World

The wife of Haiti's murdered president, seriously wounded in the very attack that killed her husband, listened in terror as the gunmen ransacked their home, she said in her first interview since the assassination.

The killers eventually found what they were looking for in president Jovenel Moise's residence, and made cursory efforts on their way out to see if first lady Martine Moise was still alive.

The US State Department said Friday that Moscow is forcing it to lay off nearly 200 Russian employees in its Russia diplomatic missions, saying the move will constrict diplomatic efforts and embassy operations.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said 182 Russian employees and dozens of contractors in Moscow, Vladivostok and Yekaterinburg would be let go after a Russian government order in April in retaliation for US actions against Russia.

The Justice Department revealed on Friday that the same Russian hackers alleged to have committed the SolarWinds cyber attack reportedly breached the email accounts of federal prosecutors.

"The department said 80% of Microsoft email accounts used by employees in the four U.S. attorney offices in New York were breached. All told, the Justice Department said 27 U.S. Attorney offices had at least one employee's email account compromised during the hacking campaign," the Associated Press reported.

Canada has fined two Americans for providing counterfeit fake vaccination documents and lying about being tested before traveling, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports.

"The Public Health Agency of Canada says the travelers also didn't comply with requirements to stay at a government authorized hotel or to get tested upon arrival," the outlet reported. "Canada eased quarantine requirements on July 5 for fully vaccinated Canadians and foreign nationals with an exemption to enter the country, but they must upload their proof of vaccination documents to the ArriveCAN app before entry."

More than 200 Afghan interpreters who helped US troops and diplomats arrived in the United States Friday, the government said, the first of tens of thousands expected to immigrate to flee the threat of Taliban retaliation.

President Joe Biden announced the arrival of the first of several such flights expected through August, as the US withdraws its last troops and rushes to move to safety those Afghans who provided crucial help during the two decades of war.

Relaxing restrictions like mask-wearing and social distancing when most people have been vaccinated greatly increases the risk of vaccine-resistant variants of the virus that causes Covid-19, new research showed on Friday.

At a time when nearly 60 percent of Europeans have received at least one vaccine dose, the authors said their modelling study showed the need to maintain non-vaccination measures until everyone is fully jabbed.

Lies, ego, hubris and self-deception: US experts are counting up the reasons for failure in the two-decade US war in Afghanistan, calling it ill-fated from the beginning, comparable to the American experience in Vietnam.

On Thursday the official US watchdog on operations in Afghanistan said it is too early to call the war a complete failure, because the government retains a slim chance of prevailing over the Taliban, the hardline Islamists that the US and allies ejected from power in November 2001.

Hundreds of thousands of people in China were in coronavirus lockdown Friday as the country battled its worst outbreak in months, while the United States intensified vaccination efforts in the face of a Delta variant-fueled surge.

The World Health Organization has warned that the highly transmissible strain, first detected in India, could unleash more Covid-19 outbreaks in a high-risk area from Morocco to Pakistan where vaccination rates are low.