war

In 15 years of dangerous missions — from midnight raids on al-Qaida safe houses in Iraq to battling Somali pirates from the deck of a heaving Navy ship on the high seas — there had never been one so shadowed by dread. As Robert James O'Neill contemplated his jump from a helicopter into Osama bin Laden's private garden, he was positive it would be his last.

On Sunday, Oct. 5, 1986, a young Sandinista soldier named José Fernando Canales Alemán sighted a Fairchild C-123K cargo plane in Nicaraguan airspace near the Costa Rican border. He fired a Russian-made shoulder mounted SAM-7 surface-to-air missile and brought down the plane. One man survived. His name was Eugene Hasenfus, and his subsequent capture by Sandinista forces led to the unraveling of a complex web now called “The Iran-Contra Affair.”

GUATEMALA CITY – In a second day of trial on Thursday, witnesses told the harrowing details of a Jan. 31, 1980 massacre by Guatemalan police that killed 37 people in a fire at the Spanish Embassy in the capital. The attack was in retaliation of a group of indigenous protesters, farmers and students who had taken over the embassy to demand an end to wartime atrocities committed in their communities.

Former police official Pedro García Arredondo will stand trial for allegedly ordering one of the biggest atrocities committed during Guatemala's 36-year civil war.

While most of the more than three million refugees who have fled the Syrian conflict have flooded into neighboring countries such as Lebanon and Turkey, a growing number are defying language barriers and distance to try their luck in Latin America.

In the past month, U.S. President Barack Obama has launched an open-ended Middle East war, built an impressive coalition of allies and entirely reversed his previous strategy of standing back from the region. Curiously, however, Obama has so far refused to reckon with the actor that more than any other is responsible for ruining his foreign policy doctrine, creating the security crisis and dragging U.S. military forces back to Iraq and Syria.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. President Barack Obama outlined an open-ended campaign Wednesday night to combat the threat posed by the Islamic State, significantly expanding the counterterrorism strategy that has been a hallmark of his presidency.

Costa Rican cops seized grenades and an RPG7 from an Heredia home near a high school on Friday.

GAZA CITY – Israel and the Palestinians agreed to a fresh 72-hour ceasefire in Gaza Sunday, accepting an Egyptian invitation to resume talks to end fighting that has killed more than 2,000 people. The ceasefire deal, which was to come into effect at one minute past midnight (2101 GMT on Sunday), clinched days of frantic mediation to stem a firestorm of violence that resumed after an earlier truce collapsed on Friday.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. forces launched a second wave of air strikes against Islamic extremists near Arbil in northern Iraq on Friday, destroying a militant convoy and killing a mortar team, the Pentagon said.