text stringlengths 9 72.5k |
|---|
^ Weiss, Caleb. “Iraqi Shia militias show US-made equipment on road to Samarra.” The Long War Journal, Threat Matrix, 4 March 2016. Web. 3 April 2016. |
^ “Iran-Backed Militia Demands Withdrawal of U.S. Force in Iraq.” Asharq Al-Awsat, 21 March 2016. Web. 3 April 2016. |
^ Gordon, Michael R. "Hezbollah Trains Iraqis in Iran, Officials Say". New York Times, 5 May 2008. Web. 3 August 2015. Gordon, Michael. "Against U.S. Wishes, Iraq Releases Man Accused of Killing American Soldiers". New York Times, 16 November 2012. Web. |
^ Wyer, Sam. “The Resurgence of Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq.” Middle East Security Report 7, Institute for the Study of War, December 2012. Web. 30 July 2015. Mamouri, Ali. “The Rise of ‘Cleric Militias’ in Iraq.” Al-Monitor (trans. T. Huffman), 23 July 2013. Web. |
^ “Hakarat Hizb Allah al-Nujaba.” Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium, Date unknown. Web. 8/3/2015. Cochrane, Marisa. “Asaib Ahl al-Haq and the Khazali Special Groups Network.” Institute for the Study of War, 13 Jan. 2008. Web. 31 July 2015. |
^ Visser, Reidar. “Religious Allegiances aming Pro-Iranian Special Groups in Iraq.” Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point, 26 Sept. 2011. Web. 3 August 2015. |
^ Associated Press. "Insurgents Who Killed Five GIs in Brazen Karbala Attack Captured." Foxnews.com. Fox News, 22 Mar. 2007. Web. 02 Dec. 2011. |
^ The Iran Times Corp. "Iran Times." The Iran Times, 05 July 2011. Web. 02 Dec. 2011. |
^ Schreck, Adam & Abdul-Zahra, Qassim. "Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq, Iraq Shiite Militia, Will Reportedly Lay Down Arms." TheHuffington Post, 6 January 2012. Web. 3 August 2015. |
^ Morris, Loveday. “Shiite militias in Iraq begin to remobilize.” The Washington Post, 9 February 2014. Web. 8 August 2014. |
^ Mamouri, Ali. “Transitional Justice Fails in Iraq.” Al-Monitor (trans. P. Menassa), 23 July 2013. Web. 3 August 2015. |
^ Mamouri, Ali. “The Rise of ‘Cleric Militias’”in Iraq.” Al-Monitor (trans. T. Huffman), 23 July 2013. Web. 30 July 2015. |
^ Michael Knights, "The Evolution of Iran's Special Groups in Iraq." |
^ Wyer, Sam. “The Resurgence of Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq.” Middle East Security Report 7, Institute for the Study of War, December 2012. Web. 30 July 2015. “Hostage Peter Moore ‘surprised’ by Asaib Ahl al-Haq apology.” BBC News, 8 July 2014. Web. July 31 2015. |
^ START: A Center of Excellence of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Incident Summary. Rep. no. 200904060002. Global Terrorism Database. Web. 29 Nov. 2011. |
^ "Incident Summary GTD ID: 200909160015." START: Global Terrorism Database. Web. 29 Nov. 2011. |
^ "Incident Summary GTD ID: 200910280004." START: Global Terrorism Database. Web. 29 Nov. 2011. |
^ "Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq". Iraq News Network, 10 August 2012. Web. 12 August 2012. |
^ Al-Jawoshy, Omar. “ISIS Suicide Bomber in Iraq Kills Dozens at Soccer Game.” New York Times, 25 March 2016. Web. 3 April 2016. |
In this puzzler, you play as a ghost. The goal of this game is to help all thepeople in a room escape. If any of these characters see you however, you lose(because saving people is a thankless job.) The main gameplay mechanic of this game is possession. As a ghost, you canpossess both animate and inanimate objects and ... |
Oprah Winfrey has opened up about her devastating family betrayal in 1990, after a relative sold a story about the talk show queen’s secret teenage pregnancy to the National Enquirer. |
She details the betrayal in the February issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, claiming the family member was paid 19,000 dollars to reveal Oprah’s pregnancy at the age of 14 and the baby’s death in hospital just weeks later. |
Oprah had kept secret the story of her childhood sexual abuse, her resulting teenage promiscuity and her pregnancy. |
“Only my family and closest friends knew. I would tell no one until I felt safe enough to share my dark past,” she writes. |
She was terrified the revelations would end her blossoming TV career, but instead discovered that having the story made public unburdened her of her secret shame. |
“No one said a word… Nobody treated me differently. |
The administrative judge of the anti-terrorism courts on Saturday remanded five suspected facilitators of the Chinese consulate attackers in police custody until January 17 and directed the investigators to submit a progress report on the next hearing. |
The Gulshan-e-Maymar police presented Hasnain, son of Abdul Qayyum; Nadir Khan, alias Arif Buledi, son of Abdul Qadir; Ali Ahmed, alias Hashim, son of Mehr Dil; Abdul Latif, son of Abdul Rasheed; and Muhammad Aslam, son of Muhammad Alam, before the judge, claiming that weapons and ammunition were found from their posse... |
Inspector Khurram Waris stated that he received a tip-off that the facilitators of the militants who carried out the attack on the Chinese consulate in Karachi on November 23 last year were present inside a walled plot in the Taiser Town neighborhood. He added that when the police raided the place, the suspects tried t... |
The suspects were booked in five cases pertaining to Section 23(1)(G) of the Sindh Arms Act and Section 4/5 of the Explosives Substances Act at the Gulshan-e-Maymar police station on Friday. |
Alleged Sept. 11 Plotters In Court, But Lawyers Do The Talking The brief courtroom session provided a glimpse of the accused plotters, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But the discussion focused on whether U.S. intelligence is listening to attorney-client conversations. |
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, seen in a file photo, and four other defendants accused of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks appeared before a military commission in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Monday. The session focused on procedural matters. |
Pretrial hearings in the death penalty trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of planning the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks lasted a little more than an hour Monday before the judge recessed the session until Tuesday. |
The men, who all came into the courtroom in camouflage vests and traditional garments known as shalwar kameez, have been in jail — awaiting this trial — for more than a decade. |
They were arraigned back in May, didn't enter pleas, and their trial has been moving at a plodding pace ever since. Monday's session offered a prime example: The dozens of defense attorneys, prosecutors and guards all gathered to discuss courtroom microphones and whether U.S. intelligence officials are secretly listeni... |
The latest kerfuffle began several weeks ago when David Nevin, the attorney defending Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was telling the judge that the defense wanted to argue a motion to preserve whatever remained of the CIA's black sites overseas as part of the defense's efforts to discuss what happened to their clients after t... |
Prosecutors had filed a classified response to the request, and as Nevin began reading the title of the motion, a spinning red light on the judge's bench suddenly lit up, and the audio and visual feeds from the courtroom went dead. |
Everyone looked around in surprise. |
Because the military commissions at Guantanamo need to keep classified information from getting out to the public, the audio feed from the courtroom is on a 40-second delay. |
When something classified is said — a censor who sits next to the judge pushes a button and starts the light spinning, and sends white noise to listeners outside the courtroom. |
During Nevin's argument, however, the feeds were cut off not by the judge or the prosecution, but by some third party. |
"If some external body is turning the commission off based on their own views of what things ought to be, with no reasonable explanation," Judge James Pohl, an Army colonel said at the time, "then we are going to have a little meeting about who turns that light on or off." |
No one seemed to know, until that moment, that there even was a third party that could cut the feed. "What that did was add another level of concern for the defense, and it played directly into their challenge to the legitimacy of the trial," says Wells Bennett, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. |
And that's more or less where Monday's hearings began: with the question of who is secretly monitoring the trial and what they are able to hear. The five defense attorneys were all reading from the same playbook — worrying aloud that this unseen force, which presumably is the CIA, was listening to the private attorney-... |
Judge Pohl kept asking for evidence that eavesdropping was happening, and the defense kept saying it needed time to prove that it was. |
An hour later, the judge had given the defense attorneys a day to investigate their motion, and the prosecution had suggested a partial solution: changing the microphones so they are push to "talk" instead of push to "mute." With those two things decided, the judge adjourned the session for the day. |
The hearings this week, however, are shaping up to be as much about the court system created to try terrorists at Guantanamo as it will be about the men in the dock. |
"The defense doesn't spend time attacking the jurisdiction, legitimacy or the authority of the Southern District of New York or the Eastern District of Virginia; that's kind of the color of the wallpaper," says Ben Wittes, who edits and writes for the Lawfare blog, which, among other things, tracks the progress of the ... |
"In the military commissions you have all the litigation you'd have in a federal court, but then you have this other layer in which people are arguing about the tribunal itself," he says. |
"My staff and I spent a full week diligently running every rumor to ground, and I can say unequivocally that no entity of the United States government is listening to, monitoring or recording communications between the five accused and their counsel at any location," chief prosecutor Brig. Gen. Mark Martins said in a s... |
"There are a whole bunch of problems with Guantanamo," says Karen Greenberg, who runs the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. |
"The question is: Can they get around these issues in such a way to try these cases [and] bring them to a conclusion in a way that you can say we had a legitimate courtroom proceeding that has democratic standards attached to it?" Greenberg says. "It is extremely difficult." |
The secret monitoring of the proceedings is just one example of a host of problems. Wittes says the commissions have been bogged down — the arraignment in which the defendants didn't even enter pleas was nearly a year ago — because lawyers aren't just litigating the facts of this case, as you would expect in federal co... |
"Unlike a federal court proceeding where you have many, many years and decades of trial practice and precedent, in the military system you don't have that reservoir of experience," he says. "Neither the judge nor the lawyers can say this is the way we've always done it, so they have to discuss everything." |
The defense motions still on the docket for this week, for example, include several attempts to get all the charges dismissed on procedural grounds. The defense says the charges weren't filed properly and that the retired admiral who oversees the commissions wasn't constitutionally appointed. |
Those kinds of issues were settled in federal court long ago, not at Guantanamo. This goes a long way toward explaining why at this early stage in the trial, the prosecution is hardly getting a word in edgewise. That will happen later. |
"As you get closer to a trial you talk more about factual issues, a lot more about who did what," says Wells Bennett. "And that's not really something the defense wants to get into." |
In the end, like so many category killers, it got killed by smarter, better operators. |
Did Toys "R" Us have to fail? Did the company have to be liquidated? |
The answer is definitively, yes. There was, in the end, no reason for being for the chain. It offered nothing special, not the lowest price, not the best selection, not the best service, not the best locations. |
Today some are mourning what will end up being the liquidation of the store, which had been a staple for more than 60 years. |
They should have been in mourning for the last two decades. Yes, it has been that bad for that long, much longer than when it went private 12 years ago and loaded up the balance sheet with more than $7.5 billion in debt. |
I've heard a lot in the last 24 hours about how Toys "R" Us could have survived if Bain Capital, KKR and Vornado hadn't taken on all of that debt to go private in 2005. |
I can understand that logic. At the same time that Toys -- as we always called it on the trading floor -- went private so did Dollar General and Burlington Coat Factory and those two companies used their private time fixing up their stores and becoming more focused. They then came public again and made you fortunes. Do... |
But I think that Toys was doomed at the turn of the century -- something the stagnant sales and stock price shows from back then because Walmart (WMT) and Target (TGT) decided to "own" the physical store business while Amazon (AMZN) actually partnered with Toys "R" Us at the same time. Both Walmart and Target decided t... |
And that was all before the private equity firms thought they were smart enough to turn the chain around by removing it from the glare of the public markets. |
But let's step back in time and realize the history of what went on here. At one point, in the 1980s, Toys "R" Us was one of the greatest growth stories of our time. That's because it was the category killer cleaning up against what were basically tens of thousands of mom-and-pop toy stores around the country. |
It was one of my greatest longs during that period because my father sold boxes, printed bags, scotch tape and gift wrap to most of those mom-and-pop stores in the Philadelphia area. Pop would tell me about each of his toy-store client bankruptcies and I would tell my clients to buy the heck out of the darned thing and... |
At the same time these mom-and-pop stores were struggling the toy companies started merging to the point where the universe was pretty much divided into Mattel (MAT) and Hasbro (HAS) . Toys "R" Us could get better prices because of its scale, sealing the fate of even the best run of the family businesses. I remember on... |
But, almost like clockwork, when these niggling competitors failed, Walmart and Target decided to do the same thing to Toys "R" Us that it did to my dad's clients, offering the hottest toys at prices that Toys "R" Us couldn't beat or didn't want to match and you started seeing the tell-tale decline in same-store sales ... |
What's the most amazing thing about this chain? I would say that it lasted as long as it did. It could not compete in any category that mattered, price, location, speed, brands, and certainly not service, you name it. |
Sure, it could have hung on if it had less debt. But in the end, like so many category killers it got killed by smarter, better operators. You know what the real bottom line, the ironic bottom line is? Walmart, Target and Amazon all coalesced to kill Toys "R" Us, but if you are at Walmart or Target right now and you ar... |
Even jaded New Yorkers do double takes upon seeing commuters carrying golf clubs on the city’s subways. Locals and visitors alike are often surprised to learn that there are 13 public golf courses in four of the five boroughs (only Manhattan is golf-free), many of them challenging, scenic, and easily accessible by publ... |
Green fees vary widely. Non-residents should expect to pay $40-$50 for 18 holes on a weekday, $50-$70 on weekends and holidays; carts are extra. |
Van Cortlandt Park South and Bailey Ave. |
Opened in 1895, Van Cortlandt Park is the oldest public golf course in the U.S. The layout is tree-lined, features two lakes, all new tee boxes, and many new bunkers. It is also probably the easiest course to get to by subway: Take the 1 or 9 train to 242nd Street and then a short walk into the big, beautiful park. |
Located side by side, these two short but sporty courses offer different experiences: Split Rock is tight and hilly, with tough greens, while Pelham Bay is more open. Take the 6 train to Pelham Park stop and transfer for a #45 bus. |
7th Ave. and 86th St. |
More than 100 years ago, Dyker Beach was a private course and it looks it, with a grand stone clubhouse and many challenging holes. It can be hard to concentrate on the sloping greens when confronted by imposing views of the nearby Verrazano Bridge. Take the R train to 86th St., then a 15-minute walk along 86th to the ... |
Arguably the city’s best track, La Tourette must be on any insider’s guide to NYC golf. Fairways are wide, but there’s plenty of sand and small greens with lots of slope. Like the other two Staten Island courses—Silver Lake and South Shore, both short and tight—getting to La Tourette includes one of New York’s great tr... |
Sculpted with coves, Cave Landing is a dramatic promontory thrusting 150 feet into San Luis Obispo Bay, just southeast of Avila Beach. |
A short path leads to a natural arch chiseled through the cliffs at the end of the headland. Other trails cross the promontory to views of the rugged coast here and more mellow beaches and sand dunes farther south. |
Generations of Chumash once fished from Cave Landing. Early in the 19th century, hides and tallow produced at Mission San Luis Obispo were loaded onto ships here. |
During the 1920s and '30s, nearby Shell Beach was a retreat for San Joaquin Valley residents escaping the summer heat. |
This hike explores Cave Landing, then descends to crescent-shaped Pirate's Cove. The cove has long been known as a clothing-optional beach, though many days are too cold and windy for people to shed their jackets, much less their swimsuits. |
The parking lot at the end of Cave Landing Road offers a trio of trail heads. For a half-mile hike, join the path leading west from the lot. It descends to a grassy plateau along the cliff edge, and hikers can look for caves at the base. |
The other trails, both southbound, are described below. |
Directions to the trail head: From U.S. 101 in Pismo Beach, take Avila Beach Drive two miles west to Cave Landing Road and turn left. Drive half a mile to the parking lot at road's end. |
To reach Pirate's Cove, join the path leading southeast and almost immediately bear left at an unsigned junction. |
After a quarter of a mile, the trail divides again. The left fork descends to Pirate's Cove, where you can walk the beach below tall cliffs. The right fork leads to an overlook and the rock arch I mentioned before. |
To reach Shell Beach from the parking lot, look for a gated dirt road curving downhill around the cove. The dirt road becomes a trail and leads to a paved path. This walkway runs atop coastal cliffs paralleling Bluff Drive, then leads to a small trail head and parking area at the end of Indio Drive. |
To add another mile to your journey, look for a dirt road beginning just above the roundabout on Indio Drive. The road heads east, rounding a hillside above the Sunset Palisades subdivision to Shell Beach Road. |
For more of John McKinney's tips, visit www.thetrailmaster.com. |
Egyptian state officials have raided the offices of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms in a renewed crackdown on the human rights group, according to the head of ECRF’s board of trustees, Ahmad Abdullah. |
Lawyers connected to ECRF are acting as the legal counsel for the family of murdered Italian student Giulio Regeni, whose body was found bearing signs of brutal torture on a desert road outside Cairo earlier this year. Regeni’s family are still fighting to find out who killed the 28-year-old doctoral student. The Egypt... |
ECRF tracks forced disappearances, which have spiked in the years since 2013 when President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi came to power. In a recent report, the group found that 912 people were disappeared in the year since August 2015. |
Abdullah said four officials claiming to be from Egypt’s ministry of investment entered the ECRF offices in Cairo’s Agouza district around 10.30am on Thursday morning, looking for the group’s executive director, prominent human rights advocate Mohamed Lotfy. Lotfy was not present, and sent a lawyer in his place. |
Abdullah was released on bail on 10 September, after serving almost five months in prison. He was arrested at his home on 25 April, and still faces a range of charges including inciting violence, belonging to a terrorist group and calling to overthrow the regime. |
There are suspicions that the raid could lead to ECRF being ensnared in the ongoing crackdown on NGOs in Egypt, reviving an infamous case from 2011 which accuses it of receiving illegal foreign funds. So far, the trial has targeted at least six Egyptian NGOs after being reopened earlier this year. |
In September, a Cairo court agreed to freeze the assets of five human rights activists and three prominent NGOs. The case continues to threaten the daily work done by civil society groups in Egypt. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.