Hannah Bloch

What caused the collapse of Easter Island, widely believed to be the world's most isolated inhabited place, hundreds of years ago? The question is a matter of hot debate.

Conventional wisdom holds that environmental destruction and internecine warfare led to societal and economic collapse on this tiny island located ...

Among the 30 victims of Friday's al-Qaida attack on a hotel and restaurant in Burkina Faso was Leila Alaoui, a French-Moroccan photographer known best for her powerful portraits of Moroccans and intimate, sensitive images of migrants and the displaced. She and her driver, Mahamadi Ouedraogo, were shot outside ...

#NPRreads is a weekly feature on Twitter and on The Two-Way. The premise is simple: Correspondents, editors and producers from our newsroom share the pieces that have kept them reading, using the #NPRreads hashtag. Each weekend, we highlight some of the best stories.

From digital editor Chris Hopkins:

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The Nobel Peace Prize ceremony took place in Oslo on Thursday evening. This year's Peace laureate, Tunisia's National Dialogue Quartet, a coalition of labor, human rights, legal and business groups, was honored for its efforts in bringing disparate sides together and promoting peace in the country since 2011.

When ...

When a man wielding a knife stabbed three people at an east London subway stop on Saturday evening and shouted, "This is for Syria," it was a bystander's blunt reaction, captured on video, that grabbed most of the attention afterward.

As police straddled and handcuffed the attacker, whom they'd Tasered ...

#NPRreads is a weekly feature on Twitter and on The Two-Way. The premise is simple: Correspondents, editors and producers from our newsroom share the pieces that have kept them reading, using the #NPRreads hashtag. On Fridays, we highlight some of the best stories.

This week, we bring you four ...

The rate of deforestation in Brazil has increased by 16 percent over the past year, the country's Environment Ministry announced.

Brazil has often declared progress in reducing the rate of deforestation in the Amazon, but the government's own figures, released Thursday, show the challenges still facing the country.

Satellite ...

The Islamic State's activities in Iraq and Syria are well-known, but the group is gaining a toehold elsewhere in the world as well. In a chilling new documentary, a long-haired fighter claims that an ISIS-run "school" teaches all local children from the age of 3 in Afghanistan's Kunar province.

U.S. photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg has seen more of Afghanistan, and recent Afghan history, than many Afghans themselves. Since 1988, he's visited Afghanistan dozens of times, covering the country for Time and The New York Times. He returned most recently last month, for the launch of an exhibition of his photography ...

It's a distinction no country wants. In its most recent report on global trends, the U.N.'s refugee agency reported that Syria last year "had become the world's top source country of refugees, overtaking Afghanistan, which has held this position for more than three decades."

Since 1979, Afghans have been ...

A single photo of a drowned Syrian child shocked the world's conscience this week and focused international attention on a conflict that has left a quarter million dead and sent 4 million fleeing in the past four years.

But beyond the powerful emotional impact and a surge in aid ...

A photo of a drowned Syrian toddler on a Turkish beach sparked anguish and outrage over the handling of the world's migration crisis.

Archaeologists in Afghanistan are uncovering a complex of Buddhist temples. Mining is expected to destroy the site eventually, but for now, archaeologists are excavating and protecting what they can.

Amid the horrors of war in Syria, Yemen and Iraq, it's become easy to overlook Afghanistan. Remember Afghanistan? Back in the mid-2000s, it was known as the "forgotten war," eclipsed by the bloodshed in Iraq. Now it's overshadowed all over again. But there's plenty of reason to pay attention.

Since ...

A new clinical trial is set to begin in the United Kingdom using the powerful noses of dogs to detect prostate cancer in humans.

While research has been done before, these are the first trials approved by Britain's National Health Service.

The trials, at the Milton Keynes University Hospital in ...

Pakistan's Supreme Court has stayed the execution of Asia Bibi, a 50-year-old Pakistani mother of five who was sentenced to death by hanging for insulting Islam. On Wednesday, the court agreed to hear her appeal.

Bibi's death sentence was handed down by a lower court in 2010 for committing "blasphemy."

...

Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani education activist and youngest-ever Nobel Peace laureate, celebrated her 18th birthday today by inaugurating a secondary school for Syrian refugee girls in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, near Syria's border.

Yousafzai survived being shot in the head by a Taliban gunman in 2012, as she returned ...

SDSS J0100+2802 is the rather understated name scientists have given to an exceptionally luminous, newly discovered quasar. It's 12.8 billion light years away and shines as brightly as 420 million suns. At its center, there's a super-sized black hole — as massive as 12 billion suns — that formed ...

While Paris worries about mystery drones, a Dutch town is confronting an aerial threat of its own: owl attacks.

In recent weeks, the culprit, a European eagle owl, has injured dozens of residents in Purmerend, about 10 miles north of Amsterdam. Known locally as the "terror owl" and

Sister Fa is a Senegalese-German rap star. Leyla Hussein is a Somali-born, London-based documentary filmmaker and psychotherapist. Their day-to-day lives are different, but they have a great deal in common.

"We're both survivors of FGM," Hussein explains. "We both have daughters and we didn't cut our daughters."

Today is the ...