Standing on a hillside, Liu Minfang looks down at the lush landscape that surrounds her home in the remote mountains of southwestern China. Terraced slopes that farmers once used for growing crops are now filled with cedar trees and bamboo. A waterfall cascades down a distant cliff. China has spent more than $100 billion on trees in the last decade alone.

Wed, 28 Jun 2017 16:45:29 -0400

It had taken American prosecutors a long time to hand down the indictment, but finally they had their man. In 2013, authorities had tracked down Alexsey Belan, a notorious Russia-linked cyber criminal, and were getting ready to extradite him to the United States. According to the US government, Russian intelligence officials had brought Belan into a new scheme: hacking a National Security Agency tool that allowed agents to scour millions of personal Yahoo email accounts.

Wed, 28 Jun 2017 16:06:30 -0400

For Holly Hollman, an active member in her Baptist church in Virginia and a frequent volunteer for its Sunday preschool program, religious freedom remains one of the most unique and hard-won rights in American history. “And we’ve done that by keeping government out of religion.

Wed, 28 Jun 2017 15:33:00 -0400

As many as 20 million people face the threat of starvation in South Sudan, northeast Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen, according to the United Nations. When the UN declares a famine, it isn’t saying that a crisis looms on the horizon: It means that very bad things are already happening, that many people have already died. Famine is declared only when at least 20 percent of families in a region face extreme food shortages, acute malnutrition exceeds 30 percent of the population, and the daily death rate exceeds two adults out of every 10,000 people, according to the World Food Program.

Wed, 28 Jun 2017 11:29:07 -0400