The US said Monday it believes the Syrian government has built a large crematorium near the notorious Saydnaya Military Prison in an effort to hide mass atrocities carried out there, and placed the onus on Russia to rein in the regime.
Stuart Jones, acting assistant secretary for the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department, laid out newly unveiled declassified intelligence in a series of photographs and said Russia, a supporter of President Bashar al-Assad, must use its influence to stop Assad’s continued atrocities.
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“Although the regime’s many atrocities are well-documented, we believe the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass atrocities taking place in Saydnaya prison,” Jones said. “We are appalled by the atrocities taking place in Syria” with the “seemingly unconditional support of Russia.”
Jones said the regime could be killing as many as 50 detainees a day at Saydnaya. In February, Amnesty International alleged that thousands of people have been hanged at the Syrian prison just 45 minutes outside the capital of Damascus in a secret crackdown on dissent.
The attorney general on Friday made an unfortunate announcement that will impact the lives of millions of Americans: he issued new instructions for prosecutors to charge suspects with the most serious provable offenses, “those that carry the most substantial guidelines sentence, including mandatory minimum sentences.”
Mandatory minimum sentences have unfairly and disproportionately incarcerated a generation of minorities. Eric Holder, the attorney general under President Obama, issued guidelines to U.S. Attorneys that they should refrain from seeking long sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.
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I agreed with him then and still do. In fact, I’m the author of a bipartisan bill with Senator Leahy to change the law on this matter. Until we pass that bill, though, the discretion on enforcement — and the lives of many young drug offenders — lies with the current attorney general
It looks like a chunk of concrete, can kill with one dose, and it’s got an ominous name — Gray Death.
And it’s the latest killer drug cocktail making headlines in the ongoing war against the national opioid crisis.
So far, it’s been limited to the Gulf Coast and states like Georgia and Ohio and “we are monitoring the potential spread of this deadly combination of drugs,” Russ Baer of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency told NBC News.
“We’ve not yet seen a national proliferation of the ‘gray death’ substance,” the DEA spokesman wrote.
But even as law enforcement is focusing on Gray Death, drug dealers are hard at work on even more lethal drug cocktails made from opioids that are smuggled into the country from Mexico or shipped in by mail from China.
. A forensic chemist prepares a sample of the drug “gray death” to be weighed at the crime lab of the Georgia Bureau of Investigations in Decatur, Ga., on May 4, 2017. Mike Stewart / AP
Donald Trump’s mounting reversals, failures and betrayals make it increasingly clear that he is a fake and a fraud.
For many of us, this is affirmative reinforcement; for others, it is devastating revelation.
But it is those who believed — and cast supportive ballots — who should feel most cheated and also most contrite. You placed your faith in a phony. His promises are crashing to earth like a fleet of paper airplanes.
He oversold what he could deliver because he had no idea what would be required to deliver it, nor did he care. He told you what you wanted to hear so that he could get what he wanted to have. He played you for fools.
That wall will not be paid for by Mexico, if in fact it is ever built. If it is built, it will likely look nothing like what Trump said it would look like. His repeal and replace of Obamacare flopped. That failure endangers his ability to deliver on major tax reform and massive infrastructure spending. China is no longer in danger of being labeled a currency manipulator. The administration is now sending signals that ripping up the Iran nuclear deal isn’t a sure bet.
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A cardboard cutout of Donald Trump used for photo-ops at a campaign event last year.Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times
Conservative pundit Erick Erickson is vouching for the reliability of a least one source who revealed to Washington Post reporters that President Donald Trump disclosed “highly classified information” while meeting with Russian officials last week.
Erickson knows one of the sources and supports their decision to go to the media, he wrote Tuesday in a blog post for his website, The Resurgent.
“This is a real problem and I treat this story very seriously because I know just how credible, competent, and serious — as well as seriously pro-Trump, at least one of the sources is,” Erickson wrote.
“You can call these sources disloyal, traitors, or whatever you want,” he added. “But please ask yourself a question — if the President, through inexperience and ignorance, is jeopardizing our national security and will not take advice or corrective action, what other means are available to get the President to listen and recognize the error of his ways?”
As police stood between opposing crowds, a crew lifted a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis from its pedestal before dawn Thursday in New Orleans — the latest in a contentious plan to dismantle four Confederate monuments in the city.
The statue, which stood for 106 years, is the second monument to come down after the New Orleans City Council voted to remove the four landmarks in 2015. After years of heated public debate and legal battles, recent court decisions paved the way for the city to relocate the four monuments.
Dozens of people — a crowd opposed to the monument’s removal as well as those backing it — gathered at the Davis statue before the operation began, at times screaming insults and threats at each other. Police separated the sides with barriers.
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New Orleans begins removing second Confederate monument
Hospitals, major companies and government offices have been hit by a massive wave of cyberattacks across the globe that seize control of computers until the victims pay a ransom.
Cybersecurity firm Avast said it had identified more than 75,000 ransomware attacks in 99 countries, making it one of the broadest and most damaging cyberattacks in history.
Avast said the majority of the attacks targeted Russia, Ukraine and Taiwan. But U.K. hospitals, Chinese universities and global firms like Fedex (FDX) also reported they had come under assault.
Europol said Saturday that the attack was of an “unprecedented level and requires international investigation.”
The ransomware, called “WannaCry,” locks down all the files on an infected computer and asks the computer’s administrator to pay in order to regain control of them. The exploit was leaked last month as part of a trove of NSA spy tools.
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How a ransomware attack can affect emergency services (watch Video)
Two Harvard University scientists are suggesting that mysterious fast radio bursts, detected in faraway galaxies, may be evidence of aliens traveling through the cosmos.
FRBs are extremely bright flashes of radio waves that last for only a thousandth of a second and are detected by earthbound telescopes. Since the first one was observed 10 years ago, 17 have actually been reported, although scientists think there are thousands of them a day.
At first, Abraham “Avi” Loeb said, he took a conservative approach to explaining them.
“It looked like the simplest explanation would be flares from stars in the Milky Way galaxy,” said Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist and chair of Harvard’s astronomy department.
But then “one of the FRBs was localized to reside in a small galaxy at a distance of about a billion light-years away,” Loeb told The Huffington Post. (One light-year is about 6 trillion miles.)
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M Weiss/CfA
An artist’s illustration of a light sail powered by a radio beam from the surface of a planet. The leakage from such beams as they sweep across the sky would appear as fast radio bursts.
He obsessed over the police interrogation for years, tormenting himself with questions he could not answer.
“How could you be so stupid?” Tyler Edmonds asked himself. “Why would you do that?”
Edmonds was 13 when he told detectives he helped his half-sister shoot her husband in his sleep ─ a story he says she concocted to skirt blame. He spent four years behind bars before his murder conviction was overturned and a second jury acquitted him. He went to therapy, and studied why children admit to crimes they didn’t commit. He began to understand what he’d done.
“I think the answer is that you’re young and you don’t know any better,” Edmonds, now 27, said.
He has rebuilt his life in many ways. But he is still paying for that confession.
After Mississippi passed a law allowing exonerees to seek compensation, Edmonds sought a payout that he hoped would help his mother, who went deep into debt to pay for his defense. The state refused to give it to him. A judge sided with the state.
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Tyler Edmonds last month at his family’s farmhouse in Columbus, Mississippi. Brock Stoneham / NBC News
Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced its largest anti-gang operation ever on Thursday, a six-week operation that netted more than 1,300 arrests nationwide.
Though the effort was led by ICE, the focus was not exclusively on immigrants. Of the arrests, 933 were US citizens and 445 were foreign nationals, with 384 in the country illegally.
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ICE said three of the arrested individuals were previous recipients of protected status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, instituted by the Obama administration for undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children.
Criminal violations or being deemed a public safety threat can void a person’s DACA status.
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.
Meet the key players in Syria’s civil war
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New Orleans begins removing second Confederate monument
How a ransomware attack can affect emergency services (watch Video)
James' World 2 