Daily News Channel
A United Nations court convicted a former governor of Rwanda to life in prison for his role in a 1994 genocide that left about 800,000 dead in the central African country. Tharcisse Renzaho was found guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The verdict, delivered Tuesday, is the third judgment on charges of genocide delivered this year by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)
Four Baghdad churches were bombed in less than 24 hours and eight civilians were wounded, officials said Sunday. Three bombs exploded outside churches Sunday afternoon, wounding the civilians, an Interior Ministry official said. The bombs detonated within a 15-minute span, between 4:30 and 4:45 p.m.
With Germany going to the polls in a general election in three months, authorities are on high alert after detecting an increase in online warnings of terrorist attacks targeting the country. The German government held high-level talks with top security and intelligence chiefs in Berlin on Thursday to discuss the growing threat posed by Islamic extremists and to coordinate counterterrorism measures. Intelligence officials are alarmed by the rising number of videos posted online by militant Islamists who say they are specifically targeting Germany.
Iran has released a British embassy staffer, leaving one of the embassy’s local staff in jail, the Foreign Office in London said Monday. “We are confirming that one of our staff remains in detention,” a Foreign Office representative told CNN, declining to be named, in line with British government policy. “It remains our top priority to get all our staff freed.” A leading Iranian cleric said Friday that the remaining British embassy staffer could be tried for inciting unrest in the wake of Iran’s disputed June 12 presidential election
So far, so good in the first major offensive of President Barack Obama’s war in Afghanistan. For the past four days, 4,000 U.S. Marines and 650 Afghan soldiers have been fighting their way into the southern reaches of Afghanistan’s Helmand River Valley, hoping to clear out insurgents there
Two weeks into turmoil, Iran’s leaders turned up the heat Friday as a high-ranking cleric warned protesters that they would be punished "firmly" and shown no mercy. “Rioters and those who mastermind the unrest must know the Iranian nation will not give in to pressure and accept the nullification of the election results,” said Ayatollah Ahmed Khatami during Friday prayers in Tehran, according to Iran’s state-run Press TV.
A market bombing in central Baghdad killed 15 people Friday morning, continuing the spike in violence as the deadline approaches for the United States to withdraw combat troops from Iraqi cities. The bomb went off in a commercial area where men buy and sell motorcycles, an Interior Ministry official said.
A blogger and Internet radio talk-show host in New Jersey was arrested Wednesday for allegedly threatening to kill three federal appeals court judges in Chicago, Illinois. Those strikes followed a major blast that killed 64 people and injured about 150 others at a Baghdad market early Wednesday and a deadly blast in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk on Saturday that killed 80 people. The Interior Ministry said seven deadly attacks hit Baghdad from Wednesday night into Thursday afternoon.
Iran’s political crisis would end pretty quickly if the opposition went toe-to-toe with the security forces — and no matter how courageous and determined the demonstrators, the likelihood of them toppling the regime on the streets right now is pretty remote. Although at least 30 and perhaps many more opposition supporters have been killed and hundreds have been arrested, the regime has used only a fraction of its capacity for violent suppression, and its security forces show no sign of wavering or splintering. The authorities have warned that defiance of bans on demonstration will no longer be tolerated, and reports out of Iran Tuesday suggested that the regime may be moving to arrest opposition presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi.
Iran’s Guardian Council has ruled out the possibility of nullifying the results of the country’s disputed presidential election, saying irregularities were reported before the balloting — not during or after. The announcement, reported by Iran’s government-funded Press TV on Tuesday, was another in a series of inconsistent stances by the council on how to handle the unrest stemming from the disputed June 12 race. “If a major breach occurs in an election, the Guardian Council may annul the votes that come out of a particular affected ballot box, polling station, district or city, like how it was done in the parliamentary elections,” council spokesman Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei was quoted as saying late Monday