Hope for Andrew Brunson

Japan executes cult leader

Japan executed doomsday cult leader Shoko Asahara and six other members of the Aum Shinrikyo group on Friday for staging the 1995 sarin gas attack that killed 13 people in the Tokyo subway system and injured more than 6,000 others.

The Japanese Defense Ministry confirmed the executions by hanging. Also hanged were two scientists who organized the production of sarin gas and another who helped carry out the attack. Six other followers remain on death row. In another attack in June 1994, the group released sarin gas in Maumoto in central Japan, killing at least eight people and injuring more than 140 others.

Asahara, formally known as Chizuo Matsumoto, founded the group in the mid-1980s with combined teachings from Buddhism and Hinduism. The apocalyptic cult attracted many young people, including graduates from top Japanese universities. Some of their rituals included drinking their leader’s bathwater and wearing electric caps in an attempt to synchronize their brain waves with their leader’s. —Onize Ohikere

ISIS wives seeking divorce

As Islamic State (ISIS) loses control of territory across Iraq and Syria, Iraqi officials are witnessing more militants’ wives filing for divorce.

In an NBC News report, Iraqi Deputy Justice Minister Hussein Jassem said authorities have seen “a huge increase” in divorce filings in the past three months, the majority of them filed by women. Jassem said the requests increasingly come from Sunni Muslim regions like Anbar and Nineveh, former ISIS strongholds.

One of the women, a 35-year-old identified as Fatima, said her husband, Omar, joined ISIS after serving in the Iraqi army before the 2003 U.S. invasion. She said authorities arrested him three years ago after liberating the city of Tikrit. “I am afraid of being accused that I support terrorism, and this is one of the reasons that drove me to ask for divorce,” Fatima said. Since ISIS lost control of Mosul in July 2017, the terror group has continued to lose swaths of territory within Iraq and Syria. —O.O.

Myanmar charges Reuters journalists

After six months of preliminary hearings, a judge in Myanmar, also known as Burma, charged two local journalists from the U.K.-based Reuters news agency with illegally possessing official government information. Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were reporting on the Rohingya crisis in western Myanmar, where security forces staged clearance operations that forced some 700,000 people to flee into neighboring Bangladesh. Yangon district Judge Ye Luin charged the journalists with violating the Colonial era Official Secrets Act, which carries up to a 14-year sentence. Stephen Adler, president and editor-in-chief of Reuters, said the case was baseless and called on authorities to release the journalists. “Today’s decision casts serious doubt on Myanmar’s commitment to press freedom and the rule of law,” Adler said. —O.O.