No one picked the winning numbers for Saturday's Powerball lottery. The Powerball jackpot now rises to $1.04 billion for Monday's game. Most people who win choose to take a lump sum, which for Monday's game would be close to half a billion dollars after taxes – not a bad deal for a $2 ticket. The jackpot has grown so incredibly la [Read more]

The U.S. government stayed open Sunday, with funding assured through mid-November, but the political infighting among Republican lawmakers surrounding the votes to keep it operating only intensified. Conservative Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida told news talk shows that he would try this week to oust House Speaker Kevin McC [Read more]

A forecast that record high temperatures and humidity would create “extreme and dangerous' conditions prompted organizers to cancel two long-distance races Sunday in Minnesota's two largest cities that were expected to draw up to 20,000 runners. The Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon from Minneapolis to neighboring St. Paul had been expec [Read more]

Despite the fact that a U.S. government shutdown was averted, another week of turmoil seems to be in the making on Capitol Hill. A conservative legislator has promised to be “relentless' in his efforts to oust Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. VOA's Veronica Balderas Iglesias has the latest. [Read more]

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday laid out a proposal to begin regulating laboratory medical tests, a multibillion-dollar industry that the agency says poses a growing risk to patients because of potentially inaccurate results. The proposed rule would end decades of regulatory ambiguity and formally bring thousands of tests per [Read more]

New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has tested positive for COVID-19 and will work remotely while isolating, his office said Sunday, just two weeks before a general election in which his Labour party is struggling. The positive test will temporarily sideline Hipkins in the campaign for the Oct. 14 election. Labour has been sliding [Read more]

Nine years after a massive waste spill from a copper mine in the northern Mexican border state of Sonora, locals are still suffering from "alarming" levels of soil, air and water pollution, Mexico's Environment Department said Thursday. Summarizing a 239-page report, officials also confirmed, using satellite images, that the spill was n [Read more]

The World Health Organization warns that soaring rates of severe malnutrition, acute hunger, and deteriorating health conditions are threatening the lives and well-being of millions of people in South Sudan with the situation set to worsen as the climate crisis kicks in. “South Sudan is a country where you see the overlap and compound [Read more]

The Supreme Court is returning to a new term to take up some familiar topics — guns and abortion — while concerns about ethics swirl around the justices. The year also will have a heavy focus on social media and how free speech protections apply online. A big unknown is whether the court will be asked to weigh in on any aspect of th [Read more]

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein returned Saturday to her hometown for the final time when a military jet carrying the late Democratic senator's body landed at San Francisco International Airport. The long-serving senator and political trailblazer died Thursday at her home in Washington, D.C., after a series of illnesses. At 90, she was the o [Read more]

President Joe Biden has signed a bill to fund the U.S. government through mid-November and avoid a shutdown, less than an hour before money for federal agencies was set to run out. Biden posted a picture of himself signing the bill on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter, late Saturday night. In the message, he urged [Read more]

Seven months after the Carter Center announced he was entering end of life hospice care, former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn made a rare, surprise appearance during a peanut festival in their hometown of Plains, Georgia. As they waved to bystanders while riding in an SUV that proceeded down the main street of Plains, it [Read more]

On the sidelines of the 78th United Nations General Assembly in New York last week, Taiwan's Minister of Digital Affairs Audrey Tang delivered a speech at the Concordia Annual Summit on digital democracy and artificial intelligence. VOA spoke with Tang about how AI might help break through China's censorship and the challenges and opportu [Read more]

The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide whether state laws that seek to regulate Facebook, TikTok, X and other social media platforms violate the Constitution. The justices will review laws enacted by Republican-dominated legislatures and signed by Republican governors in Florida and Texas. While the details vary, both laws aim to pre [Read more]

Apple is blaming a software bug and other issues tied to popular apps such as Instagram and Uber for causing its recently released iPhone 15 models to heat up and spark complaints about becoming too hot to handle. The Cupertino, California, company said Saturday that it is working on an update to the iOS17 system that powers the iPhone [Read more]

A Swiss-led team has driven electric vans across Europe and the Arabian Peninsula to Qatar to showcase zero-emission battery powered vehicles, organizers said Sunday. The five-strong Swiss and German team set out from Geneva on August 28 in two electric Volkswagen vans on a 6,500 kilometer (4,000 mile) journey that ended in Doha on Satu [Read more]

How do you cook a meal when a staple ingredient is unaffordable?  This question is playing out in households around the world as they face shortages of essential foods like rice, cooking oil and onions. That is because countries have imposed restrictions on the food they export to protect their own supplies from the combined effect of [Read more]

The U.S. Senate, in a rare weekend meeting, approved a funding bill Saturday night, sending it to President Joe Biden for his signature and averting a widely dreaded shutdown of the federal government. The bill, which passed the Senate 88-9 after winning approval in the House of Representatives, would fund the federal government through [Read more]

China's factory activity in September recorded its first expansion in six months, an official survey said Saturday, providing another sign that the world's second-largest economy is gradually improving after its post-pandemic malaise. According to the government statistics bureau and an official industry group, the monthly purchasing ma [Read more]

President Joe Biden has signed a bill to fund the U.S. government through mid-November and avoid a shutdown, less than an hour before money for federal agencies was set to run out. Biden posted a picture of himself signing the bill on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter, late Saturday night. In the message, he urged [Read more]