Iraq - US gives anti-tanks guns to stop ISIS car bombs

Erbil, Kurdistan Region - The United States will deliver 1,000 anti-tanks weapons to Baghdad next month so Iraqi forces can use the guns against deadly ISIS vehicle-borne suicide attacks, a US official said on Thursday. 



“ISIS militants launched nearly 30 suicide car bombings on the Iraqi forces when they took control of Ramadi,” the official told Rudaw on condition of anonymity.

The source said the weapons deal was agreed upon during Iraqi Prime Minister’s Haidar al-Abadi vist to Washington earlier this year. He said the anti-tank guns will arrive in June. 

ISIS took control of Ramadi, capital of Anbar province, on May 17. The quick retreat of the Iraqi Army has led many experts to question both Baghdad and Washington's policies for containing the extremists.

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Russian Woman Shoots Herself in Head Taking Selfie with Pellet Gun

MOSCOW – A 21-year-old Russian woman shot herself in the head on Thursday when she tried to take a selfie with a pellet gun pointed at her temple, Moscow police reported on Friday.

When trying to take the selfie in her office, she pulled the trigger of an air gun left behind by a security guard.

She survived the accident, but was hospitalized by the rubber bullet.

Incidentally, on Thursday, another Russian man nearly lost his life while trying to take a selfie when climbing an arched bridge in central Moscow.

The man fell, plunged to the ground and hit the asphalt, but also managed to survive despite having suffered several injuries, for which he was also hospitalized.

The self-portrait photo taken with a mobile phone or webcam known as a selfie has led to numerous accidents, some with tragic results.

On Monday, a ninth grader died in the Russian city of St. Petersburg after falling from a fifth-floor fire escape, which he had climbed to take a selfie. 

Explosion Hits Shiite Mosque in Eastern Saudi Arabia

RIYADH – Several people were killed and many others were wounded on Friday when an explosion went off at a mosque in the town of al-Qudayh in the eastern Saudi Arabian, Shiite-majority province of al-Qatif, according to the Saudi Interior Ministry.

An Interior Ministry spokesman, quoted but the Saudi Press Agency, or SPA, said that security authorities responded to reports of an explosion in a mosque in al-Qudayh after Friday prayers, and added that more information would be announced later, however other media outlets have indicated that it was a suicide bombing.

Photos released on social networks depicted the mangled body of the suspected suicide bomber, as well as traces of blood on the floor, and ambulances evacuating victims.

Last November, a recording was released in which Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi called for jihad in Saudi Arabia.

Al-Baghdadi urged Saudis to revolt against the Shiites in their country, but also the ruling Sunni al-Saud family and the Saudi army.

Also in November, a number of unidentified assailants attacked a Shiite mosque in the town of al-Daluh, in the eastern Saudi province of al-Ahsa, which resulted in the death of eight people, and the subsequent arrest of 77 people allegedly involved in the attack, apparently on the orders of IS.

Saudi Arabia’s Shiite community accounts for about 10 percent of the predominantly population, while many of them live in the eastern part of the Sunni kingdom

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Judge Demands New Plan for Releasing Hillary Clinton Emails

WASHINGTON – A federal judge on Tuesday rejected the State Department’s plan to publish next January the emails of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Judge Rudolph Contreras said Tuesday that he will ask that the emails not be released en masse but gradually and he will require that the State Department establish a schedule for making them public.

In question are some 55,000 pages of emails from the 2009-2012 period.

Clinton turned over those files to the State Department after controversy arose over the fact that during those four years she always used a personal email account and a private server for her communications.

The department’s target date for publishing the emails is Jan. 15, 2016, just two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, the first important milestone of Clinton’s battle for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The future publication of these documents comes as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Vice News.

After the judge’s ruling, Clinton said Tuesday that she wants the emails to be released “as quickly as they possibly can” be.

Clinton noted that she has said repeatedly that she wants the emails to be published, although she said that the State Department has its own procedures whereby the process could be delayed.

The former secretary of state urged her former colleagues to review the communications as soon as possible and emphasized that she is certain that they will only serve to prove “the hard work” she did while heading the department.

Clinton acknowledged in March that it would have been “smarter” to use an official email account, and she added that she only erased messages that contained personal communications and not ones related to her work as secretary of state.