The Islamic State group threatened to kill two Japanese hostages unless they receive $200 million in 72 hours, directly demanding the ransom Tuesday from Japan's premier during his visit to the Middle East. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe vowed to save the men, saying: "Their lives are the top priority."
Abe and other Japanese officials declined to discuss whether they'd pay the ransom for captives Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa, though their armed forces generally only operate in a self-defense capacity at home. Their kidnapping also immediately recalled the 2004 beheading of a Japanese backpacker in Iraq, carried out by the Islamic State group's predecessor over Japan's involvement in the U.S.-led war there.
Islamic State group threatens to kill 2 Japanese hostages
The real American Sniper was a hate-filled killer. Why are simplistic patriots treating him as a hero?
I have to confess: I was suckered by the trailer for American Sniper. It’s a masterpiece of short-form tension – a confluence of sound and image so viscerally evocative it feels almost domineering. You cannot resist. You will be stressed out. You will feel. Or, as I believe I put it in a blog about the trailer, “Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper trailer will ruin your pants.”
But however effective it is as a piece of cinema, even a cursory look into the film’s backstory – and particularly the public reaction to its release – raises disturbing questions about which stories we choose to codify into truth, and whose, and why, and the messy social costs of transmogrifying real life into entertainment.
Ohio death row inmates sue to know maker of execution drugs
Four death row inmates who are suing Ohio officials over a new state law that shields the names of companies providing lethal injection drugs want a federal court to prevent the law from taking effect in March.
Attorneys for the inmates filed the motion on Monday in US district court in Columbus. They want the court to stop the provisions that they say violate the right of free speech from taking effect, pending a trial on the lawsuit.
British intelligence captured emails from the NY Times, The Guardian, Reuters and more
The British intelligence organization GCHQ instigated a test exercise in 2008 that captured the emails of journalists and editors from Reuters, the New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC, NBC, the Washington Post and others, according to recently released files from Edward Snowden.
As a result of the test, the content of the emails was shared on the organization's internal servers where anyone in the organization could read them. GCHQ was tapping fiber-optic cables in November of 2008 when they intercepted over 70,000 emails, including emails from the mentioned news companies, according to The Guardian.
Drinking water trucked into Montana city after oil spill
Officials said Monday that they were bringing truckloads of drinking water to the eastern Montana city of Glendive after traces of 50,000 gallons of oil that spilled into the Yellowstone River were found in the city's water supply.
State and federal officials said preliminary tests Monday indicated that at least some oil entered the supply for the city of 5,300 people. They stressed they are shipping drinking water as a precaution and do not know yet whether there is any public health threat to residents. They will perform further tests to determine that.
Prosecutor who accused Argentine president of bombing cover-up found dead
A special prosecutor who had accused Argentine President Cristina Fernandez of shielding Iranian suspects as part of a cover-up in the investigation of a deadly 1994 attack has been found shot dead, authorities said Monday.
Alberto Nisman, who was set to testify Monday in a Congressional hearing about the bombing of a Jewish center — in which 85 people were killed — was found in the bathroom of his Buenos Aires apartment late Sunday, federal prosecutor Viviana Fein told Telam, Argentina's official news agency.
ISIS Goes Medieval on Gays
Here are images that pious Muslims ought find more “offensive” than those of the Prophet Mohammed.
High above the Iraqi town of Mosul, masked members of the Islamic State throw a man off a building ledge. A crowd below gawks like spectators at a sporting event. They listen intently as a masked jihadist, his face covered by a balaclava, reads out the accused's sentence like a carnival barker. For committing the eternal crime of the “people of Lot”—a Koranic euphemism for sodomy—the doomed man will he hurled to death. In the last photo, his corpse is splayed out across the wet concrete.
Iran general killed with Hezbollah fighters in Israel raid
An Israeli strike on Syria killed an Iranian general, Tehran confirmed Monday, as thousands of supporters of Lebanon's Hezbollah gathered to bury one of six fighters killed in the same raid.
The attack on Sunday near Quneitra on the Syrian-controlled side of the Golan Heights enraged Hezbollah's supporters, but analysts said the group would avoid a major escalation with Israel.
'Friendship Nine' to be cleared of civil rights sit-in crimes
Fifty-four years after nine young black men became the first U.S. civil rights protesters to serve jail time for sitting at an all-white lunch counter, surviving members of the group will return to a South Carolina courtroom this month to be exonerated of their crimes.
Their "jail, no bail" strategy helped galvanize the fight against racial inequality in the South and became a model for other protesters. But the "Friendship Nine," as the men became known, endured personal hardships for taking the bold stand.
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