The United States is on track to meet the targets of the Paris climate agreement despite President Donald Trump’s plan to withdraw from the accord, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday. Guterres said emissions-cutting plans put in motion by American businesses, regional governments and cities meant that the goals set by the former U.S. administration, which signed the deal in 2016 were within reach. “We have seen in the cities, and we have seen in many states, a very strong commitment to the Paris agreement, to the extent that some indicators are moving even better than in the recent past,” Guterres told reporters at UN headquarters in New York. “There are expectations that, independently of the position of the administration, the U.S. might be able to meet the commitments made in Paris as a country.” Greenhouse gas emissions Under the deal, the administration of former president Barack Obama pledged to …

A committee of British lawmakers published written evidence on Thursday provided by a whistleblower who says information about 50 million Facebook users ended up in the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica said the documents did not support whistleblower Christopher Wylie’s testimony to the committee this week. Wylie, who formerly worked for Cambridge Analytica (CA), alleges the data was used to help to build profiles on American voters and raise support for Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Wylie also alleges that CA was linked to Canadian firm AggregateIQ (AIQ), which he says was involved in the development of the software used to target voters. AggregateIQ, he says, received payment from a pro-Brexit campaign group before the 2016 referendum when Britain voted to quit the European Union. This was co-ordinated with the lead “Vote Leave” group in a breach of British electoral funding rules, Wylie alleged.  …

A Los Angeles judge Thursday ordered coffee companies to abide by California state law and put cancer warning labels on their products. A nonprofit group called the Council for Education and Research on Toxics is suing such popular coffee roasters and retailers as Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s. They say the companies fail to warn consumers that roasting coffee naturally produces a carcinogen called acrylamide. In the first part of the three-phase trial, Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle ruled the coffee companies failed to prove their assertion that there is no significant risk from acrylamide. In Thursday’s ruling after the second phase, Berle said the companies failed to adequately show coffee is a healthy drink. “Defendants failed to satisfy their burden of proving by a preponderance of evidence that consumption of coffee confers a benefit to human health,” he wrote. An upcoming third phase would decide what civil penalties the …

At least three companies said Thursday they were pulling advertisements from a Fox News show hosted by conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, heeding a call from a teenage survivor of the Florida school massacre whom Ingraham mocked on Twitter. Parkland student David Hogg, 17, tweeted a list of a dozen companies that advertise on The Ingraham Angle and urged his supporters to demand that they cancel their ads. Hogg is a survivor of the Feb. 14 mass shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the Parkland suburb of Fort Lauderdale. Since then, he and other classmates have become the faces of a new youth-led movement calling for tighter restrictions on firearms. Hogg took aim at Ingraham’s advertisers after she taunted him Wednesday on Twitter, accusing him of whining about being rejected by four colleges to which he had applied. On Thursday, Ingraham tweeted an apology “in …

New York City will offer free cybersecurity tools to the public as part of a new effort to improve online safety, officials said Thursday, a week after Atlanta was hit with a ransomware attack that knocked some municipal systems offline. The program, dubbed NYC Secure, will launch a free smartphone protection app to warn users when suspicious activity is detected on their devices, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced at a news conference. “New Yorkers aren’t safe online. We can’t wait around for other levels of government to do something about it or the private sector,” de Blasio said. The program will cost the city about $5 million per year, he said. “It’s our job in government to make sure that people are safe online. It’s a new reality,” de Blasio said. City agencies will also beef up security protection on public Wi-Fi networks by the end of the …

One day after calling it a “great deal for American and Korean workers,” President Donald Trump threatened to hold up a renegotiated trade deal between Washington and Seoul. Trump told an audience Thursday in Ohio that he may postpone implementing the agreement until after a denuclearization deal is made with North Korea. He called the updated trade pact with the South “a very strong card and I want to make sure everyone is treated fairly.” Trump gave no details on his strategy of holding up the trade deal or what kind of leverage he is expecting from Seoul as he gets ready for an expected summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un sometime before May. “We’re moving along very nicely with North Korea. We’ll see what happens. Certainly, the rhetoric has calmed down just a little bit,” Trump said Thursday. Trump had threatened to pull out of the Korea-U.S. …

Nearly a week after President Donald Trump issued an order banning some transgender people from serving in the U.S. military, the Pentagon is refusing to provide clarity, citing ongoing legal challenges. Last Friday, the White House released a memo from Trump to Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, stating the administration concurred with a policy for transgender service members privately recommended by Mattis in late February. The memo said Mattis and Nielsen “have concluded that the accession or retention of individuals with a history or diagnosis of gender dysphoria — those who may require substantial medical treatment, including through medical drugs or surgery — presents considerable risk to military effectiveness and lethality.” “Gender dysphoria” (formerly known as gender identity disorder) is defined by strong, persistent feelings of identification with the opposite gender and discomfort with one’s own assigned sex that results in significant distress …

FirstEnergy Corp. said it will shut down three nuclear plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania within the next three years, making it the latest U.S. utility to announce closings as the nuclear industry struggles to compete with electricity plants that burn plentiful and inexpensive natural gas. The company announced the closings Wednesday and a day later appealed to the U.S. Department of Energy for help, asking that it be allowed to get more money for electricity produced by its nuclear and coal-fired plants. It said in its request that the closings of its nuclear plants could threaten the reliability of the electric grid across the East Coast. FirstEnergy said Wednesday that it would be willing to work with both Ohio and Pennsylvania to find a way to keep the plants open, but lawmakers remain unwilling to offer a financial rescue and it appears the plants are nearing a shutdown. The natural …

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Thursday that Utah U.S. Attorney John Huber was investigating Republican lawmakers’ allegations against the FBI and that a special counsel was not needed to probe the case. The move came a day after the Justice Department’s inspector general said he was opening a probe into the FBI’s use of the Steele dossier to win approval to surveil a figure linked to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The dossier consists of memos compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele; they contain allegations of misconduct and links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Sessions said the inspector general’s probe, plus an internal department review by a U.S. attorney, were good enough, and that there was no need to resort to the extraordinary step of naming a new special counsel. In a letter sent to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of  Iowa and Republican Representatives Trey …

A Kansas militia member started trying to recruit other members to kill Muslim immigrants after the 2016 attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, an FBI informant testified Thursday. Patrick Day told jurors that Patrick Stein called him a couple of days after the Florida attack, in which a man who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group killed 49 people. He said Stein told him he was “ready to take action” against Muslims and wanted to see who else in the militia group was with him and who wasn’t. “They were outraged that a Muslim was killing all these Americans,” Day said. “I was outraged, too.” As a precaution in case they were being monitored by law enforcement, Stein held the first recruitment meeting in a shack on the property of another member of the Kansas Security Force, Day said. That June 2016 meeting was the first …

It’s a double cosmic conundrum: Lots of stuff that was already invisible has gone missing. Astronomers have found a distant galaxy where there is no dark matter. Dark matter is called “dark” because it can’t be seen. It is the mysterious and invisible skeleton of the universe that scientists figure makes up about 27 percent of the cosmos. Scientists only know dark matter exists because they can observe how it pushes and pulls things they can see, like stars. It’s supposed to be everywhere. What you see is what you get But Yale University astronomer Pieter van Dokkum and colleagues spied a vast, old galaxy with relatively few stars where what you see truly is what you get. The galaxy’s stars are speeding around with no apparent influence from dark matter, according to a study published in Wednesday’s journal Nature. Instead of shaking the very foundations of physics, scientists say …

The U.S. Justice Department has charged a former Minnesota FBI agent with leaking classified information to the online news site The Intercept, Minnesota Public Radio reported Wednesday. It said Terry Albury was charged this week by the department’s National Security Division with two counts including “knowingly and willfully” transmitting documents and information relating to national defense to a reporter for a national news organization. Albury, the only African-American FBI field agent in Minnesota, was assigned as Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport liaison working on counterterrorism matters, MPR News said. Albury’s attorneys, JaneAnne Murray and Joshua Dratel, said in a statement that their client was “driven by a conscientious commitment to long-term national security and addressing the well-documented systemic biases within the FBI.” The attorneys said Albury “accepts full responsibility” for the alleged conduct. The Justice Department and the FBI did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A source familiar with …

Dr. Ronny Jackson, picked by President Donald Trump to head the Department of Veterans Affairs, has served as White House physician to three presidents. Jackson went into active naval service in 1995 after getting his medical degree from University of Texas Medical Branch. He went on to become the honor graduate of the Navy’s Undersea Medical Officer Program in Groton, Conn., before obtaining more credentials in emergency medicine. He served as an emergency doctor specializing in resuscitating troops while deployed to Iraq in 2005 with the Surgical Shock Trauma Platoon in Taqaddum, Iraq. While Jackson was still in Iraq, the President George W. Bush administration selected him to be a White House physician under Air Force Brigadier General Richard Tubb. In 2013, then President Barack Obama appointed him to the top role, and he remained there when Trump took office. He gained a degree of fame unusual for White House …

Prosecutors have selected the five additional accusers they plan to call to the witness stand at Bill Cosby’s April 2 sexual assault retrial. The accusers, including model Janice Dickinson, were chosen from a group of eight women whose allegations date as far back as the early 1980s. Prosecutors listed their selections in a letter to Judge Steven O’Neill that was made public on Wednesday. O’Neill’s March 15 ruling cleared the way for prosecutors to broaden their case beyond the alleged assault of Andrea Constand in 2004 that led to Cosby’s only criminal charges. They want to show that he had a pattern of misconduct over a five-decade span. At Cosby’s first trial, which ended in a deadlock, O’Neill allowed only one other accuser to take the stand. But that woman is not one of the five who will testify this time in support of Constand’s case. In the letter to …

Emails released Wednesday between Arizona Governor Doug Ducey’s staff and Uber executives shed new light on the relationship between the first-term Republican and the company whose autonomous vehicle recently was involved in a fatal crash.  Accounts of the previously unseen emails released by the governor’s office were first reported by The Guardian newspaper. which had obtained them through public records requests. They indicate that Ducey’s staff worked closely with the company as it began experimenting with autonomous vehicles that the company began testing on public roads in August 2016 without informing the public.  The governor’s staff pushed back, saying Ducey’s embrace of Uber and autonomous vehicles was one of his administration’s most visible and public initiatives and that there was no secret testing. “Allegations that any company has secretly tested self-driving cars in Arizona is 100 percent false,” Ducey spokesman Patrick Ptak said. “From the beginning we’ve been very public …

The Trump administration is hopeful it can reach a deal on a new North American Free Trade Agreement before the July 1 presidential election in Mexico and U.S. midterm congressional elections in November. “I’d say I’m hopeful — I think we are making progress. I think that all three parties want to move forward. We have a short window, because of elections and things beyond our control,” U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told CNBC television Wednesday. But Canada’s chief negotiator was far less optimistic. “We have yet to see exactly what the U.S. means by an agreement in principle,” Steve Verheul told reporters Wednesday in Ottawa. There are still “significant gaps,” Verheul said. “We can accomplish quite a bit between now and then, and we’ve made it clear to the U.S. that we will be prepared to negotiate at any time, any place, for as long as they are prepared …

The U.N. secretary-general on Wednesday appointed a former U.S. career diplomat to be the organization’s political chief. Antonio Guterres named Rosemary DiCarlo as undersecretary-general for political affairs. She is the first woman to hold the position. Since August 2015, DiCarlo has been president of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy and a senior fellow at Yale University.  Prior to that, she served as the U.S. deputy ambassador to the U.N. from 2010 to 2015. During her State Department career, she was also posted to U.S. embassies in Moscow and Oslo. DiCarlo is widely respected, and the announcement of her appointment was immediately welcomed by other diplomats on social media. France’s ambassador to Washington, Gerard Araud, who served previously as U.N. ambassador during DiCarlo’s U.N. tenure, expressed his congratulations and added that she was “a great diplomat.” “Best wishes to experienced diplomat,” wrote the European Union’s U.N. envoy, Joao Vale de …

Efforts to bolster Afghanistan’s armed forces, along with an increased use of American air power, seem to be doing little to change the country’s reputation as a magnet for foreign fighters and jihadists. Afghan officials have been warning for months about the flow of 3,000 foreign fighters, many of whom had been coming from Pakistan and Uzbekistan to join the Islamic State terror group’s Afghan affiliate, IS-Khorasan. Now, officials are warning of a new surge of jihadists, many coming to Afghanistan from places like Iraq and Syria via routes that lead through Pakistan. “There has been a growth in the number of the foreign fighters in the country,” Afghan National Security Adviser Mohammad Hanif Atmar said during a visit to Washington last week. “We’re talking about hundreds of them coming from the Middle East through Pakistan, and other regional groups.” Afghan and Western officials say that while precise numbers are hard to come …

President Donald Trump’s reshuffling of his Cabinet continued Wednesday with the ouster of Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin. The now-former Veterans Affairs secretary will be replaced by Jackson, Trump’s current presidential physician who performed his most recent physical examination. Jackson was appointed to that position in 2013 by former President Barack Obama and was retained by Trump. Shulkin, also a holdover from the Obama era, served as the head of the nation’s second-largest government agency for little more than a year. He had been locked for months in a power struggle with a group of Trump political appointees among his senior staff who wanted him out. Shulkin had pledged the VA would not be privatized on his watch but would provide veterans expanded opportunities to get private-sector care. White House political appointees want a more comprehensive overhaul and to give veterans even more access to VA-funded care in …

President Donald Trump’s legal troubles deepened on Wednesday as a federal judge refused to throw out a lawsuit accusing him of flouting constitutional safeguards against corruption by maintaining ownership of his business empire while in office. U.S. District Judge Peter Messitte in Greenbelt, Maryland, allowed the lawsuit filed by Maryland and District of Columbia to proceed, rejecting a Justice Department request that it be dismissed. The judge, however, narrowed the claims to include only those involving the Trump International Hotel in Washington and not Trump’s businesses outside of the U.S. capital. A U.S. judge in Manhattan in December threw out a similar lawsuit against Trump brought by another group of plaintiffs. Both lawsuits accused Trump of violating the U.S. Constitution’s “emoluments” provisions designed to prevent corruption and foreign influence. One bars U.S. officials from accepting gifts or other emoluments from foreign governments without congressional approval. The other forbids the president …

Current and former U.S. and British intelligence officers say the West’s collective banishment this week of 115 Russian “diplomats” will be far less damaging to Russian espionage operations than British Prime Minister Theresa May and American officials have argued. And they warn tit-for-tat expulsions the Kremlin is expected to order shortly will have much greater impact on Western intelligence missions in Russia. They say the Cold War-era picture drawn by author John le Carré in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” with Russian espionage in the West depending mainly on spies based out of embassies under diplomatic cover, is anachronistic. “Western expulsions will have only a very marginal impact on ongoing Russian operations, given the fact the SVR [Russian foreign espionage] and the GRU [Russian military intelligence] run their best sources very well, and they will have back-up communications arrangements for their assets,” a retired senior intelligence officer told VOA. The officer, …

Last year, the United States lifted long-standing economic sanctions against Sudan. The sanctions included a trade embargo, a freeze on some government assets, and restrictions on Sudanese banks and the ability of foreign banks to do business with Sudan. But instead of revitalizing the economy, lifting the sanctions has highlighted a range of additional steps that Sudan must take to normalize relations and, perhaps, improve the country’s economic outlook, experts say. Diplomatic process For decades, Sudan and the U.S. have experienced more tension than cooperation. Low points have included the assassination of the U.S. ambassador to Khartoum in 1973, Sudan’s harboring of Osama bin Laden in the 1990s and the Sudanese government supporting violence against civilians in Darfur, which the U.S. called a genocide. The first of the now-abolished sanctions were imposed by President Bill Clinton in 1997 over Sudan’s alleged sponsorship of terrorism and poor human rights record. “It …

In the wake of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida, students launch the Never Again movement, demanding far stronger gun laws in the US. Just five weeks after the shooting, they organized the March for Our Lives, attended by an estimated one million people across the globe. As Sama Dizayee reports, the students say it’s just the beginning. …