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Attackers raided a luxury hotel in Burkina Faso overnight, shooting some and taking others hostage in a siege that lasted hours and ended with 29 people dead.

An al Qaeda-linked terrorist group claimed responsibility for the assault at Splendid Hotel -- a popular meeting place for Western diplomats in the capital, Ouagadougou.

The attack began Friday night and dragged on under the cover of darkness. Security forces circled the perimeter to assess the situation before they stormed in hours later.

U.S. stocks dropped on Monday as concern over global growth hit banks and other economically sensitive shares, although a late rally in energy shares left the market well above its lows of the day.

European banks led a global selloff in financial stocks as signs of stress in the sector mounted. Uncertainty over whether the Federal Reserve would raise rates this year also dragged down U.S. bank stocks, pushing the S&P financial index .SPSY down 2.6 percent.

"Investors' attitudes seem to be worsening relative to the likelihood of a global recession. I think that's what financials are reflecting – that their net interest margins are going to be further compressed under collapsing bond yields," said Mark Luschini, chief investment strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott in Philadelphia.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu blamed a Syrian Kurdish militia fighter working with Kurdish militants inside Turkey for a suicide car bombing that killed 28 people in the capital Ankara, and he vowed retaliation in both Syria and Iraq.

A car laden with explosives detonated next to military buses as they waited at traffic lights near Turkey's armed forces' headquarters, parliament and government buildings in the administrative heart of Ankara late on Wednesday.

Davutoglu said the attack was clear evidence that the YPG, a Syrian Kurdish militia that has been supported by the United States in the fight against Islamic State in northern Syria, was a terrorist organization and that Turkey, a NATO member, expected cooperation from its allies in combating the group.

And they do. Inmates describe being ambushed by guards and beaten, taunted with racial slurs, and kept out of sight, in solitary confinement, until the injuries inflicted on them have healed enough to avoid arousing suspicion.

Leonard Strickland was a prisoner with schizophrenia who got into an argument with guards, and ended up dead.

In the inmates’ telling, the guards got away with murder, ganging up on Mr. Strickland and beating him so viciously that he could barely move. The guards deny this, saying they acted only in self-defense and did what was necessary to subdue an out-of-control prisoner.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell has scheduled a news conference Sunday to discuss the fatal shooting by sheriff’s deputies of a man wielding a gun at a busy Lynwood intersection, an incident caught on a dramatic video that has sparked protests in the neighborhood.

The sheriff and homicide detectives will discuss the shooting at a news conference at 11 a.m. at the Hall of Justice downtown. A group of civil rights organizations are planning their own news conference and are calling for a meeting with McDonnell.

In the 29-second video obtained by KTLA and filmed from a restaurant across the street, a sheriff's deputy follows Robertson as he appears to be walking away from the deputy.

A brawl erupted after Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk was dragged from the podium, which led to other members rushing in to join the scuffle.

The prime minister, Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, had been answering questions at the rostrum and apparently angered a member of Parliament, Oleg Barna, with one response. Mr. Yatsenyuk had deflected a criticism of his cabinet’s energy policy by noting the energy minister is a member of Mr. Barna’s party.

Mr. Barna handed the bouquet to the perplexed Mr. Yatsenyuk, then set upon him, apparently trying to lift and carry off the prime minister, who resisted only by clutching the wooden rostrum. The brawl ensued as supporters of Mr. Yatsenyuk rushed to his defense, and then fought with backers of Mr. Barna.

MEXICO CITY — 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.

Disoriented from his long trudge underground, with gun-toting marines on his heels, he found himself standing across the street from a Walmart. Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the kingpin known across the globe as El Chapo, would have to improvise. His cavalry was not coming.

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.

The United States is to repay Iran a $400 million debt and $1.3 billion in interest dating to the Islamic revolution, Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday.

"For the United States, the settlement could save us billions of dollars that could have been pursued by Iran. There was no benefit to the United States in dragging this ou

Iranian-US ties broke down in 1979 after revolutionaries -- angered at US support for the Iran's deposed monarch -- stormed the American embassy and took hostages

a dinosaur looking up into the heavens at night, at all the twinkling stars. His smiling face utters the words: “The dot that gets bigger and bigger each night is my favorite.”

The most striking thing about Bret Stephens’s inaugural column in the New York Times was not its banal defense of the principle of scientific skepticism, but its general lameness. Rereading it this week, it is striking how modest its claims were. They essentially came to this: “Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong. Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.”

The denialists, in other words, have nothing left

The closing of The Weekly Standard is being told as a Trump story, as all stories must be these days. The magazine has been critical of Trump, and so this is another example of the gradual hegemony of Trumpism over the conservative world. That is indeed the backdrop to what happened here.

But that’s not the whole story. In reality, this is what happens when corporate drones take over an opinion magazine, try to drag it down to their level and then grow angry and resentful when the people at the magazine try to maintain some sense of intellectual standards. This is what happens when people with a populist mind-set decide that an uneducated opinion is of the same value as an educated opinion, that ignorance sells better than learning.

In that sense, the closing of The Standard resembles Chris Hughes’s destruction of the old New Republic. This is what happens when the commercial forces trying to dumb down the American media run into a pocket of people trying to resist those forces

It is fitting that Japan’s earliest remaining works, composed at a time when the country was so strongly under the civilizing influence of China, should be of a historical character. In the Confucian tradition, the writing of history has always been held in the highest esteem, since Confucianists believe that the lessons of the past provide the best guide for ethical rule in the present and future. In contrast to the Indians, who have always been absorbed with metaphysical and religious speculation and scarcely at all with history, the Chinese are among the world’s greatest record-keepers.

he wrote that it is precisely because life and nature are changeable and uncertain that things have the power to move us.

The turbulent centuries of the medieval age produced many new cultural pursuits that catered to the tastes of various classes of society, including warriors, merchants, and even peasants. Yet, coloring nearly all these pursuits was miyabi, reflected in a fundamental preference on the part of the Japanese for the elegant, the restrained, and the subtly suggestive.

Rick started life, deep in the germinal phases of Rick and Morty, as a scabrous parody of “Doc” Brown from Back to the Future. But he’s evolved into something much stranger: Doctor Who crossed with Doctor Faustus crossed with Larry David crossed with William Burroughs crossed with my therapist. His view of existence—of which he has seen a supernatural amount, having traversed many universes—is desolate and bracing. He builds himself a tiny robot whose sole purpose is to stand on the kitchen table and pass him the butter. “What is my purpose?” asks the robot. “You pass butter,” says Rick. A pause. “Oh my God,” says the robot, head dropped, tiny tin hands hanging. “Yeah,” says Rick in his rancid, sardonic way. “Welcome to the club, pal.” His grandson, Morty, meanwhile, is constantly, stammeringly overwhelmed: “What the hell, Rick? What the hell?!”

I have wept with laughter at Rick and Morty; I have flinched in repulsion. The humor oscillates between an ingrown bro-ness, a cackling in the man cave, and something so emancipated and post-everything that it is nearly transcendent. Nearly, but not. “Nobody exists on purpose,” says Morty to his sister. “Nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV.” Rick, burping warlock of the spaceways, puts it differently: “When you know nothing matters, the universe is yours.”

If you’ve been wondering why Jordan B. Peterson, the Canadian professor, guru of modern masculinity, and author of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, has been selling so many books and filling so many theaters, this is why. Rick and Morty is why. It’s no surprise, really, that a small and well-documented subset of the Rick and Morty fan base exhibits terrible, snickering, alienated-white-male troll behavior

A much-discussed new report from the pro-EU European Council on Foreign Relations sums up the problem from this perspective right in its title: “How Anti-Europeans Plan to Wreck Europe and What Can Be Done to Stop It.”

The years since the last election in 2014 have seen the emergence across Europe of parties united only by their skepticism of more Europe.

Meanwhile, institutional changes within the Parliament and the EU at large have vested real power in the body, while allowing a large plurality of members to steer (or obstruct) its business. As the ECFR notes in its alarmist report, with one-third of seats a euroskeptic bloc could strangle trade deals, dictate policy on economic sanctions against Russia, throw a wrench into complex negotiations for the EU’s next seven-year budget, and much more.

RULES? MORE RULES? REALLY? Isn’t life complicated enough, restricting enough, without abstract rules that don’t take our unique, individual situations into account? And given that our brains are plastic, and all develop differently based on our life experiences, why even expect that a few rules might be helpful to us all?

“I’ve got some good news…and I’ve got some bad news,” the lawgiver yells to them. “Which do you want first?” “The good news!” the hedonists reply. “I got Him from fifteen commandments down to ten!” “Hallelujah!” cries the unruly crowd. “And the bad?” “Adultery is still in.”

Maps of Meaning was sparked by Jordan’s agonized awareness, as a teenager growing up in the midst of the Cold War, that much of mankind seemed on the verge of blowing up the planet to defend their various identities. He felt he had to understand how it could be that people would sacrifice everything for an “identity,”