At least 350 people are dead after a landslide buried an entire village in northeast Afghanistan.
United Nations officials say that at least 300 homes were completely buried and over 2,000 people are missing in the landslide. They anticipate the death toll to rise significantly in the next week.
Badakhshan province Governor Waliullah Adeeb said that days of heavy rain were the cause of the slide. He said that rescuers know there are survivors under the slide but they are unable to reach them because they don’t have enough equipment or machinery.
They’ve begged people around the country to at least send shovels for rescuers to dig manually for people they believe are still alive.
The area is in a part of the heavily rugged mountains of Afghanistan where they are subjected to avalanches on a regular basis rather than landslides.
In their latest round of terror and blasphemy against Christ, terrorist group al-Qaeda has taken to hanging murder victims on crosses for public display.
A Syrian opposition group said that al-Qaeda based Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant killed dozens in the Syrian city of Ar-Raqqah and then hung the bodies on crosses with messages warning against standing up against Islamists.
Abu Ibrahim Alrquaoui, the head of a group called Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Slowly, says the move is the latest attempt by the Islamists to control the region through fear tactics.
“They want to stay in control,” Alrquaoui told Fox News. “Everything they do is to scare people. That’s why they kill people publicly.”
Jihadists across Syria have been resorting to the tactic of hanging victims on crosses for the last few months. Most of the victims are not actually left to die hanging on the crosses but are rather shot in the head after being lifted up.
The al-Shabab terrorist organization has stepped up a campaign against Christians with their latest effort focusing on the very public execution of a Christian woman.
Sufia, a Christian woman living in Mogadishu, was inside her home when a group of terrorists stormed inside, drug her into the street, beat her and then shot her point blank while friends, family and neighbors tried to save her.
The terrorists shouted as they were committing the murder that Sufia had been converting Muslims to Christianity. The woman’s family says she was not doing any evangelizing in their community.
The government says this is the third targeted murder of Christians this month by the Islamic terrorist outfit.
According to the watchdog group Open Doors, Somalia is the second most oppressive country for Christians behind North Korea.
The killing comes on the heels of the government driving the terrorist group out of a previous stronghold in the city of Eyn.
A tornadic storm system that killed 18 people across Arkansas, Oklahoma and Iowa Sunday killed an additional 11 people in the deep south on Monday.
Officials say that the storm also left tens of thousands without power from Kentucky through Georgia.
Massive damage was reported in Tupelo, Mississippi when a twister carved a two-mile long path that destroyed all the buildings in its path. Officials estimate the tornado was likely an EF-3 but final determinations will have to be made by the National Weather Service.
Another twister struck Louisville, MS, 90 miles northeast of Jackson, MS. The Winston Medical Center in the city sustained tornado damage and patients in the area have to be triaged on the ground.
States of emergency were put in place for Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.
(Note: This is a follow up to a story we carried on April 18, 2013 on an explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas.)
The deaths of 15 people and the wounding of 226 others in an explosion at a West, Texas fertilizer plant was completely preventable according to the investigation into the incident.
The U.S. Chemical Safety Board said Tuesday that the incident “should never have occurred.”
“It resulted from the failure of a company to take the necessary steps to avert a preventable fire and explosion and from the inability of federal, state and local regulatory agencies to identify a serious hazard and correct it,” Chairman Rafael Moure-Eraso said. “The community clearly was not aware of the potential hazard at West Fertilizer.”
The board’s investigation found that the factory was storing ammonium nitrate inside a wooden building that left it very susceptible to fire. Ammonium nitrate is a common fertilizer but is also extremely explosive.
It has been used in terrorist attacks, such as the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing.
Saudi Arabia fired Health Minister Abdullah al-Rabiah in the mist of the largest outbreak of the killer MERS virus since its discovery two years ago.
The news comes as two more people were confirmed to have died from the virus. A 73-year-old Saudi man died in Riyadh and a 54-year-old man in Jeddah died on Monday.
Saudi Arabia has been dealing with a major outbreak of the virus with over 20 infections discovered in the last week. The country’s death toll climbed to 83 and the total number of cases jumped to 261. The outbreak of the last week was more than ten percent of the total cases.
The now-former Health Minister had said on Monday he didn’t know why there was a sudden rise in the virus other than noting there was a small increase the previous April.
The World Health Organization confirmed the first cases of the virus in Southeast Asia. There is no vaccine for MERS.
Seventy-one people died and over 120 were injured when a bomb exploded under a bus in a crowded bus station in Abuja, Nigeria.
Christian leaders in the nation said that the attack was carried out by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram in their deadliest attack on the country’s capital.
Friar Patrick Tor Alumuku, the director of Communications for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Abuja, told reporters that the bus depot where the explosion happened destroyed 16 luxury busses and 24 minibuses.
“The bus depot where the explosion took place is normally used by a large number of commuters to get to work in the center of the capital,” FFr. Alumuku said. “The victims are therefore normal people, who belong to the working class.”
The bus station was described as being in a “poor, ethnically and religiously mixed” area. Boko Haram has been working to create a civil war in the nation that is almost evenly split between Christians and Muslims.
Five high school seniors are among the ten people dead in a fiery crash after a tractor-trailer slammed into their bus on a California highway.
Investigators say the crash happened around 5:30 p.m. on Interstate 5 near Orland, California. The bus was filled with seniors who were planning a visit to Humboldt State University to see if they wanted to attend in the fall.
The working theory in the investigation is that the FedEx driver was swerving to avoid a passenger car but was unable to avoid them. The passenger vehicle was involved in the accident with the truck and bus.
In addition to the students, the truck drivers and three adult chaperones were killed in the crash. At least 37 others sustained injuries, some critically, and about half remained hospitalized.
“As we mourn the loss of those who died, we join all Californians in expressing our gratitude for the tireless work of the Red Cross and emergency personnel who responded bravely to this terrible tragedy,” California governor Jerry Brown said in a statement.
A man who calls himself a contract killer reportedly confessed to police of killing at least 40 people.
Jose Manuel Martinez, 51, told investigators that he was an enforcer for a drug cartel and carried out multiple murders at the command of the cartel leaders. Martinez is facing a trial in Alabama on a single murder charge and then a trial in California for at least nine others.
Martinez was arrested last year as he was crossing the border into Arizona.
Errek Jett, district attorney for Lawrence County, Alabama, said that he believes Martinez because he told investigators details that only the killer would be able to know.
Florida officials also say they want to question Martinez in connection with gang related murders in their states.
Police say that the possibility Martinez was the killer came to light during an investigation into a series of home invasion robberies in 2012.
Islamic forces in Syria have killed a relative of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad who had been commanding troops protecting a Christian city.
A coalition of Islamic extremist groups overran the defenses of the Christian town of Kassat, killing Christians they found in their path and chanting & praising Allah as they took control of the town.
A student from the town that is now living in the United Arab Emirates told the Wall Street Journal that most of the Christians have fled to a church in the nearby village of Latakia.
“They receive food from the Armenians that are living there,” the unnamed student told the WSJ.
Islamic extremists in Syria have been attempting to exterminate the Christian population in Syria during the civil war. Christians had made up 8 percent of Syria’s population before the Civil War began.
