Illinois State Trooper Douglas Balder sat in his squad car, its red and blue lights strobing into the frozen night of Jan. 27, 2014. He was about to be set on fire.
Balder had stopped to assist a Chicago-bound big rig that had stalled out in the rightmost lane of the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway. A heavy-duty tow truck and a bright yellow Tollway assistance vehicle were also pulled over, attending to the stranded semi.
Balder, a Navy reservist and father of two, had his heater cranked against minus-30-degree wind chill. He had positioned his 2011 Crown Victoria behind the Tollway vehicle and switched on his flashers. There were also flares sputtering on the pavement, and the Tollway truck was flashing a large blinking arrow and its amber hazard lights. Visibility on that clear, cold night was excellent — around 10 miles.
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Illinois State Police
A scene from the Jan. 27, 2014 tractor trailer accident that killed one man and critically injured Illinois State Trooper Douglas Balder.
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Shortly after last November’s attacks on Paris by a Brussels-based Islamic State cell, a top U.S. counter-terrorism official traveling in Europe wanted to visit Brussels to learn more about the investigation.
When the official tried to arrange meetings, however, his Belgian counterparts were not welcoming, according to U.S. officials familiar with the events. The Belgians indicated it was a bad time to speak to foreign officials as they were too busy with the investigation, said the officials, who asked not to be identified.
Belgian officials declined to comment on the incident.
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Vincent Kessler/Reuters Several U.S. officials also say that security cooperation has been hampered by Brussels’ patchy intelligence-sharing and some agencies’ unwillingness to work with foreign countries.
Editor’s note: This post contains discussions about suicide, including quotes from a suicide note.
It was one month into the New Year and MarShawn McCarrel had a lot going for him. He’d just turned 23 years old. His family and friends loved him. He’d recently gotten back from Los Angeles, where he’d traveled to attend the NAACP Image Awards with his mother, Leatha Wellington, as his date.
He was also getting ready to start a new job in Washington, D.C. — a stark but exciting change from his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. A new romantic relationship seemed to be moving along nicely. His friends say he showed no obvious signs that anything was wrong.
Then on Feb. 8, McCarrel logged onto Facebook and typed an ominous status update. “My demons won today,” he wrote at 2:37 in the afternoon. “I’m sorry.” A few hours later, he climbed the steps of the Ohio Statehouse in downtown Columbus, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
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Ohio Statehouse in downtown Columbus Image Credit: Getty Images
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The Pentagon released a long-anticipated plan outlining the steps the Obama administration will take to close the notorious Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
The document released Tuesday morning contained few surprises and failed to remedy conflicts between President Barack Obama’s aspirations to shut down Guantanamo during his final year in office and legal restrictions imposed by Republicans in Congress that prevent the president from sending any of the remaining detainees to the U.S. It was released not because of a breakthrough agreement between the White House and Congress but because of a deadline set by lawmakers for “the details of a comprehensive strategy” on how to detain current and future people captured as part of the broad-reaching war on terror.
Speaking from the White House, Obama reminded Americans that closing Guantanamo Bay was once a bipartisan goal, backed by former President George W. Bush.
President Barack Obama will not rush through a Supreme Court choice to replace Justice Antonin Scalia this week but will wait to nominate a candidate until the U.S. Senate is back in session, the White House said on Sunday.
“Given that the Senate is currently in recess, we don’t expect the president to rush this through this week, but instead will do so in due time once the Senate returns from their recess,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said.
“At that point, we expect the Senate to consider that nominee, consistent with their responsibilities laid out in the United States Constitution,” he said.
Obama is traveling in California and returns to Washington on Tuesday. The Senate returns from recess on Feb. 22.
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President Barack Obama speaking about Justice Antonin Scalia
A deal to establish a central unified government in Libya may be reached by early next week, paving the way for the country to ask the U.S. and other international powers to act against the so-called Islamic State’s presence there, according to a top official from the country hosting the Libyan peace talks.
Mbarka Bouaida, Morocco’s minister-delegate for foreign affairs, made the prediction in an exclusive interview this week with The Huffington Post.
“We try as much as we can, as far as we can as Moroccans, to make a deal between them to find a solution,” Bouaida said Wednesday. “We’re still optimistic on this point. We think we can find a good deal, and they can maybe by the end of this week or early next week, find a solution to fix their government.”
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STRINGER via Getty Images
An oil storage tank set ablaze after ISIS tried to capture oil export facilities in Libya in January.
Donald Trump won New Hampshire with 35 percent of the vote on Tuesday, solidifying his place as the front-runner for the Republican 2016 presidential nomination when the party meets for its national convention in Ohio this summer.
But Cleveland, we have a problem. Hitting 35 percent is terrific, in baseball. In politics, it’a still 16 points shy of a victory, and neither Trump nor any other Republican has shown any signs of doing any better than 40 percent in any individual contest.
If the pattern continues — Trump is polling in the mid-30s in the next two nominating states, Nevada and South Carolina — The Grand Old Party could wind up with Trump as the top choice at its convention without the 1,237 delegates he needs to win the nomination.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Gladyes Williamson paced the halls of Congress on Wednesday, armed with a bottle of brown water and clumps of her own hair.
She’d traveled with a group from Flint, Michigan, where high lead levels have made the water irritating to the skin and unsafe to drink since 2014. Williamson trekked 14 hours on a packed bus, with no sleep, to remind Washington of what’s happening in a poor, embattled, industrial town nearly 75 miles north of Detroit.
“Not only do we feel like the Republicans hate us, but now that the Democrats don’t care either,” Williams, 62, told The Huffington Post. “We just need something tangible to make us believe that politicians care about us. The wards in Flint haven’t seen any of this federal aid, but we do all the tax paying and all the dying.”
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Washington, D.C., is bracing to be in the crosshairs of a monster storm that could clobber the East Coast with snow and ice this weekend, forecasters warned.
“Confidence is high in this being a historic snowstorm for the Mid-Atlantic region,” NBC meteorologist Bill Karins said Wednesday.
The nation’s capital could get 18 to 24 inches of snow, according to the Weather Channel. The National Weather service issued a blizzard watch for the city on Wednesday, and will be in effect Friday afternoon through late Saturday night. Baltimore, Maryland, was also included in the blizzard watch.
President Barack Obama put the American people on notice Tuesday night that a dark future awaited U.S. democracy if they didn’t begin to come together rather than retreat into ethnic or religious corners.
In describing what one Republican senator called an “apocalyptic future,” Obama laid out a possible path the country could take away from democracy and toward what sounded like an American version of fascism.
“I remember thinking it’s kind of a dreadful prediction for our future,” Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) told HuffPost. “He was very optimistic about America, but then he laid out a very almost apocalyptic future.”
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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.
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President Barack Obama speaking about Justice Antonin Scalia
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
James' World 2 