Denisé (wife) took this image of Tiger, our Jack Russell. Tiger’s a smart, very active little dog, and Denisé has done a great job capturing his “essence”. …

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They were fit and strong and humorless. “It’s difficult to say how many people I’ve killed,” a Tiger named Seetha, age twenty-two, told me. What I remember most from that trip are the tiny vials of cyanide that Seetha and every other Tiger wore around their necks, like pieces of jewelry. Capture at the hands of the Sri Lankan government often meant torture, so the Tigers weren’t taking the risk.

It was strange, meeting those women. They were impossible not to like, even to respect, despite—or even because of—their brutality. And that was it: they were as tough as the men. The Tigers, run at the time by a cult-leader-like figure named Velupillai Prabhakaran, started drafting women into the army not because Prabhakaran was a feminist but because so many of the men, after more than fifteen years of fighting, were dead. There was a surplus of women, and they wanted to fight. The headline that ran with my story was “Women Dying to be Equal.”

I thought of the Tiger ladies yesterday when I read about the decision, by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, to rescind the ban on American servicewomen in combat. The order was a long time coming. A dozen years ago, it would have been remarkable for American women to be shooting people and losing their eyes and legs in war. Not anymore. In the twelve years since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, the military has been steadily pushing women into jobs that no one could call “non-combat” without stripping the phrase of its meaning. Nowadays, women fly Apache helicopters—giant, terrifying killing machines armed with rockets and cannon. Women fly medevac helicopters, often descending directly into firefights to carry away wounded soldiers as they take enemy fire. Members of what the military calls “female engagement teams” venture into remote Afghan villages—nearly all of which are contested by the Taliban—to talk to Afghan women because of the cultural barriers that stand in the way of American men. What’s “non-combat” about those jobs?

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“It’s a sign saying, ‘I am here! I am here!’ ” says Ullas Karanth as he flails his arms and jumps up and down in a mock attention-grabbing wave.

He is referring to a scrape, a patch of jungle floor recently cleared by a tiger’s hind paws. It’s huge, the size of a cafeteria tray. Based on the freshness of the uprooted grass along the edges, Karanth figures a tiger passed here sometime last night. I kneel down and am hit by an overwhelming stench—the musky spray of a quarter-ton cat that has just marked its territory.

Signs of tigers are everywhere inside Nagarhole National Park in southwestern India. From our forest service lodge we hear the telltale alarm calls of deer in the middle of the night. On early morning drives Karanth, one of the world’s leading tiger biologists, points out paw prints the size of dinner plates. We pass trees with trunks that the cats have raked bare, signposts for rivals and potential mates.

Karanth has deep piercing eyes that can spot a deer a quarter of a mile away from inside a moving vehicle. He prefers, however, to drive with his head sticking out the window so he can read the tracks of every animal that has crossed the path beneath our wheels. Gleefully calling out each animal by name, he seems oblivious as the vehicle swerves alarmingly from side to side.

After days of searching through forests that harbor some of the highest concentrations of tigers in the world, we have yet to see one. Karanth tells me he spent 15 years looking before he saw his first wild tiger. Even when the cats are all around, he says, the odds of seeing one are slim.

A few days later, driving down a dirt lane in neighboring Bandipur National Park, we come across a jeep operated by a local tour company. Bandipur has fewer tigers than Nagarhole, but its dry, open forests make for easier wildlife viewing. The jeep has stopped and its passengers are staring intently. As Karanth pulls up behind them I see stripes of orange, black and white. “Tiger!” I yelp.

One of nature’s most perfect killing machines dozes in the afternoon heat. We watch the cat sleep as other jeeps crowd around us like a pack of dholes, the wild dogs that hunt inside the park. People gasp and point, then click their cameras from the safety of their vehicles. Slowly, the tiger opens one eye, and with a casual glance in our direction, locks me in a gaze so powerful that all else disappears. After licking its paws and stretching its back, the cat rises to its feet. Then the tiger turns its head and walks deeper into the forest until it disappears.

From the boreal forests of the Russian Far East to the jungles of Sumatra, tiger populations are in free-fall. In the past century, their numbers have plunged from an estimated 100,000 to fewer than 3,500.

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Six people have been detained for smuggling an unspecified amount of the form of uranium that can be used to make a nuclear weapon, an official said Wednesday.

Interior Ministry official Vitalie Briceag said the uranium-235 was brought in from Russia. He said the smugglers were trying to sell it to a North African country for €20 million ($28.85 million).

Uranium-235 makes up less than 1 percent of natural uranium. Highly enriched uranium — which is used to arm nuclear weapons — is 90 percent or more uranium-235.

The International Atomic Energy Agency considers 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of uranium-235 a “significant quantity” — technical language for the amount needed to make a nuclear bomb.