Taliban widen offensive as Afghan army fails to retake Kunduz
Militants appear to have dug in around key northern city despite authorities’ claims to have killed prominent Taliban leader
The Taliban are widening their offensive in northern Afghanistan after government forces failed to take back Kunduz, the strategic city in the north, which on Monday was captured by insurgents. It is the largest Afghan city to fall to the Taliban in the 14-year war.
Despite claims from Afghan authorities that an airstrike had killed a prominent Taliban leader and more than 100 insurgents, it appears that the militants have dug in around the city.
According to local people, Taliban fighters are still walking the streets freely, assuring people they do not intend to harm civilians in an apparent attempt to win local support.
Ten years on Danish daily stands by Muhammad caricatures
Debate continues as ‘Jyllands-Posten’ newspaper and cartoonist unrepentant
Derek Scally
On this day a decade ago, few outside Denmark noticed when the right-wing Jyllands-Posten daily published a dozen cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad.
The newspaper’s then culture editor, Flemming Rose, commissioned the cartoons as an experiment after hearing of a Danish author’s difficulty in finding anyone to illustrate a book about the life of Muhammad, given Islam’s ban on images of the prophet.
A few weeks later the Cartoon Crisis, as it came to be known, sparked violent protests in the Muslim world where angry demonstrators burned Danish flags and torched diplomatic offices.
A decade on, everything has changed for the Jyllands-Posten and its staff. Rose, now foreign editor, is flanked by bodyguards wherever he goes. In public appearances, angry verbal attacks or boycott calls are common. In Doha, he was dubbed a “Danish Satan”.CHINA 09/29/2015
Chinese cadets rush to defend ‘strange’ punishment
Lu Haitao
A group of Chinese students have been forced to carry out their compulsory military training wrapped in thick bed covers, as punishment for not tidying their rooms. After lying under the blazing sun in a blanket, students at southern China's Changsha University then did exercises with buckets on their head. While social media users and media outlets slammed the punishment for its absurdity, the victims themselves have rushed to defend it.
Instructors at Changsha University in China's Hunan province have inventive means of discipline. Photos published on Weibo - China's most popular social media network - and subsequently republished by several Chinese media outlets show the students carrying out their bizarre punishment. While Hunan roasted under a September sun that almost hit 30 degrees last week, around 20 or so students wrapped themselves in blankets, put a bucket on their heads and ran circuits while their classmates watched. According to Chinese media and students who were there, the spectacle lasted 10 minutes.
Several Chinese media outlets lashed out at the instructors. On Weibo, users were also quick to criticise. Yet in a bizarre twist, the teachers responsible for reprimanding them have found the unlikeliest of defenders: the students themselves.
Banksy's Dismaland theme park to be turned into shelters for migrants in Calais
By Nick Thompson, CNN
"Coming soon ... Dismaland Calais," a statement on the park's website announced Monday. "All the timber and fixtures from Dismaland are being sent to the 'Jungle' refugee camp near Calais to build shelters. No online tickets will be available."
Attached to the statement is an image of Dismaland's dilapidated castle towering over the French camp, which is currently home to at least 3,000 migrants, most of them from Sudan, Eritrea and Afghanistan.
The sprawling art installation -- Banksy's dystopian send-up of Disneyland -- is being dismantled after its five-week run in the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare in southwest England.
George Pataki calls for Twitter to censor Edward Snowden's tweet, because America
Updated by Ezra Klein on September 29, 2015, 6:00 p.m. ET
Edward Snowden joined Twitter today, and cheekily made the National Security Agency his first follow:
In response, ex-New York Gov. George Pataki called for Twitter to censor Snowden's tweets, because that's what great Americans do — suppress speech they don't like:
Pataki, who is running for president as a Republican, is currently at 0.6 percent in the polls.
Indonesia 'needs time' to tackle haze - Joko Widodo
Indonesia's President Joko Widodo has said he needs time to tackle the forest-burning which creates a haze every year over South East Asia.
In an exclusive interview with the BBC, Mr Widodo said Indonesians were also victims of the haze, but it would take three years for results to be seen from efforts to end the huge annual fires.
He also said Indonesia was open to investment, promising to cut red tape.
And he dismissed criticism he had failed to deliver on election promises.
Illegal fires
Speaking to the BBC Asia Business correspondent Karishma Vaswani in Jakarta, Mr Widodo said the haze was "not a problem that you can solve quickly".
The pollution is caused by people in Indonesia's Sumatra, Kalimantan and Riau regions illegally burning large areas of forest and peat for planting, mostly with lucrative palm oil trees.
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