Iraq ( Iraqi military fights to take back " Fallujah and parts of Ramadi " )

BAGHDAD: A senior Iraqi military commander said Sunday that a counter-offensive is underway to two key western cities from Al-Qaeda-linked militants, with pro-government Sunni tribal forces leading the operations.
Lt. Gen. Rasheed Fleih, who leads the Anbar Military Command, told the state television Sunday that “two to three days” are needed to push the militants out of Fallujah and parts of Ramadi.
Fleih said the army is providing aerial cover and logistics on the ground in support of tribal forces. He didn’t elaborate on the operations.
“The quiet and safe life that is sought by the Anbaris will not be completely restored before few hours or two to three days, God willing,” Fleih said.
Residents say it has been quiet since Saturday night in Fallujah, where militants still control the center of the city. Sporadic clashes took place Sunday in and around Ramadi. The residents spoke on condition of anonymity for their safety.
The Islamic State in Iraq and Levant has seized control of Fallujah and Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar province. Ramadi was a stronghold of Sunni insurgents during the US-led war. Al-Qaeda militants largely took both cities over last week and have been fending off incursions by government forces there since.
ISIL is also one of the strongest rebel units in Syria, where it has imposed a strict version of Islamic law in territories it holds and kidnapped and killed anyone it deems critical of its rule. Also on Saturday, it claimed responsibility for a suicide car bombing in a Shiite-dominated neighborhood in Lebanon.


Tensions in Anbar have run high since Dec. 28, when Iraqi security forces arrested a Sunni lawmaker sought for terrorism charges. Two days later, the government dismantled a months-old, anti-government Sunni protest camp, sparking clashes with militants.
To ease the tension, the Shiite-led government withdrew army forces from the cities. Sunni lawmakers see the army as a tool of Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki to target his rivals and consolidate power.
US Secretary of State John Kerry said that America would support Iraq in its combat with Al-Qaeda, but without sending troop on ground.
The US was “very, very concerned” by the fighting, Kerry told reporters as he left Jerusalem for Jordan and Saudi Arabia on Sunday to discuss his effort to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians. However, he said the US would not send ground troops in to support Iraqi forces.
The US recently supplied Iraq with Hellfire missiles often used against militants.
Violence in Iraq spiked in April after the government staged a deadly crackdown on a Sunni protest camp. Iraq’s Al-Qaeda branch has fed on Sunni discontent and on the civil war in neighboring Syria, in which mostly Sunni rebels fight a government whose base is a Shiite offshoot sect.
Militants have targeted civilians, particularly in Shiite areas of Baghdad, with waves of coordinated car bombings and other deadly attacks.
According to the United Nations, Iraq had the highest annual death toll in 2013 since the worst of the sectarian bloodletting began to subside in 2007. The UN said violence killed 8,868 last year

Saudi Arabia ( Human body parts fell from the sky in the city of Jeddah Sunday )

JEDDAH: Human body parts fell from the sky in the city of Jeddah Sunday, with police saying they could be the remains of a person trapped in an airplane’s wheel bay.
“Police received a telephone call at 2:30 a.m. from a witness reporting the fall of human remains at an intersection in Mushrefa neighborhood” in Jeddah, spokesman Nawaf bin Naser Al-Bouq said in a statement.

 Initial indications were that the remains “fell from a plane’s landing gear,” said Bouq, adding that investigations were ongoing.
Police would not say if the body parts have anything to do with the Saudia airplane that made an emergency landing at the airport in Madinah also  early Sunday.
The Boeing 767-300ER flight from Mashhad in Iran, carrying 315 passengers, made the emergency landing at dawn Sunday after the pilot reported a malfunctioning rear wheel. Twenty-nine people were injured during the rough landing.
In a desperate attempt to cross borders, some people at poorly monitored airports climb inside the bays holding the landing gear of planes. Most of them freeze to death once the aircraft reach cruising altitude, but some survive.
In 2010, the head of Beirut’s airport security resigned after the death of a man who managed to sneak onto a runway undetected and hide in the wheel bay of a Saudi-bound jet.
The man’s body was found by a maintenance worker in Riyadh who was inspecting the landing gear of the Saudi-owned Nas Air Airbus 320 after it touched down.

Mexico ( Mayor arrested for killing her " Top aide " )

VERACRUZ, Mexico – Sara Luz Herrera Cano, erstwhile mayor of the eastern Mexican city of Alvarado, was arrested on charges she masterminded the killing of her top aide, the Veracruz state Attorney General’s Office said.

Herrera Cano was taken into custody on Thursday, two days after her immunity from prosecution expired with the end of her mayoral term, Attorney General Amadeo Flores Espinosa said in a statement.

Prosecutors say Herrera Cano was behind the murder of her private secretary, Michel Martinez Corro, who went missing in late July 2012 and was found dead in Alvarado on Aug. 4 of the same year.

On Oct. 24, 2013, the AG’s office asked the Veracruz state legislature to revoke Herrera Cano’s immunity revoked, but lawmakers had yet to reach a decision by the end of the mayor’s term.

Herrera Cano is a member of Mexico’s governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI

India ( 16 year old girl gang raped " set on fire " and later died )

KOLKATA, India: The father of a teenager who was allegedly gang raped and later died after being set on fire in eastern India is demanding a federal inquiry into the case.
Hundreds of people protested Friday in Kolkata, accusing West Bengal state authorities of failing to protect the family.


Police say the 16-year-old girl reported being gang raped on two consecutive days in late October.
The girl’s father told reporters last week that his daughter was set alight Dec. 23 after being threatened with violence if she didn’t withdraw her complaint. She died from her injuries on Wednesday. Neither she nor her father is being named by Indian media under laws guarding rape victims’ identities.
Police arrested six suspects in the rape and another two who allegedly set the girl on fire.

lebanon ( Al-Qaeda leader dies while in " Custody " of Lebanese army )

BEIRUT: The leader of an Al-Qaeda-linked group that carried out attacks across the Middle East before shifting its focus to Syria’s civil war died on Saturday while in custody in Lebanon, the army said.


In a short statement, the Lebanese army said Majid Al-Majid “died this morning while undergoing treatment at the central military hospital after his health deteriorated.” It did not elaborate.
Earlier, a Lebanese army general told The Associated Press that Al-Majid died after suffering kidney failure. He was speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations. State-run National News Agency said Al-Majid died “after his health conditions deteriorated.”
Al-Majid, a Saudi citizen, was detained in Lebanon late last month and had been held at a secret location.
He was the purported commander of the Abdullah Azzam Brigades — a Sunni militant group with Al-Qaeda links — and one of the 85 most-wanted individuals in Saudi Arabia.
The US State Department designated his group a foreign terrorist organization in 2012, freezing any assets it holds in the United States and banning Americans from doing business with the group.
The brigades have claimed responsibility for attacks throughout the region, including the 2010 bombing of a Japanese oil tanker in the Persian Gulf and several rocket strikes from Lebanon into Israel.
The most recent attack claimed by the group was the double suicide bombing in November outside the Iranian Embassy in Beirut that killed at least 23 people and wounded dozens.
Reports first surfaced about his arrest in Lebanon early this week. Security officials eventually confirmed that they had a suspect in custody, but said they were not certain of his identity.
On Friday, the Lebanese confirmed his identity, following a DNA test.
Al-Majid was believed to have serious kidney problems that require dialysis. He was an important figure, and the Abdullah Azzam Brigades grew from a relatively small outfit to a larger terror group since he took over in mid-2012, after the organization’s previous leader, Saleh Al-Qarawi, was gravely wounded in Pakistan.
According to Lebanese newspapers, Al-Majid was detained during the last week of December while on his way from Beirut to the eastern Bekaa Valley that borders Syria. The reports said that he was captured while in an ambulance after he had undergone dialysis at a hospital in Beirut.
In the spring of 2013, after the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah group announced that it was fighting alongside Syrian President Bashar Assad’s troops against the Syrian rebels, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades began to target Hezbollah as well — and by extension, their Iranian patrons.
On Friday, families of those killed in the Iranian embassy bombing demanded that Al-Majid, who had not been charged in the attack, be tried in Lebanon and not be sent to his homeland.

Arab News ( Middle East Cartoons )

North Korea ( Kim Jong Un " Kills Uncle " feeds him to 120 Dogs ) Human Rights Issue ?

Forget the hangman’s noose, the firing squad or lethal injection: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un executed his uncle and a handful of the man’s aides by feeding them to a horde of 120 starving dogs, according to a shocking (but unconfirmed) account.

Jang Song Thaek, the former No. 2 official in the secretive regime, was stripped naked and tossed into a cage along with his five closest aides.

Warning: Even in their unconfirmed state, the details are a bit gruesome.

“Then 120 hounds, starved for three days, were allowed to prey on them until they were completely eaten up. This is called ‘quan jue’, or execution by dogs,” according to the Straits Times of Singapore. The daily relied on a description of the execution in a Hong Kong newspaper that serves as the official mouthpiece of China’s government there. More established outlets in mainland China have not repeated the account.

“The entire process lasted for an hour, with Mr. Kim Jong Un, the supreme leader in North Korea, supervising it along with 300 senior officials,” the Straits Times said in a piece published Dec. 24, 2013, but only now getting traction in the United States. Two American national security officials contacted for comment said they had not heard that account, which first appeared in the Wen Wei Po newspaper on Dec. 12, 2013, and declined to vouch for its credibility.