On the afternoon of 24 May 2014, a gunman opened fire at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels, killing four people. Three of them, an Israeli couple on holiday and a French woman, died at the scene. The fourth victim, a Belgian employee of the museum, was taken to the hospital but died of his injuries on 6 June. A little less than a week later, on 30 May 2014, a suspect was arrested in the French city of Marseille in connection with the shooting. The suspect was Mehdi Nemmouche, a 29-year-old French national of Algerian origin. A second suspect, Nacer Bendrer, was identified and arrested later.
Mehdi Nemmouche (Arabic: مهدي نموش; born 17 April 1985), a 29-year-old French citizen, was arrested on 30 May 2014 at the Saint-Charles railway station in Marseille in connection with the shooting. Nemmouche is suspected to have returned to France from fighting for Islamist rebels in the Syrian Civil War in 2013.[17] He appears[clarification needed] to have recorded a video bearing the flag of the rebel group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.[18]
The Economist – 24 May 2014 Magazine
Analysis of a telephone call made by Abdelhamid Abaaoud established that he was in contact with Nemmouche during January 2014. Abaaoud was the ringleader of a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris that occurred on 13 November 2015.[27]
Over the next weeks, the court heard the testimonies of the firsthand witnesses, first responders, investigators, experts, and family members of both the victims and the accused. An important testimony was that of two French journalists, Didier François and Nicolas Hénin, who had been held hostage from 2013 to 2014 in Syria by ISIS operatives. They testified that Nemmouche, under the alias "Abu Omar", was one of their guards and torturers, and described him as being "sadistic, playful and narcissistic".[38][39] The former director of the prison in Salon-de-Provence, France, in which both accused had been incarcerated in the past, testified that Nemmouche had radicalised during his prison stay. There was disagreement whether Bendrer also adhered to radical Islamic beliefs at the time.[40] During the hearings, the investigators also rejected the assertion that the Riva couple were intelligence officers for the Mossad, as did attorneys of the Riva couple's family. Whilst the wife, Miriam Riva, did work for the Mossad until her retirement, she did so as an accountant and never came into contact with any intelligence operations, they stated.[41]
The jury considered that the material evidence and eyewitness testimony proved Nemmouche was the perpetrator of the attack. Based on the security footage of the museum, the expert testimony of the medical examiners who examined the bodies of the victims, and the type of weapons used, the jury found Nemmouche had the intention to kill. The jury furthermore affirmed the premeditated nature of the killings based on the preparatory acts Nemmouche carried out, such as the procurement of the weapons he used. The terrorist intentions of Nemmouche were upheld based on his jihadist stay in Syria from 2013 to 2014, the videos he made in which he claimed responsibility for the attacks in the name of ISIS, and the conversations about Nemmouche retained from Najim Laachraoui's computer. The verdict also rejected the claim that Nemmouche was set up by intelligence officials. The jury lamented that the defence did not bring forward any element that would support those allegations. The existence of a set-up was therefore deemed to lack "sufficient plausibility and credibility".[50][51][52]
Aside from Nemmouche, the jury also found Nacer Bendrer guilty of weapons crimes and of being the co-author, and not just the accomplice, of the terrorist attack by supplying the weapons and ammunitions Nemmouche used. According to Belgian law, being the co-author of a crime means that one's aid was indispensable in the commission of the crime, i.e. that the crime would not have happened without this aid. The verdict stated Bendrer was aware of Nemmouche's radicalisation and adherence to Islamic extremist beliefs from when they got to know each other in 2009, during their incarceration in Salon-de-Provence, France. Telephone data showed that, after having had no contact for four years, Nemmouche sought contact again with Bendrer on 9 April 2014, after which Bendrer traveled to Brussels a few days later. After numerous contacts since, Nemmouche traveled to Bendrer's hometown Marseille, France, on 24 April 2014, and telephone data pinpointed him in the area of Bendrer's home around that time. After Nemmouche's return to Brussels, all contact ceased between them two. Investigators testified they took steps to hide their communications and encounters, by for example switching between multiple phone numbers and SIM cards.[50][51][52]
According to the Alliance for Audited Media, sales of newsstand copies for news magazines, the measure most accepted by the industry, fell 2% on average, following years of declining numbers. In 2013, though, the decrease was smaller than the total industry decline in newsstand sales (11%). The Economist was the hardest hit, losing 16% of its newsstand sales, after a 17% decline in 2012. The Atlantic and The Week were also hit (down 12% and 7% respectively). The New Yorker enjoyed a 16% increase, one of the highest reported in past years. Time posted some significant gains too, up 6% from the year before. Since 2008, when Pew Research started tracking these figures, the news magazines have lost 43% of their single-copy sales on average.
For a third year in a row, news magazines faced a difficult print advertising environment. Combined ad pages (considered a better measure than ad revenue) for the five magazines studied in this report were down 13% in 2013, following a decline of 12.5% in 2012, and about three times the rate of decline in 2011, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. Again, hardest hit was The Week, which suffered a 20% drop in ad pages. The Atlantic fell 17%, The Economist 16%, and Time about 11%, while The New Yorker managed to keep its ad pages losses in single digits (7%). For print magazines, the number of ad pages sold across the industry over all was down in 2013 (4.1%), after a steep decline in 2012 (8.2%).
In one eye-catching cutback, The Chicago Sun-Times laid off its entire 28-person photography department in 2013, but hired back four photographers in December. Even Aaron Kushner, a California publisher who attracted considerable attention for hiring scores of journalists and investing heavily in print journalism, implemented about 70 layoffs at The Orange County Register and The Press-Enterprise in Riverside early in 2014.
Over the course of 2013, Patch suffered more losses. In August 2013 AOL announced the closing of 400 of the 900 Patch sites that existed at the time. Finally, in early 2014, AOL dropped Patch entirely and sold majority ownership of the remaining sites to Hale Global.
In March 2013, Time Warner announced that it would spin off Time Inc. into a separate publicly traded company. In March of 2014, these plans seem to be in full effect as Time Inc. prepares to separate from Time Warner. In the meantime, Time Inc. has been integrating American Express Publishing, which it bought last year.
[7] Data are for 2014, the most recent year for which spending data by age are available from CMS, and are adjusted to 2018 dollars using the GDP chain price index. These per capita costs are for personal health-care spending, which is a subset of the total spending presented in figure 1a and excludes government administration, net cost of health insurance (the difference between the premiums paid for private health insurance and the amount paid for benefits), government public health activities, and investment in research and structures.
[21] Surprise billing is also more likely when a health plan has no in-network options at a hospital in a particular provider category. In a study of Texas hospitals, between 21 percent and 56 percent of in-network hospitals had no in-network emergency physicians, depending on the health plan (Hall et al. 2016, citing Center for Public Policy Priorities 2014).
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