Supreme Court Rules Gay Marriage Legal Nationwide
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Supreme Court Rules Gay Marriage Legal Nationwideby webdesk@voanews.com (Michael Bowman)
Same-sex marriage is now legal nationwide in the United States, after the Supreme Court ruled that America’s constitutional freedoms and protections afford gays and lesbians the right to wed. VOA’s Michael Bowman was at the high court for Friday’s narrow 5-4 decision, which settles, from a legal standpoint, a hard-fought social issue and civil rights battle.
Three separate terror attacks on the very same morning—perhaps 37 people rifled to death on a Tunisia beach, a businessman decapitated outside a gas factory in France and a Shi’ite mosque bombed in Kuwait City—sounds like more than a coincidence. Simultaneity has been a signature of al-Qaeda since Aug. 7, 1998, when the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were hit by truck bombs within minutes of each other. Counterterrorism analysts say the greater threat now appears to be ISIS, and the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria’s spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani just this week issued a general call for attacks in an audio message:
Muslims, embark and hasten toward jihad. O mujahedeen everywhere, rush and go to make Ramadan a month of disasters for the infidels.
But while the extremist group claimed responsibility for the Kuwait bombing—a rare attack in a rich kingdom that has largely escaped terror—ISIS has so far said nothing about the other two. There’s a very real chance that the timing of the three attacks was indeed coincidental—though the reason is scarcely less alarming. The fact is there are so many terror attacks these days that three bad ones happening on the same morning falls well within the realm of statistical probabilities.
There were 13,463 terror attacks across the globe in 2014, according to the U.S. State Department. That factors out to an average of 1,122 a month, or about 37 a day, which means a terror attack roughly every 40 minutes, somewhere in the world. Half of them took place in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where such atrocities have indeed grown so routine as to rarely qualify as international news. Syria, India and Nigeria together accounted for a bit better than a tenth of the sum. The rest were scattered around the globe, but not evenly. Of the 32,727 people killed, only 24 were Americans, or .07 percent of the total. Ten of those were in Afghanistan.
We are, moreover, in what has historically been the peak season for terror strikes, which past tallies show tend to rise in May, June and July. The holy month of Ramadan also factors in, with its associations of heightened piety. ISIS’s call to arms for Ramadan echoed similar summons from earlier insurgent groups in Iraq, where, as anyone who spent time in Baghdad over the last decade or so can attest, Fridays were seldom quiet.
If it seems like things are getting worse fast, they are. The number of attacks almost doubled from 2013 to 2014, as did the number fatalities. This had the perverse effect of making terror—which is meant to shock—actually less remarkable, as each attack dissolved into the generalized “background noise” of global news cycles.
ISIS has responded by amping up the horror. The group last year accounted for 17 percent of all terror strikes, yet nonetheless dominated the news by taking lives grotesquely and on video: Decapitating hostages, setting a Jordanian pilot alight in a cage, and in a new atrocity video released this week, killing captives by drowning them in a cage lowered into a pool; firing a rocket-propelled grenade at a car in which they are seated; detonating explosive necklaces looped around their necks.
The group also wallows in mass killings, usually of Shi’ite Muslims and other groups the Sunni extremists of ISIS regard as apostates. Organized terror strikes by ISIS outside its theatre of military operations in Iraq and Syria remain infrequent, but when they come they do tend to be against Shi’ite targets, like the mosque in Kuwait City that ISIS dubbed “a gathering of apostates.” And as details emerge from rural France, where both suspects were taken alive, that attack may also turn out to have been inspired by, if not quite organized by ISIS. With a human head perched on a factory fence, the incident has the medieval flavor of the Islamic State.
The Tunisia attack, on a pair of beach hotels popular with European tourists also resulted in an arrest, of a man from the Tunisian city of Kairouan who had hidden a Kalashnikov in a beach umbrella. There were no immediate claims of responsibility, but both the targets and the setting— a moderate and democratic Arab nation friendly to the West—meant that attack is likeliest to hit closest to home for Americans. Early reports said several of the dead were European.
The U.S. remains at once quite safe and yet more vulnerable than it’s been in a decade, according to authorities. Officials explain the paradox by noting that the surge in the number of attacks worldwide includes few of the “spectacular” strikes such as bombings of civilian airlines, or other plots that the West in particular has hardened itself against. But officials expect more and more of the kind of attacks ISIS calls for — small-bore, lone-wolf, often impulsive attacks that terror worldwide that may be impossible to detect in advance.
“In many ways I would say the threat streams now are higher than they’ve been since any time after Sept. 11,” Rep. Peter King, a New York Republican who serves on the House Intelligence subcommittee, tells TIME, speaking before Friday’s attacks. “ISIS has added a whole new dimension to it.”
The group’s power to inspire attacks, largely through its adept use of social media, has intelligence and counter-terrorism authorities scrambling to discern threats that could pop up anywhere a laptop or smart phone connects to the Internet. It’s a far more diffuse threat than Western countries faced from al-Qaeda, which organized specific plots through a rigid hierarchy, notes Jane Harman, formerly ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Subcommittee, now director of the Wilson Center in Washington. “A terror cell [now] is somebody on the web encountering some dangerous information,” Harman says. “That’s a terror cell.”
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ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greece’s prime minister has set a date of July 5 for a referendum on the country’s bailout deal with international creditors.
Alexis Tsipras made the announcement in a televised address to the Greek people early Saturday. It followed an emergency cabinet meeting.
Without an agreement on its international bailout, Greece faces the threat of running out of cash, defaulting on its loans and, possibly, leaving the euro currency.
Greece’s development minister is urging the nation to vote against the deal. Panayiotis Lafazanis says Greeks will answer “with a resounding no” in the vote.
Lafazanis spoke early Saturday, after an emergency cabinet meeting during which Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras announced his intention to call the referendum.
SOUSSE, Tunisia (Reuters) - A gunman disguised as a tourist opened fire at a Tunisian hotel on Friday with a rifle he had hidden in an umbrella, killing 39 people including Britons, Germans and Belgians as they lounged at the beach in an attack claimed by Islamic State.
Electric Yerevan Exposes Kremlin's Mind-Setby noreply@rferl.org (Brian Whitmore)
You can learn a lot about a country from how it reacts to a popular uprising in its neighborhood. And this is especially true if the country is Russia and the uprising is in one of its former Soviet vassals.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said on June 26 that an annual human rights report released by the United States was politically motivated and ignored rights violations by Ukraine.
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Armenian Officials To Probe Russian Soldier Accused Of Murdering Family by noreply@rferl.org (RFE/RL)
The case of a Russian soldier accused of killing seven members of an Armenian family has been handed over to investigators in Armenia.
The body of an Iraqi general killed when his military fighter jet crashed into the Arizona desert during a night training mission has been found near the U.S.-Mexico border, U.S. officials said June 26.
Hundreds Killed In Grisly Attacks Tied To Islamic State During Ramadan by noreply@rferl.org (RFE/RL)
A gunman killed dozens of people at a Tunisian beach resort, a suicide bomber blasted away dozens more at a mosque in Kuwait, and Islamic militants massacred hundreds of civilians in separate battles in Syria and Somalia June 26.
Islamic State fighters who sneaked into the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani on the Turkish border killed more than 150 people there and in nearby villages.
VIENNA (AP) -- World powers and Iran are back in nuclear talks, and this round may be the deciding one....
A look at gay marriage reaction from across USby By The Associated Press
Some snapshots of Americans reacting to Friday's Supreme Court ruling declaring that same-sex couples have a right to marry in all 50 states....
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The Latest: Gay-marriage ruling another blow to GOP beliefsby By The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Latest on the Supreme Court's ruling on same-sex marriage. (All times Eastern)...
Beheading, attack at US factory in France; suspect detainedby By JAMEY KEATEN and PHILIPPE SOTTO
SAINT-QUENTIN-FALLAVIER, France (AP) -- A truck driver once under surveillance for radical Islamic ties crashed into an American-owned chemical warehouse in southeastern France on Friday and hung his employer's severed head on a factory gate, along with banners with Arabic inscriptions....
AP PHOTOS: Gay couples celebrate after Supreme Court rulingby By The Associated Press
Same-sex couples won the right to marry nationwide Friday as a divided Supreme Court handed a victory to the gay rights movement, setting off a jubilant cascade of weddings in states where they had been forbidden. The ruling, which will put an end to same-sex marriage bans in 14 states, was criticized by some religious organizations....
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said the country will hold a referendum July 5 to decide on whether Greece should accept demands made by international creditors for more austerity in exchange for further international aid.
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