Shortly before the meeting the council issued a statement expressing "grave concern at the continued fighting in and around Debaltseve" and demanded that all parties to the conflict cease hostilities immediately.
Yet, far from expressing wonder that an act as extreme and barbaric as the murders is what it takes for the west to show defiance towards a religious duty that is not meaningful to non-Muslims, cultural provocateurs successfully argue that this highly exceptional situation is in fact indicative of a general contempt for Islam.
Iran's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, also poured derision on the Republican letter in a statement expressing astonishment that members of Congress would seek to undermine a US administration by writing directly to a foreign power, and suggesting that the letter's authors had much to learn about international and even US law.
In the 1991 book that popularised that term, the sociologist James Davison Hunter recorded a European friend expressing surprise that Americans "typically conduct their lives in private and with little controversy".
Yet just a few years later, he was the most divisive figure in the coalition: it was not merely the unions expressing no confidence, but also the school heads and Lib Dem colleagues, with whom he had once got on especially well.
There was a great working atmosphere, it was intense, there was a commitment, something going on… I remember looking around the room and thinking: we never experience this at drama school, for one second, because here everyone is looking at something real and finding a way of expressing it.
The Australian government should be embarrassed by a UN report expressing concern about the way Tasmania's world heritage area is being managed, the Bob Brown Foundation conservation group says.
Usachev also happens to be one of the most politically oppositional vloggers in Russia, frequently expressing his own opinion and commenting on the news.
As for Diego Simeone, he was left expressing his "pride" in his team.
Related: 'Papers to pee': Texas, Kentucky and Florida consider anti-transgender bills Though none of the bills has passed so far, they are seen as a sign of a new aggressiveness on the part of state-level Republicans in publicly expressing overt hostility towards transgender people.
It's wise to keep in mind that strong reactions from the likes of NBC and CNN legal analysts about the sudden likelihood that the healthcare law will be overturned could be exaggerated, expressing more of a visceral reaction that things simply didn't go as smoothly as they'd been expecting for two years.
