Paolo Zialcita

Major League Baseball announced changes to its drug use and testing policies on Thursday, removing marijuana from its "drugs of abuse" while announcing mandatory tests for cocaine and opioids. The policy will be effective starting in 2020 during spring training.

Players who test positive for prohibited substances, which include fentanyl and LSD, will be evaluated and prescribed a treatment plan. Those who don't obey the league's plan may be punished.

Updated at 7:44 p.m. ET

A team of New Zealand police and military specialists on Friday recovered the bodies of six of eight victims killed by this week's volcanic eruption on White Island that injured dozens more.

For years, YouTube has faced flak from its critics over the video platform's anti-harassment policies. Now, the Google-owned company announced Wednesday it will take a tougher stance on content negatively targeting people based on their race, gender expression or sexual orientation.

Videos and comments with a threatening or intimidating message will be removed under the new guidelines. The policy will apply to everyone, "from private individuals, to YouTube creators, to public officials."

New Zealand health officials have ordered nearly 1,300 square feet of cadaver skin to treat patients injured when a volcano spewed hot ash and deadly toxins across an island off the country's coast earlier this week.

Six people are confirmed dead and eight more are "missing and presumed deceased" after Monday's eruption on White Island, leading authorities to declare the tragedy a mass fatality incident.

Sanna Marin is set to become Finland's third female prime minister — and its youngest — leading a coalition of four other parties, all headed by women.

At just 34, she will also stand out on the world stage by being the world's youngest sitting prime minister.

Marin was nominated Sunday by her Social Democratic party after its leader, Antti Rinne, stepped down after losing the confidence among his coalition government over his handling of a postal strike.

Updated at 11:35 a.m. ET on Saturday

A pair of armed robbers and two others, including the driver of a hijacked UPS truck, were killed in an exchange of gunfire with South Florida police officers after the suspects led authorities on a high-speed chase.

O Christmas tree, o Christmas tree. How lovely are thy branches.

Those are the lyrics to a popular Christmas carol about a tree so wondrous it roused musicians to write an entire song about its green boughs and unchanging leaves. But this year, one London Christmas tree isn't exactly inspiring people to burst into holiday carols.

A prominent Japanese doctor who devoted his life to providing aid in Afghanistan was killed by unknown gunmen on Wednesday along with five Afghan colleagues. It's the second attack on aid workers in the country in recent weeks.

Officials said Tetsu Nakamura, 73, was attacked while riding in an aid vehicle in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad. He died of his wounds while he was being airlifted to a base for emergency care.

So far, there has been no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. The Taliban denied involvement; ISIS is also active in the area.

Graduate students at Harvard University began an indefinite strike Tuesday after a deadline to fulfill contract demands such as pay equity and health insurance were not met by administrators.

Negotiations between the two sides are ongoing, but the union — which represents about 4,400 student workers — said an agreement is not close to being met. Representatives with Harvard Graduate Students Union-UAW accused the university of neglecting several issues that students have faced for years.

Flight cancellations and delays continued Monday as the winter storm that tore across the United States reached the Northeast, bringing several inches of snow and coastal floods. Travel disruptions are likely, with the National Weather Service warning of hazardous driving conditions.

Updated at 4:34 p.m. ET

As weary travelers make their post-Thanksgiving trek back home — and back to work — two winter storms continue to disrupt travel plans throughout the nation. Heavy snow and ice accumulation is expected to continue battering regions across the United States on Sunday, the first day of meteorological winter, delaying or cancelling flights of thousands of customers.

Twitter will allow people to permanently archive and memorialize the accounts of deceased loved ones. The company received backlash this week after news broke that it would delete accounts that had not been logged in to in over six months.

A company spokesperson originally said inactive accounts would be removed from the platform starting in December as part of its "commitment to serve the public conversation."

The announcement sparked a mass panic.

Pennsylvania overhauled its child sexual abuse laws Tuesday, as Governor Tom Wolf signed three bills meant to protect sexual assault survivors. The reforms incorporate recommendations made by a grand jury after hundreds of cases of clergy abuse were uncovered in 2018.

Decades of alleged misconduct and cover-ups were outlined in the grand jury's report, implicating more than 300 priests in a statewide sex scandal. Nearly every instance of abuse was too old to be prosecuted, a fault legislators said the new bills will repair.

In a major blow to terrorist radicalization efforts, European law enforcement agencies have stripped Islamic State propaganda from popular online services such as Google and Twitter.

Over 26,000 items, which included videos, publications, social media accounts and communication channels, were flagged by authorities as being terrorist propaganda. Europol, the European Union's law enforcement agency, sent those items to several online service providers for removal.

Jake Burton Carpenter, whose snowboard business and promotional efforts transformed the sport into a global sensation, died Wednesday at 65 from complications from cancer.

Carpenter, the founder of the iconic Burton Snowboards company, was born in 1954 — when snowboarding was radically different from what's seen today. During the mid-1900s, snowboards looked more like long sleds, with a light weight and nylon straps.

With a bit of luck, people in the Eastern United States will be able to witness a rare meteor shower known as the Alpha Monocerotids late Thursday night. Two astronomers predicted the outburst will last less than an hour and could even yield more than 400 meteors in that time.

The home where Adolf Hitler was born will be turned into a police station, Austrian officials announced Wednesday, putting an end to a years-long debate over what to do with it.

The yellow, three-story building sits on a street in Braunau am Inn, a small medieval town on the northern border with Germany. A memorial stone sits outside with the inscription "For peace, freedom and democracy. Never again fascism. Millions dead are a warning."

The decision to convert the building into a police station was meant as a deterrent to those who would make it a neo-Nazi shrine.

The use and importation of electronic cigarettes will soon be outlawed in the Philippines, according to President Rodrigo Duterte. He criticized vaping devices at a press conference Tuesday, four days after Filipino health regulators saw their first case of vape-associated lung injury.

The Samoan government closed schools indefinitely Monday as it attempts to quell a measles epidemic that has killed at least six people and hospitalized dozens more. Health officials said the Pacific island nation's low immunization rate is the cause of the outbreak.

The Italian government declared a state of emergency Thursday in Venice following the city's worst flooding in over 50 years. On Tuesday, high tides allowed the high-water mark to reach 6 feet, 2 inches, just 2 inches less than the record measurement in 1966.

An unprecedented number of wildfires are raging across Australia's most populous state. Fire officials say there were nearly 100 active fires in New South Wales on Friday, with dozens reaching "out of control" status.

The wildfires have charred hundreds of thousands of acres across the state, driven by extremely hot, dry and windy conditions. Thousands of residents in New South Wales have been forced to leave their homes.

Chinese officials are cracking down on youth online gaming, which they say negatively affects the health and learning of minors. Official guidelines released Tuesday outline a new curfew and time restrictions for gamers under 18.