The worst drought in history is spreading from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro and beyond. Taps have run dry and lights have gone out across large swaths of Brazil affecting more than 4 million people by rationing and rolling…

In 1966 Carl Sagan announced that there are only two important criteria for a planet to support life, which meant that a septillion planets (1 with 24 zeros) were capable of supporting life in the universe. Now researchers have learned…

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation says court warrants are not required when deploying cell-site simulators (nicknamed “stingrays”) in public places. Stingrays are decoy cell towers, often deployed on small aircraft that capture locations and identities of tens of thousands…

Ebola is now the disease with the most deaths on the planet since it was discovered in 1976. The current outbreak has now killed more than 8,600 people through January 21, 2015, more than all other known Ebola outbreaks combined….

Japan has had a pacifist constitution since the end of World War II. Authored by the United States, article 9 of the Japanese constitution prohibits the use of force to settle disputes. Now Japan’s re-elected prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who…

The symbolic Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been moved closer to midnight, a statement of how close the planet is to a global disaster. “It is now three minutes to midnight,” said Kennette Benedict, the…

“Raul and Fidel Castro were raised by a rosary-reciting, Catholic mother. They attended high school at the Jesuit-run Belen College, although Raul didn’t finish. Despite initially declaring Cuba atheists state, the Castro’s have regularly, if hypocritically, paid respect to the…

Expect to see a lot of political jockeying around Pope Francis during the 2016 presidential campaign. And you will probably see candidate policies highly aligned with Pope Francis, particularly concerning economics and social policies. Even non-Catholic potential candidates mention the…

Three gunmen stormed the offices of a French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo killing twelve and injuring five more. Those dead include the editor and the editor-in-chief of the magazine as well as other editorial staff during an editorial meeting. The…

As globalism expands, there are three political blocs that are rising, the non-democratic or authoritarian, which includes Russia and China and their orbit of smaller states, the extremist groups, like the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, and Boko Haram, and the…

President Obama is increasingly allied with the Vatican on controversial policies. Pope Francis stands virtually shoulder-to-shoulder with the White House on a number of issues including income inequality and climate change. The White House and the Papacy secretly collaborated to…

The Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation have reached an epoch-making turning-point, said Rev. Martin Junge, General Secretary of The Lutheran World Federation. The relationship between Lutherans and Catholics is being transformed “from conflict to communion,” he said during…