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by Rob Lever Agence France Presse WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — The Trump administration’s new rules for a US visa program widely used for technology workers are getting cautious praise from Silicon Valley amid surging demand for high-skill employees. The H-1B visa program, which admits some 85,000 foreign nationals each year, will give higher priority to people with post-graduate degrees from US universities, under a final rule published in January by the Department of Homeland […]
ISTANBUL, Turkey (AFP) — The death toll from the collapse of an apartment building in Istanbul rose to 17 as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday that authorities have “lessons to learn” from the incident. The eight-storey block in the Kartal district on the Asian side of the city collapsed on Wednesday but the cause is not yet clear. Erdogan Saturday visited the site and said the death toll had risen to 17 with 14 […]
by Claire Lee with Olivia Hampton in Washington Agence France Presse SEOUL, South Korea (AFP) — There was still some hard work to be done ahead of the upcoming summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a Washington envoy said Saturday after three days of talks in Pyongyang. Stephen Biegun, the US Special Representative for North Korea, said preparatory talks had been productive, but more dialogue was needed ahead […]
LONDON, United Kingdom (AFP) — The family of the pilot of the small plane that crashed over the Channel while flying Argentine footballer Emiliano Sala to Britain has launched a fundraising campaign to find his remains. British rescuers on Thursday formally identified the one body pulled from the submerged wreckage as that of the 28-year-old striker. But strong currents and winter weather forced them to call off the search before locating 59-year-old pilot […]
SYDNEY, Australia (AFP) — Thousands of Sydney homes were without power Saturday after severe storms hit Australia’s largest city, causing transport hold-ups, inundating vehicles with floodwater and delaying a national football match. Heavy rains and lightning storms lashed parts of Sydney late Friday, with close to 60 millimetres (nearly two and a half inches) of rain falling in some areas. In Sydney’s west, which experienced some flash flooding, one suburb saw nearly 42 millimetres […]
BEIJING, China (AFP) — Fifteen people were killed in China on the night of the Lunar New Year in two family tragedies, after one man started a fire and another went on a knife rampage. As people celebrated to welcome in the Chinese New Year Monday night, a man surnamed Lu set fire to the home of his brother in the northern province of Shaanxi, killing seven, according to police in the town of Baoji. […]
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AFP) — Fire swept through a training facility for Brazil’s most popular football club Flamengo Friday, killing at least 10 people, authorities said. The pre-dawn blaze in Rio de Janeiro hit a building that housed youth-category players aged 14 to 17, firefighters said. In addition to the deaths, three people were injured in the fire. The cause was not immediately known. Globo TV broadcast aerial footage of the fire, which it […]
YOGYAKARTA, Indonesia (AFP) — Indonesia’s Mount Merapi, one of the world’s most active volcanoes, has spewed a plume of grey ash into the sky as fiery red molten lava streamed down from its crater. Authorities did not raise the rumbling volcano’s alert status after the eruption on Thursday evening. But any activity at Merapi raises concern and local residents have previously been ordered to stay outside a five-kilometre (three-mile) no-go zone around the crater near […]
TOWNSVILLE, Australia (AFP) — Hundreds of thousands of cattle weakened from a severe drought are feared to have died in record-breaking floods in northeastern Australia, authorities said Friday, as they stepped up efforts to feed surviving livestock. Incessant rains over an almost two-week period have flooded swathes of Queensland state, with the full scale of the devastation on drought-hit cattle stations becoming clearer as floodwaters recede. “We are expecting hundreds of thousands in terms of […]
SRINAGAR, India (AFP) — Rescuers battled Friday to reach the site of an avalanche that buried 10 people in Indian-administered Kashmir following two days of heavy snowfall across the region, police said. The avalanche hit a fire emergency facility late Thursday in the Banihal area of the Kashmir valley. Six police, two prisoners and two other personnel had taken refuge there during a storm. “We have not been able to rescue anyone so far because […]
SAO PAULO, Brazil (AFP) — The toll from a dam collapse at a mine in southeast Brazil’s Minas Gerais state has risen to 157 deaths after nearly two weeks of searches, with 182 missing, authorities said Thurday. Those listed as missing are presumed dead, but not yet located under the layers of muddy mining waste released when the tailings dam broke apart in the town of Brumadinho on January 25. In recent days, rescue teams […]
SYDNEY, Australia (AFP) — Australian and US authorities on Friday announced they had seized around a billion dollars worth of methylamphetamine — or “ice” — in a bust that revealed new ties between Mexican cartels and Aussie biker gangs. The Australian Federal Police said that a joint investigation led the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to uncover 1.7 tonnes of drugs in California last month. US authorities said the illicit cargo — with a street […]
