Terrorism suspected in car-and-knife attack at Ohio State
Terrorism suspected in car-and-knife attack at Ohio State
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A Somali-born Ohio State University student plowed his car into a group of pedestrians on campus and then got out and began stabbing people with a butcher knife Monday before he was shot to death by an officer. Police said they are investigating whether it was a terrorist attack.
Eleven people were hurt, one critically.
The attacker was identified as Abdul Razak Ali Artan. He was born in Somalia and was a legal permanent U.S. resident, according to a U.S. official who wasn’t authorized to discuss the case and spoke on condition of anonymity. The FBI joined the investigation.
The details emerged after a morning of confusion and conflicting reports, created in part by a series of tweets from the university warning that there was an “active shooter” on campus and that students should “run, hide, fight.” The warning was prompted by what turned out to be police gunfire.
Numerous police vehicles and ambulances converged on the 60,000-student campus, and authorities blocked off roads. Students barricaded themselves inside offices and classrooms, piling chairs and desks in front of doors, before getting the all-clear an hour and a half later.
Cubans bid Fidel Castro farewell, pledge loyalty to system
HAVANA (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of Cubans bade farewell to Fidel Castro on Monday, pledging allegiance to his socialist ideology and paying tribute before images of the leader as a young guerrilla gazing out over the country he would come to rule for nearly half a century.
Lines stretched for hours outside the Plaza of the Revolution, the massive plaza where Castro delivered fiery speeches to hundreds of thousands of supporters in the years after he seized power.
There and across the country, people signed condolence books and an oath of loyalty to Castro’s sweeping May 1, 2000, proclamation of the Cuban revolution as an unending battle for socialism, nationalism and an outsize role for the island on the world stage.
Tribute sites were set up in hundreds of places across the country as the government urged Cubans to reaffirm their belief in a socialist, single-party system that in recent years has struggled to maintain the fervor that was widespread at the triumph of the 1959 revolution.
Many mourners came on their own, but thousands of others were sent in groups by the communist government, which still employs about 80 percent of the working people in Cuba despite the growth of the private sector under Castro’s successor, his brother Raul.
Order could have little effect on pipeline protest camp
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — A government order for protesters of the Dakota Access pipeline to leave federal land could have little immediate effect on the encampment where scores of people have been gathered for months to oppose the $3.8 billion project.
A North Dakota sheriff on Monday dismissed the deadline as a meaningless move aimed only at reducing the government’s legal responsibility for hundreds of demonstrators.
The Army Corps of Engineers “is basically kicking the can down the road, and all it is doing is taking the liability from the Corps and putting it on” the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier said.
The Corps said last week in a letter that all federal lands north of the Cannonball River will be closed to the public for “safety concerns” starting Dec. 5. The order includes the encampment called Oceti Sakowin, or Seven Council Fires camp.
The agency cited North Dakota’s oncoming winter and increasingly contentious clashes between protesters and police.
Rebels’ hold on eastern Aleppo collapses as troops move in
BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian government forces captured more than a third of opposition-held eastern Aleppo on Monday, touching off a wave of panic and flight from the besieged enclave as rebel defenses in the country’s largest city rapidly collapsed.
The dramatic gains marked an inflection point in Syria’s nearly 6-year-old conflict, threatening to dislodge armed opponents of President Bashar Assad from their last major urban stronghold.
Reclaiming all of Aleppo, Syria’s former commercial capital, would be the biggest prize of the war for Assad. It would put his forces in control of the country’s four largest cities as well as the coastal region, and cap a year of steady government advances.
It also would bolster his position and momentum just as a new U.S. administration is taking hold, freeing thousands of his troops and allied militiamen to move on to other battles around the country.
Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, said the opposition’s losses in Aleppo are the biggest since 2012.
US investigating leak related to Petraeus case
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Defense Department is conducting a new leaks investigation related to the sex scandal that led to the resignation of former CIA Director David Petraeus, The Associated Press confirmed Monday, the same day Petraeus was meeting with President-elect Donald Trump in New York.
Petraeus, who could be in line for a Cabinet nomination, arrived at Trump Tower in early afternoon and met with Trump for about one hour. Trump afterward tweeted that he “was very impressed.”
Petraeus said Trump “basically walked us around the world, showed a great grasp of a variety of the challenges that are out there and some of the opportunities as well. Very good conversation and we’ll see where it goes from here. We’ll see where it goes from here.”
A U.S. official told the AP that investigators were trying to determine who leaked personal information about Paula Broadwell, the woman whose affair with Petraeus led to criminal charges against him and his resignation. The information concerned the status of her security clearance, said the official, who was not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Disclosure of the Broadwell information without official permission would have been a violation of federal criminal law.