Iran on Thursday accused the Saudi-led coalition battling Shiite rebels in Yemen of hitting its embassy in the capital, Sanaa, in an overnight airstrike, but there were no visible signs of damage on the building.
The accusation comes amid a dangerous rise in tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia in recent days, following the kingdom’s execution of a Shiite cleric and attacks on Saudi diplomatic posts in the Islamic Republic.
Analysts have feared the dispute could boil over into the proxy wars between the two Mideast rivals in Yemen and in Syria.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Exactly 43 years ago this week, Republican New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller called for mandatory prison sentences of 15 years to life for even the lowest-level drug offenders.
Now, some of those aspiring to be the next Republican president seem to be trying to outdo each other in striking a softer tone when it comes to tackling the nation’s drug epidemic.
Things got personal at the New Hampshire Forum on Addiction and the Heroin Epidemic on Tuesday, where candidates addressed voters in a state where more people died last year from overdoses than in highway crashes.
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New Hampshire Forum on Addiction and the Heroin Epidemic
In the days since gunmen took over a federal wildlife refuge in Burns, Oregon, the anti-federalist militants have accomplished little more than exhausting the patience of locals.
At the same time, they have brought renewed scrutiny to American right-wing, anti-government extremist groups — a population whose numbers surged in the 1990s and are on the rise once again.
A tally released Monday by The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist organizations, identified 276 anti-government militia groups in the U.S., a 37 percent jump from 2014. The militia groups are an armed subset of so-called patriot groups that “typically adhere to extreme antigovernment doctrines and subscribe to groundless conspiracy theories about the federal government,” according to the law center.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Fresh evidence of China’s slowing economy rocked U.S. stock markets Monday, setting off “violent New Year fireworks” that suggest global concerns will continue to buffet American investors in 2016.
All major U.S. stock exchanges and indexes plunged before opening on news that Chinese factory activity shrank sharply in December, and remained well in the red on the first day of trading in the new year. Middle East tensions, which briefly pushed up oil prices, added to the angst on Wall Street.
The Dow Jones industrial average briefly plunged more than 450 points before making a slight recovery.
A clip of Donald Trump is featured in a purported new recruitment video released by Al-Shabaab, the terrorist group based in Somalia.
The GOP presidential candidate is shown discussing his plan to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States.
Before Trump’s appearance in the nearly 52-minute video, the al Qaeda-linked Islamic extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a 2011 U.S. drone strike, is shown lecturing: “Muslims of the West, take heed and learn from the lessons of history. There are ominous clouds gathering in your horizon. Yesterday, America was a land of slavery, segregation, lynching and Ku Klux Klan. And tomorrow, it will be a land of religious discrimination and concentration camps.”
El Salvador’s homicide rate jumped 70 percent this year, putting the country on track to become the most dangerous in the world.
The homicide rate had dropped in recent years after the country’s gangs reached a truce that limited the violence there. But the pact collapsed last year, sending the murder rate soaring to levels that rival those of Honduras, which for years has registered the highest homicide rate in the world.
Some 6,500 Salvadorans died violently this year, compared to 3,912 the year before, according to police statistics cited by Reuters. That works out to a homicide rate of 104 per 100,000 people, or about 18 homicides a day, according to the Spanish newswire EFE — a figure that exceeds even the average daily number of violent deaths during El Salvador’s brutal civil war, which lasted from 1980 through 1992.
Tamir Rice of Cleveland would be alive today had he been a white 12-year-old playing with a toy gun in just about any middle-class neighborhood in the country on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 2014.
But Tamir, who was shot to death by a white police officer that day, had the misfortune of being black in a poor area of Cleveland, where the police have historically behaved as an occupying force that shoots first and asks questions later. To grow up black and male in such a place is to live a highly circumscribed life, hemmed in by forces that deny your humanity and conspire to kill you.
Those forces hovered over the proceedings on Monday when a grand jury declined to indict Officer Timothy Loehmann in the killing and Timothy McGinty, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, explained why he had asked the grand jurors to not bring charges. Mr. McGinty described the events leading up to Tamir’s death as tragic series of errors and “miscommunications” that began when a 911 caller said a male who was “probably a juvenile” was waving a “probably fake” gun at people in a park.
For the first time since Tamir Rice was shot and killed by the Cleveland police last year, the prosecutor in the case ran from the press.
After announcing the grand jury’s decision on Monday not to indict anyone in the 12-year-old’s death, Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty simply left and didn’t take any questions.
McGinty did acknowledge that the outcome “will not cheer anyone,” and offered a more-or-less correct view about what the law demands of police officers making split-second decisions when they fear for their lives.
“It would be irresponsible and unreasonable if the law required a police officer to wait and see if the gun was real,” McGinty said, in reference to the toy gun the 12-year-old held as officer Timothy Loehmann perceived a threat he felt left him no choice but to shoot.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
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.
El Chapo
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
New Hampshire Forum on Addiction and the Heroin Epidemic
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
James' World 2 