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From Washington, this is VOA news. I'm Ray Kouguell reporting. Another U.N. call for action in Syria.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says urgent action is needed to prevent a massacre of Palestinian refugees of the Yarmouk camp in the Syrian capital where Islamic State militants have taken control. Mr. Ban is calling for humanitarian access to Palestinian refugees trapped in the camp in southern Damascus. "The residents of Yarmouk, including 3,500 children, are being turned into human shields. They face a double-edged sword of armed elements inside the camp, and government forces outside." An estimated 18,000 Palestinians were living at the camp when it was overrun by Islamic State militants last week. Two weeks of airstrikes by a Saudi-led coalition fighting Houthi rebels in Yemen have failed to stop their advance across the country. Shiite rebels and their allied troops had extended their operations by Thursday into the central part of the city of Aden in the largely Sunni Muslim southeastern areas of the country. A Saudi coalition spokesman accused the Houthi rebels of storing weapons in residential areas and warned that those will be destroyed. Somalia's government is placing bounties on the heads of 11 al-Shabab leaders, including the militant group's top leader and the alleged mastermind of last week's massacre in Kenya. The bounties announced Thursday include a reward of $250,000 for the capture of al-Shabab chief Ahmed Omar Abu Ubyed, and amounts of between $100,000 and $150,000 for 10 other militants. A government spokesman says among the most wanted is Mohamed Mohamud, who allegedly planned the assault on Kenya's Garissa University College, an attack that left 148 students dead and dozens more wounded. This VOA news. An American health worker infected with Ebola who was working in Sierra Leone was released from the National Institutes of Health hospital in Maryland, just outside Washington DC. The U.S. aid agency, Partners In Health, says the man, whose name was not released, was declared free of the disease and allowed to return home. Taliban militants armed with rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons stormed a court in northern Afghanistan Thursday, killing at least eight people and wounding another 60. Afghan authorities said they regained control of the court complex in Mazar-i-Sharif after a six-hour siege. Several security officials, including a district police chief, were killed, along with several civilians. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is demanding Western and U.N. economic sanctions imposed against Tehran be lifted as soon as final agreement is reached on Iran's nuclear development program. In a speech on Iranian television, the cleric stressed a framework agreement with the West is no guarantee a final deal will be reached to restrain Tehran's nuclear program in exchange for lifting the international sanctions. President Barack Obama says he will make a decision soon whether to remove Communist Cuba from a list of countries the United States considers to be state sponsors of terrorism. On a visit to Jamaica, Mr. Obama said a State Department review of Cuban actions in world affairs is now complete and he is awaiting the actual recommendation from his aides. "We want to make sure that given that this is a powerful tool to isolate those countries that genuinely do support terrorism, that when we make those designations we've got strong evidence that, in fact, that's the case. And as circumstances change, then that list will change as well." President Obama has long signaled he is willing to remove Cuba from the list as part of the normalization in diplomatic relations between the two countries he announced late last year. The head of the International Monetary Fund says global growth is "moderate and uneven" and faces rising risks. The assessment came in a speech in Washington by IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde. "Global recovery continues, but it is moderate and uneven. In too many parts of the world, it is not strong enough. And in too many parts of the world, people don't just feel it." Christine Lagarde says the global economy grew about 3.4 percent last year, benefiting from declining oil prices and a strong performance by the world's largest economy, the United States. Greece made a debt repayment of $495 million to the International Monetary Fund, easing days of uncertainty and bringing relief to investors. The payment will help Greece move closer to securing an international bailout and stay in the eurozone. I'm Ray Kouguell in Washington. That's the latest world news from VOA. |