Department of State

The U.S. Department of State has issued new guidance for travelers due to concerns about an outbreak of a pneumonia-like virus in the Chinese city of Wuhan, and U.S. health officials are recommending that people avoid all nonessential travel to the city. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a Level 3 travel warning (“avoid nonessential...

Constance Wannamaker wanted to scream and cry at the same time. The Texas immigration attorney had just heard what should have been great news: Her client, a 21-year-old Guatemalan woman, was getting released from the El Paso Processing Center after weeks in detention. But that’s just a sliver of the story.

Many K-9s deployed overseas as part of a State Department program intended to help partner countries detect and prevent terror attacks suffer or die from neglect by their foreign handlers, according to a report from the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General.

The Trump administration has quietly released more than $100 million in military assistance to Lebanon after months of unexplained delay that led some lawmakers to compare it to the aid for Ukraine at the center of the impeachment inquiry. The $105 million in Foreign Military Financing funds for the Lebanese Armed Forces was released just before the Thanksgiving holiday and...

Mina Chang figured out how to work the levers in Dallas and in the nation’s capital, making connections with key figures and cultivating an online image, until her overblown credentials and claims crumbled under scrutiny. Chang resigned last week from a senior State Department post after an NBC News investigation revealed she made misleading claims about her charity work and...

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Tuesday that a cache of leaked documents proves that Chinese authorities are engaged in massive and systemic repression of Muslims and other minorities in western China, as a number of foreign governments expressed serious concern about the scale of the campaign. Pompeo said the documents underscored “an overwhelming and growing body of evidence” that...

A van loaded with two North Texas families, including children, was attacked in a popular Mexico tourist destination — and the driver was killed.

In September, Amer Fakhoury closed his New Hampshire restaurant to take his first vacation in years to visit family in his native Lebanon — a country he hadn’t been to for nearly two decades. He hasn’t returned to the United States. Soon after his arrival in Lebanon, the 57-year-old American citizen was detained by authorities and remains jailed there. Doctors...

Newly released documents show Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani was in contact with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in the months before the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine was abruptly recalled. The State Department released the documents Friday to the group American Oversight in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. They show that Pompeo talked with Giuliani on...

The Trump administration is withholding more than $100 million in U.S. military assistance to Lebanon that has been approved by Congress and is favored by his national security team, an assertion of executive control of foreign aid that is similar to the delay in support for Ukraine at the center of the impeachment inquiry. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on...

Here are the key moments from Wednesday’s public impeachment hearings, which included testimony from Gordon Sondland, ambassador to the European Union; Laura Cooper, assistant deputy secretary of defense; and David Hale, undersecretary of state for political affairs.

David Hale, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, makes his opening statement during an afternoon impeachment hearing on Nov. 20, 2019.

In a blow to GOP defenses of President Donald Trump, a Defense Department official said Wednesday the Ukrainian government asked “what was going on” with U.S. military aid as early as July 25 — the very day that Trump asked Ukraine’s president to investigate Democrats. Testifying in an evening hearing, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper told lawmakers her...

Ambassador Gordon Sondland told House impeachment investigators Wednesday that he worked with Rudy Giuliani on Ukraine at the “express direction” of President Donald Trump and pushed for a political “quid pro quo” with Kyiv because it was what Trump wanted. “Mr. Giuliani was expressing the desires of the president of the United States, and we knew that these investigations were...

Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper testified on Wednesday and revealed a new timeline for when Ukrainian officials began to inquire about previously allocated military aid being withheld.

The phone call State Department official David Holmes overheard between President Donald Trump and Ambassador Gordon Sondland lasted just two minutes. But it won’t be easily forgotten. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Holmes told Trump impeachment investigators, “someone calling the President from a mobile phone at a restaurant, and then having a conversation of this level of candor, colorful...

The Trump administration on Monday said it no longer considers Israeli settlements in the West Bank to be a violation of international law, reversing four decades of American policy and further undermining the Palestinians’ effort to gain statehood. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the U.S. is repudiating the 1978 State Department legal opinion that held that civilian settlements...

Senior Trump administration official Mina Chang resigned from her job at the State Department two and a half hours after NBC News went to her spokesperson to ask about newly discovered false claims she had made about her charity work. NBC News had previously reported that Chang, the deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stability...

The number of foreign students coming to U.S. colleges and universities continued to fall last year, according to a new report, but the Trump administration says the drop should be blamed on high tuition costs and not students’ concerns over the nation’s political atmosphere. An annual report from the Institute of International Education found that the number of newly enrolled...

Iran’s supreme leader on Sunday cautiously backed the government’s decision to raise gasoline prices by 50% after days of widespread protests, calling those who attacked public property during demonstrations “thugs” and signaling that a potential crackdown loomed. The government shut down internet access across the nation of 80 million people to staunch demonstrations that took place in a reported 100...