Six In The Morning Monday September 22

Where does Isis get its money from? US steps up the battle to find out

Individuals and businesses rather than governments are funding the extremists

ANNE GEARAN , OLIVER WRIGHT

 

 

Monday 22 September 2014

The sudden rise of the well-armed, well-financed and media-savvy Isis militant group could not have come about unless unscrupulous companies and individuals slipped money to the group or did business with it, said the founders of a new, private research and advocacy group that will seek to expose such dealings and apply pressure to stop them.

“They’ve taken great advantage of modern communications and modern financial techniques” to promote themselves, recruit followers and amass money and weapons, said Mark Wallace, a former Bush administration diplomat and lawyer heading the new organisation. “There’s been an absence of people operating to counter that.”

President Barack Obama and other world leaders are making the extremists, who have seized control of large areas of Iraq and Syria since May, a central theme of next week’s annual United Nations General Assembly.

‘Romanian Nuremberg’ trial for Communist labour camp commander

Alexandru Visinescu, 88, charged with crimes against humanity over conditions at brutal prison for Romanian political detainees

• Agence France-Presse in Bucharest
• The Guardian, Monday 22 September 2014 10.12 BST

A trial that some have dubbed the “Romanian Nuremberg” opens on Wednesday in Bucharest, with the head of a brutal Communist-era labour camp charged with crimes against humanity.

Alexandru Visinescu, 88, is accused of running an “extermination regime” at the notorious Ramnicu Sarat prison in the east of the country, which he headed from 1956 to 1963.

“In his role as commandant, the accused … submitted the political detainees to conditions designed to destroy them physically, by depriving them of medical care, food and heating and inflicting abuse on them,” the indictment reads.

Flood of Syrian Kurd refugees enters Turkey

The number of Syrian Kurds fleeing to Turkey ahead of advancing "Islamic State" (IS) militants continues to swell. Officials fear that hundreds of thousands may end up seeking refuge across the border.

Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said on Monday that more than 130,000 Syrian Kurds have fled across the border to Turkey in the past few days, as they seek to escape an advance by marauding jihadist militants.

Kurtulmus warned that the number was likely to rise.

"We are prepared for the worst scenario, which is an influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees," he told reporters in the capital, Ankara, reiterating warnings given by the United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR, on Saturday.

Turkey has already taken in more than a million Syrians fleeing from that country's civil conflict over the past three-and-a-half years.

Global fears grow as Pakistan expands nuclear capabilities

September 22, 2014 - 12:46PM

Tim Craig

Islamabad: Pakistan is expanding its nuclear program, moving towards a sea-based missile capability and expanding its interest in tactical nuclear warheads, Pakistani and Western analysts say.

The development of nuclear missiles that could be fired from a navy ship or submarine would give Pakistan "second-strike" capability if a catastrophic nuclear exchange destroyed all land-based weapons.

However, the acceleration of Pakistan's nuclear and missile programs is renewing international concern about the vulnerability of those weapons in a country home to more than two dozen Islamist extremist groups.

Sierra Leone could be facing yet another day under lockdown

Health officials in Sierra Leone have called the three-day lockdown a 'huge success' but have requested more time to identify potential patients.

By Umaru Fofana, Reuters

FREETOWN — A three-day lockdown in Sierra Leone aimed at stemming the worst Ebola epidemic on record has identified dozens of new infections, but has not reached everyone in the country and is likely to be extended, a senior official said on Sunday.

In one of the most extreme strategies employed since the epidemic began, Sierra Leone ordered its 6 million residents to stay indoors as volunteers circulated to educate households as well as isolate the sick and remove the dead.

"There is a very strong possibility it will be extended," Stephen Gaojia, head of the Emergency Operations Center that leads the national Ebola response, told Reuters after meeting with President Ernest Bai Koroma.

Echoing Tiananmen, 17-year-old Hong Kong student prepares for democracy battle

By Wilfred Chan and Yuli Yang, CNN

September 22, 2014 -- Updated 0916 GMT (1716 HKT)

He's one of the fieriest political activists in Hong Kong — he's been called an "extremist" by China's state-run media — and he's not even old enough to drive.

Meet 17-year-old Joshua Wong, a skinny, bespectacled teen whose meager physical frame belies the ferocity of his politics. Over the last two years, the student has built a pro-democracy youth movement in Hong Kong that one veteran Chinese dissident says is just as significant as the student protests at Tiananmen, 25 years ago.

Echoing the young campaigners who flooded Beijing's central square in 1989, the teen activist wants to ignite a wave of civil disobedience among Hong Kong's students. His goal? To pressure China into giving Hong Kong full universal suffrage.