UK authorities reportedly raided the Guardian’s office in London to destroy hard drives in an effort to stop future publications of leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The action is unlikely to prevent new materials coming out.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger revealed in a Monday article posted on the British newspaper’s website that intelligence officials from the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) told him that he would either have to hand over all the classified documents …

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After this summer’s massive protests against spending choices by the once-popular government, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has passed a law that will reserve all of Brazil’s oil royalties for healthcare and education.

The new law stipulates that 75 percent of royalties will go to education while another 25 percent will be for health care. The amount of royalties expected over the next year is projected to be about $800 million.

“For me and my government education is …

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Scores of Swedish women from various faiths have posted pictures of themselves wearing hijab, or traditional Muslim headscarves, in solidarity with a woman attacked in a Stockholm suburb, apparently for wearing one.

Police spokesman Ulf Hoffman said an unknown assailant had attacked the pregnant woman in the suburb of Farsta on Friday by banging her head against a car.

Hoffman said the man shouted slurs which have led police to believe the attack was motivated by the …

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Public executions and torture are daily occurrences in North Korea’s prisons, according to testimony from former inmates at a UN commission of inquiry that opened in Seoul on Tuesday.

It is the first time Pyongyang’s human rights record has been examined by an expert panel. It denies that it abuses human rights, refuses to recognise the commission and has blocked access to investigators.

Harrowing accounts from defectors now living in South Korea related how guards chopped off …

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TOKYO — Three hundred tons of highly contaminated water have leaked from a storage tank at the ravaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on Japan’s Pacific Coast, its operator said on Tuesday, raising further concerns over the site’s safety and prompting regulators to declare a radiological release incident for the first time since disaster struck there in 2011.

Workers raced to place sandbags around the leak at the site to stem the spread of the …

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Protesters filled the streets of over 10 cities in Chile on Saturday to march against what has been dubbed ‘Monsanto Law,’ a measure critics say risks the country’s food sovereignty while putting seeds in the hands of a few multi-national corporations.

The law, set into motion by former President Michelle Bachelet, is currently making its way through the parliament, and would give seed patenting rights to corporations such as Monsanto, the I Don’t Want GMOs in …

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Army Pfc. Bradley Manning should spend 60 years in prison because he betrayed the U.S. by giving classified material to WikiLeaks, a prosecutor said Monday.

The soldier’s defense attorney didn’t recommend a specific punishment, but suggested any prison term shouldn’t exceed 25 years because the classification of some of the documents Manning leaked expires in 25 years.

Coombs said Manning, who was 21 when he enlisted in 2007, had limited life and military experience. His youthful …

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New research links chemicals commonly found in our environments called phthalates and bisphenol A (BPA) to health problems in kids and adolescents.

Two studies, published Aug. 19 in Pediatrics, suggest the chemicals could be contributing to the childhood obesity epidemic.

One study, led by Dr. Leo Trasande, an associate professor of pediatrics and environmental medicine at the NYU School of Medicine, involved 766 adolescents aged 12 to 19 who were enrolled in a long-running study of their …

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More than 57,000 children this fall will be cut from Head Start, the program for pre-school age children from low-income families, because of the ongoing “sequestration” budget cuts, the Obama administration announced Monday.

Head Start and Early Head Start saw a 5.27 percent reduction in its $8 billion budget after Congress this March enacted the sequester — $1.2 trillion in across-the-board cuts to federal spending over 10 years.

Administered by the Health and Human Services Department, Head …

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Talk with Times reporter Evan Halper at 9 a.m. about California’s food stamp program, which ranks among the stingiest in the nation enrollment-wise.

Liberal California discourages eligible people from signing up for food stamps at rates conservative activists elsewhere envy. Only about half of the Californians who qualify for help get it.

That stands in contrast to other states, including some deeply Republican ones, that enroll 80% to 90% of those with incomes low enough to qualify.

That …

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