The manhunt in Brussels is bigger than 'just one man'

GlobalPost

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Need to know:

Belgium remains braced for the worst.

Shops and the metro in the capital were closed on Sunday, though officials said the metro is likely to be up and running again come Monday. Public gatherings have been canceled for the second day in a row, following a warning that a kind of parallel Paris attack was on the horizon for Brussels. Officials have said there is a "serious and imminent" threat, though they haven't been more specific than that. 

It's possible Belgium is going to extreme measures in part to compensate for its image as a weak link in Europe's security system. There were several occasions on which individuals suspected in the Paris attacks were detained in Belgium and elsewhere, then subsequently let go. Among those individuals was 26-year-old Salah Abdeslam, a French national who is believed to have slipped back into Belgium after the Paris attacks.

Though Belgian authorities said Sunday that this isn't about one man. Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon said "several suspects" tied to the Paris attacks could be at large in the country.

Brussel's Molenbeek neighborhood is a particular area of focus for Belgian authorities, since it was home to at least three of the Paris attackers.

Want to know:

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Former GlobalPost correspondent Corinne Purtill traveled to Cambodia to learn the truth about their time on the run. Their story, told for the first time now in the book "Ghosts in the Forest," is a haunting tale of isolation, loyalty, murder, and the appalling choices the quest for survival forces people to make.

Read an excerpt.

Strange but true:

Meanwhile, as all of Europe looks for terrorists, Russia is thinking puppies. Russia's interior minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev wants to send an Alsatian puppy to France after a police dog was killed during a raid linked to the Paris attacks.

Kolokoltsev said he had written to his French counterpart Bernard Cazeneuve offering to send a puppy named Dobrynya to replace Diesel, a Belgian Shepherd killed in a huge raid north of Paris last Wednesday.

Not included in this memo was the fact that Alsatians are the same as German Sheperds. But seriously, who knew?

Anyway. Kolokoltsev said that as "a sign of solidarity with the people and police of France," he was offering the puppy, which "will be able to occupy the place in service of the police dog Diesel killed during a special operation to neutralize terrorists."

A puppy might not be able to make this one all better, but it sure can't make it any worse.

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