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It has all the key points you'd expect on a birth certificate -- baby's weight, length and date of birth confirmed with an official insignia. The difference here is the governing authority's stamp: The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. It's one of many official documents relating to matters such as vaccination schedules, fishing methods and rent disputes in the areas now controlled by ISIS.

In a move that once again isn't exactly shocking, Halliburton Co. has been engaging in much more serious layoffs than they initially planned on back in February. Back in the early part of the year -- when energy analysts were confidently predicting oil prices would rebound in no time at all -- Halliburton still battened down the hatches, announcing plans for about 6,500 layoffs. Since then the analysts have for the most part gotten increasingly dour with their predictions, oil prices have stayed around $50 a barrel and Halliburton has actually laid off about 10 percent of its workforce in...

Baker Hughes Inc., one of the world's largest oil and gas service companies, said it will increase job cuts worldwide to 10,500, or about 17 percent of its total workforce. The Houston-based company said the cuts are necessary in order to weather a crash in North American drilling prompted by low oil prices. Baker Hughes announced the additional cuts Tuesday (April 21) after reporting a $32 million loss for the first quarter this year. The company's first-quarter revenue was down 20 percent compared to the same period a year ago. Earlier this year, Baker Hughes said it planned to cut...

Here’s a video that’s causing an uproar among those who care about photographers’ rights. It’s a 53-second clip recorded on on April 19th that shows an encounter one woman had with police officers on a residential sidewalk in South Gate, California. While shooting photos or footage of the assault rifle-equipped officers with her smartphone, one of the men charges her, snatches the camera from her hands, smashes it on the ground, kicks it back at her, and then walks away. Details are sparse at the moment, and we’ll update you when more info on this emerges.

Nineteen of the about two dozen people who may seek the Republican presidential nomination trooped to Nashua, New Hampshire, last weekend hoping to impress that state's primary voters and activists. The candidates rehearsed Republican talking points about lower taxes, smaller government and a strong foreign policy, but they had nothing to say about the impending Supreme Court decision that threatens to redefine marriage and undermine the family as we have always known it. That gap in presidential stump speeches is filled by an important brief just filed in the Supreme Court by members of the Republican Party's committee on resolutions,...

Wal-Mart faces a potential labor injunction from a union group asking the company to rehire all 2,200 employees affected by the abrupt temporary closing of five stores a week ago. One affected store, in Pico Rivera, California, has been a hotbed for worker protests against Wal-Mart. A union is asking labor regulators to go to court to force Wal-Mart to rehire all 2,200 employees affected by the abrupt temporary closing of five stores a week ago. The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union filed the charge on behalf of OUR Walmart with the National Labor Relations Board on Monday,...

After upgrading to OS X 10.10.3, you may find that navigating the Finder can be arduously slow at times, where the contents of folders you open may take a while to display, and otherwise scrolling and navigating may be overall sluggish. If this occurs, then you can likely fix it by clearing some Finder-related cache information from your Mac.Caches are small databases of frequently accessed resources that a program can access far quicker than having to locate and parse this information directly from locations on disk, or which store specific URLs and other Web resources that a program may use...

A Mansfield man says a drone was hovering outside his first floor window. He called police and was told there was little they could do about it.

A 20-year-old woman from a Birmingham, Alabama, suburb has left the US to join the Islamic State militant group in Syria, the local broadcaster WIAT reported on Monday. Hoda Muthana made contact with militants through social media and had been distancing herself from other Muslims in Hoover for more a year before leaving, said family spokesman Hassan Shibly, according to WIAT. Her family reportedly fled Yemen for the US more than 20 years ago. Hoda's father, Mohammed, told BuzzFeed that his daughter's introduction to social media started with the smartphone he gave her as a high-school graduation gift in 2013....

Once upon a quite different time, Americans debated politics; we didn't just trade videos of politicians making gaffes on the campaign trail. As when Barack Obama tells those who built their own businesses, "You didn't build that." Or the hapless Mitt Romney described the 47 percent of Americans who were expected to vote for his opponent in the last presidential election as "takers." As he put it: "My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." What fun -- letting the political figures we love to...

EXCLUSIVE: Proposed federal rules for NYPD training include Cop 101 advice like 'don't be racist' BY STEPHEN REX BROWN NYPD recruits are about to get a crash course in the ABCs of policing. The federal monitor overseeing reforms to the NYPD wants the current class of Police Academy recruits to be taught groundbreaking new concepts like: Don’t be racist, don’t mock others, don’t tell sexist jokes and don’t hassle people for no reason. The monitor, Peter Zimroth, asked Manhattan Federal Judge Analisa Torres on Monday to approve the stack of new training materials that will be presented to the class...

The administration granted amnesty to at least one known gang member under President Obama’s program for Dreamers, and as many as 20 others may also have been approved, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee revealed Tuesday. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency charged with approving amnesty applications, admitted it broke its own rules in approving the gang member for tentative legal status, agency chief Leon Rodriguez said in a letter to Sen. Charles E. Grassley. “Based on standard procedures and processes in place at the time, the [deferred action] request and related employment authorization should not have been...

LaTanya Dorsey is a mother who sends her daughter to a public charter school in Eastpointe. Her daughter is on the honor roll and doing very well. Dorsey didn't expect to have a say in where her daughter went to school. “Usually, it's the district that you're in is the school that you would have to attend,” Dorsey said. “That kind of surprised me — that I did have a choice to send her to another school, so I was real grateful for that.” Dorsey said that parental choice is critical to helping students attend a school that is the...

Many doctors are blacklisted and now deemed personae non gratae. Since I revealed the covert relationship between AARP and UnitedHealth Group in my article on 16 October 2012, the duo has now proudly and publicly announced their badly kept secret. Who AARP really is and what drives UnitedHealth Group is a dirty story the public needs to know. AARP derives over 80 percent of its revenue from commissions/royalties from the sale of UnitedHealthcare Group products. This cozy relationship by these fascinating bed mates is being litigated in Texas—in a class action suit, no less—by Dr. John Milton Peacock and Robbie...

As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hear oral arguments next Tuesday on whether states will continue to be free to define marriage for their own citizens, a number of amicus briefs have been filed arguing that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a fundamental right to same-sex marriage. Heritage Foundation Senior Fellow Ryan Anderson and prominent attorney and constitutional law expert Gene Schaerr recently co-authored their own amicus brief that asserts that the U.S. Constitution does not require states to redefine marriage to allow for two individuals of the same gender to get married. Speaking at a Heritage Foundation...

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The Republican presidential hopefuls — declared and undeclared — descended on New Hampshire this past weekend for the First in the Nation Republican Leadership Summit.But what issue was first on the agendas of those eyeing a shot at the Oval Office?Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush tried to varnish the family name for a new campaign. “We’re not always like our brother or sister or mom and dad. We all have our own unique DNA and our own life experiences,” he said, telling a bit of his life story including the love-at-first-sight meeting with his wife at age 17 in...

Sen. Ted Cruz now claims he “misspoke” when he told potential New Hampshire voters that he has been “pressing” Sen. John McCain to hold hearings on whether service members can carry concealed weapons on military bases.“Now, I will acknowledge, I may have misspoken in New Hampshire when I said that I had been pressing John McCain, and what I had been pressing was the Armed Services Committee,” Cruz said in an interview Tuesday on Fox News. Story Continued Below “John McCain is the new chairman of it, so I sent a letter to the previous chairman,” Cruz said.On Sunday, Cruz...

The debut of the Lilly Pulitzer collection for Target was a spectacular feat of retailing that had very little to do with the quality of the fashion that the mass marketer was selling. Lilly Pulitzer is not fashion. It is clothes. The classic Lilly Pulitzer dress comes in shrill shades of yellow and pink that are vaguely infantilizing. They are clothes that can be shrunk down and worn by 7-year-old girls without changing a single design element — if there were actual design elements to change. But there are not.

After just one day of being planted, someone vandalized and destroyed a tree planted in memory of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. A memorial stone placed at the foot of the tree is also missing, according to a local news channel. The memorial tree was planted by members of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Caucus members had planted the tree in January-Wabash Memorial Park on Saturday and just one day later, community members found it destroyed. Another tree featured in a local news report was completely destroyed – just a few meters away from the tree planted...