(CAIRO) — U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “expressed outrage” to Egypt’s president on Sunday at the death of an American citizen who insisted he had been wrongfully held in Egyptian prison, according to a state department spokeswoman.

Pompeo’s sharp remarks signal the U.S. government intended to place the death of Mustafa Kassem, 54, following his protracted hunger strike last week, high on the diplomatic agenda.

Pompeo raised his concerns to President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi about Kassem’s “pointless and tragic death” on the sidelines of an international peace summit in Berlin that aims to end Libya’s civil war.

The death of the auto parts dealer from Long Island, New York prompted an outcry from human rights groups, as well as accusations of medical negligence in Egypt’s prisons.

The case also touched a nerve in Washington, which has cultivated close security and diplomatic ties with Egypt despite growing unease over its human rights violations under general-turned-president el-..

(TECUN UMAN, Guatemala) — More than 200 mostly Honduran migrants rested on a bridge at the Guatemala-Mexico border waiting for the arrival of others and hoping sheer numbers will improve their chances of entering Mexico and continuing their journey north.

Across the river from Tecun Uman, in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Hidalgo, National Guard troops with riot shields trucked in throughout Friday afternoon in anticipation of the migrants’ next move.

Mexico’s government has said migrants entering the country without registering will not be allowed to pass from the border area. But those seeking asylum or other protections will be allowed to apply and legalize their status.

Guatemalan officials had counted more than 3,000 migrants who registered at border crossings to enter that country in recent days and there were additional migrants who did not register.

Sonia Eloina Hernández, the Ciudad Hidalgo mayor, said officials were expecting a large number of migrants.

“We’re readyin..

(BEIJING) — Four more cases have been identified in a viral pneumonia outbreak in the central Chinese city of Wuhan that has killed two people and prompted countries as far away as the United States to take precautionary measures.

The latest cases bring to 45 the number of people who have contracted the illness, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission said Saturday. Five are in serious condition, two died and 15 have been discharged. The others are in stable condition.

The cause of the pneumonia has been traced to a new type of coronavirus.

Health authorities are keen to avoid a repeat of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, another coronavirus that started in southern China in late 2002 and spread to more than two dozen countries, killing nearly 800 people.

The U.S. announced Friday that it would begin screening passengers at three major airports arriving on flights from Wuhan. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it would deploy 100 people to take the temperat..

(MEXICO CITY) — Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador announced the latest in a series of desperate ideas Friday to sell off his predecessor’s official jet, which he says is too luxurious for a country where half the people live in poverty.

López Obrador said he is considering raffling off the plane by selling six million raffle tickets at $25 apiece.

He offered to throw in a year’s free operating time in case the winner of the lottery-style scheme doesn’t have the money to operate the jet.

Mexican Twitter users quickly made the proposal a trending topic.

People posted ideas about where they would park the huge jet if they won it (clue: in the yard, because it won’t fit in the garage), what kind of parties they would throw aboard (beer-filled trips to the Super Bowl appeared popular) and what colors they would paint it (one user suggested bright purple.) As to what they would do with it if they won, the most popular idea seemed to be turning it into a stationary restaurant ..

(PIACENZA, Italy) — Art experts have confirmed that a painting discovered hidden inside an Italian art gallery’s walls last month is Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of a Lady,” which was stolen from the gallery nearly 23 years ago.

The authentication of the painting announced Friday solved one of the art world’s enduring mysteries — where did the missing work end up? — but left several questions unanswered, including who had taken it and whether it ever left the museum’s property.

A gardener at the Ricci Oddi Modern Art Gallery in the northern city of Piacenza who was clearing away ivy on Dec. 10 noticed a small panel door on a wall outside and opened it. Inside the space, he found a plastic bag containing a painting that appeared to be the missing masterpiece.

“It’s with no small emotion that I can tell you the work is authentic,” Piacenza Prosecutor Ornella Chicca told reporters Friday while two police officers stood on either side of an easel bearing the recovered painting.

“Portrait o..

Russia has a new government! Well, technically. Very technically.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a number of constitutional changes that will be put to the Russian people in a referendum, leading the government of Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev to resign en masse so as to “give the president of our country the chance to make all decisions necessary.” Unsurprisingly, the political upheaval has prompted mass speculation for what these moves mean for Putin staying on past 2024, when constitutional term limits will force him to give up the country’s presidency. Sort of.

Why It Matters:

This week’s developments matter because they are Putin’s opening moves to keep power in Russia even after he moves on from the presidency. It wasn’t clear it would come to this—after all, Putin has already been in power for 20 years now, making him the longest-serving ruler of Russia since Josef Stalin. Putin was always likely to remain a key power-broker in Russian politics; this week’s moves..

Eleven U.S. soldiers were treated for concussion symptoms following the Iranian missile attack on Iraqi military bases housing American troops, the U.S. military said.

“While no U.S. service members were killed in the Jan. 8 Iranian attack on Al Asad Air base, several were treated for concussion symptoms from the blast and are still being assessed,” U.S. Central Command spokesperson Capt. Bill Urban said in a statement. “As a standard procedure, all personnel in the vicinity of a blast are screened for traumatic brain injury, and if deemed appropriate are transported to a higher level of care.”

Eight service members were transported from the Al Asad Air Base to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, and three were taken to Camp Arifjan in Kuwait for screenings “out of an abundance of caution,” Urban said. The soldiers are expected to return to Iraq after being screened.

The missile attack on Jan. 8 was retaliation for an American drone strike near Baghdad that killed top Iran..

(TEHRAN, Iran) — Iran’s supreme leader said President Donald Trump is a “clown” who only pretends to support the Iranian people, as he addressed Friday prayers in Tehran for the first time since 2012.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says Trump will “push a poisonous dagger” into the nation’s back. He said the outpouring of grief at the funeral for Iran’s top general, who was killed in a U.S. airstrike earlier this month, shows that Iranians support the Islamic Republic.

Khamenei said America had “cowardly” killed the most effective commander in the fight against the Islamic State group when it killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani in a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad.

In response, Iran launched a barrage of ballistic missiles targeting U.S. troops in Iraq, without causing serious injuries. As Iran’s Revolutionary Guard braced for an American counterattack that never came, it mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian jetliner shortly after it took off from Tehran’s international airport, killing all 176 passengers o..

China’s birthrate dropped to the lowest level since at least 1949 last year and the labor force continued to shrink, in the latest sign of slowing growth prospects for the world’s second-largest economy.

The number of births per 1,000 people declined to 10.48, the lowest level on record according to National Bureau of Statistics data going back to when the Communist Party took power. China’s working-age population — those aged 16 to 59 — declined by 890,000, the figures released Friday showed. The number of newborns in 2019 fell to 14.65 million, a decrease of 580,000 from the year before.

China has struggled to arrest the country’s declining birthrate for years, easing its stringent one-child policy in 2013 and allowing each family to have two children in 2016. Still, top leaders have resisted calls to fully lift restrictions on the number of babies each family can have even as the birthrate in 2018 has dropped to lows unseen since the turmoil of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward.

“T..

(KYIV, Ukraine) — Ukraine’s prime minister submitted his resignation Friday, days after he was caught on tape saying the country’s president knows nothing about the economy.

In a Facebook post, Oleksiy Honcharuk said that he had given his resignation to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

“I took this post to implement the president’s program. He is an example of transparency and decency to me,” he said.

“However, in order to dispel any doubts about our respect and trust for the president, I have written a resignation letter and submitted it to the president for introduction to parliament,” Honcharuk’s statement read.

Earlier this week an audio recording surfaced in which Honcharuk appeared to make disparaging comments about Zelenskiy’s understanding of economics. He called Zelenskiy “a layman” in economics and said the president should be better educated about the national currency.

Honcharuk said that the recording was a compilation of “fragments of recorded government meetings” and ..

(DHAKA, Bangladesh) — A Bangladeshi island regularly submerged by monsoon rains is ready to house 100,000 Rohingya refugees, but no date has been announced to relocate people from the crowded and squalid camps where they’ve lived for years, officials said Thursday.

Flood protection embankments, houses, hospitals and mosques have been built on Bhasan Char, or floating island, in the Bay of Bengal, officials said.

“Bhasan Char is ready for habitation. Everything has been put in place,” Bangladesh refugee, relief and repatriation commissioner Mahbub Alam Talukder told The Associated Press.

The island is built to accommodate 100,000 people, just a fraction of the million Rohingya Muslims who have fled waves of violent persecution in their native Myanmar.

About 700,000 people came after August 2017, when the military in Buddhist-majority Myanmar began a harsh crackdown against Rohingya in response to an attack by insurgents. Global rights groups and the U.N. called the campaign ethnic c..

With high-profile protests raging across Chile, Colombia, Hong Kong, Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon, India, Spain, France and more, last year it often felt as if much of the world was out in the streets.

A lot of it was. A report published Thursday by risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft finds that a quarter of the world’s countries experienced a “surge” in civil unrest in 2019. And, the report’s authors say, that unrest is unlikely to die down in 2020.

Last year’s protests, spanning South America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe, have been compared to the late 1960’s, when civil rights, anti-war and anti-colonial movements, combined with the growth of a youth-led counter culture, prompted dramatic street protests in dozens of countries.

To understand what’s driving the current wave of discontent, and why it’s unlikely to recede this year, Verisk Maplecroft looked at what happened before protests broke out in the 47 countries that experienced an uptick of unrest in 2019.

Governmen..

(LONDON) — The governments of countries that lost citizens when Iran shot down a Ukrainian airliner demanded Thursday that Tehran accept “full responsibility” and pay compensation to the victims’ families.

The foreign ministers of Canada, the U.K., Afghanistan, Sweden and Ukraine issued the statement on after a meeting at the Canadian High Commission on Trafalgar Square.

All 176 people aboard the Ukraine International Airlines died when it was brought down by ballistic missiles shortly after taking off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport on Jan. 8.

The victims included 57 Canadian citizens as well as 11 Ukrainians, 17 people from Sweden, four Afghans and four British citizens, as well as Iranians.

“We are here to pursue closure, accountability, transparency and justice” for the victims, Canadian Foreign Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said in London.

He said Iran had accepted responsibility, but only a full investigation would reveal the “exact cause” and who wa..

Intense thunderstorms have brought hail and strong rains to some regions of Australia, where bushfires have been burning at an unprecedented scale.

Farmers and firefighters alike celebrated the rain, which has helped disperse smoke in Melbourne and could dampen bushfires. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology, however, has been weary to celebrate, calling the thunderstorms a “double edge sword.” The storms have ushered in a host of new problems like flooding while exacerbating old ones; lightning strikes have sparked at least two new fires in the Great Otway National Park.

“Unfortunately with lightning strikes, it’s not always the next day they pop up,” Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “They can smolder around in trees and in root systems for a couple of days and pop up under drier, hotter conditions.”

The bushfires in Australia have burned an estimated 15.6 million acres since July 1, which the government has struggled to conta..

A peculiar theme park in the Hague celebrates the history of the Netherlands through a series of miniature models. The Madurodam features little canals, old-fashioned windmills, tiny tulips and, amid it all, an homage to Royal Dutch Shell, the oil giant that is the biggest company in the country and, by revenue, the second largest publicly traded oil-and-gas company in the world. There’s a Shell drilling platform, a Shell gas station and a Shell natural-gas field, complete with a drilling rig. The display is at once odd–energy infrastructure in a children’s theme park–and entirely fitting: Shell has been, for decades, one of the most powerful players both in Dutch politics and on the global economic stage.

But that could soon change. As concerns grow over the existential challenges posed by climate change, Shell must grapple with its own existential crisis: How should a company that generates most of its profits by serving the world’s enormous appetite for oil navigate a long-term fut..

(KYIV, Ukraine) — Ukrainian police say they have opened an investigation into the possibility that the former U.S. ambassador came under illegal surveillance before she was recalled from her post.

The announcement Thursday came two days after Democratic lawmakers in the United States released a trove of documents that showed Lev Parnas, an associate of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, communicating about the removal of Marie Yovanovitch as the ambassador to Ukraine.

The Ukrainian Interior Ministry, which runs the police forces, said in a statement that Ukrainian police “are not interfering in the internal political affairs of the United States.”

“However, the published messages contain facts of possible violations of Ukrainian law and of the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations, which protect the rights of diplomats on the territory of another state,” the statement continued.