Morning Reads: "Fox News of the North" Goes Bust; Biggest Bank Heist Ever?

Good morning — and Happy Presidents Day! No US president was born on this date, but the late North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Il was — in 1941.

A weekend of terror –> In the wake of two Paris-like attacks that killed two and wounded five others in Copenhagen, Juan Cole explains why Denmark has become a target of Al-Qaeda. It’s not only about cartoons mocking Allah — Cole writes that a Danish intelligence officer played a key role in directing US drone strikes against leaders of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He adds that “this kind of violence is extremely useful to Al-Qaeda offshoots and affiliates, since it produces a Western backlash against ordinary everyday European Muslims, which can then drive the latter into the arms of the radicals.” AND: The Islamic State released a gruesome video on Sunday purporting to show 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians being executed. Omar Fahmy and Yara Bayoumy report for Reuters that Egypt has begun to retaliate with a series of bombing raids against ISIS targets in Libya. ALSO: Local police in the northern German city of Braunschweig canceled a major festival this weekend amid reports of a credible threat by Islamist radicals, but Oliver Pietschmann reports for Ha’aretz that an Interior Ministry spokesperson said, “we do not have any concrete indications of attack plans in Germany.”

Heist of the century? –> Hackers may have perpetrated the biggest bank robbery of all time when they gained access to the computer systems of 100 banks in 30 countries. They may have gotten away with close to a billion dollars, report David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth for the NYT, but nobody can say for sure because “no bank has come forward acknowledging the theft.”

Fail –> Canada’s Sun News Network, dubbed “Fox News of the North,” went off the air on Friday. Its problems date back to a failed attempt to get a Canadian law against “broadcasting false or misleading news” repealed in 2011. Some conservatives are saying that the network’s demise is a result of Canadians’ “intolerance” toward conservative views, but it seems the market has spoken — the CBC reports that “while the network was available to 5.1 million households, it was only attracting, on average, 8,000 viewers at any given time.”

Stories The Onion’s writers couldn’t make up –> Thomas Croci, a newly elected Republican state senator in New York, told Glenn Blain of the NY Daily News that he wants to create a “terrorist registry” modeled on the one used to track sex offenders. “It will discourage terrorists worldwide from entering New York, [and] require those already in New York to register and be monitored,” Croci said. Blain quotes one Democratic lawmaker “holding back laughter” as he asked: “’Wouldn’t those people already be in jail or out of the country?”

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