The bodies of scores of refugees have been recovered by Libyan authorities responding to two off-coast sinkings of smuggling ships thought to be carrying hundreds of people.
A Red Crescent official told the Associated Press that 105 people have so far been confirmed dead, but it is feared that the total could rise as hundreds are still missing. On Friday, Libyan authorities were observed removing bodies from the waters off the coastal city of Zuwara — a launch pad for overcrowded refugee ships heading to Europe.
Refugee boat sinkings claim at least 100 off Libya, hundreds more missing
65 Pounds of Diamonds Vanish in Russia
Rough diamonds worth millions of dollars have reportedly disappeared from Russia's supposedly impenetrable repository created by the Bolsheviks to store the tsar's jewels.
The state-owned Severalmaz company handed diamonds weighing a combined 150,000 carats — or 66 pounds — to the Gokhran repository for inventory purposes, according to respected business daily Kommersant.
Same-sex couple cheers gay marriage ruling in Kentucky
April Miller and Karen Roberts hugged as the news flashed across their television screen, and their hug turned into a brief slow dance across the living room rug.
A federal appeals court had just upheld a ruling ordering the clerk in their rural Kentucky county to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
For two months since the United States Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage across the country, Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis has refused to issue any marriage licenses, citing her Christian faith and constitutional right to religious freedom. On Thursday, her office refused to issue a marriage license to another couple, William Smith Jr. and James Yates. It was their third attempt to get a license.
More than 20 dead refugees discovered in truck in Austria
As many as 50 refugees were found dead in a parked truck in eastern Austria on Thursday, police said, marking what one Austrian official called a “dark day” in Europe’s escalating refugee crisis.
The vehicle, which contained between 20 and 50 bodies, was found on a parking strip off the highway in Burgenland state, police spokesman Hans Peter Doskozil said at a press conference with Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner. "This tragedy affects us all deeply," Mikl-Leitner said.
Bob Alexander: The Ghosts in the Clock
A bell tolls each life event.
Bong … New Year's … Bong … Birthdays … Bong … Spring … Bong … Summer … Bong … Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas and … Bong … Happy New Year.
Before we can catch our breath the bell tolls again for the very next thing as we continue to race around the sun at the speed of time. To remember what we have seen, rushing from one thing to the next, we watch television, the medium designed to make us forget. To facilitate the forgetting process the most trusted television news network tells us lies 60% of the time.
The second hand sweeps around the face of the clock, every second a new story is told, and with every revolution memories are wiped clean. Memory is a palimpsest; the new erases the old and is itself overwritten by the next. But … stop the clock … and we can see the ghosts who live between the tick and the tock. Before the present is erased by the future, we can still see the faint traces of the past. As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
Activists threaten lawsuit against EPA over fracking-induced earthquakes
Environmental groups have threatened to sue the Obama administration for failing to prevent swarms of earthquakes that came in the wake of America’s fracking boom.
In a first step to a lawsuit, the groups on Wednesday challenged the Environmental Protection Agency to improve what they said were weak laws governing the disposal of fracking waste – or go to court.
The groups, led by the Environmental Integrity Project, said the EPA had stalled for years in regulating waste from the oil and gas industry.
Marcy Borders Was Much More Than 9/11’s ‘Dust Lady’
With Marcy Borders’s death from stomach cancer, aged 42, the picture is back again, of course: Borders, caked in dust on September 11, 2001, looking stunned at the camera, caught on the day that would come to define her far-too-short life.
When I see that famous image I recall meeting her nearly 10 years later, and us both standing in the living room of her apartment in Bayonne, New Jersey, looking at the dress she wore that day which she had kept unwashed. It still smelled of smoke and burning, it was still dusty, and had a soot-like film to it, a thick, claggy texture: a remnant of a terrible day that still reeked and felt of that day.
Pew Study Finds Orthodox Similar to Evangelical Christians - not Other Jews
Wearing black hats or donning small yarmulkes, Orthodox Jews represent a distinct subgroup within the Jewish community — more observant, more conservative and more insular.
But the revelation in a report released today by the Pew Research Center is that Orthodox Jews vote, believe, worship, act and raise their children more like white evangelical Protestants than like their fellow Jews.
Okinawans decry noise, chemical pollution at US bases across island
Seventy years after the end of World War II, there are 32 U.S. military facilities in Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture. Many of the U.S. bases there are concentrated in the crowded southern part of the island
. The sparsely populated north is home to the U.S. Marine Corps Camp Gonsalves and the Jungle Warfare Training Center (JWTC). The northern and central training areas make up a 37,000-acre expanse of rugged subtropical jungle that includes the U.S.’s only site designated for practicing jungle warfare and have played a major role in training since before the Vietnam War.
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