More details from the daring U.S. military raid that took out Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Saturday. Once a powerful self-declared caliph, Baghdadi was found hiding in a tunnel. Cornered with no exit, he blew up himself and his three children. …

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Iran of seeking means to launch missiles at Israel from Yemen, where Tehran supports Houthi rebels. Netanyahu made the remark during a visit by a U.S. delegation, including presidential adviser Jared Kushner and U.S. secretary of Treasury Steve Mnuchin. Zlatica Hoke reports Netanyahu is calling for tougher sanctions against Iran. …

Fires continue burning in California, leading to the evacuation of thousands of people. Gusting winds are spurring officials to shut off all power out of fear that a spark could cause devastation. Throughout the state, people are struggling to cope. Michelle Quinn reports. …

President Donald Trump on Monday outed a military working dog that tracked down the head of the Islamic State. Trump tweeted a photo of a Belgian Malinois that he said worked with a team of special forces in the capture of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a tunnel beneath a compound in northeastern Syria. The name and other details about the dog remain a secret. “We have declassified a picture of the wonderful dog (name not declassified) that did such a GREAT JOB in capturing and killing the Leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi!” the president tweeted. Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told reporters earlier Monday that the animal “performed a tremendous service” in the Saturday night raid. Al-Baghdadi set off an explosion that killed himself and three children and apparently wounded the dog. Milley said the dog was “slightly wounded” but is now recovering and has returned to duty with its handler at an undisclosed location. He and Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the U.S. is protecting the dog’s identify by keeping any information about the canine classified for now. “We are not releasing the name of the dog right now,” Milley said. “The …

The U.S. special envoy for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, is expected to be nominated as early as this week to be second-in-command at the State Department, officials said Monday. Two Trump administration officials and a congressional aide familiar with the selection process said the White House is expected to nominate Biegun to be the next deputy secretary of state in the coming days. The officials were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. Biegun would replace John Sullivan, who has been nominated to be the next U.S. ambassador to Russia. Both positions require Senate confirmation. Biegun has had a prominent role in the delicate negotiations that led to historic meetings between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. A former Ford Motor Co. executive who served in previous Republican administrations and has advised GOP lawmakers, Biegun has led as yet unsuccessful negotiations to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons since being appointed to his current post in August 2018. He is expected to keep the North Korea portfolio if he is confirmed to the new post, the officials said. His nomination has been expected since mid-September, but its …

Lured by a long-looming stock offering of Saudi Arabia’s massive state-run oil company, investors and business leaders have returned to the kingdom’s capital for an investment forum that was overshadowed last year by the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Yet drawing big names to the Future Investment Initiative alone does not mean Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s dream of having Saudi Aramco offer a sliver of itself at a $2 trillion valuation will become a reality. King Salman’s son needs to raise $100 billion required to fund his ambitious development plans for a kingdom desperate to offer jobs to its 34 million people as unemployment remains above 10%. Stagnant global energy prices and a Sept. 14 attack on the heart of Aramco already spooked some. One ratings company downgraded the oil giant. Meanwhile, questions persist over how the initial public offering will be handled even as Saudi Aramco offers sweeteners and promises of an estimated $75 billion dividend next year.   “Tepid oil prices, the fraught politics of the Middle East and the demonization of fossil fuel producers in response to climate change fears have all made the initial public offering a mission impossible,” wrote Roberto Sifon-Arevalo of …

A North Carolina court on Monday temporarily blocked the state from using its congressional map in next year’s elections and strongly suggested it would eventually rule the districts were illegally gerrymandered to favor Republicans. The decision was a victory for Democrats, who have struggled to gain a foothold in both the state legislature and North Carolina’s 13 U.S. congressional districts, in part because of how Republicans drew the electoral lines. The ruling seems likely to ensure that the state’s 2020 congressional elections will take place under a new map, dealing a blow to Republicans’ hopes of recapturing the U.S. House of Representatives after Democrats swept to power in that chamber last year. Republicans hold 10 of the state’s 13 U.S. House seats, despite a nearly even split between Democratic and Republican votes in the popular count. In an 18-page ruling, the judges said the voters who brought the lawsuit had shown a “substantial likelihood” of succeeding if the case were to reach trial. The three-judge panel in Wake County Superior Court that issued the decision is the same group that struck down the state’s legislative map in September, finding that it violated the state constitution’s free elections, equal protection and …

A large ancient wetlands region spanning northern Botswana – once teeming with life but now dominated by desert and salt flats – may represent the ancestral homeland of all of the 7.7 billion people on Earth today, researchers said on Monday. Their study, guided by maternal DNA data from more than 1,200 people indigenous to southern Africa, proposed a central role for this region in the early history of humankind starting 200,000 years ago, nurturing our species for 70,000 years before climate changes paved the way for the first migrations. A lake that at the time was Africa’s largest – twice the area of today’s Lake Victoria – gave rise to the ancient wetlands covering the Greater Zambezi River Basin that includes northern Botswana into Namibia to the west and Zimbabwe to the east, the researchers said. It has been long established that Homo sapiens originated somewhere in Africa before later spreading worldwide. “But what we hadn’t known until this study was where exactly this homeland was,” said geneticist Vanessa Hayes of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and University of Sydney, who led the study published in the journal Nature. The oldest-known Homo sapiens fossil evidence dates back more …

The U.S. telecommunications regulator plans to vote in November to designate China’s Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corp as national security risks, barring their U.S. rural carrier customers from tapping an $8.5 billion government fund to purchase equipment or services. The Federal Communications Commission also plans to propose requiring those carriers to remove and replace equipment from such designated companies, FCC officials said on Monday. At a meeting set for Nov. 19, the FCC said it plans to vote to ask carriers how much it would cost to remove and replace Huawei and ZTE from existing networks and to establish a reimbursement program to offset the costs of removing the equipment. “When it comes to 5G and America’s security, we can’t afford to take a risk and hope for the best,” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement. “As the United States upgrades its networks to the next generation of wireless technologies — 5G — we cannot ignore the risk that the Chinese government will seek to exploit network vulnerabilities in order to engage in espionage, insert malware and viruses, and otherwise compromise our critical communications networks.” This is the latest in a series of actions by the U.S. government …

The Air Force’s mystery space plane is back on Earth, following a record-breaking two-year mission.   The X-37B landed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Sunday. The Air Force is mum about what the plane did in orbit after launching aboard a SpaceX rocket in 2017. The 780-day mission sets a new endurance record for the reusable test vehicle. It looks like a space shuttle but is one-fourth the size at 29 feet. Officials say this latest mission successfully completed its objectives. Experiments from the Air Force Research Laboratory were aboard.   This was the fifth spaceflight by a vehicle of this sort. No. 6 is planned next year with another launch from Cape Canaveral. According to Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett, “Each successive mission advances our nation’s space capabilities.”   …

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff talked to VOA’s Armenian Service on Monday about a variety of topics, including the impeachment inquiry of U.S. President Donald Trump. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Monday the House would vote on Thursday to formalize the procedures of the impeachment inquiry into Trump and Ukraine, in what will be the first time the House will go on the record on the proceedings. Schiff discussed the impasse between Congress and the White House over subpoenas and documents requested for the inquiry. Trump has been a repeated critic of Schiff, saying he should be arrested for “treason” and charged with “lying to Congress” for mischaracterizing Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Most recently, he characterized Schiff as “the biggest leaker in D.C., and a corrupt politician” in justifying his decision to keep members of Congress in the dark on the successful raid that ultimately killed IS mastermind Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on Monday. A selection of Schiff’s comments on the impeachment inquiry: * “We’re not going to allow the administration to delay the impeachment inquiry by trying to draw this out endlessly in the courts. And so we’re moving forward.” * “We’re bringing …

The boos were loud. And for President Donald Trump, they may have felt unfamiliar. Trump was showered with jeers, boos and chants (as well as some cheers) when he attended a World Series game at Nationals Park in Washington on Sunday. It was a rare moment of in-your-face disapproval for a president whose White House goes out of the way to shield him from protests and demonstrators. Since taking office, Trump has rarely ventured out to places in his deeply Democratic adopted home city or elsewhere that might feature high-volume hostility or a cold shoulder. When the boos began as Trump’s image flashed on the ballpark’s giant video screen, the president seemed momentarily taken aback. He mouthed something to his wife, Melania Trump, while gamely trying to clap along. But his smile froze and then faded as the boos continued and some in the crowd launched into a brief chant of “Lock him up,” a version of the phrase chanted against Hillary Clinton at dozens of Trump rallies during the 2016 campaign. White House officials tried to play down the negative feedback, which erupted when Trump’s image appeared on the giant video screen during a tribute to the military. “I …

Freshman Rep. Katie Hill, a rising Democratic star in the House, announced her resignation amid an ethics probe, saying explicit private photos of her with a campaign staffer had been “weaponized” by her husband and political operatives. The California Democrat, 32, had been hand-picked for a coveted leadership seat. But in recent days, compromising photos of Hill and purported text messages from her to a campaign staffer surfaced online in a right-wing publication and a British tabloid. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Hill had acknowledged “errors in judgment” that Pelosi said made her continued service in Congress “untenable.” The House ethics committee had launched an investigation into whether Hill had an inappropriate relationship with an aide in her congressional office, which is prohibited under House rules. Hill, one of the few openly bisexual women in Congress, has denied that and vowed to fight a “smear” campaign waged by a husband she called abusive. But her relationship with the campaign aide became a concern for House Democrats who have made equality in the workplace a particular priority. On Sunday, after apologizing for the relationship with a subordinate, Hill announced she was stepping aside. “It is with a broken heart that today …

Actress Geena Davis urged Hollywood filmmakers to take new steps to address an ongoing gender imbalance in media as she accepted an honorary Oscar on Sunday for her work to promote more women on screen. While equality for women lags throughout U.S. society, it is even worse in film and television, said Davis, the “Thelma and Louise” star who founded a nonprofit research group called the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2004. “However abysmal the numbers are in real life, it’s far worse in fiction – where you make it up!” said Davis as she accepted the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. “We make it worse.” The actress spoke to an audience of hundreds of Hollywood power players at the Governors Awards, an annual black-tie event hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the group that hands out the Oscars. Davis, who won a supporting actress Oscar in 1989 for “The Accidental Tourist,” said gender inequality on screen “can be fixed absolutely overnight.” She urged everyone in the audience to take the scripts they were currently working on and “cross out a bunch of first names, of ensemble characters and supporting characters, and make them …

Suspected jihadists killed 16 villagers in northern Burkina Faso on Monday in an incident highlighting the increased presence of Sahel-based Islamists in the area, local and security sources said. The gunmen came to Pobe-Mengao, about 200 km (160 miles) north of the capital Ouagadougou, threatening to take away children and telling villagers to help them buy weapons, a security source told Reuters. When they refused, they were shot dead, the sources said. A security source told Reuters that the death toll had reached 16. An Islamist insurgency with links to Islamic State and al-Qaida has crossed into Burkina Faso this year from neighboring Mali, igniting ethnic and religious tensions, especially in northern regions. Attacks by Islamist militants as well as clashes between herding and farming communities have surged since, killing hundreds of civilians and soldiers in a country that used to be a pocket of relative calm in the Sahel. The government did not immediately comment on the killings.   …

Cubans flocked to a dozen shops that opened in Havana on Monday selling home appliances and spare parts for cars in dollars, as the cash-strapped government struggles to rake in tradable currency to purchase imports and pay its debts. Washing machines, refrigerators, freezers, air conditioners, TVs, electric motorcycles, car batteries, tires and other goods were priced well below similar offers at other state stores, when available for sale in the government’s local dollar equivalent, the convertible peso. Cuba’s inefficient state-run economy is going through a liquidity crisis due to the implosion of ally Venezuela’s economy and the tightening of the decades-old U.S. trade embargo under President Donald Trump. The country is dependent on fuel, food and other imports it must purchase for tradable international currencies it earns from exports of goods and services such as sugar, tourism and technical assistance, which are all in decline. Shortages of everything from fuel to food and medicines have plagued the country this year. People line up outside a shop selling products for dollars in Havana, Oct. 28, 2019. Joel Palomino, an education professor who rents out a room in his home to tourists, said he had been waiting in line at a store …

A newly approved three-drug treatment for tuberculosis will be available in 150 countries including India and South Africa, priced at $1,040 for a complete regimen, more than twice the cost proposed in the past by advocacy groups for other treatments. The United Nations-backed Stop TB Partnership said on Monday that BPaL would be obtainable in eligible countries through the Global Drug Facility (GDF), a global provider of TB medicines created in 2001 to negotiate lower prices for treatments. Tuberculosis was responsible for 1.5 million deaths in 2018. BPaL is an oral treatment which promises a shorter, more convenient option to existing TB treatment options, which use a cocktail of antibiotic drugs over a period of up to two years. The new cocktail, which will treat extensively drug-resistant strains of the illness, consists of drug developer TB Alliance’s newly-approved medicine pretomanid, in combination with linezolid and Johnson & Johnson’s bedaquiline. Pretomanid, which will be available at $364 per treatment course, is only the third new medicine for drug-resistant tuberculosis to be approved in about 40 years, after J&J’s bedaquiline and Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co Ltd’s delamanid. Criticism Advocacy groups have long criticized the cost for bedaquiline and delamanid. Not-for-profit Medecins Sans Frontieres …

Americans will celebrate Halloween on October 31, a tradition that dates to an ancient Celtic festival in which it was believed the dead would return to haunt the living. Chances are, many of today’s trick-or-treaters will paint their faces like skulls, borrowing from an ancient Aztec tradition falling at the same time: Dia de los Muertos — the Day of the Dead. Once little-known in the U.S., it has spread from Mexico and Central America, inserting itself into Halloween. It has become big business in America: retail chains sell Day of the Dead costumes, sugar skulls and decorative items — even keychains and ashtrays. The U.S. toymaker Mattel recently launched a Day of the Dead Barbie doll; Nike has unveiled a Day of the Dead-themed athletic shoe, an update of the so-called “Cortez” model, ironically named for the very conquistador who brought down the Aztec Empire, Hernan Cortes. “Mattel Is Releasing a Day of the Dead Barbie Doll” 🤷‍♀️ Cultural appropriation? Helping to understand different cultures? Cheap, money-maker? Opening up a dialogue about death? Do the same people complaining about it own sugar skull handbags from 2010? https://t.co/u1zmaBWUpS — Carla Valentine (@ChickAndTheDead) September 26, 2019 “Mainstream  culture, they think the …

Firefighters in California battled a new blaze Monday that broke out near the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, forcing thousands of people to evacuate. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said the fire has grown to 200 hectares since it ignited before dawn on Monday and has burned down at least five homes. The area is where some of the city’s most expensive homes are located.   Basketball star LeBron James, who lives in the area, said he evacuated with his family, but had difficulties finding a nearby hotel with vacancies.   “Finally found a place to accommodate us!” the Los Angeles Lakers player wrote on Twitter. “Crazy night man!”   California firefighters are simultaneously battling several blazes in the state, including a large fire in the northern wine country. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said there are hopes that by later Monday, the near historic winds that are driving the wildfire will “substantially settle down,” as some 3,000 people work to put out the blaze. “We’re not out of the woods, but we are leaning in the right direction,” Newsom said at a briefing late Sunday. The western U.S. state is commonly hit by numerous wildfires at this time of year, …

Prosecutors say a former Boston College student who had “complete and total control” over her boyfriend has been indicted on an involuntary manslaughter charge for allegedly encouraging him to take his own life. Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins announced the indictment against 21-year-old Inyoung You during a news conference Monday. Rollins said You and Alexander Urtula exchanged thousands of text messages, including some in which she urged Urtula to kill himself. He died in Boston on May 20, the day of his Boston College graduation. Rollins says You is currently in South Korea. Rollins’ office did not provide the name of her attorney. The case is similar to that of Michelle Carter, the Massachusetts woman convicted of involuntary manslaughter for sending her boyfriend texts encouraging him to kill himself. …

President Donald Trump, celebrating last weekend’s U.S. commando raid against Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria, belittled him Monday as “a sick and depraved man and now he’s dead.” Trump told police chiefs at a convention in Chicago, “He’s dead, he’s dead as a doornail, and he didn’t die bravely I can tell you that.” The U.S. leader declared, “He should have been killed years ago, another president should have gotten him.” He claimed that the U.S. now has “tens of thousands of ISIS prisoners under tight supervision.” Syria oil fields Trump also said the U.S. plans to keep oil fields inside Syria worth $45 million a month in revenue, guarded by American troops, even as he has withdrawn most other U.S. forces from northern Syria just south of the Turkish border. Trump’s victory remarks about the raid came as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it is operating at a “heightened state of vigilance” following the death of al-Baghdadi, but that there are no plans to issue a National Terrorism Advisory System alert unless “we develop specific or credible threat information” to share with the public. “Our security posture will remain agile, we will continue to …

The executive director of the United Nations’ World Food Program has wrapped up a visit to Sudan after helicoptering into the volatile South Kordofan region to assess humanitarian needs. David Beasley told VOA’s South Sudan in Focus that the trip came about after he recently sat down with the leaders of Sudan, the rebel SPLM-North and South Sudan and received commitments to allow humanitarian workers unfettered access to the region, a development he called “quite extraordinary.” “We’ve seen people coming together, political enemies coming together from Sudan government as well as South Sudan government to allow us access to areas that had been denied for literally eight years,” Beasley said Friday. Last week, Beasley said, the WFP was able to send the first barge from Kusti, Sudan into Renk, the northernmost town in South Sudan. The barge arrived in Renk on Friday. Beasley said using a barge lets the WFP save a significant amount of money “and allows us to access the people that we’ve not been able to access.” Getting to this point was not easy.  Rebels in Sudan’s Blue Nile and South Kordofan regions have battled the government for years, and Sudan’s government blocked acccess to the areas, …

Bangladesh’s High Court on Monday asked micro-credit pioneer and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus to surrender to a labor court by Nov. 7 over the firing of three employees by Grameen Communications, where he is chairman.   The order came in response to a petition seeking a stay of an arrest warrant for Yunus issued by the labor court last month, when he was abroad.   A two-judge panel at the High Court asked the authorities not to arrest or harass Yunus before he surrenders by Nov. 7, said his lawyer, Rokanuddin Mahmud.   The three employees filed the cases in July, saying they were terminated illegally after seeking to form a trade union.   Yunus founded Grameen Bank, which provides small loans to impoverished people and shared the Nobel Peace Prize with him. He has faced several investigations by the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who has frosty relations with him. He was removed from the bank after surpassing retirement age.   A government-appointed investigation found that Grameen Bank violated its charter as a micro-lender by creating affiliates that did not benefit the bank’s shareholders, and recommended the government merge those businesses with the bank. Yunus maintains those businesses …