Blast at Japan's Controversial War Shrine Injures No One

An explosion Monday damaged a public restroom at a controversial shrine in Tokyo that honors Japanese war dead, with police suspecting foul play. No one was injured.

The Yasukuni shrine, which honors 2.5 million Japanese war dead, including executed war criminals, has been the target of criticism from China and South Korea, which suffered from Japan's World War II atrocities and aggression.

Tokyo police said in a statement that they received a call about an explosion and smoke at Yasukuni. They said they suspected a "guerrilla" attack, implying some kind of subversive activity, but declined to elaborate.

Firefighters were also called to the scene and found the ceiling and walls of the restroom had been damaged, said an official at the Tokyo Fire Department, who spoke on condition of anonymity. But the fire was out by the time they arrived.

It was unclear what caused the explosion, but a timing device and wirings were found near the spot of the explosion, according to Kyodo News service. Police will be reviewing footage on security cameras for clues, TBS TV news said. Footage on TV Asahi showed a bomb squad in protective gear entering the shrine premises.

The person in charge of media at Yasukuni was not immediately available for comment.

The shrine is a focal point for lingering tensions with Japan's neighbors over the country's aggression before and during World War II. Some Japanese lawmakers have insisted on making official visits in the name of patriotism, while other lawmakers say such visits glorify Japan's historical mistakes.

Emperor Akihito has not visited Yasukuni. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has also avoided making official visits over the last two years.

While views on the shrine have divided the Japanese public, it holds emotional significance for some because during the war soldiers promised each other they would reunite at Yasukuni if they died.

The shrine has a grandiose gate, giant cherry trees and a museum that pays homage to those who died in Japan's wars, including kamikaze pilots.

Many families and tourists visit Yasukuni. Monday was a national holiday, and shrine officials said the grounds remained open for the rest of the day.

‘NRA’s Sick Jihad'

A New York tabloid is calling the National Rifle Association's platform "sick jihad" and the organization's leader "Jihadi Wayne" after the organization fought legislation that would prohibit people on the government's watch-list for terrorists and suspected terrorists from purchasing guns.

The New York Daily News, a longtime NRA adversary, has published two front-page stories during the past week calling out the NRA and its "gun-loving Republican cohorts" for opposing legislation that would block people on the watch-list from purchasing firearms.

The tabloid's response comes after The Washington Post and others reported that, over the past decade, more than 2,000 terror suspects legally purchased guns in the United States — and a bill to put an end to it had hit NRA resistance.

"These bills have rarely made it out of committee, in part due to vehement opposition from the National Rifle Association and its allies in Congress," Wonkblog's Chris Ingraham wrote last week.

The Daily News wrote about the issue first last week, claiming in its cover story that people on the list who were able to buy firearms had gotten away with it "because gun nuts are blocking law that would end this madness."

On Monday, it ran a follow-up with the headline, "Nowhere to hide, Jihadi Wayne" — saying NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre had been "conspicuously silent" about the story.

Under U.S. law, people on the FBI's consolidated terrorist watchlist — typically those under "reasonable suspicion" as known or suspected terrorists — can buy firearms.

When the bill, "Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2015," was introduced earlier this year to prohibit that practice, the NRA put its foot down. It said that the bill, which was "sponsored by gun control extremists," was "aimed primarily at law-abiding American gun owners," and that "prohibiting the possession of firearms doesn’t stop criminals from illegally acquiring them."

The recent terror attacks in Paris only added fuel to the debate, highlighting American gun laws and questioning who the legislation serves.

The NRA's Institute for Legislative Action responded late last week, stating that it does not want to put guns in the hands of terrorists.

"While some media sources did ruefully acknowledge that Paris already has highly restrictive gun control and that the firearms used in the attacks were obtained illegally," it said, "attention soon focused on supposed loopholes in American laws that critics claim make the U.S. a virtual arms bazaar for terrorists. One tabloid went so far as to characterize NRA’s Second Amendment advocacy as a 'sick jihad.'"

Jennifer Baker, NRA director of public affairs, said that the organization is against denying Second Amendment protections only to those who were wrongly put on the government watch list. There are approximately 750,000 people on the terrorism watch-list. Some civil liberties experts have complained that the watch-list is too broad, potentially including lawful relatives or acquaintances of suspected terrorists.

“The NRA does not want terrorists or dangerous people to have firearms, any suggestion otherwise is offensive and wrong,” she said in a statement to The Post. “Under the current system, law enforcement is notified every time a person on the list attempts to purchase a firearm. Law Enforcement then makes a case by case decision on the appropriate follow-up for each circumstance.

"The NRA’s only objective is to ensure that Americans who are wrongly on the list are afforded their constitutional right to due process."

Indeed, this is not the first time the Daily News has come after the NRA. After the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, the tabloid called the NRA La Pierre the "craziest man on earth."

"Just 90 minutes after moment of silence for Newtown victims," the headline read, "vile NRA nut blames everyone and everything except the guns."

Zimbabwe's Mr Ugly Is 'Not Ugly Enough'

Mison Sere, 42, was chosen by judges over 35 other Mister Ugly contestants for his missing front teeth and wide range of revolting facial expressions.

Former champion William Masvinu, a veteran with four previous Mister Ugly titles, cried foul, however, saying that Mr Sere's ugliness should not count because it was not natural.

"I am naturally ugly. He is not. He is ugly only when he opens his mouth," Mr Masvinu said, gesturing at his rival.

Another contestant, Patrick Mupereki, asked: "Do we have to lose our teeth to win? This is cheating."

When Mr Sere was announced the winner of the competition in Harare, Mr Masvinu and his supporters mobbed the judges, claiming he was "too handsome" to win.

The mob then began pushing and shoving and hurling insults at the judges. Luckily, the chaos did not result in injuries.

Competition organisers had previously said disabilities and enhancements would see a contestant disqualified from the pageant, which was to focus on "natural ugliness".

But judge Abigail Mataranyika, a university student, said Mr Masvinu simply had not tried hard enough to make the most of his ugliness.

"Sere made tremendous effort to enhance his ugliness by pulling facial stunts but Masvinu thought he is so ugly that he didn't need to try hard. That cost him the crown."

Unemployed Mr Sere described his critics as "sore losers" who "should just accept I'm uglier than them".

Happily pocketing his $500 prize money, he said he was now hoping for a television contract.

He said: "I already moved around schools performing and showcasing my ugliness, so this is a chance to make it on TV."

Zimbabwe has a history of controversial beauty - or otherwise - pageants.

Earlier this year, Miss Zimbabwe winner Emily Kachote was bullied on social media by angry pageant fans saying she was ugly and did not deserve to win the competition.

She gave up the title two weeks into her reign after the publication of nude photos - the same thing that saw the undoing of her predecessor.

Rival Libyan tribes sign ceasefire deal

Rival tribes from southern Libya have signed a ceasefire agreement in Qatar, ending 14 months of fighting in the city of Obari in southern Libya.

The deal between the Tebu and Tuareg tribes, which calls an immediate ceasefire and the return of thousands of people displaced by the conflict, was signed in Doha on Monday.

"Signing this deal means the start of the construction and development period, and reconciliation. After 14 months of war, I think all of us are convinced that no one has interest in war," Tuareg representative Mustafa Salem told Al Jazeera.

"The implementation is important and we hope neighbouring countries will help us, because the spark of war can reach all countries, including Europe."

Tebu tribe representative Mohammed Sundo said: "The Tebu and Tuareg lived side by side in the desert for many years. But after this war, there was external interference and hidden fingers instigating.

"There are fingers of regional powers and competing political orientations and ideologies...it is not a merely tribal conflict."

Hopes for stability 

Tribal and ethnic fighting in southern Libya increased since the topple of colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. 

In July, clashes between the two tribes reached Sebha, the biggest city in southern Libya, forcing hundreds of families to flee their homes.

Efforts to negotiate a truce in September halted because the ceasefire was violated.

The Qatari mediator hoped the deal would help stabilise the rest of Libya, where two competing governments are fighting for power. 

"We have seen the importance of stability of the south as the corner stone for the stability of the entire country, because Libya has open space and can be fertile land for different extremist and armed groups," said Mohammed bin Jassim Al Thani, minister's assistant for International Cooperation Affairs.

Libya's legally installed government in Tripoli welcomed the signing of the ceasefire deal in a statement and thanked Qatar for mediating the process.

"The General National Congress looks forward to this as being the right step towards conclusive reconciliation in the South of Libya and subsequently in the whole of Libya," the statement said.

Southern Libya, where unemployment is high, is home to African, Tuareg, Arab and Amazigh tribes and some extend into neighbouring countries.

Youssef Cherif, a Tunis-based political analyst specialising in North Africa, said: "the situation remains fragile".

"While the Tripoli government welcomes the news, [on] the other side - the [UN-recognised] Tobruk government and Khalifa Haftar - there is a lot of criticism," he said, referring to the self-appointed defence minister recognised by the Tobruk administration.

Lawyer reveals details of arrest of ‘clock kid’ Ahmed

Two months after “clock kid” Ahmed Mohamed made international headlines, new details of his controversial arrest emerged Monday in a letter his attorney has sent to school and city officials in Irving, Tex.

As many as seven adults teamed up to interrogate the 14-year-old boy after a teacher mistook his homemade clock for a bomb and pressured him to sign a confession, according to the “letter of demand” from his lawyer warning of plans to file a $15 million suit.

Ahmed’s September arrest, deemed an overreaction by many observers, drew waves of sympathy and extensive news coverage; President Obama invited him to join several other science-inclined students at the White House’s “Astronomy Night” last month.

But his family, which shortly thereafter took up a benefactor’s offer to relocate to Qatar, argued in the letter that the boy’s reputation has been “permanently scarred.” They are seeking not only financial reparations but written apologies from the city’s mayor and police chief.

“Everyone in the country and around the world believes this has been a wonderful experience for Ahmed’s family, and in some ways, it has been,” said Anthony Bond, a family friend. “But now they are settled in Qatar, they have realized they are tremendously traumatized.”

The letters elaborate on the timeline of the arrest, which set the Internet into a frenzy and changed a 14-year-old boy’s life forever. Though the family left the United States in October, the story is still reverberating in Ahmed’s hometown, where a group carrying guns and anti-Muslim signs staged a protest outside a mosque this past weekend.

Religion and race were at the center of the controversy over Ahmed’s arrest. For some, it amounted to the unfair profiling of a young Muslim of Sudanese descent, while others saw his case as a bid for media attention.

The letter of demand alleges that officials at Ahmed’s school never really thought that his homemade clock, assembled from “spare parts and scrap pieces he had around the house,” was a bomb. Attorneys claim that Ahmed showed it to another teacher earlier in the day without consequence. But in his English class, a teacher told him it “looked like” a bomb.

“The basis for Ms. West’s actions is unclear. She certainly did not treat the clock as though it were dangerous. Ms. West initially placed the clock on her desk,” the letter states.

Ahmed was escorted out of class and taken to a room where five Irving Police Department officers, the principal and assistant principal performed an “interrogation,” attorneys said. He was not permitted to contact his parents and was “pressured to sign a written statement admitting that he intended to bring a ‘hoax bomb’ to school.” The letter states that the principal threatened that he would be expelled if he did not sign the confession.

An Irving School District spokeswoman said the district received the letter of demand this morning and that its own lawyers would “respond as appropriate, as with any legal matter,” but otherwise offered no comment.

Attorneys blame the school district and the city for “stoking the flames” and placing blame on Ahmed even after it was decided he would not be criminally charged and his “suspicious-looking item” was not a threat.

A week after the arrest, Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne told Glenn Beck that another side of the story was not being told. She referred to the item as a “hoax bomb,” not a clock, and said that Ahmed was not cooperative during questioning by police.

“He told a lot more to the reporters than he ever told to the police,” Van Duyne said. “There’s a problem with that. If your child was in that school and you saw something like this come in, you would want to make sure it is our priority to make our children safe in school, period.”

The family is demanding an apology from Van Duyne and others involved because they would like to return to Irving, attorney Kelly Hollingsworth said.

“Qatar is nice, but it is not Texas. That is their attitude toward this,” Hollingsworth said. “They are citizens of Irving, Texas, USA, first. Are they devout people devoted to their faith? Absolutely. But they are Texans, too, and they want to come home. What we are seeking is for them to be able to do that with their heads held high.”

Hollingsworth’s letter paints a picture of the unpredictable consequences of going viral in 2015. When Ahmed woke up on Sept. 14, he was a normal, unknown teenager. By that evening, he had been recognized by President Obama, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and thousands of people who chimed in on the Twitter hashtag #IStandWithAhmed.

But the Internet backlash was loud and persistent: The demand letter states that one blog post superimposed Ahmed’s face on an image of Osama bin Laden and described him as a “little terrorist in training”; other people posted the Mohamed family’s home address on Twitter.

Meanwhile, some detractors have claimed that the entire incident was a publicity stunt planned by Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan, a former candidate for the presidency of Sudan — or that the “homemade clock” was actually a store-bought model, not a work of precocious ingenuity.

“The generosity and support Ahmed has received has been very much appreciated, but what the system has to do is try to find a way to redress him,” Hollingsworth said. “What’s the effect of this young man having his reputation in the global community scarred for the rest of his life?”

Terrorism: 16 Arrests in Belgium

 After a dramatic security sweep late Sunday marked by the deployment of soldiers in the historic center of the Belgian capital, the authorities here announced early Monday that 16 people had been arrested in a joint police and military operation to try to head off what the prime minister earlier described as a “serious and imminent” threat of a Paris-style terrorist assault.

Belgian security forces conducted 19 raids in the Brussels region on Sunday and three in the southern town of Charleroi, Eric Van der Sijpt, a magistrate and spokesman for the federal prosecutor’s office, said at a late-night news conference. Backed by heavily armed soldiers, the police also sealed off at least two areas of central Brussels, including streets around the city’s medieval central square, the Grand Place, a major tourist attraction.

But the main target of the clampdown, Salah Abdeslam, suspected to be one of the gunmen in the Nov. 13 Paris attacks, was not among those arrested, Mr. Van der Sijpt said. The raids also uncovered no weapons or explosives, he added. 

The Belgian news media reported Sunday that Mr. Abdeslam, a resident of the Brussels borough of Molenbeek whose brother was a suicide bomber in Paris, had been seen in the eastern city of Liège but then vanished again. Mr. Van der Sijpt declined to take questions on that or other aspects of the Belgian investigation into the links between the Paris attacks and Belgium.

He said several shots were fired by the police in Molenbeek late Sunday when, during a raid on a snack bar, a car drove toward officers. One person was wounded, he added.

Sunday’s raids and show of force in the center of Brussels escalated what had been mostly low-key precautions into a highly visible and often jittery military-style operation in a city usually associated with the somnolent activity of the European Union.

The operation, the biggest in the Belgian capital since the Paris attack, began shortly after a government meeting on the crisis and a decision to maintain for a second day the highest possible alert level in Brussels.

“We fear an attack similar to the one in Paris,” Prime Minister Charles Michel said Sunday at a news conference. “A number of individuals could launch an attack on several locations in Brussels simultaneously.” He spoke amid a growing mood of crisis as the authorities extended the hunt for Mr. Abdeslam, believed to be the only known survivor from three terrorist squads that attacked Paris, and for a widening number of suspects in Belgium linked to it.

Police officers and soldiers in camouflage blocked roads around the central headquarters of the Brussels police, near the Grand Place, and around the offices of the federal police. 

Mr. Michel did not elaborate on what information the government had received of a possible assault, saying only that it had “indications that the targets of such an attack will be areas that attract large crowds like commercial centers.”

Belgium’s interior minister, Jan Jambon, said that threat was wider than that posed by Mr. Abdeslam, suggesting that the Paris attacks may have involved a far broader network than originally thought. “There’s no point in hiding it; there is a real threat,” Mr. Jambon earlier told a Sunday program on the Belgian broadcaster VRT. 

A former French intelligence official close to the investigations said that the Belgians were looking for eight to 10 people who were heavily armed with weapons and explosives, in addition to Mr. Abdeslam.

With the country’s threat level at 4, the highest possible, the United States Embassy in Brussels continued to advise citizens to “remain at home” and avoid public gatherings. The authorities announced that schools and subways in Brussels would remain closed on Monday.

A railway station under the headquarters of the European Union’s executive branch remained sealed off on Sunday, and all traffic on the Brussels metro system was suspended. Soldiers with automatic weapons patrolled malls. Several big stores stayed closed. A huge Sunday market near the Brussels-South railway station that usually draws as many as 50,000 shoppers was canceled.

Mr. Michel said Saturday that the threat level had been raised because of “information, relatively precise, of a risk of an attack similar to the one that unfolded in Paris.”

Bernard Clerfayt, the mayor of Schaerbeek, a commune of Brussels, was more loose-tongued. On Sunday, he told the Belgian television network RTBF that “there are two terrorists on the ground in the Brussels region.”

At the same time, the French authorities published a new call on Sunday for witnesses related to the attacks in Paris and last week’s raid in St.-Denis, appealing for more information about the suicide bomber who was the second of three attackers to detonate explosives vests outside the Stade de France.

The call for witnesses, published by the French national police on Twitter, included a picture but not a name, and asked anybody who had information on the person to contact the authorities. The second suicide bomber detonated his vest near Gate H of the stadium, killing only himself.

The first detonated his explosives near Gate D, killing one other person. A Syrian passport for a 25-year-old man named Ahmad al-Mohammad, from Idlib, Syria, was found near his body, but the French authorities believe the passport may have been stolen.

On Friday, the Paris prosecutor’s office said that fingerprints for both the first and second bombers were taken at the same check for migrants in Greece on Oct. 3. The third bomber, identified as Bilal Hadfi, 20, a French citizen living in Belgium, detonated his explosives on the nearby Rue de la Cokerie but did not kill anybody else.

The appeal for help and the extraordinary security measures in Brussels came amid fresh revelations about another suspect, Abraimi Lazez, 39, a Belgian of Moroccan descent, who was arrested Thursday and charged with helping Mr. Abdeslam after his return to Belgium following the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris.

The authorities arrested Mr. Lazez after finding a handgun and an unspecified amount of blood in his car, his lawyer, Sokol Vljahen, said. Mr. Lazez, who grew up in the same Molenbeek neighborhood as some of the Paris attackers, denied any link to the attacks, his lawyer said.

Mr. Abdeslam was stopped by French police officers on Nov. 14, a few hours after the attacks, during a routine traffic check as he drove back to Brussels with two friends, both of whom have since been arrested. He had a criminal record but no warrant linked to his file, and he had not yet been tied to the attacks, so he was allowed to drive on.

One of the two men traveling with him and now under arrest has since told the police that Mr. Abdeslam had been wearing a big jacket, “with something underneath,” according to the suspect’s lawyer, Carine Couquelet. While he did not know what it was, the lawyer said, the sight of it “made him scared.”

According to Mr. Lazez’s lawyer, his client never met Salah or his brother, Ibrahim Abdeslam, one of the suicide bombers in Paris. Mr. Lazez was not friends with Abdelhamid Abaaoud either, he said. Mr. Abaaoud, another Molenbeek resident, was the presumed ringleader of the Paris attacks and was killed in a police raid just north of the French capital on Wednesday.

Mohamed, another brother of Salah Abdeslam who was detained briefly after the attacks but released, appealed for Salah to turn himself in.

“We wish for him to turn himself in,” he told RTBF television in an interview on Sunday. “To answer us. For our family, for the family of victims, for all the others. We prefer to see him in prison than in a cemetery.”

He said he had not paid attention when the attitudes of his two brothers began to change six months ago. “They started praying,” Mohamed said. “Or they stopped drinking alcohol, but it’s not a radical change. For me it’s the sign of people who wanted to chasten themselves, and to be more respectful of their religion.”

When asked whether his brother Salah might have been reluctant to participate in the attacks, Mohamed said: “It is my hope that he stepped back at the last minute.”

“Maybe he saw or heard something that made him turn back. After, did he kill victims? Was he at the exact location? Was he there until the end? We don’t know.”

Clock Boy' Seeking $15m From City And School

representing Ahmed Mohamed sent letters on Monday demanding $10m (£6.7m) from the city of Irving, Texas, and $5m from the Irving Independent School District.

The attorneys, who also threatened to pursue legal action, said the teenager deserves the money and an apology because he was publicly mistreated.

Ahmed took a homemade clock to his school in September to show a teacher, but another teacher thought it could be a bomb.

The school contacted police, who handcuffed the teenager.

Ahmed, the son of Sudanese immigrants, was suspended from school for three days.

In the wake of his story going viral, Ahmed received multiple job offers and visited the headquarters of Google and Facebook.

He even chatted with President Barack Obama while attending an Astronomy Night event at the White House in October.

Ahmed and his family have since moved to Qatar, where the family accepted a foundation's offer to pay for Ahmed's high school and college tuition in Doha.