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.
The United Nations has declared the world is now officially in the post-antibiotic age.
The World Health Organization said Wednesday that the discussion regarding the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria is no longer a theoretical discussion and a harsh reality that the world needs to confront.
“The implications will be devastating,” the WHO said in a report.
The WHO report included shocking information. The report shows that the most well known of the “superbugs”, MRSA, will kill more people in the United States than AIDS. The report says a similar situation will occur this year in Europe.
International aid groups are joining the WHO in raising the alarm.
“We see horrendous rates of antibiotic resistance wherever we look in our field operations, including children admitted to nutritional centers in Niger, and people in our surgical and trauma units in Syria,” Jennifer Cohn of Doctors Without Borders told Fox.
The head of the Episcopal Conference of Cameroon said that the only entity still operating inside the Central African Republic is the Catholic Church.
“The State no longer exists,” Samuel Kleda, the archbishop of Douala, said. “The only institution that is functioning is the Catholic Church. The displaced are living in Catholic parishes.”
Violence in the Central African Republic has skyrocketed since interim President Michel Djotodia resigned from that post earlier this year. The United Nations says the conflict has led to the deaths of tens of thousands and a peacekeeping force is being formed to try and help restore the peace.
Kleda and other leaders in the region are calling on Christians around the world to provide supplies and funds to the Catholic Church’s relief efforts within the country to provide food, medicine and shelter.
The Central African Republic is a mostly Christian nation that is 25 percent Catholic. Muslim rebels who have been attempting to take over the country have been in retreat from a Christian backed militia to the point they have fled the southern and western parts of the nation.
An openly anti-Semitic official with the United Nations announced that he would be stepping down from his position.
Leaders in the U.S. and Israel expressed their joy over the departure of Richard Falk.
“The United States welcomes Mr. Falk’s departure, which is long overdue,” U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power said in a statement. “Falk’s relentless anti-Israeli bias, his noxious and outrageous perpetuation of 9/11 conspiracy theories [and] his publication of bizarre and insulting material has tarnished the U.N.’s reputation and undermined the effectiveness of the Human Rights Council.”
Falk, in his position as UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights, allegedly altered and excluded information from reports that would show Israel in the worst possible light and would overlook the murders of Israeli citizens by Islamic extremists groups and Palestinian cities.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon even publicly admonished Falk for his one-sided views on the Israel-Palestine issue.
The U.N.’s “Human Rights Council” includes nations that are not known for giving human rights to their citizens, such as Cuba, Pakistan, Russia and Saudi Arabia.
As the Obama Administration ramps up negotiations with Iran to ease international sanctions in return for permanent reductions in their nuclear program, the United Nations has released a report showing that Iran’s persecution of Christians is worse than at any level in the country’s history.
UN investigators found that Iran continues to imprison Christians strictly because of their faith and has designated house churches and evangelical Christians as “threats to national security.” At least 49 Christians were found by the investigators to be held in Iranian jails only because of their Christian faith.
“These are indicators that President Rouhani has no influence over hard-liners, who remain fully in charge of the judiciary and security apparatus, government entities that are responsible for the most severe abuses against religious minorities,” Dwight Bashir, Deputy Director for Policy at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom told Fox News.
“The situation of Christians and other religious minorities in Iran is very dire because the Iranian regime is a Sharia state. This dictatorship oppresses viciously all these precious groups with the abhorrent justification of Islamic law and by that it violates Iran’s constitution and a long-lasting tradition within Persian culture of peaceful tolerance and respect towards fellow Iranians with diverse religious backgrounds,” Saba Farzan of the Institute for Middle Eastern Democracy added.
Christians arrested for their faith have been sentenced to up to 10 years in jail.
Fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden told members of the European Parliament that many more spy operations are yet to be revealed that could show major violations of the rights of EU citizens.
Snowden said he’s going to allow the journalists to whom he’s given classified information to decide which operations are released to the public.
“I don’t want to outpace the efforts of journalists,” Snowden testified, “but I can confirm that all documents reported thus far are authentic and unmodified, meaning the alleged operations again Belgacom, SWIFT, the EU as an institution, the United Nations, UNICEF and others based on documents I have provided have actually occurred. I expect similar operations will be revealed in the future that affect many more ordinary citizens.”
Snowden testified that he still loves the United States and that the government likely missed terror plots because they were busy collecting large amounts of information and not taking the time to monitor it all.
Snowden invoked the Boston Marathon attack in his testimony, claiming the Russians had warned U.S. intelligence about one of the bombers but the FBI did only cursory investigations.
The former President of the Ukraine is on the run after being removed from power and charged with mass murder in connection with the deaths of protesters.
Victor Yanukovich was removed by the country’s Parliament over the weekend and immediately went into hiding while declaring he was still the nation’s leader and experiencing a coup d’état.
The parliament called for a new Presidential election on May 25th and appointed an interim president who immediately issued an arrest warrant for Yanukovich for mass murder. In the weeks leading to the Yanukovich’s removal, the government had been stepping up violent actions against protesters including more than two dozen deaths.
Prosecutors say the killings came at the order of Yanukovich who ordered all the protest camps destroyed and crowd forcibly removed from downtown Kiev.
The removal of Yanukovich is drawing the ire of Russian leaders who have lost a key ally in the region. The new government, and the leaders of the opposition who lead the protests, have been calling for the Ukraine to join the European Union. The protests began when Yanukovich withdrew from a tentative agreement with the EU in favor of close ties with Russia.
The United Nations report on the atrocities committed by the North Korean government is slowly being completely released to the public and the latest information shows horrific drawings of torture.
A man who survived two years inside a prison camp gave the sketches to the UN. The drawings show a glimpse into the camp where cameras are forbidden by the North Korean government.
“This was the first thing that I saw: there it said that ‘if you run, you die,'” Kim Kwang-Il told the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights.
“We are supposed to think there’s an imaginary motorcycle and we are supposed to be in this position as if we are riding the motorcycle. And for this, we pose as if we are airplanes ourselves. We are flying. And if we stand like this there’s no way that you can hold that position for a long time. You are bound to fall forward. Everybody in the detention center goes through this kind of torture,” said Kwang-Il, who was able to escape to South Korea.
Kwang-Il was sentenced to 29 months in a labor camp for smuggling pine nuts into the country.
Witnesses say the prisoners are kept starving to the point they would eat rats or snakes that they would catch in their cells or outside their buildings.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights is pressing for the International Criminal Court to put North Korean leaders on trial.
Fox News is reporting that Archbishop Francis Chullikatt, the Vatican’s observer to the United Nations, will be testifying before Congress on the level of Christian persecution in the Middle East and around the world.
Chuillikatt is expected to focus on the Middle East according to prepared testimony.
“No Christian is exempt,” the text reads, “whether or not he or she is Arab.”
The hearing before a House subcommittee will be focusing on the underreporting of assaults on Christians, the targeting of Christian communities and areas in major cities along with the need to protect human rights for Christians.
The hearing will receive information on kidnappings of women and children by Islamic militants in Syria as well as beheadings of Christians who refuse to convert to Islam at the demand of the terrorists.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons announced Friday that all of Syria’s unfilled canisters for use in chemical weapons has been destroyed.
The announcement marks a major step in the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons abilities.
The destruction of the canisters were near the city of Homs which had been inaccessible due to fighting from the country’s civil war.
The experts from the OPCW also verified that buildings used to construct chemical weapons have been partially destroyed. The buildings will be completely razed.
The joint OPCW-UN team said they plan to remove most of toxic materials from Syria by the end of the year to meet the mid-2014 deadline for destruction of all weapons.
