ISIS fighters in Iraq. Source: Wikimedia Commons Kabul, Apr 18 (EFE).- The Islamic State jihadist group has claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing Saturday outside a bank in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad that killed at least 34 people and wounded more than 100 others. If verified, it would be the first major attack by the extremist group in the South Asian country. The attac...

Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro, Apr 16 (EFE).- At least 37 tons of dead fish have been removed over the past week from this Brazilian metropolis' Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon, one of the venues for the 2016 Rio Olympics, officials said Thursday. Employees of the Comlurb municipal waste management company were continuing to use nets to remove the silvery fish, called twaite shad, many thousands ...

Source: Wikimedia Commons Cancun, Mexico, Apr 13 (EFE).- A 31-year-old man from Tlaxcala, a state in central Mexico, died over the weekend when a crocodile pulled him under in the Bojorquez Lagoon near the hotel in the Caribbean resort of Cancun, police said. Marco Antonio Sanchez Fernandez was drunk when he went for a swim on Saturday, encountering the crocodile. Sanchez Fernandez and a...

Washington, Apr 14 (EFE).- U.S. President Barack Obama on Tuesday informed Congress of his intention to remove Cuba from the list of countries sponsoring terrorism, where that nation has been since 1982 and which comes with the imposition of sanctions. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest announced the move in a communique. Cuba has been demanding for years that it be removed from the list...

Source: Sea Shepherd The crew of a vessel believed to be engaged in illegal fishing was rescued by members the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a direct-action ocean conservation group founded by the controversial Canadian activist Paul Watson. According to a news release recently published by Sea Shepherd: At 1152 GMT today, the notorious poaching vessel, Thunder, sank at 0˚ 20' North 05˚ ...

Blackwater helicopter over Iraq. Wikimedia Commons Washington, Apr 13 (EFE).- Four former U.S. Blackwater security guards were sentenced by a federal judge to long prison terms for the 2007 massacre of 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Baghdad.   U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth sentenced Nicholas Slatten to life in prison after his murder conviction in the killings at a Baghdad...

Wikimedia Commons Tijuana, Mexico, Apr 8 (EFE).- The Lo Yen City Chinese restaurant in Tijuana, a border city in northwestern Mexico, was closed for using dog meat in its dishes and not having a business license. Eyewitnesses said a person called the emergency services number after hearing a dog yowl, looking through a gate and seeing cooks at the restaurant in the El Rubi district butcheri...

Wikimedia Commons By Marc Arcas   Washington, Apr 11 (EFE).- NASA scientists are now convinced that extraterrestrial life is a fact, not a mere possibility, and says man will find conclusive signs of life far from Earth by the year 2045.   For scientists, the big question about alien life is no longer if it will be found but when.   "I think we're going to have...

ISIS fighters in Iraq. Source: Wikimedia Commons Washington, Apr 10 (EFE).- An American who was allegedly plotting a suicide car-bomb attack at a Kansas military base in support of the Islamic State jihadist group was arrested Friday while preparing the explosive. John T. Booker, Jr., a 20-year-old from Topeka, Kansas, has been charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction, at...

Wikimedia Commons Culiacan, Mexico, Apr 8 (EFE).- Canada's McEwen Mining said Wednesday that some 7,000 ounces of gold worth $8.5 million were stolen in an armed robbery at its El Gallo 1 mine in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa.   No one was hurt in the robbery and the mine in the city of Mocorito was not damaged, the company said in a statement.   Mining and pr...

Artist rendition of a protoplanetary system. Wikimedia Commons Berlin, Apr 9 (EFE).- A team of scientists has found, for the first time, complex organic molecules, the building blocks of life, in a protoplanetary disc surrounding a young star, reinforcing the theory of life beyond the Solar System. In an article published Thursday in the journal Nature, the team said it detected "large amou...

Wikimedia Commons Caracas, Apr 7 (EFE).- Some 13,000 doctors have emigrated from Venezuela in recent years, the president of the Venezuelan Medical Federation, Douglas Leon Natera, said Tuesday, while warning that "the crisis" in the sector has a "tendency to gradually get worse."   "Around 13,000 doctors have gone" from the nation's 300 private and state hospitals, specifically "7,...

EFE file photo New York, Apr 6 (EFE).- The preliminary agreement negotiated among six big international powers and Iran is the "best option" for ensuring that Tehran does not develop a nuclear bomb, U.S. President Barack Obama said in an interview published Monday in The New York Times. The framework agreement, the details of which must be worked out before July 1, is "the best option for u...

A Germanwings A-319. Wikimedia Commons Berlin, Apr 5 (EFE).- Lufthansa airline did not inform German air traffic authorities about the psychiatric problems being experienced by Andreas Lübitz, the co-pilot who deliberately crashed a Germanwings Airbus jet in the French Alps, killing all 150 on board. The Sunday edition of the daily Die Welt based its reporting on air traffic officials' rema...

ISIS fighters in Iraq. Source: Wikimedia Commons Mosul, Iraq, Apr 4 (EFE).- Jihadists of the radical Islamic State posted a video Saturday showing how they recently destroyed ancient statues in the northern Iraqi city of Hatra, declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1985. The destruction was confirmed to Efe by an official of the Tourism Ministry in the northern province of Nineveh. ...

An execution chamber in the US Austin, Texas, Apr 3 (EFE).- Anthony Ray Hinton, a man condemned to death in 1985 for killing two people in Alabama, was freed Friday after spending 30 years in jail for a crime that a new trial found he did not commit. Friends and family greeted the African American Hinton, now age 59, as he walked out of the Jefferson County jail in Birmingham, Alabama. H...

Kenyan forces responded to the attack. Source: Wikimedia Commons Nairobi, Apr 2 (EFE) .- At least 147 people were killed and 79 others were wounded on Thursday in an attack launched by Somali jihadist group Al-Shabab on Garissa University, near the Somali border in northeastern Kenya, the Kenyan government said. The National Disaster Operation Center said that, after 16 hours of clashes, th...

Source: Flickr Commons Mexico City, Mar 31 (EFE).- Health officials closed three clinics and a hospital therapy center in Mexicali, the capital of the northwestern Mexican state of Baja California, in response to the death earlier this month of an Australian woman who underwent plastic surgery. The medical facilities in the Valley of Mexicali were shut down after inspections discovered viol...

A Germanwings A-319. Wikimedia Commons Berlin, Mar 31 (EFE).- Co-pilot Andreas Lübitz, thought to have deliberately crashed an airliner in the French Alps last week, in 2009 reported to the Lufthansa flight school the fact that he had overcome a "serious depressive episode," the German airline said Tuesday. Lufthansa revealed the new information in a communique on Tuesday after conducting a...

Source: Flickr Commons Sao Paulo, Mar 30 (EFE).- A Brazilian man strangled his pregnant 16-year-old girlfriend, decapitated her and turned himself into police two days later after riding across Sao Paulo in a bus with her head in a plastic bag, local media reported Monday. The situation unfolded in the Pedreira neighborhood in the extreme southern part of Brazil's largest city, when handyma...

A district of Tunisia - Wikimedia Commons Tunis, Mar 29 (EFE).- At least nine members of the Okba Ibn Nafaa terrorist group, including its leader and the mastermind behind the deadly attack on the Bardo museum in this capital, Lokmane Abu Sakhr, died in an operation carried out on the weekend by the Tunisian National Guard, an Interior Ministry spokesman told Efe on Sunday. The operation in...

Credit: Flickr Commons; Thomas Pompenigg Seattle, Mar 30 (EFE).- The United States grants citizenship to any person born in its territory, a constitutional provision that in recent years has promoted the creation and expansion of a new business: maternity tourism. With a neatly organized network of agencies and hotels, maternity tourism targets pregnant women, most of them Chinese, who want...

Wall surrounding a temple in the magnificent Tihuanaco, Bolivia. Wikimidia Commons La Paz, Mar 27 (EFE).- The government of Bolivia announced it will start exploratory excavations this year at the ancient fortress of Tiahuanaco after a buried pyramid was detected. Ludwing Cayo, director of the Tiahuanaco Archeological Research Center, told Efe that the formation is located in the area of Ka...

A Germanwings A-319. Wikimedia Commons Berlin, Mar 28 (EFE).- The German co-pilot suspected of deliberately crashing a passenger plane into the French Alps and killing himself and the other 149 people on board told his girlfriend last year that he was in psychiatric treatment and that he planned to do something that would make his name known worldwide. "When I heard about the crash, I kept ...

ISIS fighters in Iraq. Source: Wikimedia Commons Washington, Mar 26 (EFE).- The FBI arrested a U.S. soldier, who was planning to travel to the Middle East to provide the Islamic State with his military knowledge, and his cousin, who was going to remain in this country allegedly to carry out a terrorist attack, the Department of Justice announced Thursday in a communique. Both men - who are ...

A Germanwings A-319. Wikimedia Commons Washington, Mar 25 (EFE).- The U.S. government confirmed Wednesday that three Americans died in the Germanwings passenger jet crash in the French Alps and said that efforts are continuing to determine if there were any more on board the ill-fated plane. State Department spokeswomen Jen Psaki earlier on Wednesday had confirmed the deaths of two U.S. cit...

Jinotega (in red). Wikimedia Commons They call him the “Butcher of Jinotega.” Basil Edsel Givner is an expat from the United States who was convicted of the gruesome murder of Harley Silva Soza, a 34-year old man who was found decapitated and cut into eight parts in Jinotega, a coffee-producing region of Nicaragua. According to a news report by S. Ruiz of La Prensa, a major daily newspaper ...

A Germanwings A-319. Wikimedia Commons Washington, Mar 24 (EFE).- The U.S. government offered assistance and support to the countries affected by the air tragedy Monday in the French Alps and said that, so far, "there are no indications" that terrorism played a role in the crash of the Germanwings jet carrying 150 people and en route from Barcelona to Düsseldorf. "There is no indication of ...

Wikimedia Commons New York, Mar 22 (EFE).- Felipe de la Cruz, the father of one of the survivors of an attack on a group of education students in southern Mexico last year, made a presentation on the case this weekend to the U.S. branch of Amnesty International. The students' families consider it essential that the human rights organization "know the facts" so it can make recommendations th...

A landmine explosion. Source: Wikimedia Commons By Cynthia de Benito San Andres de Pisimbala, Colombia, Mar 21 (EFE).- To live in some of the 688 Colombian municipalities devastated by anti-personnel mines and other explosives, one must learn to look at the ground, a rule that hundreds of peasants have made a routine of their daily lives. "The mines really change community life. Once we ...

One of Ishiguro's robots. Source: Wikimedia Commons Managua, Mar 21 (EFE).- Japanese scientist Hiroshi Ishiguro presented in Nicaragua two robots he calls "humanoids," which he developed with systems of cognitive intelligence, and which are capable of walking, talking and interacting with people. Ishiguro is director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory of the Upper School of Engineering ...

Supporters of President Maduro rally in Caracas EFE/AGENCIA VENEZOLANA DE NOTICIAS/ Washington, Mar 19 (EFE).- The Obama administration's designation of the situation in Venezuela as a threat to U.S. national security may herald a military intervention, the Venezuelan foreign minister said Thursday at the Organization of American States headquarters in this capital. "History has shown that ...

New Orleans International Airport. Source: Wikimedia Commons Washington, Mar 21 (EFE).- A police officer shot and wounded a man who had attacked three Transportation Security Administration workers with a machete and insecticide at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, local authorities said. The attacker, a 63-year-old taxi driver identified as Richard White who did not have a...

Flickr Commons A 30-year suspect allegedly tried to rape a Canadian woman who was walking down the beach of Los Brasiles Island in Poneloya, a coastal community in the Pacific seaboard of Nicaragua. Poneloya is in the district of Leon. According to a news story published by national newspaper La Prensa, the Canadian woman was all alone when Gerson Uziel Cuadra Vargas, a known felon, jumped ...

Source: Wikimedia Commons Washington, Mar 17 (EFE).- A former U.S. Air Force mechanic has been formally charged with trying to join the Islamic State in Syria, the Justice Department announced Tuesday in a statement. The accused was identified as Tairod Nathan Webster Pugh, a 47-year-old U.S. citizen who served as an avionics and instrumentation specialist in the Air Force from 1986-1990. He i...

Sosua Beach. Source: Wikimedia Commons Santo Domingo, Mar 17 (EFE).- A total of 29 Dominican women, including 20 minors, who had become the victims of sex traffickers in the northern tourist town of Sosua, were rescued by Dominican and U.S. authorities after an undercover police investigation, the U.S. Embassy in this capital announced Tuesday.   As part of the investigation, author...

Pixabay Commons Panama City, Mar 18 (EFE).- Europe is concerned about its loss of influence in Latin America and China's growing presence in the region, one of the co-presidents of the Euro-Latin American Parliamentary Assembly, or Eurolat, said here. "We worry about no longer being the big economic partner that Europe has been for many Latin American countries, and about being replaced by ...

EFE file New York, Mar 17 (EFE).- Venezuela on Tuesday took out a full-page ad in The New York Times to ask the U.S. government to immediately cease its "hostile actions" against Caracas and to retract the executive order declaring the South American nation to be a threat to its national security. Entitled "Venezuela is not a threat," the ad takes the form of a letter directed at the Americ...

Tikrit. Wikimedia Commons Baghdad, Mar 16 (EFE).- The tomb of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein reportedly has been destroyed during the ongoing assault to liberate the strategic city of Tikrit from the Islamic State. According to what security officials told Efe on Monday, the mausoleum located in Al Ouya, south of Tikrit, was destroyed during fighting that erupted in the area between Iraqi go...

Jackie Cobell - Source: Facebook By Irene Valiente. Buenos Aires, Mar 16 (EFE).- Jackie Cobell, a 60-year-old British woman who does not pay much heed to age, nationality or ideologies, plans to challenge the cold waters around the Falkland Islands, scene of a 1982 war between Argentina and Britain, this week as a symbol of friendship and unity. Cobell told Efe in an interview that she h...