illuminate unique predator-prey interactions in the ocean 517 million years ago A new study led by researchers at the American Museum of Natural History presents the oldest known example in the fossil record of an evolutionary arms race. These 517-million-year-old predator-prey interactions occurred in the ocean covering what...
From its headwaters in Brazil, the Paraguay River flows hundreds of miles (kilometers) south to where it joins the Parana River to form a single 2,100-mile (3,400-kilometer) waterway that carries much of the agricultural and mineral wealth of South America to the Atlantic. The riverine waterway connects Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay and carries...
As it passed above the Niger Delta in 2021, a satellite took an image. It showed acres of land, scraped bare. The site, outside the city of Port Harcourt, was on a cleanup list kept by the United Nations Environment Programme, supposed to be restored to green farmland as the Delta was before thousands of...
The pace at which anthropogenic climate change has altered the terrestrial carbon stores is making our current climate-change mitigation efforts seem fruitless, unless behaviors are quickly changed. Climate change induced by human behaviors, or anthropogenic climate change, has been a hot topic for decades and is not going away. As with any problem, reviewing datasets...
