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In June 29, 2014, the Islamic State (also called ISIS) declared the “State of the Islamic Caliphate,” which adherents and supporters regard as nothing less than a restoration of the earliest model of the caliphate.

Recent satellite images show that the Spratly islands, a series of features in the South China Sea, are growing at a staggering pace. Tons of sand, rocks, coral cuttings, and concrete are transforming miniscule Chinese-occupied outcroppings into sizeable islands with harbors, large multi-story buildings, airstrips, and other government facilities. The parties behind the construction and defense of these islands remain a thinly veiled secret.

Over the last several years, the Iranian rumor mill has churned out a steady stream of tales about the imminent death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 75. Given Khamenei’s advanced age, regardless of whether he is ill or not, a succession may happen sooner rather than later.

In the blink of an eye, global debates about cannabis regulation have shifted from “whether” to “how.” In 2014, Uruguay became the first nation to explicitly regulate cannabis from seed to sale. Likewise, in the rest of the world, there are a number of gray-area regulatory systems, including in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain. All offer insights into how the United States - and other countries - might tackle the “how.”

Just a few days before US President Barack Obama arrived in India in January this year, the US embassy in New Delhi recorded an air quality index reading of 222, a level that the US Environmental Protection Agency describes as “very unhealthy”, nearly “hazardous”. In fact the pollution level was so bad that the embassy purchased 1,800 Swedish air purifiers ahead of the president’s arrival.

China’s largest online marketplace, Taobao, offers everything from inflatable donkeys to live mice to breast implants. And now fake boyfriends are available for purchase, too.

As advanced economies become more automated and digitized, almost all workers will be affected, but some more than others.

The term “robotics revolution” evokes images of the future: a not-too-distant future, perhaps, but an era surely distinct from the present.

In 2008, the actress and activist Mia Farrow approached the private security company Blackwater and some human rights organizations with a proposition: Might it be possible to hire private military contractors to end the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan?

From the cotton gin and the steam engine to electricity and the transistor, new technologies have been revolutionizing the world for centuries, transforming life and labor and enabling an extraordinary flourishing of human development. Now some argue that advances in automation and artificial intelligence are causing us to take yet another world-historical leap into the unknown.

Most observers agree that the United States, propelled by its boom in oil and gas production, is becoming increasingly central to global energy.

In October 2013, the U.S. Department of State eliminated its funding program for advanced language and cultural training on Russia and the former Soviet Union.

On March 17, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won reelection, thanks in part to a desperate last-minute pledge to his right-wing base that the Palestinians would never get a state so long as he was in power.

On election night in November 1992, I waited anxiously with other animal welfare activists at the Radisson Hotel in Denver, Colorado, to learn the outcome of a statewide ballot measure to ban the baiting, hound hunting, and spring hunting of black bears.

Starting with the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik in 1957, early space missions were funded exclusively by national governments, and for good reason: going to space was astronomically expensive.

In the beginning, drones were almost exclusively the province of militaries.

Two months from now, the U.S. Congress may shutter a government agency that, in the past six years, has supported more than 1.3 million American jobs and generated more than $2 billion in deficit-reducing profits.

In a series of speeches he delivered shortly after taking office in 2012, Chinese President Xi Jinping cast corruption as not merely a significant problem for his country but an existential threat.

Over the past several years, the shale revolution has upended oil and gas markets in the United States and the world at large. At first, shale development was dismissed as unworkable, then it was minimized as unsustainable. Now, having helped drive a massive drop in the global price of oil, it is hailed as an economic and geopolitical game changer. But shale isn’t the only energy story of interest, nor even the only potentially revolutionary one.

After 9/11, many within the U.S. national security establishment worried that, following decades of preparation for confronting conventional enemies, Washington was unready for the challenge posed by an unconventional adversary such as al Qaeda. So over the next decade, the United States built an elaborate bureaucratic structure to fight the jihadist organization, adapting its military and its intelligence and law enforcement agencies to the tasks of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency.