British comedian and actor Russell Brand arrived at court on Friday after he was charged last month with rape and sexual assault. London’s Metropolitan Police charged Brand, 49, with one count of rape, one count of indecent assault, and one count of oral rape, as well as two counts of sexual assault. The charges relate to four separate women. The ...

The world’s oldest person, Sister Inah Canabarro Lucas, has died at age 116, her order announced on Wednesday. The soccer-loving Brazilian nun officially became the oldest person in the world in January following the death of Japan’s Tomiko Itooka, according to Guinness World Records (GWR). When Canabarro was born on June 8, 1908, according to GWR, Theodore Roosevelt was still ...

The man sitting in front of us belongs to the Sinaloa Cartel — one of the most powerful and feared criminal networks in the world — and one the US government recently designated a foreign terrorist organization. This is a gang that “murder, rape, torture and exercise total control… posing a great threat to (the United States’) national security,” according ...

The pontificate of Pope Francis profoundly shook up the Catholic Church. His restless 12-year-papacy, with its focus on a “poor church for the poor,” called on Catholicism to leave its comfort zone and pitch its tent among the poorest communities. Francis opened discussions on topics that were once viewed off limits, such as the role of women. He welcomed LGBTQ ...

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency on Friday classified the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) as an extremist entity that threatens democracy, a move enabling it to better monitor the party that came second in February’s federal election. The BfV agency’s finding, based on a 1,100-page expert report, that the AfD is racist and anti-Muslim allows the authorities to increase surveillance of ...

China restated its case that Covid-19 may have originated in the United States in a white paper on its pandemic response released on Wednesday, after President Donald Trump’s administration blamed a lab leak in China. The White House launched a Covid-19 website on April 18 in which it said the coronavirus came from a lab leak in China while criticizing ...

Kenya’s police have said the fatal shooting of a lawmaker by a gunman aboard a motorcycle in the capital Nairobi on Wednesday evening appeared to be targeted and premeditated. Charles Were, a member of parliament representing Kasipul constituency in Kenya’s west, was shot dead at around 7:30 p.m. (11.30 a.m. ET) when his vehicle was stopped at a traffic light ...

The United States and Ukraine have signed an “economic partnership agreement” that will give Washington access to Kyiv’s rare earth minerals in exchange for establishing an investment fund in Ukraine. The US and Ukraine have been trying to hammer out the natural resources agreement since US President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January. The deal comes after ...

A “no photograph upon landing” announcement punctured the serene silence of the cabin as I gazed at the snow-capped peaks outside our airplane window, a stark reminder that we were entering a land of profound beauty and immense political sensitivity. Our Air China flight from Beijing carried not just my cameraman and me, but also about two dozen other foreign ...

Ukraine managed to wrangle some more favorable terms out of the United States before signing the long-awaited minerals deal on Wednesday. The agreement on natural resources was finally struck late on Wednesday, after weeks of tense bargaining that at times turned sour and temporarily halted Washington’s aid to Ukraine. Kyiv eventually convinced US President Donald Trump to drop some of ...