Russia confirms plane which crashed over Sinai was bombed in ‘terror act’
Explosive traces have been found on the wreckage
Russian security officials have confirmed that the plane which crashed over Sinai at the end of October was brought down by a bomb, after explosive traces were found on the wreckage.
Improvised explosives equivalent to up to 1.5kg of TNT were used to bring the plane down, killing all 224 people on board, the head of Russia’s security service, the FSB, has said.
Alexander Bortnikov met with President Vladimir Putin to brief him on the findings of investigators, and according to state media said: “We can definitely say this was an act of terror.”
Mr Putin has responded by ordering Russian special forces to “find and punish” those responsible for the crash.
‘Dad is a martyr’: how Adel Termos became a saviour in Beirut bombings
As Lebanon deals with the shock of twin suicide attacks that killed at least 43 people, Adel Termos has been hailed as a hero for preventing a worse atrocity
The narrow, winding alleys of Burj al-Barajneh in south Beirut are enveloped in sadness and a tense resignation, with the grief echoed in the darkened skies and intermittent rain.
Almost overnight, new portraits of victims – many of them children, mostly young boys – who were killed in twin suicide blasts on Thursday have been posted up around the impoverished neighbourhood.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks, in which a bomber detonated his explosives next to a crowded bakery as people streamed on to the street after sunset prayers, and then, as onlookers rushed to aid the victims, a second bomber blew himself up just 50 metres up the road.
With at least 43 dead and hundreds injured, it was Lebanon’s worst bombing since the August 2013 blasts in Tripoli, which killed 47. But if it had not been for Adel Termos, it could have been much worse.
17 November 2015 – 09H25
Humanity’s future in the balance at UN climate summit
In two weeks’ time, world leaders gather for a crunch climate summit in terror-hit Paris to determine what kind of future awaits humankind.
Security fears threaten to overshadow the conference to be launched by some 120 heads of state after a coordinated spree of attacks by gunmen and suicide bombers killed 129 people in the French capital.
But US President Barack Obama has stood firm in his resolve to attend the November 30 opening, and France insists it won’t bend a knee to terrorism by postponing the event.
After all, the stakes are high.
Will we succeed in containing greenhouse gas emissions altering Earth’s climate? Or will we overshoot the critical warming level beyond which science says our planet could become inhospitable to humans?
Here’s a map of every state refusing to accept Syrian refugees
Updated by Sarah Frostenson
In the wake of Friday’s deadly terrorist attacks in Paris, more than twenty US governors have said they won’t allow Syrian refugees to resettle in their state.
The secretive industry of social media monitoring
Schools and police turn to private firms to help address school violence, but measuring their success is nearly impossible.
It was midafternoon on a Brooklyn college campus when an unexpected phone call sent a chill through the school. The caller warned that a student, shortly before, posted the sort of message that every campus feared – one that threatened mass murder at the school.
“I sit in class and think about how I would kill each person,” the student tweeted. Each person would die, he wrote, in their “own special way.”
The caller was not a cop, a campus security guard, or even a student. He was an employee of an obscure eight-year-old company called GEOCOP that had no ties to the school.
Tokyo sues Okinawa in US base relocation dispute
The Japanese government took the local government in Okinawa to court Tuesday, launching a legal battle in their longstanding dispute over the planned relocation of a U.S. military air base on the southern island.
A lawsuit filed in a regional high court in Okinawa seeks an injunction to overturn Okinawa Gov. Takeshi Onaga’s recent decision to cancel a previously issued approval for land reclamation work for the base relocation.
The long-stalled plan would move the U.S. Marine Air Station Futenma to a less-populated part of Okinawa, but many residents want the base moved out of the prefecture entirely. They feel Okinawa bears an unfair burden of the U.S. military presence in Japan. The prefecture houses more than half of the 50,000 American troops stationed in Japan and U.S. bases occupy nearly a fifth of the land on its main island.
Onaga’s predecessor approved the land reclamation, but then lost to him in a re-election bid. The central government sued Okinawa after Onaga refused to follow an order from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism to reinstate approval for the work.
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