Selina Cheng

Jared Kushner traveled to Iraq last week to meet with senior Iraqi leaders, US advisors, and forces on the field in the country. Official images of US president Donald Trump’s son-in-law, senior advisor, and Middle East peace envoy in the company of general Joseph Dunford were published on the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s (which Dunford chairs) Flickr account the next day. Kushner and his tight-fitting bulletproof vest quickly became an object of mockery on the internet.

The United States did not formally recognize the People’s Republic of China until 1979, more than 30 years after its founding. But the first-ever official state visit between Communist China and the US actually took place several years earlier: In February 1972, then-president Richard Nixon visited China in a ground-breaking détente famously brokered by Henry Kissinger. Archival photos of the trip show Nixon shaking hands with Mao Zedong, and sharing a toast and a meal (using chopsticks) with China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai.

All eyes are on Donald Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping as they meet for the first time at the US president’s Mar-a-Lago golf club in Florida. But, the venue represents exactly what Xi has been trying to crack down on in China—over-the-top, showy extravagance.

Certain basic items are in perpetual short supply in Cuba, but the country’s public health policies guarantee that condoms are always abundant. Naturally, the contraceptive has been repurposed to satisfy all kinds of needs in daily life: From rubber bands, to fishing, to wine.

The former TV reality star has apparently gone camera shy, now that he’s president of the United States.

Much has been made of Chinese president Xi Jinping’s family lineage and what it augurs for his domestic leadership. But those ties may also be influencing Xi’s approach to US relations and the Trump administration, according to (paywall) a New York Times report.

In yet another legal quagmire for the US president, a US federal judge has allowed a lawsuit against Donald Trump to proceed, which accuses him of inciting violence during a campaign rally last year.

Vladimir Putin made a trip to the Arctic this week to participate in the International Arctic Forum held March 29-30 in Arkhangelsk, Russia.

It’s hard to manage 1.4 billion people, especially when more than half of them tend to clutter together—55% of China’s population live in cities and towns, according to the World Bank data from 2015.

A long-dormant volcano in the far east of Russia took geologists by surprise when the eruption began March 24, for the first time since the last confirmed eruption around 1350.

A 1983 picture map of Silicon Valley may be a goofy throwback, but it reveals how much the US tech landscape was once changed—to everybody’s surprise—by an outsider called Microsoft.

After a knife and car attack left several dead in London on March 22, a disturbing photo has been circulating on the internet, showing a woman looking at her phone as she walks past the crime scene. Some commenters have interpreted the image as proof of indifference. But that interpretation is the result of several perceptual errors well-known in psychology.

You might have already seen the video of a giant white rooster that has left the internet stunned today. The bird has quickly been identified by viewers as a brahma chicken. While some call the animal ”terrifying,” the bird used to be much more common before the advent of industrial farming, and it’s pretty good-natured too.

German chancellor Angela Merkel may be the most powerful woman on earth, but she still sometimes has trouble getting heard by a man. When she modestly asked US president Donald Trump if he wanted to shake hands during a photo-op at the White House today, his response was to stare into space in stone-cold silence.

Few outside of Canada truly love curling. Whether or not the winter game, which involves sliding granite rocks across ice, even deserves to be called a sport regularly comes up for debate in the US, during the Winter Olympics. But a small group of refugees in Canada who recently discovered the slippery game seem to have embraced it with open arms.

For conservative Hindu women in India, becoming a widow can mean eternal banishment from society. When husbands die, widows often end up ostracized, dismissed as inauspicious perpetual mourners. Until recently, they were not socially permitted to celebrate the colorful Hindu spring festival of Holi.

On International Women’s Day more than 25 years ago, the CIA created a list of nine female spies who have made an exceptional contribution to US intelligence.

It’s turned out to be a big week for Blue Origin. The Jeff Bezos-owned space company on March 6 that it has finished assembling the first of seven engines for the giant reusable New Glenn rocket, which is designed to carry humans and cargo to the moon by 2020, and on March 7 the firm announced the rocket’s first client.

An unusual photo of Kellyanne Conway perched on a couch in the Oval Office appeared late last night (Feb. 27), immediately drawing thousands of critical comments from users across Facebook and Twitter.

Boris Johnson, foreign secretary of the United Kingdom, met up with his Australian counterpart Julie Bishop yesterday (Feb. 23), who before attending to business had to stop and fix Johnson’s necktie.

As the Feb. 22 deadline to clear the protest site at Standing Rock, North Dakota, approached, flames engulfed some of the camps.

An ancient North American dynasty ruling parts of the what is now the southwestern US 1,200 years ago used to only pass its power to elites born from powerful women, according to new DNA evidence.

Even spies and assassins have a good sense of humor when it comes to poking fun at their enemies—just look at the woman suspected of killing the former heir apparent to Kim Jong-Il, leader of North Korea, while wearing a LOL shirt. It was no different back in the heyday of spy culture: buried in a trove of recently declassified CIA documents is a list of Soviet jokes from the 1980s that offer a glimpse of how American spies during the Cold War enjoyed a good laugh at the expense of their enemy.

Ikea issued a catalog in Israel without a single woman that is targeted at the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. The men and boys featured in the catalog wear Orthodox Jewish attire, and live in households with religious objects, the Jerusalem Post reports.