Britain on Saturday urged Iran to de-escalate tensions in the Gulf by releasing a UK-flagged ship it said had been illegally seized in Omani waters in an "utterly unacceptable" gambit. Tehran was defiantly ignoring mounting European appeals to free the captured oil tanker and its mostly Indian crew, as the United States prepared to redeploy troops to Iran's regional arch-rival Saudi Arabia. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said it seized the Stena Impero ship on Friday for breaking "international maritime rules" in the Strait of Hormuz, a Gulf choke point for about a third of the world's sea-borne oil.

A U.S. lawmaker described 'unacceptable' border detention facilities while meeting with a U.S. citizen in Border Patrol custody.

Kenyan Finance Minister Henry Rotich was arrested on Monday on suspicion of financial misconduct related to the construction of two dams, an unprecedented detention of a sitting minister for corruption in a country notorious for graft. Rotich denied any wrongdoing in a large newspaper advertisement in March. Rotich and 27 co-accused face eight charges, ranging from conspiring to defraud and financial misconduct, said Noordin Haji, the director of public prosecutions.

San Francisco -- A 29-story office building at 123 Mission Street illustrates the policy puzzles that fester because of these facts: For centuries, tobacco has been a widely used, legal consumer good that does serious and often lethal harm when used as it is intended to be used. And its harmfulness has been a well-established and widely publicized scientific proposition for generations.The building is the headquarters of Juul, a large company that markets vaping products -- electronic cigarettes -- and that has been running full-page ads in major newspapers ostensibly attempting to limit sales of its product: "Youth vaping is a serious problem" that justifies "cracking down on underage sales at retail stores" and removing from stores "flavored products." Juul's flavors include mint, mango, fruit, and cucumber. Other companies' flavors have included "Unicorn Puke" and "Zombie Juice." The target audience is not mature.This city, Juul's host, recently banned such products from being sold in stores or online and delivered to city addresses. Its purpose is to limit cigarette smoking, the nation's foremost cause of preventable death. Well.In 2016, cigarette companies spent $8.7 billion advertising and otherwise promoting their products, 34 percent more than the total spending by all presidential and congressional campaigns ($6.5 billion) in the 2016 cycle. The companies claim that their primary aim is to enlarge market share, not enlarge the market by creating new smokers, and especially not young ones. However, the companies know that few people begin smoking after 21, so if there is to be a future market for the companies' products . . . Altria, maker of Marlboro and other brands, has invested $12.8 billion in Juul.Some smokers who cannot quit can transition to e-cigarettes, which deliver large doses of nicotine but are less harmful than inhaling smoke from burning tobacco. More people under 18 vape than smoke. For some, e-cigarettes will be a gateway to real ones: Data show that vapers are more likely than non-vapers to become smokers, but that although teen smoking has stopped declining, it remains at a historic low. More than 3 million high-school pupils (one in five) and half a million middle-school pupils vape. America is in a rapidly expanding mass experiment with a new product, and it will be a while before there is sufficient data to estimate whether it will be a net public-health benefit.In 1906 -- 302 years after King James I called smoking "harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs," and 299 years after he planted Jamestown in Virginia, whose tobacco enhanced his treasury -- a character in an O. Henry short story said, "Say, sport, have you got a coffin nail on you?" This was long before the surgeon general declared tobacco carcinogenic (1964) and addictive (1988). Today, cigarettes are stigmatized by common sense, social disparagement, and government, whose best cost-benefit ratio involves the dissemination of public-health warnings.When vaping among high schoolers increases 78 percent in one year (from 2017 to 2018), it has become a fashion fad that is flourishing in the absence of credible frightening information. But, then, after more than half a century of the aggressive dissemination of such information, 16 percent of American adults still smoke.In "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer," Siddhartha Mukherjee, an oncologist, writes, "In the turbulent century between 1850 and 1950, the world offered conflict, atomization, and disorientation. The cigarette offered its equal and opposite salve: camaraderie, a sense of belonging, and the familiarity of habits. If cancer is the quintessential product of modernity, then so, too, is its principal preventable cause: tobacco."So, perhaps some causes of increased vaping resemble those of the current opioid epidemic, which echoes the alcohol crisis that accompanied the mass movement of Americans from farms to cities early in the 20th century. But while San Francisco anathematizes vaping, what Mukherjee says remains true: "One of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars."More cigarettes might be sold because of bans on vaping products -- because smokers cannot use e-cigarettes to stop smoking, or because teenaged vapers will move on to readily available cigarettes. Perhaps instead of bans California should revive the anti-smoking ads that three decades ago reduced the number of smokers 17 percent in three years: "I tried it once and I, ah, got all red in the face and I couldn't inhale and I felt like a jerk and, ah, never tried it again which is the same as what happened to me with sex."© 2019 Washington Post Writers Group

DTE Energy says it hopes to restore power to 80% of affected customers by Monday

Rep. Elijah Cummings said on Sunday said he has “no doubt about it” that President Trump is racist.

The Royal Netherlands Air Force soon will buy another eight or nine F-35 stealth fighters, defense minister Ank Bijleveld said in a July 2019 interview.The additional F-35s will help the Dutch air force to reequip an additional front-line fighter squadron.The decision partially restores deep cuts to the Dutch fighter fleet that began at the end of the Cold War and continued through the 2008 global financial crisis. Today the RNLAF operates around 60 F-16s in three front-line squadrons and one training unit.At its peak in the late 1980s, the Dutch F-16 fleet included more than 200 airframes, making it one of Europe’s most powerful fighter forces.The Netherlands is a major partner in the U.S.-led F-35 program and originally planned to acquire 114 of the radar-evading warplanes to fully replace the F-16 fleet. But the country’s defense budget shrank and the F-35’s cost rose.Amsterdam in 2013 budgeted just $6 billion to buy 37 F-35s, enough to equip two F-16 squadrons plus the training unit. Critics pointed out that 37 fighters would be sufficient to support long-term deployments of just a handful of aircraft.“Because pilots are also busy with training and surveillance of Dutch airspace, only four aircraft could be permanently on a foreign mission,” Dutch newspaper Trouw reported. “Should an [F-35] crash, even that limited assignment would be difficult.”

A French submarine that went missing in the western Mediterranean in 1968 has been found, officials said Monday, ending a 51-year wait for families of the crew who continue to seek answers to the naval disaster. The diesel-electric Minerve submarine was lost off France's southern coast with 52 sailors on board on January 27, 1968. "We found the submarine Minerve last night located 45 kilometres (30 miles) south of Toulon, about 20 kilometres further south than where it was searched for in 1968," the French maritime prefect of the Mediterranean, Vice Admiral Charles Henri du Che, told reporters in Toulon.

Eric Sparkes showed up during a WSB-TV interview with Rep. Erica Thomas of Austell on Saturday, outside the Atlanta-area Publix store where the incident occurred , the station reported . Thomas confronted Sparkes in front of reporters and said he had "degraded and berated" her. In a tearful Facebook video posted Friday, Thomas said she was in the express line because she is nine months pregnant and cannot stand for long.

A tourist was kicked in the crotch by a wild horse on the beach of Assateague Island, located off the coast of Maryland, after the man attempted to pet the animal.