Search-and-rescue operations are under way off the coast of Hawaii after two Marine CH-53E Super Stallion helicopters on a nighttime training mission collided, with six people aboard each aircraft.
Cairo (AFP) – An Egyptian court Wednesday jailed 69 Islamists for life for torching a church near Cairo in August 2013, as anger flared over a crackdown on supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi.
20,000 refugees flee violence in Burundi, fearing Hutu-Tutsi war; Generational history of Hutu and Tutsi tribes
A young girl who survived a migrant boat disaster that killed all her friends and family amongst hundreds of others has written an open letter to people in Gambia, her home country, telling them to stay at home. The letter
Five men, who reportedly confessed to playing a role in detonating a car bomb on behalf of the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) outside the U.S. consulate in the capital of northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, have been arrested by Kurdish authorities.
WASHINGTON, DC—The U.S. and Afghan governments lack accurate data on the Afghan security forces’s manpower, capability, and payroll, making it difficult to assess Afghanistan’s ability to fight the Taliban and prevent other terrorist groups from using the country to stage new attacks, according to a specially-appointed congressional watchdog agency.
The United States, on Wednesday, deployed three Navy fast patrol craft to join the destroyer Farragut in the Straits of Hormuz where Iran seized a cargo ship registered in the Marshall Islands, reports Military.com, quoting a Pentagon spokesman.
Five of the six former Guantánamo Bay detainees being hosted by Uruguay are refusing to sign an accord with the local United Nations body that would pay for their rent and utilities for one year, demanding that the United States subsist their lives and claiming they were promised three years of free living in the Latin American nation.
20-year-old Juma Laki is a Kenyan who traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2013, looking for work. He just learned the hard way that chatting with a woman and keeping her photo on his smartphone is an “apparent contravention of the Sunni kingdom’s puritanical laws,” as Kenya’s Standard Digital puts it. After a friend sold him out to the Saudi “special police,” Laki found himself in jail.
Sen. Tom Cotton Zarif takes on Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, challenging him to come to Washington, D.C. to “debate Iran’s record of tyranny, treachery, & terror” and mocking Zarif’s “cowardly character,” as exhibited by how he “hid in US during Iran-Iraq war while peasants & kids were marched to die.”
Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Renald “Luz” Luzier, who drew the toon of Mohammed holding a “Je suis Charlie” sign for the record-breaking post-massacre comeback issue of the French magazine, says he’s done drawing pictures of Islam’s prophet.
Christians in Aleppo, Syria, are currently facing some of the most intense fighting since the civil war broke out in 2011. Archbishop Jean-Clément Jeanbart spoke out following Easter attacks on Christians, warning the world Christianity in Syria “could disappear.”
Introduced by a New York University (NYU) statement as H.E. (His Excellency), Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif spoke to a Manhattan crowd Wednesday about U.S.-Iran relations, the ongoing nuclear talks with world powers, his disdain for Sen. Tom Cotton, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and other issues of the day.
“It is clear from talking with front line Kurdish Peshmerga that Canadian special forces have done more on the ground in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant than their coalition partners, including the U.S., and are going to play a critical part in the coming action to expel these fanatical hardliners from Mosul,” writes the Canadian National Post.
Matthew Luke, Al Jazeera America’s (AJA) former director of media and archive management, was fired because he complained about his boss’s constant “anti-American and anti-Semitic rants,” a new lawsuit alleges.
In Iran, it is controversial when your president says that “the police are not tasked to enforce Islam but their duty is to enforce the law,” according to the responses of the country’s top Islamic clerics.
A school in northeast France received criticism after the principal sent home a 15-year-old Muslim girl named Sarah for wearing a long black skirt, which the principal believed was a violation of the nation’s secular dress code for schools.
A new study claims that Pope Francis is the most influential person on Twitter for the third year in a row, and his influence is growing steadily. Although U.S. President Barack Obama has more followers than any other world leader, Pope Francis is the most retweeted leader, which counts more for “influence,” according to the criteria used by the study.
A group of Muslim supporters in Egypt have joined a project to raise money to build a new Coptic Christian church just north of Cairo.
While climate change activists busily campaigned the Pope for support for their projects, Francis’s mind was elsewhere, reflecting on the importance of traditional marriage and the plight of women in the world.
The Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) has begun establishing roots in Tunisia to add territory to their caliphate in the Middle East. It appears they already possess admirers in the country, which is a hotspot for international tourists.
The Venezuelan government will begin rationing electrical supplies this week in response to high demand triggered by heat. Public employees will only have to work six hours a day until further notice, and police units will be sent to inspect private businesses to ensure they only use their allotted amounts. Venezuelan Vice President Jorge Arreaza blamed the measures on climate change.
Nigeria’s jihadist group Boko Haram is in Zimbabwe and could soon reach South Africa, reports the U.K. based news outlet ZimEye, citing Zimbabwe’s national intelligence agency.
While details remain sketchy about the incident, Iranian patrol craft forcibly stopped and boarded a merchant ship under flag of the Marshall Islands. The incident raises two questions—what triggered it and what, if any, responsibility the U.S. may have, under its treaty with the Marshall Islands, to respond to this act of Iranian aggression.
A video has surfaced on Facebook of a group of about 12 Cuban refugees halfway through their voyage to Miami on a tiny motorboat, displaying their rudimentary navigation technology and hoping to make it ashore in America “with luck.”
(Reuters) – A Nepali-French search and rescue team pulled a 28-year-old man, Rishi Khanal, from a collapsed apartment block in the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu on Tuesday after he had spent around 80 hours in a room with three dead bodies.
