By Jen Rose Smith

(CNN) — If a steaming bowl of soup strikes you as the ultimate in old-fashioned comfort, you’ve got plenty of company.

Soup is one of the world’s oldest and most universal foods, said Janet Clarkson, author of the book “Soup: A Global History.”

“Every culture has some kind of soup,” she said. “It’s got very ancient roots.” Early people simmered it in everything from turtle shells to lengths of bamboo, she writes in the book, turning out metal soup pots starting in the Bronze Age.

Boiling food made it possible to subsist on stable grains, with herbs and other ingredients added for nourishment or medicinal purposes.

Each time you deliver a pot of hearty soup (with perhaps a side of bread) to a friend with the sniffles, Clarkson said you’re in fact carrying on an age-old tradition. “Separating food and medicine — that’s not how ancient people thought of it,” she said. “I think in every country in the world, historically, some soups were seen as restorative.”

That’s true no matter what you call it. Today, soup leans brothy while stews are more substantial, but the world’s spoonable foods have never fit neatly into the two English-language categories.

While Clarkson dove into centuries of etymology to trace the history of soup, potage and broth, she settled on a generously broad take. “Just some stuff cooked in water,” she wrote, “with the flavored water becoming a crucial part of the dish.”

It’s a definition that leaves room for the world’s tremendous culinary diversity. These are CNN Travel’s nominations for 20 of the best soups around the world:

Banga | Nigeria

Fruits from the oil palm tree lend both fat and flavor to this soup from the Niger Delta, which also features fresh catfish, beef and dried seafood.

It’s so popular that packets of ready-mixed banga spice are sold in shops. Most blends include African nutmeg, castor seed, orima, jansa and beletete leaves.

The spices infuse a rich, red sauce that’s the soup’s main draw: Soak it up with eba or a ball of starch, two Nigerian staples both made from cassava prepared with different methods.

Beef pho (phở bò) | Vietnam

Broth is simmered for hours with cinnamon, star anise and other warm spices to create a wonderfully aromatic base for this rice noodle soup.

Pho is among Vietnam’s most recognized culinary exports, but the soup is a relatively new food, wrote Andrea Nguyen, author of “The Pho Cookbook.”

And while today’s pho restaurants serve a wide range of flavors, beef is the original. By 1930, Nguyen explained, the soup was served with slices of raw beef cooked gently in the broth.

Today, beef pho remains the most beloved version in Vietnam, with options that include the original

By Michelle Watson, Julia Vargas Jones, Aileen Graef, CNN

(CNN) — Members of the Jewish community across the world woke up Sunday to yet another fatal attack — something that has become all too common for those of the faith.

The attack Sunday on Sydney’s Bondi Beach, which has been declared a terrorist incident, has left at least 15 people dead and 40 hospitalized in what police say was an incident targeting Jewish people.

The shooting took place as hundreds gathered to celebrate the first of eights nights of Hanukkah, a holiday which takes place close to the winter solstice during the longest nights of the year. A millennia-old tradition, it celebrates the triumph of light over darkness: the victory of the Maccabees over the Syrians and the rededication of the Second Temple of Jerusalem around 165 BC.

Today, that history is resonating even more with Jewish communities across the world following the latest in a wave of antisemitic attacks in Australian cities.

“Sydney was always the type of place which was a haven for all people,” Rabbi Levi Shemtov, executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch, told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday.

“But lately, things have taken a turn for the worse in a very major way. People saw this coming. They said it would come. They begged the prime minister to do something about it, and he just was casual or went the other way too many times,” Shemtov said.

In July, a man set the door of a synagogue alight and a group of protesters stormed an Israeli restaurant in Melbourne. The next month, the country expelled the Iranian ambassador to Canberra after the country’s intelligence agency found Iran was behind at least two antisemitic attacks on Australian soil.

President Donald Trump called Sunday’s incident “a terrible attack.”

Authorities in Read more

By Chris Mooney

Planet-warming pollution rates exploded after the end of World War II. James Watt’s steam engine launched the Industrial Revolution in 1769. Before that, for thousands of years, humans were clearing forested land for farming, releasing carbon from trees and plants into the atmosphere.

The severity of global warming has long depended on your frame of reference — on what temperature you think was normal for the Earth before humans began changing it. But what year should mark that moment?

That’s what makes a groundbreaking new temperature dataset released by a group of scientists based in the United Kingdom so striking. The datasets used to diagnose the modern history of the planet’s climate — and to proclaim that the world is now very near to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming — typically begin with the year 1850.

The new one goes all the way back to 1781.

This extended time frame matters because greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increased 2.5 percent between 1750 and 1850, enough to have caused some warming that the data hasn’t accounted for.

The new temperature record, dubbed GloSAT, helps contribute to the growing sense among scientists that the Earth has warmed more than what calculations based on the 1850 starting year would suggest.

“That 1850 start time is one that’s chosen for essentially practical considerations, given the information that’s available,” said Colin Morice, lead author of the new study and a scientist with the Met Office Hadley Centre in the UK. “For sure, 1850 is not the start of industrialization.”

The new dataset, published in Earth System Science Data by 16 scientists, shows a significantly cooler Earth from the late 1700s through 1849 compared with 1850-1900 — the latter being what scientists have defined as the “preindustrial” baseline period used to assess the planet’s temperature change.

However, not all of the warming between the two early periods can be attributed to human activities, scientists caution.

Among other factors, two very powerful volcanic eruptions in the early 1800s had a marked cooling effect on the Earth. Particles from those eruptions spread around the planet’s stratosphere and blocked some sunlight.

“We know 1815 was Tambora, with well documented impacts,” said Ed Hawkins, a researcher with the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and one of the study’s authors. “The 1808 eruption was nearly as big, but we have no idea where it happened.”

Some of the warming that occurred by the late 19th century is a natural recovery from the cooling effect of these eruptions. But perhaps not only.

The leading climate science authority, the U.N. Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change, concluded in 2021 that there had probably been some human-caused warming between 1750 and 1850, assessing that it was between 0 and 0.2 degrees.

The scientists behind GloSAT come down right in the middle of that range.

Morice and many of the same researchers contributed to a second study, accepted in the journal Environmental Research Letters, which uses the new dataset and climate models to analyze how much additional warming humans may have caused between 1750 and 1850. That study, led by Andrew Ballinger of the U

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By Sandra Gonzalez, TuAnh Dam, Danya Gainor, CNN

(CNN) — Robert Reiner, the celebrated actor, director and producer, was found dead with his wife Michele at their home in Los Angeles on Sunday, a spokesperson for the Reiner family said. He was 78.

Detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department were investigating an apparent homicide. “We’re going to try to speak to every family member that we can to get to the facts of this investigation,” LAPD Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton said. Investigators were interviewing a family member Sunday evening regarding the deaths, a law enforcement source told CNN.

“He was brilliant and kind, a man who made films of every genre to challenge himself as an artist,” Kathy Bates said in a statement through a representative.

Reiner came to stardom playing the son-in-law of Archie and Edith Bunker on the 1970s hit show “All in the Family” before going on to create a truly diverse body of incredibly successful work, including classics like “This is Spinal Tap,” “Stand By Me,” and “The Princess Bride.” He cemented his status as a leading director with “When Harry Met Sally…”, “Misery,” and “A Few Good Men,” which earned four Oscar nominations.

Reiner was born in 1947 in The Bronx, New York, to Estelle and Carl Reiner, the writer, actor, director and producer whose many decades’ worth of credits included “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “The 2000 Year Old Man.”

Reiner said he found it a challenge to step out of his father’s shadow.

“I didn’t feel the pressure from my father, I felt the pressure internally because my father had achieved at such a high level that I thought, ‘Well, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to break through,’” he told The Atlantic in 2017.

He did. Reiner earned two Emmy Awards for his role on “All in the Family” playing Mike Stivic, who would get into arguments with his conservative father-in-law on the groundbreaking show, which often explored political and social issues through comedy.

‘This Is Spinal Tap’

Though Reiner continued to act – he had a part on season 4 of FX’s “The Bear” earlier this year – he moved behind the camera in the 1980s, making his directorial debut with “This Is Spinal Tap,” the musical comedy that more or less invented the mockumentary. “It pioneered a new narrative format,” Reiner wrote in a history of the movie published earlier this year.

“Spinal Tap” also did something more important, he noted: it “transformed the way people talk and think about the music industry.”

After years of development, a sequel to the film – “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues” – was released in September, 2025.

‘The Princess Bride’

Reiner exhibited extraordinary range. He followed his first film with an adaptation of Step

CNN

By Sandra Gonzalez, TuAnh Dam, Danya Gainor, CNN

(CNN) — Robert Reiner, the celebrated actor, director and producer, was found dead with his wife Michele at their home in Los Angeles on Sunday, a spokesperson for the Reiner family said. He was 78.

Detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department were investigating an apparent homicide. “We’re going to try to speak to every family member that we can to get to the facts of this investigation,” LAPD Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton said. Investigators were interviewing a family member Sunday evening regarding the deaths, a law enforcement source told CNN.

“He was brilliant and kind, a man who made films of every genre to challenge himself as an artist,” Kathy Bates said in a statement through a representative.

Reiner came to stardom playing the son-in-law of Archie and Edith Bunker on the 1970s hit show “All in the Family” before going on to create a truly diverse body of incredibly successful work, including classics like “This is Spinal Tap,” “Stand By Me,” and “The Princess Bride.” He cemented his status as a leading director with “When Harry Met Sally…”, “Misery,” and “A Few Good Men,” which earned four Oscar nominations.

Reiner was born in 1947 in The Bronx, New York, to Estelle and Carl Reiner, the writer, actor, director and producer whose many decades’ worth of credits included “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “The 2000 Year Old Man.”

Reiner said he found it a challenge to step out of his father’s shadow.

“I didn’t feel the pressure from my father, I felt the pressure internally because my father had achieved at such a high level that I thought, ‘Well, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to break through,’” he told The Atlantic in 2017.

He did. Reiner earned two Emmy Awards for his role on “All in the Family” playing Mike Stivic, who would get into arguments with his conservative father-in-law on the groundbreaking show, which often explored political and social issues through comedy.

‘This Is Spinal Tap’

Though Reiner continued to act – he had a part on season 4 of FX’s “The Bear” earlier this year – he moved behind the camera in the 1980s, making his directorial debut with “This Is Spinal Tap,” the musical comedy that more or less invented the mockumentary. “It pioneered a new narrative format,” Reiner wrote in a history of the movie published earlier this year.

“Spinal Tap” also did something more important, he noted: it “transformed the way people talk and think about the music industry.”

After years of development, a sequel to the film – “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues” – was released in September, 2025.

‘The Princess Bride’

Reiner exhibited extraordinary range. He followed his first film with an adaptation of Stephen King’s coming-of-age story “Stand by Me” and then directed cult comedy “The Princess Bride.”