US authorities charged Tuesday an American woman known as “JihadJane” with recruiting jihadist fighters to plan deadly attacks in Europe and South Asia.
The Justice Department unsealed an indictment against Colleen LaRose from Pennsylvania, who was arrested in October 2009, and said she had been given a direct order to kill an unidentified Swedish citizen.
The indictment charged LaRose with “conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, conspiracy to kill in a foreign country, making false statements to a government official and attempted identity theft.”
It said LaRose and five unindicted co-conspirators in Asia, Europe and the US had recruited men on the Internet to commit attacks as well as women “who had passports and the ability to travel to and around Europe in support of violent jihad.”
The U.S. government and human rights activists called Tuesday for Nigeria to investigate and prosecute those responsible for the deaths of more than 200 unarmed people in renewed violence between Christians and Muslims.
Acting President Goodluck Jonathan had promised that the fighting would stop after more than 300 people were slain in January. Jonathan fired his national security adviser late Monday night following the weekend violence.
“After the January killings, the villages should have been properly protected,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said. “Clearly, previous efforts to tackle the underlying causes have been inadequate, and in the meantime the wounds have festered and grown deeper.”
Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong, or the “Snow Leopard” as he has been dubbed, is making his final preparations for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
A skier preparing to take part in the Games at this point in the calendar is not the most sensational news, until it is understood the 31-year-old grew up in Accra, Ghana (where the annual average temperature is around 79 degrees Fahrenheit) and learnt to ski only six years ago on a dry slope.
Nkrumah-Acheampong hopes his remarkable and unconventional rise to prominence — he achieved the strict qualifying criteria set by the world governing body of his sport from his training base at an artificial snow dome in Milton Keynes, England where he was a former employee — can act as inspiration to his countrymen.
President Barack Obama stumped Sunday for the Democratic candidate in Massachusetts’ knife-edge Senate election, saying that his legislative agenda depended on her winning.
The seat, which was occupied by Edward Kennedy for almost five decades before his death in August, was considered a Democratic stronghold. But candidate Martha Coakley finds herself struggling ahead of Tuesday’s vote against Republican opponent Scott Brown.
A win by Brown would strip the Democrats of their 60th Senate seat, meaning their majority was no longer big enough to easily override Republican opposition to Obama’s bitterly fought health care reforms and other major projects.
“A lot of these measures are going to rest on one vote in the United States Senate,” Obama told a noisy Coakley rally in Boston.
“That’s why the opponents of change and progress have been pouring money in,” he said. “They want to keep things as they are.”
Bodies littered Haiti’s capital on Wednesday after an earthquake that may have killed thousands of people as it collapsed shanty towns, luxury hotels and even the presidential palace.
With victims pinned under debris and powerful aftershocks rattling the country, looting broke out soon after the 7.0 magnitude quake which spared no part of the capital Port-au-Prince, which was close to the epicentre.
Injured residents of the crowded city poured into the streets screaming in panic with each new tremor. Many bodies were just left in the streets or crushed under debris.
The quake toppled the cupola on the gleaming white presidential palace, a major hotel where 200 tourists were missing and the headquarters of the UN mission in Haiti where up to 250 personnel were unaccounted for.
The force’s head Hedi Annabi was among those feared dead, according to France’s foreign minister.
Jordan reported that three of its peacekeepers were killed and 21 wounded in the quake, the most powerful to hit the country in more than a century.
