Philippines mulls pullout of Syria peacekeepers The Philippine foreign secretary says he is recommending to President Benigno Aquino III to pull out all Filipino U.N. peacekeepers from the Golan Heights following the abduction of four by Syrian rebels. More
8 die in clothing factory fire in Bangladesh as Rana Plaza toll passes 900 Eight people were killed when a fire swept through a clothing factory in Bangladesh, police and an industry association official said on Thursday, as the death toll from the collapse of another factory building two weeks ago climbed above 900. More
Porn and movies, not tech secrets, found on Chinese spy suspect's NASA laptop The Chinese national taken into custody on an airplane waiting to take off for home had pornography and illegally downloaded movies on his NASA computer, not government secrets, reports say. He is now set to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of violating NASA computer rules. More
What to know about bird flu as farms fight outbreaks in California The rise of bird flu across farms in California has raised questions about the virus and its potential threat to humans. While the threat to humans is currently small. 01/4/2025 - 7:50 pm | View Link
Bird flu could merge with seasonal flu to make mutated virus that could spread among humans, CDC warns For example, if a human gets infected with a bird flu and also carries a human influenza A virus, these two viruses can exchange genetic material. This is known as genetic shif ... 01/3/2025 - 11:24 am | View Link
In severe bird flu cases, the virus can mutate as it lingers in the body As the seasonal flu picks up, there are even more opportunities for the bird flu to acquire mutations as the different influenza viruses mix. 01/3/2025 - 11:00 am | View Link
Bird Flu Warning Over New Virus Risk: 'Significant Public Health Concern' Public health officials have warned that new mutations of bird flu with human flu could have dangerous consequences. 01/2/2025 - 9:50 pm | View Link
Will bird flu lead to another pandemic in the US? Experts weigh in as concerns grow Doctors say the case of a teen left in critical condition shows H5N1 "can cause severe human illness." Mutations in the virus are deepening concerns about the spread of H5N1. 01/2/2025 - 4:26 am | View Link
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korean investigators left the official residence of impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol after a near-six-hour standoff on Friday during which he defied their attempt to detain him. It’s the latest confrontation in a political crisis that has paralyzed South Korean politics and seen two heads of state impeached in under a month.
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The country’s anti-corruption agency said it withdrew its investigators after the presidential security service blocked them from entering Yoon’s residence for hours, due to concerns about their safety.
The agency said its outnumbered investigators had several scuffles with presidential security forces and expressed “serious regret about the attitude of the suspect, who did not comply with the legal process.”
It said detaining Yoon would be “virtually impossible” as long as he is protected by the presidential security service.
Ukraine on Wednesday halted Russian gas supplies to European customers through its pipeline network after a prewar transit deal expired at the end of 2024 and almost three years into Moscow’s all-out invasion of its neighbor.
Even as Russian troops and tanks moved into Ukraine in February 2022, Russian natural gas kept flowing through the country’s pipeline network — set up when Ukraine and Russia were both part of the Soviet Union — to Europe, under a five-year agreement.
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Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom earned money from the gas and Ukraine collected transit fees.
Ukraine’s energy minister, Herman Halushchenko, confirmed Kyiv had stopped the transit “in the interest of national security.”
“This is a historic event.
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korean officials said Monday they will conduct safety inspections of all Boeing 737-800 aircrafts operated by the country’s airlines, as they struggle to determine what caused a plane crash that killed 179 people a day earlier.
Sunday’s crash, the country’s worst aviation disaster in decades, triggered an outpouring of national sympathy.
For President Jimmy Carter, morality was a personal obligation that became a national calling. A deeply religious man, he taught Sunday school for most of his adult life until the point in 2020 when he physically couldn’t anymore, and he projected that same moral leadership from his entry into politics through his ascendance to the presidency.
Moo Deng might seem to most people like just an adorable viral baby hippo, but to the government of Thailand, where she’s from, she’s a cultural ambassador and shining example of the country’s push to boost what it calls its “soft power.”
The term soft power was coined at the height of the Cold War by American political scientist Joseph Nye, who used it to describe “when one country gets other countries to want what it wants” without the use of force, in contrast to the hard power “of ordering others to do what it wants.”
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But in the last year and a half, since the Pheu Thai party came to power in August 2023, Thailand has sought to redefine soft power instead as getting others to want what it has—with a particular emphasis on highlighting the country’s cultural prominence to attract tourists and foreign investment.
Moo Deng isn’t alone.
SEOUL, South Korea — A passenger plane burst into flames Sunday after it skidded off a runway at a South Korean airport and slammed into a concrete fence when its front landing gear apparently failed to deploy. Most of the 181 people on board died in one of the country’s worst aviation disasters.
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The Jeju Air passenger plane crashed while landing in the town of Muan, about 290 kilometers (180 miles) south of Seoul.