LJUBLJANA, September 26 -- Slovenian Foreign Minister Karl Erjavec reiterated here Thursday that Slovenia would not take part in the U.S.-led military strike against the Islamic State group. Slovenia will in no case participate in military operations against the IS, while it remained committed to fighting terrorism in different ways, said Erhavec in an exclusive interview with Slovenian Press Agency. Previously, the Slovenian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that "As a responsible part of the international community, and an EU and NATO member, Slovenia is part of efforts to fight terrorism." "But any decisions will be in compliance with international law and Slovenian legislation," the official statement noted. Slovenian Prime Minister Miro Cerar, who was sworn in last week, told Radio Slovenia on Wednesday that Slovenia supports anti-terrorism, but it will not take part in military action against the IS. Local POP TV reported on the day that police have seized unlicensed weapons in two house searches targeting an individual suspected of having fought for the IS in Syria. The self-claimed IS has reportedly seized control of large swathes of Iraq and Syria, where Islamic extremists have executed hundreds of Iraqis and Syrians, as well as foreign hostages. The brutal campaign has also forced more than a million people to flee their homes. Considering the IS as a global threat, the United States and its allies have started air strikes on IS militants in Iraq and Syria, and are seeking to build an international coalition against the group. More than 50 countries have reportedly agreed to join the U.S.-sponsored anti-IS coalition. Source: Agencies
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KIEV, September 26 -- The international Rapid Trident-2014 exercises ended in the Lvov region, western Ukraine, on Friday, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry press service said. According to US European Command data, the exercises started on September 15 and involved at least 1,300 servicemen from 15 world countries, including Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, the United Kingdom, Germany, Georgia, Spain, Canada, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Norway, Poland, Romania, the United States and Ukraine. The exercise co-director, Ukrainian Army Colonel, Alexander Sivak, said the tasks, set during the manoeuvres, “were carried out successfully”. During the exercises, the units practiced their skills of clearing territories of mines, organizing marches and conducting patrols. Commenting on the maneuvers, US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt said a group of US advisors would come to Ukraine in the near future. Source: Agencies And These Guys Are Risking Their Lives To Document It RAQQA, September 26 -- Earlier this week, a video aired on French television showed scenes of daily life in Raqqa, Syria, the de-facto capital of the Islamic State. Filmed in secret and at a huge risk by a Syrian woman who hid a camera behind her niqab, the footage shows armed men patrolling the city, a woman carrying an AK-47 into a playground, and an internet café where foreign women who traveled to the caliphate phone their relatives back in France, saying they love it there. The video, like VICE News' The Islamic State before it, once again brought the attention of the world to Raqqa, a city where life under the Islamic State is as inscrutable to outsiders as it is terrifying — a reminder of the caliphate's brutality as much as of its bureaucratic efficiency. With open dissent all but stifled in the city — and punished with death, when it still happens — a group of young residents has taken the huge personal risk of documenting life under the Islamist fighters' rule — sharing photos, videos, and stories from the city on the web. Even after one of them was caught and executed, the group carried on, speaking with journalists and sharing images from the city. "We were activists against the Assad regime when we started, but after our city was freed, and ISIS took over our freedom, we just decided to launch this campaign to expose all the crimes that ISIS do." "Raqqa is being slaughtered silently" is both the group's name and the reason for its existence — to make sure the world hears and sees what's going on in the city, which now lives between the violence of its conquerors and the air strikes of the US and its allies. VICE News caught up with 22-year-old Abu Ibrahim Raqqawi, a member of the group who in the last four years went from medical student, to activist against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, to a chronicler of the fate of his city under the Islamic State, which he documented one crucifixion at the time until he was forced to flee just two weeks ago. With him, VICE News spoke about this latest video filmed by a woman with no connection to his group, life in Raqqa — especially for women, divides between Arab and foreign members of ISIS, and local support and criticism for US air strikes. KARACA, September 26 -- Islamic State fighters tightened their siege of the strategic town of Kobani on Syria's border with Turkey on Friday, pushing back Kurdish forces and sending shells into Turkish territory, witnesses said. The Sunni Muslim insurgents, who launched their assault on Kobani more than a week ago, besieging it from three sides, took control of high ground to the west of the town and a village to the east in fierce fighting. More than 140,000 Kurds have fled Kobani and surrounding villages since last Friday, crossing into Turkey. The U.N. refugee agency has said the entire 400,000 population of the town could flee. Kurds watching the fighting west of Kobani from hills on the Turkish side of the border -- Syrian refugees and Turks among them -- said they feared an imminent Islamic State assault on the town and called for U.S.-led air strikes on the insurgents. "After here it's flat to Kobani. It'll be easy (for them)," said one Turkish Kurd who gave his name as Mohammed. "Where is America, where is England, why are people not helping?" said another villager, Ali. The siege of Kobani has fuelled Kurdish anger not just at the Sunni insurgents but also against the Turkish state. Kurdish militants fought a three-decade insurgency for greater rights in southeast Turkey, and many Kurds accuse Ankara of supporting the Islamist insurgents against their ethnic kin. Several hundred unarmed protesters who had gathered on the Turkish side of the border in solidarity with the Syrian Kurds at one point broke through a barbed wire fence and rushed towards Kobani in an apparent bid to help defend it. The group, including pro-Kurdish politicians from Turkey, later gathered on a railway line on the Syrian side of the border, clashing with Turkish security forces who fired tear gas and were initially reluctant to let them back in. U.S.-led air strikes have targeted Islamic State fighters elsewhere in Syria but some Kurdish military officials have said they made the situation in Kobani more precarious by pushing the Sunni insurgents towards the Turkish border. Source: Agencies OKLAHOMA, September 26 -- A man has beheaded a woman after a workplace dispute in Oklahoma, U.S. law enforcement officials told CNN on Friday. He also tried to kill another woman, officials said. The incident happened late Thursday afternoon at a Vaughan Foods processing plant in Moore, about 10 miles south of Oklahoma City. There were no immediate indications of a link to terrorism, officials said. A sheriff's deputy shot the suspect, identified by officials as 30-year-old Alton Alexander Nolan. He was taken to a hospital and is expected to survive. Source: CNN
Al-Nuaimi, a well-known figure in Mosul, was remembered for her courageous work promoting the rights of women and helping the poor. "She used to stand before courts in order to defend those who were detained by U.S. forces, and she did that for free," a Mosul resident told NBC News. Al-Nuaimy was detained Sept. 17 after she posted messages on Facebook describing IS' bombing and destruction of mosques and shrines in Mosul as "barbaric." She was accused by the self-styled Islamic court of apostasy and sentenced to death by IS fighters. Her body will be handed to family who have been warned against conducting a funeral ceremony, a local journalist told NBC. Source: NBC 科技资讯网 9月26日 国际报道:有关iPhone 6 Plus弯曲的话题在社交媒体上持续发酵,iPhone 6 Plus弯曲的照片和视频在网上疯传,对iPhone 6设计缺陷的担忧甚至影响到了苹果股价。 苹果当地时间周四发表声明称,iPhone弯曲只是“极端个例”,发售6天来,只有9名客户就iPhone 6 Plus弯曲与公司接洽。苹果还表示,在iPhone整个开发过程中,它进行了“严格的”测试,确保产品符合标准。 本周,苹果既有成功也有失意。苹果周一宣称,发售周末iPhone 6和6 Plus销量达到1000万部。但此后出现了iOS 8操作系统存在缺陷和iPhone 6 Plus设计缺陷的媒体报道。 这些问题的出现正值CEO蒂姆•库克(Tim Cook)试图向外界展示苹果创新节奏并未因史蒂夫•乔布斯(Steve Jobs)去世而放慢之际。对于苹果销售更多型号iPhone的努力,这些问题无疑也是一大打击。iPhone是苹果最大的摇钱树,占到苹果营收的逾半数。 以下是苹果就iPhone 6 Plus弯曲问题发表的声明: iPhone在设计、制造过程中都考虑到漂亮和坚固。iPhone 6和iPhone 6 Plus外壳采用一体成型的阳极氧化铝材质制造,能有效缓冲外部压力,在承受外部力量较大的部位还使用不锈钢和钛金属进行了加固,并使用智能手机产业强度最高的玻璃。我们选择这些高质量的原材料和制造工艺,可以确保iPhone 6和iPhone 6 Plus的坚固性和耐用。在整个开发周期,我们还进行了大量严格的测试。iPhone 6和iPhone 6 Plus符合或超过我们全部标准,确保正常情况下不会出现问题。 正常使用情况下,iPhone弯曲只是极端的个例,发售头6天来,总共只有9名客户就iPhone 6 Plus弯曲问题与我们接洽。与苹果其他产品一样,在使用过程中iPhone 6和6 Plus出现问题请与我们接洽。 ROTTERDAM, September 26 -- Warplanes from the US-led coalition have bombed oil installations and other facilities in territory controlled by the Islamic State (IS) in eastern Syria for a second consecutive day, activists said. The strikes reportedly hit two oil areas in Deir ez-Zour province on Friday, a day after the US and its Arab allies attacked a dozen makeshift oil producing facilities in the same area near Syria's border with Iraq. The US Central Command said there had been "additional strikes" in the last 12 hours but did not give any details. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strikes overnight and early on Friday hit the Tink oil field as well as the Qouriyeh oil-producing area in Deir ez-Zour. The raids aim to cripple one of IS's primary sources of cash - black market oil sales that the US says earn up to $2m a day. The Observatory and another activist collective, the Local Coordination Committees, also reported strikes on the town of Mayadeen, including on the IS headquarters. Deir ez-Zour, which borders Iraq, is almost entirely controlled by IS and was a major oil-producing province before Syria's conflict began more than three years ago. Strikes also hit areas southeast of the city of Hasakah, close to the Iraqi border. They targeted IS, al-Qaeda's Syrian branch the Nusra Front and other fighters, the Observatory said. Fighters hiding Following the conflict it shows the strikes on IS would undoubtedly weaken the group, which controls large parts of Syria and Iraq. "They'll be on the defensive, they won't be able to expand the territory they control. It will be hard for fighters to move from one area to another, especially in large convoys. "But now IS is adapting to the air strikes, hiding among civilians. It will be very hard to defeat the group." Reports from the ground said dozens of fighters, from IS and the Nusra Front, as well as some civilians, have been killed since the US-led coalition began its bombing campaign in Syria early on Tuesday. Hundreds of civilians and soldiers have been killed in IS's fight to take control of territory in the east and north of Syria and in neighbouring Iraq. The widely-feared group has attacked minorities in both countries and drawn international outrage after the beheading of two American journalists and a British aid worker. But the foreign intervention has been met with a mixed reaction among Syrians, with the political opposition saying the US and its allies should also strike the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Source: Agencies TOKYO, September 26 -- The Pyongyang television has shown North Korean leader Kim Jong-un limping, the Japanese news agency Radio-Press, that analyzes mass media programs in North Korea, reported on Friday. In the July video footage, released late on Thursday, the speaker said “the marshal, despite health problems, continues, like the flame flow, keeping the path of leading the nation,” the report said. This summer, the Pyongyang television has at least twice shown the young leader, in his early 30s, walking with a limp. However, this is the first open mentioning of Kim Jong-un’s possible health problems. Health rumors swirl around Kim Jong-un as he has failed to appear in public since September 3. The North Korean leader, named the world's 46th most powerful person by Forbes Magazine last year, was also absent from a major political meeting in Pyongyang, the session of the Supreme People’s Assembly, on Thursday. Since he took power in December 2011, Kim Jong-un has participated in all the four sessions of the Supreme People’s Assembly, the unicameral legislature of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Source: Agencies WASHINGTON, September 26 -- Ukraine needs official foreign assistance in the amount “closer to $100 billion rather than the $55 billion that the IMF is now estimating” to save its economy, American economist Desmond Lachman wrote in his blog on The Hill newspaper website on Wednesday. The former International Monetary Fund (IMF) executive and now analyst at the American Enterprise Institute says “it is all too likely that the IMF is lowballing Ukraine’s needs in much the same way as it did in its Greek bailout programme.” He says the estimates are growing now the same as in the past. “Last May, at the time it launched its Ukraine lending programme, the IMF estimated that Ukraine might need around $35 billion in official external support. Today, some six months later, it is estimating that Ukraine might need around $55 billion in official external financing.” Lachman says, “One would have thought that this question would have been the main topic under discussion during [Ukrainian President Petro] Poroshenko’s U.S. visit. If Kiev “might need at least an additional $19 billion of external official support to see it through 2015, the White House has agreed to provide Ukraine around an additional $50 million in assistance. This leaves unanswered the basic question as to from where the remaining $18.95 billion is to be obtained,” the analyst says. According to him, “This is not to argue that Ukraine’s economy is not worth supporting, especially considering the country’s geopolitical importance to the West. Rather, it is to argue that the U.S. taxpayer deserves a transparent and realistic discussion of how much money supporting Ukraine will in the end cost the official international community.” “In that respect, one has to hope that [U.S.] policymakers do not resort to backdoor financing of Ukraine through the IMF without appropriate legislative approval. This is all the more so the case considering that any further substantial IMF lending to this war-torn country runs the risk of significantly compromising the IMF's balance sheet and undermining its credibility as a condition-based lender,” the analyst says. Meanwhile, the IMF existing programme for Ukraine is estimated at some $17 billion for the next two years. IMF Communications Director Gerry Rice told reporters at a briefing on Thursday that Kiev had not officially asked for this programmes revision, although it is the key part of the international assistance package on the tentative amounts of which Lachman commented. Source: Agencies WASHINGTON, September 26 -- US President Barack Obama has raised the fate of jailed journalists in Egypt and his concerns over political repression in his first meeting with his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, according to US officials. Obama and Sisi met on Thursday on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, as the two countries gingerly sought common ground after a period of turmoil caused by the toppling by Sisi, a former army chief, of Egypt's first elected president, Mohamed Morsi, last year. Ben Rhodes, US deputy national security adviser, announced onboard Air Force One that the talks were "productive" and focused on issues wracking the Middle East, including US operations to take on the Islamic State (IS) group and counterterrorism. Rhodes said that Obama specifically raised Washington's "ongoing concerns about Egypt's political trajectory. They had a frank exchange on those issues". "The president raised a number of specific concerns that we have related to human rights," Rhodes said, including the rights to free speech and the rights of journalists. "The president expressed his view that those journalists should be released." Obama had said earlier that he and Sisi intended to discuss a range of security issues, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Libya and IS. The US has frequently raised the plight of three Al Jazeera journalists jailed by Egypt after being accused of ties with Islamists. Australian Peter Greste, Egyptian-Canadian Mohamed Fahmy and Egyptian Baher Mohamed were convicted in June after being falsely accused of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood. Greste and Fahmy received seven-year terms, while Mohamed was sentenced to 10 years, in a case that caused international outrage. Eleven defendants who were tried in absentia, including one Dutch and two British journalists, were given 10-year sentences. Source: Agencies BAIKONUR, September 26 -- Russia’s Soyuz TMA-14M manned spaceship with an international crew of a long-duration expedition 41-42 separated from the carrier rocket and entered a designated orbit, a Baikonur spokesman said. The spaceship is piloted by Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyayev. He and his crew mates Yelena Serova and American astronaut Barry Wilmore when reaching the ISS will join Maksim Surayev, Gregory Wiseman, and Alexander Gerst, who have been workign aboard the ISS since May this year. The new crew will work in orbit for 169 days. “All the three crewmembers feel well,” a spokesman for the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) said. The spaceship TMA-14M is to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) after a shortened, six-hour, flight. One of the advantages of the shortened-flight diagram is that the crew do not have to get adapted to zero gravity in the closed space of the spaceship Soyuz. The condition of weightlessness begins to tell on the human organism in about five hours' time (of the flight), that is, the cosmonauts will be adapting themselves to zero gravity when aboard the ISS - in comfortable conditions. It is the second flight for the crew’s commander Aleksandr Samokutyayev. His first space flight took place in 2011. Barry Wilmore is no novice in space flights either - he was among the crew of the U.S. space shuttle in the autumn of 2009. For Yelena Serova, this is the first flight in her career. Moreover, she is the first Russian woman cosmonaut to set out on a long space flight in the past 20 years. Her predecessor, Yelena Kondakova, made a five-month orbital flight aboard the Mir space station in 1994. When in orbit, the new crew are to perform an extensive programme for scientific studies and applied research and experiments. They will receive three Russian resupply Progress spacecraft and a European ATV space vehicle. Besides, Samokutyayev and Maksim Surayev are to make a spacewalk. Source: Agencies DAMASCUS, September 26 -- Syrian government forces have overrun rebels in a town northeast of Damascus, strengthening President Bashar al-Assad's grip on territory around the capital. The town - Adra al-Omalia - is about 30km from central Damascus but far from parts of Syria where the United States has launched air strikes against fighters from the Islamic State (IS). Syrian state TV on Thursday said the armed forces had "imposed their control over the town of Adra al-Omalia and eliminated a number of terrorists." Troops were combing the area and clearing out explosives planted by armed groups, it added. Assad's forces, backed by the Lebanese Shia movement Hezbollah, have been gradually extending control over a corridor of territory from Damascus to the Mediterranean coast this year, seizing towns and villages along the main north-south highway and in the mountainous Qalamoun area along the Lebanese border. The advances in Adra al-Omalia show that the government is continuing to press that campaign as US-led forces bombard IS positions elsewhere in the country. Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group, confirmed the government had taken control of Adra al-Omalia after clashes with rebels including some from the Nusra Front, al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, whose positions have also been hit by US air strikes. The Observatory, which monitors the conflict through a network of sources, earlier said at least 29 people - 18 of them rebel fighters - died during fighting on Wednesday between rebels and government forces in the outskirts of Damascus. State TV broadcast what is said was live footage from the town showing soldiers standing in the area near buildings that had collapsed or were smashed up. Many Syrian activists and rebels have criticised the US for focusing on striking Islamic State and other armed groups while doing little to bring down Assad. Syria's conflict started as a peaceful protest movement but, after a government crackdown, turned into a war that has killed more than 190,000 people over more than three years. Fighting still regularly kills nearly 200 people a day. Source: Agencies WASHINGTON, September 25 -- Mohsin Al Fadhli, the leader of the Khorasan group of militants who had close ties to terror mastermind Osama Bin Laden, was killed by Tomahawk cruise missiles unleashed on his bases near Aleppo in northern Syria on Tuesday night.
The Pentagon said: “Khorasan has established a safe haven in Syria to develop external attacks, construct and test improvised explosive devices and recruit Westerners to conduct operations.” Al Fadhli was killed when the US and five Arab states carried out raids on IS targets in Syria. More than 20 of the 47 Tomahawk cruise missiles fired by US ships were aimed at eight Khorasan targets including training camps. Al Fadhli, 33, was born in Kuwait and by the age of 20 was sufficiently high-ranking in Al Qaeda to have known about the 9/11 attacks in advance. US Army Lieutenant General William Mayville Jr, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said: “We’ve been watching this group closely for some time, and we believe the Khorasan group was nearing the execution phase of an attack either in Europe, or the homeland.” A ban on uncharged mobile phones and laptops this summer on air passengers was introduced due to the threat posed by Khorasan and Western jihadists. Source: Agencies |
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