Meet a changing Mongolia.
Rivers are dry. Pastureland is giving way to mines. And wintertime smog obscures the famed blue sky.
It’s a story of internal migration and economic transformation in an …
- Mongolians are migrating away from rural areas, seeking work elsewhere. And one of the places they're going is Ömnögovi, a mineral-rich province in the South Gobi, home to the mega-mining projects Tav …
- Last winter, a report by UNICEF Mongolia deemed the situation a "child health crisis." In the past decade, the incidence of respiratory illness across Ulaanbaatar has increased 2.7-fold per 10,000 peo …
- Dzuds, unique to Mongolia, are homegrown natural disasters born out of the country's unusual environment: landlocked, semiarid and prone to swings in temperature and precipitation. Historically, dzu …
- Why this regional craze for the two-humped creature? The origin story is intertwined with Mongolia's transition to democracy.
- The frozen surfaces that make the game of musun shagai possible are harder to come by in a warming world.
- Invaded and used as a Japanese military base in 1942, the Bay of Rabaul, on the northern end of Papua New Guinea's New Britain island, saw one of the most intense, sustained Allied bombing campaigns o …
- "You know, you grow up in violent home, it makes you want to see things different," Ruth Beriso says. "You want to change the future — maybe your own future."
- Betel nut is the pit of the walnut-sized fruit of an areca palm tree. It is also carcinogenic and is believed to contribute to Papua New Guinea's high rate of mouth cancer, the most common type of can …
- In the Eastern Highlands, the accusation of sorcery is a vigilante's rallying cry. Nationally, such accusations are believed to be responsible for dozens of deaths every year.
- Much attention has been paid in recent years to Russia's annexation of Crimea. But Ukraine is not the only place where Russia has exploited ethnic conflicts and disputed territories along its borders.
- For Georgia's government, figuring out how to help, and for how long, has proved complicated.
- Officially, they’re known as “internally displaced people,” or IDPs, and there are 40 million of them across the globe – outnumbering refugees by more than 2 to 1.
- Since World War II, Greenland has gone from isolated communities where people lived entirely off hunting to a country with commercial fishing hubs and the beginnings of a large-scale mining industry. …
- In Greenland, and in other parts of the Arctic, there is a suicide "season" — a time when the most people die by suicide. It's well-known among public health officials and priests and teachers and oth …
- People in many parts of the Arctic consider Eskimo a derogatory term because it was widely used by racist, non-native colonizers.
- In Hollywood, the percentage of parts that depict indigenous characters, including American Indian and Alaska Native people as well as circumpolar native groups such as Inuit people, is so low that it …
- Between 1970 and 1980, the suicide rate in Greenland quadrupled to about seven times the U.S. rate (as of 2017, it was about six times higher).
- The Arctic Winter Games are the Olympics of traditional Inuit sports. The Alaskan high kick is one of about a dozen indigenous games at the event. Others include the stick pull, the sledge jump and th …
- In the dark months, some hunters leave the dogs and walk out onto the frozen ocean, lone figures against an endless white backdrop, looking for the breathing holes of seals.
- The 850,000 people who live on the island of Reunion, which lies east of Madagascar, depend on the Indian Ocean that surrounds them. Many homes are near the sea. The beaches attract tourists. But the …
- Public health care is too expensive, or simply not available, for many families in Cameroon. So they have turned to unauthorized clinics for care.
- Pentecostalism is now the fastest-growing Christian denomination in the world — and nowhere is it growing faster than in sub-Saharan Africa, home to nearly 45 percent of all Pentecostals.
- The syndrome seems to be caused by the immune system's response to a parasitic worm, an international team reports in the journal Science Translational Medicine. And they think it's the same worm resp …
- Scott Dowell, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, is leading its investigation into nodding syndrome. Usually, he says, investigators can figure out the cause of a strange …
- It starts with the nodding. Then come the seizures. The children stop growing and stop talking. Ultimately, the disease wrecks the children, physically and mentally.
- "To me, to live here in Australia and to think about that, that our country won't exist or our race," Tiibea Baure says, her eyes welling with tears, "then it's like we are nothing."
- Already, land is scarce, and drinking water can be in short supply. There's nowhere to retreat. So concerns about climate change are felt very acutely here.
- Chinese companies have made a big push into Africa seeking raw materials like oil. And enterprising Africans now travel to China to buy cheap goods at the source and ship them home.
