Power on Stall

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.

Adam Goldman reports on terrorism and national security for The Washington Post.

Greg Miller covers the intelligence beat for The Washington Post.

Saturday, August 8, 2015

John McAfee: The Ashley Madison hack is the death knell of secrets

from ibtimes.co.uk

By John McAfee

July 23, 2015 17:25 BST

Saturday, June 27, 2015

Gunman Pursued Tourists in Slaughter at a Tunisian Beach Hotel

from nytimes

By CARLOTTA GALL and FARAH SAMTIJUNE 27, 2015

A man and woman place flowers at the beach next to the Imperial Marhaba Hotel. CreditJeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

SOUSSE, Tunisia — Dressed in black shorts and a T-shirt, the young man walked purposefully along the beach but looked much like a tourist — until he unwrapped an assault rifle and opened fire, first into the sand and then in an arc at sunbathers.

“He seemed like he did not know how to handle the weapon, because it is heavy,” said one witness, Hassen, 30, who declined to give his full name. “He seemed not to be experienced.”

Yet the gunman was silent and businesslike, Hassen and other witnesses said on Saturday. As the tourists fled and saw friends falling, he pursued the sunbathers from the beach to the pool and eventually to the administration offices on the second floor of the Imperial Marhaba Hotel here, killing 39 people and wounding 38 others in all on Friday.

Later identified by the authorities as a 23-year-old Tunisian student, Seifeddine Rezgui, the gunman was eventually shot and killed by a policeman, but not before carrying out Tunisia’s worst terrorist attack in living memory.

A woman prepared to lay flowers at the beach next to the Imperial Marhaba Hotel, where 39 people were killed on Friday. CreditJeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

The only words he uttered were to tell Tunisians to get away. It was tourists, he made clear, he wanted to kill. Fifteen of them were British, a spokesman for the British Embassy in Tunis said, a number that is expected to rise as more bodies are identified. About the same number of Britons were injured, he said.

“Something was not right,” said Christine Callaghan, a middle-aged woman from Norfolk, England, describing the moment she first heard the gunshots as she lay with her husband by the pool. “It was very long and very loud,” she said, from her hospital bed on Saturday. “My husband screamed out: ‘Quick, run!’ ”

The tourists fled in their bathing suits into the hotel through the dining room, piling up mattresses in a corridor for protection, and barricading themselves into a banquet hall as they heard gunfire and explosions.

In the rush Mrs. Callaghan lost sight of her husband. “He thought I was in front of him, but I was behind,” she said.

As the tourists barricaded the doors, Mrs. Callaghan was locked out, trapped in the corridor as the gunman approached. “I was shot in the femur and fell down. Another lady was shot four times and her leg was across my tummy,” she said tearfully.

“She was shot in the stomach. Her husband, Joe — his shirt was completely splattered with blood — was talking to her to keep her awake,” she recounted.

Friday, June 12, 2015

Greek shares after IMF pulls out of bailout talks

from chron.com

By ELENA BECATOROS, Associated Press | June 12, 2015

Greece's Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras leads a meeting with the Egyptian Defence Minister General Sedki Sobhi Stark at Maximos Mansion in Athens, Friday, June 12, 2015. Stark warnings to Greece and the unexpected decision by the International Monetary Fund to walk away from bailout talks weighed on Greek shares Friday, a day after hopes of an impending deal triggered widespread buying. Photo: Thanassis Stavrakis, AP / AP

Photo By Thanassis Stavrakis/AP\
Greece's Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras leads a meeting with the Egyptian Defence Minister General Sedki Sobhi Stark at Maximos Mansion in Athens, Friday, June 12, 2015. Stark warnings to Greece and the unexpected decision by the International Monetary Fund to walk away from bailout talks weighed on Greek shares Friday, a day after hopes of an impending deal triggered widespread buying.

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greece said Friday it will present its creditors with new proposals over the weekend in an attempt to breathe life into stalled bailout discussions that have stoked fears of the country's bankruptcy.

Confirmation that talks would proceed over the weekend came after the close of play in European markets. Fears that the two sides were as far apart as ever on such issues as pensions and the budget saw the main stock index in Athens close 5.9 percent lower and the Stoxx 50 index of leading European shares end down 1 percent.

A Greek government official indicated a deal with creditors may be nearer than thought after Prime MinisterAlexis Tsipras had conferred with senior ministers.

"The Greek side is ready to table counter-proposals to bridge the remaining differences," a government official said.

The official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter on the record, said Greece believes an agreement is "closer than ever" and that Greek representatives will meet those representing the creditors in Brussels on Saturday.

Pressure on Greece to secure a deal is mounting. Greece's 240 billion-euro ($270 billion) bailout expires June 30, at which point the country will lose access to the rescue loans it desperately needs to repay debts and avoid a default that could force it out of the euro.

The most dramatic sign of an impasse in the discussions had come on Thursday when the International Monetary Fund sent its negotiators home from bailout talks with Greek officials in Brussels, citing a lack of progress.

The weekend talks come ahead of a meeting late next week of the eurozone's 19 finance ministers — a meeting that European Union President Donald Tusk has said "is really crucial and should be decisive."

Despite the lack of visible progress, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has shown a willingness to continue the talks — her views matter perhaps more than most as Germany is Greece's single biggest creditor.

"Where there's a will, there's a way, but the will must come from everybody," she said in a speech in Berlin. Germany stressed that a solution would have to include the IMF.

Greece's creditors — its fellow eurozone states, the European Central Bank and the IMF — want the country to commit to new economic reforms before they disburse the last 7.2 billion euros ($8.2 billion) left in Greece's bailout fund.

The key points of contention appear to be cuts to Greek pensions, changes in the labor market and the size of Greece's government budget. Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the eurozone's top official, said the onus was on the Greek government to come up with "sound" proposals.

Greece's final installment has been pending since last year and with no access to the international borrowing market, Greece has been struggling to pay both its international debts, and to continue paying salaries and pensions.

Without outside help, Greece is unlikely to be able to repay a roughly 1.6 billion-euro IMF debt installment due June 30 and larger debts due to the European Central Bank in July and August.

"We are coming to a head," said David Mackie of JP Morgan. "Our judgment remains that Greece will offer concessions to get a deal."

In Germany, there appear to be mixed views about saving Greece.

A poll by the TNS-Emnid agency for the German weekly Focus found that 46 percent of Germans wanted Greece to keep the euro, while 42 percent thought it should return to the drachma. That survey of 1,004 people, conducted over landline phones Monday and Tuesday, has a reported margin of error of 3.6 percentage points.

But another poll, conducted by the Forschungsgruppe Wahlen institute for ZDF television, showed 41 percent of Germans in favor of Greece staying in the eurozone and 51 percent against — a marked shift from the beginning of the year, when it found 55 percent wanted Greece to stay and 33 wanted it to go. That poll of 1,230 people, again over landlines, gave a margin of error of three percentage points.

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Monday, February 9, 2015

Nobody Understands Debt

from nytimes

FEB. 9, 2015

Paul Krugman

Many economists, including Janet Yellen, view global economic troubles since 2008 largely as a story about “deleveraging” — a simultaneous attempt by debtors almost everywhere to reduce their liabilities. Why is deleveraging a problem? Because my spending is your income, and your spending is my income, so if everyone slashes spending at the same time, incomes go down around the world.

Or as Ms. Yellen put it in 2009, “Precautions that may be smart for individuals and firms — and indeed essential to return the economy to a normal state — nevertheless magnify the distress of the economy as a whole.”

So how much progress have we made in returning the economy to that “normal state”? None at all. You see, policy makers have been basing their actions on a false view of what debt is all about, and their attempts to reduce the problem have actually made it worse.

First, the facts: Last week, the McKinsey Global Institute issued a report titled “Debt and (Not Much) Deleveraging,” which found, basically, that no nation has reduced its ratio of total debt to G.D.P. Household debt is down in some countries, especially in the United States. But it’s up in others, and even where there has been significant private deleveraging, government debt has risen by more than private debt has fallen.

You might think our failure to reduce debt ratios shows that we aren’t trying hard enough — that families and governments haven’t been making a serious effort to tighten their belts, and that what the world needs is, yes, more austerity. But we have, in fact, had unprecedented austerity. As the International Monetary Fund has pointed out, real government spending excluding interest has fallen across wealthy nations — there have been deep cuts by the troubled debtors of Southern Europe, but there have also been cuts in countries, like Germany and the United States, that can borrow at some of the lowest interest rates in history.

All this austerity has, however, only made things worse — and predictably so, because demands that everyone tighten their belts were based on a misunderstanding of the role debt plays in the economy.

You can see that misunderstanding at work every time someone rails against deficits with slogans like “Stop stealing from our kids.” It sounds right, if you don’t think about it: Families who run up debts make themselves poorer, so isn’t that true when we look at overall national debt?

No, it isn’t. An indebted family owes money to other people; the world economy as a whole owes money to itself. And while it’s true that countries can borrow from other countries, America has actually been borrowing less from abroad since 2008 than it did before, and Europe is a net lender to the rest of the world.

Because debt is money we owe to ourselves, it does not directly make the economy poorer (and paying it off doesn’t make us richer). True, debt can pose a threat to financial stability — but the situation is not improved if efforts to reduce debt end up pushing the economy into deflation and depression.

Which brings us to current events, for there is a direct connection between the overall failure to deleverage and the emerging political crisis in Europe.

European leaders completely bought into the notion that the economic crisis was brought on by too much spending, by nations living beyond their means. The way forward, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany insisted, was a return to frugality. Europe, she declared, should emulate the famously thrifty Swabian housewife.

This was a prescription for slow-motion disaster. European debtors did, in fact, need to tighten their belts — but the austerity they were actually forced to impose was incredibly savage. Meanwhile, Germany and other core economies — which needed to spend more, to offset belt-tightening in the periphery — also tried to spend less. The result was to create an environment in which reducing debt ratios was impossible: Real growth slowed to a crawl, inflation fell to almost nothing and outright deflation has taken hold in the worst-hit nations.

Suffering voters put up with this policy disaster for a remarkably long time, believing in the promises of the elite that they would soon see their sacrifices rewarded. But as the pain went on and on, with no visible progress, radicalization was inevitable. Anyone surprised by the left’s victory in Greece, or the surge of anti-establishment forces in Spain, hasn’t been paying attention.

Nobody knows what happens next, although bookmakers are now givingbetter than even odds that Greece will exit the euro. Maybe the damage would stop there, but I don’t believe it — a Greek exit is all too likely to threaten the whole currency project. And if the euro does fail, here’s what should be written on its tombstone: “Died of a bad analogy.”