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
