At least 11 people died and dozens were injured in strong tornadoes that swept through the Dallas area and caused substantial damage this weekend, while 13 people died in flooding in the Midwest.
It was the latest of a succession of powerful weather events across the country, from heavy snow in New Mexico, west Texas and the Oklahoma Panhandle to flooding in parts of the Plains and Midwest. Days of tumultuous weather have led to 43 deaths overall — those in Texas, plus five in Illinois, eight in Missouri and 19 in the Southeast.
The full extent of damage from Saturday’s storms along a nearly 40-mile stretch near Dallas came into clear focus. Local officials estimated as many as 1,450 homes were damaged or destroyed. Vehicles were mangled, power lines fell and trees were toppled. Heavy rain, wind and falling temperatures hampered cleanup efforts Sunday afternoon.
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G.J. McCarthy/The Dallas Morning News via AP
Damage is seen in a mobile home park after Saturday’s tornado in Garland, Texas, Sunday, Dec. 27, 2015. At least 11 people died and dozens were injured in apparently strong tornadoes that swept through the Dallas area and caused substantial damage this weekend. (G.J. McCarthy/The Dallas Morning News via AP)
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The refugee crisis in Europe and the ongoing devastation in Syria gained worldwide attention in September when photos emerged showing a drowned Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, lying facedown on the shores of Bodrum, Turkey. Alan’s father is now asking the world to do what it can to help his fellow refugees.
“I’d like the whole world to open its doors to Syrians,” Abdullah Kurdi told the U.K.’s Channel 4 News in a statement broadcasted on Christmas.
Kurdi was a barber in Kobani, Syria, before he and his family fled to Turkey to escape “barrel bombs, explosions and also Daesh” — another name for the militant group that calls itself the Islamic State.
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Anadolu Agency via Getty Images A Turkish gendarmerie soldier moves Alan Kurdi’s body, which washed ashore on a beach after a boat carrying 12 migrants sank off the coast of Mugla’s Bodrum district on Sept. 2, 2015.
In a sign of deep political tension within the Taliban, a collection of religious leaders in the group’s headquarters in Pakistan issued a letter of rebuke this month to the new insurgent leader over his bloody crackdown on dissenting commanders.
It was unclear whether the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times and confirmed in interviews with several Taliban commanders, would amount to more than a symbolic setback for the Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar Mansour. He has aggressively consolidated power since he was named leader in July. Commanders say he has kept a grip on the group’s biggest sources of income, including the trafficking of opium.
The Taliban commanders and members of the group’s ruling council at the headquarters in Quetta, Pakistan, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal negotiations, differed on how much weight was carried by the letter from the religious leaders. But they agreed that it reflected unease over infighting and deadly crackdowns ordered by Mullah Mansour, including the deployment of hundreds of fighters to kill a rival senior commander this month.
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An Afghan police officer searching for drugs in Nimroz Province this spring. The top Taliban commander, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, has a tight grip on trafficking of opium by the Taliban.Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has begun preparing for a series of raids that would target for deportation hundreds of families who have flocked to the United States since the start of last year, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
Citing people familiar with the operation, the Post said the nationwide campaign to deport the illegal immigrants by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could start as soon as early January.
It would be the first large-scale effort to deport families who have fled violence in Central America, the newspaper said.
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A prominent advocacy group is trying to enlist basketball fans to do something about the scourge of gun violence in America.
Everytown for Gun Safety, in collaboration with the NBA, turned to top players like Steph Curry, Chris Paul, Joakim Noah and Carmelo Anthony to participate in an ad campaign against gun violence. The players joined with survivors and victims’ families in a series of short videos directed by Spike Lee.
In one of them, Curry recalls hearing about a little child who died from gun violence at age 3, the same age as his daughter Riley.
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SpaceX made history Monday night when it successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket into orbit, deployed 11 satellites, and then brought the 15-story booster back to Earth for a soft, vertical landing just six miles from where it took off at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
It marks the first time billionaire Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has attempted to land a rocket on land and the first ever successful attempt to recover a rocket from an orbital flight, NBC News reports.
As the rocket came to rest on its landing pad, a SpaceX webcast commentator confirmed, “The Falcon has landed,” drawing an eruption of applause from those gathered at the based private space flight company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
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Making friends is no easy task for modern white nationalists.
In an era of gay marriage and a black president, more than a half-century after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law, separatists can’t exactly swan dive into conversations with strangers about the white-power cause.
But Rachel Pendergraft — the national organizer for the Knights Party, a standard-bearer for the Ku Klux Klan — told The Washington Post that the KKK, for one, has a new conversation starter at its disposal.
You might call it a “Trump card.”
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Donald Trump energizes the crowd during a campaign rally at Dorton Arena in Raleigh, N.C., on Dec. 4. (Ted Richardson/AP)
The number of children who are caught trying to slip across the U.S.-Mexico border alone and illegally has quietly surged again more than a year after President Obama referred to the problem as an “urgent humanitarian situation.”
While the world has been focused on Europe’s migrant crisis, apprehensions of unaccompanied minors along America’s own border have exploded: More than 10,000 undocumented children have been stopped in just the last two months, according to U.S. Border and Customs Protection.
The 10,588 apprehensions are a 106 percent increase over the same Oct. 1 through Nov. 30 period from last year, when 5,129 kids were picked up.
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Salvadorian immigrant Stefany Marjorie, 8, watches as a U.S. Border Patrol agent records family information on July 24, 2014 in Mission, Texas. John Moore / Getty Images FILE
Mother Teresa, who dedicated her life to helping India’s poor, will be made a saint in the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican said Friday.
She will likely be canonized in September to coincide with the 19th anniversary of her death and Pope Francis’ Holy Year of Mercy, according to an Italian Catholic newspaper report.
The pontiff marked his 79th birthday on Thursday by approving a decree that the nun had performed a second miracle 11 years after her death, the Vatican confirmed in a statement.
Guards inside prisons shouldn’t have guns. That’s pretty much an accepted fact. Except in Nevada—and the results are mayhem and death.
In the solitary unit at High Desert State Prison in Nevada, the guards usually follow a simple practice: Never let two inmates out of their cells at once, because you never know what might go wrong. The prison is a massive complex less than an hour from Las Vegas, surrounded by electric fences with razor ribbon and then miles of brush and gravel. In “the hole,” as the solitary unit is known, inmates are isolated for around 23 hours a day—sometimes because they’re being punished, sometimes for their own protection. One evening last November, a 38-year-old corrections officer named Jeff Castro was supervising prisoners as they took turns in the shower cage when two inmates were released into the corridor at the same time.
Andrew Arevalo was a heavily tattooed, round-faced 24-year-old who had been convicted of stealing two paint machines. Carlos Perez, who was four years older, was serving time for hitting a man with a two-by-four and was due to get out of prison in March. Even though they both had their hands restrained behind their backs, they started trying to fight. To Steve McNeill, a prisoner who was watching from his cell, it looked pretty funny: two guys in T-shirts and boxer shorts yelling at each other, clumsily kicking at each other’s shins and then backing away. “Neither could affect an effective offensive, McNeill recalled. ”It was like some awkward and quirky dance, then ‘BOOM.’”
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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.
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
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James' World 2 