Contemporary World

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant sits near Pripyat, in northern Ukraine — on the broad lowland plains east of Europe, north of the Black Sea, and just south of the border with Belarus. On April 26…

This is Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China — the immense paved plaza at the symbolic centre of the North China Plain, where the ancient imperial capital sits between the Taihang Mountains to the west…

This is Berlin, the capital of Germany, sitting in the broad North European Plain between the Rhine basin to the west and the Oder River — the natural boundary with Poland — to the east. On November…

This event unfolded in Moscow, Russia — the capital city sitting on the flat East European Plain, roughly equidistant between the Baltic Sea to the northwest and the Caspian Sea to the southeast, at…

This event took place at CERN, the particle physics laboratory straddling the border between France and Switzerland near Geneva, nestled between the Jura Mountains to the northwest and the Alps to…

Kuwait City, the capital of Kuwait, sits on the northwestern corner of the Persian Gulf — exactly where the flat Arabian Peninsula meets the ancient river plains of Mesopotamia, with Iraq to the…

New Delhi, the capital of India, sits on the broad plains of the Ganges-Indus heartland — flanked by the Himalayas to the north and tapering toward the Indian Ocean to the south, exactly the…

Los Angeles, California, USA — the vast Pacific-coast city nestled between the San Gabriel Mountains and the Pacific Ocean in the southwestern corner of North America — was the site of six days of…

This was Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — a city hugged between dramatic granite peaks and a wide South Atlantic bay on South America's southeastern coast, exactly the coastal setting the title clue…

Maastricht, a city in the southern Netherlands — where the Rhine delta country stretches between France and Germany, close to the North Sea coast — was where the treaty came into force on November 1…

The signing took place on the White House lawn in Washington D.C., United States — situated along the Potomac River on the Atlantic seaboard of North America, roughly midway up the eastern coast. On…

This breakthrough happened in Champaign, Illinois — a city sitting on the flat glacial plains of the American Midwest, well inland from both coasts, south of Lake Michigan and straddling the upper…

This is Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia — perched on the Horn of Africa, the continent's sharp northeastern tip where the Indian Ocean meets the Gulf of Aden, directly south across the water from…

Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States, sits on the Potomac River along the eastern seaboard of North America — the continent that stretches from the Arctic tundra of Canada in the north…

This is Kigali, the capital of Rwanda — a densely hilled, landlocked country sitting on the high plateau between the Congo basin and the East African Rift Valley, almost exactly at the continent's…

Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa, sits on the high interior plateau near the continent's southern tip — exactly where Africa narrows between the Indian Ocean to the east and the…

Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States, sits on the eastern seaboard where the Potomac River meets the fall line separating the Appalachian piedmont from the Atlantic coastal plain. In…

This atrocity unfolded in Srebrenica, a town in Bosnia and Herzegovina — tucked into the forested ridges of the Dinaric Alps in the western Balkans, roughly midway between the Adriatic coast and the…

Geneva, Switzerland — a landlocked city tucked between the Alps to the south and the Jura Mountains to the northwest, close to the borders of France and Germany — is where the World Trade…

San Jose, California, sits at the southern tip of San Francisco Bay, nestled in the Santa Clara Valley between the Coast Ranges and the Pacific shore — the heart of what became known as Silicon…

This is Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina — a city nestled in a mountain valley in the western Balkans, exactly where the rugged Dinaric Alps rise inland from the Adriatic and the…

Washington, D.C., the federal capital of the United States, sits on the Potomac River along the Atlantic seaboard of North America — the low-lying tidal plain the title clue pointed toward. In…

East London sits on the Eastern Cape coast of South Africa at the mouth of the Buffalo River, where it meets the Indian Ocean. The city is surrounded by the former Ciskei and Transkei homelands. On…

The Roslin Institute sits near Edinburgh, Scotland — on the eastern side of Great Britain, just south of the Firth of Forth where the North Sea cuts into the island's coast. In 1996, scientists there…

Ottawa, the capital of Canada, sits on the Ottawa River in the country's southeast, where the Canadian Shield meets the St. Lawrence lowlands — the political heart of a nation spanning from the…

Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States, sits on the Atlantic coastal plain along the Potomac River, roughly 100 miles inland from the Chesapeake Bay and east of the Appalachian Mountains…

This is Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan — a high-altitude city cradled by the Hindu Kush mountain range in Central Asia, landlocked between Iran to the west and Pakistan to the east. In 1996, the…

Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, sits near the head of the Gulf of Thailand on the long Indochinese Peninsula. In July 1997, Thailand's currency, the baht, collapsed after the government could no…

This is Hong Kong, on the southern edge of China's Pearl River Delta coast, exactly where the South China Sea meets the steep hills of the Guangdong peninsula. On July 1, 1997, the United Kingdom…

Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom, sits on the northeastern shore of the island of Ireland — separated from mainland Britain by the Irish Sea and sharing a land border…

This was Rome, the capital of Italy — sitting on the Tiber River in the middle of the Italian Peninsula, exactly the boot-shaped landmass stretching south into the Mediterranean that the title clue…

This conflict unfolded in and around Pristina, the main city of Kosovo — a landlocked territory in the mountainous heart of the western Balkans, wedged between the Adriatic Sea to the west and the…

Beijing, the capital of China — sitting on the North China Plain just south of the Great Wall and west of the Bohai Sea — was the seat of power where the Golden Shield Project, widely known as the…

The target of this 78-day air campaign was Brussels, Belgium — the headquarters of the alliance that ordered the strikes, located in the low-lying heart of Western Europe between the North Sea coast…

Seattle, Washington, in the United States, is the city on Puget Sound — the deep inland sea carved into the Pacific Northwest coast, with the Cascade Range rising sharply to the east. In late 1999…

Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut in northern Canada, sits on Baffin Island — a massive island between Hudson Bay and the Labrador Sea, deep inside the Arctic Circle in the far northeast of North…

This event is anchored in Kano, the largest city in northern Nigeria — a vast country occupying the bulge where West Africa pushes farthest into the Atlantic, with its northern regions edging toward…

This event took place at the United Nations headquarters in New York City, USA — on Manhattan Island, wedged between the Hudson River and the East River, at the northeastern edge of the North…

Tora Bora is a cave-riddled mountain complex in eastern Afghanistan, nestled in the Hindu Kush range just a few kilometres from the Pakistani border — exactly the kind of high, remote terrain the…

This is a reclaimed field near Shanksville, in the Appalachian ridges of Somerset County, western Pennsylvania — the empty rural ground the title clue pointed toward. On September 11, 2001, United…

On September 14, 2001, just three days after the September 11 attacks, the U.S. Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force with near-unanimous support — 98–0 in the Senate and 420–1…

This is the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, on the west bank of the Potomac River directly across from Washington, D.C. — the five-sided military headquarters the title clue pointed toward. On…

The ceremony took place in Doha, the capital of Qatar — a small peninsula projecting northward into the Persian Gulf from the Arabian coast, flanked by Saudi Arabia to the south and Bahrain across…

Washington, D.C., the federal capital of the United States, sits on the Atlantic seaboard of North America — wedged between the Appalachian Mountains to the west and the tidal lowlands of the…

This is New York City, on the northeastern coast of the United States, where the Hudson River empties into the Atlantic at one of the world's great natural harbours — exactly the dense island skyline…

On November 13–14, 2001, Afghan Northern Alliance forces backed by U.S. Special Forces and American and British airstrikes captured Kabul from the Taliban regime, which had controlled roughly 90…

This is Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan — a city sitting in a high mountain valley of the Hindu Kush, deep in the heart of Central Asia, exactly where those rugged ranges seal the country off from…

The city is The Hague, in the Netherlands — sitting in the flat Rhine-Maas delta where northwestern Europe meets the North Sea, exactly the coastal lowland the title clue described. On July 1, 2002…

This attack struck Kuta, a beach resort town on Bali — a small island in Indonesia, sitting between the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north, in the heart of Southeast Asia's vast…

This is Baghdad, the capital of Iraq — a city built on the Tigris River in the flat, sun-baked lowlands of Mesopotamia, the ancient land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the Middle East. In…

This is Baghdad, the capital of Iraq — sitting in the heart of Mesopotamia, the ancient floodplain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, exactly where those two great rivers converge before…

On December 13, 2003, U.S. forces launched Operation Red Dawn near Ad-Dawr, a small town south of Tikrit, Iraq. About 600 soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division and Task Force 121 searched two farm…

In April 2004, CBS News and journalist Seymour Hersh published photographs revealing that U.S. military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison, 32 kilometers west of Baghdad, had subjected Iraqi detainees to…

This is Banda Aceh, the northernmost city of Sumatra, Indonesia — sitting at the very tip of the island where the Indian Ocean and the Andaman Sea converge, exactly where the title clue pointed. On…

This was Fallujah, Iraq — a city sitting on the Euphrates River in the broad Mesopotamian plain between the two great rivers, roughly 65 kilometres west of Baghdad. In November 2004, U.S. and Iraqi…

The Punggye-ri nuclear test site sits in the mountainous northeast of North Korea — a peninsula jutting southward from the Asian mainland, squeezed between China to the north, Russia at its…

This is Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, a city built on the Tigris River in the broad alluvial plain of Mesopotamia — the ancient land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the heart of the Middle…

The event took place in San Francisco, California, USA — a city built on a hilly peninsula where the Pacific Ocean meets San Francisco Bay, on the far western edge of North America. In January 2007…

Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States, sits on the northeastern seaboard of North America — on the Atlantic coastal plain just east of the Appalachian Mountains, near where the Potomac…

Ottawa, the capital of Canada, sits in the country's southeast, where the Canadian Shield meets the St. Lawrence lowlands, roughly halfway between the Atlantic and the heart of the continent…

This is Chicago, on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan in the American Midwest. On the night of November 4, 2008, Barack Obama delivered his presidential-election victory speech to a crowd of…

The event unfolded in Sidi Bouzid, a provincial town in central Tunisia — sitting on the high interior plateau of North Africa, roughly halfway between the Sahara Desert to the south and the…

This disaster unfolded at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Ōkuma, Japan — on the Pacific-facing coast of Honshu, the main island of the arc that curves along Asia's eastern edge. On March…

This is Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt — sitting in the Nile Delta where Africa's longest river spreads into the Mediterranean, at the continent's northeastern corner where Africa nearly touches Asia…

This is Bluffdale, in the U.S. state of Utah — a small city in the Salt Lake Valley, the high-elevation desert basin running between the Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the…

Sevastopol, on the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine — a wedge of land pushing south into the Black Sea, with the narrow Kerch Strait separating it from Russia to the east and the Bosphorus connecting the…

Paris, the capital of France, sits along the Seine River in the heart of northwestern Europe — exactly where the broad North European Plain meets the Channel coast facing England. In 2015…

The city was Vienna, Austria — a landlocked Alpine capital in the heart of Central Europe, where the Eastern Alps give way to the Danube basin and the continent's old imperial crossroads. On July 14…

This event unfolded in London, the capital of the United Kingdom — an island nation perched off the northwestern edge of continental Europe, separated from France and the mainland by the English…

This ruling was issued in Ottawa, Canada's capital, perched on the Ottawa River where the rocky Canadian Shield plateau gives way to the fertile St. Lawrence lowlands in the heart of the continent…

Ottawa, Canada's capital, sits where the Ottawa River flows into the St. Lawrence lowlands, near the northern shore of the Great Lakes — exactly the inland river-junction geography hinted at in the…

Geneva, Switzerland — a city tucked between the Alps and the Jura mountains on the western tip of Lake Geneva — was where the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March…

This is Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, sealed off from the sea and hemmed in by the towering Hindu Kush, sitting almost equidistant between Iran to the west, Pakistan to the south and east, and the…