The U.S. military presence in Iraq is beset by paradoxes. President Donald Trump ran for office on a platform of minimizing U.S. troops in the region and yet has been forced to increase their numbers. Iraqis are split largely along sectarian lines on the size of the U.S. presence they want in the country. Iran […]

Earlier this year, while flying over northern Botswana, Vanessa Hayes looked out over the Makgadikgadi Pans—giant salt flats that stretch for more than 6,000 square miles. They are the remnants of what was once Africa’s largest lake. Hayes could see traces of the lake’s shoreline from the air. She glimpsed massive fault lines running across its former bed—signs […]

Humanity being annihilated by chemical weapons or the molten lava of a supervolcano may sound like the plots of Hollywood disaster movies, but they are in fact among the very real ways mankind could be wiped out according to research. The Global Challenges Foundation—an organization which aims to reduce the global issues which we all […]

On the territorial fringes of the alliance, where European military might is at its thinnest, an overconfident Putin might exploit the weakness to conduct a new “hybrid” war. They came trundling through the town of Voronezh in western Russia in broad daylight on Oct. 3. Green army vehicles on flatbed train cars, apparently heading west, toward […]