CNN has not renewed show host Reza Aslan’s program a week after the host was forced to apologize for calling President Donald Trump “a piece of shit” for Trump’s response to a suicide bombing at a concert in Manchester.
“CNN has decided to not move forward with production on the acquired series Believer With Reza Aslan (season two),” a CNN spokesperson said in a statement. “We wish Reza and his production team all the best.”
The news comes a week after Aslan had to apologize for calling Trump a “piece of shit” in a tweet. The tweet, which has since been deleted, read:
“This piece of shit is a not just an embarrassment to America and a stain on the presidency. He’s an embarrassment to humankind.”
Former FBI Director James Comey came to the Senate intelligence committee ready to unload, one month after President Donald Trump fired him, and he delivered.
Comey talked for close to three hours, answering a range of questions about the FBI’s Russia investigation, and his private interactions with Trump and his thinking about how he handled the Hillary Clinton email probe. And, like his previous hearings, he made it hard for Democrats and Republicans to extract clear victories beyond what he wanted to tell.
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Comey called President Donald Trump a liar — a lot
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards say Saudi Arabia supported ISIS in the deadly twin attacks in Tehran on Wednesday, an accusation likely to infuriate the Saudi kingdom amid high tensions in the region.
At least 12 people were killed when six attackers mounted simultaneous gun and suicide bomb assaults on Iran’s Parliament building and the tomb of the republic’s revolutionary founder, in one of the most audacious assaults to hit Tehran in decades. The targets were highly symbolic.
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Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia and Shiite-majority Iran have had strained relations throughout their history and have been involved in a sectarian feud for more than 1,000 years. The two rivals are on opposite sides of the violent conflicts in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, and given the tensions, Iran’s implication about the attack isn’t a great shock.
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Six attackers went after two highly symbolic targets
Acting US ambassador to China David Rank resigned from his post in Beijing over President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, several sources familiar with the decision told CNN.
A career foreign service officer since 1990, Rank assumed the position of deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Beijing in January 2016 and had been serving as charge d’affaires until the arrival of Trump’s pick for the job, former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, who was confirmed by Congress late last month.
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“Dave is exactly the type of diplomat any American would want representing their interests abroad, and he was sought after within the State Department for increasingly difficult and challenging assignments because he’s strategic, smart, savvy, curious, loyal and non-partisan,” said Dan Feldman, who worked with Rank for five years on Afghan issues.
The gunman in Monday’s fatal shooting spree at an Orlando, Florida, business targeted his victims and had a “negative relationship” with at least one of them, according to law enforcement.
Army veteran John Robert Neumann, Jr. killed five employees of Fiamma Inc. before killing himself, Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings said.
The company makes accessories for recreational vehicles. Neumann was fired from there in April.
He walked into the business Monday morning and pointed his gun at a new, temporary employee and told her to leave, Demings said.
“He was certainly singling out the individuals he shot,” Demings told reporters Monday afternoon.
An ISIS leader who provided the group with the religious justification for turning “infidel” women into sex slaves was killed earlier this week in a U.S. airstrike, according to reports on jihadi websites.
Posts on ISIS forums in the “deep web” say Turki al-Binali, 32, was killed Monday.
Alex Kassirer of Flashpoint Intelligence, which tracks ISIS social media for NBC News, reports that jihadis “are posting a lot of photos of him and eulogizing him (many referring to him by his kunya (battle name), Abu Sufyan al-Sulami).”
Many of the social media posts carried an Arabic hashtag that translates into “the martyrdom of Sheikh Turki al-Binali.”
. Senior ISIS leader Turki al-Binali. via Flashpoint
A disgruntled former employee at an Orlando, Florida RV accessory business fatally shot five workers Monday morning before turning the gun on himself, according to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office.
The shooting was first reported around 8 a.m. at the headquarters for Fiamma, Inc. Once deputies arrived on scene, they found three men and one woman already dead, Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings said during a press conference.
A fifth man was transported to a nearby hospital where he died, according to Demings.
Authorities believe suspect John Robert Neumann Jr., 45, who was fired in April, shot himself just before deputies entered the scene two minutes after they were first called, Demings said at a later press conference.
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Orlando Business Mass Shooting: Fired Employee Kills 5
Barely an hour after a news organization published an article about a Top Secret National Security Agency document on Russian hacking, the Justice Department announced charges against a 25-year-old government contractor who a senior federal official says was the leaker of the document.
The May 5, 2017 intelligence document published by The Intercept, an online news organization, describes new details about Russian efforts to hack voting systems in the U.S a week prior to the 2016 presidential election. While the document doesn’t say the hacking changed any votes, it “raises the possibility that Russian hacking may have breached at least some elements of the voting system, with disconcertingly uncertain results.”
Even as the document was ricocheting around Washington, the Justice Department announced that a criminal complaint was filed in the Southern District of Georgia charging Reality Leigh Winner, 25, a federal contractor, with removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet.
. Reality Leigh Winner, 25, a federal contractor charged by the U.S. Department of Justice for sending classified material to a news organization, poses in a picture posted to her Instagram account. Handout / Reuters
Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian dictator with the pockmarked face whose brutal six-year reign was ended by a U.S. invasion, has died. He was 83.
Noriega, who in recent years had suffered from prostate cancer and survived several strokes, was the first foreign leader to be convicted of crimes in a U.S. court and served more than a dozen years in an American prison before he was finally allowed to return home to Panama.
Noriega died at Hospital Santo Tomas in Panama City at around 11:00 p.m. local time, the hospital confirmed to NBC News.
Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela also tweeted about the death, saying his passing “closes a chapter in our history; his daughters and their families deserve a burial in peace.”
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U.S. Drug Enforcement Agents help Noriega into plane from Panama City to Miami on Jan. 4, 1990. Charles M. Reger / U.S. Air Force via AP
Fired FBI director James Comey plans to testify publicly in the Senate as early as next week to confirm bombshell accusations that President Donald Trump pressured him to end his investigation into a top Trump aide’s ties to Russia, a source close to the issue said Wednesday.
Final details are still being worked out and no official date for his testimony has been set. Comey is expected to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russia during last year’s presidential election.
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Comey has spoken privately with Special Counsel Robert Mueller III to work out the parameters for his testimony to ensure there are no legal entanglements as a result of his public account, a source said. Comey will likely sit down with Mueller, a longtime colleague at the Justice Department, for a formal interview only after his public testimony.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Comey called President Donald Trump a liar — a lot
Six attackers went after two highly symbolic targets
James' World 2 