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What the West really needs to take on the Islamic State is ... a jobs program. That's what a top State Department spokeswoman suggested the U.S.-led coalition is doing to stop the slaughter of civilians by Islamic State militants across the region. "We're killing a lot of them, and we're going to keep killing more of them. ... But we cannot win this war by killing them," department spokeswoman Marie Harf said on MSNBC's "Hardball." "We need ... to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it's lack of opportunity for jobs, whether --"...

Its been just a few days since a shooter killed three people and wounded nine others at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, and Republicans have already resumed their baseless accusations against the group. Carly Fiorina has determinedly promulgated the claim, first advanced by the Center for Medical Progress in its deceptively edited videos, that Planned Parenthood sells “body parts” from fetuses. Donald Trump, in characteristically garbled fashion, appeared both to acknowledge that some claims about the videos were false and to cite the videos as a potential motive for violence. Meanwhile, in the House, conservatives say they are...

President Barack Obama has paid a late-night tribute to those killed in the terrorist attacks in Paris two weeks ago, shortly after his arrival for climate talks in the French capital. The American president's motorcade went straight from Orly Airport on Sunday to the famed French concert hall, the Bataclan, site of the worst bloodshed when the terrorists struck on Nov. 13.

About 20 students and faculty gathered on Monday afternoon for the third and final Community Conversation of the semester. The event, 'He Said, She Said, Ze Said,' was geared toward discussing personal pronoun usage in classroom and social settings. The conversation began by showing a video that talked about respect, safety and resources for LGBTQ+ students on college campuses. A major focus of the video was transgender respect and safety in classroom settings. 'We just want you to advance in the direction that accommodates and addresses the needs of a changing demographic of students,' they said. The Community Conversation also...

Iranians are turning to the Internet to vent long-simmering dissatisfaction with a domestic car industry dominated by producers Iran Khodro Industrial Group and Saipa Corp, following years of sanctions that led to the exit of foreign makers. Almost 20,000 people die on Iran’s roads each year, and police say faulty cars are partly to blame. “Creating and supporting campaigns not to buy cars is treason to the national interests,” Iranian Minister of Industry, Mines and Trade Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh said. “This campaign is wrong, sinful and anti-revolutionary, and it would inflict damage on the domestic economy,” he added, in remarks...

The Greek government and the UN refugee agency have brought in extra staff and ships to deal with some 25,000 stranded migrants on the island of Lesbos. A processing centre has been also set up on an abandoned football ground to help the migrants to get to Athens. A Greek minister said on Monday Lesbos was "on the verge of an explosion.

Police departments in the United States are reported to have bought a foul-smelling liquid developed in Israel to repel protesters. What is "skunk" and how is it used, asks Yolande Knell. It is a truly putrid stench. Palestinians who have been sprayed describe it as "worse than raw sewage" and "like a mixture of excrement, noxious gas and a decomposing donkey". Invented by Israeli firm Odortec, skunk water was first used by the Israeli military against demonstrators in the occupied West Bank in 2008. Since then armoured vehicles equipped with water cannon spraying jets of the stinky liquid have become...

Hillary Clinton is trying to tackle America’s student debt problem, and she’s trying to use emojis to help her case. Clinton on Monday announced plans dubbed “the new college compact” to commit $350 billion over the next 10 years to make college more affordable, if elected president. Then, she took to Twitter to ask people to use emoji to describe their feelings about student loan debt. The thing is, she hasn’t gotten a whole lot of emoji responses. But most of all, her tweet seems to have backfired among most people on Twitter. Some noted that using sad faces, cats...

At a time when home prices nationally are, if anything, showing signs of being too strong, the picture in Baltimore is the opposite. According to CoreLogic, prices in the Baltimore-Columbia-Towson metro area were down 8% in the year ending June, the worst showing of the 100 biggest metro areas. Nationally, prices rose 6.5% in the 12 months ending June, CoreLogic says. What’s driven that is a huge rise in foreclosure sales. Foreclosures — known in the business as real estate owned — accounted for 52% of all transactions in Baltimore in May — dwarfing the national average in the low...

With his Clean Power Plan, President Barack Obama is repeating California’s expensive mistake of ignoring the engineering realities of saving the planet and imposing political quotas requiring solar, wind and other renewable energy sources. The big problem is that solar and wind energy are inherently unreliable. Solar power plummets on cloudy days, and falls to zero at sundown. Same goes with wind turbines on a windless evening. In 2006, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature required utilities to use renewables for 20 percent of their power, a figure later increased to 33 percent by 2020. If these seem like suspiciously...

The most powerful woman in California isn’t a celebrity, she’s not even someone you often see on TV. That’s because the most powerful woman in California is Mary Nichols, head of the state’s Air Resources Board. Rules set by Nichols’ agency are among the strictest environmental laws in the nation. Nichols’ goal is for every new car sold in California by the year 2030 to be zero- or almost-zero-emissions, a quest which is taking a toll on automakers selling these efficient vehicles. September will be the biggest test for the 70-year-old Nichols’ grand plans. That’s when her mandate of having...

ObamaCare enrollees are less satisfied with their plans than people with other types of health insurance, according to a new poll. The poll from the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, the research arm of the consulting firm, finds that 30 percent of people with insurance through ObamaCare’s marketplaces are satisfied with their plans. That compares with 42 percent satisfaction from people with employer-sponsored plans, 48 percent with Medicaid and 58 percent with Medicare. Cost is the most common reason cited for the dissatisfaction with ObamaCare.

BAGHDAD -- U.S.-led airstrikes targeting the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria have likely killed at least 459 civilians over the past year, a report by an independent monitoring group said Monday. The report by Airwars, a project aimed at tracking the international airstrikes targeting the extremists, said it believed 57 specific strikes killed civilians and caused 48 suspected "friendly fire" deaths. It said the strikes have killed more than 15,000 Islamic State militants.

Just because he hasn’t been in Ferguson much over the last year, doesn’t mean Reverend Al Sharpton has forgotten about the Michael Brown family and what’s happened in the region since Brown’s death last August 9th. That’s according to pastor Carlton Lee, the Ferguson chapter president for Sharpton’s “National Action Network.” “Rev (Sharpton) has been extremely, extremely busy,” Lee says.

The Kraft Heinz Co. is voluntarily recalling about 36,000 cases of Kraft Singles cheese products because some of the packaging film may stick to the slices and pose a choking hazard. The recall applies to 3-lb. and 4-lb. sizes of Kraft Singles American and White American pasteurized prepared cheese product. The products being recalled have a "best when used by" date of Dec. 29, 2015 through Jan. 4, 2016, followed by the manufacturing code S54 or S55.

Landlords will be expected to evict tenants who lose the right to live in England under new measures to clamp down on illegal immigration. They will be able to end tenancies, sometimes without a court order, when asylum requests fail, ministers say. Landlords will also be required to check a migrant's status in advance of agreeing a lease. Repeat offenders could face up to five years in prison. Financial support for failed asylum seekers will also end under the plans. Some 10,000 currently continue to receive a taxpayer-funded allowance of £36 a week, despite their applications having been rejected, because...

When Dan Price, CEO of the Seattle-based credit card payment processing firm Gravity Payments, announced he was raising the company's minimum salary to $70,000 a year, he was met with overwhelming enthusiasm. But in the weeks since then, it's become clear that not everyone is equally pleased. Among the critics? Some of Price's own employees. Two of the company's "most valued" members have left the company, "spurred in part by their view that it was unfair to double the pay of some new hires while the longest-serving staff members got small or no raises." Maisey McMaster — once a big...

Michelle Obama is dishing her younger self some sage words of wisdom in her latest Instagram clip with rapper Wale. Wale asked what she would like to do if she had a different occupation, and her answer may surprise you! "I would be Beyoncé," she said with a smile, while busting a "Single Ladies" dance move. "I got the hand up!" The two ladies have gotten quite close over the years, and Bey even performed at Michelle's 50th birthday party last year.

Hillary Clinton paid roughly $57 million in federal and state taxes over the last eight years based on a statement just released by the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign. The statement does not say how much Clinton earned each year. She made roughly $15 million in charitable donations. “We’ve come a long way from my days going door-to-door for the Children’s Defense Fund and earning $16,450 as a young law professor in Arkansas — and we owe it to the opportunities America provides,” Clinton said in the statement.

People who insist that climate change isn’t happening often try to disprove it by pointing to what they see as contradictory phenomena. One of their most visually compelling arguments has centered upon Antarctic sea ice, which expanded to reach record levels in 2014. If the planet really is warming, they ask, then shouldn’t the ice in the southern ocean be melting? But now, in a new, not-yet-published paper, James Hansen, former director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and colleagues push back even harder. They argue that the increase in Antarctic sea ice not only doesn’t refute climate...