Yousuf fled with his family from his home in eastern Afghanistan eight years ago to escape the war, but he couldn’t escape tragedy. In the capital, Kabul, five of his children died, not from violence or bombings, but from air pollution, worsened by bitter cold and poverty.

Police investigators are looking into drug overdoses as a potential cause of death among some of the nine students who have died this semester at the University Southern California.
USC President Carol L.
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Surging gasoline prices caused U.S. consumer prices to rise last month at the fastest pace since March.
The Labor Department said Wednesday that its consumer price index rose 0.4% in October after a flat reading in September.
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The Education Ministry announced on Wednesday that all schools, daycares, and kindergartens within a 40 km (25 miles) radius of the Gaza border will be closed on Thursday due to the ongoing rocket fire from Gaza.

The United Auto Workers union will tighten financial controls, ban contributions from employers and vendors to charities run by its officers, and hire an ethics officer in the wake of a federal corruption investigation.
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California regulators opened a formal investigation Wednesday into preemptive power outages that blacked out large parts of the state in October, drawing strong rebukes from public officials and residents who said the shut-offs were too broad and poorly executed.
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The worst flooding in Venice in more than 50 years prompted calls Wednesday to better protect the historic city from rising sea levels as officials calculated hundreds of millions of euros in damage.
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University students from mainland China and Taiwan are fleeing Hong Kong, while those from three Scandinavian countries have been moved or urged to leave as college campuses become the latest battleground in the city’s 5-month-long anti-government unrest.
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President Donald Trump says he and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are “very good friends,” but their meeting Wednesday at the White House failed to resolve an issue that has badly strained relations between the two NATO allies.
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Republican Gov. Matt Bevin could face a legacy-defining decision when the vote totals from the Kentucky governor’s race are double-checked Thursday — concede to Democrat Andy Beshear or contest last week’s election in a historic move that could put the outcome in the hands of state lawmakers.