History Readings

uggesting that Italy has continued its long-running policy of paying ransoms for captives.

The two young women were taken hostage in July while working on humanitarian projects in the embattled northern city of Aleppo.

Dressed in black hijabs, Ms Ramelli, 20, and Ms Marzullo, 21, appealed for help in the video, saying they were “in great danger” and could be killed.

Turkish officials threatened to shut down Twitter in the country unless the social-media company blocked the account of a left-wing newspaper that had circulated documents about a military police raid on Turkish Intelligence Agency trucks that were traveling to Syria last January.

issued an order barring coverage of the investigation

Networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus complied with the court order on Wednesday, removing content from accounts to avert a shutdown, Turkish news outlets reported.

he flow of cocaine from the Caribbean to the U.S. has more than doubled in the past three years.

t is the

first federal plan of its kind that outlines the steps federal authorities are taking and will take to crack down on drug trafficking specifically in both U.S. territories.

How do 7 billion people on a tiny blue ball of a planet live with their differences when the deepest of those differences are religious and ideological?

In short, how do we respect diversity, and still promote liberty and maintain harmony?

Today, even when we are not talking to the world, we can be heard by the world, and the world can organize its response, frequently violent.

An advisory panel charged with looking at public safety in the wake of the deadly Newtown school shooting agreed Friday to include in its final report a recommendation to ban the sale and possession of any gun that can fire more than 10 rounds without reloading

recommendations in three categories: law enforcement and emergency response; safe school design and operation; and mental health and wellness.

“Whether or not this law would stand the test of constitutionality is not for this commission to decide,”

Setting the stage for a potentially historic ruling, the Supreme Court announced Friday it will decide whether same-sex couples have a right to marry everywhere in America under the Constitution.

argued in Apri

decision is expected by late June

A Chinese government official I know was put under

shuanggui, the secretive system of internal Communist Party investigation in which victims are detained, questioned without counsel and sometimes tortured

the most probable reason for his travails with the authorities was that his political patron also got in trouble.

Britain and the US are to share expertise on preventing radicalism and tackling domestic "violent extremism

Mr Cameron also said Britain would deploy more unarmed drones to help ground forces tackle Islamic State

Concerns over additional attacks by Islamic extremists intensified on Thursday, after an anti-terror raid by police in Belgium

A Brooklyn man who claimed the police manufactured gun-possession charges against him had his case dismissed on Thursday, amid two investigations into the practices of a group of police officers in the 67th Precinct in East Flatbush.

The man, Jeffrey Herring, had maintained his innocence ever since his arrest on June 4, 2013, asserting that officers had planted the gun on him and fabricated the circumstances of his arrest.

The officers claimed that they got a tip from a confidential informer that Mr. Herring had a gun

BP will face a maximum fine of $13.7bn under the Clean Water Act for its Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010, several billion less than feared.

Federal magistrate Carl Barbier ruled on Thursday that the size of the spill from the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, the worst offshore spill in US history, was smaller than the government had claimed.

A simple negligence ruling, which BP sought, caps the maximum fine at $1,100 per barrel.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without proving that a crime occurred.

Holder’s action represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on drugs.

A 20-year veteran of the Trumbull police force Tuesday began serving a 30-month prison term Tuesday for repeatedly sexually assaulting a teenaged girl he met through the department’s explorer program.

William Ruscoe told Superior Court Judge Robert Devlin Friday he was sorry for his actions.

“I was completely betrayed by someone I looked up to as a role model,” the girl told the judge. “I still wake up in a pool of sweat after having a nightmare where I yell stop and no, the two words I yelled that night at him.”

Most New Yorkers didn't approve of police officers turning their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio at the funerals of two officers shot to death in their patrol car

The Quinnipiac University poll found that 69 percent disapproved of the silent protest

Among the poll results, 77 percent said relations between de Blasio and the police are "generally bad."

(Reuters) - While most Americans approve of the work being done by their local police, nearly a third feel that some officers "routinely lie to serve their own interests," a survey released on Thursday by Reuters and the IPSOS polling organization showed.

The number rises to 45 percent among African-Americans.

Nearly 70 percent of African-American respondents believe that police target minorities.

Nearly five years after it hit best-seller lists, a book that purported to be a 6-year-old boy's story of visiting angels and heaven after being injured in a bad car crash is being pulled from shelves. The young man at the center of The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, Alex Malarkey, said this week that the story was all made up.

The book's publisher, Tyndale House, had promoted it as "a supernatural encounter that will give you new insights on Heaven, angels, and hearing the voice of God."

"I did not die. I did not go to Heaven," Alex wrote. He continued, "I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the claims that I did, I had never read the Bible. People have profited from lies, and continue to. They should read the Bible, which is enough. The Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be infallible."

"He was a healthy 19-year-old when he went in there," said Tanyatta Woods

Deundrez Woods, an all-city wrestler at Huntsville High School, had been enrolled in summer school in 2013 when he was arrested for using a phony $100 bill at Wal-Mart. He was sentenced to jail for 60 days. His mother says the jail time was the result of an unpaid speeding ticket.

He'd been locked up for about three weeks when he appeared in court. But by then, she says, her son looked all wrong.

For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.

The shift to a majority-poor student population means that in public schools, a growing number of children start kindergarten already trailing their more privileged peers and rarely, if ever, catch up. They are less likely to have support at home, are less frequently exposed to enriching activities outside of school, and are more likely to drop out and never attend college.

"It is imperative that these two be located and apprehended as their behavior is becoming increasingly brazen and dangerous," the Grayson County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.

They're accused of stealing a neighbor's red Toyota pickup truck, which was spotted on security video nine days later outside a Walmart store in Manning

A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.

"I see this as a call for action to close the gap between conservation on land and in the sea," said Loren McClenachan of Colby College, who was not involved in the study.