6 December 2014 Last updated at 09:02
Reports of bid to free US hostage Luke Somers in Yemen
US and Yemeni forces have launched an operation to rescue a US hostage held by al-Qaeda militants, reports say.
Details of the bid to free UK-born journalist Luke Somers are unclear.
It comes as nine alleged al-Qaeda militants were reported to have died in a drone strike believed to have been carried out by the US in Yemen's southern Shabwa province.
Yemen's defence ministry confirmed a "major operation" was taking place in the region.
Mr Somers, who was abducted in Yemen in 2013, has appeared in a video appealing for help.
Earlier this week, the Pentagon confirmed that an attempt to rescue Mr Somers last month had failed.
There are conflicting reports about the outcome of the operation to free him on Saturday.
China Today: Dilemma for leadership as Hong Kong and Taiwan seek change
Protests in Hong Kong and Taiwan elections reveal resentment of mainland
Clifford Coonan
While the People’s Republic of China tends to dominate the headlines due to its sheer scale, the greater China story also includes the former crown colony of Hong Kong and the self-ruled island of Taiwan, to which those on the losing side fled after the civil war in 1949.
Aside from the obvious drama of this year’s demonstrations in Hong Kong – the tear gas in Admiralty, the sight of students doing their homework on the barricades, the umbrellas, the yellow ribbons – one of the striking aspects of the protest was the high level of unhappiness with China it revealed among the people on the streets.
The students and other democracy activists wanted the city’s pro-Beijing chief executive, CY Leung Chun-ying, to resign, and demanded that China reverse its decision to vet the candidates for Hong Kong’s elections in 2017.
Opinion: We need fraternité against the cancer of French anti-Semitism
Attacks against Jews in France have doubled this year. Anti-Semitism is no longer a fringe problem and the French can only eliminate it if they confront it together, writes DW's Max Hofmann.
The frail 80-year-old man asked me not to use his real name in my story. So we agreed on an alias: Sigismund Silberstein. He was still afraid that someone from Germany would find him and attack him because of his Jewish heritage. Silberstein fled the Nazis in Germany to France in the 1930s. He found safety in his small apartment in a Paris suburb.
My encounters with Silberstein took place in 1994 and 1995; he is no longer alive today. But one thing is certain: France now, 20 years later, would no longer be able to offer him the sense of security he felt back then. Anti-Semitism is growing in France like a cancer and society is so divided that there is no simple solution for it.
Cry for justice: the Ampatuan massacre
December 6, 2014 - 12:00 AM
By Lindsay Murdoch
On the fifth anniversary of the massacre of 58 people in the Southern Philippines, Lindsay Murdoch revisits the killing fields to find that justice has still not been served.
A breeze rustles corn crops below a back-hoe scarred hilltop in the rolling green hills on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, only a call to prayers from a distant mosque breaking the killing field's silence.
Women suffered the most here, screaming as they were stripped of their clothes and slashed in the genitals before being shot multiple times and pushed into pits.
When their bullet-ridden bodies were dug up, some were found clutching each other.
Jihadi hostage-taking: Could it get out of control in Lebanon?
Al Qaeda's threat to kill an American in Yemen is in the headlines, but a long-running hostage drama in Lebanon has deteriorated to where women and children are now mentioned as targets.
BEIRUT, LEBANON — While the world has been transfixed – and horrified – by the gruesome and chilling hostage dramas played out in the Middle East these past months, Lebanon has been gripped by its own increasingly convoluted kidnapping crisis.
The lives of some 26 Lebanese soldiers and policemen hang in the balance as the government in Beirut wages a protracted and tense negotiating battle with two of the most radical and aggressive Islamist groups operating today in the Middle East: the extremist Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, Syria’s Al Qaeda affiliate.
Now Lebanon’s detention of two women and a videotaped threat to capture the wives and children of Lebanese soldiers is raising the specter of an already white-knuckled process spinning out of control.
Japan, Awash in Chaos
By Noah Smith
U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt called Dec. 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy,” but to many Americans it’s more of an occasion for head-shaking confusion. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor wasn’t a crippling blow so much as an unprovoked act of imperial suicide. When Japan took on the U.S., it picked a fight with a country with more than five times its gross domestic product and twice its population. From the day the U.S. entered World War II until the day it ended, Japan produced 17 new aircraft carriers. The U.S. produced 141.
But it gets worse. At the time it attacked the U.S. -- and the British Empire at the same time -- Japan was already engaged in an attempt to subjugate the world’s most-populous nation. It was the ill-fated bid to conquer China -- a country with 10 times the population and 20 times the land mass of Japan -- that prompted the U.S. to place an oil embargo on the Japanese Empire, which was what prompted the attack on the U.S. and Japan’s conquest of Southeast Asia. Japan desperately needed oil, because fighting China meant going up against impossible odds. The Empire’s offensives had already started to bog down by 1939.
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