Surviving An ISIS Massacre
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DIWANIYA, Iraq — Ali Hussein Kadhim, an Iraqi soldier and a Shiite, was captured with hundreds of other soldiers by Sunni militants in June and taken to the grounds of a palace complex in Tikrit where Saddam Hussein once lived.
The militants, with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, separated the men by sect. The Sunnis were allowed to repent for their service to the government. The Shiites were marked for death, and lined up in groups.
Mr. Kadhim was No. 4 in his line.
As the firing squad shot the first man, blood spurted onto Mr. Kadhim’s face. He remembered seeing a video camera in the hands of another militant.
“I saw my daughter in my mind, saying, ‘Father, father,' ” he said.
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Ebola: $600m needed to fight outbreak as pace of infection accelerates
Ghana says infection has spread to new part of the country as WHO confirms there are now 3,500 confirmed African cases
The United Nations has said $600m (£365m) in supplies would be needed to fight west Africa's Ebola outbreak, as the death toll from the worst-ever epidemic of the virus reached 1,900 and Guinea warned it had penetrated a new part of the country.
The pace of the infection has accelerated, and there were close to 400 deaths in the past week, officials said on Wednesday. It was first detected in the forests of south-eastern Guinea in March.
"This Ebola epidemic is the longest, the most severe and the most complex we've ever seen," said Dr Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), at a press conference in Washington.
Chan said there were more than 3,500 cases across Guinea, Liberia andSierra Leone.
Ukraine derides Russia ceasefire plan before summit
Ukraine denounces Kremlin proposal, calling it a bid by a “terrorist state” to deceive EU and Nato.
Ukraine’s government has denounced a Kremlin ceasefire plan for the country’s conflict, calling it a bid by a “terrorist state” to deceive the European Union and Nato as they prepared to discuss moves to counter alleged Russian aggression.
On the eve of today’s Nato summit in Wales, US president Barack Obama reaffirmed the alliance’s commitment to defend all its allies during a visit to ex-Soviet Estonia, France postponed delivery of a warship to Russia and Poland urged Nato states to give “military-technical” help to Ukraine in its battle with Moscow-backed separatists.
In an unexpected development yesterday, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenkoannounced that plans for a “permanent ceasefire” in Donetsk and Luhansk regions had been agreed with Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin.
Fighting against forced marriages in Niger
Niger has the one of the highest rates of child marriages in the world. In some rural areas, girls are still considered to be heir parents’ property. But some girls are fighting back - with desperate measures.
In the deserted, slightly grimy restaurant, Zeinabou Moussa is sitting on a wobbly plastic chair, nervously pulling at her headscarf. Although she is a slight girl, who averts her eyes every time she's asked a question, the 16-year old commands respect and fear in the male translator, sitting besides her. After all, she is Zeinabou, or as many call her now "the penis biter."
Without looking up, Zeinabou reveals why she is known as such. It was because of her desperate plan to fight back, should her newly-wed husband try to rape her. "I thought if I bit him really hard, he would let me go."
Zeinabou was 15 and a student in Yekoua, a small village in southern Niger, when her parents decided to marry her off against her will. She was forced to abruptly end her schooling in order to become her parents’ neighbor’s second wife. Although she didn’t really know anything about sex, Zeinabou said, she did have at least a vague notion of the male anatomy, thanks to several friends.
South Korean soldiers face murder charge amid bullying claim
September 4, 2014 -- Updated 0015 GMT (0815 HKT)
Like most South Korean mothers, Ahn Mi-ja was worried about her son's compulsory military service.
She has a point -- Yoon Seung-joo's medical unit is stationed close to the border with North Korea, which remains a very real threat.
Yet the real enemy was far closer than she could have ever imagined.
For more than a month, Private Yoon was beaten. Denied food, the 20-year old was forced to lick phlegm from the floor or eat his own vomit. He was hooked up to an intravenous drip to revive him when he faltered.
Then on April 6 this year, his body could take no more. Force-fed frozen food as he was being beaten, he simply stopped breathing and died. The official autopsy report stated the cause of death as asphyxiation.
His alleged abusers were half a dozen of his fellow comrades. The oldest was just 25.
Have you seen Venezuela's latest economic indicators?
Nobody else has either. The Central Bank has failed to release certain economic indicators, like Venezuela's inflation rate, for months.
CARACAS, VENEZUELA — • A version of this post ran on the author's blog, Caracas Chronicles. The views expressed are the author's own.
For those of us living in Venezuela, you only need a short stroll to your local market to see the current state of our economy. However, there’s always the need to have some sort of statistical confirmation.
Too bad the Central Bank (BCV) has stopped reporting on some of those important numbers in the last few months, at least publicly.
What started last December with an unusual twenty-day delay in the release of the November inflation rate has turned into a complete blackout of information. The last BCV report on inflation was from May. Yes, there have been alleged leaks on the June and July numbers, but the BCV has neither confirmed nor denied them.
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