North Korea Gives South Korean Missionary Life Sentence

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Photo Credit: APNorth Korea said Saturday it has sentenced a South Korean Baptist missionary to hard labor for life for allegedly spying and trying to set up underground churches, the latest in a string of missionaries to run into trouble in the rigidly controlled North.

North Korean state media said the missionary was tried Friday and admitted to anti-North Korean religious acts and “malignantly hurting the dignity” of the country’s supreme leadership, a reference to the ruling Kim family. The rival Koreas have different English spelling styles for Korean names, so the North called the missionary Kim Jong Uk, but Seoul has previously referred to him as Kim Jung Wook.

Christian missionaries have been drawn over the years to totalitarian North Korea, which tolerates only strictly sanctioned religious services. North Korean defectors have said that the distribution of Bibles and secret prayer services can mean banishment to a labor camp or execution.

North Korea said in a dispatch dated Friday but released early Saturday that Kim had defense counsel, but the details of the trial could not be independently confirmed.

North Korea does not have an independent judiciary, does not provide fair trials and imposes rigid controls over many aspects of its citizens’ lives, including in religious matters, according to the U.S. State Department.

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Village Protests Rape, Killings of Indian Sisters

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Photo Credit: Dennis Jarvis / Creative CommonsTwo teenage sisters in rural India were raped and killed by attackers who hung their bodies from a mango tree, which became the scene of a silent protest by villagers angry about alleged police inaction in the case. Two of the four men arrested so far are police officers.

Villagers found the girls’ bodies hanging from the tree early Wednesday, hours after they disappeared from fields near their home in Katra village in Uttar Pradesh state, police Superintendent Atul Saxena said. The girls, who were 14 and 15, had gone into the fields because there was no toilet in their home.

Hundreds of angry villagers stayed next to the tree throughout Wednesday, silently protesting the police response. Indian TV footage showed the villagers sitting under the girls’ bodies as they swung in the wind, and preventing authorities from taking them down until the suspects were arrested.

Police arrested two police officers and two men from the village later Wednesday and were searching for three more suspects.

Autopsies confirmed the girls had been raped and strangled before being hung, Saxena said.

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Residents of Small Guatemalan Town Want Jews to Leave

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Indigenous residents of San Juan La Laguna, a small town of under 10,000 in the Guatemalan state of Sololá, have asked members of the Jewish community — comprising 10 ultra-Orthodox families, most of whom arrived only recently — to identify themselves in a municipal registry and leave within the next few months.

The registry was established to verify whether immigrants from the Jewish community are legally in the country and where they are from, information which has not been asked of other foreigners granted temporary visas.

“We, as a local authority, have nothing against the Jewish community,” city mayor Rodolfo López told The Times of Israel on Tuesday. “But every community, and especially ours, as indigenous Mayans, has very special customs and traditions and we have to defend our rights.”

Residents have filed complaints with the municipality that the community of ultra-religious Jews have used a public body of water as a mikveh (ritual bath), practiced unhygienic rituals like kaparot (where a chicken is swung around a rabbi’s head before being slaughtered), and made disparaging comments about immodesty to tourists.

According to the mayor, the indigenous population has also been suspicious since a Canadian couple accused of child abuse reportedly moved to San Juan La Laguna with their six children.

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Libyan Warplanes Strike Islamist Militias in Benghazi

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / ESAM OMRAN AL-FETORIBy Reuters.

Libyan warplanes bombed militia bases in Benghazi on Wednesday as part of a renegade former general’s campaign to purge the chaotic North African state of Islamist militants, witnesses and officials said.

Two jets attacked a base belonging to the February 17 brigade, one of the Islamist-leaning armed groups operating in Benghazi, and an Ansar al-Sharia militant base in the west of the city, a Reuters witness and an air force official said.

The attacks are part of a campaign by irregular forces loyal to former Libyan army general Khalifa Haftar who earlier this month launched operations against Islamist militants he says the weak central government has failed to control.

“Our forces are bombing the February 17 battalion base and Ansar al-Sharia base in Quarsha,” Mohamed Hejazi, a spokesman for Haftar, told Reuters.

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Photo Credit: APAmericans Urged to Leave Libya After Group Linked to Benghazi Attack Threatens U.S.

By Patrick Goodenough.

The State Department on Tuesday warned American citizens not to travel to Libya and urged those there to leave immediately.

The embassy in Tripoli has not been evacuated, although the administration began positioning military assets in Sicily last week to carry out a potential emergency extraction if deemed necessary. The amphibious assault ship USS Bataan moved into the Mediterranean Sea.

“This is a portion of a special purpose Marine Air-Guard task force crisis response that’s moved to a naval air station in Sicily,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told a briefing. “This positioning was done in the event these resources are needed in the future.”

“We continue to review the situation and address embassy security needs,” Psaki said.

The travel warning said the staffing at the embassy has been limited, “due to security concerns,” and that the mission could offer only “very limited emergency services to U.S. citizens.”

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Poof, the Magic Settlements!

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Photo Credit: Jewish Policy CenterWhen Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah/Palestinian Authority (PA) signed a reconciliation agreement with Hamas, a recognized terrorist group that calls in its Charter for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews, the State Department’s spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, observed, “It’s hard to see how Israel can be expected to negotiate with a government that does not believe in its right to exist.”

Despite the obvious truth of this statement, Secretary of State John Kerry blamed Israel. As he told the Congress, “700 settlement units were announced in Jerusalem. And poof! That was sort of the moment.”

Again the claim is that “magical” settlements can “magically” destroy a major peace negotiation. Somehow, the PA promoting hatred and violence, not arresting terrorists, allying itself with Hamas, refusing to accept Israel as a Jewish state are not the destroyers of peace – it is the announcement of the construction of Jewish homes within the boundaries of settlements that existed when Oslo began. Specifically, in Gilo, a southern Jerusalem neighborhood of 40,000, which would remain part of Israel under any conceivable peace agreement.

Apparently, an alleged Palestinian desire for peace and statehood alongside Israel magically evaporated – poof! – at that moment.

Yet, if Palestinians’ urgent objective was to end settlements, they could do no better than rapidly negotiating with Israel the establishment of a Palestinian state from which they could exclude Jews. But this is precisely what they won’t do, because the price is acceptance of the Jewish state of Israel and an end of claims and conflict with it.

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iPhones Frozen by Hackers Demanding Ransom

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Photo Credit: AlamyOwners of iPhones and iPads have been targeted by a hacker who is freezing iOS devices and demanding a ransom of up to £55 to unlock them.

The majority of the attacks have taken place in Australia although there are also reports of Britons being affected.

It appears that the hacker, who goes by the name Oleg Pliss, has managed to exploit the Find My iPhone feature which can track and remotely lock stolen devices.

Users have been told to send ransoms of between $50 and $100 Australian dollars (up to £55) to a PayPal account in order to have their devices unlocked.

Those affected have taken to Apple’s support forums to seek help. One user, veritylikestea from Melbourne, said: “I was using my iPad a short while ago when suddenly it locked itself.

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Pregnant Pakistani Woman Stoned to Death by Family

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Photo Credit: K.M. ChaudaryA pregnant woman was stoned to death by her own family in front of a Pakistani high court on Tuesday for marrying the man she loved.

Nearly 20 members of the woman’s family, including her father and brothers, attacked her and her husband with batons and bricks in broad daylight before a crowd of onlookers in front of the high court of Lahore, police investigator Rana Mujahid said.

Hundreds of women are murdered every year in Muslim-majority Pakistan in so-called “honor killings” carried out by husbands or relatives as a punishment for alleged adultery or other illicit sexual behavior, but public stoning is extremely rare.

Mujahid said the woman’s father has been arrested for murder and that police were working to apprehend all those who participated in the “heinous crime.”

Another police officer, Naseem Butt, identified the slain woman as Farzana Parveen, 25, and said she had married Mohammad Iqbal against her family’s wishes after being engaged to him for years.

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Nigeria Army Claims to Know Whereabouts of Abducted Girls

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Photo Credit: ReutersNigeria’s military knows where the more than 200 girls abducted by Boko Haram are but has ruled out using force to rescue them, the state news agency quoted Chief of Defence Staff Air Marshal Alex Badeh as saying on Monday.

Seven weeks since Boko Haram militants abducted more than 200 girls taking exams at secondary school in the remote northeastern village of Chibok, little is known of their whereabouts or what the military is doing to get them out.

“The good news for the parents of the girls is that we know where they are, but we cannot tell you,” Badeh was quoted by the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) as saying.

“But where they are held, can we go there with force? We can’t kill our girls in the name of trying to get them back.”

Most officials think any raid to rescue them would be fraught with danger and probably not worth the risk that the girls would be killed by their captors – an Islamist group that has shown a high degree of ruthlessness in killing civilians.

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Swiss Group to Allow Assisted Dying for Elderly Who Are Not Terminally Ill

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Photo Credit: Christian Hartmann / ReutersA Swiss organisation that helps people take their own lives has voted to extend its services to elderly people who are not terminally ill.

Exit added “suicide due to old age” to their statutes at an annual general meeting held over the weekend, allowing people suffering from psychological or physical problems associated with old age the choice to end their life.

Assisted dying is legal in Switzerland and technically even a healthy young person could use such services. However, organisations involved in this work set their own internal requirements, which differ from group to group.

The move has been criticised by the Swiss Medical Association amid fears it will encourage suicide among the elderly. “We do not support the change of statutes by Exit. It gives us cause for concern because it cannot be ruled out that elderly healthy people could come under pressure of taking their own life,” said the association’s president, Dr Jürg Schlup.

But Exit said that most people who would choose this option were already members of the organisation and had been looking into assisted dying for years.

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Following Pope Visit to Security Fence, Netanyahu Highlights Pre-Wall Terror Deaths (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTube ScreenshotA day after Pope Francis was pictured praying at Israel’s security barrier on Sunday beneath a slogan that compared Palestinians with Jews under the Nazis, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu explained to him in no uncertain terms why the wall was erected in the first place.

At a Jerusalem memorial for terror victims, Netanyahu told the pope, “When my son was ten years old, his best friend was a girl, a beautiful Ethiopian girl, who sat next to him in class. One day she didn’t come. She was blown up in a bus not far from here because there was no fence, no wall.”

After the pope responded with prayers for peace and a harsh condemnation of terrorism, Netanyahu elaborated further.

“I’m grateful for your words today. Israel wants peace. Here we have a hospital, Hadassah Hospital. Palestinians come to this hospital. With the wall, they come. We cannot go to their hospitals, they come to our hospitals,” he said. “We don’t teach our children to plant bombs. We teach them peace. But we have to build a wall against those who teach the other side. But it cannot prevent the incitement to hate and terror and the destruction of Israel that permeates so much of the society on the other side of the fence. If that changes, then the walls could come down and we will have peace.”

The pope’s unscheduled visit to the security barrier on Sunday drew harsh criticism, especially as a result of the imagery that emerged from the trip showing the pope in the same frame as graffiti that read, “Bethlehem look like Warsaw Ghetto.”

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