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At first, the attack had all the hallmarks of a typical Boko Haram assault. Armed fighters stormed a town on the border with Nigeria, shooting every man they saw.

Boko Haram, the Islamist extremist group terrorizing this part of the world, is on the hunt — for food.

After rampaging across the region for years, forcing more than two million people to flee their homes and farms, Boko Haram appears to be falling victim to a major food crisis of its own creation.

The suspects, identified as Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27 — armed with .223-caliber assault rifles and semiautomatic handguns and wearing masks and body armor — are believed to have opened fire at a social services center here around 11 a.m. on Wednesday, unleashing the deadliest mass shooting since the assault on an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., nearly three years ago

“There had to be some degree of planning that went into this,” Chief Burguan said. “I don’t think they just ran home and put on these tactical clothes.”

As the suspects fled in a black sport utility vehicle, large parts of the city were paralyzed throughout the day.

ISIS Gains a Foothold in Gaza

GAZA CITY — The early hours of the morning of Nov. 24 began with a boom. The Israeli Air Force was hitting targets here in the Gaza Strip, shattering the pre-dawn quiet of this besieged coastal enclave.

“For years, they were ‘quiet,’ they didn’t get involved in politics,” Yousef said. Then, “When Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006, some of them decided to involve themselves.”

Unlike Rubio, he considers violent jihadism a small, toxic strain within Islamic civilization, not a civilization itself.

And unlike Bush, he doesn’t consider it a serious ideological competitor.

While Republicans think ISIS is strong and growing stronger, Obama thinks it’s weak and growing weaker.

the headline grabber in the paper from the liberal thinktank CentreForum concerns ethnicity: the serial losers after 28 years of marketisation, testing, a centralised curriculum and decentralised control of schools are poor white kids.

“During the early years, white British pupils are among the highest achievers,” say the authors. “By the end of secondary school however, those white British pupils are overtaken by 10 other ethnic groups to just below average, when compared with other ethnicities.”

Thatcherite culture celebrated the chancers and the semi-crooks: people who had been shunned in the solidaristic working-class towns became the economic heroes of the new model – the security-firm operators, the contract-cleaning slave drivers; the outright hoodlums operating in plain sight as the cops concentrated on breaking strikes.

So this was a premeditated, conscious attempt to hurt vulnerable children in order to deter future would-be asylum seekers who might bring their kids with them. It was an instrumental cruelty in which children were not seen as subjective beings to be protected but as objects to be used. It wasn’t a policy designed to be hidden, but to be broadcast.

A Trump administration official said Tuesday he warned for months about the potential for harm to migrant children if they were separated from their parents before the administration launched its “zero tolerance” border policy earlier this year.

Shklar puts it this way: “No child can deserve brutality. Punishment is justifiably inflicted in the service of retribution, education or public security; but if it goes away from, or beyond, these ends, we call it ‘cruel and unusual’ and forbid its use.”

To the governments of the other 27 European Union nations, the U.K. message is that failure to agree a Brexit deal would be a geopolitical calamity that could bring unimaginable risks to the Continent’s security. But to the British public, the message has been one of reassurance. The government insists that preparations are well under way to cope with any fallout should the talks fail: Brexiters have flooded the airwaves to drive home the message that no deal is no big deal.

In December’s Joint Report on the state of the negotiations, the British government accepted an obligation to pay €40 billion ($46.4 billion) to the EU in settlement of the U.K.’s outstanding financial commitments

if the U.K. leaves the EU with no agreement and refuses to pay its debts, it will become an international legal pariah, at least in the EU’s eyes. The EU will want to recover what it believes it is rightfully owed and will pursue its claims through international courts.

The good news is that the Trump administration has adopted an approach toward North Korea that goes beyond trading insults, or missiles. They are going to talk.  The bad news? Donald Trump intends to do it himself.“I’m elated and horrified at the same time,” said Jim Walsh, a senior research associate at the MIT Security Studies Program and a board member of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “Elated because the parties are talking; horrified by the prospect of the two most unusual leaders in the world together in a room—what could possibly go wrong?”

So, why not have Trump and Kim meet? Direct talks between America’s and North Korea’s heads of state have never been tried, and nothing else has worked. A summit might be a good idea because it is unprecedented.

Trump may have fantasies of being a ruler like Kim, but he is not. In most matters—and certainly those pertaining to Korea—he is his opposite. He is no policy expert, and he has driven out or failed to appoint specialists to advise him. He disdains expertise and experience as a matter of rule, preferring to make great decisions by instinct—his faith in his gut is wider than his considerable waist. He is driven first and foremost by self-promotion, his degree of calculation is tweet deep; and he has set himself up—“I alone can fix this!”—to be a sucker for the grandstand play. He craves spectacle.

Mr. Bolton, President Bush’s under secretary of state for arms control and international security, had a general disdain for diplomacy that rankled several Republican members of the committee, including George Voinovich of Ohio and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. Mr. Lugar had quietly counseled the administration not to nominate him.

That disdain, in and of itself, did not sink his nomination. Rather, it was the testimony we heard and evidence we uncovered that Mr. Bolton had a habit of twisting intelligence to back his bellicosity and sought to remove anyone who objected

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he Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, offered Tehran billions of dollars in sanctions relief in exchange for agreeing to curb its nuclear program.The agreement was aimed at ensuring that "Iran's nuclear program will be exclusively peaceful." In return, it lifted U.N. Security Council and other sanctions, including in areas covering trade, technology, finance and energy.

ran signed the agreement with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — the U.S., Russia, France, China and the United Kingdom — as well as Germany and the European Union.

The process of diplomacy that the United States pursued with Iran could offer some insights on how to begin engagement with an adversary whose leadership is extremely distrustful of the United States and vice versa,” she wrote in a post for the Arms Control Association.

Fifty years ago this month, France erupted. Students lobbed cobblestones at riot police in Paris’s Latin Quarter. Millions of union workers went on strike. The government of President Charles de Gaulle tottered. Today, the events of May 1968 are generally regarded as more of a cultural milestone than a political one, a time when the ideals of a rising generation collided with the mores of an older, more powerful establishment. Fifty years later, the legacy of those historic weeks remains a subject of debate between the country’s conservative and progressive factions. It is, as the philosopher André Glucksmann described it in 2008, “a monument, either sublime or detested, that we want to commemorate or bury.”

Mr. Caron’s photographs of joyful, radiant students capture what made the unrest seem to some “a huge collective fiesta,” as the journalist Marc Kravetz once described it. But in his photographs of the turmoil in the Latin Quarter — armed riot police racing through the streets, students hurling projectiles through the air — Mr. Caron appears to be documenting nothing less than urban guerrilla warfare (much like this week’s May Day riots). In these photos, Mr. Caron’s experience as a combat photographer helped give his photos a cinematic immediacy and power that quickly made them among the most widely circulated at the time. The protests fizzled in June, President de Gaulle remained in power, and Mr. Caron moved on to other conflicts. In 1969, he photographed the troubles in Northern Ireland and the anniversary of the Prague spring in Czechoslovakia. In 1970, he was taken hostage for a month while covering the civil war in Chad with a group including Mr. Pledge. Just a few months after their release, Mr. Caron traveled to Cambodia, where, one day, he disappeared in Khmer Rouge-controlled territory, never to be seen again. He was 30.

From the fifteenth century on, ethnic Armenians made up a significant minority group within the Ottoman Empire. They were primarily Orthodox Christians, unlike the Ottoman Turkish rulers who were Sunni Muslims.  Armenian families were subject to the and to heavy taxation. As "people of the Book," however, the Armenians enjoyed freedom of religion and other protections under Ottoman rule.

To make matters worse, other Christian regions began to break away from the empire entirely, often with aid from the Christian great powers. Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia...  one by one, they broke away from Ottoman control in the last decades of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.

The Armenian population began to grow restless under increasingly harsh Ottoman rule in the 1870s.  Armenians started to look to Russia, the Orthodox Christian great power of the time, for protection.

Henry of Navarre

Mahomet II conquered Constantinople

One section of the citizens of Paris massacred the rest on Saint Bartholomew’s night

On July 31st, 1589, a young Jacobin friar, Jacques Clément, left Paris for the suburb of Saint-Cloud where Henry III of France had set up his military encampment.

As he did so, the friar produced a knife that he had hidden in the capacious sleeve of his habit and plunged it into Henry’s abdomen

Henry died early the next morning bringing to an end the Valois dynasty that had occupied the French throne since 1328. Henry III was the first king of France to be assassinated by one of his own subjects

The Taliban have held secret meetings with Afghan officials to discuss a ceasefire, the US military says.

However, the Taliban rejected the claims, saying the group did not "want to waste time in the name of talks" with the Afghan government "in the presence of the occupying forces".Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has previously proposed negotiations with the Taliban, saying they could be recognised as a political party if they accepted a ceasefire and recognised the country's constitution.

The Taliban have shown an openness to talks in the past, suggesting that, in addition to the armed struggle, negotiations were a "legitimate" way of achieving their main objective: an end to what they call the "occupation by foreign forces".

Like all the black men and women in my family, he believed in hard work, but like all the black men and women in my family, no matter how hard he worked, he never got ahead.

So when I was young, that flag outside our home never made sense to me. How could this black man, having seen firsthand the way his country abused black Americans, how it refused to treat us as full citizens, proudly fly its banner? I didn’t understand his patriotism.

I had been taught, in school, through cultural osmosis, that the flag wasn’t really ours, that our history as a people began with enslavement and that we had contributed little to this great nation. It seemed that the closest thing black Americans could have to cultural pride was to be found in our vague connection to Africa, a place we had never been

A deal with General Motors and Ventec Life Systems to produce tens of thousands of the critical lifesaving devices seemed imminent. Then the announcement was pulled back.

The White House had been preparing to reveal on Wednesday a joint venture between General Motors and Ventec Life Systems that would allow for the production of as many as 80,000 desperately needed ventilators to respond to an escalating pandemic when word suddenly came down that the announcement was off.

The decision to cancel the announcement, government officials say, came after the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it needed more time to assess whether the estimated cost was prohibitive. That price tag was more than $1 billion, with several hundred million dollars to be paid upfront to General Motors to retool a car parts plant in Kokomo, Ind., where the ventilators would be made with Ventec’s technology.

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan GrishamMichelle Lynn Lujan GrishamCapitol Christmas tree lights up Washington Here are 16 places celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day for the first time this year New Mexico releases plan to provide free college to all state residents: report MORE (D) on Tuesday signed into law a measure that grants courts the permission to authorize temporary seizures of guns from individuals deemed to be a threat to themselves or others.Grisham said in a statement that the so-called red flag law would reduce the state’s “unacceptable suicide rate and other forms of gun violence.”

The office added that the law would address the “unconscionably high” per capita rates of firearm deaths and suicide in the state. The firearm death rate in New Mexico was 18.5 per 100,000 people in 2017, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Citizens have a right to bear arms and we cannot circumvent that right when they have not even committed a crime or even been accused of committing one," he wrote. "'Shall not be infringed' is a very clear and concise component of an Amendment that our forefathers felt was important enough to be recognized immediately following freedom of speech and religion."

although the transformation of the role of government in less than two weeks has been genuinely jaw-dropping, this is not yet the same as a wartime crisis in some very important ways. These differences need to be understood, not least because it may help to avoid the error, long familiar in military strategy, of mistakenly setting out to fight the last war rather than tackling the one that we actually face.

Britain in 2020 is not the Britain of 1939, let alone the Britain of 1914. We are an infinitely more connected, more individualistic and more informed society today than we were then.

the incomplete character of Sunak’s huge spending spike. Johnson may say that the state is standing behind society “through thick and thin” but the state is not yet standing behind households, behind renters and the self-employed. At the height of the second world war, public expenditure topped 80% of national income. We are nowhere near that figure yet.

many Americans of good will honestly, if erroneously, believe that what happened in Charlottesville is “not us.” How can this be?

Answering this question demands a look back at some of the most significant patterns of white-on-black violence in American history to identify the precise ways in which that violence was justified, forgotten, or defined as something other than the racist terror that it was.

American chattel slavery—in which blacks were bought, sold, worked, and bred for profit—was created and maintained through violence that was at once brutal and routine