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Lebanese security forces have arrested nine people, most of them Syrian nationals, over their alleged involvement in last week's twin bombings in Beirut that killed at least 44 people, the interior minister said.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group claimed responsibility for the attacks last Thursday, which hit a busy shopping street in Burj al-Barajneh.

The initial plan was apparently to send five suicide bombers to a hospital in the neighbourhood, he said, but heavy security forced them to change the target to a densely populated area.

As Allied Forces fought the Nazis for control of Europe, an unlikely unit of American and British art experts waged a shadow campaign

It was the fall of 1943. A couple of months earlier, the Sicilian landings of July 10 had marked the beginning of the Allied Italian campaign.

The idea of safeguarding European art from damage was unprecedented in modern warfare.

So, if we’re going to fast from anything this Lent, Francis suggests that even more than candy or alcohol, we fast from indifference towards others.

Describing this phenomenon he calls the globalization of indifference, Francis writes that “whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others, no place for the poor. God’s voice is no longer heard, the quiet joy of his love is no longer felt, and the desire to do good fades.” He continues that, “We end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own.”

Germany train crash: Several killed near Bavarian town of Bad Aibling

The trains' operator said both trains had partially derailed and were wedged into each other.

nd scores more injured, police say, after two passenger trains collided in the German state of Bavaria.

There is chaos in the French refugee camp that has come to be known as the Jungle. In an effort to dismantle the camp, riot police in Calais have directed bulldozers and fired tear gas and water cannons at the refugees, and some aid workers have been caught in the crossfire.

They came in very forcefully. They told the refugees they had one hour to leave their houses or they would be arrested. And the minute the refugees were out of the houses, they stepped in and begin demolishing them with axes and hand tools and carting all the remains away with bulldozers.

This camp has been around since March 2015. And originally, all the refugees were just living in tents. And over the last six months, we've had a massive project with volunteers from all over Europe coming in and building little shelters.

Nancy Reagan dies in Los Angeles at 94: Former first lady was President Reagan's closest advisor

First Lady Nancy Davis Reagan, whose devotion to her husband made her a formidable behind-the-scenes player in his administrations and one of the most influential presidential wives in modern times, died Sunday of congestive heart failure, her office said

Although Reagan pursued some programs of her own as first lady, she considered her most important role promoting the political, physical and mental well-being of Ronald Reagan.

Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes was livid. On February 19, 1942, 74 days after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, his boss, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the internment of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, 62% of whom were American born.

To drive his dissent home, Ickes soon had four Japanese-American men and three women transferred from a relocation camp in Arizona to his home in Olney, Maryland.

Donald Trump has defended his call to stop all Muslims from entering America, approvingly invoking FDR's mistaken action of 1942 as his benchmark. FDR, in my opinion, was the greatest president in U.S. history. But EO 9066 was his biggest mistake.

What's your first and last name? Your education and work experience? Do you have recommendations? And are you willing to be a suicide attacker or would you prefer to be a fighter for ISIS?

Germany's interior minister said he believes data in the documents -- described by European media as the names and personal data of tens of thousands of possible ISIS recruits -- could allow authorities to prosecute people who joined ISIS and then returned to their home countries.

If they did not hear from him, they would know that he is dead."

Rage grew in a Turkish town on Syria's border Monday in the aftermath of weekend bombings as the government blamed Marxists with Syrian connections for the deadly attacks.

The Turkish government places the blame for the attacks on local perpetrators. "For the time being, there is no evidence suggesting that al Qaeda was involved," Interior Minister Muammer Guler told Turkey's state news agency, Anatolia. The nine suspects in custody are all Turkish nationals, he said. Guler and other Turkish officials accuse a former Marxist terror group that they say maintains relations with Syria's intelligence services.

Stripped to his undershirt and covered in filth, the world’s most notorious drug lord dragged himself out of the sewers and into the middle of traffic.

The Mexican marines had been on Mr. Guzmán’s trail for more than six months, ever since he humiliated the nation by escaping its most secure prison through a tunnel that led into the shower floor of his cell.

But it had come at a cost. The authorities had swept through 18 of his homes and properties in his native lands. Days on end in the inhospitable mountains, where even a billionaire like Mr. Guzmán was forced to rough it, left him yearning for a bit of comfort.

Though the AfD may be emboldened by its boost in the polls following the events in Chemnitz, it might still encounter trouble elsewhere. This week, the AfD has faced calls by some of its political opponents for the party to be put under domestic surveillance for its links to radical groups. Although such surveillance has been imposed on two of AfD’s youth groups over concerns of right-wing extremism, calls to impose surveillance on the entire party have been rejected by Interior Minister Hoorst Seehofer, who cited insufficient grounds for such a move.

Though the AfD has attempted to distance itself from groups like Pegida in the past, some within the party have called for making common cause with them in order to mobilize more supporters. In Chemnitz, Dirusus said, “it seems the radical wing of the AfD won out.” Indeed, one of AfD’s lawmakers, Björn Höcke, was pictured last week marching alongside Pegida founder Lutz Bachmann.

what happened in Chemnitz was largely unprecedented—and not just because of the scale of the riots. “What is interesting about this is you obviously had a mix of people on the far-right side,” Marcel Dirsus, a political scientist at the University of Kiel, told me, noting the confluence of AfD supporters with more extreme groups such as the far-right, anti-Islam nationalist movement Pegida.

Storm-ravaged Puerto Rico has promised a full audit of a $300m (£227m) deal won by a small electrical firm with Trump administration connections.A US House of Representatives committee is also scrutinising the contract.The chief executive of Whitefish Energy Holdings in Montana knows US Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, while one of its investors has donated to Donald Trump.

Puerto Rico, a US territory whose 3.4 million residents are US citizens, was struck by two hurricanes in September - Irma and, later, the more-destructive Maria. The second storm all but wiped out the island's power grid.

The US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) placed the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) in charge of "the immediate power restoration effort".When asked by BBC News about the contract, USACE spokeswoman Catalina Carrasco said on Monday "the US Army Corps of Engineers does not have any involvement with the contract between the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority and Whitefish". She referred further questions to Prepa.

the book did not surprise me, as such, but it still stunned, shocked, and disgusted me. You simply cannot unread it, or banish what is quite obviously true from your mind

It helps explain more deeply the rants of Pope Francis about so many of his cardinals, especially his denunciations of “Pharisees” and “hypocrites,” with their sexual amorality and their vast wealth and power. “Behind rigidity something always lies hidden; in many cases, a double life,”

The only tiny consolation of the book is the knowledge that we now have a pope — with all his flaws — who knows what he’s dealing with, and has acted, quite ruthlessly at times, to demote, defrock, or reassign the most egregious cases to places where they have close to nothing to do

Like many Austrian fraternities, Germania zu Wiener Neustadt sometimes uses a songbook at its get-togethers. It looks ordinary enough, with its red cover, gold crest, and curling script. The cover is studded with metal nails called “Biernagel” that keep the book slightly elevated so it doesn’t get wet when lying in beer.Unlike most other songbooks, however, it contains lyrics about killing Jews. “Step on the gas,” one line reads. “We’ll manage the seventh million.”

The party had gotten negative press just two weeks earlier, when its minister of the interior proposed “concentrating refugees into camps.” The Jewish community of Vienna, where the majority of the country’s 12,000 to 15,000 Jews live, has been boycotting the FPÖ; it refused to participate in the government’s official Holocaust memorial ceremony last month.

Austria has many high school and university student associations. What makes these fraternities (“Burschenschaften”) unique is that they’re infused with German nationalism. They originated in German university towns in the first half of the 19th century and stood for a united German nation. During the Nazi era, the fraternities were merged with the Nazi students’ associations. They reemerged after the war. Today, not all members of these fraternities are far-right extremists, anti-Semites, or neo-Nazis; some are right-wing conservatives who adhere to old traditions, like a mask-free fencing ritual that often leaves members with scarred faces.

Global warming has heated the oceans by the equivalent of one atomic bomb explosion per second for the past 150 years, according to analysis of new research. More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions has been absorbed by the seas, with just a few per cent heating the air, land and ice caps respectively. The vast amount of energy being added to the oceans drives sea-level rise and enables hurricanes and typhoons to become more intense.

A Guardian calculation found the average heating across that 150-year period was equivalent to about 1.5 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs per second. But the heating has accelerated over that time as carbon emissions have risen, and was now the equivalent of between three and six atomic bombs per second.

The total heat taken up by the oceans over the past 150 years was about 1,000 times the annual energy use of the entire global population.

In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.

Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.

Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.

The German government is offering rejected asylum seekers benefits in kind worth up to €1000 if they voluntarily return home. The Federal Ministry of the Interior announced the new program called “Your Country, Your Future, Now!” which will run until February 28, on Saturday. Under it families who agree to leave will be entitled to up to €3000. The funding complements the “Jump-Start Plus” return program, launched last February.

The number of asylum applications has fallen drastically compared to the previous year.

China had long been the only superpower in the region, secure in the knowledge that it was the Middle Kingdom around which the rest of the world pivoted. Japan, cushioned by stormy seas, held itself apart from its Asian neighbors much of the time and had developed a unique and inward-looking culture.

both Qing China and Tokugawa Japan faced a new threat: imperial expansion by the European powers and later the United States.

Both countries responded with growing nationalism, but their versions of nationalism had different focuses and outcomes.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, stronger powers imposed humiliating, one-sided treaties on weaker nations in East Asia.

The treaties imposed harsh conditions on the target nations, sometimes seizing territory, allowing citizens of the stronger nation special rights within the weaker nation, and infringing on the targets' sovereignty.

the Treaty of Nanjing, forced China to allow foreigner traders to use five treaty ports, to accept foreign Christian missionaries on its soil, and to allow missionaries, traders, and other British citizens the right of extraterritoriality. This meant that Britons who committed crimes in China would be tried by consular officials from their own nation, rather than facing Chinese courts. In addition, China had to cede the island of Hong Kong to Britain for 99 years.

President Donald Trump will travel Tuesday afternoon to Yuma, Arizona, which he'll say demonstrates the benefits of a border wall — or, at least, border fencing. The visit could set the table for a legislative battle next month over whether to include border wall money in a spending bill that Congress must pass by Sept. 30 to keep the federal government funded

“What was once one of the least secure border areas in America is now one of the most secure areas because of those investments in border security,” said one Department of Homeland Security official speaking on background. The officials blurred the distinction between Trump’s campaign vision of a border wall — big, beautiful and concrete — and the sort of fencing and other technologies that DHS relies on currently.

Trump will visit a Marine base in Yuma, where he’ll get a tour of U.S. Customs and Border Protection equipment, including a Predator drone and a Border Patrol boat and surveillance truck. The president will then head into a closed-door briefing and later meet with Marines, according to an administration official. In the evening, Trump will hold a campaign-style rally in Phoenix, part of a broader effort to reinvigorate his base. The rally comes one week after Trump drew fire for blaming “both sides” for violence at a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that attracted white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis, and where one counter-demonstrator was killed.