The New York Times reports Donald Trump Jr. allegedly met with an Israeli social media specialist and an emissary for the crown princes of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Two officers "did what they could" when a teenager opened fire and killed 10 inside a Texas school, their chief said Saturday, tight-lipped about a probe into the latest US mass shooting. Friday's massacre in the rural community of Santa Fe wounded 13 more, including a school police officer who is in critical condition. Dimitrios Pagourtzis, a 17-year-old student at the same Santa Fe High School, is being held on two charges: aggravated assault to a public servant and capital murder, which means he could face the death penalty.
Saudi authorities have arrested seven people for suspicious contacts with foreign entities and offering financial support to enemies overseas, state news agency SPA said on Saturday. Citing a state security spokesman, an SPA statement said the suspects arrested "had suspicious contacts with foreign entities to support their activities, recruited people working in sensitive government sites and offered financial support of hostile elements overseas." They aimed at undermining the security and stability of the Kingdom and dividing national unity, the statement said, adding that work was still underway to identify everyone involved in their activities and take all legal measures against them. Saudi Arabia has arrested at least five people, mostly women who previously agitated for the right to drive and an end to the kingdom's male guardianship system, rights activists said on Friday.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea on Saturday reiterated its demands for South Korea to send back 12 North Korean restaurant workers who came to the South in 2016, saying such a move would demonstrate Seoul's willingness to improve relations.
Stephen Paddock was the gunman who killed 58 people and wounded hundreds more last October, when he opened fire from the window of his room at the Mandalay hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. Yesterday, following legal action from news organizations, the Las Vegas police department released a trove of documents on the investigation, including statements from witnesses and victims. Mostly the documents contain harrowing accounts from victims of Stephen Paddock’s shooting spree.
China has for the first time landed several bombers on an island in the disputed South China Sea, a move that could provoke renewed tensions between countries bordering the strategically vital maritime region. Several bombers of various types -- including the long-range, nuclear strike capable H-6K -- carried out landing and take off drills at an unidentified island airfield after carrying out simulated strike training on targets at sea, the Chinese airforce said in a statement Friday. Wang Mingliang, a defense expert cited in the statement, said the takeoff and landing exercises on islands in the South China Sea will help the air force "strengthen its combat capability to deal with martime security threats".
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — A 20-year-old Palestinian is in critical condition Sunday after publicly setting himself on fire but his motives remain unclear with family believing he was despairing over Gaza's dire living conditions and Hamas, the Islamic militant group that rules the territory, alleging personal problems.
An ageing airliner carrying 110 people crashed shortly after take off from Havana airport in Cuba on Friday, leaving just three survivors in the country's worst aviation disaster in three decades. The 39-year-old Boeing 737 had taken off on an internal flight when it went down into a cassava field not far from the end of the runway just after midday, bursting into flames and leaving huge plumes of black smoke. A local resident told Granma, the Cuban state newspaper, that the plane crashed after it attempted to return to the airport – making a turn and clipping electricity cables, then plummeting to the ground. Miguel Diaz-Canel, the Cuban president, visited the scene immediately and said: "There is a high number of people who appear to have died. "Things have been organised, the fire has been put out, and the remains are being identified." Granma reported there was a baby aged under two on board, plus four children. The Cubana Airlines Boeing 737 had just left the Jose Marti airport when the accident happened Credit: ADALBERTO ROQUE/ AFP The paper also said that the crew was “foreign” and that there were foreigners on board, but did not give details. The three survivors were taken to the Calixto Garcia hospital, in the Vedado district of Havana. Families of those on board were asked to bring photos of their loved ones to the scene, to assist with identification. The Boeing 737 had just left the Jose Marti airport en route to the town of Holguin – a flight of around an hour and a half. The plane crashed near a school and lay in a farm field, heavily damaged and burnt, with firefighters spraying water on its smouldering remains. Miguel Diaz-Canel, visiting the crash site Credit: AFP What appeared to be one of the wings of the plane was wedged among scorched tree trunks, but the main fuselage appeared to have been entirely destroyed. Firefighters and rescue workers combed through the wreckage, but there seemed little chance of finding survivors. The plane was believed to be a Cubana airlines flight. Mercedes Vazquez, director of air traffic, told Prensa Latina that the plane was owned by Damojh - a Mexican company which operates under the name Global. At a glance | Cuba A Global employee told AP that the plane was theirs. Cuban state television had earlier claimed that the plane was owned by Blue Panorama, an Italian firm, but they denied involvement. The Cuban state carrier had suspended its own domestic flights in March owing to a shortage of aircraft, according to security site Garda World. Cubana has also taken many of its aging planes out of service in recent months due to mechanical problems. The airline is notorious among Cubans for its frequent delays and cancellations, which Cubana blames on a lack of parts and airplanes due to the US trade embargo on the island. Friday's crash was Cuba's third major fatal accident since 2010. A survivor is loaded into an ambulance Credit: AFP Last year, a Cuban military plane crashed into a hillside in the western province of Artemisa, killing eight troops on board. In November 2010, an AeroCaribbean flight from Santiago to Havana went down in bad weather as it flew over central Cuba, killing all 68 people, including 28 foreigners, in what was Cuba's worst air disaster in more than two decades. The last Cubana accident appears to have been on Sept. 4, 1989, when a chartered Cubana plane flying from Havana to Milan, Italy, went down shortly after takeoff, killing all 126 people on board, as well as at least two dozen on the ground. Cubana's director general, Capt. Hermes Hernandez Dumas, told state media last month that Cubana's domestic flights had carried 11,700 more passengers than planned between January and April 2018. It said that 64 per cent of flights had taken off on time, up from 59 per cent the previous year. "Among the difficulties created by the US trade embargo is our inability to acquire latest-generation aircraft with technology capable of guaranteeing the stability of aerial operations," he said. "Another factor is obtaining part for Cubana's aircraft."
Police say five-year-old Cali Anderson died in the last two weeks, and her father and step-mother rented a car to take the child`s body from Reno to a Sacramento storage unit.
The teen accused of killing 10 people in a mass shooting at his Texas high school on Friday was described by fellow students as a quiet loner who played football but kept to himself and was reportedly the victim of some bullying. The suspect, identified as 17-year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis, was a junior at Santa Fe High School near Houston. Classmates remembered he often wore a trench coat, similar to the garment authorities said the assailant used to conceal the two firearms he carried into the school.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scrutiny of the 33-year spy career of new CIA director Gina Haspel has focused on her undercover role in the harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists, but she cut her teeth in intelligence operations against Russia.
Sri Lanka's president Saturday warned that Tamil extremists were regrouping abroad to revive their demand to divide the island nation nine years after the end of its decades-long ethnic war. Maithripala Sirisena said government forces had failed to quash the Tamil rebels' separatism, although they were militarily conquered by May 2009 following a no-holds-barred offensive. "We have defeated terrorism of the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), but we have not been able to defeat their ideology," Sirisena said.
- Among the 110 people killed were 99 Cubans, the six-person Mexican crew and five foreign passengers -- an Argentine couple, a Mexican woman and two people from Western Sahara, according to Cuba's Transport Minister Adel Yzquierdo. - The aircraft was a Boeing 737-200 leased to Cuba's state airline Cubana de Aviacion by Mexican company Global Air, also known as Aerolineas Damojh.
BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq's Muqtada al-Sadr, the maverick Shiite cleric whose political coalition beat out Iran's favored candidates to come in first in national elections, says he wants to form a government that puts Iraqis first.
When hundreds of residents of Hawaii's Big Island fled their homes after the Kilauea volcano erupted, some left behind not only most of their belongings, but also their beloved pets. In the two weeks since fountains of lava and poisonous gas spewed from the volcano, volunteers have made heroic efforts to retrieve a veritable Noah's Ark of dogs and cats, geese and ducks, cows and goats, horses, cattle and exotic birds. Many were reuniting with their owners at evacuation shelters.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — The wife of former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has slammed police raids on their properties, saying Saturday they appeared targeted at vilifying the family to provoke public anger.
A war monitor said buses evacuated Islamic State fighters from an enclave south of Damascus on Sunday in a withdrawal deal, though state media denied the report and said the Syrian army was fighting to finish off the insurgents. The recovery of the enclave south of Damascus will mark another milestone in President Bashar al-Assad's war effort, crushing the last besieged rebel enclave in western Syria. Swathes of territory at the borders with Iraq, Turkey and Jordan, however, remain outside state control. Syrian government forces and their allies have been battling to recover the enclave south of Damascus since defeating rebels in eastern Ghouta, also near the capital, in April. The area is centred around the al-Hajar al-Aswad district and the adjoining Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk. In a live broadcast, a reporter with Syrian state TV said the Syrian army operations in the Hajar al-Aswad area were nearing their end and insurgent lines were collapsing as columns of smoke rose from the area behind him. Smoke billowing from the Palestinian camp of Yarmouk during regime strikes targeting the Islamic State group in the camp Credit: Stringer/AFP The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights earlier said buses had entered the enclave after midnight to take out fighters and their families. They had left towards the Syrian Badia, a sparsely populated expanse of territory east of the capital that extends to the border with Jordan and Iraq, it said. Islamic State militants had torched their offices in the Yarmouk enclave, the Observatory said. Negotiated withdrawals have been a common feature of the Syrian war in recent years as the government, aided by the Russian military and Iran-backed forces, has steadily clawed back territory. The rebels have mostly been given safe passage to northwestern Syria. In the last two months alone, the United Nations says 110,000 people have been evacuated to northwestern Syria and rebel-held areas north of Aleppo. Syrian president Bashar Assad meets Vladimir Putin for talks in Sochi on May 17 Credit: MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/AFP The opposition has called it a policy of forced displacement amounting to demographic change to drive out Assad's opponents. The Syrian government has said nobody is forced to leave and those who stay must accept state rule. While Assad has vowed to win back "every inch" of Syria, the map of the conflict suggests a more complicated time ahead from now on. The U.S. military is in much of the east and northeast, which is controlled by Kurdish groups that want autonomy from Damascus. It has used force to defend the territory from pro-Assad forces. Turkey has sent forces into the northwest to counter those same Kurdish groups, carving out a buffer zone where anti-Assad rebels have regrouped. In the southwest, where rebels hold territory at the Israeli and Jordanian border, Assad faces the risk of conflict with Israel, which wants his Iranian-backed allies kept well away from the frontier and has mounted air strikes in Syria.
Ten people, mostly students, were killed when a teenage classmate armed with a shotgun and a revolver opened fire in a Texas high school Friday, the latest deadly school shooting to hit the United States. The gunman, arrested on murder charges, was identified as Dimitrios Pagourtzis, a 17-year-old junior at Santa Fe High School.
Guests of Prince Harry and his new wife Meghan were set to tuck into dishes including Scottish langoustines, grilled asparagus and rhubarb crumble tartlets at a lunchtime reception for the newlyweds. Canapes being served include poached free-range chicken in a lightly spiced yoghurt with roasted apricot, croquettes of confit Windsor lamb and garden-pea panna cotta with quail eggs and lemon verbena. There were also bowl foods such as pea and mint risotto with pea shoots, truffle oil and parmesan crisps, and 10-hour slow roasted Windsor pork belly, all washed down with champagne, wines and a range of soft drinks.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday addressed thousands of expatriate Turks in Sarajevo at his only election rally outside Turkey after other European countries banned such events. The Bosnian capital was chosen for the event -- ahead of Ankara's presidential and parliamentary elections next month -- after European Union states such as Germany, Austria and the Netherlands barred Turkish politicians from electioneering in their countries, stoking tensions between Ankara and Brussels. Turkey is scheduled to go the polls on June 24, with three million expatriate Turks allowed to vote, including 1.4 million in Germany.
A 27-year name row between Greece and Macedonia cannot be resolved without consitutional revision in the neighbouring country, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said Saturday amid hopes for a June deal. "As regards the debate surrounding (Macedonia's) name, the government will not enter more specific talks if the above requirements are not fulfilled first," Tsipras' office said in a statement. In a speech to his party later Saturday, Tsipras said the countries were "closer than ever before" to a solution.
SANTA FE, Texas (AP) — A 17-year-old armed with a shotgun and a pistol opened fire at a Houston-area high school Friday, killing 10 people, most of them students, authorities said. It was the nation's deadliest such attack since the massacre in Florida that gave rise to a campaign by teens for gun control.
Indian Kashmir came to a virtual standstill Saturday as separatist groups called for a shutdown to protest a visit by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the Muslim-majority region gripped by deadly new tensions and clashes with rival Pakistan. Shops shut and streets in the main city, Srinagar, were empty except for police and paramilitary patrols as authorities imposed maximum security for Modi's one-day visit. Authorities cut mobile internet services in the region and ordered a curfew in parts of Srinagar.
The mayor of Oakland is pushing back on President Donald Trump’s claims that she obstructed justice by warning undocumented immigrants of an impending federal raid. Mayor Libby Schaaf, a Democrat, wrote in a weekend op-ed that it was her “duty” to warn immigrants about the raid, which was set to target around 1,000 people living in the Bay Area earlier this year. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has indicated that a tweet from the mayor prevented the arrest of as many as 800 people.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Blisters on the middle finger of his pitching hand are nothing new for veteran Dodgers left-hander Rich Hill, but the latest one is worse than usual and he doesn't know how to solve the problem.
By Alissa de Carbonnel TEHRAN (Reuters) - The European Union's energy chief sought to reassure Iran on Saturday that the bloc remained committed to salvaging a nuclear deal with Tehran despite U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to exit the accord and reimpose sanctions. Miguel Arias Canete delivered the message on a visit to Tehran and also said the 28-nation EU, once the biggest importer of Iranian oil, hoped to strengthen trade with Iran.
