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By Elizabeth Barber BOSTON (Reuters) – The Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer shot to death by the Boston Marathon bombers had dreamed since childhood of wearing a badge and driving a police cruiser, his brother and father testified on Wednesday. The officer, Sean Collier, died in his police car three nights after the April 15, 2013, attack, when convicted bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, shot him
By Ian Simpson WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. federal judge begins hearings on Wednesday on whether would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley Jr. could get more time outside the mental hospital where he has lived since shooting Ronald Reagan in 1981. Hinckley, 59, has been allowed since December 2013 to leave Washington’s St. Elizabeths Hospital for 17 days a month to stay with his mother in Williamsburg, Virginia. Hinckley shot Reagan
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama will once again stop short of calling the 1915 massacre of Armenians a genocide, prompting anger and disappointment from those who have been pushing him to fulfill a campaign promise and use the politically fraught term on the 100th anniversary of the killings this week. Officials decided against it after opposition from some at the State Department and the Pentagon.
SANAA, Yemen (AP) — Saudi-led airstrikes targeted Iran-backed rebels and their allies in Yemen on Wednesday, hours after Riyadh declared an end to a nearly monthlong air campaign that has claimed hundreds of lives but left the Shiite rebels in control of the capital and much of the country’s north.
President Obama said the U.S. sent “very direct messages” to Iran warning it not to send weapons to Yemen that could be used to threaten shipping traffic in the region.
During a dramatic first day of the penalty phase in the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, federal prosecutors showed the jury an image of the convicted Boston Marathon bomber giving the middle finger to a security camera at the courthouse.
By Kieran Guilbert LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Myanmar’s religious and ethnic minorities may be targeted, abused and suppressed by a proposed population control law which could be a serious setback for the country’s maternal health advances, according to a U.S.-based human rights group. The bill introduces the practice of birth spacing, requiring women to wait three years between pregnancies, which can curb maternal and child deaths, the Physicians for
By Magdalena Mis LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – More than 100,000 people in Vanuatu have no clean drinking water, a month after a monster cyclone struck the tiny Pacific nation, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Wednesday. Two thirds of the archipelago’s water and sanitation infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed and most wells are contaminated, UNICEF said in a statement. “There is water but quality is not
Novo Nordisk has launched its Saxenda obesity drug in the United States, it said on Wednesday, a long-awaited milestone that will provide a new revenue stream for the Danish drugmaker. Sydbank analyst Soren Lontoft Hansen said the price was as expected because it has the same active ingredient as Novo’s Victoza- a diabetes drug used to treat obesity directly.
By Philip Blenkinsop BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Commission proposed on Wednesday a new law allowing individual EU countries to restrict or prohibit imported genetically modified crops even if they have been approved by the bloc as a whole. The proposal covering GM crops in human food and animal feed upset trading partners, notably the United States, which wants Europe to open its doors fully to U.S. GM crops as
