Scott Neuman

Western leaders are pressuring Moscow for a full and transparent investigation into the fatal shooting of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, a staunch opponent of President Vladimir Putin.

Nemtsov, 55, a deputy prime minister in the 1990s who later organized mass rallies against Putin in 2011 and 2012. Most recently, ...

As we reported late Friday, the House managed to approve a one-week extension of funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which President Obama signed. The passage capped a day of scrambling that saw a longer three-week stopgap shot down in the House.

But the thorny issue that has ...

A bomb blast at a rally in eastern Ukraine has killed two people on the first anniversary of the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych, an event that helped trigger Russia's annexation of Crimea and a separatist uprising.

Ukraine's Interior Ministry described the blast at a pro-Kiev rally in Kharkiv as ...

Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson says he's taking seriously a call by Islamist extremists for attacks on shopping malls in the West, including Minnesota's giant Mall of America.

In an interview on CNN's State of the Union program, Johnson said a video released by the Somali-based group al-Shabab "reflects ...

Updated at 2:20 p.m. ET

Grammy-winning trumpeter and composer Clark Terry, who recorded with the likes of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Quincy Jones, has died at age 94.

Gwen Terry wrote that her husband "has joined the big band in heaven where he'll be singing and playing with the ...

Updated at 11:50 p.m.: Death toll rises

The bodies of at least 68 passengers have been recovered from the site of a capsized river ferry in Bangladesh, The Associated Press reports.

Up to 140 people are believed to have been on the ferry; however, officials have not determined the ...

A Chilean man who began an around-the-world bicycle journey four years ago and was closing in on a Guinness distance record has been killed.

Juan Francisco Guillermo was hit by a passing pickup truck while stopped on the side of a highway in rural Thailand. His Singaporean wife and 2-year-old ...

The Turkish army launched an overnight operation to rescue some 40 of its soldiers guarding an Ottoman-era tomb in Syria. The soldiers had come under attack by self-declared Islamic State.

The remains of the Tomb of Suleyman Shah were taken back across the border.

NPR's Peter Kenyon, reporting from Geneva, ...

British Prime Minister David Cameron is urging his nation's schools to guard against the influence of extremism after three school-aged girls slipped out of the country in a suspected attempt to join the self-declared Islamic State.

The Associated Press reports that Cameron said the teenagers' disappearance was deeply concerning.

"We ...

Given a deal to end to a nine-month slowdown at West Coast ports announced on Friday, we thought now might be the time to promote this new-to-us video from FleetMon.com that gives us a strong representation of just how busy are the world's shipping lanes.

The video shows ...

Secretary of State John Kerry is signaling the possibility of more sanctions on Russia over continued fighting in eastern Ukraine, saying the U.S. and its allies would not tolerate Moscow's "brazen" violations of the Minsk cease-fire agreement.

Reuters reports that Kerry's remarks were made as he began talks ...

A federal judge has ruled to temporarily block an Obama administration order to detain mothers and children seeking asylum in the U.S., what is known as the "no-release" policy.

The Wall Street Journal says: "The lawsuit challenged the new practice by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a unit ...

A fire in one of the world's tallest residential skyscrapers in Dubai forced the evacuation of hundreds of people before it was safely extinguished with no deaths.

Local media reports that the blaze broke out in the 86-story Torch Tower at about 2:30 a.m. local time in the United ...

Newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, in a surprise visit to Afghanistan today, gave the strongest indication to date that the White House is considering slowing down its troop withdrawal timetable to accommodate security concerns.

Carter said Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and President Obama would get a chance to ...

For more than 500 million years, sea creatures have been getting bigger — much bigger as it turns out, according to a study by scientists who say that the evolutionary trend toward larger body size fits with a 19th-century principle known as Cope's rule.

The rule, first posited ...

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, speaking on the one-year anniversary of a bloody day of anti-government protests in Kiev that precipitated the ouster of his Moscow-backed predecessor, accuses Russia of having a direct role in the killing of dozens of activists.

Poroshenko told a crowd gathered for the first ...

.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Russian-backed Ukrainian separatists continued to shell government positions in the country's contested east despite a truce agreement that went into effect nearly a week ago.

Meanwhile, a British parliamentary report published today accuses Europe's leaders and diplomats of a "catastrophic misreading" of the mood in the Kremlin ahead ...

Thailand's parliament has given preliminary approval to a law that would make it illegal for women in the country to hire themselves out as surrogate mothers to would-be foreign parents. The legislation follows a series of high-profile scandals in the past year that have shed a negative light on the ...

In what is being described as an unprecedented occurrence, Australia is getting slammed by two major cyclones at the same time.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Cyclone Lam blew out a wind monitoring station as it barreled ashore as a Category 3 storm at Elcho Island in Australia's ...