GlobalPost

It's time to stop drinking civet-poop coffee

Perhaps you’ve heard of “kopi luwak,” the world’s priciest coffee. And perhaps you know its main claim to notoriety: The drink, which costs up to $100 per cup, is brewed from beans swallowed and excreted by civets, small mammals that look something like a cross between cats and weasels. 

Sounds repellent? Well, Kopi luwak is tainted by more than a furry animal’s anal glands. Just as off-putting is its cruelty.

Inside Myanmar's Rohingya camps: What it looks like to be a refugee in your own country (PHOTOS)

Today tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims live in internment camps along Myanmar’s west coast. Despite generations of history in the country’s Rakhine State, members of the minority are referred to as “Bengalis” by the Buddhist majority, who regard them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. 

When sectarian riots broke out in June 2012, killing scores and displacing thousands, security forces removed Rohingya to camps encircling Rahkine’s state capital, Sittwe, supposedly for their own safety.

Instead, nearly four years later, they suffer from chronic malnutrition, receive minimal medical care and are forbidden to travel freely outside the camps — let alone return home.

These photos were taken in several internally displaced person (IDP) camps outside Sittwe in January 2016.

The refugee crisis is turning more girls into child brides

Just when it seemed like Syria's civil war couldn't possibly find new ways to induce human suffering — it's now leading to a resurgence in child marriages.

For many Syrian parents it is a desperate measure sought in extreme circumstances. Large numbers of Syrians are living in harsh conditions in informal camps, unable to provide for their families — so they marry off their daughters to husbands who can. For others, it is to find stability when they are far from home and surrounded by chaos.

How 'Mad Max: Fury Road' caused actual fury in the world's oldest desert

The Namibian desert, with its stark, lunar landscape, makes an ideal dramatic backdrop for a post-apocalyptic movie like "Max Max: Fury Road.” But now, residents and environmentalists say that the film’s crew caused damage to sensitive parts of the ecosystem.

The mystery behind mass sperm whale deaths in Europe

Beaches across northern Europe turned into cetacean graveyards this winter, as sperm whale after sperm whale kept stranding itself.

Scientists are still baffled.

The US is killing more civilians in Iraq and Syria than it acknowledges

ISTANBUL, Turkey — In almost a-year-and-a-half of bombing Iraq and Syria, the United States admits to killing just 22 innocent people. That number is impossibly low.

A GlobalPost investigation has unearthed a disturbing truth about the US military campaign against the Islamic State: Many more civilians are dying in American airstrikes than the US government acknowledges. People in Iraq and Syria can see what is happening. And so can the enemy. The Islamic State portrays the conflict as a war on Sunnis and a war on Muslims. When the coalition kills civilians — and does not investigate and apologize — the Islamic State fills the void with propaganda. 

According to the US Department of Defense: “No other military on Earth takes the concerns over collateral damage and civilian casualties more seriously than we do.” Yet our investigation found there has been no honest official estimate of how many civilians the United States has killed in Iraq and Syria. Even if civilian casualties are an inevitable part of war, the American public is being fed the comforting illusion that this war can be fought without shedding much innocent blood.

And that is simply not the case.

Brazil’s worst environmental disaster, in pictures

When the dams holding waste from a Brazilian iron ore mine collapsed in November, it triggered a huge, harmful mud wave that blanketed villages and polluted a major river flowing into the Atlantic.

The torrent carried billions of gallons of mud and waste, killing at least 17 people, leaving hundreds of families homeless, wiping out wildlife and unleashing other devastation that, all together, the government considers to be Brazil's worst environmental disaster ever.

Marcio Pimenta, a Brazilian documentary and travel photographer, recently retraced the more than 300-mile route of destruction. He visited the source in Mariana, Minas Gerais state, in the southeastern part of the country. And he toured mud-caked rural villages until reaching the ocean shore.

With US help, Saudi Arabia is obliterating Yemen

The Saudi-led coalition may be guilty of war crimes in Yemen. And that means the US might be complicit as well.

SANABAN, Yemen — The terrifying power of a bomb is how it can alter life so dramatically, so completely, so instantaneously. How it can crush concrete, rip apart flesh, and snuff out life. 

The moments before the pilot pulls the trigger and sends the missile screeching down choreograph the final dance with fate: another step forward into a room, a turn around a corner, a walk outside to get some air — trivial actions that determine everything afterward.

This power is a fact of life in Yemen now. 

It is brought forth by a coalition of Arab countries led by Saudi Arabia and supported by the United States. The airstrikes have been relentless since March, a period now of eight months. They are supposed to be targeting a local rebel group, but appear largely indiscriminate, regularly hitting civilian targets. Thousands of people have been killed. Human rights groups say some of these strikes amount to war crimes.

Australia plans to kill two million feral cats. Before you get mad, hear them out

It’s open season on wild cats Down Under.

Over the next five years Australia will slaughter two million feral felines as part of a plan to protect native animals from the "efficient predators," which have been a “major contributor” to the extinction of at least 27 mammals since they were introduced to Australia by Europeans more than 200 years ago. (You can blame them for exterminating the lesser bilby and desert bandicoot.)

There are at least 20 million feral cats prowling Australia, and together they kill an estimated 75 million native animals every day.

With the survival of more than 100 native animals at risk from the marauding moggies (that's Australian for cats), the government has decided to take drastic action to prevent Australia's already worrying extinction record from getting worse.

As you can imagine, the plan is pretty controversial.