Gazette 092514

Thursday September 25th 2014

BREAKING NEWS: Eric Holder To Resign As Attorney General: Report

Eric Holder Jr., the nation's first black U.S. attorney general, is preparing to announce his resignation Thursday after a tumultuous tenure marked by civil rights advances, national security threats, reforms to the criminal justice system and five and a half years of fights with Republicans in Congress.
Two sources familiar with the decision tell NPR that Holder, 63, intends to leave the Justice Department as soon as his successor is confirmed, a process that could run through 2014 and even into next year. A former U.S. government official says Holder has been increasingly "adamant" about his desire to leave soon for fear he otherwise could be locked in to stay for much of the rest of President Obama's second term.
Holder already is one of the longest serving members of the Obama cabinet and ranks as the fourth longest tenured AG in history. Hundreds of employees waited in lines, stacked three rows deep, for his return in early February 2009 to the Justice Department, where he previously worked as a young corruption prosecutor and as deputy attorney general — the second in command — during the Clinton administration.

WORLD EVENTS

Islamic State crisis: US hits IS oil targets in Syria

The US-led coalition against Islamic State (IS) has targeted 12 oil refineries in Syria on a third night of air strikes against the militants.

Raids carried out by US, Saudi and UAE aircraft killed 14 of the group's fighters and five civilians in eastern Syria, activists said.

According to the Pentagon, the refineries generated up to $2m (£1.2m) per day in revenue for the militants.

In northern Syria, Kurdish forces say they have pushed back an IS advance.

US President Barack Obama has vowed to dismantle the IS "network of death".

Islamic State (IS) oil production

• IS is believed to control six out of 10 of Syria's oil fields, including the Omar facility, and four small fields in Iraq, including Ajeel and Hamreen
• Production in Syria is estimated at 50,000 barrels per day and 30,000 in Iraq, generating revenue of between $1m (£600,000) and $5m per day
• Oil is sold to local merchants, or to middlemen who smuggle it into Iraqi Kurdistan or over borders with Turkey, Iran and Jordan, and then sell to traders in a grey market. Oil is also sold to the Syrian government
• Seizures of smuggled fuel in Turkey rose from 35,260 tons in 2011 to more than 50,000 tons in the first six months of 2014, before the Turkish authorities began to crack down on illegal trade

Iraqi woman activist killed by ISIS

BAGHDAD –  Militants with the Islamic State group publicly killed a rights lawyer in the Iraqi city of Mosul after finding her guilty of apostasy in a self-styled Islamic court, the U.N. mission in Iraq said Thursday.
Samira Salih al-Nuaimi was seized from her home on Sept. 17 after allegedly posting messages on Facebook that were critical of the militants' destruction of religious sites in Mosul.

According to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq, al-Nuaimi was tried in a so-called "Sharia court" for apostasy, after which she was tortured for five days before the militants sentenced her to "public execution."
She was killed on Monday, the U.N. mission said. Her Facebook page appears to have been removed since her death.
"By torturing and executing a female human rights' lawyer and activist, defending in particular the civil and human rights of her fellow citizens in Mosul, ISIL continues to attest to its infamous nature, combining hatred, nihilism and savagery, as well as its total disregard of human decency," Nickolay Mladenov, the U.N. envoy to Iraq, said in a statement, referring to the group by an acronym.
The militant group captured Iraq's second largest city Mosul during its rapid advance across the country's north and west in June, as Iraqi security forces melted away. The extremists now rule a vast, self-declared caliphate straddling the Syria-Iraq border in which they have imposed a harsh version of Islamic law and beheaded and massacred their opponents.

Lebanon Detains 450 Suspected Nusra Front Militants In Syria Border Crackdown

BEIRUT, Sept 25 (Reuters) - The Lebanese army said one person was killed and two wounded during a search for suspected militants at refugee camps near the border with Syria, and security sources said the number detained in the past two weeks had reached about 450.

The army has been stepping up efforts to prevent fighters from Syria using the Lebanese border town of Arsal and surrounding areas as a base. Arsal was the scene of last month of the deadliest spillover of fighting in the three-year civil war in Syria and is also home to tens of thousands of refugees.

The Lebanese army said soldiers had shot at three people on a motorbike who were trying to set fire to parts of a refugee camp during the raids, killing one and wounding the other two.

The army says the hundreds of people arrested are mainly Syrians and authorities accuse them of being members of groups such as Nusra Front, Syria's al Qaeda wing, which is fighting President Bashar al-Assad's forces.

Anti-Assad insurgents often cross the border, using Arsal to rest or seek medical treatment. On Thursday the army said it had detained four people believed to be linked to Nusra Front.

Clashes last month in and around Arsal killed dozens. Islamist militants captured a group of Lebanese soldiers during the fighting and have since killed at least three of them. They are believed to be holding more than a dozen others.

Sunni Muslim militants and other groups in Syria accuse the Lebanese army of working with Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi'ite movement which has sent fighters to help Assad's forces.

Egypt sentences alleged al-Qaida member to life in prison

CAIRO –  An Egyptian court has sentenced an alleged al-Qaeda bomb-maker with ties to the group's offshoots in Yemen and Somalia to life in prison.
The public prosecutor said in a statement Wednesday that 28-year-old telecommunications engineer Mahmoud Abdel Aziz was a bomb-maker and communications specialist for the al-Shabab militant group in Kenya and Somalia, and had helped the group communicate with al-Qaida's Yemen affiliate.

The prosecutor says Abdel Aziz, who went by the nom de guerre "Hakeem al-Masry," was recruited to al-Qaeda in 2009. The statement said he was arrested in Kenya for being in the country illegally and handed over to Egypt, without specifying when.

France Launches Airstrikes In Iraq

PARIS/BEIRUT, Sept 25 (Reuters) - French fighter jets struck targets in Iraq on Thursday and the United States and its allies stepped up air raids in Syria against Islamic State militants who have taken over large areas of both countries.

France's strikes were its first since Sept. 19 when Paris joined the United States military action against Islamic State in Iraq and followed the beheading of a French tourist, reported late on Wednesday, in Algeria in retaliation.

Overnight, U.S.-led air strikes in eastern Syria killed 14 Islamic State fighters, according to a monitoring group, while on the ground, Kurdish forces were reported to have pushed back an advance by the Islamists towards the border town of Kobani.

A third night of air raids by the United States and its allies targeted Islamic State-controlled oil refineries in three remote locations in eastern Syria to try to cut off a major source of revenue for the al Qaeda offshoot, U.S. officials said.

The strikes also seem to be intended to hamper Islamic State's ability to operate across the Syria-Iraq frontier, an area where it has declared an Islamic caliphate.

The air raids follow growing alarm in Western and Arab capitals at Islamic State's rapid military gains in Iraq and Syria and the beheadings of U.S. and British hostages posted on the internet.

U.S. President Barack Obama has vowed to keep up military pressure against the group, which advanced through Kurdish areas of northern Iraq this week despite the air strikes.

Some 140,000 refugees have fled to Turkey, many telling of villages burnt and captives beheaded.

Turkey Mulls Military Role Against ISIS

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday he is considering expanding support for Western and Arab operations against the Islamic State group to include military involvement.

His comments Tuesday to Turkish reporters in New York mark a potential shift in Turkey's position on international efforts to fight the group, hours after the U.S. and Arab allies launched airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria.
Erdogan spoke on the sidelines of an annual meeting of world leaders at the United Nations a day after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he expects a more robust role for Turkey in the fight against the Islamic State group after Ankara secured the release of 49 Turkish hostages that were being held by the extremist group.

Turkey, a U.S. ally and NATO member, has so far not committed to a U.S.-led coalition to take on the militants, who have swallowed large chunks of Syria and Iraq. It made commitments at various regional conferences to help in the effort against the Islamic State group, but help has been limited so far, Kerry said.
On Tuesday, Erdogan seemed to signal that might change.
"Of course, we will do our part. God willing, we will also discuss it together with our government," Erdogan told reporters according to Turkey's DHA news agency.
Asked what role Turkey was considering, he said: "It includes everything. Both military and political."

UN unanimously passes resolution to combat 'foreign terrorist fighters'

• Resolution seeks to halt movement of radicalised jihadists
• British PM: ‘Isis cruelty is literally medieval in character’

The United Nations security council agreed on Wednesday to launch a concerted effort to staunch the flow of radicalised jihadists from around the world to the cause of Islamic State and other terrorist groups.
In a rare session of the security council attended by heads of state – only the sixth of its kind in the organ’s 68-year history – all 15 member states voted for a US-backed resolution that seeks to step up the battle against “foreign terrorist fighters”, as US president Barack Obama described them.
The agreement from the world body’s highest panel was designed to tackle, Obama said, the new threat of the “unprecedented flow of fighters in recent years to conflict zones, most recently Syria and Iraq”.
He added: “These terrorists exacerbate conflicts; they pose an immediate threat to people in these regions; and as we’ve already seen in several cases, they may try to return to their home countries to carry out deadly attacks.”
Western governments, as well as Arab states neighbouring Syria and Iraq that have provided the majority of foreign fighters, have grown increasingly alarmed in recent months about the steady flow of their citizens to the Isis cause. Precise figures are not known, but Obama put the figure higher than previously stated at more than 15,000 fighters from at least 80 countries.
Of those, the New York-based intelligence analysts the Soufan group has estimated that the lion’s share of fighters have come from Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia, each of which have been the source of more than 2,000 jihadists.
Europe is also thought to have provided about 1,000 fighters, with the UK source of 500 and Belgium at least 250. The US has put the figure of its foreign fighters at about 100.

Anjem Choudary held in London terror raids

Nine men, including the radical Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary, have been arrested in London on suspicion of being members of a banned organisation.

Officers are searching 18 premises in London and one in Stoke-on-Trent.
The Met Police said it was part of an ongoing inquiry into Islamist-related terrorism and not in response to any immediate threat to the public.
Mr Choudary is the former UK head of the Islamist group al-Muhajiroun or Islam4UK, banned in the UK in 2010.
The arrested men, aged between 22 and 51, are being held at police stations in central London.
Anjem Choudary is a deeply controversial Islamic figure, a man who many Muslims despise because they believe he causes enormous damage to their position in British society.
Alongside another now-banned cleric, he once spearheaded al-Muhajiroun, a group that argued that the West is fighting a war against Muslims and Islam.
When the government banned the group, some of its former members founded new organisations, including Islam4UK and Muslims Against Crusades - which were also later banned.
The latter group's protests against British soldiers returning from Afghanistan, led to counter-protests and the subsequent formation of the English Defence League.
Mr Choudary has always denied allegations that he has either incited or glorified acts of terrorism.

British man in court charged with plotting to kill coalition soldiers in Iraq

Anis Abid Sardar alleged to have been involved in manufacture of improvised explosive devices recovered from Iraq

A 37-year-old British man has appeared in court accused of plotting to murder coalition forces in Iraq with a roadside bomb in 2007.
Anis Abid Sardar was arrested by counter-terrorism police at his home in Wembley, north-west London, on Tuesday.
He is alleged to have been involved in the manufacture of a number of improvised explosive devices recovered from Al Anbar province of Iraq.
Sardar is charged with conspiracy to murder on or before 22 November 2007, and one count of conspiring to cause an explosion with intent to endanger life or property.
Wearing prison-issue white drawstring trousers and grey sweatshirt, Sardar sat down flanked by two suited men as he appeared in the glass-fronted dock at London’s Westminster magistrates’ court on Thursday.
He spoke only to confirm his name and age during the brief hearing. No formal plea was entered.
Chief magistrate Howard Riddle remanded the married Londoner in custody to appear at the Old Bailey on 3 October.

Ukrainian president says he believes most dangerous phase of conflict has passed

KIEV, Ukraine –  Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko says he believes the conflict with Russia-backed separatists in the east is on the wane and that peace efforts will work.
In a news conference Thursday outlining his plans for Ukraine over the next half-decade, Poroshenko said: "I have no doubt whatsoever that my peace plan will work and that the main and most dangerous part of the war is behind."

Poroshenko's proposals were a foundation for agreements this month aimed at ending the conflict that has killed at least 3,500 people since mid-April. The first step was a cease-fire called three weeks ago that in the beginning was repeatedly violated. But in recent days, reports of violations have decreased notably.
Related:Worst part of Ukraine's crisis over - President Poroshenko

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Boston bomb trial delayed two months

The trial of a man suspected to be one of the Boston Marathon bombers has been pushed back by two months to January.

Judge George O'Toole granted Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's lawyers' request for more time but refused their pleas to move the trial from Boston to Washington.
Mr Tsarnaev, 21, has pleaded not guilty to 30 federal charges and could face the death penalty if convicted.
Three people were killed and more than 260 were injured by two explosions near the finish line in April 2013.
The defence team had asked for the trial to be delayed until at least September 2015, saying a November trial would not have given them enough time to prepare.
They also asked that the trial be moved due to the media coverage in Boston and the local public mood.
But the judge said there was no reason to assume in advance that a fair jury could not be selected in Massachusetts.
Tsarnaev is accused - along with his older brother Tamerlan - of placing two pressure cooker bombs near the marathon's finish line.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died in an exchange of fire with police officers several days later.

Cheney: ‘Stunned’ over Obama comparison between Mideast, Ferguson unrest

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said he was “stunned” that President Obama appeared to compare the unrest in the Middle East to the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., during his United Nations speech.
Cheney, speaking with Fox News on Wednesday, said it’s “outrageous” to suggest a “moral equivalence” between the two situations.

“I was stunned. I mean, in one case, you've got a police officer involved in a shooting. There may be questions about it. They'll be sorted out through the legal process. There's no comparison to that with what ISIS is doing to thousands of people throughout the Middle East, with bloody beheadings of anybody they come in contact with,” he said.
The president invoked the demonstrations in Missouri toward the end of his U.N. General Assembly speech in which he urged international partners to join in the fight against the Islamic State and other terror groups.
Obama acknowledged that some countries would question the U.S. call to action.
“I realize that America’s critics will be quick to point out that at times we too have failed to live up to our ideals; that America has plenty of problems within its own borders. This is true. In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri -- where a young man was killed, and a community was divided,” Obama said. “So, yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions. …

U.S. Believes Khorasan Leader Killed In Syria Strike

WASHINGTON, Sept 24 (Reuters) - The United States believes that a U.S. strike in Syria has killed Mohsin al-Fadhli, the leader of a group of al Qaeda militants known as Khorasan, a U.S. official told Reuters on Wednesday.

"We believe he is dead," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

U.S. officials have said the al Qaeda-linked group posed an immediate threat to the West and had been nearing the execution of a plot against U.S. or European targets.

Obama calls for new regional talks to try to bring peace to the Middle East

President tells UN it is ‘time for a broader negotiation in which major powers address their differences directly, honestly, and peacefully’
Barack Obama has called for a meeting of regional powerbrokers in the Middle East to negotiate a broader political solution to current instability, in a potential glimpse into longer term US strategy for resolving the civil wars in Syria and Iraq.
Speaking before the United Nations general assembly, the president said it was “time for a broader negotiation in which major powers address their differences directly, honestly, and peacefully across the table from one another, rather than through gun-wielding proxies”.
Pressure is growing in Washington for Obama to explain how recent US strikes against Islamic extremists in Syria and Iraq will bring about a more lasting political settlement and his comments may indicate an eventual willingness to negotiate with Shia leaders in Iran over their involvement in both countries.
Earlier international talks in Geneva to end the Syrian civil war have foundered over the continued US insistence that president Bashar al-Assad must stand down, but negotiations did succeed in agreeing the destruction of his chemical weapon stocks.
It is hard to see the US administration dropping its opposition to Assad, but the government in Damascus claims it was given warning of US air strikes this week in a potential sign of new cooperation.
And Obama appeared to signal a tougher line with the Sunni countries in the region who have backed rebel groups fighting Assad – despite their support this week for US air strikes against Islamic State fighters in Syria.
In thinly veiled criticism of Gulf states who the US believes allow funds to flow to Islamic extremists and hardline religious schools across the Middle East, the president said there would be no lasting peace until such radicalism was checked at its root.

Los Angeles approves $15.37 minimum wage for hotel workers

The Los Angeles City Council voted Wednesday to raise the minimum wage for hotel workers to $15.37, one of the highest wage requirements in the country.
Hotel workers in yellow shirts packed City Hall as the council voted 12 to 3 to approve the measure, which will go into effect for hotels with at least 300 rooms beginning in July. Hotels with 150 rooms or more will have to meet the wage requirement a year later.
“Hotel workers are here because they want family-supporting wages,” said Maria Elena Durazo, executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, during the public comment portion of the meeting. “Hotel workers are here because they know they deserve better.”
But opponents of the wage hike said it would be bad for business. James Crank, president of the Beverly Garland hotel in North Hollywood, said one set wage across such a sprawling and diverse city didn’t make sense.
“The San Fernando Valley is not Santa Monica,” Crank said. “The San Fernando Valley hotels cannot contain a rate of this magnitude.”
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