Among the more ambitious hopes for Pope Francis’ visit to South Sudan this week is that it will give a jolt to a peace process aimed at ending a decade of conflict that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

A powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked wide swaths of Turkey and neighboring Syria on Monday, killing more than 2,600 people and injuring thousands more as it toppled thousands of buildings and trapped residents under mounds of rubble.

As the sun set at 5 p.m. on December 10 in Paducah, Kentucky, National Weather Service staff were tracking a supercell storm and ready to send tornado warnings across the state. Over 200 miles away in Mayfield, workers at a candle factory were clocking in for overtime shifts to keep up with Christmas demand and earn bonus pay.

The tea tasted bitter and earthy, but Lorenzo Gonzales drank it anyway. On that frigid night in remote Utah, he was hoping for a life-changing experience, which is how he found himself inside a tent with two dozen others waiting for the psychedelic brew known as ayahuasca to kick in.

Guatemala, Nicaragua and Cuba reached all-time lows on Transparency International’s corruption index released earlier this week, due to increased organized crime by public institutions, co-optation by political and economic elites and increased human rights abuses.

The study of America’s place in the world could start with a quote from John F. Kennedy or Richard Nixon. It could start by dissecting Ronald Reagan’s farewell presidential address or Barack Obama’s university commencement speech in Boston. But there is a better place to begin—with Perry Miller, a mid-century scholar of history and literature…

North Korea said on Thursday that drills by the United States and its allies have reached an “extreme red-line” and threaten to turn the peninsula into a “huge war arsenal and a more critical war zone.”

Russia’s refusal to allow on-the-ground inspections to resume is endangering the New START nuclear treaty and U.S.-Russian arms control overall, the Biden administration charged on Tuesday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin put his country’s thousands of nuclear warheads into “special combat readiness” as a part of his strategy when invading Ukraine in February. The entire world went on high alert.

Thousands of schools in the UK closed some or all of their classrooms, train services were paralyzed and delays were expected at airports on the biggest day of industrial action Britain has seen in more than a decade, as unions stepped up pressure on the government Wednesday to provide better pay amid a cost-of-living crisis.

Two years after Myanmar’s generals ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government, thousands of people have died in civil conflict and many more have been forced from their homes in a dire humanitarian crisis.

Growing numbers of people in Asia lack enough to eat as food insecurity rises with higher prices and worsening poverty, according to a report released Tuesday by the Food and Agricultural Organization and other United Nations agencies.

Everyone wants to know what the future holds. Most have no idea. So many are confused, not knowing where to turn for answers to the great questions about the future!

Half of the mass attacks in the United States from 2016 to 2020 were sparked by personal, domestic or workplace disputes, according to a new U.S. Secret Service report that aims to prevent violence by identifying warning signs.

Atomic scientists set the “Doomsday Clock” closer to midnight than ever before on Tuesday, saying threats of nuclear war, disease and climate volatility have been exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, putting humanity at greater risk of annihilation.

Light pollution caused by the incessant nighttime glow of electric lights appears to be intensifying, according to research using observations from tens of thousands of people at various locations around the world.