After hundreds of airstrikes failed to curtail the Taliban’s $200 million-a-year opium trade, the U.S. military quietly ended a yearlong campaign that targeted drug labs and networks laced around the Afghan countryside.

The end of the operation, code-named Iron Tempest, comes as Trump Administration officials engage in direct peace talks with Taliban leaders that could end the 17-year-old war.

The U.S. military first began targeting Taliban narcotics facilities with airstrikes and Special Operations raids in November 2017 when opium production jumped to record highs in Afghanistan. At the time, U.S. commanders estimated the Taliban operated up to 500 drug labs, which helped fuel their nearly two-decade long insurgency.

Since then, U.S. and Afghan warplanes have launched more than 200 strikes aimed at disabling Taliban narcotics production, processing, trading and transportation networks. Yet the drug trade thrived. So, over time, the U.S. halted the number of air raids. Only two str..

While you would think it would be hard for a bee the size of a thumb to go missing, Wallace’s giant bee did just that. The jaw-dropping giant disappeared for 38 years and scientists and bee lovers were convinced it had gone extinct like so many other insects. Luckily, they were wrong. The world’s largest bee—the Wallace’s giant bee or Megachile pluto—has been rediscovered, minding its own beeswax on Indonesian’s North Moluccas islands.

The bee’s disappearing act was foiled by an intrepid and determined search team of North American and Australian biologists who wanted to figure out once and for all whether the bee still existed. The Guardian reports that the scientists found the answer in a termite’s nest in a tree, where a single female Wallace’s giant bee had set up a home. The bee, which photographer Clay Bolt described as a “flying bulldog” calling the entire experience of snapping the first photo of the newly-rediscovered bee “absolutely breathtaking”, which is exactly what someo..

The question of whether two women who joined ISIS in Syria and Iraq—one British and another American-born—should be allowed to return to their respective countries has provoked fierce debate on how Western governments should treat citizens who left to join the caliphate.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he has told the State Department to ban the return of Hoda Muthana, a 24-year-old U.S.–born woman who left Alabama for Syria in 2014 and is now detained in a Kurdish camp. “I have instructed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and he fully agrees, not to allow Hoda Muthana back into the Country!” Trump wrote on Twitter.

Britain’s Home Secretary Sajid Javid, meanwhile, has moved to revoke the citizenship of teenager Shamima Begum, who left London to marry an ISIS fighter in Syria four years ago and has begged to be allowed to return with her newborn son.

The resistance to Muthana and Begum’s repatriations comes only days after Trump on Twitter asked Britain, France, Germany and o..