TheDailyBlog.nz Top 5 News Headlines Sunday 15th November 2015

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TDB top 5 headlines - 1

5: 

Hollande: Paris attacks an act of ‘war’

Latest developments

  • Islamic State claims responsibility for attacks in official statement
  • Police make a number of arrests in Brussels after attacks
  • A Frenchman has been identified as one of the Bataclan concert hall attackers – AFP
  • Holder of Syrian passport found at scene crossed into EU through the Greek island of Leros in October.
  • Egyptian passport and Syrian passport found on two attackers at the Stade de France, according to French newspaper La Liberation.

The worst attack was carried out at the Bataclan concert hall, where officials say four gunmen systematically killed at least 87 people at a rock concert before anti-terrorist commandos launched an assault on the building.

Some 40 more people were killed in five other attacks in the Paris region, the official said, including an apparent double suicide bombing outside the Stade de France national stadium, where Mr Hollande and the German foreign minister were watching a friendly soccer international.

In total eight attackers are reported to have been killed around Paris, including seven by their suicide belts.

The police believe all of the gunmen are now dead but it is not clear if any accomplices are still on the run .

It is was the worst such attack in Europe since the Madrid train bombings of 2004, in which 191 died.

RNZ

4: 

ISIL Claims Responsibility for Beirut Suicide Blasts That Killed 43

In Lebanon, the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for one of the worst attacks to hit Beirut in years. On Thursday, at least 43 people were killed and more than 200 wounded in a double suicide attack on a civilian neighborhood in Beirut. The bombers struck during rush hour in an apparent bid to maximize the civilian death toll. The blasts are seen as an ISIL attack against the Lebanese political movement Hezbollah. We’ll have more on the Beirut bombings later in the broadcast.

Democracy Now!

3: 

Paris terror attacks ‘carried out by three coordinated teams of gunmen’

Three coordinated teams of jihadi gunmen struck at six different sites across Paris in a bloody wave of suicide bombings and shootings that left nearly 130 people dead, the Paris public prosecutor has said.
François Molins told a news conference on Saturday that at least 129 people were killed and 352 more injured – including 90 critically – in the attacks on Friday night on the Stade de France, a city-centre concert hall and a series of packed cafes and bars.

Molins said three French nationals had been arrested in Belgium, where they all lived, in connection with the attacks, France’s deadliest since the second world war and the worst witnessed in Europe since the 2004 Madrid railway bombings.
Islamic State on Saturday claimed responsibility for the atrocities, which the French president, François Hollande, denounced as an “act of war” that must be countered “mercilessly”.

As police worked to identify the militants, all of whom died in the attacks, Molins also confirmed that at least one of the fighters, identified by his fingerprints, was a French national from the Paris suburb of Courcouronnes. The man, born in 1985, had a criminal record and had been flagged as an extremist as early as 2010, the prosecutor said.

He also said a Syrian passport, belonging to a man born in 1990 who was not known to the French authorities, had been found lying close by the bodies of two other jihadis, who both blew themselves up in the course of their attacks.

The Guardian 

2:  

French officials warned austerity increased insecurity

Following the carnage in and around Paris Friday night when eight assailants used explosives and automatic weapons to kill at least 129 people, recent warnings by security officials over the spiking threat of attack amid budgetary austerity have assumed a particularly grim prescience.

Those warnings noted the rapidly increasing number of recruits to the ranks of groups like the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant group (ISIL) – many of whom who have travelled to and gained battle experience in Syria or Iraq. But the French security officials also stressed that sharp cuts in public spending have restricted the means available to security services those recruits under surveillance.

In private conversations during the 11 months between January’s Charlie Hebdo strikes and Friday’s attacks – for which ISIL has claimed responsibility – some members of France’s overloaded security services saw a new wave of attacks as inevitable.

“More and more cases [of identified radicals] arrive every day, and we’re already unable to maintain surveillance of people flagged as potentially dangerous,” a visibly exhausted and enervated senior French security official confided earlier this autumn. “Meanwhile, politicians of all stripes are imposing austerity that cuts into our resources the same as it does hospitals and schools. You can’t constantly try to do more with less without something eventually breaking down.”

Aljazeera

1: 

The Terror Attacks in Paris: A Timeline of Events

Gunmen killed 129 people in multiple attacks and an explosion at a soccer game in Paris, France, on Friday night, in what is being widely described as the worst attack the city has seen since World War II. Around 350 other victims are reportedly hospitalized, with around 100 in critical condition.

Paris, shocked and grieving, remains on lockdown while authorities continue to seek for possible accomplices in the attacks. All of the eight attackers known so far died on Friday, seven by detonating suicide belts and another in a shootout with police at the Bataclan, a theater where at least 80 concertgoers were held hostage and then killed.

Here is how last night’s events unfolded, all times local in Paris:

Vice News