News

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA — The U.S. military’s secretive X-37B robot spaceplane blasted off from Florida on Thursday night on its seventh mission, the first launched atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket capable of delivering it to a higher orbit than previous missions. The Falcon Heavy, composed of three rocket cores strapped together, roared off its launch […]

Former U.S. President Donald Trump has denied bullying his way into the 1992 movie Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. The businessman-turned-politician took to his social media platform, Truth Social, on Wednesday to refute director Chris Columbus’ claim that he insisted upon making a cameo appearance in the movie in exchange for letting them […]

YUMA, ARIZONA — As the world pivots from planet-warming fossil fuels to renewable energy, a new pollution problem is rearing its head: What to do with old or worn-out solar panels? Thousands of photovoltaic slabs are being installed across the United States every day, particularly in the sunny west and south of the country, as states […]

The New York Times on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the companies’ artificial intelligence models infringe upon the newspaper’s intellectual property. The complaint, viewed by VOA, argues that the AI models created by OpenAI and Microsoft used “millions of The Times’s copyrighted news articles” to train chatbots that now compete with the […]

Ukraine’s military said Thursday that Russian forces attacked overnight using eight drones launched from Russian territory near the Sea of Azov. The Ukrainian air force said on Telegram that its air defenses shot down seven of the drones over the Dnipropetrovsk, Kirovohrad and Zaporizhzhya regions. Russia’s Defense Ministry said Thursday its forces thwarted an attack […]

The IRS has unveiled a “voluntary disclosure program” for businesses that claimed a pandemic-era tax credit in error and want to pay the money back. Worth thousands per employee, the employee retention tax credit, or ERC, was designed to support small businesses affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. The lucrative tax break sparked a cottage industry of firms pushing employers to […]

The Michigan Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected an attempt to remove former President Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 presidential primary ballot. The Michigan court ruled against an appeal by liberal group Free Speech For People to block Trump from running for his involvement in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol. Michigan, a key election battleground, has helped […]

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis said in his Christmas message on Monday that children dying in wars, including in Gaza, are the “little Jesuses of today” and that Israeli strikes there were reaping an “appalling harvest” of innocent civilians. In his Christmas Day “Urbi et Orbi” (to the city and world) address, Francis also called the […]

TOKYO, JAPAN — Japan’s SLIM space probe entered the moon’s orbit Monday in a major step toward the country’s first successful lunar landing, expected next month. The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) is nicknamed the “Moon Sniper” because it is designed to land within 100 meters (328 feet) of a specific target on the lunar […]

PARIS — Even as human-caused climate change threatens the environment, nature continues to inspire our technological advancement. “The solutions that are provided by nature have evolved for billions of years and tested repeatedly every day since the beginning of time,” said Evripidis Gkanias, a University of Edinburgh researcher. Gkanias has a special interest in how nature […]