Iraqi security officials say an explosion has happened in an arms depot belonging to an Iranian-backed militia faction north of Baghdad.
The explosion is the latest in a series of mysterious blasts that have rocked military bases and weapons depots around the country recently.
The explosions have been in bases and warehouses belonging to militia groups under the umbrella of the mainly Iran-backed militias known as the Popular Mobilization Forces.
Some have been blamed on drone attacks, others on faulty storage.
No one has claimed responsibility for Tuesday's explosion near the Balad air base in Salaheddin province or either of the other two explosions.
In response, Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi last week banned unauthorised flights throughout the country.
The officials who confirmed the explosion spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

Explosion rocks arms depot north of Iraqi capital

PTI Automatic

A truck driver has been arrested after saying he would commit a mass shooting at a church in Memphis, Tennessee, authorities say in newly filed court records.
Thomas Matthew McVicker was apprehended in Indianapolis before the plan could be carried out, according to court papers filed Monday.
It's the most recent case in a string of men being arrested around the country for threatening to carry out shootings.
McVicker, 38, made "credible threats to conduct a mass shooting and suicide" planned for Thursday, an FBI special agent said in a sworn affidavit.
The circumstances of his arrest in Indiana weren't outlined in the affidavit.
Earlier this month, a friend of McVicker in the south Alabama town of Fairhope told a Florida FBI officer that McVicker has been considering "shooting a church up" or killing people on the street.
Later, in a telephone call, the friend said McVicker told her the church shooting would happen when he was in Memphis on Thursday and that he "intended to take his ..

FBI: Truck driver threatened mass shooting at Memphis church

A small plane has made an emergency landing on a main highway in Croatia, surprising drivers but causing no injuries.
Croatian emergency services say the incident happened Saturday on the highway connecting the capital Zagreb with the northern Adriatic port of Rijeka.
It is one of the main roads in the country and is usually crowded during the tourist season and on weekends.
Local firefighters from the nearby region of Vrbovsko cited a "technical malfunction" on the plane as the reason for the landing.
They added the incident caused no casualties, only damage.
Croatian media carried videos from the scene showing a single-engine Cessna plane parked at the side lane on the highway.
News portal 24sata says a woman and her flight instructor were on the plane.

Small plane makes emergency highway landing in Croatia

Heavy rains have hit the Turkish city of Istanbul, flooding streets and basements, stranding drivers on roads and disrupting rail and ferry services.
At least one person was found dead inside a flooded underpass, the private DHA news agency reported.
Haberturk television said Saturday's rainstorm flooded Istanbul's historic Grand Bazaar  a sprawling complex of covered alleyways lined with shops.
The heavy downpour also flooded a pedestrian underpass lined with stalls and video footage showed merchandise floating in the almost waist-high flood waters.
Authorities suspended ferry services across the Bosporus and some tram services were also halted.
A car was dragged into a pit caused by a collapsed road but its passengers escaped without injuries, Haberturk reported.

Rainstorm hits Istanbul; 1 killed

Libya's coast guard says it has intercepted four boats carrying 278 Europe-bound migrants off the country's Mediterranean coast.
Saturday's statement by spokesman Ayoub Gassim said the migrants, including 18 women and two children, were intercepted Tuesday in separate rescue operations off the coast near the capital, Tripoli.
He said the migrants were given humanitarian and medical aid before being taken to detention centers in Tripoli.
Libya slid into chaos after the 2011 uprising that toppled and later killed long-ruling dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
Armed groups have proliferated, and the country has emerged as a major transit point for migrants fleeing war and poverty in Africa and the Middle East for a better life in Europe.

Libya intercepts boats with over 270 Europe-bound migrants

Pakistani police say a second mosque's prayer leader has been killed in as many days near the southwestern city of Quetta.
Shafqat Mahmood, a police officer in Kuchlak, where the attacks occurred, said Mohammad Azam was shot dead Saturday in front of a grocery store.
On Friday, a bomb planted in a mosque under the prayer leader's wooden chair killed him and three other worshippers and wounded 20.
Quetta is the capital of Baluchistan province, the scene of a low-level insurgency by separatists demanding more autonomy. Islamic militants also operate there.
While Sunni militant groups have claimed past attacks on Shiites, the prayer leaders targeted this week were both Sunni.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Police: 2nd mosque prayer leader killed in South West Pakistan

High levels of bacteria forced the swimming portion of a triathlon test event for the Tokyo Paralympics to be canceled on Saturday.
It's the second setback in the triathlon for organizers of next year's Olympics and Paralympics. An Olympic triathlon running event was shortened from 10 kilometers to 5 kilometers on Thursday because of what the International Triathlon Union called "extreme levels" of heat.
Tokyo's hot and humid summers are a major worry for Olympic organizers. The water issues are a reminder of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics three years ago when high bacteria and virus levels were found in waters for sailing, rowing and open-water swimming.
In a statement, the ITU said E-coli levels were "more than two times over the ITU limits." It said the water was at Level 4, the highest risk level.
E-coli bacteria, which normally live in the intestines of animals and people, can produce intestinal pain, diarrhea and a fever.
The venue in Tokyo Bay, called Odaiba, has been a concern ...

High bacteria level cancels water portion of Tokyo triathlon

School teachers in Hong Kong were marching Saturday to the official residence of the city leader as another weekend of protests got underway.
An overflow crowd rallied at a public square in the financial district before setting off for Government House, carrying signs that read "Protect the next generation" and umbrellas to ward off intermittent downpours.
Teachers said they want to show their support for the protesters, many of whom are students.
They said the government should answer the protesters' demands and stop using what they called police violence to disperse demonstrators who take over streets and besiege and deface government buildings.
"We are here due to continuous violence by the government and police," said a secondary school teacher, who gave only his last name, Ko. "We feel we have the right to protect our students."
Hong Kong's protests, nearing the end of their 10th week, show no sign of relenting. Both a march on the Kowloon side of Victoria Harbour and a ...

Hong Kong teachers' rally starts another weekend of protest

Three hundred tourists are stranded in a national park in Alaska after heavy rains triggered mudslides and caused excess water from a culvert to damage a road.
The superintendent of Denali National Park and Preserve closed Denali Park Road to all traffic at mile 30 on Friday. The road is the only one inside the vast park.
The National Park Service said in a news release it anticipates reopening the road Saturday.
The park service says officials are working to ensure the safety and comfort of those effected. Shuttle buses are gathering people at the Toklat Rest Area temporarily while road crews continue to address hazard areas.
Similar debris flows led to daylong traffic restrictions last week. Continued heavy rains since kept the road and surrounding tundra saturated with water.

Mudslides isolate 300 tourists in Alaska national park

When Jordan Ballard read that one of the victims of the El Paso massacre had few relatives and the public was invited to her funeral, the Los Angeles resident bought a plane ticket and flew to El Paso to honour a woman she had never met.
She was one of hundreds of strangers who braved 100-degree (38 Celsius) heat to pay their respects to 63-year-old Margie Reckard. Feeling alone after her death, Reckard's companion of 22 years, Antonio Basco, had welcomed anyone to come.
"I arrived here this morning," said Ballard, 38, who lived in New York City during the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. "His story moved me." The service was moved from a funeral home to La Paz Faith Memorial & Spiritual Center to accommodate the crowd.
Vocalists and musicians volunteered to help, including a mariachi band. Condolences and orders for flowers poured in.
"He felt like he was going to kind of just be by himself with this whole thing but it's not so," Perches Funeral Homes director Harrison Johnson ...

Hundreds arrive to honour El Paso victim after public invited

Members of China's paramilitary People's Armed Police marched and practised crowd control tactics at a sports complex in Shenzhen across from Hong Kong in what some interpreted as a threat against pro-democracy protesters in the semi-autonomous territory.
The sound of marching boots and synchronized shouts echoed from the grounds on Friday. Officers in green camouflage stood guard at closed entrances. A stadium security guard said "it wasn't clear" when the paramilitary police would leave the grounds.
Chinese state media have only said that the Shenzhen exercises were planned earlier and were not directly related to the unrest in Hong Kong, though they came shortly after the central government in Beijing said the protests were beginning to show the "sprouts of terrorism."
From a distance, police could be seen conducting drills in military fatigues, using shields, poles and other riot-control gear. In one exercise, two groups marched in formation with those in front raising shields as .

China flexes muscle near Hong Kong amid more weekend rallies

Travellers flying into the United States on Friday ran into long lines at major airports nationwide because of a temporary computer outage that affected the US Customs and Border Protection agency.
Airports warned travellers  both Americans returning home and foreign visitors  of delays, and some travellers tweeted photos and videos of huge lines.
A CBP spokeswoman said the systems were running again by early evening on the East Coast.
The agency didn't precisely describe the breakdown, but the spokeswoman said there was "no indication of any nefarious activity." She said officers were able to access security-related databases and maintain security standards while screening people manually.
Rebekah Tromble, an associate professor at George Washington University, tweeted a video clip in which she panned over the arrival hall at Dulles International Airport in northern Virginia. She estimated there were at least 5,000 people packed into the hall.
Tromble was asked if she could see ...

Customs and Border Protection outage snarls major airports

North Korea on Saturday said leader Kim Jong-un supervised another test-firing of an unspecified new weapon that extended a streak of weapons demonstrations seen as an attempt to pressure Washington and Seoul over slow nuclear negotiations and their joint military exercises.
Pyongyang's Korean Central News Agency on Saturday said Kim following Friday's launches expressed "great satisfaction" over his military's "mysterious and amazing success rates" in recent testing activity and vowed to build up "invincible military capabilities no one dare provoke." The report did not mention any specific comment on the United States or South Korea.
Friday's launches were North Korea's sixth round of tests since late July that revealed developments of a new rocket artillery system and two separate short-range mobile ballistic missile systems that experts say would expand the North's ability to strike targets throughout South Korea, including US bases there.
KCNA did not describe what Friday's ...

Kim expresses 'great satisfaction' over weapons tests

Peter Fonda, the son of a Hollywood legend who became a movie star in his own right both writing and starring in counterculture classics like "Easy Rider," has died.
His family says in a statement that Fonda died Friday morning at his home in Los Angeles. He was 79.
The official cause of death was respiratory failure due to lung cancer.
Born into Hollywood royalty as Henry Fonda's only son, Peter Fonda carved his own path with his non-conformist tendencies and earned an Oscar nomination for co-writing "Easy Rider."
He never won an Oscar but would later be nominated for best actor in "Ulee's Gold." The family says this is one of the saddest moments of their lives and asks for privacy.

'Easy Rider' star and writer Peter Fonda has died at age 79

A German shipping company says pirates have abducted eight crew members from one of its vessels off the coast of West Africa.
Shipping company MC-Schiffahrt said on its website that pirates attacked the MarMalaita late Wednesday while it was anchored off Douala, Cameroon.
The Hamburg-based company said it has assembled an emergency response team and is working with "all relevant authorities" to free its crew.
Russia's Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Friday that three Russians were among those seized, citing information coming from the seaman recruiting agency Marlow Navigation of St. Petersburg.

German shipping firm: 8 crew seized by pirates off Cameroon

Jeffrey Epstein's prison death has been ruled a suicide by hanging, the medical examiner's office said on Friday.
Epstein, 66, was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City on Aug. 10, touching off outrage and disbelief over how such a high-profile prisoner, known for socializing with powerful people including presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, could have gone unwatched.
The Bureau of Prisons said Epstein had apparently killed himself, but that didn't squelch conspiracy theories about his death.
Messages seeking comment were left for Epstein's lawyers. An office telephone number for Dr Michael Baden, the pathologist hired by Epstein's representatives to observe the autopsy, rang unanswered.
Epstein, who was charged with sexually abusing numerous underage girls over several years, had been placed on suicide watch last month after he was found on his cell floor on July 23 with bruising on his neck.
But multiple people familiar with operations 

Medical examiner rules Epstein death a suicide by hanging

A suspected Russian airstrike has hit a displaced people's gathering in a town in Syria's last rebel enclave, killing at least 13, including a number of children, activists and a war monitor said.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strike, suspected to have been carried out by Russian aircraft on Friday, hit in the town of Hass south of Idlib province, where peopled displaced by the violence had congregated. The monitoring group said the attack killed at least four children.
Other activist-operated networks, including the Thiqa news agency, reported the attack and also put the death toll at 13.
Syrian troops have been on the offensive in Idlib and its surroundings, the last major rebel stronghold in Syria, since April 30 in a Russia-backed campaign. Fighting has picked up in recent days, after a collapsed short-lived cease-fire and government troops have been seizing territory on the enclave's edge.
Idlib and the surrounding rebel-held area is home to some .

Airstrike in Syria rebel area kills 13, including children

The pace of US home construction fell a sharp 4 per cent in July despite strong demand from would-be buyers, held back by a shortage of skilled labor and affordable land.
The Commerce Department said Friday that housing starts slipped last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.19 million units. So far this year, housing starts have declined 3.1 per cent.
Though there was a slight 1.3 per cent uptick in the construction of single-family homes last month, the gain was offset by a 17.2 per cent plunge in the apartment category.
The construction slowdown, which has persisted all year, is thwarting prospective homebuyers. The solid job market and falling mortgage rates have boosted interest among people seeking homes, yet the shortage of available homes and rising prices have dampened sales.
The slowdown in construction, which in turn contributes to the scarcity of available housing, may contribute to a weakening of the overall economy.
Robert Frick, corporate economist at the ...

US home building fell 4 per cent in July, slowing housing market

Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib said Friday she would not visit her grandmother in the occupied West Bank, despite being granted an Israeli permit on humanitarian grounds, saying Israel's "oppressive" conditions aimed to humiliate her.
Israel barred Tlaib and another Democrat, Rep. Ilhan Omar, from visiting Jerusalem and the West Bank over their support for the international boycott movement following an unprecedented appeal from President Donald Trump to deny them entry.
Israel had said Tlaib could visit relatives in the West Bank on humanitarian grounds.
The Interior Ministry released a letter purportedly signed by Tlaib in which she promised not to advocate boycotts during her visit.
"Visiting my grandmother under these oppressive conditions meant to humiliate me would break my grandmother's heart," she said in a statement.
"Silencing me with treatment to make me feel less-than is not what she wants for me  it would kill a piece of me that always stands up against racism and ...

Tlaib declines to visit West Bank, citing Israeli conditions

A Texas-based company is facing criticism for naming a beer after the location of nuclear tests that resulted in the contamination of a Pacific island chain, a report said.
Manhattan Project Beer Company is under scrutiny by Marshall Islanders who were exposed to high levels of radiation by U.S. government research from 1946 to 1958, The Pacific Daily News reported Thursday.
The government and residents of the Republic of the Marshall Islands have objected to the company's beer named Bikini Atoll, an area of the island chain that remains uninhabitable.
The name is insensitive to people still dealing with the impacts of radiation decades later, islanders said.
The company has several beers with nuclear-themed names including Half-life, Plutonium-239, Particles Collide, and 10 Nanoseconds.
"Our beer named Bikini Atoll was not created to mock or trivialize the nuclear testing that took place in the Marshall Islands," the company said in a social media post. The company is "creating ...

Beer named for Pacific island nuke test site draws criticism

The captain of an Iranian supertanker at the center of a diplomatic standoff no longer wants to keep command of the ship, which is in need of repairs that could impede its immediate departure from Gibraltar, the sailor's lawyer said Friday.
The tanker  and its 2.1 million tons of Iranian light crude oil  seemed to perform mild maneuvers on Friday but largely remained still, shrouded in heavy fog in waters off the British overseas territory a day after authorities ended its detention for allegedly breaching European Union sanctions on Syria.
The release Thursday, as the United States reportedly maneuvered to re-seize the tanker, came as the head of the Gibraltar government said that Iran had promised him not to deliver the fuel to a sanctioned refinery in Syrian territory, although an Iranian official later disputed that those assurances had been delivered.
Any delay of the vessel's departure could provide a window of opportunity for the US to mount further legal action and try to ...

AP

AP

Page 1449 - Ap/pti