2014 – The year-end review in five words

#2014In5words With just a few days more left for 2014, can we describe it in just 5 words? ‘It was a messy year’ would best describe the year going by.
2014 was a year that has seen happenings that are disgusting, barbaric, and revolting with breakup of Ukraine, air crashes of Malaysian Airlines flights, destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons, atrocities like beheading of innocents and the cold blooded murder of women committed by ISIS in Iraq and Syria, by the kidnapping of schoolgirls from Chibok by Boko Haram in Nigeria, by the Pakistani Taliban in Pakistan mowing down hundreds of innocent children, by the growing black-divide in the United States, by the epidemic Ebola.
Of course, there have been moments of joy and rejoicing – like the Sochi Winter Olympics, the revelations about methane on Mars, the low-cost Mangalyaan mission to Mars by India, the Nobel Prize for Malala Yousafzai, the emergence of BJP as a political power in India, the drop in oil prices due to fracking etcetera.
Therefore, we can safely describe #2014In5words – ‘it was a messy year’.

57 persons killed in Wagah Border suicide blast

It has been reported by Pakistani police spokeswoman Nabeela Ghazanfar that the latest death toll in the suicide blast at the Wagah order is 57 - the bomber had detonated explosives in a car park 500 metres (yards) from the border gates and parade ground even as hundreds of spectators were returning from the ceremony. Apparently, a suicide vest had been discovered in a nearby field fueling speculation that there could have been a second bomber.
The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (TTP-JA), a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban, has claimed responsibility of the deadly suicide attack in which at least 57 people were killed and over 110 were injured. The TTP-Ja has directly threatened Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
In a twitter the TTP-JA has threatened through an open message to both governments across the border indicating that if there can be an attack on one side, there can be another on the other side.
Initially, there were conflicting versions of the tragic incident. The Pakistani and Indian agents are arch-rivals and do not share intelligence. From their accounts, it is not clear as to what the true intention of the bomber were. One line of thinking appears to be that the intention was to lead to more number of casualties on the Indian side of the border and, thereby, stir up tensions between the nuclear-armed nations.
It seems both the Indian and Pakistani intelligence agencies had drawn up plans for an imminent strike on their Wagah land border before the suicide blast and increased level of security prevented what could possibly have been a more devastating attack.
Pakistani police are reported to have revealed that they had recovered a "huge" cache of weapons and explosives near the border, where thousands of people from both the sides gather at dusk every day to watch a flamboyant ritual parade by their security forces.