World News

President Trump in 2019 sought to open a backchannel of communication with top Iranian officials and saw the U.N. General Assembly meeting in September as a potential opportunity to defuse escalating tension with Tehran, but the effort failed.

The Biden administration on Thursday rescinded former US President Donald Trump’s restoration of UN sanctions on Iran, an announcement that could help Washington move toward rejoining the 2015 nuclear agreement aimed at reining in the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.

In a surprise retaliatory move, Facebook blocked Australians from sharing news stories after the country’s House of Representatives passed legislation that would require the social media giant to pay for Australian news content, the Washington Times reports. The proposed legislation has yet to be passed in the Australian Senate.

The Biden administration is killing a pipeline from which the public could benefit, Biden is promoting a pipeline to enrich both one of the world’s worst dictatorships and a group responsible for thousands of U.S. deaths.

The Biden administration said Thursday it’s ready to join talks with Iran and world powers to discuss a return to the 2015 nuclear deal. It’s also reversed the Trump administration’s determination that all UN sanctions against Iran had been restored and eased stringent restrictions on the domestic US travel of Iranian diplomats posted to the United Nations.

After a seven-month,300-million-mile journey, a NASA rover on Thursday successfully landed on the red planet, where it will search for signs of ancient life.

The United Nations says time is running out for Yemenis, as malnutrition rates hit record highs and the war-torn country speeds towards “the worst famine the world has seen in decades.”

The world’s debt-to-GDP ratio rose to 356% in 2020, a new report from the Institute of International Finance finds, up 35 percentage points from where it stood in 2019, as countries saw their economies shrink and issued an ocean of debt to stay afloat.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei demanded “action, not words” from the United States if it wants to revive Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, challenging new President Joe Biden to take the first step toward a thaw.

The coronavirus pandemic has sent the global debt soaring to a new level, having added $24 trillion of debt in the past year, according to a study from The Institute of International Finance.

The Iranian and Russian militaries have kicked off a joint naval drill in the Indian Ocean aimed at boosting security of maritime trade in the region, Iran’s state TV reported on Tuesday.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday that the US was open to diplomacy with Iran and voiced support for the 2015 deal Iran signed with world powers, while asserting that it must not be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon.

A conservative group is warning that the United Nations is preparing to compile a list of “LGBT hate groups” that could be used as a “blacklist” to punish groups and organizations that subscribe to traditional beliefs about gender and sexuality.

According to new economic data, China dethroned the US as Europe’s top trade partner in 2020, likely buoyed by strong demand in China for European goods, and Chinese medical products in Europe.

The European Union has urged Hungary to allow one of the nation’s last independent radio stations to continue after it was forced off-air on Monday.

President Biden’s vow to expand U.S. engagement with allies will be put to the test later this week when he participates in a virtual meeting with leaders of the world’s wealthiest democracies and then delivers remarks to the annual Munich Security Conference.

A rocket attack late Monday near the Irbil airport and a nearby base housing U.S. troops killed one foreign civilian contractor and injured at least five other people, the U.S. coalition and officials in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region in Iraq said.

Iran has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s nuclear watchdog, about its plan to end sweeping inspection powers given to the agency under the 2015 nuclear deal, its envoy to the agency wrote on Twitter on Monday.

China’s exploitation of products made by Supermicro, as the U.S. company is known, has been under federal scrutiny for much of the past decade, according to 14 former law enforcement and intelligence officials familiar with the matter.

Kosovo held parliamentary elections to form a new government amid concerns that the popularity of an anti-establishment party could undermine talks on normalizing relations with neighboring Serbia. Adding to problems is the coronavirus pandemic and an economic crisis in what is the Western Balkan’s most impoverished nation.