From Washington, this is VOA news. I'm David Byrd reporting.
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Embattled Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt has resigned after fighting numerous scandals and alleged ethics violations.
As AP Sagar Meghani reports, President Donald Trump praised Truitt's work, Pruitt's work, that is, and thanked him for his service to the country.
From travel and security cost dealings with industry lobbyists, Pruitt was facing several congressional and oversight inquiries and had become a constant source of embarrassment to the president, who tweeted he has accepted Pruitt's resignation.
Pruitt denied wrongdoing and the president had praised his efforts to cut regulations at the EPA.
He tweeted Pruitt's done an outstanding job within the agency, writing "I will always be thankful to him for this."
Sagar Meghani, Washington.
China has warned that it will retaliate with tariffs on U.S. goods if the Trump administration goes ahead with planned tariffs against Chinese products.
As Reuters Ed Giles reports, President Donald Trump plans to impose 25 percent tariffs on more than 800 Chinese products, beginning in just a few hours.
China's commerce ministry delivered a stern warning on Thursday, saying Donald Trump's tariff threat was risking the whole global economy.
"U.S. measures are essentially attacking global supply and value chains. To put it simply, the U.S. is opening fire on the entire world, including itself."
Just a day before, Chinese state media put it even more bluntly, saying a trade war would bring chaos to the world. At the same time, Beijing stuck to its line that it doesn't want to fight a trade war. But it seems to be gearing up for a pushback when the tariffs drop on Friday.
That's Reuters reporter Ed Giles.
For more on these stories and the rest of the day's news, log on to our website voanews.com. This is VOA news.
British police said Thursday that a couple left critically ill in the same area where a former Russian spy was poisoned earlier this year "handled a contaminated item."
The police said in a statement that tests of samples from Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley showed they were exposed to the nerve agent Novichok and are now trying to determine the source of that contamination.
Novichok is a Soviet-designed nerve agent that is believed to be more potent than such better known toxins as VX and sarin.
The couple was found unconscious Saturday in Amesbury, 13 kilometers from Salisbury, where a former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found ill in March.
A forecast of rain on Friday has rescuers in Thailand in a race against the water as they scrambled to extract 12 young football players and their coach from a flooded cave complex.
The 12 boys and their coach have been trapped in the Tham Luang cave since June 23.
Officials are still trying to decide whether to attempt to bring boys out using scuba diving equipment or to keep them in the cave until the waters recede.
???Harry Long is a British cave rescue specialist. "Those bits of visibilities can be zero if those current inside the smallest section of passage that makes life very much more difficult and the people who are going to have to oversee the diving ???. That in fact is what does take place in the end. We're going to have their ???work cartel to ensure these lads can get through this safely."
Water is still flooding the complex and is being continuously pumped out, reducing the flooding by about one centimeter an hour.
The boys have been described as being in good health. Authorities have said they are being attended to by Thai Navy SEALs and medics who are staying with them inside the cave.
Dozens of people are reported missing after a tourist boat capsized on rough seas late Thursday in the southern coast of Thailand.
The boat carrying mostly Chinese tourists overturned off the island of Phuket and officials say the search for missing passengers has been suspended for now.
The provincial governor said that 53 people were missing and the search would resume early Friday.
A second boat capsized earlier in the day off the island's coast but officials said the 39 Chinese and European tourists on board that vessel were rescued.
And at least 24 people were killed and dozens more were injured Thursday when a series of explosions ripped through fireworks workshops in a town just north of Mexico City.
The dead included four firefighters and two police officers who rushed to the scene after the first explosion, only to be killed by the second wave of blasts.
