Everyone wanted to announce peace first, but only one group wants to leave. The beginnings of a long-trailed and horse-traded deal with the Taliban emerged Friday to perhaps get the United States out of its longest war and, as a more remote possibility, end decades of brutal conflict in the land-locked graveyard of empires. It…

With eleven days to go until Israel’s election, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced plans to build thousands of new homes in a part of Jerusalem that the international community holds as the capital of a future Palestinian state. The announcement immediately drew verbal fire from Palestinians, who called the planned construction “land theft” and…

Climate change could destroy almost all of Earth’s coral reef habitats by 2100, according to new research. About 70-90% of all existing coral reefs are expected to disappear in the next 20 years due to warming oceans, acidic water and pollution, said scientists from the University of Hawaii Manoa, who presented their findings Monday at…

Tell Trump he’s got power and he’ll use it. Washington sages thought that the crushing pressures, ingrained customs and the implied morality of his office would force Donald Trump to conform to traditional notions of presidential behavior. But the US President’s latest flurry of decrees shows that was a bad bet. American presidents can pretty…

Dagmar Turner wasn’t just showing off when she played the violin during her brain surgery at King’s College Hospital in London. Surgeons asked the 53-year-old to play her instrument to ensure that the professional violinist’s musical abilities were not damaged during a tumor removal. The tumor, in her right frontal lobe, was dangerously close to…

At first glance, Christiana Figueres doesn’t have that many reasons to be optimistic. The Costa Rican diplomat played a pivotal role in negotiating the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. But while the deal was widely praised as a landmark achievement, it has since begun to crumble. The United States left the pact under President Donald…

Around 70,000 years ago, a Neanderthal was laid to rest in Shanidar Cave. Excavations in recent years have slowly revealed its entire upper body, including a lower back, the clenched bones of a right hand and the left hand almost acting as a pillow beneath the skull. It’s the first discovery of its kind in…

What will a second Donald Trump presidential term look like — if it happens? That was the thought in many delegates’ minds as they gathered over the weekend in the southern German city of Munich for a security conference. The official theme at the conference was “Westlessness,” an intentional gripe at the impact of Trump’s…

As China and the world try to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, the fight against another deadly disease, Ebola, has reached an encouraging “milestone,” the World Health Organization said Friday. Four countries in Africa, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Ghana and Zambia, have licensed an Ebola vaccine to “cement hard-fought progress”…

This week, an iceberg the size of Atlanta broke off a glacier. Researchers discovered a dramatic decline in Antarctic penguin colonies. And Antarctica may have just registered its hottest temperature ever. In case all of that was not enough to make you at least a little concerned, yet another unusually high temperature was logged in…