Paris attacks: Call to overhaul French intelligence services
- 28 minutes ago
- Europe
French intelligence services should be overhauled in the wake of last year's terror attacks in Paris, a parliamentary commission of inquiry has recommended.
Various services should be merged into a single agency, the commission said.
Commission president Georges Fenech proposed a body similar to the US National Counter-Terrorism Centre.
The January and November attacks, which killed 147 people in all, prompted criticism of the security response.
"Faced with the threat of international terrorism we need to be much more ambitious... in terms of intelligence," said Mr Fenech.
Philippines police boast of 30 drug killings since Duterte was sworn in on Thursday
Hardline president’s ascension to office is followed by wave of shootings, prompting outcry over ‘serial summary executions of users and petty drug lords’
Thirty “drug dealers” have been killed since Rodrigo Duterte was sworn in as Philippine president on Thursday, police said, announcing the seizure of nearly US$20m (£15m) worth of narcotics but sparking anger from a lawyers’ group.
Duterte won the election in May on a platform of crushing crime, but his incendiary rhetoric and advocacy of extrajudicial killings have alarmed many who hear echoes of the country’s authoritarian past.
Oscar Albayalde, police chief for the Manila region, said five drug dealers were killed on Sunday in a gun battle with police in a shanty town near a mosque near the presidential palace.
Inside Aleppo, the Syrian city with a past and present shaped by war
Robert Fisk tours Aleppo and finds a broken civilisation with painful reminders of ancient tragedies
Maybe dust is the vital physical element of war. It lay across the old cobbled streets of the burned Aleppo soukh of Abdul Hamid, in the cindered wooden shops of al-Ajami Street, thick in the air as we sprinted across the road just east of the pulverised minaret and wreckage of the Omayyad Mosque of Sulieman ben Abdul Malik. Its grey particles cloaked this ancient place like an unwanted blessing, history on the retreat.
There had been a small retreat, too, among the still contested alleyways of the medieval centre of this tragic city. Each time I come here, the Nusrah Front have advanced a little further into the west of Aleppo, the Syrians retired to what we used to call “prepared positions”, a few hundred metres of movement here and there amid the ruins.
But the front lines have now congealed into the ground, plastic sheets concealing the entrances of old buildings from snipers, three new Russian-built BMP armoured vehicles of the Syrian army nestling beneath the gold and red Ottoman-style lanterns of a long-devastated hotel.
Private security company’s dog killing sparks outcry in Kuwait
OBSERVERS
Widespread outcry has gripped the gulf state of Kuwait over the past week after a strange scandal broke: shortly after losing an important contract, a private security firm euthanised 24 of its bomb-detection dogs and buried them quickly, in a shallow, roadside grave. Since then, the company boss has been nowhere to be found and further scandals have also emerged including company employees not being paid for months. So what is going on? The Observers investigated this twisted tale.
The scandal started in mid-June when Koweit National Petroleum Company broke off a contract with Eastern Securities of Kuwait. A few days later, on June 21, this American private security firm had 24 of its bomb detection dogs euthanised. Previously, these dogs were used to search for explosives on oil fields. Angered by this, an employee of the company posted photos of the dead animals on Facebook.
A spokesperson for the Koweit National Petroleum Company said that the company had played no role in the decision to terminate the lives of the dogs. He said that Koweit National Petroleum Company broke its contract with Eastern Securities because “tests carried out by a third party to evaluate the capacity of the dogs to detect bombs were not conclusive.” He also said he regretted that Eastern Security had decided to kill the animals.
'Welcome to Jupiter!' NASA's Juno space probe arrives at giant planet
Updated 0633 GMT (1433 HKT) July 5, 2016
NASA says it has received a signal from 540 million miles across the solar system, confirming its Juno spacecraft has successfully started orbiting Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system.
"Welcome to Jupiter!" flashed on screens at mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. The Juno team cheered and hugged.
"This is phenomenal," said Geoff Yoder, acting administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.
The probe had to conduct a tricky maneuver to slow down enough to allow it to be pulled into orbit: It fired its main engine for 35 minutes, effectively hitting the brakes to slow the spacecraft by about 1,212 miles per hour (542 meters per second).Iraq: ICRC camera drone captures damage in Ramadi
Homes, schools and hospitals crumbled to rubble shown in dramatic scenes captured by an ICRC drone camera.
Chilling aerial footage of Ramadi, a once bustling city in central Iraq, has captured the extent of destruction caused by war.
In late December, Iraqi forces, backed by US air strikes, announced the recapturing of Ramadi, which had been lost to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group in May 2015. The US-led coalition carried out more than 600 air strikes in the area from July to December last year.
A new six-minute clip, released by the International Red Committee of The Red Cross (ICRC) shows homes in Ramadi turned to rubble, along with flattened school, destroyed hospitals and damaged ambulances.
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