International

The FBI is looking into whether the U.S.-based director of a Russian government-run cultural exchange program is a spy who tried to recruit young Americans as intelligence assets, a national intelligence community official said Wednesday.

"My former colleagues are probably going to get upset with me," says former diplomat who calls out US government for failed strategy in Yemen.The U.S. military, according to one former diplomat with a frontrow seat to its drone policy in Yemen, is creating new terrorists in that country at breakneck speed.

American whistleblowers have met with Edward Snowden in Moscow, and report that he is settling in to life there. In conversation, they say he seems at ease and has no regrets over the massive information leak that caused him to flee the United States.

Barawe, the small coastal town in Somalia where Navy SEALS came ashore in a failed raid last weekend, is facing reprisals from the terror group al-Shabab, the focus of the raid. Residents say that al-Shabab insurgents are increasing their presence and blame the residents for spying for the US.

Switzerland is one of Europe's richest countries but does not have a minimum wage law.
But growing public activism over pay inequality since the 2008 financial crisis has already led to two referendum drives on CEO pay.

A man arrested in Belgium shortly after the terror attacks on September 11, 2001 has been extradited to the US. He is charged with conspiracy in a suicide bomb plot meant to kill Americans traveling in Europe.

The world is aging so fast that most countries are not prepared to support their swelling numbers of elderly people, according to a global study being issued Tuesday by the United Nations and an elder rights group.

A new wave of bombs tore through Baghdad on Monday, officials said, killing at least 55 people. Most of the blasts were car bombs detonated in Shiite neighborhoods, the latest of a series of well-coordinated attacks blamed on hard-line Sunni insurgents determined to rekindle large-scale sectarian conflict. Multiple coordinated bombing strikes have hit Baghdad repeatedly over the last five months.

Inspectors entrusted with the enormous task of overseeing the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons stockpiles began their mission Monday, flying to Lebanon en route to Syria, where their first priority will be to help the country scrap its ability to manufacture such arms by a Nov. 1 deadline. Syria's Foreign Minister said the government refuses to sit down for talks with members of the main Western-backed opposition groups, putting a damper on U.S.-Russian efforts to hold a peace conference with the two sides by mid-November.

Secretary of State John Kerry will sign arms trade treaty on conventional weapons.