Nigeria gunmen kidnap 20 women in northeast

By HARUNA UMAR2 hours ago

North Korea threatens 'plot-breeding' U.N. rights office with 'punishment'

By By James Pearson7 hours ago

By James Pearson

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea on Monday threatened a planned U.N. field office in South Korea set up to investigate human rights abuses in the isolated country, saying anyone involved would be "ruthlessly punished".

The United Nations in March called for the field office to monitor human rights in North Korea following the release of a 372-page U.N. Commission of Inquiry report that detailed wide-ranging abuses, including systematic torture, starvation and killings comparable to Nazi-era atrocities.

"Anyone who challenges our dignity and social system and agrees to go ahead with the establishment of the office will be ruthlessly punished," the North's Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea said in a statement.

The committee handles issues related to South Korea.

South Korean president Park Geun-hye and others from international human rights organizations would "pay the price", the statement, carried by the official KCNA news agency, said.

The planned office was a "hideous politically-motivated provocation", and an "anti-North Korean plot-breeding organization," led by South Korea and the United States, it added.

North Korea "categorically and totally" rejected the accusations set out in the report, saying they were based on material faked by hostile forces backed by the United States, the European Union and Japan.

North Korea called Michael Kirby, the Australian judge who led the investigation and held hearings in South Korea, Japan, Britain and the United States, a "disgusting old lecher with a 40-odd-year-long career of homosexuality".

North Korea is under U.N., U.S. and other national sanctions due to repeated nuclear and ballistic missile tests since 2006 in defiance of international demands to stop.

(Additional reporting by Kahyun Yang; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Pyongyang lashes out at a planned field office meant to investigate human rights abuses.
'Will be ruthlessly punished'

Social media accounts paint chilling portrait of Las Vegas cop killers

Posts before rampage warned of 'coming sacrifices' and 'bloodshed'

By Jason Sickles, Yahoo2 hours agoYahoo News

A day before going on a shooting rampage that left two Las Vegas police officers and a bystander dead, Jerad Miller, one of the gunmen, posted this on Facebook:

“The dawn of a new day. May all of our coming sacrifices be worth it.”

Witnesses reportedly said Miller, 31, and his wife, Amanda, shouted, “This is a revolution” and “We're freedom fighters” when they ambushed the officers who were on their lunch break at a pizza restaurant.

If their social media accounts are any indication, rants about attacks and disgust with authority were a common thread in their lives.

“To the people in the world...your lucky i can't kill you now but remember one day one day i will get you because one day all hell will break lose and i'll be standing in the middle of it with a shot gun in one hand and a pistol in the other,” Amanda Miller posted on Facebook on May 23, 2011.

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Amanda Miller created and posted this Bitstrip comic to her Facebook six months ago. (Facebook)

After killing Police Officers Alyn Beck, 41, and Igor Soldo, 31, and taking their weapons, police said, the Millers fled across the street to a Walmart store, where they shot and killed customer Joseph Wilcox, 31, before apparently taking their own lives in a suicide pact.

The couple, who married in September 2012, moved from Lafayette, Indiana, to Las Vegas, Nevada, in January of this year.

Photos on 22-year-old Amanda Miller’s Facebook page shows the couple celebrating Christmas with family two weeks before departing for Nevada. In one photo, she poses with copies of the “Shooter’s Bible” and “Extreme Survival.”

“My new books that my Grandma Paula got me!” she wrote on Facebook.

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Amanda Miller shows off books she received last Christmas. (Facebook)

According to the Lafayette Journal & Courier, Jerad Miller had a long history of arrests and convictions for drug offenses while in Indiana.

In a July 8, 2013, video he posted to YouTube, he vents about the government making a profit from an ankle monitor he has to pay for and wear while under house arrest. He also rants about the local courthouse and questions why citizens need permits.

“You have to go down to that big stone structure, monument to tyranny, and submit, crawling, groveling on your hands and knees,” he says on the video. “Sounds a little like Nazi Germany to me or maybe communist Russia.”

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Amanda and Jerad Miller in April in Las Vegas. (Facebook)

On Monday, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that a neighbor said the Millers might have been planning a larger attack on an unidentified court building. According to the story, the couple’s next-door neighbor and friend was holding documents for the couple that included detailed plans to take over a courthouse and execute public officials.

Jerad Miller used the handle “USATruePatriot” on another YouTube account where video titles included “second amendment logic,” “Would George Washington use an AK?,” and “Police confiscate guns and threatened to kill me.” In two videos, he stands in front of an American flag dressed as the Joker and rambles about what it would be like to be president of the United States.

“A new world order under the Joker,” he shouts while belting out an evil laugh.

Jerad Miller’s profile picture on Facebook is of two knives behind a mask and the word “PATRIOT” in stars and stripes. Much of his social activity was centered on Second Amendment gun laws, government spying and drug laws. Six days before Sunday’s rampage, he posted on Facebook that, “to stop this oppression, I fear, can only be accomplished with bloodshed.”

“We can hope for peace. We must, however, prepare for war. We face an enemy that is not only well funded, but who believe they fight for freedom and justice. ... We, cannot with good conscience leave this fight to our children, because the longer we wait, our enemies become better equipped and recruit more mercenaries of death, willing to do a tyrants bidding without question. I know you are fearful, as am I. We certainly stand before a great and powerful enemy. I, however would rather die fighting for freedom, than live on my knees as a slave.”

Investigators with the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center said the Millers' web writings were typical of right-wing, militia-type thinking.

But Heidi Beirich said the SPLC’s intelligence files don’t show the couple to be members of an organized group.

“It’s just the two of them doing this crazy thing that the two of them decided to do,” Beirich, director of the SPLC’s intelligence project, told Yahoo News.

The ADL says in the past five years, there have been 43 separate incidences of violence between domestic extremists and U.S. law enforcement. All but four of the attacks were perpetrated by right-wing extremists, according to the ADL.

“The two police officers who lost their lives are only the latest in a series of casualties in a de facto war being waged against police by right-wing extremists, including both anti-government extremists and white supremacists,” Mark Pitcavage, ADL director of investigative research, said in a written statement. “Some extremists have deliberately targeted police, while others have responded violently when meeting police in unplanned encounters. The killings are not the effort of a concerted campaign, but rather a series of independent attacks and clashes stemming from right-wing ideologies.”

Jerad and Amanda Miller posted threatening messages that hinted at their anger toward authority.
'one day i will get you'

Israel: Hezbollah is now stronger than any Arab army

Israel's top military officer warned today that Hezbollah's capabilities have grown substantially since the 2006 war, putting much of Israel within the reach of the Lebanese Shiite militant organization.

By Nicholas Blanford17 hours ago

Israel’s top military officer warned today that Hezbollah is more powerful than most of the world’s armies and that a confrontation between Israel and the Lebanese Shiite militant organization was a near certainty.

While the threat posed by conventional Arab armies has diminished in recent years, Israel now faces highly mobile enemies like Hezbollah, skilled in asymmetric warfare and equipped with advanced weapons systems, Gen. Benny Gantz said. However, the massive destruction Israel can inflict on Hezbollah’s assets and Lebanon’s infrastructure continues to deter Hezbollah from overt aggression against Israel.

“Bring me four or five states that have more firepower than Hezbollah: Russia, China, Israel, France, and England,” he told Israel’s annual security-oriented Herzliya Conference. “What is this enormous power that they [Hezbollah] have that can cover every area of the state of Israel?”

Gantz’s comments reflect Israel's longstanding concern about Hezbollah’s growing might, which has soared in terms of weaponry, technology, and personnel since the two enemies last fought each other in open war in 2006.

Last week, an anonymous Israeli intelligence officer wrote in Israel’s Maarachot military magazine that in the next war, Hezbollah would not merely defend against an Israeli invasion but could make a “ground offensive and multi-pronged attack on Israeli territory."

In the past eight years, the Iran-backed group is believed to have acquired GPS-guided Syrian-manufactured missiles fitted with 1,100-pound warheads with ranges of at least 150 miles. That puts Tel Aviv within range of the Lebanese border. It also has drones that can carry dozens of pounds of explosive. In October 2012, a drone operated by Hezbollah penetrated Israeli airspace in the south before being detected and shot down by Israeli jets.

Hezbollah’s reconnaissance and communications capabilities have also improved. Fighters serving in Syria use thermal imaging cameras to monitor rebel movements and prepare ambushes, including one in February that killed 175 rebel fighters near Otaiba, east of Damascus. It has built a few dozen training camps across the Bekaa Valley in recent years to process the steady influx of new recruits.

But the most significant change may be the crucial combat experience Hezbollah's cadres have gained from fighting in Syria's war on behalf of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Hezbollah is credited with helping turn the tide against the rebel forces in the past year, granting Mr. Assad the confidence to hold a presidential election last week that saw him earn his third seven-year term in office in a poll widely derided by the Syrian opposition and the West.

“Iran is investing a lot in Hezbollah in Syria.... Hezbollah is involved up to their necks in it,” Gantz said.

It is fortunate for Israel that Hezbollah's attention is divided between domestic politics, military preparations against Israel, and its intervention in Syria, Gantz said. Fear of a damaging war has served as a mutual deterrence.

“Hezbollah is like a state and they know exactly what is going to happen in Lebanon if they start a war with us, and that this would set Lebanon back decades,” he said.

Despite that, tensions rose in February and March after an Israeli airstrike on a Hezbollah facility in the Bekaa Valley. The target was a 2,450-sq.-ft. utility building, possibly a temporary arms storage facility, beside a track used by Hezbollah to smuggle weapons into Lebanon from neighboring Syria, according to comparisons of satellite imagery on Google Earth.

It was the first Israeli air attack against Hezbollah in Lebanon since 2006. In response, Hezbollah detonated a roadside bomb against Israeli troops on Lebanon’s southern border. It is also thought responsible for staging three other attacks against soldiers in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, wounding four.

Related stories

• Hezbollah 101: Who is the militant group, and what does it want?
• Battlefield lessons in Syria strengthen Hezbollah's fighting force
• Rebel evacuation of Homs is crowning moment for Syrian regime (+video)
• Behind Israeli strikes on Syria, a simmering battle with Hezbollah (+video)
• Look who's training: Hezbollah prepares for war (+video)

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In Donetsk, pro-Russian patrols keep order at night

By Laetitia Peron18 hours ago

Donetsk (Ukraine) (AFP) - His head shaven and his neck tattooed, Sergiy may be an unlikely law enforcer, but since war pushed the city of Donetsk to the brink of anarchy, he has helped keep the streets safe from crime.

"The police aren't in a position to be everywhere and do everything," said the 30-year-old, explaining why he set up a brigade of volunteers to patrol this city of one million residents.

The vigilantes, as self-proclaimed as the pro-Russian "Donetsk People's Republic" that they serve, are mainly active at night, when the city is at its most vulnerable.

Moving around the dark streets they observe the situation, and prefer to leave it to the police to act.

"We're not supposed to be in the frontline. We're not going to fight tanks with bottle openers... We're here merely to get information fast and to verify it," said Sergiy, who declined to give his last name.

Even so, a recent night patrol with Ivan, one of Sergiy's recruits, demonstrated that the members of the brigade can find themselves in tense situations.

"Base to all stations: Anything to report? Over," Ivan said, speaking into his walkie-talkie as his vehicle moved slowly down a dark street.

The reply from the other patrols was negative, but Ivan soon had his hands full himself.

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A coal miner holds a flag of the so-called "Donetsk People's Republic" as an armed pro …

Having been called to a situation where a man was reported to have behaved in a threatening manner, he and his patrol jumped out of the vehicle and seized the suspect.

"Face against the wall!" Ivan yelled, brandishing a Colt revolver. "Put your damn face against the wall!"

The man, it turned out, was drunk, and when he agreed to walk home quietly, the patrol decided an arrest was unnecessary.

- Potentially dangerous work -

For Ivan and the other members of the brigade, this is exhausting and potentially dangerous work, but they do it because they consider it important.

The mood is tense in Donetsk, which has not been safe since a pro-Russian rebellion broke out in early April, triggering an "anti-terrorist" operation by the authorities in the capital Kiev.

The power vacuum has unleashed a wave of crime, and in Donetsk, where armed men of uncertain loyalties roam the streets at will, several shops have been pillaged, while others have been closed down as a precaution.

In this situation, the vigilante brigade -- modelled on volunteer auxiliary units organised in Soviet times -- has taken it upon itself to seek out possible trouble makers, whether drunkards, burglars or pro-Ukrainian fighters backing the regime in faraway Kiev.

The brigade claims to be working in close cooperation with the police of the young "People's Republic", and on Ivan's night patrol everything suggested smooth coordination with the official security apparatus.

The patrols also rely on a network of residents who report suspicious situations via an app that turns their smartphones into walkie-talkies.

"Our group is made up of people who are interested in what's going on in this city," said Sergiy. "We're simply concerned about the security of this city."

But despite all their efforts, the city doesn't feel much safer.

Every patrol takes place in streets that seem a little more deserted than the night before.