Japan and China have now been worried about the decline of their populations as a result of fewer babies being born and the rise of their aging populations. Japan is now the world’s most rapidly declining population. There were fewer than 800,000 babies born last year. Prime Minister Kishida Fumio stressed in his speech that the birth rate had fallen "to the brink of not being able to maintain a…

Two Pakistani brothers were released from the Guantánamo Bay military prison Thursday after two decades in custody with no charges, the Department of Defense announced. The brothers were transferred to US custody after Pakistani officials arrested them in their home city of Karachi in 2002. After about a year and a half in CIA custody, they were moved to the detention center in 2004. (BBC)

On February 13, the news agency Radio Liberty published an article on its web page: "Gas control is an important geopolitical weapon for the Kremlin. The investigator talks about how the Kremlin's ties to the Uzbek gas sector were exposed. Radio Ozodlik released an investigation that found that Uzbek and Russian insiders, including those associated with Gazprom, have gained control of hundreds of gas and oil fields in Uzbekistan under…

A boat carrying 71 weak and hungry Rohingya Muslims fleeing from refugee camps in Bangladesh landed Thursday in Indonesia’s northernmost province of Aceh. One of the Fifteen-year-old Shorif Uddin, who was on the boat with his parents, said two or three people died while they were at sea because of a lack of food.