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PARIS — A French soldier was stabbed in the throat in a busy commercial district outside Paris on Saturday, and the government said it was trying to determine if there were any links to the brutal killing of a British soldier by suspected Islamic extremists. French President Francois Hollande said the identity of the attacker, [...]
LONDON — Police, politicians and activists in Britain are warning of rising anti-Muslim sentiment following the slaughter of an off-duty British soldier in a London street, an apparent act of Islamic extremism that has horrified the nation. Metropolitan Police investigating the killing of Lee Rigby, a 25-year-old soldier who was run over by attackers then [...]
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — Making his first official trip to sub-Saharan Africa, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Saturday demanded that Nigeria respect human rights as it cracks down on Islamist extremists and pledged to work hard in the coming months to ease tensions between Sudan and South Sudan. Kerry, attending the African Union’s [...]
NEW DELHI — Suspected Maoist rebels set off a land mine and opened fire Saturday on a convoy of cars carrying local leaders and supporters of India’s ruling Congress party in eastern India, killing at least 17 people and wounding 24 others, police said. Senior police officer M. Gupta said the attack occurred in the [...]
LAHORE, Pakistan — Sixteen schoolchildren and a teacher burned to death in eastern Pakistan early Saturday when a short-circuit near a leaking gas tank caused their minibus to burst into flames, police said. Police officer Ijaz Ahmad said five children were also injured, three of whom were listed in critical condition, in the blaze in [...]
MAKHACHKALA, Russia — A female suicide bomber blew herself up in the southern Russian region of Dagestan on Saturday, injuring at least 18, including two children and five police officers, authorities said. The attacker was later identified as a widow of two Islamic radicals killed by security forces. It was the first suicide bombing in [...]
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis’ obsession with the devil took on remarkable new twists Tuesday, with a well-known exorcist insisting Francis helped “liberate” a Mexican man possessed by four different demons despite the Vatican’s insistence that no such papal exorcism took place. The case concerns a 43-year-old husband and father who traveled to Rome from [...]
BAGHDAD — A string of attacks killed at least 16 people in Iraq on Saturday, while gunmen abducted eight policemen guarding a post on the country’s main highway to Jordan and Syria, the latest in a wave of violence to grip the country. The shootings and bombings follow three days of attacks that killed 130 [...]
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) – Conservative religious lawmakers in Afghanistan blocked legislation on Saturday aimed at strengthening provisions for women’s freedoms, arguing that parts of it violate Islamic principles and encourage disobedience. The fierce opposition highlights how tenuous women’s rights remain a dozen years after the ouster of the hard-line Taliban regime, whose strict interpretation of [...]
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — Nigeria’s military declared a 24-hour curfew Saturday on neighborhoods in a northeastern city that’s the spiritual home of an Islamic extremist network as soldiers continued the government’s emergency campaign in the region, with authorities saying they killed 10 suspected insurgents. A statement Saturday on behalf of Lt. Col. Sagir Musa named 11 [...]
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis toured St. Peter’s Square to greet tens of thousands of people attending a rally of prayer, music and speeches Saturday, and he embraced the brother of a Pakistani politician who was assassinated in his country after calling for greater religious freedom for Christians there. Earlier in the day, the pope [...]
PARIS — France will see its first gay weddings within days, after French President Francois Hollande signed a law Saturday authorizing marriage and adoption by same-sex couples and ending months of nationwide protests and wrenching debate. Hollande’s office said he signed the bill Saturday morning, a day after the Constitutional Council struck down a challenge [...]
WASHINGTON — Ineffective management at the Internal Revenue Service allowed agents to improperly target tea party groups for extra scrutiny when they applied for tax exempt status, an internal Treasury Department report said Tuesday. Lax managers allowed the practice to go on for more than 18 months, said the report from the Treasury inspector general [...]
Normally, it’s uncomfortable at best to hear a federal judge – let alone a panel of three such jurists – thunder criticism from the bench. But as usual, Gov. Jerry Brown is different. For beyond doubt, prison realignment has drawn more criticism than any other single thing he has done in his second incarnation as [...]
The current U.S. Congress is a study in contrasts between Republican and Democratic philosophies, but contrasts also exist within the GOP itself. GOP leaders have had limited success in keeping the deep divisions in their congressional ranks out of the public eye; they have had none at all in concealing the party’s increasingly acrimonious rift [...]
A given number of Californians with a given amount of income will spend a given amount on groceries – and with 38 million residents, the state’s grocery business is not only huge, more than $100 billion a year, but hugely competitive. Traditional supermarket chains – Safeway, Raley’s, Albertsons, Save Mart, Ralphs, etc. – compete fiercely. [...]
DHAKA, Bangladesh — Ten days after the horrifying collapse of a garment-factory building, life has become still more gruesome for crews working to recover bodies at the site. The death toll rose to 547 on Saturday and the stench of decaying flesh was sickening evidence that the work is not yet done. Rescue workers said [...]
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — Search teams on Saturday found the bodies of two American crew members near where their military refueling plane crashed in the rugged mountains of Kyrgyzstan, while the third crew member was still missing, the emergencies minister of the Central Asian nation said. The KC-135 plane crashed Friday afternoon about 100 miles (160 [...]
KABUL, Afghanistan — Seven U.S. soldiers and a member of the NATO-led coalition were killed on Saturday in one of the deadliest days for Americans and other foreign troops in Afghanistan in recent months, as the Taliban continued attacks as part of their spring offensive. The renewed violence came as Afghan President Hamid Karzai acknowledged [...]
Each of these “incidents” occurred in an American community from April 22 to April 24, 2013 (and these are just the tip of the iceberg). Since the Newtown massacre, more than 3,300 Americans have died by gunfire. Closer to home, since Jan. 1, 2013, Sacramento has experienced 47 shootings. By what twisted legal logic and [...]
There was a faint whiff of orchestration in Jason Collins’ disclosure of his sexuality, beginning with his first-person declaration on Sports Illustrated’s website: “I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay.” Basketball fans knew the first two parts. The news was in the last sentence. Collins became the first active male player in [...]
Like flowers blooming in the spring, Republican candidates for governor have begun to pop up during the past few weeks. But there’s a key difference between the people who are jumping up this time and many who ran in gubernatorial primaries of the past two decades: There are no billionaires among the early entrants. There [...]
In the April 21 letter to the editor, “Embrace being the new minority,” Robert Hawkins went on a real tirade against Murray Bass’ April 6 column “Cultural changes weaken us as a nation.” Hawkins’ rage never did subside all the way through his letter. He lambasted Bass from start to finish for all the stuff [...]
How perversely ironic that a core principle of the National Rifle Association’s argument in support of unregulated firearms appears to have come true. For years, the NRA has argued that all citizens are entitled to unregulated access to assault rifles and large-clip magazines, presumably to fend off evildoers, such as criminals, a tyrannical government and [...]
Some members of Congress have been agitating for the Obama administration to declare accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev an enemy combatant and have him tried before a military tribunal instead of a civilian criminal court. This would be a mistake on several counts. The federal criminal courts have a long and successful track record [...]
In the gripping 2007 novel, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” a Pakistani-born, Princeton-educated protagonist chronicles his growing disaffection with the fast-track financial-sector life he worked so hard to achieve in America. Uncannily, in light of last week’s Boston Marathon bombings, the movie of Mohsin Hamid’s book is slated to open Friday in New York and Los Angeles. [...]
No one is seriously suggesting that California will soon become another Cyprus, the Greek-speaking Mediterranean island nation whose economic bailout plan includes dunning holders of large bank accounts as much as half their holdings and freezing the rest. But since a federal bankruptcy judge gave the go-ahead for the city of Stockton to seek shelter [...]
I read that the new school superintendent of Fairfield-Suisun School District is taking a hefty cut in pay to come aboard, compared to her predecessor, and is doing so with full understanding (April 11, “Vote expected to confirm next schools chief”). Well, I think that’s great; Solano County supervisors, did you read about that? What an [...]
