When a child goes missing in this central Ugandan district, villagers beat drums into a pulsing rhythm that sends rescuers scampering through bushes. Others, riding motorcycles, try to block exit routes. In response to the kidnappings and ritual killings of children here, the traumatized community has created a rudimentary but effective abduction alert system that […]
CASSANO ALL’JONIO, Italy – Pope Francis journeyed Saturday to the heart of Italy’s biggest crime syndicate, met the father of a 3-year-old boy slain in the region’s drug war, and declared that all mobsters are automatically excommunicated from the Catholic Church. During his one-day pilgrimage to the southern region of Calabria, Francis comforted the imprisoned […]
Baghdad, Iraq (CNN) — A strategic border crossing and three other towns in western Iraq fell Saturday to the control of ISIS militants, a senior Iraqi security official said. In addition to their offensives in northern Iraq, the militants have now strengthened their hand in the western province of Anbar, the country’s largest geographically, and were […]
As Iraq edges toward chaos, Joe Biden is having a quiet I-told-you-so moment. In 2006, Biden was a senator from Delaware gearing up for a presidential campaign when he proposed that Iraq be divided into three semi-independent regions for Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. Follow his plan, he said, and U.S. troops could be out by […]
The owner of an Australian funeral home says she was forced to keep a dead body in her car overnight with the air conditioning turned on because the morgue wouldn’t accept the corpse, according to the North West Telegraph. Joanne Cummings, co-owner of Pilbara Funeral Services, told the Australian newspaper she burned through three tanks of […]
Thousands of heavily-armed Shiite militiamen paraded through several Iraqi cities Saturday as Sunni militants seized two strategically located towns in what appeared to be a new offensive in western Anbar province. The capture of the two towns — Qaim on the Syrian border Friday and Rawah along the Euphrates River on Saturday— dealt another blow […]