A still frame from a hostage video posted online on Thursday by Islamist militants in Gaza who claimed to have kidnapped an Italian citizen, Vittorio Arrigoni.

Update | 8:57 p.m. After this post was originally published, a Hamas security official told Reuters and The Associated Press that an Italian peace activist kidnapped in Gaza has been killed. The official said that the Italian activist’s body was found in an abandoned house after midnight local time and two men were arrested. My colleague Fares Akram in Gaza is working to confirm these reports and will have more information soon in his new article.

Original Post | 5:55 p.m. Islamist militants in Gaza threatened to kill a kidnapped Italian peace activist in a chilling hostage video posted online on Thursday.

As Reuters reports, the video shows a blindfolded man who appears to be Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian activist who has worked in support of the Palestinian cause in Gaza for more than two years. A text warning on the video said that the militants would execute their prisoner unless the Hamas government releases imprisoned members of their jihadist movement by 5 p.m. on Friday afternoon.

As The Associated Press explains, “Hamas itself is a fundamentalist Islamic group, but it faces challenges from even more extremist offshoots of Islam,” including the group that abducted Mr. Arrigoni, which claims an affiliation with Al Qaeda. Read more…

Earlier this month, Athit Perawongmetha, a Thai photographer, rented a car and drove to the Japanese city of Fukushima, inside the evacuation zone around the nuclear power plant crippled by the earthquake and tsunami in March.

Mr. Perawongmetha’s pictures, which were featured on Time magazine’s Web site last week, show eerie, desolate streets. Wreckage from the tsunami, which battered the city and the nearby Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on March 11, is still scattered across the landscape. Dogs roam the empty roads. A body decomposes in the rubble.

In an interview with CNN, Mr. Perawongmetha called Fukushima a ghost town. Traffic lights still flip from one color to the next and air conditioners still hum, but there are no people.

“It’s like Hollywood movie,” Mr. Perawongmetha said. “You woke up and then you walk into middle of nowhere.”

My colleague C.J. Chivers reports on Thursday from the besieged Libyan city of Misurata, which he reached on an aid ship chartered by the International Organization for Migration.

As he explains, since February, rebels in the city have been “largely cut off from the world by forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Front lines cross through several of its neighborhoods, and artillery or rocket batteries fire their munitions into the neighborhoods.” On Thursday, medical officials there said that at least 23 people were killed by shelling near the port, which is under rebel control and is their lifeline to the outside world.

This week, a television crew from Britain’s ITN also made it into the city by boat and filed this harrowing report on how the city is being defended by protesters, like the owner of a clothing shop and a physicist, who picked up weapons:

Read more…

While Vaclav Klaus, the Czech president, is not as well-known globally as his predecessor, Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who led Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, in the past three days, nearly 5 million people have watched video of one of Mr. Klaus’s recent news conferences on YouTube.

The video, of Mr. Klaus admiring a ceremonial pen during a state visit to Chile, and then attempting to slip it into his pocket without anyone noticing, was annotated and set to music by the Czech television program 168 Hours on Sunday:

After several copies of the video started to circulate, most of them implying that Mr. Klaus had stolen the pen, both his spokesman, Radim Ochvat, and Chilean President Sebastián Piñera’s office told reporters that the Czech president had done nothing wrong. Chile’s billionaire president, they insisted, was more than happy to make a gift of the pen – which was encrusted with semiprecious Chilean lapis lazuili stones – to his Czech visitor. Read more…

According to Syrian bloggers, this photograph shows men in the village of Bayda, in northeastern Syria, after they were detained by the security forces on Tuesday.

Updated | Thursday | 9:35 a.m. Hundreds of women and children from the Syrian village of Bayda, where large numbers of men were reportedly detained on Tuesday, marched to Syria’s main coastal highway on Wednesday, calling for the release of their husbands, fathers and sons, human rights activists told Reuters.

As my colleagues Liam Stack and Katherine Zoepf reported, one activist said that Bayda’s male population had been “punished” by the security forces on Tuesday for having supported protests on previous days in the nearby coastal city of Baniyas.

According to a Syrian blogger who writes on Twitter as Razaniyat, this video shows the village’s women and children chanting “We want the men of Bayda!” as they marched on Wednesday:

Three hours later, the same blogger wrote that the protesters from Bayda were on the highway between Baniyas and Latakia, another coastal city where a violent crackdown on dissent has been reported in recent days, and “refusing to go home till ALL detainees are released.” Read more…

As unrest reportedly continued in Syria on Tuesday, dramatic video posted on YouTube appeared to show an attack on protesters in the southern city of Dara’a on Friday, during clashes that left at least 21 people dead.

A Syrian exile based in Washington, Mohammad Al Abdallah, wrote on Twitter that this brief, blurry clip, which was uploaded on Tuesday, shows: “security forces executing a wounded protester in Dara’a last Friday.”

While restrictions on independent reporting in Syria make it impossible to verify exactly when or where that video was filmed, another YouTube clip, which appears to show same scene in more graphic detail, was posted online one day earlier.

This street-level video, also said to have been filmed in Dara’a on Friday, looks like it was shot at roughly the same time and place as the previous clip, and ends with graphic images of a badly wounded or dead protester being dragged past the camera:

The water tower to the right in both clips looks identical, as does the position of the white car on the street and the building at the end of the block. Read more…

International Atomic Energy Agency The International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale

As my colleagues Hiroko Tabuchi, Keith Bradsher and Andrew Pollack report, “Japan has raised its assessment of the accident at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to the worst rating on an international scale, putting the disaster on par with the 1986 Chernobyl explosion.”

In technical terms, the decision raised the alert level for the accident from 5 to 7 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, which runs from 0 to 7. The increase of two levels is significant because,  according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, “the scale is designed so that the severity of an event is about 10 times greater for each increase in level on the scale.”

Last month, John Large, a nuclear engineer, explained the scale in layman’s terms for Britain’s Channel 4 News: “1 is someone dropping a milk bottle in the control room, and Chernobyl is 7.” Read more…

Updated | 2:21 p.m. After Bahrain’s interior ministry acknowledged that two political prisoners had died in custody last week, the daughter of a detained human rights activist began a hunger strike on Monday, calling on the authorities to release her father and other members of her family who have been arrested.

Zainab Alkhawaja, who has used her Angry Arabiya Twitter feed to document the crackdown on dissent in Bahrain in recent weeks, explained in an open letter to President Obama posted on her blog that her father, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, was badly beaten in a predawn raid on her home on Saturday.

Ms. Alkhawaja’s father is a former president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights who has also worked for a rights group based in Ireland, Front Line.

As she had explained on the social network minutes after the raid on Saturday, Ms. Alkhawaja’s husband, Wafi Almajed, and brother-in-law, Hussein Ahmed, were arrested at the same time.

Read more…

As my colleagues Liam Stack and Ethan Bronner report, an Egyptian activist who criticized Egypt’s army on his blog was sentenced to three years in jail on Monday by a military court.

The activist, Maikel Nabil, is a 25-year-old blogger who argued in a detailed post last month that Egypt’s army had tortured protesters and worked to undermine the anti-Mubarak revolution. To make his case, Mr. Nabil cited his own observations as a participant in the uprising, reports from the international press and human rights groups, and video showing scars on the bodies of protesters who said that they had been tortured by the military.

Three days before he was arrested, Mr. Nabil also published a post calling on Israelis to stop “supporting Egyptian militarists” like Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the head of Egypt’s ruling army council. Mr. Nabil, a Coptic Christian who called himself “pro-Israel” in an interview with an Israeli newspaper last year, also argued that Egypt’s military would prefer an Islamist government to a truly democratic one.

As the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm reported, Mr. Nabil was arrested late last month and charged with “publishing false information” and “insulting the Armed Forces.” Read more…

As my colleague Adam Nossiter reports, Laurent Gbagbo, the Ivorian president who had refused to stand down after losing an election in November, “was captured on Monday after a weeklong siege of his residence.”

The first images of Mr. Gbagbo in custody were broadcast by the Ivorian channel Télévision Côte d’Ivoire, which supports Alassane Ouattara, the internationally recognized winner of the disputed election. Read more…