Power on Stall: August 2015

Thursday, August 20, 2015

North Korea orders troops on war footing after exchanging fire with South

from bbc

1 hour ago

From the sectionAsia

Screen grabs of Kim Jong-un attending the emergency expanded meeting of central military commission on the night of 20 August 2015 — North Korea's state broadcaster Korean Central Television aired footage of leader Kim Jong-un attending an emergency meeting on Thursday night

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has ordered his frontline troops to be on a war footing, state media says, after an exchange of fire with the South across their heavily fortified border.

The KCNA report said Mr Kim declared a "semi-state of war" at an emergency meeting late Thursday.

It threatened action unless Seoul ends its anti-Pyongyang border broadcasts.

The North often uses fierce rhetoric when tensions rise and it has made similar declarations before.

The BBC's South Korea correspondent Steve Evans says that although this ritual of aggression often sees such language escalate to the firing of ammunition, this time the rhetoric is fiercer and and artillery shells are now in use.

KCNA reported that Mr Kim had ordered that troops be "fully ready for any military operations at any time" from 17:00 Friday local time (01:30 GMT), at the emergency meeting of the central military commission.

Residents evacuated

Earlier, the North warned that it would take strong military action if the South does not end border propaganda broadcasts and dismantles the broadcast facilities "within 48 hours".

However, in a separate letter Pyongyang said it was willing to resolve the issue even though it considers the broadcasts a declaration of war, South Korea Unification Ministry said, according to Reuters.

The tensions were ratcheted up after North Korea on Thursday shelled across the border reportedly to protest the propaganda broadcasts which restarted after a hiatus of 11 years.

The South responded with artillery fire. There were no reported casualties.

South Korea ordered the evacuation of residents from an area of its western border.

The two Koreas remain technically at war, because the 1950-1953 war ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty.

South Korea and the US also began annual joint military exercises on Monday - they describe the drills as defensive, but North Korea calls them a rehearsal for invasion.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Bangkok attack turns Malaysia family's vacation into tragedy

from yahoonews

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — This week's deadly bombing in Bangkok left a Malaysian family struggling to come to grips with an attack that claimed at least four members who had been enjoying a Thai vacation.

Among the hardest-hit has been Tan Kim Kee, 71, who was devastated when told her family had been caught in the middle of Monday's blast at a shrine popular with tourists as well as Thais.

"She cannot accept the truth," close family friend Visen Lim Gin Seong said Wednesday. "She has been crying nonstop since yesterday and asking why heaven is so cruel to the family when they have been so good to people."

Seven members of the family had traveled by train Saturday from Butterworth on northern Malaysia's Penang island to the Thai beach resort city of Hua Hin, and arrived in Bangkok on Monday, Lim said.

Neoh Ee Ling, 33, who is five months pregnant, was not injured in the bombing, and her father, Neoh Hock Guan, 53, reportedly suffered minor injuries. But four other family members, including Ee Ling's 4-year-old daughter, are confirmed dead, and a fifth is presumed to have died.

"All the family members are distraught," Lim, a businessman, said in a phone interview from Penang. "It is also heartbreaking for friends and neighbors. They are good, friendly and generous people. Nobody expects this to happen."

"Seven of them went on holiday, but only two came back," Lim said.

The family had waited for Hock Guan's youngest son, Neoh Jai Jun, 20, who studies in Taiwan, to return to Malaysia before heading to Thailand for a vacation, while his sister-in-law, Lim So See, 52, who lived in Singapore, joined the trip as well, Lim said.

Jai Jun was killed in the blast, and So See is presumed dead. The other members of the family who died were Hock Guan's 49-year-old wife, Lim Saw Gaik; son-in-law Lee Tze Siang, 35; and granddaughter Lee Jin Xuan, 4.

The Monday evening explosion at the open-air Erawan Shrine, located at one of Bangkok's busiest intersections, left 20 people dead and more than 120 injured.

Hock Guan was quoted by the Malay Mail as saying he was about to pray at the shrine on Monday evening when he dropped the candle he wanted to light.

"When I bent to pick it up, I heard the explosion," he said. "The next thing I knew, none of my family members were in sight."

"I can't believe our holiday would end like this ... this incident is a black mark in our lives," he said.

Lim said Hock Guan — who runs a cake business and is known as "Kuih Guan" in his neighborhood — and his family are well known for their charity work, cooking food for a nearby old folks' home and making frequent visits and donations to orphanages. Kuih is the Malay word for cake.

But now the surviving family members are struggling to deal with the aftermath of the attack.

Ee Ling's 6-year-old son, Lee Jian Hen, who stayed back with his grandmother in Penang, sensed something was amiss when he saw crying family members and photos of his father in the newspapers.

The boy's grandfather, Lee Ting Hiang, 61, told local media that Jian Hen has become reserved and moody since the tragedy.

"He keeps on asking why his father's photographs are all over the newspapers, but we have yet to tell him ... I don't know how," Ting Hiang said. "This is the hardest thing I have to do in my life — breaking the news of my son's death to his son."

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This story has been corrected to fix spellings of names and Neoh Hock Guan's age.

Saturday, August 15, 2015

Leader of Islamic State used American hostage as sexual slave

from washingtonpost

By Adam Goldman and Greg Miller August 14 at 5:31 PM

The leader of the Islamic State personally kept a 26-year-old American woman as a hostage and raped her repeatedly, according to U.S. officials and her family.

The family of Kayla Mueller said in an interview Friday that the FBI had informed them that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, had sexually abused their daughter, a humanitarian worker.

Mueller’s parents said the FBI first spoke to the family about the sexual assault in late June and provided more details two weeks ago. The bureau pieced together what happened to the American from interviews with other hostages and the captured wife of a senior Islamic State figure.

The FBI also told the Muellers that their daughter had been tortured.

“June was hard for me,” said Marsha Mueller, Kayla’s mother. “I was really upset with what I heard.”

The disclosure that Mueller was raped by Baghdadi adds to the grim evidence that the exploitation and abuse of women has been sanctioned at the highest levels of the Islamic State. The sexual enslavement of even teenage girls is seen as religiously endorsed by the group and regarded as a recruiting tool.

[The world’s most powerful jihadist]

News of Baghdadi’s abuse of Mueller, who was from Prescott, Ariz., was first reported Friday by the Independent, a London newspaper.

“As painful as this is for our family, we just feel like the world needs to know the truth,” said Carl Mueller, Kayla’s father. The Muellers noted that Friday would have been their daughter’s 27th birthday.

The Islamic State claimed that Mueller was killed earlier this year after a Jordanian fighter plane dropped a bomb on the building where she was being held. The U.S. government confirmed the death but not the cause.

Mueller’s family had previously released a letter their daughter had written in which she talked about the conditions of her captivity. “Please know I am in a safe location, completely unharmed + healthy (put on weight in fact); I have been treated w/the utmost respect + kindness,” she wrote in the letter, which the family received in the spring of 2014.

[Remembering Kayla Mueller]

Kayla’s mother said she had thought her daughter had been treated reasonably until she learned about the conditions of her captivity during a June meeting with FBI officials in Washington. The FBI said they learned about Mueller’s mistreatment from the wife of a senior Islamic State operative captured earlier this year, as well as young female members of the Yazidi religious sect who had spent two months in captivity with Mueller before at least one of them escaped last fall.

U.S. officials had previously said that Mueller was abused by her captors, but it was not known until now that she was kept as a sex slave of the leader of the Islamic State.

Baghdadi is a former Iraqi insurgent who was detained by U.S. forces early in the Iraq war. He was part of an al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq that was thought to have been largely destroyed before the civil war in Syria allowed it to regenerate.

Though little is known about his background, Baghdadi is regarded as an experienced fighter and a capable leader. His most prominent public appearance came last year when he surfaced at a mosque in Mosul to declare himself the leader of a restored caliphate.

Mueller was abducted in August 2013 after leaving a hospital in the Syrian city of Aleppo. Three months after she died, the compound where she had been held was targeted in a raid by U.S. Special Operations forces.

The operation was aimed at capturing Abu Sayyaf, the nom de guerre of a high-ranking Tunisian member of the Islamic State, who was thought to be in charge of oil smuggling and other illicit enterprises that have funded the terrorist group.

Sayyaf was killed in what U.S. officials described as intense “close quarters combat.” But his wife, identified only as Umm Sayyaf, survived and was eventually brought back to Iraq aboard a bullet-riddled U.S. aircraft. She was then questioned by U.S. interrogators for months, providing information about Mueller as well as the Islamic State’s leadership, before recently being turned over to Iraqi custody.

Systematic abuse

Mueller’s mistreatment is the latest evidence of the Islamic State’s systematic abuse of women on a significant scale.

A report released in April by Human Rights Watch accused the Islamic State of war crimes for its brutal treatment of female Yazidis — many of them teenagers — who were captured in Iraq last August, taken to Syria and forced into sexual slavery by the Islamic State.

After surging into the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar last year, Islamic State fighters captured as many as 1,000 Yazidi women, many of whom were given a bleak choice of “marriage” to a fighter or imprisonment and potential death.

The Human Rights Watch report focused on 20 women who escaped the group and provided detailed accounts of their treatment.

One described attempting to kill herself by going into a bathroom, turning on water and grasping a wire “to electrocute myself but there was no electricity.”

After being discovered, she said she was badly beaten, handcuffed to a sink, stripped of her clothes and washed. “They took me out of the bathroom, brought in [a friend] and raped her in the room in front of me,” said the woman, who is referred to only as Leila. Later she, too, was raped.

Another victim, who was only 12 years old, said that after being abducted in Sinjar, the women in her family were separated from the men and sent to a house in Mosul. Islamic State fighters “would come and select us,” she said. One of the captors beat her, she said, and then “spent three days having sex with me.”

A recent issue of the English-language magazine published by the Islamic State described the taking of sex slaves as religiously justified. The article — titled “Slave girls or prostitutes?” — endorsed the practice, saying sex slaves are “lawful for the one who ends up possessing them even without pronouncement of divorce by their [non-Muslim] husbands.”

The article went on to cite accounts that the prophet Muhammad “took four slave-girls as concubines,” a purported religious basis for the practice.