BBC News with Jerry Smit.
President Obama says his administration is going to review whether to restore North Korea to its list of state sponsors of terrorism after blaming Pyongyang for a cyber-attack on the U.S. firm, Sony Pictures Entertainment. In an interview with CNN, Mr. Obama said he would implement a suitable response to the hacking.
“I don't think it was an act of war. I think it was an act of cyber vandalism that was very costly, very expensive. We take it very seriously. We'll respond proportionally, as I said. We are gonna be in this environment in this new world where so much is digitalized that both state and non-state actors are going to have the capacity to disrupt our lives in all sorts of ways.”
The Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani has gone to Mount Sinjar to congratulate his fighters on breaking a long siege by the Islamic State group. The offensive by Kurdish Peshmerga fighters was launched last week. Mr. Barzani said the fighters were now intensifying their efforts to recapture the town of Sinjar below the mountain. Jim Muir reports.
“Touring the strategic mountaintop of Sinjar, where his Kurdish Peshmerga forces have now regained control, President Barzani said that recapturing the town of Sinjar was not originally part of the battle plan. But Kurdish troops have penetrated deep into the town, which lies to the south of the mountain. Heavy fighting is going on there, but Mr. Barzani vowed to crush the militants wherever they could be found. The Kurdish advance has broken the IS siege imposed on thousands of minority Yazidis trapped for months on the mountain. Supply convoys are now able to get through.”
Counting is taking place after voting closed in the Tunisian presidential election, seen as the culmination of the country's political transition following the Arab Spring uprising there almost four years ago. National television said early exit polls suggested the 88-year-old Beji Caid Essebsi is expected to win the poll. Turnout was lower than expected, as Naveena Kottoor reports from Tunis.
“It has been a very long election period. We had parliamentary elections here in October and the first round of presidential elections in November. And this was the third election in three months. So I think that explains why we are seeing lower turnout figures than people might have hoped for. Early days yet, but both candidates have given a press conference and have said that they would accept the results. One of them, Beji Caid Essebsi, the 88-year-old, leader of the Nidaa Tounes Party here, has already claimed victory. But I think we should wait until we have official election results.”
Votes have been tallied in Liberia where Senate elections were held on Saturday despite the Ebola outbreak. In the capital Monrovia, the former football star George Weah has taken an early lead against the son of the Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Although strict health precautions were in place, turnout was low due to concerns about Ebola.
World news from the BBC.
The Pakistani Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan says police have arrested a number of suspects in connection with a recent attack on a school in Peshawar that left more than 140 people dead, nearly all of them children. On Sunday, thousands of Pakistanis visited the army run institution to mourn those killed. The Minister declined to give further details of those arrested.
Those suspects have been taken into custody. please allow me not to divulge either the number or their identities. But quite a few suspects who’ve facilitated us in some way or other. And the interrogation is moving ahead in a very positive manner. Kindly wait for just a few days before we reveal the details, because there are still certain arrests have been made as a reserve of them from all over the country.
There has been widespread condemnation at the killing of two New York police officers who were shot dead in their patrol car on Saturday. The authorities say that before the killings the gunman announced his plans online as retaliation for the death of Eric Garner, a black man who died when white police officers tried to arrest him for selling untaxed cigarettes. The civil rights campaigner Al Sharpton said police misconduct cannot be tackled by people taking things into their own hands.
One of the best-known entertainers of the German-speaking world Udo Juergens has died at the age of 80, just two weeks after his last concert. Udo's career spanning half a century. The Australian born Juergens sold more than 100 million records.
A court in Argentina has decided to recognize that an orangutan, who's spent the last twenty years in the Buenos Aires Zoo, was a creature who had feelings, and therefore should be allowed to live in greater freedom. In an unprecedented legal case, the court agreed that although the orangutan named Sandra was not human, the habeas corpus writ could be extended to her.