Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the United States has concluded that the Syrian government used chemical weapons in an attack in May. Speaking in New York on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday, Pompeo said U.S. officials had determined that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government had …
Arab leaders have reasserted their rejection of any attempt by Israel to annex Palestinian land in the aftermath of Israel’s election. Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi and President Barham Saleh of Iraq meeting at the United Nations this week say they refuse possible Israel’s annexation designs …
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began the task of forming a new coalition government Thursday after inconclusive elections Sept. 17. The move comes even though Netanyahu’s Likud party obtained one seat less than challenger Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party in the election. Likud won 32 seats to Blue and …
British car production increased by an annual 3.3% in August, the first rise in 15 months, helped by several factories having moved their summertime shutdowns to April in preparation for the original Brexit date, an industry body said Thursday. MW, Peugeot, Honda and Jaguar Land Rover all closed factories ranging …
Commercial fisheries in seven U.S. states have suffered from catastrophic failures and disasters over the past two years, making them eligible for federal aid, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross blamed the problems in part on extreme flooding in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi from the Gulf …
Amazon on Wednesday unveiled a cornucopia of new gadgets as it extended the reach of Alexa from automobiles and homes essentially into people’s heads. Amazon digital aide Alexa vies with Google Assistant software to be at the heart of smart homes where lights, security systems, televisions and more are …
The number of invasions of indigenous lands in Brazil has jumped in the first nine months of President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, a Brazilian Catholic Church agency said Tuesday. The Missionary Indigenous Council said illegal miners, loggers and tappers of natural resources are involved in most of the invasions. The council …
An Army veteran who was deported to Mexico in 2018 arrived back in Chicago Tuesday for a final chance at becoming a U.S. citizen and living in the city he has called home since boyhood. Federal immigration authorities granted Miguel Perez Jr. a two-week parole into the U.S. for an …
U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts, speaking at a New York synagogue on Tuesday night, lamented the perception that the Supreme Court is becoming politicized and that the justices’ decisions are guided primarily by their partisan affiliation. Roberts’ concerns about the impression of the court comes during a highly-charged political moment …
A strong earthquake rattled eastern Pakistan Tuesday afternoon forcing residents into the streets in several cities, with witnesses claiming a building collapsed in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. The shallow 5.8-magnitude hit 22.3 kilometers (13.8 miles) north of the city of Jhelum along the boundary separating the agricultural heartland of Punjab province and …
Google won a major case in the European Union on Tuesday, when the bloc’s top court ruled that the U.S. internet giant doesn’t have to extend the EU’s “right to be forgotten” rules to its search engines outside the region. The case stems from a 2014 ruling that said people …
Thousands of migrant workers in Qatar are not getting paid by their employers and are being forced to live in dire conditions, according to Amnesty International. Despite pledging to overhaul labor laws for migrants in 2018, Amnesty said the Qatari government has failed to implement its policies on unpaid wages, …
Russia’s Interior Ministry says a former Kremlin official, whom media reports have called a CIA informant, has been officially declared missing. The ministry said on Monday that it had added Oleg Smolenkov, born in 1969, to its list of missing people and that it has launched a search to locate …
Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg scolded world leaders Monday at a United Nations summit calling for climate action, saying people are suffering and dying from the effects of global warming and that all the leaders have are empty words. “We are in [the] beginning of a mass extinction and all …
Pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq known as Popular Mobilization Forces are becoming bolder, despite calls by Iraq’s Shiite spiritual leader and prime minister to put their weapons under government control. The PMF is an umbrella organization of Iraqi Shiite militias formed in 2014 to fight the Sunni militant Islamic State …
Hundreds of mourners gathered Sunday to commemorate the loss of yet another European glacier. Dressed in mourning clothes, they hiked for hours in the Glarus Alps in eastern Switzerland to reach the remnants of the Pizol glacier at 2,600 meters above sea level. The glacier has lost more than 80% …
U.S. President Donald Trump admitted talking about corruption with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, but stopped short of saying they talked about investigating 2020 leading Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. A Wall Street Journal report says Trump urged Zelenskiy eight times to investigate Biden and his son Hunter, and whether a …
Tanzania has declined to provide detailed information on suspected Ebola cases, the World Health Organization (WHO) said, posing a challenge in efforts to fight the outbreak. Despite several requests “to date, clinical data, results of the investigations, possible contacts and potential laboratory tests performed … have not been communicated to …
Five brothers came to the US from Ukraine almost two decades ago in search of the American Dream — that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed in the United States. During those 20 years, they’ve had all kinds of jobs, from washing floors, to delivering mail to working at …
In 20 months, an anti-smoking group in Lebanon collected 240,000 cigarette butts from around a university campus. It did not take long to put those butts to good use, creating something unique to help clean up Beirut’s beaches. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi gets to the bottom of this story. …
The head of Ukraine’s state-owned oil company says Kyiv will remain able to supply Europe with natural gas from its subterranean storage units even if European Union-mediated talks don’t pan out. “We are fully confident that Ukraine can maintain gas supply … at least during the first quarter of 2020,” …
Protesters burned a Chinese flag and police fired pepper spray during a march Saturday in an outlying district of Hong Kong in renewed clashes over anti-government grievances. Police accused protesters of spraying water at officers during the march by several thousand people in Tuen Mun in Hong Kong’s northwest. …
Dozens of demonstrators were arrested at yellow vest protests in Paris on Saturday as more than 7,000 police were deployed to quell any violence by the movement and its radical, anarchist “black blocs.” There were also fears that the demonstrators could try to infiltrate a march against climate change in …
President Donald Trump irritably defended himself Friday against an intelligence whistleblower’s complaint, including an allegation of wrongdoing in a reported private conversation Trump had with a foreign leader. The complaint, which the administration has refused to let Congress see, is “serious” and “urgent,” the government’s intelligence watchdog said. But …
Two reporters for the U.S.-based Bloomberg news agency have appeared in court accused of trying to undermine Turkey’s economic stability with a story they wrote on last year’s currency crisis. The trial against Kerim Karakaya and Fercan Yalinkilic opened in Istanbul on Friday. Thirty-six others have also been charged for …
Sixty years ago, children accounted for more than one-third — 36% — of the U.S. population. Today, that number is 22% and shrinking faster than anticipated. The U.S. Census Bureau had not expected the kid population to drop that low until 2030, but the reality hit more than a decade …