| French police kill 'Allahu Akbar' attacker Posted: 20 Dec 2014 03:28 PM PST  Joué-lès-Tours (France) (AFP) - French police on Saturday shot dead a knife-wielding man who attacked three officers in a police station while shouting "Allahu Akbar" ("God is great"). The man wounded one officer's face at the entrance to the police station in Joue-les-Tours near the central city of Tours and injured two others before he was killed. The attacker "shouted 'Allahu Akbar' from the moment he entered until his last breath," the source said. "It looked like the sort of act called for by Islamic State," the source said.
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| Kurds advance against IS group in Syria, Iraq Posted: 20 Dec 2014 01:07 PM PST  BEIRUT (AP) — Kurdish fighters advanced on the Islamic State extremist group in Iraq and Syria on Saturday, pushing into the contested, refugee-packed Sinjar mountains and gaining ground in the embattled Syrian border town of Kobani after heavy clashes, Kurdish officials and an activist group said.
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| Yazidis cheer Kurds on Iraqi mountain for breaking Islamic State siege Posted: 20 Dec 2014 01:06 PM PST By Isabel Coles SINJAR MOUNTAIN, Iraq (Reuters) - Iraqi Kurdish fighters flashed victory signs as they swept across the northern side of Sinjar mountain on Saturday, two days after breaking through to free hundreds of Yazidis trapped there for months by Islamic State fighters. A Reuters correspondent, who arrived on the mountain late Saturday, witnessed Kurdish and Yazidi fighters celebrating their gains after launching their offensive on Wednesday with heavy U.S. air support. The Iraqi Kurdish flag fluttered, with its yellow sun, and celebratory gunfire rang out. ... |
| Egypt's Sisi meets Qatari envoy as ties thaw Posted: 20 Dec 2014 12:20 PM PST  Egypt said Saturday it aims to end differences with Qatar as President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi who ousted his Doha-backed Islamist predecessor met with an envoy from the Gulf emirate. Ties between Cairo and Doha deteriorated after then army chief Sisi ousted Mohamed Morsi, whose Muslim Brotherhood movement was backed by Qatar. Since Morsi's ouster in July last year, a crackdown overseen by Sisi against the Brotherhood has left hundreds dead. Qatar repeatedly denounced Sisi's ouster of Morsi and it still provides shelter for some Brotherhood leaders who fled Egypt.
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| AP PHOTOS: A look at 2014 in the business world Posted: 20 Dec 2014 12:03 PM PST  LONDON (AP) — No one said the recovery from the global financial crisis would be easy and 2014 provided that in spades.
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| Final goodbye: Roll call of some who died in 2014 Posted: 20 Dec 2014 12:01 PM PST  They each turned a moment of violence into a call to action. For James Brady, that moment was when he was shot and wounded by a would-be presidential assassin. For Chung Eun-yong, it was the killings of his two children during a Korean War massacre.
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| Politics, shotgun marriage in government, war loom in 2015 Posted: 20 Dec 2014 11:52 AM PST  WASHINGTON (AP) — Tumultuous 2014 is not even in the books, and already the shape of 2015 looms. The new year promises more war, when the plan was for less. It brings a new order in government, with an institutionally weakened president and strengthened opposition.
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| Top news of 2014 left public grasping for answers Posted: 20 Dec 2014 11:34 AM PST  Twenty-thousand feet down the answers may be waiting, hidden in some underwater canyon far off Australia's coast. But more than nine months after searchers began scouring the seas for a Malaysia Airlines jetliner that vanished with 239 people aboard, the catastrophe defies resolution.
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| Iraq Kurds deliver aid to Mt Sinjar, expand operation Posted: 20 Dec 2014 10:05 AM PST  Kurdish peshmerga forces delivered aid on Mount Sinjar and expanded a major offensive against jihadist-held areas in northwestern Iraq on Saturday after breaking a months-old siege. The peshmerga closed in on Sinjar town south of the mountain and Tal Afar to its east. If successful, the move would significantly alter the map of the Islamic State (IS) group's self-declared cross-border "caliphate" and isolate its Mosul hub. The autonomous Iraqi Kurdish region's peshmerga troops reached the flanks of Mount Sinjar with food and other aid three days after launching a vast operation in the region backed by US-led coalition air strikes.
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| Egypt receives 10 Apache helicopters from U.S.: sources Posted: 20 Dec 2014 09:46 AM PST  CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt received 10 Apache helicopters from the United States in the past week, security sources said on Saturday, a sign of easing tensions between the long-time allies confronting Islamist extremism across the region. The United States originally announced in April that it had decided to lift its hold on the delivery of the attack helicopters, imposed last year after the military toppled elected president Mohamed Mursi and cracked down hard on his Muslim Brotherhood supporters. ...
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| Bombings kill 12 in Iraq Posted: 20 Dec 2014 07:54 AM PST BAGHDAD (AP) — Bombs targeting commercial streets and an army patrol killed 12 people in and around Baghdad Saturday, Iraqi authorities said. |
| 2 car bombs rock southern Sweden's city of Malmo Posted: 20 Dec 2014 07:36 AM PST  COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Swedish police say two car bombs have shattered dozens of windows in a multiethnic district of Malmo, Sweden's third largest city.
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| Exclusive: Iran's support for Syria tested by oil price drop Posted: 20 Dec 2014 07:06 AM PST  By Suleiman Al-Khalidi AMMAN (Reuters) - Syrian businessmen and trade officials say they are worried the economic lifeline provided by Iran is under strain from plunging oil prices, despite public messages of support from Syria's strongest regional ally. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has relied on oil-producing Iran to help him fight insurgents in a nearly four-year-old civil war and also prop up a currency under pressure. "If it had not been for Iranian support we could not have survived the crisis," a senior Syrian trade official said from Damascus, requesting anonymity. ...
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| Kurds press Sinjar operation in north Iraq Posted: 20 Dec 2014 05:36 AM PST  Iraqi Kurdish and allied forces on Saturday pressed on with a vast operation to wrest back swathes of land from the Islamic State jihadist group. A day after a months-old siege on Mount Sinjar was broken, Kurdish peshmerga forces launched another offensive from Rabia, on the Syria border, to further clear the area. "Peshmerga forces launched a new offensive south of Rabia to Mount Sinjar" at 8:00 am (0500 GMT), the Kurdistan Regional Security Council (KRSC) said in a statement. The KRSC is headed by Masrour Barzani, who is the autonomous Iraqi Kurdish region's intelligence chief and also the son of Kurdish regional president Massud Barzani.
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| Iraq's Shiite fighters desert over shortages Posted: 20 Dec 2014 04:55 AM PST  BAGHDAD (AP) — Abu Murtada al-Moussawi answered the call last summer from Iraq's top Shiite cleric to help save the country from the Islamic State group, but after less than three months on the front lines he and several friends returned home because they had run out of food.
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| See Bradley Cooper Play a Reluctant Hero in New 'American Sniper' Clip (Exclusive) Posted: 19 Dec 2014 09:50 PM PST In Clint Eastwood's war film, which will open on Christmas Day, Cooper's Chris Kyle, a heroic serviceman in Iraq, is approached by a comrade while back stateside |
