The Taliban Wants to Blow Up Pakistan's Historic Election This Weekend
Pakistan is trying to finish its first-ever peaceful democratic transition, but extremists representing a small portion of the population will do anything they can to stop it.
The two most high-profile, hiding-in-plain sight figures at Wikileaks now claim to be helping the high-profile, on-the-lam NSA leaker on his apparent quest to seek asylum in Iceland. But Glenn Greenwald, Snowden's defacto spokesperson, denies that Wikileaks is involved at all. Assange, it appears, might just be trying to make leakers cool again.
Pakistan is trying to finish its first-ever peaceful democratic transition, but extremists representing a small portion of the population will do anything they can to stop it.
This week, an emotional young traffic officer named Ri-Kyong Sim was honored at a military ceremony with the North Korean equivalent of the Medal of Valor — for what, nobody on the outside is exactly sure, but the best guess is that she may have inadvertently saved Kim Jong-un's life.
As workers continue to pull bodies out of the wreckage of the collapsed Bangladeshi factory, another factory in the capital of Dhaka caught on fire, killing eight more than people.
As the world's third largest supplier of the plant, Bolivia's trying to shake itself free from coca's drug-addled past and turn the crop into nutritious food. There's only one problem: It tastes terrible.
Over a week after multiple parties found condemning evidence, the Italian clothing company Benetton admits that it bought clothes from the garment factory in Bangladesh that recently collapsed and killed over 800 people.
This we know for sure: Silvio Berlusconi is still guilty of tax fraud. But the former three-time Italian prime minister and long-time media baron may never see the inside of a jail cell, on account of being a wealthy political fat cat, and also because he's really old.
A container ship lost control and took out the massive concrete and glass control tower overlooking Genoa, Italy's busiest port, on Tuesday evening, killing three people while another four were taken to the hospital for treatment and a few more are still missing.
Police in Europe rounded up 31 people in three countries on Wednesday and recovered most of the $50 million in diamonds stolen from the Brussels Airport earlier this year, proving once again that most daring and outlandish crimes are the hardest to get away with.
Stephen Hawking is known for a lot of things — theoretical physics, quantum mechanics, general relativity — but being an an activist for peace in the Middle East is hardly one of them. Not any more!
Did the Assad regime just shut down Syrian online access again? For several hours on Thursday — beginning around 3 p.m. Eastern time, or 10 p.m. in Damascus — Internet traffic in the warring country ground to an almost complete halt, just like it did in November when the government blacked out web usage to stymy opposition maneuvers.
In meetings with the South Korean president Tuesday, President Obama surely asked about Kenneth Bae, the 44-year-old American sentenced to 15 years in a North Korean gulag. Here's a question worth asking: Now that it appears Bae was using his China-based tour agency as an undercover pipeline to sneak Christian followers into atheist North Korea, is it going to be even harder to get him out? Because Dennis Rodman's basketball diplomacy really isn't helping.
The way the nation met 33-year-old MBTA Transit Police officer Richard Donohue was violent, fast, and scary: He was exchanging fire with the Tsarnaev brothers, the story went, and he took a gun shot to his right thigh from the Boston bombing suspects, which almost killed him. Now comes a more complete picture.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev has been dead for two and a half weeks, but his family is still having problems figuring out what to do with his body, and not just because this is Boston and Boston is strong: A complex web of potential protests, social media-fueled burial outsourcing, and legal technicalities are making sure the late marathon bombing suspect begins his final rest in anything but peace.
A new report by the Department of Defense claims for the first time that the Chinese government is directly connected to attacks on U.S. computer systems, including those owned by the government. What's with the change in tone?
The situation has turned from bad to worse to absurd in Peru, where the Ecuadorian ambassador is being forbidden from reentering the country due to an altercation at a supermarket in Lima two weeks ago.
Just over a month after moving its ballistic missiles to a launch site in the direction of the United States, the North Korean is pulling back and removing two Musudan missiles from launch ready status.
After more than two years of civil war, tens of thousands of deaths, a refugee crisis, ethnic cleansing, religious strife, terrorism, chemical warfare, and an international conflict that has engulfed all of its neighbors, Syria is still in the hands of Bashar al-Assad. Just the way he planned it. Here's how we got to the current state of play after the Israel attacks, and what's next.
The last remaining member of a neo-Nazi group — who's being called "the Nazi bride" by the German press, and probably soon the American tabloids — is now on trial for murder in a case that's remarkable as much for the horrible crimes as the retrograde justice for human-rights violations that were ignored for years.
North Korean state-run media now insists the country has no plans to use Kenneth Bae, the American citizen sentenced to 15 years in a labor camp, "as a political bargaining chip" — and that the foreign ministry "has no plan to invite anyone of the U.S.," even though that kind of a deal might be in Pyongyang's best interests. Here's why the DPRK might actually be worth believing this time around.
Accusations that an American documentary filmmaker was posing as a U.S. spy in Venezuela are "ridiculous," if you believe President Obama, who according to Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro is the "chief of the devils." Did you catch all of that? Here's the whole story.
The death toll from Bangladesh's horrific factory collapse has topped 650 people, and rescuers believe there could be dozens, if not hundreds, more bodies still trapped inside.
A week after we learned that the CIA delivered bags full of cash to Afghan President Hamid Karzai in exchange for his cooperation, the United Kingdom's MI6 admitted to doing the same thing this weekend.
A member of the United Nations commission of inquiry announced on a Swiss-Italian television show that they believe the Syrian rebels have used chemical weapons on Assad's troops.
For the second time in as many days, Israel mounted a late night air raid on Syrian military facilities that were allegedly holding weapons destined for Hezbollah. This attack produced some of the biggest explosions seen in Damascus since the two year old conflict began.
Afghan president Hamid Karzai isn't ready to give up his financially beneficial relationship with the CIA just yet. No, he wants those backpacks full from cash to keep coming.
Paul Templer survived a trip few can claim they've returned from. Namely, he was inside a hippo's stomach and lived to tell the tale.
Reports came out late Saturday night that Israel made the curious decision to attack Syria, potentially entering the armed conflict, but as more information came out it was clear Israel was trying to protect its own interests.
For twenty-seven years, the world's average temperature has been hotter than the average during the second half of the 20th century. Last year, it was the ninth-warmest in recorded history — but still cold for the past ten.
Despite its straight-from-science-fiction premise, it's real: A group of scientists meeting at the White House to discuss a brand-new ocean. Impending Arctic ice melt makes this just another day in the geopolitics of climate change.
The new People's Daily building is massive, imposing, and, uh, currently shaped like a colossal penis. So the country's censors are working overtime to stop Chinese people on social media from laughing at the expense of the very state-run newspaper in charge of controlling the country's message.
It looks like the new leader of China may have borrowed a propaganda slogan from mustachioed New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
Chaudhry Zulfikar Ali, the state attorney in a number of cases surrounding power and the reputation of the government in Pakistan, was shot 13 times Friday on his way to the bail hearing for former president Pervez Musharraf, and his death aises questions about just who can challenge the status quo by law in the country.
The mounting death toll is becoming harder and harder to ignore, but that's exactly what the country's garment industry might do in the long term, thanks in part to its extensive ties to figures in political power in Bangladesh, one of whom is now saying this sort of thing "happens everywhere."
For the second time this week an American cargo plane has crashed overseas, this time a military jet that has gone missing in Kyrgyzstan.
Kenneth Bae, a 44-year-old American citizen, was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in a North Korean gulag this week for "hostile acts" against the country and Kim Jong-Un's regime. Considering the DPRK's penchant for hyperbole and habit of punishing Americans, the truth about Bae's situation remains murky. Here's what we know so far.
Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, son of the former Libyan dictator, appeared in a court today. One of the last remaining symbols of his father's regime, Qaddafi is caught in a weird legal nexus between the country's new government and the international criminal court.
American troops may have finally left Iraq, but for that nation's citizens the war is only getting worse.
The latest in a slow trickle of information from Saudi Arabia brings the mortality rate to 16 deaths among 24 known infections — and not unlike China with its bird flu outbreak, the Saudi government isn't exactly being straightforward about how many people are sick with SARS cousin NCoV. If humans are dying, why don't we know more about how and why?
Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American who lives in Washington state, was condemned to 15 years of hard labor by a North Korean court this week, prompting rumors of a possible diplomatic rescue mission to Pyongyang.
Time on the Fukushima power plant cleanup, The Atlantic Cities on pedestrian energy, USA Today on climate change and precipitation, Politico on Obama's Keystone deliberations, and New Statesman on the climate effects of the recession.
While violence in the Russian republic of Dagestan is nothing new, the region's connection to the Boston Marathon bombings has shined a new global spotlight on the long-running conflict.
The Venezuelan National Assembly is a little shaken up after a brutally violent brawl broke out between politicians on Tuesday night as the pro-government lawmakers sparred with the opposition — literally.
Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, is running his mouth about Syria again, only this time the Assad ally sounds like he's actually getting ready to make a move.
The Obama administration is getting ready to send arms to Syrian rebels, The Washington Post's Karen DeYoung reports, by way of very convoluted descriptions from anonymous senior administration officials attempting to describe the Obama administration's thinking. Got that? Didn't think so. Here's a guide to where we're at — almost.
Zimmerman and his attorneys appeared in court to waive his right to seek an immunity hearing under Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law — and keep the rest of their strategy close to the vest. His fate in the killing of Trayvon Martin will now be put in the hands of a jury beginning June 10, when one of the most emotional trials in recent American history will begin.
Two recent disasters — the tsunami at Fukushima and Hurricane Sandy — show that shoreline infrastructure can easily result in extensive ocean pollution. With sea levels rising rapidly, this problem could quickly become significantly greater.
With Congress out of town, the president Obama held a rare Q&Awith reporters at the White House today, swatting away the idea of an intelligence failure in the Boston bombings, and a Fox News report about intimidation of witnesses in the Benghazi investigation. He also promised to continue to push for the closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison.
Boston bombing investigators continue to probe the idea that Tamerlan Tsarnaev knew or was influenced by someone in the Islamic militant community in Russia. Unfortunately, all the potential suspects who could talk about it happen to be dead.
A Boeing 747 jet enroute to Dubai crashed and caught fire moments after lifting off on Monday morning from Bagram Airfield in northeast Afghanistan. Seven crew members were killed.
In the days since his apparent suicide, the myths (that men are abused as often as men) and realities (that men are abuse victims) have returned around the so-called Men's Rights Movement, leaving advocates on both sides as conflicted as Silverman himself. We've attempted to sort them out.
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