Cartoon by Clay Jones A court on Friday suspended the ban on Islamic burkini swimming costumes imposed by a French Riviera town in a ruling likely to set a precedent to be followed in France's other beaches. France's Council of State, the country's top administrative court, lifted the ban in the Cote d'Azur town of Villeneuve-Loubet. The ruling was expected to be adopted by 30 other muni...

Michael Temer with Dilma Rousseff By Manuel Pérez Bella for EFE Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is facing her most difficult moment yet in a long and storied political career: she now stands suspended from office, alone, surrounded by hostile forces and retaining scarce support from her once-loyal social base. The constant erosion suffered by her party's congressmembers has been refle...

Wikimedia Commons By Igor G. Barbero for EFE He may not be able to close his fists perfectly yet, owing to a layer of warts that are still on his palms, but the "Tree Man" of Bangladesh is pleased with his new hands after a string of surgeries freed them of the burden of warts that resembled the bark of a tree. Now awaiting cosmetic touch-ups, 27-year-old Abul Bajandar, is thinking about...

Nintendo - Niantic The death of a woman, who was killed after she was hit by a car whose driver was distracted playing Pokemon Go, is the first recorded fatality related to the popular smartphone game in Japan, media reported Thursday. Keiji Goo, 39, was arrested Wednesday after his van hit two women in Tokushima (southwest), killing one of them, aged 72. The other woman, aged 60, suffer...

By Wendy Anders This afternoon, the Washington Post reported from Havana, Cuba that an agreement was reached by the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) leftist rebel group to end the continent’s longest conflict after after 52 years of fighting. After nearly four years of negotiations and a ceasefire announced in June, “'We have finished fighting with w...

Source: RAI The old mountain village of Amatrice was obliterated by a 6.2 magnitude earthquake that hit early Wednesday morning, leaving nearly 200 people dead and at least 53 missing. From the ground, EFE could see that many houses collapsed and cars were crushed by the falling rubble. In this scene of destruction and pain, a man tried to cycle through debris-strewn streets with tears i...

Illustrative image. (Flickr Commons) A Japanese man, arrested last weekend for allegedly stabbing his 12-year-old son to death, told the police he did it because the child was not studying for his secondary level exams, the police said Tuesday.   The accused, Kengo Satake, 48, a transporter from Nagoya city was taken for interrogation after his arrest, a police spokesperson told loc...

By Wendy Anders This morning in Geneva, Switzerland, Costa Rica’s Security Minister Gustavo Mata reiterated Costa Rica’s wholesale commitment to the effective implementation of the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty. The Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is a multilateral treaty regulating international trade in conventional weapons, according to the United Nations website that entered into force in Dec...

By Wendy Anders Costa Rica’s President Luis Guillermo Solís and U.S. Navy Adm. Kurt Tidd, commander of U.S. Southern Command, greet each other prior to the opening ceremony for the Central American Security Conference April 7 in San Jose. Photo by Jose Ruiz, SOUTHCOM Today President Obama and Vice President Biden received Costa Rican President Luis Guillermo Solis at the White House. Enc...

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega (C) listens during an official meeting with Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (R) and then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (L) during an official state visit by the Nicaraguan president to Iran in 2007. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif began his first Latin American visit Monday in Havana, where he met with Foreign Minister Bruno Rodrigu...

Wikimedia Commons A Sri Lankan Airlines pilot intended to fly from Germany to Sri Lanka despite arriving drunk to his flight, announced Frankfurt Airport on Sunday. The plane he was due to fly carried 259 passengers and 15 crew members. The crew were forced to stop the pilot from launching the plane, and the flight, which was supposed to leave on Friday, was delayed until Saturday. Th...

FARC guerrilla unit marching in 1998. Wikimedia Commons The names of the more than 8 million victims of Colombia's decades-long armed conflict will be inscribed on trees in an expanse of the southeastern province of Vaupes to be known as the "Forest of Peace. Supported by the Colombian government, the Forest is an initiative of the NGO Saving the Amazon. The group began planning the proj...

Wikimedia Commons "You can't get it more cheaply" calls a Caracas woman selling flour at the open-air market in Petare, the largest shantytown in Latin America, where hundreds of vendors offer basic products that are generally scarce here at prices often more than 20 times higher than those fixed by the government. Stringent price controls have prevailed in Venezuela since 2003 but, neverth...

Wikimedia Commons French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on Wednesday he supported the ban issued in several parts of the country against the burkini, but ruled out government legislation on the matter. Valls said in an interview with La Provence newspaper that general laws dictating clothes are not a solution. The Prime Minister's comments arrive in the wake of an all-out beach brawl i...

"El chapo Guzmán" por Fabrizio León Diez - Obra do próprio. Licenciado sob CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons A son of Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" (Shorty) Guzman is among six people kidnapped at a restaurant in this Pacific resort city, Jalisco state Attorney General Eduardo Almaguer said Tuesday. An examination of items found in the cars of the victims, sitting abandoned in the ...

Arequipa. Wikimedia Commons A magnitude-5.3 earthquake left four people dead, 68 injured and 1,253 families homeless in a rural area of Caylloma province in southern Peru's Arequipa region, to which the authorities have sent humanitarian aid in helicopters and by land. The fatalities were an 80-year-old woman, another age 70 and her granddaughter, a minor, as well as United States citizen E...

By Wendy Anders Last Wednesday August 10 at Germany’s Federal Foreign Ministry Office, Costa Rica and Germany celebrated the ratification of the establishment of legal instruments as part of an agreement to eliminate double taxation of income and assets, stated Costa Rica’s Ministry of Foreign Relations in a press release Friday. The agreement aims to provide clear guidelines for both co...

Cartoon by Clay Jones Milwaukee police reported on Sunday that the armed man an officer killed after a traffic stop on the weekend was black. The city is trying to recover its calm after a night of disturbances on the weekend that have made it a new focus of tension as a result of police violence. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Sunday ordered the National Guard deployed in Milwaukee to p...

Britain could remain in the European Union until the end of 2019, almost a year longer than anticipated by the British government, according to The Sunday Times newspaper. The Theresa May-led Conservative government is preparing to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which provides for a two-year period to negotiate cutting off of ties with Brussels. London has publicly stated that it ha...

MS-13 tattoo (El Salvador) - Wikimedia Commons The governments of the Northern Triangle of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras) will create a tri-national force to combat organized crime, with a special target on gangs, following an agreement signed Saturday in the Salvadoran capital by defense and security authorities. The proposal, called "Elite Security Group" was sugges...

Wikimedia Commons A women's rights group staged a protest Friday in front of the Japanese embassy in Pasay City, south of Manila, urging an apology from Japan's government for the alleged sexual enslavement of Filipino women during World War II, an epa journalist reports. The rally, organized by the Gabriela group, included about 20 people, with four women claiming to be former "comfort wom...

Illustrative image. (Flickr Commons) A 16-year-old boy was killed by gunmen inside a church in the Mexican Pacific resort city of Acapulco, but the motive for the killing has not been determined, state prosecutors said Wednesday. The boy was gunned down Tuesday inside the Parroquia del Niño Jesus in Acapulco's Juan R. Escudero district after being chased by several armed men, the Guerrero s...

Wikimedia Commons Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte threatened to declare martial law if his country's justice obstructs his controversial anti-drug campaign which so far has killed more than 800 alleged drug traffickers since his election in May. Duterte responded to Supreme Court Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno's letter which was written after the president included the names of sev...

PublicDomainPictures.net Hurricane Earl has so far caused 45 deaths in the Mexican states of Veracruz and Puebla, making it the country's deadliest storm in three years as tropical storm Javier is expected to target Mexico's Baja California Sur on Tuesday, the authorities informed today. The national Civil Protection coordinator of the Ministry of the Interior, Luis Felipe Puente, said at a...

Wikimedia Commons Dozens of people have died from an unknown disease in the northwestern Nagaland area of Myanmar over the last two months, an epa journalist reported. As of this morning, the sickness has claimed the lives of 40 people, marking an increase after Friday's death toll of 39, according to Shu Maung, Assistant General Secretary of the Council of Naga Affairs. Most victims of th...

The radioactive material reported stolen earlier this weekend in northern Mexico has been recovered, national emergency management chief Luis Felipe Puente said. "The radioactive source has been found and the protocol for its recovery has been implemented," Puente said in a Twitter post. Emergency management officials issued an alert Friday following the theft of the radioactive material, sa...

Flickr Commons By Hector Pereira A litter of five puppies has to go home from a veterinarian's office without getting the necessary vaccinations, because now pets in Venezuela suffer from the same shortage of medicines as people do as a result of the country's economic crisis. Briceida Niño, a mom in Caracas, took her five pups to one of the veterinarian centers assigned to the "Nevado M...

Wikimedia Commons Controversy has sparked in France after a French NGO decided to arrange a day at a water park near Marseille for women who wear the Islamic full-cover swimsuit known as "burkini", while French authorities plan to ban it. On its Facebook page, Smile 13 announced the organization of the day on Sept. 17 at SpeedWater Park, giving access only to women wearing burkinis, while m...

Wikimedia Commons The State of Israel has been buying gas masks for decades from suppliers who also sold them to the Nazi regime, Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot reported Wednesday. The country obtains its gas masks from two companies: the German firm Drager and the American MSA, which used to be German and whose previous name was Auer. Based on recent findings, both companies manufactu...

Wikimedia Commons A total of 4,027 refugees and migrants have died in the Mediterranean in the first seven months of this year, a 35 percent increase compared with the same period of 2015, the International Organization for Migration, or IOM, reported on Tuesday.   Drowning was the main cause of death though fatalities sometimes resulted from violence among people on the crowded boa...

Wikimedia Commons At least three children died and their parents were wounded in an air strike on Tuesday by a U.S. drone that missed its target in Al-Wadiah, in southern Yemen, witnesses told EFE. The bombing destroyed the house of the family, located in the village of Al-Shemil in the district of Al-Wadiah, birthplace of Yemeni President Abdo Rabu Mansur Hadi. The adults were taken to ...

Source: Wikimedia Commons An expert on aircraft accidents said the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared in March 2014 with 239 people on board, was deliberately crashed into the Indian Ocean, Australian media reported Monday. "Somebody was flying the airplane at the end of its flight ... Somebody was flying the airplane into the water," Larry Vance, who investigated the Swissai...

Scotland Yard, the London Metropolitan Police, believes that a terrorist attack in Britain is a matter of time. The Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe said, in an article published on the Mail on Sunday, that he could not promise that there will never be an attack, noting that the security forces are working hard to avoid what may occur. Hogan-Howe added that he understo...

Airstrikes on a hospital in northern Syria has wounded babies staying in incubators, according to the UK-based Save the Children NGO, which said there is "no excuse for this vile attack", in a tweet. The bombing, which took place on Friday night, targeted the entrance of a maternity hospital in the Syrian province of Idleb, said the non-profit in a recently released statement. The bombing wo...

Illustrative image. (Flickr Commons) The probe into last week's coach fire which killed 26 people - including 24 Chinese tourists - took an abrupt turn on Friday when prosecutors announced that the driver was driving under the influence of alcohol and could have drunken alcohol to commit suicide. "Tests of the blood, urine and stomach residue of driver Su Ming-cheng showed that his blood al...

Wikimedia Commons Vinicio Cerezo, who in 1991 became the first Guatemalan head of state in four decades to hand over power to a democratically elected successor, said the Central American nation faces dangerous consequences due to a failure to fully implement the 1996 Peace Accords. "The danger for Guatemala is that our state becomes truly a failed state if we continue on this course," he s...

Photo from one of various Twitter accounts attributed to Caro QuinteroMexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, a fugitive from justice since 2013, said in an interview with Proceso magazine that he did not kill U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique Camarena in 1985 and denied that he was trying to grab control of the Sinaloa drug cartel. Caro Quintero, considered one of Mexico's mo...

Photo: JayPLee Flickr CommonsGerman police is investigating the possibility that the Sunday night explosion in the city of Ansbach in Bavaria, southern Germany, which killed the perpetrator of the attack and injured at least ten people, is an Islamic attack. Bavarian Interior Minister, Joachim Herrmann, said at a press conference that the fact the attacker attempted to kill several people near...

Wikimedia CommonsFormer Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega was taken Friday to the Legal Medicine Institute for the physical and psychiatric exams ordered by the court hearing the case against him for the death of union leader Heliodoro Portugal back in the 1970s. The defense attorney for Panama's one-time strongman, Ezra Angel, told EFE briefly this Friday that Noriega's examinations ...

Today's print cover of Tageszeitung -tz- tabloid from MunichFriday's assault at a Munich shopping mall was "probably" the work of a lone assailant who took his own life after fatally shooting nine people, German police said. "We found a man, who killed himself. We assume, that he was the only shooter," the Munich police said on Twitter shortly after authorizing the resumption of transit servic...