Health Ministry

The Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen staged multiple airstrikes on a detention center operated by the Houthi rebels in the southwestern province of Dhamar, killing at least 100 people and wounding dozens more Sunday, officials and the rebels’ health ministry said. Franz Rauchenstein, the head of the Red Cross delegation in Yemen, suggested that the death toll could be higher...

Twenty-five people have died and dozens more have been hospitalized after drinking tainted liquor in Costa Rica, NBC News reported, citing health officials. The announcement Monday came nearly a month after the country’s health ministry first put the alcohol-related death toll at 19 and attributed the deaths to methanol poisoning. Liquor producers sometimes use the potentially toxic liquid to increase...

Costa Rica issued a nationwide warning after at least 19 deaths were attributed to methanol poisoning from contaminated alcohol consumption.

An airstrike hit a detention center for migrants near the Libyan capital early Wednesday, killing at least 44 people and wounding more than 130, the U.N. mission to the war-torn country said. The airstrike raises further concerns about the European Union’s policy of partnering with Libyan militias to prevent migrants from crossing the Mediterranean, which often leaves them at the...

Shops were closed and streets were empty across Sudan on Sunday, the first day of a general strike called for the start of the workweek by protest leaders demanding the resignation of the ruling military council. The Sudanese Professionals Association urged people to stay home to protest the deadly crackdown last week when security forces violently dispersed the group’s main...

Yemen’s Houthi rebels on Saturday began a long-delayed withdrawal of forces from the port facility in the key city of Hodeida, the group said, following the terms of a December cease-fire aimed at alleviating the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, the head of the rebels’ Supreme Revolutionary Committee, said the pullout from Hodeida, as well as the two...

Palestinian militants on Saturday fired over 250 rockets into Israel, drawing dozens of retaliatory airstrikes on targets across the Gaza Strip in a round of heavy fighting that broke a month-long lull between the enemies. Six Palestinians, including a pregnant mother and her baby, were killed, while four Israelis were wounded, including an elderly man who was in a critical...

Former President Alan Garcia mortally wounded himself with a gunshot to his head Wednesday as officers waited to arrest him in a big graft probe that has put Peru’s most prominent politicians behind bars and provoked a reckoning over corruption. Authorities broke through a door at Garcia’s mansion in a leafy, upscale neighborhood of the Peruvian capital after hearing gunfire....

In July 2017, a plane chartered by the United Nations idled on the tarmac at an airport in the Horn of Africa as officials waited for clearance to deliver half a million doses of cholera vaccine to Yemen. Amid the country’s ruinous war, the disease was spiraling out of control, with thousands of new cases reported each day. The green...

The United States has temporarily withdrawn some of its forces from Libya due to “security conditions on the ground,” a top military official said Sunday as a Libyan commander’s forces advanced toward the capital of Tripoli and clashed with rival militias. A small contingent of American troops has been in Libya in recent years, helping local forces combat Islamic State...

An opioid crisis has quietly spread in the Gaza Strip, trapping thousands in the hell of addiction and adding another layer of misery to the blockaded and impoverished coastal territory. The scourge can be traced to the mass import of cheap opioid-based Tramadol pain pills through smuggling tunnels under Gaza’s border more than a decade ago. A more addictive black-market...

Israeli forces shot dead six Palestinians Friday, four of them in a single incident, in one of the deadliest days in months of mass protests along the security fence separating Gaza and Israel, Gaza’s Health Ministry said. The ministry said four were killed in one location, where the Israeli military said it opened fire on a crowed of Palestinians who...

Argentina’s Senate on Thursday rejected a bill to legalize elective abortion, a defeat for a grassroots movement that came closer than ever to achieving the decriminalization of the procedure in the homeland of Pope Francis. Lawmakers debated for more than 15 hours and voted 38-31 against the measure that would have legalized abortion in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy....

The lower house of Argentina’s congress on Thursday approved a bill that would legalize elective abortion in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy, sending the measure to the Senate. President Mauricio Macri has said he will sign the bill if it’s approved. The measure has roused fierce passions in the homeland of Pope Francis, and the vote was tight: 129...

On Tuesdays, 18-month-old Joaquim Santos spends an hour sitting by himself in a corner of a special needs classroom in this small city in northeast Brazil, one of the country’s poorest regions and one hit hard by the Zika virus. Two harried teachers look on as other toddlers play around Joaquim, who has severe developmental delays after being born with...

Israel’s defense minister on Sunday rejected international calls for an investigation into deadly violence along Gaza’s border with Israel, saying troops acted appropriately and fired only at Palestinian protesters who posed a threat. Fifteen Palestinians were killed and over 700 wounded in Friday’s violence near the Israeli border, according to Palestinian health officials. It was the area’s deadliest violence since...

Brazil’s yellow fever outbreak has now infected more people than the previous one, which had been the largest in decades. The Health Ministry said Wednesday that officials have confirmed 846 cases of the mosquito-borne disease. Of those, 260 have died. In the 2016-2017 outbreak, Latin America’s largest nation saw 777 cases and 261 deaths.

The U.N. is voicing alarm over the spread of HIV in Egypt, where the number of new cases is growing by up to 40 percent a year, and where efforts to combat the epidemic are hampered by social stigma and a lack of funding to address the crisis. The virus that causes AIDS, U.N. officials say, is infecting more young...

Hurricane Nate brought a burst of flooding and power outages to the U.S. Gulf Coast before weakening rapidly Sunday, sparing the region the kind of catastrophic damage left by a series of hurricanes that hit the southern U.S. and Caribbean in recent weeks. Nate — the first hurricane to make landfall in Mississippi since Katrina in 2005 — quickly lost...

Hurricane Nate gained force as it continued rapidly moving over the central Gulf of Mexico early Saturday after drenching Central America in rain that was blamed for at least 21 deaths. Forecasters said it was likely to reach the U.S. Gulf Coast over the weekend. Louisiana and Mississippi officials declared states of emergency and Louisiana ordered some people to evacuate...