10 things you need to know today: December 26, 2014

(Image credit: (REUTERS/Mike Segar))

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1. Two more men charged with threatening New York police
2. Hackers claim responsibility for PlayStation and Xbox Christmas slowdown
3. Islamist militants stage Christmas attack on African Union peacekeepers' base in Somalia
4. ISIS governor in Mosul reportedly killed in airstrike
5. Jordan warns ISIS not to hurt captured pilot
6. Turkish teen arrested for insulting Erdogan
7. Putin cancels cabinet ministers' New Year's holiday plans
8. LeBron James loses in his first game in Miami since leaving the Heat
9. Armored van spills millions of dollars onto Hong Kong highway
10. The Interview draws crowds

last updated 13 January 2015

1. Two more men charged with threatening New York police

Two men were arrested for threatening New York police over the last two days, a police spokesman said Thursday, bringing to six the number of people charged with terrorist threats or false 911 calls since the Saturday slayings of officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu. Jose Maldonado, 26, was charged with posting threats on his Facebook page. Tyrone Melville, 41, allegedly called the precinct where Ramos and Liu worked, saying he wanted to "kill more cops" with the bullets from the dead officers' bodies.

Users of Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox Live gaming networks experienced connection problems on Christmas Day, and a hacker group called Lizard Squad claimed responsibility. The group said on Twitter that it had snarled both networks with distributed denial of service attacks, which overwhelm servers with phony traffic. Both companies said they were investigating the outages. Gaming networks often get swamped with traffic over the holidays as people sign on and download updates for new consoles.

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Al Shabab militants attacked an African Union peacekeeping base in Somalia on Thursday as soldiers were sharing a Christmas meal. At least three soldiers, a civilian, and five of the attackers from the Islamist group — al Qaeda's Somali affiliate — were killed. Three of the eight assailants were captured. A military spokesman said some of the attackers involved in the "reprehensible attack" were wearing Somali army uniforms when they managed to sneak onto the base.

The Islamic State's shadow governor of Mosul in northern Iraq was killed in an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition, an Iraqi police commander said Thursday. The ISIS leader, Hassan Hassan Saeed al-Jabouri, had only been installed by the Islamist militant group 25 days earlier. He was the second ISIS governor reportedly killed by airstrikes since the group seized control of the city — Iraq's second-largest — earlier this year. The U.S. has not confirmed Jabouri's death.

Jordan on Thursday threatened "grave consequences" if Islamic State militants harm Lt. Moaz al Kasasbeh, a Jordanian pilot captured by ISIS after his F-16 fighter jet crashed in northern Syria. ISIS claimed to have shot him down, but U.S. military leaders said the plane had simply crashed. Either way, Kasasbeh's aircraft was the first lost by a U.S.-led coalition since the launch of airstrikes against ISIS in September. The coalition includes four Arab states — Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

Turkish police arrested a 16-year-old high school student for insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, local media reported Thursday. The boy was shown in a video reading a statement commemorating the killing of a Turkish soldier by Islamists nearly a century ago, then making a declaration invoking the memory of the founder of the modern Turkish republic — Mustafa Kemal Ataturk — deemed harshly critical of the pro-Islamist Erdogan. As the boy spoke, people around him chanted, "Everywhere is bribery, everywhere is corruption."

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday told his government ministers to cancel New Year's vacation plans to deal with the country's economic crisis. The New Year is Russia's main holiday, and Russian companies give employees time off from Jan. 1 to Jan. 12. Orthodox Christmas is celebrated on Jan. 7. "For the government, for your agencies we cannot afford this long holiday, at least this year — you know what I mean," Putin told cabinet ministers in a televised meeting.

The Miami Heat beat LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers 101-91 on Thursday in James' first game back in Miami since he left the Heat after helping the team reach the NBA finals four years in a row. James scored 30 points, but it wasn't enough to counter former teammate Dwyane Wade's 31 points — 24 of them in the first half. James and Wade embraced warmly before the game and before the start of the second half.

Boxes filled with $2.4 million spilled out of an armored van onto a Hong Kong highway on Christmas Eve, prompting drivers and passersby to scramble onto the roadway to grab as much cash as they could. The melee brought traffic to a halt on the road in the center of the Chinese-run city. Police officers dashed in, too, to retrieve the money. "Any person who finds the relevant bank notes should return them to police as soon as possible, or they may be committing a theft," police warned.

Sony Pictures' The Interview attracted sell-out crowds on Christmas Day in many of the more than 200 theaters where it made its debut, despite threats of violence from hackers. Many moviegoers said they showed up in support of free speech. The film, also available for pay-per-view streaming, is a comedy about a fictional plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Sony had canceled the movie's release after major cinema chains balked at showing it, but reversed course after independent theaters asked to screen it.

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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.