Hollande Seeks to Calm Rising Tensions

French President François Hollande insisted Thursday that any anti-Muslim or anti-Semitic acts would be be “severely punished,” as he sought to calm rising social tension after his country’s bloodiest terrorist attacks in decades.

“Anti-Muslim acts, like anti-Semitism, should not just be denounced but severely punished,” Hollandesaid Thursday at the Arab World Institute in Paris.

Noting that Muslims are the main victims of Islamic extremist violence, he said, “In the face of terrorism, we are all united.”

With 120,000 security forces deployed to prevent future attacks, France is tense after 17 people were killed in its capital in last week’s rampage carried out by three radical Muslim gunmen.

The three days of terror began on January 7 when two brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, massacred 12 people, including two policemen, at the headquarters of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The following day, another militant Islamist, Amédy Coulibaly, killed a policewoman on the outskirts of the capital. On January 9, Coulibaly stormed a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris, killing four people.

Commando units killed all three gunmen in twin assaults on Friday.

While the Kouachi brothers said they were financed by al Qaeda in Yemen, Coulibaly claimed allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) group.

On Wednesday, a leader of Yemen’s al Qaeda branch officially claimed responsibility for the Kouachi brothers’ attack, saying in a video posted online that the slayings were committed in “vengeance for the prophet”, referring to cartoons of Prophet Mohammed created by Charlie Hebdo staff.

The Muslim faith forbids depictions of the prophet.

The attacks occurred in an atmosphere of rising anti-Semitism in France, and have prompted scattered attacks on Muslim sites around France in an apparent backlash. They have also put many French Muslims on the defensive.

Homegrown terrorism?

US and French intelligence officials are leaning toward an assessment that the Paris terror attacks were inspired by al Qaeda but not directly supervised by the group, a view that would put the violence in a category of homegrown incidents that are extremely difficult to detect and thwart.

In his speech, Hollande said that France’s millions of Muslims should be protected and respected, “just as they themselves should respect the nation” and its strictly secular values.

Earlier this week, French justice officials also began cracking down by arresting dozens of people who glorified terrorism or made racist or anti-Semitic remarks.

Hollande’s comments come on the same day that two of Charlie Hebdo’s best-known cartoonists  – Georges Wolinski, 80, and Bernard "Tignous" Verlhac, 57 – were laid to rest in private family funerals.

Meanwhile in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday pledged to heighten security measures against militant Islamists and “hate-preachers”.

"Hate preachers, violent delinquents who act in the name of Islam, those behind them, and the intellectual arsonists of international terrorism will be rigorously fought with all legal means at the disposal of the state," she said in a speech to parliament.

Charlie Hebdo First Post Attack Issue

The first post-attack issue of Charlie Hebdo, completed by the survivors of last week’s massacre on the French satirical magazine that left 12 dead, sold out within just a few hours when it hit French newsstands Wednesday.

Even before dawn, most French kiosks had sold out of the much-anticipated issue – despite a record print run of three million copies from the usual 60,000 – but people still lined up in the hope of getting their hands on a spare copy.  On Wednesday, the magazine announced it would make five million copies available, including translations into five languages.

The core of the magazine’s staff died last Wednesday when militants Islamists stormed its central Paris offices and killed a total of 12 people, including some of France’s finest cartoonists.

Here are some tweeters' accounts of the rush to newsstands.

"Charlie Hebdo sold out. On sale tomorrow,” a sign at a newsstand says.

People were seen queuing for a copy all across France. By 10am vendors said the first post-attack issue of Charlie Hebdo had sold out.

At Place de la République in central Paris, the line to the newsstand was overwhelming.

Despite the newsstands selling out of copies, many people chose to wait around in case a new Charlie Hebdo shipment would arrive. Here in Bordeaux.

Even abroad, people were wondering where they could get hold of a copy.

Belgian Anti Terrorist Raid

Belgian police killed two men who opened fire on them during one of about a dozen raids on Thursday against an Islamist group that federal prosecutors said was about to launch “terrorist attacks on a grand scale”.

Coming a week after Islamist gunmen killed 17 people in Paris, the incident heightened fears across Europe of young local Muslims returning radicalised from Syria. But prosecutors’ spokesman Eric Van Der Sypt said the Belgian probe had been under way before the Jan. 7 attack on French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

A third man was detained in the eastern city of Verviers, where police commandos ran into a hail of gunfire after trying to gain entry to an apartment above a town centre bakery. All three were citizens ofBelgium, which has one of the biggest concentrations of European Islamists fighting in Syria.

Other raids on the homes of men returned from the civil war there were conducted across the country, Van Der Sypt said, adding that they were suspected of planning attacks on Belgian police stations. Security had been tightened at such sites.

“The searches were carried out as part of an investigation into an operational cell some of whose members had returned from Syria,” he said. “For the time being, there is no connection with the attacks in Paris.”

Describing events in the quiet provincial town just after dark, he said: “The suspects immediately and for several minutes opened fire with military weaponry and handguns on the special units of the federal police before they were neutralised.”

Earlier in the day, prosecutors said they had detained a man in southern Belgium whom they suspected of supplying weaponry to Amédy Coulibaly, killer of four people at a Paris Jewish groceryafter the Charlie Hebdo attack.

After the violence in Verviers, La Meuse newspaper quoted an unidentified police officer saying: “We’ve averted a Belgian Charlie Hebdo.”

Two French brothers, who like Coulibaly claimed allegiance to Islamist militants in the Middle East, killed 12 people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo.

Islamist strength

Belgium has seen significant radical Islamist activity among its Muslim population.

Public television RTBF showed video of a building at night lit up by flames, with the sound of shots being fired. Marie-Laure from Verviers told RTBF she was in the street with her children when a police commando told them to run for cover.

“When we began running, we heard three or four big explosions and shots,” she said. “It was really startling.”

Per head of population, Belgium is the European country from where the highest number of citizens have taken part in fighting with Syrian rebels in the past four years, data compiled by security researchers have shown.

Belgium has taken a lead in EU efforts to counter the threat perceived from the return of “foreign fighters” from Syria. The Belgian government believes about 100 of its nationals have come back from there, while a further 40 may have been killed and about 170 are still in the ranks of fighters in Syria and Iraq.

Belgium is part of the US-led coalition fighting Islamic State and has six F-16 aircraft taking part in bombing raids on Syria and Iraq.

A court in Antwerp is due to deliver its verdict on 46 people accused of recruiting young men to join jihadists or of becoming jihadists in Syria, Belgium’s largest Islamist militant trial to date. The court was to have given its verdict this week, but it was delayed for a month after the Paris violence.

In Germany, police arrested a suspected supporter of the insurgent group Islamic State who was recently in Syria, federal prosecutors said.

Russia says arms for Kiev won't solve Ukrainian crisis

(Reuters) - A deputy Russian foreign minister declared on Tuesday that supplying weapons to Kiev would not help solve a crisis in east Ukraine, after the White House said U.S. PresidentBarack Obama would sign corresponding legislation this week.

Greek Vote

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Italian Protests

Tens of thousands of union workers marched through more than 50 Italian cities on Friday to protest government economic reforms that they say erode their rights.

Putin Under Pressure

(Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin is under pressure to show he has a prescription to cure Russia's rapidly growing economic ills in his annual state of the union address on Thursday.
Western sanctions over the Ukraine crisis, sharp falls in global oil prices and the ruble's slide against the dollar culminated in an acknowledgement by government officials this week that Russia will enter recession next year.

Pope Francis

Pope Francis on Sunday urged Muslim leaders worldwide to "clearly" condemn terrorism carried out in the name of Islam, and called for an end to the persecution of Christians in the Middle East.

UK DNA tests

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East Ukraine Artillery Fire

Intense artillery fire broke out in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk early on Sunday, in what was the worst fighting the region has seen since a fragile ceasefire agreement came into effect in September.

Catalans Symbolic Vote

Hundreds of thousands of Catalans are expected to back independence from Spain on Sunday in a symbolic referendum on secession being held across the northeastern region, despite opposition from Madrid.

The “consultation of citizens” follows a legal block by the central government against a more formal, albeit still non-binding ballot which regional leaders had been pushing for.
Pro-independence organisations have campaigned vigorously for a big turnout from the wealthy region’s 7.5 million people, and more than 40,000 volunteers will help set up informal voting stations on Sunday.

Ukrainian Rebel President

Pro-Russian rebels elected a separatist leadership in eastern Ukraine on Sunday in a vote President Petro Poroshenko called “a farce”.

Mining electrician-turned-rebel leader Alexander Zakharchenko won over 81 percent of the vote, according to the exit polls of an election that has worsened a standoff between Russia and the West.
The United States and European Union have already denounced it as illegitimate, but Russia has said it would recognise the result, deepening a crisis that began with the popular overthrow of a Moscow-backed president in February.