PISCATAWAY, N.J. - President Barack Obama delivered a commencement address at Rutgers University on Sunday that steered clear of the typical graduation advice and sounded a lot like a tough, aggressive takedown of the Republican presidential front-runner.
The president, who spoke before a crowd of more than 50,000 in the school’s football stadium, called on the graduates to reject politicians who hark back to better days. The 45-minute-long address was filled with obvious jabs at Republican front-runner Donald Trump, whom the president didn’t name but who was a foil for the graduation speech’s most cutting applause lines.
Obama slammed Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the country’s southern border, saying the world is becoming ever more interconnected and “building walls won’t change that.”
Manchester police and an Army bomb disposal unit carried out a controlled detonation of a suspicious package that was found Sunday just before kickoff of Manchester United’s English Premier League game, a discovery that forced evacuation of the Old Trafford stadium and postponement of the game against Bournemouth.
Bournemouth players had just begun their warmups when the package was discovered shortly before the Premier League match was to begin at 10 a.m. EDT in the stadium, which holds 75,653 fans. Players immediately left the field and an evacuation began. Less than two hours later, Manchester police tweeted that detonation of the package, which multiple reports indicated contained a cell phone strapped to a gas pipe, had taken place. The package was believed to have been discovered in a bathroom.
The game was delayed for 45 minutes before being postponed by what the club was calling an “operation code red.”
The package was discovered during a routine search of the stands in the northwest quadrant of the stadium and a decision was quickly reached to evacuate the entire stadium.
BAGHDAD – The Islamic State group launched a coordinated assault on a natural gas plant north of Baghdad that killed at least 14 people, while a string of other bomb attacks in or close to the capital killed 15 others, Iraqi officials said.
The attack on the gas plant started at dawn with a suicide car bomber hitting the facility’s main gate in the town of Taji, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) north of Baghdad. Then several suicide bombers and militants broke into the plant and clashed with the security forces, an official said, adding that 27 troops were wounded.
The IS-affiliated Aamaq news agency credited a group of “Caliphate soldiers” for the attack.
In a statement, Deputy Oil Minister Hamid Younis said firefighters managed to control and extinguish a fire caused by the explosions. Younis said technicians were examining the damage.
A car bomb targeting a shopping area in the town of Latifiyah, about 20 miles south of the capital, killed seven people, including two soldiers, police and hospital officials said. They said that 18 people were also wounded in the attack, four of whom were soldiers.
Elsewhere in Baghdad, three separate bomb attacks targeted commercial areas, killing at least eight civilians and wounding 28 others, police added.
The Sunday attacks killed 29 people across Iraq. Since Wednesday, more than 140 people have been killed in a spate of bombings in Baghdad and elsewhere.
SANAA, Yemen – A suicide bomber on Sunday detonated his explosives among policemen standing in line outside a police base in the southern Yemeni city of Mukalla, killing 25, security and health officials said. At least 17 more people were injured in the attack and the officials said the death toll was likely to rise further.
The Yemeni affiliate of the extremist Islamist State group claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement posted on social media networks by IS sympathizers.
Sunday’s victims were policemen returning to work for the first time since last month’s recapture of Mukalla by forces loyal to the internationally-recognized government. The port city had been held for more than a year by Yemen’s local al-Qaida affiliate.
The victims also included young men applying for jobs with the city’s local police, according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Associated Press & Washingston Post
