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Republican senator on Trump soliciting foreign interference: 'Things happen'

Republican Senator Richard Shelby defended an argument from President Trump’s legal team that soliciting foreign interference in an election is not an impeachable offense, saying, “things happen.”

Bloomberg pledges $70 billion to bolster black America in new plan

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced his presidential campaign's plan for bolstering economic opportunity for black Americans.

Five die in Russian hotel after boiling water floods basement

Five people, including one child, were killed in the Russian city of Perm on Monday when a hot water pipe exploded in the night and flooded a basement hotel room with boiling water. At least three other people were taken to hospital with burns after the incident in the Mini Hotel Caramel, which is located in the basement of a residential building, the region's investigative committee said. A doctor treating the victims, Andrei Babikov, said a 33-year-old woman had burns covering 35% of her body.

Cult slayed pregnant woman and five of her children in Panama

A religious sect whose members believed to be “anointed by God” forced a pregnant woman and five of her children to walk through fire as part of a cult ritual, according to local residents.

El Chapo 701 craft lager coming soon thanks to drug lord's daughter

The mug shot of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, imprisoned leader of the ruthless Sinaloa Cartel, is not just for police blotters anymore.

Iran confirms two missiles fired at Ukraine airliner

Iran has confirmed two missiles were fired at a Ukrainian airliner brought down this month, in a catastrophic error that killed all 176 people on board and sparked angry protests. The country's civil aviation authority said it has yet to receive a positive response after requesting technical assistance from France and the United States to decode black boxes from the downed airliner. The Kiev-bound Ukraine International Airlines plane was accidentally shot down shortly after takeoff from Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport on January 8.

Illegal crossings plunge as US extends policy across border

Adolfo Cardenas smiles faintly at the memory of traveling with his 14-year-old son from Honduras to the U.S.-Mexico border in only nine days, riding buses and paying a smuggler $6,000 to ensure passage through highway checkpoints. Father and son walked about 10 minutes in Arizona's stifling June heat before surrendering to border agents. Instead of being released with paperwork to appear in immigration court in Dallas, where Cardenas hopes to live with a cousin, they were bused more than an hour to wait in the Mexican border city of Mexicali.

Watch live: SpaceX is about to blow up a rocket in a crucial test to show NASA that its spaceship ready to launch astronauts

Elon Musk's SpaceX is going to make one of its own rocket boosters explode to prove that its Crew Dragon spaceship is ready to send people to space.

Biden campaign warns media against spreading Trump misinformation

The memo represents an especially strong rebuke of the GOP-backed conspiracy theories.

The images of Australia's storms are downright apocalyptic

Australia just can't catch a break. As wildfires continued to devastate parts of the country, a miles-long dust storm rolled across New South Wales Sunday, blotting out the sun. As CNN reports, the area has been experiencing drought since 2017, so dirt is loose and easily kicked up by high winds.> In Australia, people have been filming rolling clouds of dust sweeping across New South Wales. > > The massive dust storms blanketed entire towns and blacked out the sun over the weekend. https://t.co/59EwemGKFX pic.twitter.com/RA7nMgMsjN> > -- CNN (@CNN) January 20, 2020In other parts of the southeast, thunderstorms over the past two days brought hail stones the size of baseballs, bringing down trees, battering cars and buildings, and leaving thousands of people without electricity, according to The New York Times. There's also been flash flooding. And the Bureau of Meteorology says the storms could continue for another few days.> Parts of eastern Australia has been pelted by golf-ball sized hail - the storms have helped to fight some bushfires, but many continue to burnhttps://t.co/aaGqbxlEIa pic.twitter.com/VVuWXINivH> > -- BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) January 20, 2020More stories from theweek.com Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel dissect Trump's impeachment defense, 'all-star defense team' The strongest case for Joe Biden Boeing goes from bad to worse

'I stayed alive to tell' - Auschwitz's dwindling survivors recount horrors of Nazi death camp

A strip of skin tattooed with the Auschwitz death camp number 99288 sits in a silver frame on a shelf in Avraham Harshalom's living room. As the 75th anniversary of the camp's liberation on Jan 27, 1945, nears, Harshalom, 95, is very clear about why he kept it. Harshalom is one of some 200,000 Holocaust survivors living in Israel today.

A Drexel University professor has been charged with stealing $185,000 in government grant money to spend on Philadelphia strip clubs and iTunes

The Philadelphia district attorney's office charged Chikaodinaka Nwankpa with theft by unlawful taking and theft by deception last week.

China's Navy Warships Are Now Armed With Land-Attack Missiles

China says its newest destroyer is capable of launching land-attack missiles.

Body of woman who was missing for almost 6 years found in car submerged in NJ river

Vanessa Smallwood of Maple Shade, N.J., was 46 at the time of her disappearance. She was identified in a statement from New Jersey State Police.

Bloomberg says his life would be different "if I had been black"

The former New York City mayor was in Tulsa on Sunday to unveil an ambitious policy proposal aimed at delivering economic justice for black Americans.

Leopard runs into house before being captured in south India

A leopard that ran into a house and sparked a frantic search and a frenzy of attention in southern India on Monday has been caught and tranquilized. The big cat emerged from the Kamdanam forest and ran into a house in Shadnagar town in Telangana state, said Dr. Mohammad Abdul Hakeem, a wildlife official. Deadly conflict between humans and animals has increased in recent years in India largely due to shrinking forest habitats and urban expansion.

Ex-Carnival and Norwegian Cruise Line workers reveal the things they couldn't live without on board

Workers for cruise lines like Carnival and Norwegian might be away from home for over six months, so they need to be thoughtful about what they pack.

Iran Could Still Strike Back at the U.S.

How might Iran respond to the death of Qasem Soleimani? Ever since the Trump administration’s January 3 killing of Soleimani, the Islamic Republic’s top military commander, that question has been on the mind of policymakers in Washington and the American public at large.Iran’s January 8 rocket attack on U.S. military bases in Iraq clearly constituted part of its response, but Iranian leaders quickly made clear that more retaliation is forthcoming. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself has said that, while the rocket attack was a “slap” at the United States, it was “not enough,” and the Islamic Republic will continue its opposition to the United States with the ultimate goal of driving America out of the Middle East altogether.Doing so, however, is likely to prove difficult for Iran. As a recent analysis by CNBC notes, sanctions leveled by the Trump administration over the past two years have inflicted extensive damage on the Iranian economy. The country’s GDP shrunk by nearly 10 percent last year, and its exports of crude oil declined from a peak of 2.5 million barrels per day to less than 500,000 daily.Domestic conditions, meanwhile, are deteriorating. Inflation is on the rise within the Islamic Republic and is now pegged at over 30 percent. So, too, is joblessness; nearly a fifth of the country’s workforce is currently estimated to be unemployed. Meanwhile, governmental expenditures have surged as Iran’s ayatollahs struggle to keep a lid on an increasingly impoverished, and discontented, population.All of this, according to CNBC’s analysis, profoundly limits Iran’s ability “to fund a war” against the United States. But that doesn’t mean the threat from Iran is nonexistent. Iran still has the ability to “ramp up its aggression against the U.S.” through the use of its network of proxy forces in the region.That network is extensive — and lethal. It comprises not only Iran’s traditional terrorist proxies, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia and the Palestinian Hamas movement, but also assorted Shiite militias in Iraq (the so-called “Hashd al-Shaabi”) and even Yemen’s Houthi rebels. Recently, it has also made use of the “Shi’a Liberation Army” (SLA), a group of as many as 200,000 Shiite fighters — drawn from Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere — that has been trained and equipped by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and deployed to foreign theaters such as Syria.Notably, these forces appear to have been thrown into chaos, at least temporarily, by the killing of Soleimani. Reports from the region suggest that Iraqi militias are “in a state of disarray” after the death of the Iranian general, and aren’t currently ready to strike U.S. or allied targets. Over time, however, we can expect Tehran to regain control and direction of its troops and weaponize them anew against the United States and regional U.S. allies such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain. That is doubtless the top priority of Soleimani’s successor as head of the Quds Force, Esmail Ghaani, who has already commenced outreach to Iranian proxies in an effort to reinforce Tehran’s support for “resistance” activities.Tehran likewise has another potent tool by which to target the United States: cyber warfare. Over the past decade, the Iranian regime has made enormous investments in its cyber-war capabilities and carried out a series of demonstration attacks on targets such as Saudi Arabia’s state oil company and various U.S. financial institutions to showcase its newfound technological prowess. In the wake of President Trump’s pullout from President Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, Iran reshaped its cyber-activism against the United States, focusing less on offensive attacks and more on gathering information about potential policy from the notoriously opaque new administration in Washington.But Tehran’s potential to do significant harm to the U.S. in cyberspace remains. Indeed, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has warned publicly that Iran could carry out a cyberattack against critical U.S. infrastructure in the near future, with potentially significant “disruptive effects.” And so far, neither the Pentagon nor the State Department has articulated much by way of a strategy to deter Iran from carrying out such attacks, or to mitigate the damage they could do. (In the aftermath of Soleimani’s killing, that lack of strategy has become a matter of growing concern on Capitol Hill.)Perhaps the most compelling reason to expect an asymmetric Iranian response to Soleimani’s killing, however, is that asymmetric warfare plays to Iran’s inherent strengths. Ever since the regime’s grinding eight-year war with neighboring Iraq in the 1980s — a conflict that Iran lost handily — its leaders have exhibited a strong penchant for military asymmetry over direct confrontation. This preference has only been reinforced by persistent Western sanctions, which have eroded the country’s conventional military capabilities and made the acquisition of spare parts and matériel considerably more difficult.Soleimani was the regime’s principal architect of asymmetric war, and had devoted nearly a quarter-century to building up the Islamic Republic’s asymmetric potency. That is precisely why his targeted killing by the Trump administration represents such a significant blow to the integrity of Iran’s proxy network — and to the prudence of its time-tested asymmetric strategy. Going forward, Tehran may well have to rethink its approach, and could conclude that the potential costs of continuing its campaign of aggression against U.S. forces in the region are now simply too high. If it doesn’t, however, the very capabilities that Soleimani spent his career cultivating will remain the most potent weapons the Islamic Republic has to wield against the United States.

A Surge of Migrants Rushes a Mexican Border Crossing

CIUDAD TECÚN UMÁN, Guatemala -- After days of walking and hitchhiking, a crowd of migrants rushed a bridge at Guatemala's border with Mexico on Saturday and clashed with Mexican police who used pepper spray and closed the crossing's large metal gates to keep them out.More than 1,000 migrants were trying to cross the bridge spanning the Suchiate River, which delineates a section of the border between Guatemala and Mexico. After calm was restored, small groups of 20 or so migrants, many of them women and children from Central America, were allowed to file through in orderly fashion and register with Mexican migration officials.The melee was the latest test of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's resolve to get tougher on undocumented migration and stop the flow of migrants illegally entering Mexico, many of them trying to make their way to the United States.The governments of Mexico and several Central American countries, the source of many of the undocumented migrants who have sought to cross the southwest border of the United States in recent years, have been under pressure from President Donald Trump to help stem the flow. Trump temporarily withheld development aid and threatened tariffs to try to force his counterparts in the region to take a tougher stance.The showdown on the southern border of Mexico on Saturday involved the vanguard of a mass mobilization of migrants, most of them Hondurans who set off from the northern city of San Pedro Sula earlier in the week as part of a new caravan. They are part of a tradition of mass migrations that have offered safety in numbers to participants.Over the years, such caravans have usually numbered in the hundreds and have mostly passed unnoticed. But in fall 2018, a caravan that at one point numbered more than 7,000, according to the Mexican authorities, caught the attention of Trump. He turned the matter into a campaign issue, warning against an invasion along the American border.By some estimates, the current mobilization is also in the thousands. The Guatemalan authorities say that more than 4,000 migrants, part of this scattered caravan, have entered Guatemala from Honduras since Wednesday. Many of them had been expected to arrive in the small Guatemalan border city of Tecun Uman on Saturday or Sunday.In recent days, as the caravan approached the Guatemalan border with Mexico, the Mexican authorities announced that only migrants who registered with proper documentation seeking asylum, work permits or other protections would be allowed to enter. Once registered in Mexico, migrants were transported on white unmarked buses to another location to continue their application process.Lopez Obrador said Friday that 4,000 jobs in southern Mexico needed to be filled, which seemed to raise hopes among migrants here that they would be offered employment at the border. But at the same time, the Mexican government also stepped up its enforcement.On Saturday, dozens of armed guards lined the banks of the Suchiate River across from Tecun Uman to prevent migrants from slipping across. A recording warned migrants over a loudspeaker that the United States would not be granting asylum and would instead send them back to Guatemala."Mexico will offer opportunities of employment in your country of origin," the message added.On Friday night, Alex Valladares, 28, sat on a sidewalk with other migrants bedding down on plastic and cardboard in Tecun Uman. He said he had worked for years in Indianapolis as an undocumented mechanic until he was discovered by the authorities and sent back to Honduras, his home country."I'm searching for a better life, employment," Valladares said.At one time, his heart was set on returning to the United States. But now, Valladares said, he sees more opportunity in Mexico. A friend who had also been deported from the United States had called to offer him a job as a mechanic in Veracruz, a Mexican city on the Gulf of Mexico. All he had to do was get there."Better that I can stay in Mexico where they'll give me papers to work legally," he said.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

Two More Bodies Found at Tijuana Property Where Missing California Couple Were Buried Under the Dirt Floor

Two more bodies have been discovered at a Tijuana, Mexico, property where investigators earlier found the remains of a missing California couple buried under the dirt floor of a house on Friday. Jesús Rubén López Guillén, 70, a U.S. resident, and his wife Maria Teresa Guillén, 65, a naturalized U.S. citizen, were reported missing by their daughter Norma López after they traveled from Garden Grove to Tijuana on Jan. 10 to collect more than $6,400 in overdue rent from their 37-year-old son-in-law. Police in Garden Grove launched a missing persons investigation after López said she could no longer track her parents’ movements through the Find My Phone app. She said the last signal she received before their phone went dead was at the property they owned where her husband was living in southern Tijuana, about 4 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. Their bodies were found buried under the dirt floor of one of the property’s three homes late Friday.While conducting an investigation into the circumstances of the Guilléns’ murder, Mexican investigators say they discovered the bodies of another couple buried in the property. It is not known if they were found in the same house as the Guilléns’ remains. The new victims have not yet been identified, but police in Mexico say they also may have been involved in a monetary dispute with the son-in-law.The son-in-law, a Mexican national who was deported from the U.S. in 2012 and identified only as “Santiago” in court documents, was first charged with the California couple’s disappearance and taken into custody while the property was searched. Baja California state prosecutor Hirán Sánchez confirmed that when his in-law’s bodies were found, he was charged with their murder.Sanchez told reporters that when the son-in-law was first questioned about what happened to his in-laws, he offered up a “series of contradictions” including a tale that they had walked across the border and that he had picked them up. López says her parents had instead driven their own pickup truck to retrieve the money. The son-in-law also told police that he first took them to their property and then they went together to a bank to exchange currency he paid them, after which he said he drove them back to the border. Instead investigators say that the son-in-law tried to extract money with the couple’s bank cards.“The Guilléns drove themselves to their houses, not Santiago,” Sanchez said at a news conference. “They never left.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

Intelligence officials: New ISIS leader is one of its founding members

The Islamic State's new leader is Amir Mohammed Abdul Rahman al-Mawli al-Salbi, one of the terrorist organization's founding members, intelligence officials told The Guardian.Last October, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a raid in Syria, and officials said Salbi replaced him just hours after his death. Born to an Iraqi Turkmen family, Salbi has a background as an Islamic scholar, and came up with the ISIS religious rulings authorizing the enslavement of Iraq's Yazidi minority. Salbi met Baghdadi in 2004, when both were detained by U.S. forces at Camp Bucca in Iraq.There aren't many founding members of ISIS left, and the group doesn't have nearly as many fighters as it did during its peak in the mid-2010s. ISIS no longer controls vast swaths of Iraq and Syria, but they are still behind assassinations and roadside bombings in northern Iraq, a senior Kurdish official told The Guardian. There are rural networks that "remain very much intact," the official said. "After all, ISIS members in Iraq still receive monthly salaries and training in remote mountainous areas. That network allows the organization to endure, even when militarily defeated."Salbi's whereabouts are unknown, but intelligence officials believe it's likely he is near Mosul, Iraq. There is a $5 million bounty on his head.More stories from theweek.com Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel dissect Trump's impeachment defense, 'all-star defense team' The strongest case for Joe Biden Boeing goes from bad to worse

Trump's Russia adviser 'escorted from White House' amid investigation

President Trump's latest Russia expert has reportedly been escorted from the White House amid claims of a security-related investigation.

China confirms human-to-human transmission as SARS-like virus spreads

A SARS-like virus that has spread across China and reached three other Asian nations is contagious between humans, a government expert said Monday, fuelling fears of a major outbreak as millions travel for the Lunar New Year holiday. The new coronavirus strain, first discovered in the central city of Wuhan, has caused alarm because of its connection to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which killed nearly 650 people across mainland China and Hong Kong in 2002-2003. The total number of people diagnosed with the virus rose to 218, as Beijing and Shanghai confirmed their first cases on Monday while more than a dozen more emerged in southern Guangdong province and and 136 new ones were found over the weekend in Wuhan, according to state broadcaster CCTV.

2 more Puerto Rico officials fired after warehouse break-in

Gov. Wanda Vázquez fired the heads of Puerto Rico’s housing and family departments Sunday in the latest fallout over the discovery of a warehouse filled with emergency supplies dating from Hurricane Maria. The removal of Housing Secretary Fernando Gil and Department of Family Secretary Glorimar Andújar came a day after the governor fired the director of Puerto Rico’s emergency management agency. Vázquez fired him hours after a Facebook video showed angry people breaking into the warehouse in an area where thousands have been in shelters since a recent earthquake.

Evacuation crackdown ordered as Philippine volcano 'recharges'

Philippine authorities ordered a crackdown Monday on evacuees' daily visits to their homes in the danger zone around Taal volcano as scientists warned it could be "recharging" for a more powerful explosion. More than 110,000 people have taken refuge in evacuation centres since Taal burst to life a week ago, but many hard-hit towns have let residents back for hours each day to fetch items, feed livestock and clean up their houses. "We are directing DRRMCs (civil defence officers)... not to allow anyone to enter the danger zone," said Epimaco Densing, undersecretary for the Department of Interior.

Pair of storms to unleash rain, snow across Middle East this week

More unsettled weather is set to grip the Middle East this week after several storms have battered the region in recent weeks.The first of two storms to impact the area this week has dampened locations from the Mediterranean coast to Iraq on Monday. This slow-moving system will continue to bring wet weather to the region on Tuesday and Wednesday.The steadiest rainfall is expected from northern Israel and Lebanon into southern Syria and central Iraq. Downpours are possible in Beirut, Damascus, Homs and Baghdad. Rain will also spread into the lower elevations of western Iran with snow falling in the mountains. In the higher terrain of Lebanon and Syria, snow accumulation can be expected.On the southern side of this storm, showers may briefly dampen southern Jordan, far northern Saudi Arabia and Kuwait from Tuesday into Wednesday. This storm will then push into eastern Iran with rain and high-elevation snowfall on Thursday.CLICK HERE FOR THE FREE ACCUWEATHER APPA second storm will race southward from Turkey into the Middle East late Thursday into Friday, bringing soaking rain and mountain snow to Syria, Lebanon and Israel on Thursday night through Friday morning.The storm will then lash Jordan, Iraq and northwest Iran on Friday with impacts continuing into Friday night in Iraq and Iran.Local downpours and high-elevation snowfall may result in travel impacts across the region, before drier weather builds across the Middle East this weekend.Keep checking back on AccuWeather.com and stay tuned to the AccuWeather Network on DirecTV, Frontier and Verizon Fios.

Mexico Murders Rise to Record in AMLO’s First Year in Office

(Bloomberg) -- Murders in Mexico rose to a new record in 2019, the first full year of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s presidency, posing a challenge to the popular leader to make good on a campaign promise of reducing violence.Slayings, often fueled by the nation’s drug cartels, climbed to 34,582, compared with 33,743 a year earlier, according to data released by the national public security system. The 2.5% increase represents the least since homicides fell in 2014 and compared with increases of 17% to 28% in the previous three years.“What’s relevant is that homicides continue at an extremely high level, and the only change is the height of the wave,” said Vidal Romero, a professor of political science at Mexico’s Autonomous Institute of Technology, or ITAM, and co-director of the Center for the Study of Security, Intelligence and Governance. “Things haven’t changed, and there’s no policy that’s getting to the root of the problem.”Drug traffickers pose a shared threat to the U.S. and Mexico. Murders in the Latin American nation are often carried out with weapons smuggled in from the U.S. Meanwhile, American overdose deaths, from drugs that frequently originate in or travel through Mexico, surged to about 70,000 annually in recent years, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.While Lopez Obrador, known popularly by the abbreviation AMLO, has managed to maintain his approval at 72%, according to a poll by newspaper El Financiero published earlier this month, voters probably would hold his Morena party responsible for poor security results at mid-term congressional elections in 2021, Romero said.Two high-profile episodes late last year focused attention on Mexico’s security challenge. In October, Lopez Obrador’s security cabinet decided to release the captured son of kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman to avoid a firefight and bloodshed between authorities and criminals that the government worried would affect civilians. In November, nine members of a Mormon family with dual American-Mexican citizenship were killed in an attack by cartel gunmen.President Donald Trump has pushed Mexico to do more to confront drug gangs, calling for the nations together to “wage war” on the cartels. In November he floated classifying them as terrorist organizations. In December, after a visit to Mexico City by U.S. Attorney General William Barr, Trump said he was holding off “temporarily” on the proposal at the request of Lopez Obrador.Read More: Trump Pushes Mexico to Step Up Efforts to Battle Drug GangsSo far, Mexico has resisted a heavy-handed approach, wishing to avoid the level of militarization that took place when Felipe Calderon was president from 2006 to 2012. Mexico’s efforts have been focused on deploying tens of thousands of members from its new National Guard, a force that officially began work in July and still isn’t at full strength.Lopez Obrador’s strategy also includes education and subsidies for young people. But the phrase he has used at times to summarize his philosophy, “hugs, not shots,” has been criticized by many security analysts as naive and Pollyannish.(Updates with comments in third paragraph.)To contact the reporter on this story: Eric Martin in Mexico City at emartin21@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Nacha Cattan at ncattan@bloomberg.net, Walter Brandimarte, Dale QuinnFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Iran considers dual nationals on downed Ukrainian plane to be Iranians: TV

Iran considers the passengers with dual nationality, who were on a Ukrainian plane that was shot down accidentally earlier this month, killing all on board, to be Iranian citizens, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Monday. Many of the 176 who perished in the disaster were Iranians with dual citizenship, which is not recognized by Iran. "We have informed Canada that Tehran considers dual nationals who were killed in the plane crash as Iranian citizens ... Iran is mourning their deaths," Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi told a televised weekly news conference.

Deadly NJ police chases kill innocent victims, catch few crooks

Many police pursuits across the nation end tragically and disproportionately affect black people. Chases often start with a traffic violation.

The 11 most expensive cities to live in around the world in 2020

The 16th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey reveals cities bordering the Pacific Ocean are the most expensive.

Local Governments May Soon Be Forced To Rethink How They Use Private Property

An upcoming court case could be very impactful.

17 more cases of a mysterious and deadly virus have been detected in China

Wuhan, central China, seems to be the origin point of 2019-nCov, a virus that has infected 62 patients and killed two people.

S. Korea naval unit to expand operations to Strait of Hormuz

A South Korean anti-piracy unit has temporarily expanded its mission to the Strait of Hormuz, a vital global oil route at the center of soaring tensions between Iran and the United States. South Korea’s Defense Ministry announced the expansion Tuesday, saying it was meant to help ensure the safe passage of South Korean vessels and nationals through the waterway. South Korea has conducted anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden since 2009 and is expanding to the strait that connects the Gulf of Oman and Persian Gulf.

Climate crisis could justify asylum claims: UN committee

Governments that send refugees back to countries severely affected by climate change could be in breach of their human rights obligations, a UN committee said on Monday. The independent experts on the Human Rights Committee issued a non-binding but closely watched ruling in a case brought by Ioane Teitiota from the Pacific island nation of Kiribati. Several Pacific island nations including Kiribati are seen as among the most vulnerable in the world to climate change as they are just a few metres above sea level.

Photos of starving lions in Sudan spark campaign to save them

One of the five lions at Khartoum's Al-Qureshi Park is believed to have died.

Trump impeachment news: President gives 'chilling' defence as his legal team lay out furious response to Senate trial

The day before his impeachment trial is set to begin, Donald Trump's lawyers are urging the Senate reject the charges against him and are calling the hearings an "illegitimate partisan effort to take him down" by Democrats.Meanwhile, the prosecution team from the House has filed a stern reply to the president's legal team, following their response to a summons request calling the impeachment articles "constitutionally invalid." House managers replied, calling the president's assertion that he can't be removed from the presidency "chilling" and "dead wrong".

Double trouble: Sri Lanka's twin gathering marred by overcrowding

Thousands of twins packed two-by-two into a stadium in Sri Lanka's capital on Monday - so many that officials struggled to count them in time to prove they had organised a record-breaking gathering. Huge queues built up at the open-air venue in Colombo as sets of siblings waited to get their birth certificates checked. The last record was set in Taiwan in 1999, when 3,961 sets of twins, 37 sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets gathered outside Taipei City Hall.

Mothers who occupied vacant Oakland house will be allowed to buy it

Intervention of California governor helps Moms 4 Housing group score victory in fight against state’s homeless crisisThe homeless mothers who took over a vacant house in Oakland, California and occupied it for almost two months will be allowed to purchase the property – a major victory in a movement working to keep such homes out of the possession of speculators.The group Moms 4 Housing entered the house on Magnolia Street on 18 November with the intent to stay. The house had sat vacant for more than two years before it was purchased in July at a foreclosure auction for $501,078 by Wedgewood Properties, a real estate investment company with a history of buying up foreclosed-upon houses cheaply, evicting the tenants, renovating the homes and then putting them back on the market at much higher prices.Housing advocates say companies such as Wedgewood fueled the housing crisis that now grips the state, which needs anywhere between 1.8m and 3.5m new housing units by 2025. More than 15,500 units remain vacant in Oakland alone, according to the latest US census bureau data, while 4,071 people are homeless. House-flipping has led to rapid gentrification, which then in turn led to the widespread displacement of black residents.In Oakland, 78% of the homeless population reported that their last place of residence before becoming homeless was within county limits. Seventy percent were black.Moms 4 Housing chose the Magnolia Street house in part to try to force Wedgewood to negotiate the sale of the home back to the community.“This is what happens when we organize, when people come together to build the beloved community,” Dominique Walker, one of the mothers who lived in the house with her two children, said in a statement, on the day that America marked Martin Luther King Day. “Today we honor Dr King’s radical legacy by taking Oakland back from banks and corporations.”With the housing and homelessness crisis worsening each day, the mothers received widespread support for their cause, from local lawmakers to California governor Gavin Newsom, who praised the activists.Moms 4 Housing had brought the issue to court, but a judge ruled in favor of Wedgewood. Sheriff deputies arrived in the early hours of 15 January to evict them, arresting two of the mothers and two of their supporters.Wedgewood has maintained that the mothers had committed a criminal act in breaking into the house, and the house legally belonged to the company.“Wedgewood has always been and continues to be open to thoughtful and purposeful discussions,” spokesman Sam Singer said in a statement.“After regaining possession of Magnolia Street, we engaged in discussions with governor Gavin Newsom, mayor Libby Schaaf and councilman Larry Reid. These led to progress that everyone should agree is a step in the right direction in helping to address Oakland’s homelessness and housing crisis.”

Iran acknowledges Russian-made missiles targeted Ukraine jet

Iran acknowledged on Tuesday that its armed forces fired two Russian anti-aircraft missiles at a Ukrainian jetliner that crashed after taking off from Tehran's main airport earlier this month, killing all 176 people on board. For days after the Jan. 8 shootdown, Iran denied that it fired missiles at the plane, initially blaming a technical malfunction and engine fire for the crash.

Hypersonic Missiles? The Old Supersonic Ship-Killer Missiles Are Just As Deadly

Despite all the fuss about hypersonic weapons being game-changers, the older, slower supersonic weapons are still a menace to surface ships.

Mysterious Sars-like virus spreading across China amid sharp rise in new cases and a third death

China says a mysterious Sars-like virus has spread across the country, including to Beijing, raising concerns as millions begin trips for the Lunar New Year. A day after state authorities said the virus was "controllable", officials said a third person was confirmed to have died and there were nearly 140 new cases.  The new coronavirus strain has caused alarm because of its connection to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which killed nearly 650 people across mainland China and Hong Kong in 2002-2003. In Wuhan, the central city where the coronavirus was first discovered, 136 new cases were found over the weekend, the local health commission said, without giving details about the person who died. Health authorities in Beijing's Daxing district said two people who had travelled to Wuhan were treated for pneumonia linked to the virus and are in stable condition. In Guangdong, a 66-year-old Shenzhen man was quarantined on January 11 after contracting a fever and showing other symptoms following a trip to visit relatives in Wuhan, the provincial health commission said in a statement. A total of 201 people have now been diagnosed with the virus in China. In Wuhan, 170 people are still being treated at hospital, including nine in critical condition, the city health commission said. Read more: Just how worried should we be about this virus - and what do we know?  Wuhan is a city of 11 million inhabitants that serves as a major transport hub, including during the annual Lunar New Year holiday when hundreds of millions of Chinese people travel across the country to visit family. In its first statement since the virus was detected, China's National Health Commission said on Sunday the disease's source was unknown but vowed to "step up monitoring" of any mutations during Chinese New Year period. Chinese authorities said they had begun "optimised" testing of cases across the city to identify those infected, and said they would begin "detection work ... towards suspected cases in the city" as a next step, as well as carrying out "sampling tests". How the coronavirus spreads Scientists from the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College in London have warned that the number of cases in Wuhan is likely to be closer to 1,700, much higher than the number officially identified. China is yet to confirm whether the virus can be spread from one person to another, but Wuhan's health commission has previously said the possibility "cannot be excluded". China's centre for disease control sought to quash speculation about the coronavirus at the weekend, publishing a flyer that dismissed "five big rumours". One of them included claims about the coronavirus spreading, which China's disease control authority had dismissed at the time by saying all cases were being treated in Wuhan. Global outbreaks of coronaviruses Although there has been no official announcement of screening measures on the mainland, Chen Xiexin, Wuhan deputy mayor, said infrared thermometers had been installed at airports, railway stations and coach stations across the city. Mr Chen said passengers with fevers were being registered, given masks and taken to medical institutions. Nearly 300,000 body temperature tests had been carried out, according to state broadcasters. Authorities in Hong Kong have also stepped up detection measures, including temperature checkpoints for travellers arriving from the Chinese mainland. The United States has said it will begin screening direct flights arriving from Wuhan at San Francisco airport and New York's JFK, as well as Los Angeles, where many flights connect.

The US Air Force recently acquired a new $64 million Gulfstream private jet for VIP government officials — see inside

The US president isn't the only government official that flies in a VIP plane operated by the US Air Force.

Troops fire gas as migrants try to storm into Mexico

Hundreds of Central Americans from a new migrant caravan tried to force their way into Mexico Monday by crossing the river that divides the country from Guatemala, prompting the National Guard to fire tear gas. The Central Americans, from the so-called "2020 Caravan" of around 3,500 undocumented migrants, gathered on the Guatemalan side of the Suchiate River at dawn, demanding migration authorities let them continue their journey to the United States.

Mountain lion attacks, injures 3-year-old boy in California wilderness park

The attack occurred in Whiting Ranch, where a mountain biker died in a similar attack in 2004. The adult female lion was shot by authorities.

‘A Defining Moment.’ An Indian State’s Decision to Challenge the Country's Controversial Citizenship Law Signals a Growing Divide

Kerala's lawsuit argues that the Citizenship Amendment Act is "discriminatory" and runs counter to the Indian constitution's secular principles.

Gunman kills two Hawaii police officers, dies in house fire: local media

"Our entire state mourns the loss of two Honolulu police officers killed in the line of duty this morning," Hawaii Governor David Ige said in a statement. Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell called the shootings "an unprecedented tragedy" for the state. A third officer was injured in the incident in which the spreading fire destroyed several houses in an affluent area near the base of Diamond Head, a volcanic mountain at the southern tip of the island, KITV News reported.

Crosby woman dies from flu after trip to Israel, family says

The 21-year-old, who loved to travel, always seemed healthy, according to the family.