Conservationists in Cambodia on Friday celebrated the discovery of six highly endangered Mekong giant catfish in the critical Southeast Asian waterway plagued by illegal fishing, habitat loss and plastic waste.Besides overfishing and plastic pollution, the Mekong River Basin has been degraded by upstream dams and climate change, which have had a major impact on water levels in the critically endangered catfish's aquatic home.
Chinese leaders met this week to plot economic policy for the coming year, sketching out plans to raise government spending and relax Beijing’s monetary policy to encourage more investment and consumer spending. Leaders of the ruling Communist Party wrapped up their two-day Central Economic Work Conference on Thursday with praise for President Xi Jinping's guidance and a pledge to “enrich and refine the policy toolbox” and defuse risks facing the world's second-largest economy. One of the biggest: threats by President-elect Donald Trump to sharply raise tariffs on imports from China once he takes office.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday told Turkey it was "imperative" to work against a resurgence of the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria following the fall of Bashar al-Assad. In response, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told Blinken Turkey was committed to ensuring stability in Syria "as soon as possible" and "preventing ISIS" jihadists from gaining a foothold there.
Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has ordered the military to "prepare to remain" throughout the winter in the UN-patrolled buffer zone that is supposed to separate Israeli and Syrian forces on the Golan Heights.Israel captured most of the Golan Heights from Syria during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
A 66-year-old doctor affiliated with several Cincinnati-area hospitals is “the prime suspect” in a 1989 sexual assault, court records say.
From her private hospital in Afghanistan's capital, doctor Najmussama Shefajo predicts a rise in maternal mortality rates "within three or four years", following the latest restrictions on women's education."We may not see the impact very quickly but after three to four years we will see the maternal mortality rate go up and up," said Shefajo.
A US serviceman was sentenced to five years in prison for kidnapping and raping an underage girl last year, an official from Naha District Court on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa told CNN Friday.
It's not snow or freezing temperatures that signal the holiday season in some parts of America. Sometimes it's seasonal harvests.
Dr. Mehmet Oz is Trump’s pick to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Oz held stocks in companies doing business with Medicare.
The industrial-scale drug lab sat just up a hill from a main road on the western edge of Damascus, the city that was the seat of power for the Assad family which long denied any links to the narcotics trade. President Bashar al-Assad's government in Syria was accused by Washington and others of profiteering from the production and sale of the addictive amphetamine-like stimulant commonly known as captagon which became entrenched across the Middle East, from front lines of wars to construction sites and high-end parties. The annual trade in captagon is worth billions of dollars a year, experts say, and Western governments have linked the illicit trade in Syria to Assad's brother, Maher al-Assad, and the Fourth Division of the Syrian army he commanded.
‘The statements change every day’: Capitol rioters try to parse Trump’s pardon pledges
The most serious charge against healthcare CEO killing suspect Luigi Mangione is murder in the second-degree in New York, but the murder charge could be upgraded if prosecutors find evidence to prove he had an intent to commit terrorism by targeting other executives.
Kurdish authorities have made overtures to Islamist-led rebels who seized power in Syria last week, but the long-oppressed community fears it could lose hard-won gains it made during the war, including limited self-rule.As rebels led by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) seized power, ousting president Bashar al-Assad, the Kurdish authorities in northeastern Syria have multiplied overtures to the new leaders, like adopting the three-starred flag used by the opposition.
Accurately predicting the weather is hard — really hard, but a new AI-powered forecast model just hit a milestone that has experts saying your forecast could soon get more accurate, and further out, too.
UK postal operator Royal Mail has been fined £10.5 million ($13.3 million) for delays in delivering mail for the 2023/2024 financial year, Britain's communications regulator Ofcom said Friday.Britain's communications regulator has previously proposed that Royal Mail cut delivery to five days a week, or even just three days, potentially saving the company hundreds of millions of pounds.
Japan's refusal to recognize same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, a high court ruled Friday, the latest victory for the LGBGQ+ community to add pressure on the reluctant government. Friday’s decision by the Fukuoka High Court in southern Japan marks the eighth victory out of nine rulings since the first group of plaintiffs filed lawsuits in 2019. A. In Friday’s ruling, presiding Judge Takeshi Okada noted that the current civil law provisions barring the marriage of same-sex couples violates their fundamental right to the pursuit of happiness guaranteed under Article 13 of the Japanese Constitution.
China's industry ministry will set up an artificial intelligence standardisation technical committee focusing on developing industry standards in areas such as large language models and AI risk assessment, it said on Friday. The 41-member committee includes representatives from tech giant Baidu and leading academic institutions such as Peking University, the ministry said in a statement. Beijing is trying to strike a balance between regulating the fast-growing AI sector and promoting its development, amid global concerns about safety and ethical implications.
For the Catholic Marist Brothers of Aleppo, one of nearly a dozen Christian communities in Syria's second city, today's most pressing question is how to decorate the Christmas tree.Of the approximately 200,000 Christians who lived in Aleppo before 2011, just 30,000 remain in the city, according to community leaders.
Jonathan Bailey is opening up about his sexuality and how it's evolved, explaining that there are "many nuances" throughout his experience.
An ancient relic that many Christians revere as Jesus Christ’s “Crown of Thorns” is returning to Notre Dame, five years after it was saved from the flames of the cathedral’s devastating 2019 fire. The ceremony will be presided over by the archbishop of Paris and attended by knights and dames of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher, marking a key moment in the cathedral’s restoration journey. In 1239, it was acquired by King Louis IX of France, who brought it to Paris and housed it at Notre Dame before commissioning the Sainte-Chapelle for its safekeeping.
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