After drought, Zimbabwe seeks foreign help for flood victims

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After drought, Zimbabwe seeks foreign help for flood victims

Zimbabwe has appealed for international help for victims of floods that have left 246 people dead and displaced hundreds since December when torrential rains started pounding a country emerging from severe drought. An El Nino-induced drought last year scorched crops in the southern African country, leaving more than 4 million in need of food aid, but Zimbabweans are now having to contend with floods after receiving above-normal rains. Minister for local government Saviour Kasukuwere said floods had swept through villages in the southern and southwestern parts of Zimbabwe, destroying roads, crops and livestock and forcing people into temporary government shelter.

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MS-13 gang suspects indicted in slayings of 3 teenagers

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MS-13 gang suspects indicted in slayings of 3 teenagers

CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. (AP) — Federal prosecutors said Thursday they had captured the members of a violent street gang who killed three high school students, including two girls who were inseparable best friends and were attacked with a machete and baseball bats as they walked through their suburban neighborhood.

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The Latest: Le Pen lays out platform for French economy

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The Latest: Le Pen lays out platform for French economy

PARIS (AP) — The Latest on the French presidential election campaign (all times local):

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Photos of the day - March 2, 2017

Tour guides wearing traditional Chinese dress practice smiling by biting chopsticks at Qingming Grand-River Park in Kaifeng, central China’s Henan Province; Cheryl Kreiser of Silver Spring, Md. holds up a sign outside Justice Department,as she joined a group to protest Attorney General Jeff Sessions; and, An Iraqi special forces soldier fires a sniper rifle during a battle with Islamic State militants in Mosul, Iraq. These are just a few of the photos of the day for March 2, 2017. See more news-related photo galleries and follow us on Yahoo News Photo Tumblr.  

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Amazon finally explained what happened when it accidentally took down the internet

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Amazon finally explained what happened when it accidentally took down the internet

The Amazon Simple Storage Service and Amazon Web Services, also known as S3 and AWS, happen to power a lot of the internet as you know it. And they're usually quite dependable, meaning that the companies using the solutions can rest assured that their websites will be up no matter what. But no internet service can have a 100% uptime rating, and the same goes for AWS. It was Amazon’s AWS that failed on Tuesday, taking plenty of popular services and sites down with it.

Now, Amazon has finally explained exactly what happened on Tuesday when it took down much of the web.

In lengthy and rather technical note to customers, Amazon explained that an employee entered a command incorrectly and caused a chain of events that ultimately led to parts of the internet going bonkers. Amazon has protocols in place to fix downtime issues like these, but the problem was so ample that not even Amazon could fix it in a timely matter. That’s why the outage lasted for several hours — well, technically it wasn’t an outage since only subsets of AWS’s complex architecture went down.

“We build our systems with the assumption that things will occasionally fail, and we rely on the ability to remove and replace capacity as one of our core operational processes,” Amazon said. “While this is an operation that we have relied on to maintain our systems since the launch of S3, we have not completely restarted the index subsystem or the placement subsystem in our larger regions for many years.”

The good news is that Amazon was able to restore order in the universe, and it’s now looking to prevent this from ever happening again. If you want to read the entire explanation, check out Amazon’s full post here.

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Donald Trump Is No Ronald Reagan

Trump is like Reagan in the same way that a card table is like a racehorse: They have the same number of legs, but after that the similarities are sparse.

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Caterpillar shares sink on news of federal probe

Caterpillar, which is based in Peoria in the midwestern state of Illinois, confirmed the presence of agents, but did not disclose the nature of the probe. "Law enforcement is present in various Peoria-area Caterpillar facilities executing a search warrant," a spokeswoman said. Some of the investigators sported jackets with an Internal Revenue Service logo, while others appeared to be from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Peoria Journal Star reported.

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The Latest: Fillon hit by campaign defections

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The Latest: Fillon hit by campaign defections

PARIS (AP) — The Latest on the French presidential election campaign (all times local):

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The Latest: Culture min sees nationalism threat to fashion

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The Latest: Culture min sees nationalism threat to fashion

PARIS (AP) — The Latest on the French presidential election campaign (all times local):

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South Korea's Lotte Duty Free says website crashed after attack from Chinese IPs

By Joyce Lee and Heekyong Yang SEOUL (Reuters) - Lotte Duty Free on Thursday said a cyber attack using Chinese internet protocol (IP) addresses has crashed its website, the latest report of irregularity from a South Korean firm in China since Seoul decided to deploy a U.S. missile defense system. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which overloads servers with requests, began slowing all four language versions of the website at 11:00 a.m. (0200 GMT) and crashed them all around 12:00 p.m., Lotte Duty Free said in a statement. The attack comes after affiliate Lotte International Co Ltd on Monday approved a land swap to allow the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) system on what was once its property, in response to the North Korean missile threat.

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Victims of California plane crash identified by relatives

RIVERSIDE, Calif. (AP) — A plane that crashed into a California neighborhood and destroyed two homes was carrying husband-and-wife pilots and their grown daughter, and a mother and daughter who were friends of the family, relatives said Wednesday.

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Eleven bodies, some with signs of torture, found in Mexico's Veracruz

Eleven bodies were found near a tourist area in the Mexican state of Veracruz on Wednesday, a day after the government said it would send federal police to calm one of the most violent regions of the country. After years of falling homicide levels, Mexico is suffering a deteriorating security situation not seen since former president Felipe Calderon announced a war on drug gangs in 2007. In 2016, more than 20,000 homicides were reported, the highest level registered since Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto took office in 2012.

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Canada, U.S. join forces on tackling border asylum-seekers

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Canada, U.S. join forces on tackling border asylum-seekers

By David Ljunggren OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadian and U.S. officials are working on a plan to tackle asylum seekers crossing into Canada illegally, with American officials keen to discover how they entered the United States in the first place, said a source familiar with the matter. U.S. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly is set to visit Canada this month for talks on the border and the influx of people, said the source, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. Hundreds of people, mainly from Africa but also the Middle East, have walked across the border, seeking asylum.

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