Six In The Morning Friday January 30

ISIS launches attack on Kirkuk

By Yousuf Basil and Jomana Karadsheh, CNN

Updated 0958 GMT (1758 HKT) January 30, 2015

30 January 2015 Last updated at 09:14

Amman, Jordan (CNN) ISIS militants have launched an attack on the oil-producing northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk.

Militants have taken over Maktab Khalid, an area southwest of the city after heavy clashes with Kurdish Peshmerga troops. Among those killed was Brig. Gen. Shirko Fateh, the highest-ranking operational commander of the Peshmerga brigade located in Kirkuk. 

Separately, heavily armed militants attacked an abandoned hotel in central Kirkuk used by local police as headquarters. Police and Peshmerga sources in Kirkuk told CNN that armed men put snipers on the rooftop of the hotel and security forces are surrounding the area.

There has been recent speculation that ISIS might attack Kirkuk to force Kurdish troops to divert their efforts away from Mosul, ISIS' stronghold in Iraq. Peshmerga fighters have moved in around the outskirts of Mosul recently, backed by coalition airstrikes.

South Africa apartheid assassin de Kock given parole

South African apartheid-era death squad commander Eugene de Kock has been granted parole after 20 years in jail.

He was nicknamed "Prime Evil" for his role in the killing and maiming of activists fighting white minority rule in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Justice Minister Michael Masutha said he would be released "in the interests of nation-building".

He was sentenced in 1996 to two life terms in prison and a further 212 years for the crimes he committed.

China to force buyers of computers and phones in Xinjiang to register names

Reports that new measure is designed to ‘prevent people spreading harmful information’

Reuters

Friday 30 January 2015 04.58 GMT

Anyone buying a mobile phone or a computer in the restive far-western Chinese region of Xinjiang will have to register their personal details with police, state media reported, in the latest sign of tightening government restrictions.

The measures were designed to “prevent people spreading harmful information and carrying out illegal activities”, the English-language Shanghai Daily reported, citing government officials. 

Xinjiang, which borders Central Asia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, has struggled with violence in recent years between majority Han Chinese and mostly Muslim Uighurs. 

ROBERT FISK

Isis hostage crisis: The prisoner swap has only one purpose for the militants - recognition its Islamic State exists and that foreign nations acknowledge its power

The Jordanian pilot, the failed Iraqi suicide bomber and the Japanese journalist are all part of Isis's frontier re-drawing in the Middle East - whether they realise it or not

However tragic the ending, the weird and unprecedented prisoner swap – of a failed suicide bomber, an air force pilot and a journalist – has only one purpose for Isis: recognition that its Islamic State exists and that foreign nations acknowledge its power.

You only had to listen to the number of reporters talking in the last few hours about “the Islamic State” – without the usual “so-called”and “self-styled” in front of it – to realize that we are already, with scarcely a thought for the consequences, accepting the Caliphate as a viable, if illegitimate, nation. Forget the original demand for cash – Isis is funneling the stuff in from its friends in the Arab Gulf – because a Jordanian king and a Japanese deputy foreign minister are more valuable than a billion dollars. 

French schoolboy (8) suspected of ‘defending terrorism’

Police summons of child who would not take part in ‘Charlie Hebdo’ minute’s silence sparks national debate 

Lara Marlowe

An eight-year-old schoolboy identified by French media only as “Ahmed” was questioned by police in Nice for at least half an hour on suspicion of “defending terrorism”. The boy’s father was summoned with him and was also interrogated. 

The Committee Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) said the treatment of Ahmed and his father “illustrates the collective hysteria into which France has plunged since early January.” Seventeen people were killed by three Islamist gunmen, who were in turn killed by police, on January 7th, 8th and 9th.

The director of the Flore primary school in Nice filed a complaint with police on January 21st. The boy had refused to participate in a minute’s silence in homage to the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and refused to hold hands with other students in a “circle of solidarity”. More than 200 similar incidents were reported in schools across France.

Argentina's Kirchner proposes intel reform: needed change or diversion?

President Kirchner says prosecutor Nisman, who was buried Thursday in Buenos Aires, was killed by rogue Argentine spies. She told the nation that a change to the Intelligence Secretariat is the best way forward.

By Jonathan Gilbert, Correspondent

BUENOS AIRES — The mysterious death of a federal prosecutor who filed an explosive criminal complaint against President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is roiling Argentina. While investigators try to establish if Alberto Nisman was killed or driven to suicide, the president is calling for radical changes to a powerful intelligence agency she accuses of conspiring against her. 

Many Argentines believe the government had a hand in Mr. Nisman’s death as a way to silence his accusations that the president secretly sought to shield former Iranian officials from charges that they directed a fatal car-bomb attack on a Jewish center here in 1994. He was buried Thursday in a Jewish cemetery. 

But the government says that a shadowy intelligence agent fed Nisman misleading information to build a false case against President Kirchner, then plotted the prosecutor's death to make it appear a government cover-up.