WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. tax agency, said Thursday that it has taken steps to address a wide disparity in audit rates between Black taxpayers and other filers. And it said it is more closely examining the returns of larger numbers of wealthy people and major companies. "We are overhauling compliance efforts to advance...

SAO PAULO, Brazil — The death toll from heavy rains in Brazil's southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul rose to 29, local authorities said Thursday evening, as the state government declared a state of public calamity to handle the dramatic situation. The storms, which have caused the greatest devastation in the state in recent years, also left...

phoenix — Democratic Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs has relegated a Civil War-era ban on most abortions to the past by signing a bill Thursday to repeal it.  Hobbs said the move was just the beginning of a fight to protect reproductive health care in Arizona. The repeal of the 1864 law that the state Supreme Court recently reinstated won't take effect...

Presumed Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says if elected he would restore a travel ban on some majority-Muslim countries on the first day of his new administration. VOA Correspondent Scott Stearns reports.

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia — A judge declared a mistrial Thursday after a jury said it was deadlocked in the trial of a military contractor accused of contributing to the abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq two decades ago.  The mistrial came in the jury's eighth day of deliberations. The deliberations went far longer than the trial itself. ...

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