New York: Iran on Wednesday slammed as “hostile” new US sanctions aimed at preventing importers from buying Iranian oil using foreign currencies. The US sanctions, which took effect on Wednesday, will make it even tougher for Iran to get paid in cash for crude it sells to large oil buyers such as India and China.

“This is the latest ring in the series of hostile actions against Iran,” said Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast.

“We are …

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Tunisia’s prime minister has said that he will dissolve the Islamist-led government and form a national unity administration, following the killing of prominent secular opposition leader Shokri Belaid in front of his home.

Hamadi Jebali announced during a speech to the nation on Wednesday that he will form a cabinet of technocrats to run the country until elections are held.

“After the failure of negotiations between parties on a cabinet reshuffle, I decided to form a small …

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Students at Duke University today protested a fraternity party dubbed the “Racist Rager,” at which attendees dressed as Asians, including wearing conical hats, geisha costumes and an inflatable sumo suit.

On Tuesday, the school’s Asian Student Alliance plastered the campus with fliers that included the fraternity’s original email invitation that to a Feb. 1 party called “Kappa Sigma Asia Prime,” as well as photographs of frat members and other partygoers dressed in Asian-stereotype costumes.

The original invitation, …

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WASHINGTON — The White House on Wednesday directed the Justice Department to release to the two Congressional Intelligence Committees classified documents discussing the legal justification for killing, by drone strikes and other means, American citizens abroad who are considered terrorists.

The White House announcement appears to refer to a long, detailed 2010 memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel justifying the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric who had joined Al Qaeda in …

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But the current frontline of the austerity agenda is the assault on the US Postal Service, a vital public service that is older than the country. And it is advancing rapidly. On Wednesday, the Postal Service announced that Saturday first-class mail delivery is scheduled for elimination at the beginning of August—the latest and deepest in a series of cuts that threatens to so undermine the service that it will be ripe for bartering off to …

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The self-proclaimed Saudi cleric Fayan Al-Ghamdi has been accused of raping and torturing his own 5-year-old daughter, Lama Al-Ghamdi, to death. Dr. Mohammed Mehdi, the medical examiner in Lama’s case reported to Asharq Al-Awsat that the “offender committed all sorts of physical abuse on the victim” and that the 5-year-old girl suffered from clear evidence of sexual abuse and rape, including “swelling in the region of the genitals and laceration in her anal area.”

The father …

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Four of the tightest Senate races took place in states with some of the largest percentages of Native Americans: Arizona, New Mexico, North Dakota and Montana. The Native vote in three of those states helped Democrats win key victories and maintain control of the Senate.

Yet the 2012 election in these states also revealed just how hard Native communities still must work to participate in democracy—and just how little they are getting in return for their …

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The FBI is using a racial and ethnic mapping program to collect intelligence on American communities – and it doesn’t want you to know which ones it’s spying on, or how it’s using census data to do so. The ACLU and the ACLU of Michigan filed a brief in federal court on Friday to challenge the FBI’s secrecy over its profiling practices.

FBI documents we already secured show that the Bureau is profiling some communities for …

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The detailed circumstances in which a US government may order the killing of an American citizen who is a high-ranking member of al-Qaida have been revealed in a leaked memo prepared by Obama administration lawyers.

The document, acquired by NBC and dating from 2011, lays out for the first time the precise rationale for carrying out targeted killings of senior al-Qaida members who are US citizens, and who are believed to pose an “imminent threat of …

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For millions of undocumented migrants who have spent years in the US legal shadows, the rupture of the political deadlock on immigration was the realisation of what once seemed a forlorn hope.

But even if the moves to fix America’s broken immigration system result in a deal that once seemed so elusive, for many others it will come too late. Those are the people for whom the pressure of living without proper legal status bore down …

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