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SANAA, Yemen — A suspected U.S. drone strike killed four al-Qaida militants Saturday in a southern Yemeni province once overrun by the group, according to security officials. The officials said the attack took place around dawn in an area called Deyqa in Abyan province. Officials spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to brief the [...]
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea fired three short-range guided missiles into its eastern waters on Saturday, a South Korean official said. It routinely tests such missiles, but the latest launches came during a period of tentative diplomacy aimed at easing tensions. The North fired two missiles Saturday morning and another in the afternoon, South [...]
DES MOINES, Iowa — It’s all about the odds. With four out of every five possible combinations of Powerball numbers in play, someone is almost sure to win the game’s highest jackpot, a windfall of hundreds of millions of dollars – and that’s after taxes. The problem, of course, is those same odds just about [...]
INCLINE VILLAGE, Nev. — Nevada wildlife officials say they were forced to euthanize a bear that entered an Incline Village condominium because the bruin posed a danger to the public. A woman phoned authorities after encountering the 3-year-old, 325-pound male bear inside her unit late Thursday night on Lake Tahoe’s north shore. The Reno Gazette-Journal [...]
KABUL, Afghanistan — Two bombs hidden in a motorcycle and a car exploded inside an elite gated community linked to the family of Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Friday evening, killing at least nine people and wounding more than 70 near the southern city of Kandahar, an official said. The blasts happened inside Aino Mina, [...]
BAGHDAD — Bombs ripped through Sunni areas in Baghdad and surrounding areas Friday, killing at least 76 people in the deadliest day in Iraq in more than eight months. The major spike in sectarian bloodshed heightened fears the country could again be veering toward civil war. The attacks followed two days of bombings targeting Shiites, [...]
PETARE, Venezuela — Stern-looking soldiers clutching assault rifles wave down the beat-up Chevy Caprice entering this sprawling slum on the outskirts of Caracas. Flashlights in his face, the driver steps out and places his hands on the roof while the soldiers frisk him for drugs and weapons. He’s clean, and a hand gesture from the [...]
TORONTO — A video purportedly of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack has caused an uproar in Canada. Ford on Friday called the allegations “ridiculous.” The video has not been released publicly, and there is no way to verify whether it is authentic. Reports by gossip website Gawker and the Toronto Star said it was [...]
Two of the hot topics trending on Twitter Tuesday were Angelina Jolie and the IRS. Beauty and the Beast. Jolie stunned the world with a New York Times op-ed article explaining why she had decided to have a preventive double mastectomy once she learned that she has the BRCA1 gene, which spikes the risk for [...]
Mr. Scherr, my English teacher at Armijo High School, was just one of the people who responded positively to my column last week on teacher appreciation. However, writing about those influential teachers made me think of rather strange incident I had with a junior high teacher I had who we’ll call “Mr. Simmons.” Back in [...]
Russia’s propaganda apparatus may need an infusion of fresh talent to impart a much-needed touch of realism for what movie theaters used to call “selected short subjects.” This arcane branch of Russian cinematography began with a regular series of propaganda films showing Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president and former prime minister, engaged in all manner of [...]
I would like to thank Sen. Lois Wolk for all of her hard work over the years, and for fighting to keep some water in the Delta for us, the people of the 3rd District. Even if the opponents say (April 27, “Legislators criticize state leader’s Delta comments”), “the Delta cannot be saved,” it would [...]
SAN DIEGO — Journalist-turned-activist Jose Antonio Vargas recently said that “racism and xenophobia have no place in the debate on immigration reform, period.” No place? Racism and xenophobia have a permanent place in the immigration debate. As I learned from nearly 25 years of writing about the subject at ground zero – in cities such [...]
As an 18th-century frontier village, it was named El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula, or in English, Town of Our Lady the Queen of Angels of the Little Portion. The name came from a small river that Spanish explorers had discovered 12 years earlier, its name a tribute to [...]
The consensus has been that the economy will continue to recover slowly but steadily unless Congress does something stupid, always a possibility, to mess it up. But surveys of economists by The Wall Street Journal and USA Today indicate that the recovery is strong enough to withstand even Congress. And the possibility of an unexpected [...]
To a person, probably, most of Barack Obama’s supporters believed – a belief the candidate encouraged – that, if elected, he would rein in the worst excesses of President George W. Bush’s national-security strategy. The opposite has happened. President Obama has embraced targeted drone assassinations. Bush operatives used waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” that [...]
When it comes to setting education funding policies for California, preconceived notions have long held at least as much sway as actual reality. Thus it was that when the state Supreme Court in 1971 issued its landmark Serrano v. Priest decision demanding that per-student school funding be equalized throughout the state, the presumption was that [...]
LONDON — Two respiratory viruses in different parts of the world have captured the attention of global health officials — a novel coronavirus in the Middle East and a new bird flu spreading in China. Last week, the coronavirus related to SARS spread to France, where one patient who probably caught the disease in Dubai [...]
BAGHDAD — A sharp rise in attacks on Sunni holy sites in Iraq is feeding fears that the country could spiral into a new round of sectarian violence similar to the bloodletting that brought Iraq to its knees in 2006 and 2007. Majority Shiites control the levers of power in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. Wishing to [...]
SAVAR, Bangladesh — The 19-year-old seamstress who spent 17 days trapped in the rubble of a collapsed factory building said Monday that she will never again work in a Bangladesh garment factory. Reshma Begum was pulled in remarkably good shape from the wreckage of the eight-story Rana Plaza building on Friday. Stunned rescue workers were [...]
SAVAR, Bangladesh — Several of the biggest Western retailers embraced a plan that would require them to help pay for factory improvements in Bangladesh as the nearly three-week search for victims of the worst garment-industry disaster in history ended Monday with the death toll at a staggering 1,127. Bangladesh’s government also agreed to allow garment [...]
There’s absolutely nothing wrong, per se, with incurring debt, whether it’s by families, businesses or governments. A functional credit market is absolutely vital to a modern economy. ”Functional,” however, means not taking on debt beyond a reasonable capacity to repay. We just experienced a wrenching example of dysfunctional borrowing. Mortgage bankers loaned too much money [...]
With high gas prices and a struggling economy, vacation planning is a little dicey this year. Are you planning a summer vacation this summer? Participate in this week’s poll: Last week’s results How does the economy compare to a year ago for you? Better: 42 percent Worse: 30 percent Same: 28 percent 71 Daily Republic [...]
With high gas prices and a struggling economy, vacation planning is a little dicey this year. Are you planning a summer vacation this summer? Participate in this week’s poll: Last week’s results How does the economy compare to a year ago for you? Better: 42 percent Worse: 30 percent Same: 28 percent 71 Daily Republic [...]
SEOUL, South Korea — For 20 years, fears about North Korea’s headlong pursuit of nuclear bombs have been deflected by admonishments not to overestimate an impoverished dictatorship prone to bragging and tantrums. Not anymore. After three nuclear tests of apparently increasing power and a long-range rocket launch that puts it a big step closer to [...]
JERUSALEM — Israeli police with metal barriers and human chains on Friday held back thousands of ultra-Orthodox protesters who tried to prevent a liberal Jewish women’s group from praying at a key holy site, the first time police have come down on the side of the women and not the protesters. The switch followed a [...]
