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Sydney Siege















Morning Must Reads: December 17





Morning Must Reads: December 16





Stop Linking the Sydney Siege to Islam





ISIS Casts a Shadow Over the Sydney Hostage Crisis, Connected or Not





LIVE: Australian Authorities Hold Press Conference After Sydney Siege



 
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TIME
Politics
Morning Must Reads

Morning Must Reads: December 17




TIME Staff


Dec. 17, 2014


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The early morning sun rises behind the US Capitol Building in Washington, DC.
Mark Wilson—Getty Images


Terror Threat Nixes The Interview
MoreMorning Must Reads: January 22Morning Must Reads: January 21Baker Faces Complaint for Refusing Anti-Gay Order NBC NewsPill-Popping Mommas: 'Many' Pregnant Women Use Opioids NBC News'It's So Cool!': Sidecar Dogs Make Easy Riders NBC NewsSome cinema chains are pulling Sony’s film The Interview from their lineups after hackers threatened a 9/11-style attack against theaters who screen the upcoming movie. Sony said it is going forward with plans to release the film, but would support theaters’ decisions
Starbucks CEO Talks Racism
Howard Schultz outlined his concern about the effects of racism and increasing social polarization in America in a letter to all Starbucks employees
Putin’s Influence Wanes
Russia’s worst economic crash since 1998 may force the Russian President to rethink his adventures abroad
Jeb Bush Eyes Run for Presidency
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush announced Tuesday that he will “actively explore” running for president in 2016. “I think we need to have candidates lift our spirits,” he said, one day before announcing his formal intention to explore a campaign
U.S. Will Bid to Host the Summer Olympics in 2024
The United States Olympics Committee (USOC) unanimously approved on Tuesday a U.S. bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics and Paralympic Games. One of Boston,
Washington D.C., San Francisco and Los Angeles will be picked for the bid in 2015
Pakistan Mourns After Peshawar School Massacre
Pakistanis mourned collectively and individually on Wednesday after a brutal attack on a school in Peshawar by Taliban militants that claimed more than 140 lives, including 132 children. But questions remain over the military’s relationship with extremist groups
Angelina Jolie Hires Experts to Protect Her Kids Online
Angelina Jolie and her husband Brad Pitt, who don’t use social media, have hired a cyber-security team to monitor their children’s Internet usage and exposure. “We wouldn’t even know what to look for,” she said
Australia’s PM Demands Answers After Sydney Siege
Tony Abbott has said that everything from the nation’s gun laws to its national security policies are up for serious review after a troubled Iranian migrant on bail was able to evade watch lists, buy a firearm and take over a Sydney café, leading to three deaths
Clifford the Big Red Dog Creator Norman Bridwell Dies at 86
Author and illustrator Norman Bridwell died on Friday, Dec. 12, in Martha’s Vineyard at age 86. His publisher, Scholastic, announced the news Tuesday, but did not give a cause of death. Bridwell was best known for creating the Clifford the Big Red Dog book series
Bill Cosby Won’t Be Charged Over L.A. Molestation Claim
Los Angeles prosecutors on Tuesday declined to file any charges against Bill Cosby after a woman recently claimed the comedian molested her around 1974. The rejection of a child sexual abuse charge by prosecutors came roughly 10 days after Judy Huth met city police
NHL Teams Postpone Seasonal Hospital Visits
Several NHL teams are postponing their annual holiday visits to hospitals, amid a mumps outbreak within the league. At least 15 NHL players have so far come down in the outbreak, including for the Anaheim Ducks, Minnesota Wild, New Jersey Devils and New York Rangers
Poll: 57% of Americans Say Race Relations in U.S. Are Bad
A majority of Americans now say that race relations in the United States are bad, according to a new poll, which showed the most pessimistic assessment of racial issues in almost two decades
We will hold an #AskTIME subscriber Q&A this Friday, December 19, at 1 p.m., with TIME managing editor Nancy Gibbs, who recently selected The Ebola Fighters as TIME’s choice for Person of the Year 2014.
You can submit your questions beforehand on Twitter using the #AskTIME hashtag or in the comments of this post. We depend on smart, interesting questions from readers.
You will need to be a TIME subscriber to read the Q & A. ($30 a year or 8 cents a day for the magazine and all digital content.) Once you’re signed up, you can log in to the site with a username and password.
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Politics
Morning Must Reads

Morning Must Reads: December 16




TIME Staff


Dec. 16, 2014


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The early morning sun rises behind the US Capitol Building in Washington, DC.
Mark Wilson—Getty Images


Scores Killed in Taliban Attack
MoreMorning Must Reads: January 22Morning Must Reads: January 21Baker Faces Complaint for Refusing Anti-Gay Order NBC NewsPill-Popping Mommas: 'Many' Pregnant Women Use Opioids NBC News'It's So Cool!': Sidecar Dogs Make Easy Riders NBC NewsA Pakistani official says that more than 126 people have been killed, mostly schoolchildren, in a Taliban attack on a military-run school in the northwestern city of Peshawar. Witnesses said gunmen stormed the school and started shooting at random
Who Was Man Haron Monis?
The Sydney hostage taker who died in a shootout has been identified as Man Haron Monis. The 50-year-old was being investigated for murder and sexual assault
Camille Cosby Defends Bill
The actor’s wife fiercely defended her husband in a statement Monday as outrage mounts over allegations he drugged and raped multiple women
29 Instagram Photos That Defined the World in 2014
TIME, in association with the photo-sharing app, takes a look back at the key moments of 2014: From the toll of war in Gaza to the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., and from the border between Mexico and the U.S. all the way to Mongolia, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone
U.S. Surgeon General Confirmed Despite Gun-Control Support
The Senate confirmed Vivek Murthy as U.S. Surgeon General on Monday despite concerns he was underqualified and too outspoken on gun control to be the top spokesman on public-health matters. Illinois Senator Mark Kirk is the only Republican to confirm Murthy
Robin Williams Was Google’s Top Trending Search of 2014
The comedian and actor, who died in August, led the list of the people, places and things that got the biggest boost in search traffic this year compared to 2013. Williams topped a list that also included the World Cup, Ebola, ISIS and Flappy Bird
Tattooing Your Pet Is Now Illegal in N.Y.
Body art like tattoos and piercings on pet animals will soon be a crime across the state following a law passed on Monday. The law does make exceptions for markings made for identification or medical reasons, but those only include preapproved letters and numbers
Mother of Tamir Rice: He Had No Chance Against Police
Samaria Rice, the mother of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy fatally shot by police who believed he was carrying a gun, said Monday that he was never given a chance to follow officers’ orders when they pulled up next to him on a Cleveland playground
Adrian Peterson, NFL Exec Suspension Discussion Leaked
The NFL’s executive vice president for football operations Troy Vincent appeared to tell Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson that he would only be suspended for two games, according to recordings of their conversation that surfaced on Monday
Ebola Coverage Has Been Dubbed ‘Lie of the Year’
Guess what spawned a “dangerous and incorrect narrative” in 2014? Fact-checking website PolitiFact says erroneous statements about the Ebola epidemic edged the U.S. “toward panic,” and led to misinformation and fear toward people thousands of miles away
London Crawling: Scientists Name Snail After Clash Singer
A new genus of snail has been named after Joe Strummer, leader of iconic British rock band The Clash, “because they look like punk rockers in the 70s and 80s and they have purple blood and live in such an extreme environment,” said researcher Shannon Johnson
66 Journalists Killed in 2014: Report
At least 66 journalists were killed across the globe this year while another 178 media workers were imprisoned, according to monitoring outlet Reporters Without Borders. The watchdog organization noted that attacks on journalists are becoming increasingly barbaric
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TIME
World
Australia

Stop Linking the Sydney Siege to Islam




Ian Lloyd Neubauer


Dec. 16, 2014


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Visitors look at a makeshift memorial near the scene of the fatal siege in the heart of Sydney's financial district on Dec. 16, 2014. Sydneysiders including tearful office workers and Muslim women in hijabs laid flowers at the scene in an outpouring of grief and shock
Peter Parks—AFP/Getty Images


The perpetrator was not a jihadist but a criminal described by his own lawyer as "damaged goods"
If the location of the Sydney siege — images of which flashed around the world for 16 hours before two hostages and a gunman were killed — appeared familiar, it’s because Martin Place is a popular international film set. Superman Returns and the Matrix trilogy were filmed in the pedestrianized, central Sydney precinct, lined with colonial-era buildings that are the headquarters of Australia’s largest financial institutions, law firms and broadcasters as well as high-end retailers like Brooks Brothers and the Lindt Chocolat Café, where the tragedy took place.
MoreWatch Non-Australians React to the Taste of Vegemite PizzaHundreds of Asylum Seekers Are on Hunger Strike Over Australia’s Resettlement PlanBaker Faces Complaint for Refusing Anti-Gay Order NBC NewsPill-Popping Mommas: 'Many' Pregnant Women Use Opioids NBC News'It's So Cool!': Sidecar Dogs Make Easy Riders NBC NewsWhat is absolutely alien, on the other hand, is that nature of a man like the 50-year-old Iranian-born perpetrator, Man Haron Monis. There is no point in trying to place him, as some have attempted, in an overarching discourse of Islamist terrorism and history, because he was plainly not a terrorist but a mentally disturbed individual and serial sex offender. Neither is it helpful to describe this tragedy — as media mogul Rupert Murdoch did — as a “wake-up call” for the nation, because, from the Port Arthur massacre to the Bali bombings, Australia has had plenty of those already.
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The Last Men of SteelReview: Interstellar’s Wonder of Worlds BeyondTo be sure, Monis lost a final appeal in the High Court to overturn a conviction he had received for sending hate mail to the widows of Australian troops killed in Afghanistan. So much, so jihadist. But he was also a pervert (facing 40 charges of sexual assault) and accused of being an accessory to the murder of his ex-wife. That makes him more criminal than terrorist. As everyone now knows, he couldn’t even get his props right: the black flag he forced his hostages to hold in the window of the café was not the emblem of the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) but a plain and simple shahada — a common Muslim inscription that says “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” Unable to furnish his own, Monis had to demand an ISIS flag from the authorities in exchange for a hostage. He never got it.
It’s true that Australia has been expecting a terrorist attack. Security assets have been high alert since September when ISIS called for members to seek retribution against Australia and other members of the coalition it is fighting in the Middle East. Clive Williams, professor at Macquarie University’s Department of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism, also concedes that Monis’ deranged last stand “had some of the characteristics of a terror attack — it was religiously motivated, designed to terrorize and directed towards noncombatants.” But, he stresses, “the thing that was lacking was strategy. It was an irrational act of violence and it is not clear what he hoped to achieve.”
He adds: “It seems more of a reaction to the problems he was experiencing in the criminal justice system. The one thing that will probably come out of this that we need to look at how we manage people with mental-health issues.”

Williams sentiments were echoed by Keysar Trad, the founder of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia and voice for Sydney’s Lebanese Muslim community: “I am hoping that all Australians will see this for what it is: the actions of a madman.”
Australia’s long-suffering asylum seekers, thousands of whom remain cruelly holed up in indefinite detention in offshore detention centers in third-world backwaters, may be fearing some backlash. Monis arrived in Australian in 1996 as a political exile. Abdul Numan Haider, a teenage terrorist suspect who was shot dead in Melbourne in September after attacking two police officers with a knife, arrived in Australia as a refugee with his parents a decade ago.
The Refugee Council of Australia (RCOA), however, has refused to entertain suggestions that the Australian government will clamp down even harder on refugees. “I don’t think there is any point speculating,” an RCOA spokesperson tells TIME. “It’s not something we are talking about.”
Greg Barton of the Global Terrorism Research Centre also talks the idea down. “I don’t think it makes sense to relate this event to Australia’s migration policy, except to say that people coming from troubled backgrounds are vulnerable to further trouble themselves. We need to reach out to them more and engage with them rather than simply seizing their passports,” he says of the dozens of Australian Muslims who’ve had their travel documents seized over fears they intend to join the 150-odd Australian jihadists fighting in Syria and Iraq.
Monis may have sympathized with those fighters and he may have been inspired by them to a degree. But trying to make sense of a lunatic killer described by his own lawyer as “damaged goods” is an exercise in futility. He could just as easily have cloaked himself in the guise of any number of radical causes to help generate media coverage.
In that sense, Monis has not changed Australia forever but the opposite: he has brought out what was always there. Take a look at the #IllRideWithYou social-media hashtag, used to express solidarity with Australians Muslims fearing the scapegoating and bigotry that invariably follows events like this. In that gesture of support is the spontaneous generosity and the tolerance and the ready compassion that is forever Australian.




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TIME
World
Sydney Siege

ISIS Casts a Shadow Over the Sydney Hostage Crisis, Connected or Not




Karl Vick
@karl_vick


Dec. 15, 2014


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A bouquet is pictured under police tape near the cordoned-off scene of a hostage taking at Martin Place after it ended, early on Dec. 16, 2014. 
Jason Reed—Reuters


Before ISIS, the self-proclaimed Sheikh behind the 16-hour hostage drama might have been called a crank instead of terrorist
MoreSydney Teen Who Made Anti-Semitic Remarks Ordered to Attend Shabbat DinnerPHOTOS: Chaotic Scenes as Sydney Hostage Crisis UnfoldsUber Charged 4 Times Its Usual Rate During Sydney Hostage SiegeOn Sept. 3, two weeks and one day after James Foley was beheaded by the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), the U.S. official in charge of preventing terrorist attacks against the homeland said he saw no evidence of a threat to the U.S. from ISIS. That apparently remains the case today, even after the horror of the siege in Sydney, where in the course of the 16 hours he held the Lindt cafe hostage, the self-declared sheikh named Man Haron Monis sent out for the black flag associated with ISIS; he had not brought one of his own. All preliminary indications are that Monis, who reportedly died in the hail of automatic weapons fire that ended drama, was acting on his own, a lone wolf like Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, who shot up the Canadian parliament building in Ottawa Oct. 22 or Mehdi Nemmouche, the veteran of Syrian fighting who killed four people at a Jewish museum in Brussels May 24.
MoreMorning Must Reads: December 17Morning Must Reads: December 16Baker Faces Complaint for Refusing Anti-Gay Order NBC NewsPill-Popping Mommas: 'Many' Pregnant Women Use Opioids NBC News'It's So Cool!': Sidecar Dogs Make Easy Riders NBC NewsFor all the fear ISIS inspires, one-off, lone wolf attacks are all the group seems to have attempted to do in the West—and not even by its own hand. ISIS essentially publishes its version of a feel-good bumper sticker: Practice Random Attacks and Senseless Acts of Terror. “If you can kill a disbelieving American or European – especially the spiteful and filthy French – or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way, however it may be,” the ISIS spokesman Abu Mohammed al Adnani urged Sept. 22, after the Obama administration announced an air campaign aimed at destroying the group before it destroyed Iraq. “Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him.”
Ugly and unpleasant, but a long way from 9/11. But then ISIS long has defined itself by not being al Qaeda. Formidable as the group may have proved itself in military terms, gobbling up large swaths of Syria and Iraq, that’s what a fighting force does in a war, and the war ISIS is fighting is very much located in the Middle East. It’s a war to establish its vision of Islam—extreme, yes, but sectarian above all. ISIS is Sunni, and in Syria it attacks the regime of President Bashar Assad, a member of the Alawite sect that Sunni extremists regard as apostates. In Iraq, ISIS made its gains against a Baghdad government that under then-prime minister Nour al-Malaki defined the state as Shi’ite, also deemed heretical by ISIS. Both governments are backed by Iran, the world’s only Shi’ite theocracy.
The largely Christian West simply does not figure so prominently, which is why al Qaeda has parted ways with ISIS. In 2o05, when bin Laden was still alive, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote from his hideout in Afghanistan or Pakistan to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the jihadist who headed the Iraq al-Qaeda branch that would become ISIS. “Many of your Muslim admirers amongst the common folk are wondering about your attacks on the Shia,” wrote al-Zawahiri, who now heads al Qaeda. “And can the mujahedeen kill all of the Shia in Iraq?” The answer, delivered in gruesome video post after gruesome video post, is that they sure are giving it a try.
The self-declared sheikh named Man Haron Monis. Stephen Cooper/Newspix/RexUSA
Monis was born in Iran as a Shia and reportedly converted to the Sunni tradition. But it’s unclear whether he was fired by a convert’s zeal. His Twitter account mentioned ISIS, and in generally positive terms, but more as a bystander than as a fanboy, the name for social media mavens who cheer on the Sunni extremist group online. “He’s posted things saying, ‘Oh my God, some people are saying the Islamic State is doing well,'” says Laith Alkhouri, research director for Flashpoint Partners, a private security consultant that made a copy of Monis’ Twitter account before it was taken down. “Even though he was pretty active on social media, he was trying to bring attention to what he saw as injustice to Muslims in Australian,” Alkouri tells TIME. “But he didn’t seem quite bloodthirsty like the ISIS guys.”
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The Last Men of SteelReview: Interstellar’s Wonder of Worlds BeyondWhat he seemed, in fact, was the kind of figure who showed up in the news cycle long before anyone had heard of either al Qaeda or ISIS. Monis had written tasteless letters to the families of fallen Australian soldiers, but politics appeared to have gotten bound up with his quite personal complaints against the state. Australian news channels produced footage of him standing on a busy street corner in clerical garb and turban, wearing chains on his wrists and holding aloft a sign complaining he had been tortured in prison. His legal woes included charges for indecent exposure, and of involvement as an accessory in the murder by stabbing and fire of his ex-wife. In a Monday interview with Australian Broadcasting, Monis’ former lawyer called him a “damaged-goods individual” who had reached a breaking point.
Absent the frame of Islamist terror, the siege of the Lindt cafe might have looked like one more socially isolated middle-aged man, taking his private torment public at gunpoint. But the frame is indeed Islamist terror; it’s become inescapable. So even after the shooting stopped in Sydney, the number of hostages remains in the billions.






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TIME
World
Crime

LIVE: Australian Authorities Hold Press Conference After Sydney Siege




TIME Staff


Dec. 15, 2014


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Watch the press conference live here at 1:30 p.m. ET
+ READ ARTICLE
Australian authorities are holding a news conference following a tense, day-long hostage situation in a Sydney cafe that ended early Tuesday morning after heavily-armed police in Australia stormed the premises. No deaths have been confirmed.

 





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