President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban on refugee resettlement will worsen the agonies of refugees, a spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday. Speaking at a press briefing at the UN headquarters, Farhan Haq, the deputy spokesperson for Guterres, said refugees are ordinary people forced to flee war, violence and persecution in their […]
Continue Reading“My dear family, please forgive me,” reads the handwritten letter discarded in the dusty halls of an Islamic State training compound in eastern Mosul. “Don’t be sad and don’t wear the black clothes (of mourning). I asked to get married and you did not marry me off. So, by God, I will marry the 72 […]
Continue ReadingAbout 100 headstones at a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia have been knocked over, police said on Sunday, in the latest apparent vandalism incident at a Jewish burial ground in the United States. A Mount Carmel Cemetery visitor called police on Sunday morning to say the gravestones of three of his relatives had been toppled, police […]
Continue ReadingTensions between South Africans and foreigners rose again in Pretoria and parts of Johannesburg recently. Authorities say despite government pleas for peace, damage to property, acts of violence and looting continue to be reported in Pretoria. The Home Affairs minister spoke out Thursday to respond to reports from the Nigerian government claiming that 116 of […]
Continue ReadingA comic show and a recent pop concert have drawn rebuke from powerful religious figures and social media users in Saudi Arabia this week, highlighting the sensitivity of cultural reforms underway in the conservative kingdom. Thousands of Saudis – including women – decked out in costumes and face paint attended the country’s first-ever Comic Con […]
Continue ReadingA stand-off between security forces and monks at Thailand’s biggest temple has exposed a struggle as much about power as religion in the predominantly Buddhist country, where the junta has shut down dissent since a 2014 coup. For the past week, some 4,000 police and soldiers have surrounded the Dhammakaya temple, which practices a form […]
Continue ReadingA stolen WWII gate bearing the infamous Nazi slogan. Returning after two years to its home in Dachau, a former concentration camp in Germany. It disappeared overnight in 2014 and only resurfaced in Norway in December after police followed an anonymous tip off. The words “work sets you free” cast into this Iron Gate would […]
Continue ReadingOmar Abdel-Rahman, the Muslim cleric known as “the blind sheikh” who was convicted of conspiracy in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and of planning a broader “war of urban terrorism” in the United States, died on Saturday in a North Carolina prison, authorities said. Abdel-Rahman, 78, died of natural causes at 9:40 a.m. (1440 […]
Continue ReadingIslamic State published a video on Sunday threatening Egyptian Christians and showing the last statement of a man it said was responsible for the deadly bombing in December of a Coptic cathedral in Cairo. The masked man in battle-dress, whom the group identified as Abu Abdallah al-Masri, is seen encouraging militants all over the world […]
Continue ReadingPakistani security forces killed dozens of suspected militants on Friday, a day after Islamic State claimed a suicide bombing that killed more than 80 worshippers at a Sufi shrine, the biggest in a spate of attacks this week across the country. The bombing at the famed Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine in southern Sindh province was […]
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