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Japan terrorist group founder freed after serving time

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TOKYO -- Fusako Shigenobu, who co-founded the terrorist group Japanese Red Army, was released from prison Saturday after serving a 20-year sentence, and apologized for hurting innocent people. “I feel strongly that I have finally come out alive,” she said, welcomed by her daughter and a crowd of reporters and supporters in Tokyo. “I have hurt innocent people I did not know by putting our struggles first. Although those were different times, I would like to take this opportunity to apologize deeply,” said Shigenobu, who wore a black hat and gray suit. Shigenobu was convicted of masterminding the 1974 siege of the French Embassy in the Hague, the Netherlands. She was arrested in 2000 in Osaka in central Japan, where she had been in hiding. The Japanese Red Army, formed in 1971 and linked with Palestinian militants, took responsibility for several attacks including the takeover of the U.S. Consulate in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 1975. The group is also believed to have been behind a 1972 ...
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Fleeing the Russians: Evacuations are slow, arduous, fraught

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BAKHMUT, Ukraine -- To a threatening soundtrack of air raid sirens and booming artillery, civilians are fleeing towns and cities in eastern Ukraine as Russian forces advance. Negotiating narrow apartment building staircases, volunteers carry the elderly and infirm in their arms, in stretchers or in wheelchairs to waiting minibuses, which then drive them to central staging areas and eventually to evacuation trains in other cities. “The Russians are right over there, and they’re closing in on this location,” Mark Poppert, an American volunteer working with British charity RefugEase, said during an evacuation in the town of Bakhmut on Friday. “Bakhmut is a high-risk area right now,” he said. “We’re trying to get as many people out as we can in case the Ukrainians have to fall back.” He and other Ukrainian and foreign volunteers working with the Ukrainian charity Vostok SOS, which was coordinating the evacuation effort, were hoping to get about 100 people out of Bakhmut on Friday, Popper...
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