German police chief sacked over sexual assaults

The police chief of the German city of Cologne has been dismissed amid mounting criticism of his force’s handling of New Year’s Eve sexual assaults and robberies.

The state government of North Rhine-Westphalia said on Friday it was sending Wolfgang Albers into early retirement, and the 60-year-old commander said he understood the reasons why.

Many of the crimes have been blamed on foreigners in the country, which last year accepted about 1.1 million refugees – more than any other European nation.

But none of the 31 suspects has been accused of specifically committing sexual assaults, the aspect of Cologne’s disturbances that attracted most public outrage at home and abroad.

The Arab Spring, five years on: A season that began in hope, but ended in desolation

Five years ago, waves of popular protest began to spread, thrillingly, across the Arab world. Is anyone better off as a result? Patrick Cockburn reflects

• Patrick Cockburn

Arab Spring was always a misleading phrase, suggesting that what we were seeing was a peaceful transition from authoritarianism to democracy similar to that from communism in Eastern Europe. The misnomer implied an over-simplified view of the political ingredients that produced the protests and uprisings of 2011 and over-optimistic expectations about their outcome.

Five years later it is clear that the result of the uprisings has been calamitous, leading to wars or increased repression in all but one of the six countries where the Arab Spring principally took place. Syria, Libya and Yemen are being torn apart by civil wars that show no sign of ending. In Egypt and Bahrain autocracy is far greater and civil liberties far less than they were prior to 2011. Only in Tunisia, which started off the surge towards radical change, do people have greater rights than they did before.

Slovakia vows to refuse entry to Muslim migrants

Responding to the sexual assaults in Cologne and Hamburg, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico has reiterated his aim to allow no Muslims into the country. According to reports, some of the attackers were refugees.

Robert Fico said on Thursday that Slovakia would fight against immigration from Muslim countries to prevent attacks like last year’s shootings in Paris and large-scale assaults of women in Germany, which took place on New Year’s Eve.

“We don’t want something like what happened in Germany taking place in Slovakia,” Fico said, adding that the country must “prevent [its] women from being molested in public places.”

According to reports by local German newspaper “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger” and an online preview of investigations by Sunday paper “Welt am Sonntag,” Cologne authorities have identified some of the perpetrators in the attacks as been Syrian asylum seekers.

‘Multi-culturalism is a fiction’

In light of the attacks, Fico told reporters that Bratislava would ” never make a voluntary decision that would lead to the formation of a unified Muslim community in Slovakia.”

From drugs to pet iguanas: Snapshots from a Nicaraguan prison

Photos taken by inmates and posted on Facebook offer a rare look into life for prisoners at a jail in Nicaragua. The photos are testament to the deplorable conditions that the prisoners live in and the violence that reigns in the facility.

Since 2008, the Nicaraguan government has made it increasingly difficult for human rights advocates to gain access to the La Modelo prison, located in the western town of Tipitapa. The Nicaraguan Centre for Human Rights has decried this on several occasions.

Only a few stories published by the local press give a small, rare glimpses into what happens behind the walls of La Modelo prison. Recently, local journalists reported on a telephone smuggling network within the prison, as well as a rape case and an inmate who died after being beaten.

The prison also made the news when an American citizen, Jason Puracal, was imprisoned there for alleged drug trafficking, though there was no real evidence to his crimes. When he was finally freed, Puracal denounced the conditions within the prison, especially the omnipresent violence and the tensions between inmates, many of whom belong to gangs and some of whom are drug traffickers and murderers.

Silently protesting Muslim woman ejected from Trump rally

By Jeremy Diamond, CNN

Updated 0401 GMT (1201 HKT) January 9, 2016

Rose Hamid, a 56-year-old flight attendant sitting in the stands directly behind Trump, stood up Friday during Trump’s speech when the Republican front-runner suggested that Syrian refugees fleeing war in Syria were affiliated with ISIS.

Trump has previously called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S.

Despite her silence, Trump supporters around her began chanting Trump’s name — as instructed by Trump campaign staff before the event in case of protests — and pointed at Hamid and Marty Rosenbluth, the man alongside her who stood up as well.

As they were escorted out, Trump supporters roared — booing the pair and shouting at them to “get out.” One person shouted, “You have a bomb, you have a bomb,” according to Hamid.

Koreas slide into Cold War standoff after nuke test by North

North Korea trumpets a hydrogen bomb test. South Korea responds by cranking up blasts of harsh propaganda from giant green speakers aimed across the world’s most dangerous border. Now Pyongyang warns of war.

As the world looked Saturday for ways to punish the North over a nuclear test that pushes Pyongyang closer to its goal of a nuclear armed missile that can reach the U.S. mainland, the two Koreas have quickly slid into the kind of Cold War-era standoff that has defined their relationship over the past seven decades.

A top North Korean ruling party official’s warning that the South’s broadcasts have pushed the Korean Peninsula “toward the brink of war” is typical of Pyongyang’s over-top-rhetoric. But it is also indicative of the real fury that the broadcasts, which criticize the country’s revered dictatorship, cause in the North.