Svati Kirsten Narula

In Tonga, the taste for fish and vegetables—lean staples of traditional Pacific island diets—was lost long ago.

Pregnant women in the US are officially being warned to watch out for the Zika virus, which appears to be harmful to fetal brain development, and which they might have been exposed to if they have recently traveled outside the country.

A record 1.18 billion people traveled internationally as tourists in 2015, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization, marking the sixth year in a row that international tourism increased by at least 4%. It’s a remarkable statistic in light of recent terror reports, which tend to discourage tourism.

For six years, Mahabir Pun made monthly two-day treks from his village in Nepal’s remote Annapurna region to the city of Pokhara, the nearest place with internet access, so he could check his email. Then, in 2001, he started imagining what it would be like to have an internet connection closer to home. The video below, one of Vimeo’s recent “staff picks,” chronicles Pun’s successful effort to make that happen.HIKING FOR EMAILS from Clemens Purner on Vimeo.

There’s a new report out this week about ocean plastics, the man-made debris that floats and sinks in global waterways and often lands in marine creatures’ stomachs. According to the study (pdf), which was a collaborative effort by McKinsey & Co.’s environmental business unit and the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, roughly 60% of all the plastic in global waters originates in five countries: China, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), which governs the sport of track and field, is rife with corruption—from cheating athletes and the administrators who blackmailed them to top executives who willfully ignored wrongdoing.

More than 30,000 organ transplants occurred in the US in 2015, an increase of approximately 5% compared to 2014, and a record high, according to the United Organ Sharing Network (UNOS). The number of transplants was made possible by a record number of individual organ donors: more than 15,000, the majority of whom were deceased and thus able to donate multiple organs.

The continuing search for MH370, the Malaysia Airlines flight that vanished in 2014 with 239 people on board, hasn’t provided the answers that investigators and grieving families were looking for, but it hasn’t been entirely fruitless, either. In addition to finding a fragment that authorities think came from the missing aircraft, search parties have also made a few unrelated but interesting discoveries; the shocking extent of garbage floating around the sea was one early revelation, and now the remains of two uncharted shipwrecks have been found.

Swedish police have been accused of covering up a spate of sexual assaults during a summer music festival in Stockholm and during recent New Year’s celebrations in Malmö. These allegations surfaced less than one week after a similar uproar in Germany, where Cologne’s police chief lost his job over the public’s belated discovery of some 500 sexual assaults that occurred there on New Year’s Eve.

Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman can’t blame Sean Penn for leading the military to his hideout in Sinaloa, where he was captured on Jan. 8 after months on the lam. Though some suspect that the fugitive’s secret meetings with the US actor were a beacon to authorities, El Chapo’s location was apparently given away by a neighbor.

Fallout continues after Germany’s discovery of a mass assault on women during New Year’s celebrations in Cologne. Wolfgang Albers, Cologne’s chief of police, was ousted today after allegations that his force was not adequately prepared for the attack and sought to downplay and cover up details about it in the immediate aftermath.

US president Barack Obama called out a pro-gun “conspiracy” on CNN last night (Jan. 7), as he defended his administration’s position on gun reform.

What to watch for today

When 34-year-old Kensuke Miyazaki becomes a father next month, he’s going to take time off from work—becoming the only member of Japanese parliament, ever, to take advantage of his country’s generous paternity leave policy.

As the main refuge for asylum-seekers in Europe today, Germany is facing a tremendous influx of new citizens—but paradoxically, economists say the country’s future is still threatened by underpopulation.

British lawmakers are actually going to debate stopping the divisive US presidential candidate Donald Trump from entering their country, after half a million Brits signed an online petition calling for a ban.

Between 500 and 1,000 men robbed and sexually assaulted women in Cologne, Germany on New Year’s Eve in a coordinated attack, according to the city’s police. Police chief Wolfgang Albers described ”a completely new dimension of crime” carried out by perpetrators of apparent Arab or North African descent. The assaults are being cited by German anti-immigration activists as proof that the country’s intake of 1 million refugees is leading to anarchy.

According to Donald Trump, the only advantage his political opponent Hillary Clinton has is “the woman card.”

Authorities in Belgium announced today (Dec. 30) that the annual New Year’s Eve fireworks display in Brussels has been canceled due to threats of terrorism during the event. Evidently, the recent arrests of two men suspected of planning one such attack in the city did not assuage safety concerns. The Belgian prime minister alluded to new “information” as the reason for the decision, according to the BBC.

The US continues to wrestle with the consequences of fatal shootings involving police officers and unarmed civilians.

What to watch for today

The mayor of San Vitaliano, a town outside of Naples, issued an edict (PDF, Italian) last week banning the use of wood-fired ovens in restaurants for the next three months. If business owners want to continue making traditional wood-fired pizzas and breads before then, they must install special filters on their ovens, which are blamed for exacerbating the town’s air pollution problems.

Four months after his son’s body washed up on a beach in Turkey, sparking a global change in tone about the Syrian refugee crisis, Abdullah Kurdi has released an emotional statement on a British television news channel.

Whether they’re mere figureheads or active change-makers, there’s no doubt that presidents, prime ministers, and other heads of state experience unique levels of stress, the detrimental effects of which on health and aging have been well-documented. Now a Harvard-affiliated study, published in the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) last week, has concluded that the stress of leading a nation likely cuts a person’s lifespan two years short.