Author: Reporter

The horse is symbolic of the American West, but when and how domesticated horses first reached the region has long been a matter of historical debate. A new analysis of horse bones gathered from museums across the Great Plains and northern Rockies has revealed that horses were present in the grasslands by the early 1600s, earlier than many written histories suggest. The timing is significant because it matches up with the oral histories of multiple Indigenous groups that recount their peoples had horses of Spanish descent before Europeans physically arrived in their homelands, perhaps through trading networks. The study,...

The war in Ukraine helped push the global total of people left internally displaced by conflict or natural disasters to a record high of 71.1 million last year, according to a report released in May by the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. By the end of 2022, 5.9 million people had been forced to move inside Ukraine because of Russia’s invasion, bringing the global total of people internally displaced by conflict and violence to more than 62 million, an increase of 17% since 2021. Syria had 6.8 million displaced by conflict after more than a decade of...

Six months after she got the call informing her that her U.N. assistance would be cut, Najwa al-Jassem is struggling to feed her four children and pay rent for their tent in a Syrian refugee camp in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley. She once received food rations and cash that covered most of their modest monthly expenses. The family now only gets the equivalent of $20 a month, which just covers the rent for their cramped tent. Her husband gets only sporadic day labor and “my kids are too young for me to send them to work the fields,” she...