NEW YORK – Hillary Clinton's family foundation will no longer accept foreign and corporate donations if she is elected president, and will bring an end to its annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting regardless of the outcome of the November election.
Former President Bill Clinton said the foundation plans to continue its work but intends to refocus its efforts in a process that will take up to a year to complete.
The former president, who turns 70 on Friday, said he will resign from the board.
WASHINGTON – The Obama administration said Thursday that a $400 million cash payment to Iran seven months ago was contingent on the release of a group of American prisoners.
It is the first time the U.S. has so clearly linked the two events, which critics have painted as a hostage-ransom arrangement.
State Department spokesman John Kirby repeated the administration's line that the negotiations to return the Iranian money – from a military-equipment deal with the U.S.-backed shah in the 1970s – were conducted separately from the talks to free four U.S. citizens in Iran. But he said the U.S. withheld the delivery of the cash as leverage until Iran permitted the Americans to leave the country.
MEXICO CITY – Federal police executed at least 22 people on a ranch last year, then moved bodies and planted guns to corroborate the official account that the deaths happened in a gunbattle, Mexico's human rights commission said Thursday.
One police officer was killed in the confrontation in the western state of Michoacan on May 22, 2015. The government has said the dead were drug cartel suspects who were hiding out on the ranch in Tanhuato, near the border with Jalisco state.
The National Human Rights Commission said there were also two cases of torture and four more deaths caused by excessive force. It said it could not establish satisfactorily the circumstances of 15 other deaths.
ANKARA, Turkey – A string of bombings, blamed on Kurdish rebels and targeting Turkey's security forces, killed at least 14 people and wounded more than 220 others, officials said Thursday.
Two attacks were car bombings that hit police stations in eastern Turkey, while a third – a roadside blast – targeted a military vehicle carrying soldiers in the southeast of the country.
Authorities say the assaults were carried out by the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which has launched a campaign of car bombings targeting police stations or roadside bomb attacks against security force vehicles.
Associated Press
