Month: February 2017

Soldiers say they fired mortars with explosives so bright they could scan the Tigris River after hearing Islamic State militants were preparing boats to once again approach Iraqi-forces controlled eastern Mosul late Saturday. VOA’s Heather Murdock is on the scene in Mosul, where Iraqi forces say they believe the lights deterred the potential militant attack. …

Read more “Iraqi Forces Light Up Sky, Thwarting IS Attack”

The president of South Sudan said on Monday that soldiers who rape civilians should be shot, trying to mollify citizens outraged by abuses by security forces and quell growing international anger over attacks. South Sudan was plunged into a sporadic civil war in 2013 when Salva Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, fired his deputy, an ethnic …

Read more “South Sudan President Says Soldiers Who Rape Should Be Shot”

French presidential candidate Francois Fillon says he will continue his campaign, despite criticism amid media reports he paid his wife an unjustified salary for 15 years while he was a member of parliament. Claiming his wife was paid fairly for work she did, Fillon only apologized for the “error” of judgement in employing his family, …

Read more “Despite Scandal, Fillon Continues French Presidential Campaign”

In January, Russian media mentioned Donald Trump more often than Vladimir Putin, according to the Interfax news agency. What are Russian news outlets saying about the new U.S. president? (RFE/RL’s Russian Service) …

Russia, Turkey, and Iran on February 6 discussed the implementation of the cease-fire they brokered in Syria and reportedly agreed to meet again later this month. …

The wife of a Swedish-based academic and researcher says Iran has sentenced her husband to death on espionage-related charges. …

Egypt loses African soccer cup, Hamada Elrasam documents, the Egyptian soccer supporters reactions during and after the game, at one of the biggest gathering for soccer fans in Cairo. …

Kurdish security forces have captured dozens of cellphones the so-called Islamic State (IS) rigged with explosives for terrorist attacks in northern Iraq. …

Serbs in Kosovo’s ethnically divided city of Mitrovica Sunday tore down a controversial wall that ethnic Albanians say aggravated an already tense situation. Bulldozers quietly knocked down the 2-meter concrete barrier after talks between the ethnic Albanians and the city’s Serb minority, mediated by the European Union and U.S. diplomats. EU foreign policy chief Federica …

Read more “Serbs in Mitrovica Tear Down Controversial Wall”

Local Kosovar Serb authorities in the ethnically divided town of Mitrovica have demolished a concrete wall they had built near the Ibar River in December 2016 that they called a landslide barrier. However, the Kosovar government saw it as a provocation, and parliament voted to knock it down. The demolition was carried out on February …

Read more “Controversial Wall Torn Down in Kosovo’s Mitrovica”

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence has warned Iran “not to test the resolve” of the Donald Trump administration days after the U.S. imposed new sanctions on the Islamic republic over a ballistic-missile test. …

A century ago, Faberge produced its last legendary Easter egg. The following year, in 1918, in the early days of Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, the legendary Russian jewelry firm was nationalized and destroyed. The Faberge family and many of the firm’s masterpieces found refuge in the West, where the firm’s legacy is being preserved today. …

Nearly three years ago, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi won a sweeping national election victory with promises to develop the economy and root out corruption. But with a series of key state elections beginning this weekend, Modi’s popularity — and his surprise currency decree that sparked months of financial uproar — is now being tested. …

Read more “State Elections Test the Popularity of India’s Modi”

Women are underrepresented in high tech industries, and at American universities, they make up only 1 in 6 students of computer science. That’s changing on some campuses, as Mike O’Sullivan reports from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, near Los Angeles, where more than half of last year’s graduates in computer science were women. …

Quantum computers, once they become available, are likely to help us solve problems too complex for the fastest computers today. So far, several laboratories around the world say they have created small quantum chips as the proof of concept. Scientists in Britain now say they have created the first blueprint for a large-scale quantum computer. …

Read more “A Step Toward a Large-scale Quantum Computer”