Six In The Morning

 War with Isis: Islamic militants have army of 200,000, claims Kurdish leader

Exclusive: CIA has hugely underestimated the number of jihadis, who now rule an area the size of Britain

PATRICK COCKBURN  IRBIL  Sunday 16 November 2014

The Islamic State (Isis) has recruited an army hundreds of thousands strong, far larger than previous estimates by the CIA, according to a senior Kurdish leader. He said the ability of Isis to attack on many widely separated fronts in Iraq and Syria at the same time shows that the number of militant fighters is at least 200,000, seven or eight times bigger than foreign in intelligence estimates of up to 31,500 men.

Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of the Kurdish President Massoud Barzani said in an exclusive interview with The Independent on Sunday that “I am talking about hundreds of thousands of fighters because they are able to mobilise Arab young men in the territory they have taken.”

Pussy Riot: ‘When friendly people like us become enemies of the state, it is very strange’

Masha and Nadia, fearless leaders of the radical feminist group whose name president Vladimir Putin refuses to utter, have thrown themselves back into political activism since their release from a penal colony last December. In their most revealing interview to date, Pussy Riot’s daring duo take Carole Cadwalladr on a three-day adventure around Moscow

Carole Cadwalladr The Observer, Sunday 16 November 2014

Nadia is explaining how Masha succeeded in getting the authorities to allow them both to have the books they wanted in jail. “I like theoretical books and they couldn’t provide them for me and they refused to allow people from outside to send me books. Until, after four months, Masha pushed the prison administration to give us the books because she fucked with their brains.”

Is that Masha’s special skill? Fucking with people’s brains?

“Yes!” says Masha. And her eyes light up and she enunciates the English words carefully: “I’m a fucking brains person.”

Hong Kong student activists blocked from flying to Beijing to press free election case

Three student leaders who want to talk directly to Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang have been prevented from boarding a plane.

Chris Buckley and Alan Wong  November 16, 2014 – 11:41AM

Hong Kong: A group of pro-democracy activists from Hong Kong were prevented on Saturday from boarding a flight to Beijing, where they had hoped to lobby the Chinese government to heed their calls for free elections.

The plan by the three activists, leaders of the Hong Kong Federation of Students, to talk directly to Prime Minister Li Keqiang and other officials had been certain to be rejected by the Chinese government.

But the attempt to fly to Beijing represented another round in a battle of images and rhetoric that has pitted the protesters against the Hong Kong government and Beijing.

Mexico: soldiers face charges, but not officials who tried to hide massacre

Last summer, members of a Mexican army patrol killed 22 suspected criminals, most of whom had surrendered. A daisy chain of politicians, prosecutors, and other officials glossed over the massacre, altering the crime scene, torturing witnesses, and denying evidence.

  By Tim Johnson, McClatchy

MEXICO CITY – More than four months have passed since members of a Mexican army patrol killed 22 suspected criminals, most of them after they’d surrendered, in a rural area southwest of Mexico City. Three soldiers now await trial on charges of first-degree murder.

But the mass killing June 30 wasn’t the only crime committed.

Once the bodies fell to the ground in an empty warehouse in the town of Tlatlaya, a daisy chain of politicians, prosecutors and other officials glossed over the massacre by altering the crime scene, torturing witnesses and denying evidence.

The man who was kidnapped by pirates – twice



BBC

Kings Nehemiah Okoye, a Nigerian marine engineer, has been a seafarer for 25 years. In 2010, while working for the Shell oil company, he was kidnapped by pirates off the coast of Nigeria. Less than two years later he was kidnapped again, this time by Somali pirates. This is his story.

I was first attacked on 1 October 2010. Nigerian pirates killed all 16 of the military personnel who were escorting our vessel, then they boarded our boat, stole all our property and vandalised everything else.

FIFA turbulence intensifies, Rauball moots UEFA split

How do you recover transparency when all about you are crying “foul”? For FIFA, the answer is to commission an independent legal report, and then to withhold it. A top German football official is by no means impressed.

DW-DE

The president of the German Football League (DFL), Reinhard Rauball, told Kicker on Saturday that world governing body FIFA must release the full investigative report into the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, to be held in Russia and Qatar.

FIFA released a shorter, 42-page report by German judge Hans-Joachim Eckert, the chairman of the ethic committee’s adjudicatory chamber, on Thursday. At the time, Eckert declared that the “assessment of the 2018/2022 World Cup bidding process is therefore closed.”