The banning of private gun ownership in Venezuela has made firearms such a valuable commodity that 57% of police killed in the nation’s capital this year were targeted for their weapons, according to Venezuela’s largest newspaper.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro met the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, in Damascus in 2007 to discuss “drug trafficking, money laundering, the distribution of arms and issuing of passports… to terrorists,” according to a new book citing witnesses and Venezuelan diplomatic cables.
Sierra Leone has experienced a dramatic fall in the number of Ebola cases in the nation over the past month, prompting the government to reopen schools and attempt to return civilians to normal daily life. Much has changed in the past year due to the outbreak, including the population of stray dogs, which has doubled to an estimated half a million.
While the ongoing migrant crisis in the Mediterranean Sea has captured the world’s attention after more than 800 people drowned in a capsized ship headed to Italy last week, a parallel situation has begun to unravel in the Aegean, with more than 100 mostly Syrian refugees drowning in the last 48 hours as they attempted to reach Greece.
This week, the Venezuelan government announced a series of manufacturing and infrastructure investments from China that could ultimately amount to up to $20 billion in ten years, though China only agreed to an initial $5 billion in “development” funds this Sunday.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, on a visit to a Muslim center in Maryland, claimed that President Barack Obama had agreed to the construction of a Turkish-funded mosque in the state, and may even attend the opening himself. The White House has denied that any such opening is on the President’s schedule.
The leadership of Greece’s nationalist Golden Dawn party went to court Monday for the first day of what is expected to be a long trial of unprecedented scope for the nation. Golden Dawn’s leadership, who have exhibited Neo-Nazi sympathies, are being accused of running a criminal organization masked as a political party.
The South African government has announced the arrest of more than 300 people accused of partaking in violence against immigrants and refugees in the country, after mob attacks have left seven dead and prompted at least two other African countries to repatriate their citizens, fearing for their safety.
FBI Director James Comey has prompted the U.S. Ambassador to Poland to issue an apology to that nation for remarks in which he implied that Poland was partially to blame for the Holocaust, and not exclusively a victim of Nazi Germany during its occupation.
The Kenyan government has broken ground on a new wall that will span a large swatch of the border between Kenya and Somalia. While the project had been announced in March, Kenyan authorities appear to have expedited the groundbreaking in response to the terrorist attack at Garissa University.
The State Department announced this week that it has received a guarantee from the Cuban government to enter a bilateral dialogue to discuss the extradition of American fugitives out of Cuba to serve their criminal sentences, as well as dialogue with Spain regarding Cuba providing safe haven to members of the Basque terrorist group ETA. The Cuban government has yet to publicly comment on the State Department’s claims.
A senior advisor to the Prime Minister of Turkey was declared “retired” today after having called the death of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of Ottoman Turks in 1915 a “genocide” and praising Pope Francis for condemning those who deny the genocide took place.
The Spanish government has lodged a formal complaint with Venezuela’s ambassador to Madrid after President Nicolás Maduro accused Spanish President Mariano Rajoy of being a “racist” in a national broadcast, adding, “In Spain, they are all racists.”
A mysterious gun attack at the headquarters of the Ayışığı (Moonlight) Association in Turkey has left two dead, with law enforcement and local sources claiming the violence is a result of tensions between the Ayışığı group, accused of terrorist recruiting, and a local drug cartel whose members claim the group attacked for selling drugs to minors.
Turkish authorities broke ground on Tuesday on the Akkuyu nuclear power plant, a project spearheaded by Russian developers that the Turkish government claims is indispensable to the nation’s energy independence.
The government of Sierra Leone reopened schools nationwide on Tuesday, after closing them for nine months to prevent the spread of the Ebola virus. President Ernest Koroma’s confidence in reopening the schools is a sign that the Ebola outbreak may be, after a year of international struggle to contain it, nearing an end.
Newly released statistics show that the communist government of Raúl Castro in Havana has exponentially increased the number of political arrests, beatings, and detentions since President Barack Obama announced that a White House concessions package would be afforded to the regime.
The Somali terror group Al-Shabaab has taken credit for a suicide bombing and subsequent raid on a government building in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, in which at least 17 people have died, according to the most recent estimates.
The White House announced today that Cuba will be removed from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, despite its ties to Marxist, jihadist, and other separatist terrorist organizations. The removal of the state sponsor of terror label is believed to be the beginning of diplomatic relations with Cuba that can lead to the potential establishment of a U.S. embassy in Havana.
Kenya’s oldest newspaper, The Standard, reports that the Iranian government warned Kenyan officials that the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab was planning to attack Garissa University.
On April 14, 2014, the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram abducted more than 300 schoolgirls from the village of Chibok, cementing their international reputation as one of the most ruthless and dangerous terror groups in the world. One year later, more than 200 of those girls remain missing, and Nigeria’s president-elect is making no promises to find them.
Threats and arrests were made. Government workers lost their jobs. Free chickens were handed out. An all-encompassing mass media campaign against President Barack Obama took over Venezuelan state airwaves, where President Nicolás Maduro vowed to hand Obama a 10-million-signature petition against his recent sanctions on Venezuela. Yet, when the time came to show President Obama– and the American public– those signatures, Maduro came up empty-handed.
The Chinese government has banned mainland residents on the Hong Kong border to travel freely into the autonomous region, limiting their visits to one per week following protests against smugglers triggering a spike in retail prices for Hong Kong residents.
A Costa Rican journalist reports that Cuban dictator Raúl Castro claimed at the Summit of the Americas this past weekend that he will step down as head of state in 2018 and implied that Cuba may hold elections to replace him.
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, a hardline leftist and long ally of South American socialists Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales, tweeted “¡Heil Hitler!” in response to a Twitter user posting an article reporting that ex-Ecuadorian President Osvaldo Hurtado had called him a “fascist” for his repeated crackdowns on journalists.
