PARIS — President Emmanuel Macron was projected to finish in the top spot in the French presidential election on Sunday, for the moment holding off a far-right challenge that would shake global politics. But far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s gains and second-place finish set up a competitive runoff election on April 24.
The goal of this column is to present news from around the world that is not often – if ever – covered by more mainstream entities, using local sources wherever possible, but occasionally using news aggregators not used, again, by the mainstream media. Also, please note that we do use links to Wikipedia; while Wikipedia is well-known as a largely-useless site for any kind of serious research, it does serve as a launch-pad for further inquiry, in addition to being generally free of malicious ads. As with anything from Wikipedia, always verify their sources before making any conclusions based on their pages.
This column will cover the preceding week of news.
North America
Starting off, we will obviously need to address the New York City subway attack.
At approximately 8:24 a.m. EDT, a man later identified as 62-year-old Frank Robert James reportedly donned a gas mask, threw two smoke grenades, and fired some 33 shots from a Glock 17 9mm handgun, injuring some 29 people, 10 from gunshots and 19 from the ensuing panic.
The suspect has an extensive arrest record, but in all of those previous cases, the charges were either dropped or reduced to misdemeanors, allowing him to retain the ability to legally purchase firearms, a very common occurrence in the United States, even though both the state of New York, and New York City itself, enforce some of the strictest firearms laws in the United States, in spite of numerous Supreme Court rulings to the contrary. As with many other incidents in recent years, the investigation by the NYPD, FBI, BATFE and HSI were hampered by a lack of security cameras. Despite a city-wide appeal to people who had been at the scene of the attack to send any pictures or videos of the suspect to the NYPD, although the suspect was identified, he was not arrested until he, himself, called the tip line and advised the police of his location the day after the attack.
As a result, authorities in Los Angeles, California remain in “high alert” for similar events, as that metro area increasingly faces rising crime from the effects of homelessness and the rampant effects of enforced lax law enforcement.
[Source 1] – [Source 2] – [Source 3] – [Source 4] – [Source 5]
Elsewhere in the nation, police in Virginia recovered a “live grenade” near a Goodwill store. No images of the device in question were released.
In Boston, Massachusetts, local police and the FBI are investigating the reported theft of police uniforms, mere weeks before the world-famous Boston Marathon is due to be run. This year marks the ninth anniversary of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three people and wounded over 260 others, whose perpetrators – brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev – were killed by police (Tamerlan) or sentenced to death (Dzhokhar).
Europe
In the United Kingdom, 26-year old Ali Harbi Ali, a British citizen of Somali descent, was given a rare sentence of life in prison for the 2021 stabbing murder of Sir David Amess (father of actress Katie Amess), Conservative MP for Southend West.
Amess was stabbed to death by Ali on 15 October, 2021, at a “constituency surgery” (an event where politicians speak one-on-one with their constituents) in Leigh-on-Sea. These events always present a significant security risk, as two other MP’s have been killed and two more wounded at similar events in the past decades.
“If I thought I did anything wrong, I wouldn’t have done it,” he told the jury.
Ali expressed no remorse for his attack, telling police at the time of his arrest that he was influenced by the propaganda of Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, a senior leader and official spokesperson of the so-called “Islamic State” (killed in an airstrike in 2016), who had called on Muslims to attack people in their home countries who were deemed to be enemies of the IS. Ali had entered a plea of “not guilty” for the attack, claiming that his actions were “religiously motivated”. According to police, Ali conducted research on over 250 MP’s before narrowing his target list down to Amess and a few others.
[Source 1] – [Source 2] – [Source 3] – [Source 4]
Africa
Turning to Africa, Nigerian government officials released a statement that “armed gangs” that have been attacking remote communities in Nigeria’s northwestern regions are actively working with the terrorist group Boko Haram, who have been battling several governments in an insurgency that began in 2009. While previously believed to have been simple, criminal banditry, the increasing number and violence of attacks in recent months has led Nigerian officials to confirm the ties suspected by counter-terrorism specialists.
This comes as Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with a population of over 200 million, has seen a series of nightmarish attacks this week, including the massacre of over 100 people in attacks on four villages in northern Plateau State, as well as other attacks throughout the rest of the nation, resulting in dozens more deaths, bombings and arson attacks.
Labeling the “criminal gangs” as being part of Boko Haram will allow – in theory – far more resources to be devoted to combating them. However, Nigeria’s security services have been stretched thin by the long-running fighting.
Across the continent in Somalia, meanwhile, Somali National Army (SNA) troops – backed by the newly-formed African Union Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS) – killed seven Al-Shabaab terrorists in a foiled attack on an army encampment in Dinsoor, in the country’s south on the 11th. Somalia is slowly beginning to stabilize after decades of civil war, lawlessness and the ongoing campaigns against Al Shabaab.
[Source 1] – [Source 2] – [Source 3] – [Source 4] – [Source 5]
Middle East
In the Middle East this week, various Yemeni groups accused the Saudi-led coalition that intervened in the country’s civil war in 2015, of repeatedly violating a UN-brokered ceasefire agreement. The confusing, multi-sided war has reportedly killed over 100,000 people, in addition to an estimate 85,000 who have died as a result of the ongoing famine in the country since it began in 2016. The UNICEF organization and various NGO’s described Yemen as “the largest humanitarian crisis in the world“, and estimated that 80% of the population, over 24 million people, were in need of humanitarian assistance.
Meanwhile, desultory fighting continues throughout war-torn Syria, as Turkish forces continued shelling areas in the country’s north, along with low-level violence from both native factions and several international belligerents who have intervened for all sorts of claimed reasons, legitimate and otherwise.
The same holds true for Iraq, as security forces engaged in the now-normal give-and-take of attacks, IEDs and arrests throughout the country, as another Coalition supply convoy was attacked in the Babil Governate, in which are the remains of the historic city of Babylon.
[Source 1] – [Source 2] – [Source 3] – [Source 4] – [Source 5] – [Source 6] – [Source 7] – [Source 8] – [Source 9]
In Pakistan, Balochi insurgents attacked reported military intelligence posts of the MI and ISI in the city of Kharan.
Elsewhere in the country, a total of 15 police officers and soldiers were killed in three separate incidents in the country’s northern regions. The terror group “Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan” claimed responsibility for all three attacks. In the Bajaur District, one Mufti Shafiullah Jan, a teacher at the Government High School, died of his injuries after being seriously injured in an IED blast while on his way to work, despite paramedics’ best efforts to save him.
[Source 1] – [Source 2] – [Source 3] – [Source 4] – [Source 5] – [Source 6]
South Asia
Finally, in central India, Communist insurgents kidnapped and murdered two men – one of them a former insurgent who had surrendered in 2010 – claiming that they were “police informants” in pamphlets left at the scenes in the city of Gadchiroli.
In the north of the country, in Jammu & Kashmir, scattered gun battles with various insurgent groups killed a total of six terrorist suspects and wounded two police officers, in two separate incidents, amid the long-running strife in the region.
