WASHINGTON

Democratic Party platform to support gay marriage

The Democratic Party is moving to include support for gay marriage in the official party platform for the first time, a Democratic official said Monday, marking a key milestone for advocates of same-sex unions.

The party’s platform drafting committee voted to include language backing gay marriage during a weekend meeting in Minneapolis, the official said. Democratic delegates will formally approve the platform during the party convention in Charlotte, N.C. in early September.

It was unclear if the party would call for any national action to legalize gay marriage.

BUKULMEZ, Turkey

Thousands fleeing Syria to escape Aleppo fighting

Outside a Turkish hospital near the Syrian border, a man in a gray gown and flip-flops held his sleeping 2-year-old daughter, Aya. On Aya’s right eye was a bandage.

Aya lost her eye when she was struck by shrapnel from a shell that also killed her 8-month-old brother, Mohammad, and their mother. The father and daughter were among some 200,000 people who the U.N. said late Sunday have fled Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, during days of clashes between rebels and the military.

Aleppo residents, some severely wounded, are packing up belongings and loading them onto cars, trucks and even motorcycles to seek temporary shelter in rural villages and schools outside the city and dusty tents across the border in Turkey.

As the violence intensified, the country’s most senior diplomat in London defected. Charge d’affaires Khaled al-Ayoubi is the latest in a string of high-profile diplomats to abandon President Bashar Assad’s regime.

SALT LAKE CITY

Obama’s white mother traced to African slave

A team of genealogists has found evidence that President Barack Obama could be a descendent of an African slave — but not through the lineage of his black father, the most likely route researchers had followed and exhausted.

The link, genealogists with Ancestry.com said Monday, is, in fact, through an examination of his white mother’s family history.

“We were surprised and excited to make that connection,” said Joseph Shumway, a member of the Utah-based Ancestry.com team.

Obama’s father was from Kenya and his mother was from Kansas. It had been generally assumed that the president had no slave ancestors because researchers couldn’t find it through the lineage of his father. However, no one had yet performed any exhaustive research into the lineage of his white mother, who turns out to have a mixed-raced family history.

Ancestry.com said the maternal line traces back to one of the first documented African slaves in the U.S.

The company said Obama could be the 11th great-grandson of John Punch, an African slave in colonial Virginia. He is believed to have had children with a white woman, starting a family line that led generations later to Obama’s mother.

The White House declined comment Monday.

BERLIN

Geithner meets officials to quell eurozone fears

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his German counterpart stressed the need for coordinated action Monday in the face of the eurozone debt crisis and faltering global growth, but left open what joint steps Europe and the United States would take to shore up the world economy.

Geithner traveled to the German North Sea island of Sylt for informal talks with Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, before heading on to meet Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank.

Geithner and Schaeuble praised efforts by Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy to turn their debt-ridden economies around, and voiced optimism about economic reforms meant to deepen integration among the 17 eurozone members.

The joint statement made no reference to Greece, which has struggled to implement the reform package agreed to with creditors. The country faces the possibility a chaotic exit from the common currency area if it fails to meet its bailout conditions.

Geithner and Schaeuble “emphasized the need for ongoing international cooperation and coordination” and stated that the U.S. and Germany would “continue to cooperate closely … to further stabilize global and European economies.” 

— From news service reports