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Migrant crisis: Thousands stranded at Balkan borders

Several hundred, including young children and babies, spent the night in the open at Croatia's border with Slovenia.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants, many from Syria, Africa and Afghanistan, have been making their way from Turkey to the Balkans in recent months, in a bid to reach Germany, Sweden and other EU states.

CAIRO — Unidentified gunmen sprayed bullets on a police minibus as it passed through a Cairo district early on Sunday, killing eight plainclothes officers in an ambush that was later claimed by the Islamic State.

Although the Islamic State’s claim of responsibility could not be independently verified, its format and language was consistent with earlier statements from the group. The Islamic State also claims to have

The Egyptian Interior Ministry said in a statement that four assailants had fired on the unmarked police minibus as it passed through Helwan

Yussuf, who has lived here most of his life, has to leave by November because Kenya is shutting all its refugee camps, displacing 600,000 people. The government said the camps have become infiltrated by terrorists

Now the Kenya government wants to repatriate Dadaab refugees to Somalia. The government also wants to close another camp, Kakuma, that houses refugees from South Sudan, where a fragile cease-fire has taken hold in that country’s civil war.

Kenya announced in May that it would will shutter the camps by November and send refugees back to Somalia and elsewhere after numerous attacks staged by al-Shabab, a Somalia terrorist group linked to al-Qaeda.

Scott Pruitt confirmed to EPA

The Senate confirmed Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency, an agency Republicans desperately want to rein in after what they charge was eight years of dangerous activism under the Obama administration that hurt businesses, jobs and the economy.

Next up will be Commerce nominee Wilbur Ross, Interior nominee Ryan ZInke, Housing and Urban Development nominee Dr. Ben Carson, and Energy nominee Rick Perry.

Painting black tar roofs with a white, solar-reflective coating is a low cost, quick and tangible way to reduce the risk of power grid ‘brown-outs’, save millions of dollars in energy costs, and curb climate change. The statistics are as simple as they are staggering: A roof covered with solar-reflective white paint reflects up to 90% of sunlight as opposed to the 20% reflected by a traditional black roof. On a 90°F day, a black roof can be up to 180°F. That heat has a major impact on interior building temperature, potentially heating your room to between 115 – 125°F. A white roof stays a cool 100°F. Plus the inside of the building stays cooler than the air outdoors, around 80°F in this example, reducing cooling costs.

White roofs also reduce the “urban heat island” effect in which temperatures rise in dense urban areas because of the proliferation of heat-radiating, black tar surfaces. For example, the Urban Heat Island effect causes New York City to be about 5 degrees warmer than surrounding suburbs and accounts for 5 to 10 percent of summer electricity use.

Volunteers saw that all it takes is a paint roller, some solar-reflective white coating and a little hard work to start curbing climate change.

Volgograd was a relatively quiet Russian city, known best for its legacy as a World War II battlefield.

in October, when a female suicide bomber blew herself up on a city bus, killing six passengers, most of them teenagers.

two back-to-back suspected suicide attacks just ahead of New Year celebration

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych has warned that the country's stability is threatened by continuing clashes between police and anti-government protesters in the capital Kiev.

The authorities say police have the right to use firearms in self-defence.

Former Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko, who was injured in clashes earlier this month, is among four representatives of the opposition who will be taking part in the talks with the authorities, according to the website for Ukraine's Fatherland Party.

In just the last two weeks, Islamist militants have detonated a car bomb at the gates of the capital’s security headquarters, gunned down a senior Interior Ministry official in broad daylight and shot down a military helicopter over Sinai with a portable surface-to-air missile.

Egyptians returning from jihad abroad to join a campaign of terrorism against the military-backed government.

“Egypt is again an open front for jihad,” said Brian Fishman, a researcher in counterterrorism at the New America Foundation in Washington. “The world is being turned on its head, and, for the United States, the ability to rely on Egypt as a stabilizing force in the region — rather than a source of problems — is really being challenged.

The government of President Viktor F. Yanukovych announced a tentative resolution on Friday to a crisis that has brought days of bloodshed to Ukraine. The agreement, which has yet to be signed, was announced after all-night talks with opposition leaders, Russian representatives and the foreign ministers of Germany, Poland and France.

Any deal that does not include the president’s departure, however, is unlikely to get very far with protesters and it was uncertain whether, in the event of a final deal, the protest movement’s political leadership could deliver the support of an angry base comprising many different groups and factions.

revious settlements and truces have broken down several times, though those previous deals were not reached with the high-level involvement of European Union and Russian mediators, as was the case in the overnight talks Friday. The statement from Mr. Yanukovych’s office said the talks had been “very difficu

The sotni, as the units are called, take their name from a traditional form of Cossack cavalry division. Activists estimate at least 32 such groups are in Kiev now, with more forming all the time.

Mr. Chontorog said that he had been in the square many times as a protester, but that after the violence on Thursday wanted to commit himself to the fight, which meant following orders from the commander of his hundred.

Thursday, a few antigovernment protesters could be seen carrying weapons. But with reports that the police have killed more than 70 demonstrators, most of the gunfire clearly came from the other side of the barricades. The interior minister reported that 29 police officers had been taken to the hospital and 67 had been captured by the protesters.

He tried to make a handful of minced meat stick to a skewer, and said, sardonically, “See here, true Sharia has finally arrived in Swat.”

2009, the Pakistani Army launched an offensive to drive the Taliban out of Swat—and forced Fazlullah across the border, into Afghanistan. These days, the valley is relatively peaceful, and Pakistani tourists have returned in droves.

Mehsud, who had been “killed” by American drone strikes on at least two previous occasions, was actually killed by another drone strike at the start of November—transforming him overnight, in the eyes of Pakistani politicians and commentators, from a mass murderer into a marty

Ukraine’s Parliament on Tuesday ordered law enforcement agencies to immediately disarm the country’s unofficial paramilitary groups, signaling growing resolve in the interim government to confront nationalists and other vigilantes who played a key role in the overthrow of Viktor F. Yanukovych, the country’s deposed president.

The passage of the bill comes as tensions in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, have grown between nationalist groups who continue to patrol the main squares of the city and Arsen Avakov, the country’s new interior minister.

e group’s headquarters at a downtown hotel and began negotiations. Just after dawn on Tuesday morning, members of the group, many in military fatigues and balaclavas, boarded buses and left for a “training ground” outside the city, according to local news and video reports.

President François Hollande of France announced the formation of a new government on Monday, after broad losses by his Socialist Party in recent nationwide city elections that were widely seen as a rebuke to the deeply unpopular president.

Mr. Hollande replaced Mr. Ayrault with Manuel Valls, currently the interior minister, who has made a name for himself as a stern proponent of law and order in a political party that is sometimes accused of leniency or naïveté.

“The message you’ve sent me, I’ve received it personally,” Mr. Hollande said in a televised address. He promised a “combat government” that would be charged with “giving strength back to the economy,” and announced reductions in corporate and payroll taxes.

Deadly violence and street protests in Tunisia on Wednesday postponed talks intended to end a political standoff that had thwarted completion of a new constitution in the birthplace of, and a relative bright spot in, the Arab Spring revolts.

the second anniversary of Tunisia’s first free election, the promise appeared to have slipped away again with attacks from two fronts on the moderate Islamist governing party, from militant hard-liners on one side and secular political factions on the other.

slamist militants in Sidi Bouzid, an interior province, killed at least six security officers on Wednesday and wounded several others, apparently in an attempt to disrupt the reconciliation

Baghdad, Iraq (CNN)ISIS has closed off a dam to the north of the Iraqi city of Ramadi -- seized by its forces last month -- cutting water supplies to pro-government towns downstream and making it easier for its fighters to attack forces loyal to Baghdad, local officials and residents said.

They added that the level of water in the Euphrates was now low enough that the river could be walked across, making it easier for ISIS militants to cross and attack the pro-government towns of Husaybah and Khalidiyah as well as the large security forces base at Habbaniya.

The 800 will be assigned to special combat missions against ISIS in Ramadi and other areas, a statement from the Iraqi Interior Ministry said.

CAIRO — An Egyptian court on Saturday sentenced former President Hosni Mubarak to life in prison as an accomplice in the killing of unarmed demonstrators during the protests that ended his nearly 30-year rule.

They denounced the verdict as a sham because the court also acquitted many officials more directly responsible for the police who killed the demonstrators, and a broad range of lawyers and political leaders said Mr. Mubarak’s conviction was doomed to reversal on appeal.

Mr. Mubarak, 84, was an “accessory to murder” because he failed to stop the killing, a rationale that lawyers said would not meet the usual requirements for a murder conviction under Egyptian or international law.

Three Turkish cabinet ministers resigned on Wednesday in an intensifying corruption scandal that has challenged the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and polarized the country.

Economy Minister Zafer Caglayan and Interior Minister Muammer Guler, both of whose sons have been arrested in the anticorruption investigation, stepped down.

Hours later, Erdogan Bayraktar, the environment and urban planning minister, announced his resignation in an interview with the private NTV television network. Mr. Bayraktar’s son was detained as part of the corruption probe but later released.

“How We Got to Now” divides technological history into six thematic areas — glass, cold, sound, cleanliness, time and light.

the ones here function more like departure points for sets of skillfully interwoven narratives. To take the example of glass, we begin with a formation of molten silica, probably by a crashing comet, 26 million years ago in the Libyan desert. In due course we move to the glassmakers of Venice in the 13th century. And then things get more interesting. Monks laboring over religious manuscripts find that curved pieces of glass can aid their vision; a few centuries later, spectacles become popular, because parts of the European population, in response to the invention of the printing press, discover they need corrective lenses to read these new things called books. In time come telescopes and microscopes, which bring forth revolutionary ideas about stars and germs. Fiberglass eventually arrives, and soon we figure out how to make fiber optic glass cables, which carry pulses of laser light and zip petabytes of data around the globe.

I particularly like the cultural observations Johnson draws along the way. The invention and refinement of the glassmaking process, for example, also led to the production of high-quality mirrors. This helped painters like Rembrandt create startling works of self-portraiture; also, it coincided with a new generation of writers, Shakespeare included, willing to examine their characters’ interior lives with unprecedented scrutiny. “The mirror helped invent the modern self,” Johnson asserts. What’s more, “it set in motion a reorientation of society that was more subtle, but no less transformative, than the reorientation of our place in the universe that the telescope engendered.”