The government of North Korea has once again threatened to attack a proposed United Nations field office planned to be built in Seoul and specialize in monitoring human rights abuses perpetrated by the Kim Jong Un regime.
Perhaps the greatest success of Nigeria’s elections held last Saturday is that the Islamist terror group Boko Haram has failed to steal the biggest headlines for itself. Former military dictator Muhammadu Buhari is currently leading the polls with half a million more votes that incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan in an election marked more by allegations of fraud than terrorist violence.
Nigeria’s electoral commission began releasing the results of its Saturday presidential election on Monday, as delays triggered by protests, Boko Haram attacks, and faulty election technology marred an election already postponed by Islamist violence.
A Chinese couple has been sentenced to spend years in prison for wearing overtly Islamic fashions in the western Chinese city of Xinjiang. Chinese authorities sentenced the man to six years for sporting a beard and the woman to two years for wearing a burqa.
In an extensive interview with the Kurdish news outlet Rudaw, a captured Islamic State jihadist tells reporters that he and his comrades took hallucinogenic drugs “just before” entering battle that distorted the look of the battlefield and made them feel more empowered to kill.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pledged his full support to the Sunni Arab coalition currently fighting the Shiite Houthi rebels that have taken over Yemen’s capital, Sanaa. Stating that Iranian attempts to “dominate the region” have “begun annoying us,” Erdogan noted that Turkey is ready to further involve itself in the conflict “if there is a role to play.”
Adımlar Magazine, a radical Islamist publication headquartered in Istanbul that has publicly supported ISIS, has lost a writer and three of its editors were injured this week in a blast at their headquarters. Responsibility for the attack is disputed in several publications, though the editor in chief of Adımlar insists the bombing was the work of “the CIA or the Mossad.”
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has vowed to collect millions of signatures for a petition against American President Barack Obama, demanding that he repeal executive sanctions against high-ranking armed forces officials in the country over human rights abuses against anti-socialist protesters.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari visited Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Tuesday in an event that appears intended to strengthen ties between Baghdad and Damascus in light of their mutually shared threat of Islamic State (ISIS) invasion. Iraq’s desire to forge stronger ties with Assad flies in the face of American diplomatic efforts to isolate the dictator after his alleged use of chemical weapons on civilians.
In a surprising assessment that indicates the Venezuelan economy is doing worse than its socialist government has indicated, a Barclay’s report on the nation’s oil exports show that the nation has reduced exports of crude to the Caribbean by at least half, including exports to its greatest political ally, Cuba.
The Islamist government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sentenced two cartoonists to 11 months in prison for drawing a magazine cover in which some claim it is implied that Erdogan is homosexual. The cartoon also overtly depicts Erdogan discussing killing journalists.
Mexican ruling party PRI Mayor Javier Garfio Pacheco has issued an apology after comments at a rally suggesting that female domestic employees not keep up with current events because “the news is not that good,” and instead to watch Mexican primetime soap operas, known as telenovelas.
The Turkish Parliament is considering an extensive Internet regulation bill that has been expanded this week to include a ban on sharing content prohibited by the state–not just punishment for those who publish the content originally.
The human rights violations occurring in Venezuela– from thousands of arbitrary arrests to beatings and rapes to the murder of unarmed teenagers– have taken up little of the international spotlight in the past year. They have, however, increasingly caught the attention of human rights groups like Amnesty International, which details and condemns the abuses in a report released this week.
The Nigerian jihadist group Boko Haram has abducted between 350-500 people from the northeast Nigerian town of Damasak, Borno state, according to a report by Reuters. The abduction follows news of Nigerian officials liberating a new town while the terror group lost two female suicide bombers to a premature detonation.
The government of Uruguay has closed its doors to former Guantánamo detainees “definitively” and halted its program to accept refugees from the Syrian civil war for at least another year, according to Foreign Minister Rodolfo Nin Novoa.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has decided to jump into the fray of the Alberto Nisman murder mystery, telling an Argentine news outlet that the high-ranking prosecutor– found dead hours before he was scheduled to accuse the Argentine president of aiding Hezbollah– should have been “disciplined” for cooperating in his investigations with the United States.
Leftist Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, during a visit with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin, raised the issue of Greece receiving war reparations for the damage the Nazis did to the country in World War II. Despite Merkel’s rapid dismissal of the possibility, the two appeared cordial and friendly during their public press event leading up to a reception dinner.
Chinese officials visited Baghdad this weekend to vow cooperation with the Iraqi government in eradicating the Islamic State and rebuilding the oil-rich Iraqi economy. Outlets differ on the sparse details, though the message of resolve to participate in the fight against ISIS appears throughout.
Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, the head of the United Nations mission against the Ebola virus in Africa, told the BBC he expects the outbreak that began in February 2014 to be vanquished “by the end of the summer.”
The Brazilian government is preparing to thwart attempts by the Islamic State to recruit young Brazilian citizens to orchestrate “lone wolf” attacks in the Latin American nation, particularly during the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics.
A mass grave containing an estimated 100 bodies, most with their throats visibly cut through, was found in the northeastern Nigerian town of Damasak after Chadian and Nigerian forces eradicated occupying Boko Haram terrorists.
Emails obtained by the Associated Press show discussions among the senior administrators of the World Health Organization from as early as June 2014, in which officials refused to yet declare a state of emergency in west Africa over the Ebola outbreak for fear of angering local governments and interfering with the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.
The chief of staff to Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner accused slain prosecutor Alberto Nisman of using public funds to issue friends no-show jobs, buy “expensive champagne,” and hire prostitutes. Nisman died the day before formally accusing the President and other high-ranking officials of conspiring to protect Iranian terrorists for lower oil prices from the Islamic Republic.
In her memoir Hard Choices, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised her own work and that of the State Department in securing the departure of threatened dissident Chen Guangcheng from China. Chen, now in Washington, D.C., disputes this in his own memoir, in which he laments pressure by Clinton’s State Department to trust the Chinese Communist Party– so much pressure that “I no longer felt that they were on my side.”
