From Washington, this is VOA news. I'm Jim Bertel reporting.

At least 15 Palestinians were killed and hundreds injured by Israeli security forces confronting one of the largest Palestinian demonstrations in recent years along the Israel-Gaza border.

Riyad Mansour is the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations. "These peaceful demonstrators posed no threat whatsoever to Israel or its heavily armed soldiers, yet its trigger-happy soldiers used live ammunition, tear gas and rubber bullets to shoot indiscriminately."

Israel accuses militants of carrying out attacks under the cover of protests.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has called for an independent and transparent investigation into the deadly clashes.

In Syria, there are conflicting reports about whether the main rebel group in eastern Ghouta near Damascus has agreed with Russia to leave the town of Douma.

Syrian government forces have surrounded Douma, where tens of thousands of civilians live.

The recapture of Douma would represent a major victory for President Bashar al-Assad. It will eliminate the last major rebel stronghold in the Damascus area since the war began seven years ago.

A massive fire has broken out at a World Food Program facility in Yemen.

Yemen's official news agency reported the fire on Saturday quoting a Yemeni official as saying the fire caused severe damage to humanitarian aid held at the outpost. The cause of the fire is unclear.

An official told the French news agency the fire engulfed four warehouses and destroyed an estimated 50 tons of food. Yemeni officials are urging the United Nations to investigate.

From Washington, this is VOA news.

Vote counting is underway in Sierra Leone after Saturday's election to choose their new president in a runoff vote.

ECOWAS election monitor Amos Sawyer says the vote was very professional. "The counting was open and transparent. And we are just impressed from what we have seen at this polling station and we are hoping that this will be a pattern across the country."

The current president, Ernest Koroma, is stepping down this year after serving two five-year terms.

Russia ordered Britain to cut more than 50 people from its diplomatic missions in Russia.

The move comes as relations between the two countries deteriorate further following the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in Britain.

On Friday, the Kremlin ordered 59 diplomats from 23 Western countries to leave the country in retaliation for the expulsion of Russian diplomats.

Crowds lined the streets of Cambridge, England, on Saturday for the funeral of physicist Stephen Hawking, who died March 14 at age 76.

The famous scientist's science books and television cameos made him a pop-culture icon.

Hawking's funeral was held Saturday at the Cambridge University church known as Great St. Mary's.

China's Tiangong-1 space station is hurtling towards Earth and is expected to crash into the atmosphere in the next 24 hours.

It's the largest man-made object to reenter Earth's atmosphere in a decade.

The European Space Agency's Holger Krag says there is minimum risk. Uncontrolled reentries happen all the time.

"The risk ??? are growing still very low. There have been 13,000 tons of space hardware coming down in the whole history of space flight and there has not been a single reported casualty."

Any surviving pieces of the space station are expected to end up in the ocean.

Catholic churches in Colombia have donated a quarter-million communion wafers to congregations in neighboring Venezuela, where a food crisis has led to shortages of the holy bread.

Venezuela's economic crisis, fueled by a decline in oil production, has led to shortages of many staple food items.

A new Associated Press poll shows only 1 in 10 African-Americans thinks the United States has achieved all the goals of the civil rights movement nearly 50 years after the assassination of civil rights champion Martin Luther King Jr.

Doctor King was killed on April 4, 1968 while he was at a motel in Memphis, Tennessee. James Earl Ray, a segregationist, pleaded guilty of the killing and spent his life in prison before his death in 1998.

I'm Jim Bertel, VOA news.

That's the latest world news from VOA.