North America

TORONTO, Dec 29 (Reuters) - An Ontario judge granted bail on Thursday to one of the eight teenage girls charged with killing a 59-year-old man in downtown Toronto, Canada, this month, subject to conditions.

The teenager, whose name cannot be published, must surrender her passport, not have a cell phone, stay in Ontario and not go online except for school, among other conditions. Her bail was set at C$9,500 ($7,005.90) with two sureties.

Judge Maria Sirivar will give reasons for her bail decision Jan. 10.

Dec 29 (Reuters) - The U.S. Treasury Department said Thursday that electric vehicles leased by consumers starting Jan. 1 can qualify for up to $7,500 in commercial clean vehicle tax credits, a decision that makes those assembled outside North America eligible.

The announcement is a win for South Korea and some automakers that earlier this month sought approval to use the commercial electric vehicle tax credit to boost consumer EV access. Automakers said the credit could be used to reduce leasing prices.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 29 (Xinhua) -- The United States is bracing for the end of 2022, a year marked by a deep political divide alongside an array of unresolved problems.

"Our politics has gotten so angry, so mean, so partisan," U.S. President Joe Biden said from the White House as part of his Christmas remarks this year.

"Too often we see each other as enemies, not as neighbors; as Democrats or Republicans, not as fellow Americans," Biden said. "We've become too divided."

PARTISAN DISCORD

DALLAS (AP) — Southwest Airlines continued to extract itself from sustained scheduling chaos Thursday, cancelling another 2,350 flights after a winter storm overwhelmed its operations days ago.

The Dallas carrier acknowledged it has inadequate and outdated operations technology that can leave flight crews out of position when adverse weather strikes.

Southwest was the only airline unable to recover from storm-related delays that began over the weekend when snow, ice and high winds raked portions of the country.

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. Rep.-elect George Santos of New York was under investigation by Long Island prosecutors on Wednesday, after revelations surfaced that the now-embattled Republican lied about his heritage, education and professional pedigree as he campaigned for office.

Despite intensifying doubt about his fitness to hold federal office, Santos has shown no signs of stepping aside — even as he publicly admitted to a long list of lies.

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 28 (APP): The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, Tuesday called on the Taliban to revoke immediately a raft of policies that target the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan, saying that they cause “terrible, cascading effects” on their lives and risk destabilizing the nation.

“No country can develop – indeed survive – socially and economically with half its population excluded”, he said in a statement.

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 27 (NNN-UNNS) — A hundred million people across the world were forced to leave their homes in 2022 and the United Nations is continuing to help those in need in a myriad of ways, UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, said.

Filippo Grandi, head of the agency, described the figure as “a record that should never have been set,” UN News Service (UNNS) said.

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico Dec 28 (Reuters) - Even before the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday opted to keep in place a measure aimed at deterring illegal border crossings, hundreds of migrants in northern Mexico were taking matters into their own hands to slip into the United States.

The contentious pandemic-era measure known as Title 42 had been due to expire on Dec. 21, but last-minute legal stays pitched border policy into limbo and made a growing number of migrants decide they had little to lose by crossing anyway.

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 27 (Xinhua) -- The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), has unveiled an internal investigation about unethical medical experiments on at least 2,600 incarcerated men in the 1960s and 1970s.

The experiments included putting "pesticides and herbicides" on the men's skin and injecting them into their veins. In one experiment, "small cages with mosquitos" were placed close to the participants' arms or directly on their skin to observe "host attractiveness of humans to mosquitos," the investigation showed.

MEXICO CITY, Dec. 28 (Xinhua) -- Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Tuesday criticized the "inhumane" treatment of migrants by U.S. Republicans, saying he would propose to U.S. and Canadian leaders at a summit next January to tackle immigration issue at its source.

According to U.S. media reports, busloads of migrants were dropped off outside the residence of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris in Washington, D.C. on Saturday night amid historically frigid temperatures.