A Libyan Strongman Looks to Washington, but a Health Crisis Looms

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A Libyan Strongman Looks to Washington, but a Health Crisis Looms Photo In Benghazi’s devastated downtown, ex-fighters warmed themselves over a bonfire made from broken furniture. The forces of Gen. Khalifa Hifter routed the last Islamist militias from Benghazi in December. Credit Declan Walsh/The New York Times BENGHAZI, Libya — Pulverized buildings daubed with the names of fallen fighters line the ghostly seafront in Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city. Land mines and booby-trapped bodies are scattered across the rubble. At night, men huddle over bonfires piled with broken furniture.
This picture of devastation is what victory looks like for Gen. Khalifa Hifter, the military strongman whose forces routed the last Islamist militias from Benghazi in December. After three years of grinding combat, and with the help of foreign allies, General Hifter now controls most of eastern Libya and has become the most powerful if polarizing figure in a fractured landscape.
Now, as he aims to cons..

Attack on Skripals Shows Russia Is ‘Reckless,’ U.K. Says

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Attack on Skripals Shows Russia Is ‘Reckless,’ U.K. Says Photo A photograph of Yulia S. Skipal from her Facebook account. Credit via Associated Press LONDON — The nerve agent attack on two people in England “demonstrates how reckless Russia is prepared to be, how little the Kremlin cares for the international rules-based order,” one of Britain’s intelligence chiefs said on Thursday, in an unusually public and scathing commentary on a foreign power.
In his first speech after a year as director of the Government Communications Headquarters, the British equivalent of the National Security Agency, Jeremy Fleming said the threat from Russia had “never gone away,” but had become impossible to ignore after the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter, cyberattacks on Ukranian infrastructure and other actions.
“They’re not playing to the same rules,” he said at a cybersecurity conference in Manchester, England. “They’re blurring the boundaries between criminal and state activity.”
Ru..

Pope Francis Admits ‘Grave Errors’ in Chile Sex Abuse Cases

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Pope Francis Admits ‘Grave Errors’ in Chile Sex Abuse Cases Photo Pope Francis at the Vatican last week. Credit Alberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse, via Associated Press ROME — Pope Francis has apologized for “grave errors” in the handling of sexual abuse cases in Chile, where he had adamantly defended a bishop accused of covering up abuse by the country’s most notorious pedophile priest.
In an extraordinary letter to the bishops of Chile, published on Wednesday, a remorseful pope then invited representatives of the abuse victims to Rome so that he could personally apologize. Francis has endured intense criticism over accusations that he had a blind spot on the issue of sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church.
A spokesman for the Chilean bishops’ conference said that some of the victims would go in the coming weeks, and that the pope would individually ask for their forgiveness. Francis in the letter also summoned the country’s 32 bishops to meet at the Vatican in May — an exceptionall..

In a Syrian Town, People Started Shouting: ‘Chemicals! Chemicals!’

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In a Syrian Town, People Started Shouting: ‘Chemicals! Chemicals!’ Photo A picture said to show victims of the chemical attack on the Damascus suburb of Douma. Credit Emad Aldin/EPA, via Shutterstock BEIRUT, Lebanon — For two days and a night, the computer science student had been huddling with his family in the basement of their apartment building as pro-government forces rained bombs down on their rebel-held Syrian town.
After night fell, they heard the whirring of helicopter blades followed by the whistling sounds of objects falling from the sky. Soon, a strange smell wafted down the stairs.
“People started shouting in the streets, ‘Chemicals! Chemicals!’” the student, Mohammed al-Hanash, 25, said by phone from Syria.
The attack in the Syrian town of Douma on Saturday, which witnesses and medical workers said used chemical weapons, has resonated far beyond the war-scarred community’s destroyed buildings, ratcheting up tensions among world powers and threatening to escalate Syria’s m..