On 7 January 2015, at about 11:30 CET (10:30 UTC), two masked gunmen forced their way into the offices of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris, France. They killed 12 people, including the editor Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier, 7 other Charlie Hebdo employees, and 2 National Police officers, and wounded 11 others. Charlie Hebdo had attracted attention for its depictions of Muhammad, the founder of Islam.
The gunmen were armed with AK-47 assault rifles, a shotgun, and an RPG launcher. They fired up to 50 shots with automatic weapons, shouting "Allahu Akbar", Arabic for "God is great".
Police detained several people during the manhunt for the two main suspects. A third suspect voluntarily attended a police station after hearing he was wanted, and was not charged. The assailants were described by police as "armed and dangerous", and the threat level in Île-de-France and Picardy was raised to its highest possible status. On 9 January, police tracked the assailants to an industrial estate in Dammartin-en-Goële, where they took a hostage.
Another gunman also took hostages, at a kosher supermarket near the Porte de Vincennes. GIGN (a special operations unit of the French Armed Forces) combined with RAID and BRI (special operations units of the French Police) conducted simultaneous raids in Dammartin and at Porte de Vincennes. Three terrorists were killed and four hostages were killed in the Vincennes supermarket before the intervention; some hostages were injured. A fifth suspect is still on the run. 17 people were killed at four locations between 7 and 9 January, in addition to the 3 suspects; at least 21 others were injured, some critically. The attacks are the deadliest act of terrorism in France since the 1961 Vitry-Le-François train bombing by the Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS).
On 11 January 2015, up to 2 million people, including more than 40 world leaders, met in Paris for a rally of national unity to honour the 17 victims. In all, 3.7 million people joined demonstrations nationwide, in what officials called the largest public rally in France since World War II. The phrase Je suis Charlie (French for "I am Charlie") came to be a common worldwide sign of solidarity against the attacks. The remaining staff of Charlie Hebdo announced that publication was to continue, with plans for a print run of three million copies for the next week's issue, rather than its typical 60,000. The "survivors' issue" of Charlie Hebdo will also be sold outside France.
"Je suis Charlie" is a slogan adopted by supporters of free speech and freedom of expression after the 7 January 2015 massacre in which 12 people were killed at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris France. It identifies a speaker or supporter with those who were killed at the Charlie Hebdo shooting, and by extension, a supporter of freedom of speech and resistance to armed threats. Some journalists embraced the expression as a rallying cry for the freedom of self-expression.
Wikipedia Entry - 13th January 2015
Boko Haram Crisis
Who are Boko Haram?
- Founded in 2002
- Initially focused on opposing Western education - Boko Haram means "Western education is forbidden" in the Hausa language
- Launched military operations in 2009 to create Islamic state
- Thousands killed, mostly in north-eastern Nigeria - also attacked police and UN headquarters in capital, Abuja
- Some three million people affected
- Declared terrorist group by US in 2013
The insurgency by Boko Haram, which is fighting to create a hard-line Islamic state in north-eastern Nigeria, has left more than 13,000 dead and 1.5 million displaced since 2009.
The group has seized dozens of towns and villages in north-east Nigeria in the last six months and now reportedly controls large parts of Borno state, which borders Niger, Chad and Cameroon.
Meanwhile in the Borno state town of Baga, a resident on Monday said he saw "corpses everywhere" following a major assault by the militants there last week.
"They have set up barricades in strategic locations in the town. There are corpses everywhere. The whole town smells of decomposing bodies," Borye Kime, who fled the attack to Chad but returned briefly Monday to collect some possessions, told AFP.
Local officials have cited huge numbers of dead in the attack on the town on the shores of Lake Chad in Borno state.
There was no possibility of immediately confirming the figures.
Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan has been fiercely criticised for his failure to beat back Boko Haram, whose territorial gains have led to fears of a total collapse of government control in the north-east.
North Korea - Nuclear Threats and Inner Atrocities
Yeonmi Park was nine years old when she was invited to watch her best friend’s mother be shot.
Growing up in North Korea, Yeonmi had seen executions before. She remembers her mother piggybacking her to public squares and sports stadiums to watch the spectacles used by Kim Jong-il’s Workers’ Party to silence even the slightest whisper of dissent.
But this killing lodged in her mind. Yeonmi watched in horror as the woman she knew was lined up alongside eight other prisoners and her sentence was read out. Her crime was having watched South Korean films and lending the DVDs to friends. Her punishment in this most paranoid of dictatorships was death by firing squad.
As the executioners raised their weapons, Yeonmi covered her face. But she looked up again, just in time to see an explosion of blood and the woman’s body crumple to the ground. ‘It was a shock,’ she remembers. ‘It was the first time I felt terrified.’
Yeonmi is recounting the horrific incident over a milkshake in Seoul, the ultra-modern capital of South Korea that is only 35 miles from the North Korean border but, with its luxury cars and 10-lane motorways, feels like another planet. Twelve years have passed since that day, and Yeonmi, now 21, is one of tens of thousands of North Korean defectors who have escaped one of the world’s most reclusive and repressive regimes.
Hoeryong concentration camp (or Haengyong concentration camp) is a political prison camp in North Korea. The official name is Kwan-li-so (penal labour colony) No. 22. The camp is a maximum security area, completely isolated from the outside world.Prisoners and their families are held in lifelong detention.
Qatar Football Deaths - Modern Day Slavery
Nepalese migrants building the infrastructure to host the 2022 World Cup have died at a rate of one every two days in 2014 – despite Qatar’s promises to improve their working conditions, the Guardian has learned.
The figure excludes deaths of Indian, Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi workers, raising fears that if fatalities among all migrants were taken into account the toll would almost certainly be more than one a day.
Qatar had vowed to reform the industry after the Guardian exposed the desperate plight of many of its migrant workers last year. The government commissioned an investigation by the international law firm DLA Piper and promised to implement recommendations listed in a report published in May.
But human rights organisations have accused Qatar of dragging its feet on the modest reforms, saying not enough is being done to investigate the effect of working long hours in temperatures that regularly top 50C.
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