MEXICO CITY — Squads of riot police backed by water cannon Friday swept into the historic heart of Mexico’s capital, scurrying between bonfires to flush out striking teachers, some of whom swung pipes and threw rocks at security forces.
As helicopters hovered overhead, masked protesters fleeing the square tore up pavement, installed impromptu barricades and tossed rocks.
BOSTON -- Judith and Warren Russell, parents of Katherine Russell, declined to comment to The Associated Press as they entered the grand jury room in U.S. District Court in Boston [....]
The U.S. Attorney's office would not comment on whether Russell or anyone else is being investigated or why a grand jury continues to meet after four people have already been indicted.
By James S. Traub, ForeignPolicy.com, Sept. 13, 2013
[....] When Obama somewhat reluctantly chose Kerry as his secretary of state, very few people -- me included -- expected to see the veteran senator go out on such a limb. [....]
By Colum Lynch, The Cable @ ForeignPolicy.com, Sept. 11, 2013, 8:41 pm
U.N. inspectors have collected a "wealth" of evidence on the use of nerve agents that points to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad using chemical weapons against his own people, according to a senior Western official.
once again puts together a superb selection of photo journalism easily viewed on one page. This one is 38 photos illustrating what the World Health Organization now calls the worst ongoing humanitarian crisis on earth. With the captions, the result of the whole is so strikingly "biblical" and global that it's like a slap across the face.
By Chris Buckley, New York Times, Sept. 10/11, 2013
HONG KONG — These are bad times to be a Big V in China. Big V, for verified account, is the widely used moniker for the most influential commentators on China’s growing microblog sites — online celebrities whose millions of fans read, discuss and spread their outpouring of news and opinions, plenty of which chastise or ridicule officials. And the Communist Party has turned against them in the most zealous crackdown on the Internet in years.
BEIJING — A homemade bomb outside a school in the southern city of Guilin on Monday killed at least two people and injured 17, many of them children, according to state news reports.
The two who died in the explosion were a man and a woman, according to the microblog of China Central Television, the main state television network. Of the injured, 10 were children who attended the school, which housed both elementary and secondary grades.
Philippine officials say Muslim rebels have taken 20 more civilians hostage during a second day of a standoff with the military in the southern part of the country.
Police say a faction of the the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) now holds at least 170 people hostage in Zamboanga, a city on the southern island of Mindanao.
About 300 gunmen stormed villages there Monday, killing at least four people and injuring at least 14 others. Local officials say about 1,500 people have fled their homes.
By Eva von Schaper, Bloomberg News, Sept. 10, 2013
Almost one in four men surveyed in Asia said they committed rape at least once, in a study that may encourage renewed steps to prevent sexual violence.
NEW DELHI — It began in the smallest of ways, when a teenage Hindu girl complained to her family that she'd been verbally harassed by a Muslim boy.
The girl's brother and cousin allegedly responded by going to the teenage boy's home and shooting him to death. Reacting to that, members of his family and others in the Muslim community allegedly beat to death the brother and cousin.
This link will take you to those news items posted as comments on the last thread.
Thought I should start a new thread on topic for further updates and/or discussion, because this is definitely a "developing" and not a finished story.
My father, Terry Anderson, was kidnapped during the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s. Now, history is repeating itself as members of Lebanon’s various sects escalate tit-for-tat abductions.
By Sulome Anderson, The Atlantic, Sept. 6, 2013
[....] His English isn’t good, so my fixer does most of the talking.
“The Sunni people are acting like thugs,” the man says. “They’re trying to make a sectarian war. They’re the ones who are kidnapping and killing people, throwing bombs, eating hearts.” [....]
By Yasmine El Rashidi, New York Review of Books, online now, and Sept. 26, 2013 issue
If you want a much better understanding of why educated liberal Egyptians are calling the Muslim Brotherhood "terrorists," and why they are angry at Western denunciation of the military coup, you'll read this.
Venezuela was plunged into darkness on Tuesday when the country's main power distribution network failed, depriving 70% of the country of electricity and creating traffic chaos in much of Caracas.
