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Burundi’s government was Saturday accused of launching a campaign of repression against independent media, the day after loyalist troops defeated an attempted coup against the central African nation’s president. Rights activist Innocent Muhozi said journalists were being subjected to threats of arrest and even death, and that the head of the prominent independent radio station RPA had been forced to flee the country. On Friday President Pierre Nkurunziza thanked loyalist
BEIRUT (AP) — U.S. commandos mounted a rare raid into eastern Syria overnight, killing a senior Islamic State commander in a firefight, capturing his wife and rescuing a Yazidi woman held as a slave, the Pentagon said Saturday.
The verdict was announced Saturday in Cairo.
The agency is called in to investigate the possibility that the Amtrak train’s windshield was hit with an object shortly before the train derailed.
By Scott Malone and Elizabeth Barber BOSTON (Reuters) – Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death by a U.S. jury on Friday for helping carry out the 2013 attack that killed three people and wounded 264 others in the crowds at the race’s finish line. After deliberating for 15 hours, the federal jury chose death by lethal injection for Tsarnaev, 21, over its only other option: life in
By Jarrett Renshaw PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) – The Amtrak train that derailed in Philadelphia and a separate commuter train in the vicinity may have been hit by projectiles of some kind shortly before the wreck, a U.S. transportation official said on Friday, after investigators interviewed members of the Amtrak crew. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was called in to examine a remnant of the Amtrak locomotive’s shattered windshield with a
By Gary Robertson RICHMOND, Va. (Reuters) – Virginia’s all-women Sweet Briar College holds its final commencement on Saturday, as school supporters battle to stop it from becoming the latest U.S. women-only school to shut down. The 700-student school in southwest Virginia is scheduled to close because of financial woes amid a changing educational landscape that has made U.S. all-women schools a vanishing breed. Commencement speaker Teresa Tomlinson, the mayor of
Four countries including Russia have blocked a bid to add chrysotile asbestos to a list of dangerous substances subject to export restrictions, participants at a UN meeting in Geneva said Saturday. Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Zimbawe opposed listing the mineral also known as white asbestos, which health experts say causes cancer, on the Rotterdam Convention list, according to groups attending the Geneva meeting that wrapped up Saturday.. The 1998 Rotterdam
By Magdalena Mis LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Under the shade of a wooden shack in the western Chadian town of Bagasola, heavily pregnant Zara Gayi sells mangoes and vegetables, hoping to earn enough money to feed her four children. “My husband used to ride boats to Nigeria. In the past, he could earn 100,000 Naira ($500) a month,” she told the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF. Disruptions to trade
By Magdalena Mis LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – South Sudan has defended a law limiting the number of foreign aid workers that can work in the country despite concerns from relief groups that the move could have “potentially catastrophic effects” for the millions of people who need help. The law, which is awaiting President Salva Kiir’s signature after being passed on Tuesday, requires non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to limit foreign employees,
