US-led airstrikes have killed 52 Syrian civilians in one day, a monitoring group reports. There was fighting in the vicinity, but the strike allegedly failed to kill even a single Islamist fighter. "Airstrikes by the coalition early on Friday on the village of Birmahle in Aleppo province killed 52 civilians," the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP. [...]

Moscow may team up with Beijing to create a scientific station on the Moon. The challenge for Russia is to build its own space station by 2024 to achieve its lunar exploration goals. According to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who supervises defense-related policies, the question on "bringing China in as the main partner in creating a lunar scientific station," is currently being [...]

Ukraine has the fastest falling economy of 2015 according to the British periodical The Economist. The country has seen its GDP shrink by 6.5 percent since last April, with countries like Libya and Macau performing better. The Ukrainian economy showed the most significant deepening recession compared to the rest of the world, according to the data, published on Wednesday by the head of the anal [...]

More than 5 million hens will be euthanized at an Iowa egg-laying facility after the majority of them were found to be contaminated with a lethal strain of avian influenza, or bird flu. It is the worst outbreak yet to be recorded in the US. This is the second time a bird flu epidemic has been reported in Iowa, which provides almost 20 percent of all eggs that are consumed in the United States. [...]

Despite US policy banning federal officials from doing business with kidnappers, particularly terrorists, a government source told the Associated Press the FBI has for years negotiated and paid ransoms to kidnappers both domestically and internationally. The government source said the FBI used a secret exemption begun under the Bush Administration which allowed the bureau to use money to engage [...]

European aviation consortium Airbus said it would file criminal charges over industrial espionage, following reports that US and German foreign intelligence spied on the industry giant. "We are aware that as a large company in the sector, we are a target and subject of espionage," the company said in a statement to AFP on Thursday. [...]

Russian President Putin did not agree to a possible deployment of peacekeepers in eastern Ukraine, his spokesman said in response to Kiev's claims to the contrary. Moscow insists that all points of the Minsk agreement are fulfilled first. The peacekeeper initiative was discussed on Thursday in a phone conversation between the so-called Normandy Four - the leaders of France, Germany Russia and U [...]

Russia is to renew production of the Tu-160 "Blackjack" supersonic strategic bomber and missile carrier, according to defense minister, Sergey Shoigu. “Today it is already necessary to solve the task of not only maintaining and modernizing long-range aviation, we must also produce the Tu-160 missile carrier,” Shoigu said during a visit to the Kazan Aviation Plant, as cited by Sputnik news a [...]

The Russian and Chinese Navies are to hold a joint exercise in the Mediterranean Sea in mid-May, a first in that part of the world. A total of nine warships from the two countries are to participate, Beijing said. "The aim is to deepen both countries' friendly and practical cooperation, and increase our navies' ability to jointly deal with maritime security threats," [...]

Electric car producer Tesla Motors has adapted battery technology for household and business applications. The wall-mounted batteries will make solar power more accessible and throttle grid consumption to diminish loads and bills. [...]

The fragile state Iraq is now in is directly linked to the US-led invasion of 2003, which happened without a US Security Council mandate, Kofi Annan, who was UN Secretary General between 1997 and 2006, told RT. “You cannot disassociate the situation in Iraq today from the US intervention of 2003. [...]

Citing an anti-Russia policy brief, US lawmakers approved $200 million for providing "lethal weapons of a defensive nature" to the Ukrainian government as part of the $600 billion Pentagon budget proposal for the fiscal year 2016. The House Armed Services Committee passed its proposal for the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with a bipartisan vote of 60 to 2, in what Defense News [...]

Vladimir Putin has written a column (something he very rarely does), recalling the stories of his parents who survived the hardships of the Leningrad blockade, his dead brother and World War II with very personal details. ‘My dad was breathing via a reed in a swamp while the Nazis passed by, just a few steps away’ [...]

At a congressional hearing on Wednesday, witnesses said creating a way to grant authorities access to encrypted communications to aid in criminal probes will inevitably by exploited by adversaries. Amid a growing reliance within the tech industry to enable [...]

Angela Merkel's government has been accused of lying to the country's parliament after it was alleged that it knew German spies were conducting economic espionage for the NSA. Revelations show that some spooks were even spying on German companies. Germany’s interior minister, Thomas de Maiziere, who is a close ally of Chancellor Merkel denied on Wednesday that he had lied to parliament about [...]

Pope Francis in a highly emotional appeal called for equal pay for men and women during his weekly General Audience in St Peter's Square, Rome. "Why is it taken for granted that women must earn less than men? No! They have the same rights. The discrepancy is a pure scandal," he said as cited by Reuters. [...]

The US Supreme Court is hearing arguments on lethal injections for the first time in nearly a decade, following a botched execution in Oklahoma and amid a nationwide shortage of the drugs used in the procedure. On Wednesday, the state of Oklahoma and lawyers for three death row inmates there presented their arguments to the Supreme Court, where the nine justices appeared to be sharply split bet [...]

Travis Sanders was out with his family at a lava lake at the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park last week when he was tasered to the ground for trying to take some snaps of the lava with a small toy drone. Sanders was minding his own business and flying his drone over the lava lake when he was apprehended by a park ranger who told him to land it at once. [...]

Texas Governor Greg Abbott told state troopers to monitor a US military training exercise, codenamed Jade Helm 15, after locals showed concern that the looming maneuvers actually look more like an "exercise in the imposition of martial law." The large-scale operation involves elite teams from four branches of the military, including the SEALs and Green Berets, and is set to kick off in seven st [...]