2015/11/14

Islamic State claims Paris attacks

Islamic State claimed responsibility on Saturday for a coordinated assault by gunmen and bombers that killed 127 people at locations across Paris that President Francois Hollande said amounted to an act of war against France.
In the worst attack, a Paris city hall official said four gunmen systematically slaughtered at least 87 young people at a rock concert at the Bataclan concert hall before anti-terrorist commandos launched an assault on the building. Dozens of survivors were rescued, and bodies were still being recovered on Saturday morning.
Some 40 more people were killed in five other attacks in the Paris region, the official said, including an apparent double suicide bombing outside the Stade de France national stadium, where Hollande and the German foreign minister were watching a friendly soccer international.
The assaults came as France, a founder member of the U.S.-led coalition waging air strikes against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, was on high alert for terrorist attacks.

The FBI has said it is now investigating the San Bernardino shooting in the US state of California as a "terrorist" attack, adding that it had uncovered new evidence.

David Bowdich, assistant director of the FBI's Los Angeles office, also said the attackers tried to destroy evidence - crushing two cell phones and throwing them in a rubbish bin.

Upon reading the original source documents of Islam—the Quran, hadith, biographies, and histories—one is struck by the casual and matter-of-fact way that Muhammad and his Muslims traffic in violence and bloodshed.


What fascinates the jihadis ... is “pure revolt”, and this includes kicking against their parents’ tightly bound geographical and linguistic communities. The European jihadis who go to Syria and Iraq speak French or English peppered with badly pronounced Qur’anic Arabic and are surprisingly indifferent to the old colonial struggles and injustices


Several suicide bombers were found with women’s underclothes in their pockets, for the virgins they would meet in paradise



THE Barcelona terror attack has increased the divisions between the Spanish and Catalonian administrations with either side blaming the other for failings in the run-up to the killings.

In a propaganda video released by the SITE Intelligence Group Wednesday, an ISIS member describes the Barcelona perpetrators as "our brothers," while another threatens "Spanish Christians" and promises to return the country to the "land of the Caliphate."

2015/11/10

Document Exposes Intensification of State-sanctioned Religious Repression in Troubled Tibetan County

Chinese authorities have intensified anti-religious campaigns by systematically converting Tibetan monastic institutions into Chinese government offices and the monastic population into Chinese Communist Party members in Diru (Ch: Biru) County in Nagchu (Ch: Naqu) Prefecture, Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), in Kham province.
These campaigns, implemented by the local County government and party through a new regulation, has severely curtailed the right to freedom of religion and belief of local Tibetans, particularly the monastics many of whom have been expelled and punished, as the authorities exercise absolute control over the functioning and administration over religious institutions.
TCHRD recently obtained a copy of Document no. 224 issued by the Diru County government on 19 September 2015 that calls for the intensification and deepening of the campaign to purge and reform religious institutions. The document contains a set of regulations divided into three chapters, 24 sections and 74 articles and has been circulated among relevant County, Township/town level offices, Monastery Management Committees, relevant management committees, monastic and village based permanently stationed cadres.
The regulation identifies and targets 24 activities through which religious institutions (monasteries, temples and hermitages) will be “purged and reformed” in Diru County. For instance, the Chinese authorities will keep an account of all monastic properties, and retain the sole authority to decide over their storage and repair. The authorities will monitor and control religious gatherings and ceremonies restricting local Tibetans from organizing or participating in important religious rituals.

Chinese authorities in Tibet have ordered the destruction of houses built in traditional style in three counties outside the regional capital Lhasa, with their replacement by Chinese-style dwellings scheduled for completion in five years, according to a local source.

Demolition and construction will begin in 2016 in Tagtse (in Chinese, Dazi), Lhundrub (Linzhou), and Maldro Gongkar (Mozhugongka) counties, located outside Lhasa city, a resident of the area told RFA’s Tibetan Service.

“We are being forced to accept and support the plan without any choice,” RFA’s source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Seriously?

Jonah Leher (207, pp. 141-142) proposes that the 1913 riot at the first performance of Stravinky's "Rite of Spring" was caused by the effect of unfamiliar sounds on certain neurons which, when overstimulated, precipitate a flood of dopamine that can, in turn, produce symptoms resembling those of schizophrenia. Irving Massey in The Neuronal Imagination (Preface)

2015/10/30

Jailed Saudi blogger awarded Europe's rights prize

Raif Badawi, the Saudi blogger jailed and lashed for allegedly insulting Islam last year, has been awarded the European Parliament's Sakharov human rights prize.

"[The blogger is an] unusually courageous and ... exemplary man [who is facing punishment that] objectively can only be described as brutal torture," Schulz said on Thursday. Badawi, 31, was sentenced to 10 years in jail and 1,000 lashes for insulting Islam.


The Portuguese like the crooks because they do the same (when they can)

Portugal has this culture of keeping everything quiet and secret. It doesn't do to rock the boat, and so outrageous things continue to happen here and nobody does anything about them.

The latest piece of idiocy has a government minister claiming there is very little or no corruption in Portugal. That is printed in our local paper as a straight-faced piece, and no comment made. Extraordinary! Anywhere else the wretched woman would be torn to shreds for making such an outrageous statement. But not in Portugal.

This is the country where government ministers and various rich people have been using kids from the orphanages as sex toys. This is the country where EU money poured in over the border with no restrictions, and government hangers-on, and all their friends were lapping it up and turning it into speed boats, and luxury mansions in Brazil


Monster's kingdom

When a condemned killer said the woman he and others brutally gang-raped on a New Delhi bus was responsible for what had happened to her, his comments were shocking in their callousness and lack of remorse. But the underlying view has wide acceptance in India.


Alexander Litvinenko and Karl Marx’s stepchildren


In November 2006, Litvinenko, by then a British citizen, met two other FSB officers in a London hotel, and they took tea together. Litvinenko’s tea was laced with polonium-210, an extremely rare element. He died a slow and painful death. The two agents, Andrei Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun, slipped back to Russia, where the former is a member of parliament and the latter a businessman. Owen’s report pointed the finger not just at Lugovoy and Kovtun, but at the Russian president who, Owen wrote, “probably” authorized the murder.

“We regret that a purely criminal case has been politicized and has darkened the general atmosphere of our bilateral relations,” Maria Zhakarova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said primly in response to the report.
British Prime Minister David Cameron said the reports findings were a grave matter and that further action would be taken against Russia on top of the sanctions already imposed. But, Cameron added, the UK would have to continue “some sort of relationship” with Russia. Right away, a chorus of realists – cynics, if you prefer – said, “You bet it will.”
The UK is the biggest investor in Russia – largely through the energy company BP, which has invested $16 billion in the country through its 20 percent stake in the Russian state’s oil corporation, Rosneft. It’s a troubled relationship: Igor Sechin, the head of Rosneft, is banned from travelling to the West. But Bob Dudley, head of BP, sits on the Rosneft board

2015/10/27

Beethoven - Piano Sonata no. 32, op.111 - Sviatoslav Richter

Tibet protesters’ ‘heavy handed’ arrest in UK!

Apart from arresting them on Oct 20 for protesting against the visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping with waving of Tibetan flags, the Met Police of UK’s capital London have raided the homes of Tibetan women Sonam Choden (31) and Jamphel Lhamo (33) and charged them with conspiracy to protest under the country’s Public Order Act 1986. London-based Chinese democracy activist Shao Jiang, a survivor of the 1989 Tiananmen square massacre and who was also arrested on Oct 20, too had his home raided.

2015/01/08

The latest blows delivered by an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades

They are only the latest blows delivered by an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades. It’s the same ideology that sent Salman Rushdie into hiding for a decade under a death sentence for writing a novel, then killed his Japanese translator and tried to kill his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher. The ideology that murdered three thousand people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. The one that butchered Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam, in 2004, for making a film. The one that has brought mass rape and slaughter to the cities and deserts of Syria and Iraq. That massacred a hundred and thirty-two children and thirteen adults in a school in Peshawar last month. That regularly kills so many Nigerians, especially young ones, that hardly anyone pays attention.

Most victims are children, women and elderly people who could not run fast enough when insurgents drove into Baga, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on town residents.
“The human carnage perpetrated by Boko Haram terrorists in Baga was enormous,” Muhammad Abba Gava, a spokesman for poorly armed civilians in a defence group that fights Boko Haram, told the Associated Press.
He said the civilian fighters gave up on trying to count all the bodies. “No one could attend to the corpses and even the seriously injured ones who may have died by now,”.

&

Do not let compassion for them keep you from carrying out God’s law—if you believe in God and the Last Day—and ensure that a group of believers witnesses the punishment. (MAS Abdel Haleem, The Quran, New York: Oxford UP, 2004)

A newly released audio message from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) features a top official in the group, Harith al Nadhari, praising the attack on the office of Charlie Hebdo earlier this week.



On perversion

perverse structure remains perverse even when the acts associated with it are socially approved