Word: terrorism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...disabling condition is bad, but there's a particular terror connected to the kind that destroys the body and leaves an alert mind locked inside. Stephen Hawking has spent much of his life inside just that kind of corporeal prison. The late Jean-Dominique Bauby described his own, similar experiences in the extraordinary memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a book he wrote one painstaking letter at a time by blinking his eye in alphabetic code...
...what happens when beauty turns to terror? Australia found out last weekend when wildfires swept through the southeastern state of Victoria. Fires are a regular and natural occurrence in the Australian bush, but nobody was ready for the conflagration that exploded through the forests and towns north of Melbourne, and elsewhere in the state, on Saturday Feb. 7. Fueled by 117 degrees F (47 degrees C) heat and fierce northerly winds, huge fireballs burned through fields, cars, houses, stores and schools...
...French justice officials produced cell phone records that showed the suicide bomber, Nizar Nawar, had called Ganczarski shortly before the attack to receive a blessing - a benediction prosecutors say was the go-ahead sign for the strike. Nawar made a similar call to Pakistan to speak with al-Qaeda terror maestro Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, currently held in Guantanamo as the self-proclaimed architect of 9/11. (Sheikh Mohammed will be tried in absentia by France as the plotter of the Tunisian attack this spring...
...French officials, who had asked for a 30-year sentence for Ganczarski, were still pleased with the outcome. The guilty verdict in a such a difficult case, they note, is a sign that France's counter-terrorism and civil justice system works. "It's gratifying to see the French legal system can both enhance security and render justice to victims by prosecuting terror cases above the board, and by the book," says Marc Trévidic, a senior investigating magistrate in France's specialized anti-terrorism division. "It's especially true in a complicated case like this...
...outcome of the French trial comes at a significant moment. On Monday, a U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco will hear a case brought by three plaintiffs charging they were tortured during extraordinary renditions the Bush administration approved as part of the war on terror. Previous legal challenges to such measures were thwarted by government refusal to provide courts with evidence or testimony requested, citing state secrecy. Many observers now hope the Obama administration will release previously withheld information as it deconstructs the extra-legal system for dealing with terror suspects and return them to courts that handled them...