Burkina Faso terror attack kills 18, government says
Eighteen people have been killed and a number have been wounded in a "terrorist attack" in the centre of the capital of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou, the government says.
Gunmen opened fire on customers seated outside a restaurant, witnesses were quoted as saying.
The attack is now over, authorities say, with the two assailants also killed by security forces.
A jihadist attack on a nearby cafe killed 30 people in January last year.
There are fears that the latest attack is the work of one of the affiliates of al-Qaeda that are active in the Sahel region, the BBC's Alex Duval Smith reports.
In limbo for 70 years, stateless West Pakistani families bear scars of partition
The descendants of thousands of people who fled their homes during the British retreat from India in 1947 are still denied welfare in autonomous Indian state
The scrubby lowlands of Jammu are stuck between the Himalayas and the dusty plains of Punjab, and home to 19,000 families stuck in time. West Pakistan no longer exists on world maps, but in the north Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, clustered in poor villages along the Tawi river, there are still West Pakistanis.
Like at least 14 million others, they fled their homes during the hasty British retreat from India in 1947, when the division of the subcontinent into one Hindu-majority country and another Muslim-dominated triggered religious violence.
Unlike those millions, the West Pakistanis and their descendants are still officially refugees: citizens of India but stateless inside its borders, barred from local government jobs, colleges and welfare, and unable to buy property or take out loans. They are living embodiments of the lingering scars of partition, 70 years on.
Given the President we elected, Americans shouldn't be surprised by the actions of the far right in Charlottesville
Trump's bigoted rhetoric has been gearing up to this point for years, and even now he refuses to condemn the violence of neo-Nazis
If you’re surprised by what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend, you shouldn’t be. On Friday neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and other “alt-right” activists descended on the city and, predictably, violence erupted.
As of Sunday morning, three people are dead, including one protestor mowed down in an apparent act of domestic terrorism and two police officers who died when their helicopter crashed. All of this is horrifying, but it was entirely and utterly predictable.
Since even before Donald Trump declared his candidacy over two years ago, he has ratcheted up some truly incendiary rhetoric. It all started with his racist birtherism, questioning the legitimacy of his predecessor Barack Obama by insisting he was born in Kenya. He called Mexicans rapists, he has called for violence against protestors at his rallies, he shared anti-semitic tweets, and refused to condemn the support his campaign and presidency have garnered from white supremacists. He claimed a federal judge would be biased because of his Mexican ancestry. His “travel ban” is widely and correctly seen as a Muslim ban.
Security fears force more NGOs to end migrant rescues off Libya
Two more aid groups have suspended migrant rescues in the Mediterranean, joining Doctors Without Borders, because they felt threatened by the Libyan coastguard.
Save the Children and Germany's Sea Eye said on Sunday their crews could no longer work safely because of the hostile stance of the Libyan authorities. Doctors Without Borders - or Médécins sans Frontières - cited the same concern when it said on Saturday it would halt Mediterranean operations.
"We leave a deadly gap in the Mediterranean," Sea Eye's founder Michael Busch Heuer warned on Facebook, adding that the Libyan government had issued an "explicit threat" against non-government organisations operating in the area around its coast.
Tillerson, Mattis present united front on North Korea, urge China to act
Updated 0552 GMT (1352 HKT) August 14, 2017
As America's top military official arrived in South Korea, two of the Trump administration's most senior figures attempted to present a clear, united position on North Korea's ongoing threats.
In a co-authored opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, said the aim of the US' "peaceful pressure campaign" was denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, not regime change.
"We have no desire to inflict harm on the long-suffering North Korean people, who are distinct from the hostile regime in Pyongyang," they wrote.
The Misguided Attacks on ACLU for Defending Neo-Nazis’ Free Speech Rights in Charlottesville
EACH TIME HORRIFIC political violence is perpetrated that is deemed to be terrorism, a search is immediately conducted for culprits to blame other than those who actually perpetrated the violence or endorsed the group responsible for it. It’s usually only a matter of hours before the attack is exploited to declare one’s own political views vindicated, and to depict one’s political adversaries as responsible for, if not complicit in, the violence. Often accompanying this search for villains is a list of core civil liberties that we’re told ought to be curtailed in the name of preventing similar acts of violence in the future.
All of this typically happens before much of anything is known about the killer, his actual inspirations, his mental health, or his associations. In the aftermath of the widespread horror such violence naturally produces, the easiest target for these guilt-by-association tactics are those who have advocated for the legal rights of the group of which the individual attacker is a member and/or those who have defended the legal right to express the opinions in the name of which the attack was carried out.
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