Hamas releases footage claiming to show Israeli hostage Matan Zangauker in captivity
FILE PHOTO: A woman casts a shadow as she walks past a banner calling for the release of the hostages kidnapped during the deadly October 7 attack by Hamas, in Tel Aviv
Hamas releases hostage video claiming to show living hostage
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Hamas releases footage claiming to show Israeli hostage Matan Zangauker in captivity
Hamas released a video claiming to show Israeli hostage Matan Zangauker in captivity on Saturday.
In the video a man who introduces himself as Matan Zangauker, 24, can be seen pleading with the Israeli leaders to make a deal that would bring captives being held by Hamas in Gaza back to Israel.
Mediating countries, including Qatar, see increased momentum for a possible deal that could allow the 100 hostages being held in Gaza to be released in exchange for scores of Palestinian prisoners, after Israel signed a landmark ceasefire deal with Hezbollah in Lebanon last month.
Donald Trump's Middle East envoy has travelled to Qatar and Israel to try to kickstart the U.S. president-elect's diplomatic push for a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal before he takes office on Jan. 20, a source briefed on the talks told Reuters.
Hamas has released several videos of hostages begging to be released over the course of the war as it enters its fifteenth month, but Israeli officials have dismissed the short, edited clips as psychological propaganda meant to put pressure on the government.
The Hostage Families Forum, which represents hostage family members, called the video "proof of life" and said that it "provides further evidence that after more than 420 days in captivity, there are hostages still alive and enduring severe suffering".
Japan's economy expanded in July-September at a faster pace than initially reported thanks to upward revisions in capital investment and exports, keeping alive market expectations for a near-term interest rate hike by the central bank.
But a downward revision on consumption underscores the fragile nature of the economic recovery, and leaves uncertainty on how soon the central bank could raise interest rates again, with a December hike not guaranteed either, some analysts say.
The data will be among factors the BOJ will scrutinise at its next policy meeting on Dec. 18-19, when some analysts expect a hike in short-term interest rates from the current 0.25 per cent.
"It does support the case for a December rate hike, though the weakness in consumption is a concern," said Takeshi Minami, chief economist at Norinchukin Research Institute.
Gross domestic product (GDP) rose an annualised 1.2 per cent in the three months to September, the Cabinet Office's revised data showed on Monday, higher than economists' median forecast and the initial estimate of 0.9 per cent growth.
The revised numbers translate into a quarter-on-quarter expansion of 0.3 per cent in price-adjusted terms, compared with a 0.2 per cent growth in preliminary data released on Nov. 15.
The upgrade was caused in part by a smaller-than-expected decline in capital expenditure, which fell 0.1 per cent in the third quarter compared with a preliminary reading of a 0.2 per cent drop. It compared with economists' estimate for a 0.1 per cent rise.
External demand, or exports minus imports, knocked 0.2 per centage point off growth, less than a 0.4 point drop in the preliminary reading, the revised GDP data showed.
Private consumption, which accounts for more than half of the Japanese economy, rose 0.7 per cent, less than the preliminary reading of 0.9 per cent growth.
"While the data isn't something that gives a huge boost to rate hike expectations, it won't be a hindrance to raising rates either," said Uichiro Nozaki, an economist at Nomura Securities.
The upward revision still leaves third-quarter GDP growth much slower than an annualised 2.2 per cent expansion in the April-June period, which was largely in reaction to a contraction in the first quarter caused by output disruptions in some auto plants.
The BOJ phased out a decade-long, radical stimulus in March and raised short-term interest rates to 0.25 per cent in July on the view Japan was progressing towards sustainably achieving its 2 per cent inflation target.
Governor Kazuo Ueda has signalled readiness to raise rates again if the BOJ becomes more convinced that inflation will durably stay around 2 per cent backed by rising wages and robust domestic demand.
Nozaki at Nomura Securities expects consumption to have slowed in the current quarter, but to rebound in the January-March quarter on prospects of firm wage growth.
But others are less optimistic about Japan's economy with overseas uncertainties, such as threats of higher tariffs by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, clouding the outlook.
"While improvements in real wages will underpin consumption, the recovery in external demand will be muted as overseas growth stagnates," said Masato Koike, senior economist at Sompo Institute Plus.
"Japan's economy will continue recovering but the pace will be modest," he added.
Many market players expect the BOJ to hike rates again by the March end of the current fiscal year, though they are divided on whether it would come in December or early next year.
The BOJ is staying guarded on the timing of the next rate hike with December hardly a done deal given soft consumption, its governor's cautious decision-making style and anxiety over U.S. economic policy in a second Trump presidency, sources have told Reuters.
The commander of South Korea's special forces that stormed parliament last week after a martial law declaration said on Monday he was ordered to block lawmakers from entering the chamber to prevent a vote to lift the emergency measure.
Colonel Kim Hyun-tae, the commanding officer of the 707th Special Missions Group, told reporters he took all responsibility for his troops' raid on parliament but said he was acting under orders from the defence minister.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, who is now a subject of a criminal investigation, declared martial law on Dec. 3 only to rescind the order within hours after parliament met in defiance of a security cordon to vote it invalid.
Yoon survived an impeachment vote in a opposition-led parliament on Saturday which plunged South Korea into a constitutional crisis.
Yoon said ahead of the vote he was entrusting his fate to the ruling party, but he did not offer to resign.
Kim said his unit landed on the grounds of parliament with orders to cordon off the main building to prevent lawmakers from entering but was met with legislative staff members inside who blocked their entrance.
"We were all victims who were used by the former defence minister, Kim Yong-hyun," the commander told reporters outside the defence ministry in Seoul.
"The members of the Group are not guilty. Their only guilt is that they followed the orders of their commander," he said, fighting back tears.
The former defence minister was arrested on Sunday over his role in declaring martial law and ordering the deployment of troops to parliament.
The leader of Yoon's People Power Party, Han Dong-hoon, said on Sunday that Yoon would be excluded from foreign and other state affairs, and the party and Prime Minister Han Duck-soo would manage government affairs.
National Assembly speaker Woo Won-shik said it was unconstitutional to delegate presidential authority unless the president is impeached.
The main opposition Democratic Party, which led the failed impeachment motion on Saturday, said it would raise the motion again.
There has been a lot of speculation that the gunman who murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Midtown Manhattan Hilton hotel last week was a professional killer who used a British bolt-action, magazine-fed suppressed pistol known as a "Welrod," or possibly a modern-day Welrod-variant known as the Brügger & Thomet (B&T) VP9 pistol.
Firearms expert David Katz, a former DEA firearms instructor who is now the CEO of Global Security, told Fox News that the killer might have used Welrod and/or a "modernized version of a World War II pistol."
Welrod
"The operation that he does with his hands is consistent with the operation of that weapon," Katz said, noting that he "immediately moved to rack the slide manually with his left hand" after he fired.
B&T VP9
Multiple law enforcement sources also told Fox News that they believe the killer used a Welrod pistol.
"I'd bet my pension that this is the weapon that was used on the United CEO. It's very, very quiet and requires manual cycling after each round is fired. Top choice by pros for up-close, quiet work," the source said.
However, firearms collector and expert Texas Gun Vault shared his opinion on the firearm used in the murder of the CEO, stating that he does not believe it was a Welrod or any variant thereof.
"Well based off the footage that we saw of the assassination ... the assassin kept his right hand on the pistol grip and manipulated the gun with his left. So that's not the typical way that you would run a Welrod," the gun collector and expert said around the 10:30 minute mark.
He said the "way the gun looks in profile ... does not look like a Welrod ... and I know lot of people were hoping and wishing it was because it's a cool design and it's the gun if he was some type of super secret assassin or something of that nature," adding, "Unfortunately, I don't think that's the case and the actual answer is much more mundane: What do I think it was. I believe it was a typical semi-automatic pistol with a silencer."
To save readers time, we started the video at the 10:30 mark.
Listen for about five minutes as the gun collector provides insightful commentary on what he believes the firearm used and explains how those unspent 9mm bullets with messages ended up at the crime scene.
The case in New York City against Daniel Penny is a shambolic and, arguably, unconstitutional mess. Based on the nexus of the facts and New York self-defense law, the case should never have been filed. The trial has been conducted along unconstitutional racial lines, and the judge, faced with a hung jury, did something that was definitely unprecedented and is arguably unconstitutional.
New York allows people to use self-defense against perceived threats. However, in addition to requiring reasonable justification, it also requires “proportionality.” It’s that last that the prosecution is banging away at in the Daniel Penny trial, for it claims that Penny was reckless and/or negligently ignorant of the risk created by using a choke hold to subdue Jordan Neely.
The defense has countered that Penny used an appropriate method to subdue a violent and dangerous man and that when Neely stopped resisting, he immediately downgraded his hold simply to retain control over Neely. Instead, says the defense, Neely died from agitation, excitement, K2 intoxication (a potent intoxicant and stimulant), and a sickle cell trait, all of which led to sudden death from cardiac arrest. I agree.
The prosecution initially charged Penny with a greater charge (second-degree manslaughter) and a lesser one (negligent homicide). The first carries a maximum 14-year prison sentence, and the second a maximum four-year prison sentence. The jury instructions were set up so that the jurors were to consider the negligent homicide charge only if they had first agreed to reject the manslaughter charge. That is, both decisions were their responsibility. The analysis was to have worked this way:
Step One: If you find that Penny committed manslaughter, do not go on to Step Two. Instead, return to the courtroom to announce your verdict.
Step Two: If you find that Penny did not commit manslaughter, continue to step two to determine whether he committed negligent homicide.
Last week, after three days of deliberation, the jury announced that it was deadlocked on the manslaughter charge and hadn’t even reached the negligent homicide charge. The prosecution responded by asking Judge Maxwell Wiley to dismiss the manslaughter charge and, instead, have the jury decide only the negligent homicide charge. This request violated the jury instructions, but Judge Wiley thought it was a great idea.
Then, without sequestering the jury over the weekend, he sent them out into a community in which the anti-Penny mob is rampant, including loudly protesting on the streets immediately outside the courthouse. The only thing he did was to honor the phony request by the prosecution that the jurors be anonymous based on claims that “both sides” had made threats. That’s unlikely because leftists have loudly made threats, and no Penny supporters have—and the judge and prosecution both know this.
Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is outraged by what the judge did:
As I have contended from the start, rather than bring a one-count criminally negligent homicide case, Bragg added a baseless recklessness charge to the indictment so the jury would have two counts, increasing the odds of conviction by giving the jury something to compromise on. Instead of deciding negligence as the central question, that count was treated as a fallback position for the jurors to have something to pin on Penny — i.e., they could feel good about convicting him of negligence, not because he was guilty but because they had already acquitted him of the more severe recklessness charge.
Now, after the jury could not find Penny guilty of recklessness after four days — and how disturbing it is that one or more jurors were apparently in favor of doing so — the judge is letting Bragg remove the recklessness count from the case. It will go down as an acquittal for Penny on that charge, so he is no longer facing a potential 15-year prison term. For the jury, however, it makes the hard work of the last four days pointless.
This is a disgrace.
A disgrace—and a dangerous break with legal precedent.
Before New York City abandoned legal principles to attack Trump and turn the courts into racial circuses, the law on hung juries allowed prosecutors to retry the case (which means starting from scratch) or to request a dismissal. There’s a real question about whether retrying the case amounts to double jeopardy, but it’s still something prosecutors request and judges allow. Never before has a judge allowed the retrial to happen in the original case after the jury received instructions and began deliberations.
I would argue at a more fundamental level that the rule of unanimous juries in criminal trials combined with the prohibition against double jeopardy makes a good argument for discarding retrials altogether when there is a hung jury. The 1824 decision in United States v. Perez set the precedent for this practice, but it never addressed the constitutional prohibition on double jeopardy. Instead, since then, the only trigger for double jeopardy has been a verdict—which, of course, is something a hung jury, by definition, never reaches.
It's hard to know at this point whether the jury, having been relieved of the burden of manslaughter, will now become a hung jury as to the negligent homicide. Or will having a lesser charge assuage the conscience of the holdouts and see them agree to imprison Penny for only four, not 14 years? Will the screaming mobs they’ll see all weekend (despite the judge’s order that they put the case out of their minds) affect their decision now that they have an easier out? The jury is not protected and they are vulnerable, something that Judge Wiley finds acceptable.
And if they are again a hung jury, will Alvin Bragg, a fanatic racialist, retry the negligent homicide case? We know that race is a motivating factor in the case because Dafna Yoran, the prosecuting attorney, relentlessly referred to him as “the white man,” both during questioning and in her closing argument. The judge should have granted the defense’s motion for a mistrial but, reliably, did not.
As McCarthy says, this is disgraceful, but it’s also a dangerous precedent. A New York judge has abandoned even the pretense of impartial justice and has openly sided with the racist, baying mob.
John Dale Dunn MD JD is an emergency physician and attorney, both for more than 40 years who lives in Brownwood, Texas.
It’s tempting for New York City to greet last week’s Sixth Avenue killing of UnitedHealthcare chief Brian Thompson with macabre relief: It’s never good to have someone fatally shot in the street, but at least this crime wasn’t yet another “random” attack.
The poor guy, whether for a personal, business, or ideological reason, could have been targeted anywhere.
Wrong: Put in context, it’s yet another blow for a fragile Gotham.
Yes, New York, as a high-profile global magnet for superstars and business and political leaders, has always had more than its fair share of assassinations: John Lennon, Meir Kahane.
But each such incident must be seen in its context. Is a particular assassination just another bullet point of lawlessness in a dangerous, unpleasant city, or is it an aberration in an otherwise safe, pleasant city?
When Lennon was killed, in 1980, Gotham had 1,814 murders; as for broader felonies, The New York Timescalled it the “the worst year of crime in New York City history.”
In 1990, when Kahane was killed, the city had gotten even worse: 527,257 felonies, including 2,262 murders. Nobody was safe, so why should important people be any different?
After 1990, crime, including murder, steadily fell until 2019.
Now, Thompson’s sidewalk murder in the heart of Midtown punctuates nearly five years of rising crime and disorder.
Violent crime has steadily been increasing in New York City since 2019.AP
After nearly three decades of sure decline, murder rose 53% between 2019 and 2021, the highest such rise in such a short time on record. Murder is still 14% above 2019 levels, and there’s no sign we’ll get back there anytime soon. Felonies are 30% higher than in 2019.
And random chaos reigns: Thompson’s killing came barely two weeks after Ramon Rivera, sprung on no-bail supervised release on a recent theft charge, after having just served a months-long sentence in Rikers for repeat thefts and burglaries, stabbed three stangers to death across core Manhattan.
And Thompson’s killing came the day before one teenage migrant fatally stabbed another, also in core Manhattan — a five-minute walk from City Hall Park, a place generally teeming with armed officers.
Murder in the southern half of Manhattan, including Midtown and downtown, with 23 killings so far this year, is 80% higher than the average annual total between 2015 and 2019.
In the 2010s, with crime steadily falling and the city’s streets feeling generally safe, the fact that a masked man could shoot an executive right in front of a marquee Midtown hotel as the sun is rising might have been dismissed as an aberration.
Plus, the perpetrator was masked. Until early 2020, the video of a masked perpetrator would have seemed jarring, out of place in New York.
Now, men on mopeds and e-bikes whiz by us fully masked every day — and not because of the weather or COVID.
Masked men on bikes are now normal after the COVID pandemic.NYPD
Even the sight of a fully masked man lurking in the alley between Sixth and Seventh avenues does not arouse suspicion, at least no more than we’ve all learned to walk around with over the past half-decade.
There’s another reason why the Thompson killing is a bad sign for New York: The open-air execution of a top executive has spurred the finance and business world to beef up security.
They don’t know yet if the Thompson killing is a one-off, or the start of a terror campaign against CEOs.
Tight security is not easy in a dense city like New York. Yes, hotel conferences can scan attendees’ badges, and more executives can travel around in SUVs with blacked-out windows straight into hotel and business garages.
It’s unclear if the murder of Brian Thompson was a one-off event or the beginning of an anti-CEO rampage.UnitedHealth Group/AFP via Getty Images
But this type of security isn’t ironclad: Most hotels are still relatively open spaces, allowing for people to meet in lobbies and restaurants, and many older office buildings and private residences don’t have door-to-door garage access.
Nor is this type of security convenient: There’s a reason why the myth used to be that millionaires and paupers alike ride the subway.
If the level of security you need dictates that you never enter a crowded, or even uncrowded, space with any strangers — that you literally cannot cross the street from one hotel sidewalk to another without risking your life — then New York is not the place for you.
Your business is better off setting up shop, or holding conferences, on a car-based suburban campus where you can easily control and monitor access.
That’s not New York’s fault, just as 9/11, which caused businesses to briefly rethink skyscraper life, was not New York’s fault.
But failing to control things within our control — the general level of crime and disorder — means that the things we can’t control have a worse impact: It’s not one thing or another, but all of them at once.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
