Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo died

Liu Xiaobo, one of China’s most famous pro-democracy advocates and political prisoners, just died in Chinese custody at a hospital. He was 61. He is the first Nobel Peace Prize winner to die in state custody since the days of Nazi Germany. 

[Liu Xia is a poet and photographer. She married Xiaobo in 1996 when he was imprisoned in a “reeducation through labor” camp. His “crime” then was to have urged the government to find a peaceful way to unite mainland China with Taiwan, that is, to do so without the dire threats commonly issued by the People’s Republic of China. Liu Xia visited her husband in prison after he was awarded the Nobel Prize. She was then placed under house arrest and deprived of a mobile phone, Internet access, and all but a tiny number of visitors. She was allowed out briefly in 2013 to attend the trial of her brother, Liu Hui—part of what human rights lawyers say is official retaliation against the family. She called out to a crowd of well-wishers: “Tell everybody that I’m not free.”]

Zoltán Kocsis (30 May 1952 – 6 November 2016)

Xenakis - 'Metaux'

The Panama Papers

A massive leak of documents exposes the offshore holdings of 12 current and former world leaders and reveals how associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin secretly shuffled as much as $2 billion through banks and shadow companies.

The leak also provides details of the hidden financial dealings of 128 more politicians and public officials around the world. The cache of 11.5 million records shows how a global industry of law firms and big banks sells financial secrecy to politicians, fraudsters and drug traffickers as well as billionaires, celebrities and sports stars.

...

The documents make it clear that major banks are big drivers behind the creation of hard-to-trace companies in the British Virgin Islands, Panama and other offshore havens. The files list nearly 15,600 paper companies that banks set up for clients who want keep their finances under wraps, including thousands created by international giants UBS and HSBC.

Documents from the leaked Mossack Fonseca database showed the relations of three of the seven members of the Communist party’s elite ruling council, the politburo standing committee, had companies that were clients of the offshore law firm. They included relatives of Chinese president Xi Jinping. 

A Communist party censorship directive instructed news organisations to purge all reports, blogs, bulletin boards and comments relating to this week’s highly sensitive revelations. 

The Portuguese Parliament 

has provoked outrage by failing to condemn the long prison sentences handed to the so-called Luanda book club, 17 dissidents convicted of political defiance against Angola’s government.

...

Dos Santos, 73, has been president since 1979 and has been accused of presiding over one of the world’s most corrupt governments, amassing a great fortune for himself, his family and friends, while two-thirds of his country lives below the poverty line.  

“If Angola was the front office of corruption, Portugal was the back office” [Well... it used to be the front office]

[On Portugal: it had more domestic violence fatalities than all Europe's terrorism victims in the last 10 years]

[Portugal's Siresp rescue network 'failed forest fire victims'] 

[Although the destruction wrought so far this year does not match the record 426,000 hectares destroyed in 2003, this year's fires have been the deadliest.]

["There are people setting fires, bad people. It is the only explanation that I can see, there is no other," said Maria Conceicao, another resident of Pucarica.] [few months later was Ophelia...]

[A falling tree has killed at least 13 people and injured 49 at a religious ceremony on the Portuguese island of Madeira.]

[While studying in Aveiro (Portugal), Ms. Antunes said, she experienced the pressure herself when she refused to join a hazing ritual that required simulating sexual intercourse, as well as licking yogurt from a boy’s lap. Her mother complained to the university, but no action was taken.]

[The Portuguese court’s decision “ignored the physical and psychological importance of sexuality for women’s self-fulfillment and other dimensions of women’s sexuality”, the European court said.]

[Defense officials in Portugal say they are compiling a list of weapons and ammunition stolen from the national armory in a brazen daytime raid.]

[The Portuguese internal affairs minister said she was concerned about the theft of 50 pistols from the national police premises,]

[Portugal's dark history, or a just a slice of it...]

In memoriam of Brussels' terrorist attacks victims

Losar

Losar is Tibetan for New Year. The Tibetan calendar is based on Tibetan astrology, a synthesis of Indian and Chinese astrology. The Tibetan calendar is lunar, which means it follows the cycles of the moon, so the New Year begins on a new moon.

Pierre Boulez (26 March 1925 – 5 January 2016)

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.

It was the worst such attack in Europe since the Madrid train bombings of 2004, in which 191 died.

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."

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)

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

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.

Jonathan Stewart Vickers (October 29, 1926 – July 10, 2015)

Maria Friderike Radner (1 January 1981 – 24 March 2015)

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

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

Crime and History

The Sexual Abuse of King Sebastian of Portugal (1554-1578) / A Pedophile in the Palace

One of the primary reasons for the British settlement of Australia was the establishment of a penal colony to alleviate pressure on their overburdened correctional facilities. Over the 80 years more than 165,000 convicts were transported to Australia.

The Armenian Genocide was carried out during and after World War I and implemented in two phases: the wholesale killing of the able-bodied male population through massacre and subjection of army conscripts to forced labour, followed by the deportation of women, children, the elderly and infirm on death marches leading to the Syrian desert. Driven forward by military escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to periodic robbery, rape, and massacre

"Holodomor": In the spring of 1933, the rural population of Ukraine was dying at a rate of 25,000 a day, half of them children. The land that was known worldwide as the breadbasket of Europe was being ravaged by a man-made famine of unprecedented scale. It was engineered by Stalin and his hangmen to teach Ukraine’s independent farmers  “a lesson they would not forget” for resisting collectivization, which meant giving up their land and livestock to the state. (Ukraine was then under Soviet domination).  Moreover, it was meant to deal “a crushing blow” to any national aspirations of the Ukrainian people, 80 percent of whom were peasant farmers. While millions of men, women and children in Ukraine and in the mostly ethnically Ukrainian areas of the northern Caucasus were dying, the Soviet Union was denying the famine and exporting enough grain from Ukraine to have fed the entire population.

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.

1965: the Indonesian Genocide. Indonesia is a society where the murderers remain in power, 

http:/

A paramilitary unit from Serbia known as the Scorpions, officially part of the Serbian Interior Ministry until 1991, participated in the massacre, along with several hundred Russian volunteers.

...

According to evidence collected from Bosniaks by French policeman Jean-René Ruez, some were buried alive; he also heard testimony describing Serb forces killing and torturing refugees at will, streets littered with corpses, people committing suicide to avoid having their noses, lips and ears chopped off, and adults being forced to watch the soldiers kill their children.

The ethnic cleansing of Georgians in Abkhazia: as the war progressed, the Abkhaz separatist have carried out same policies of violent displacement of ethnic Georgians from their homes in greater proportions which has left 250,000 people being forcefully evicted from their homes. Under the alleged aid from Russia, they managed to re-arm and organize "volunteer battalions" from North Caucasus. According to political analyst Georgy Mirsky, the Russian military base in Gudauta was, "supplying the Abkhazian side with weapons and ammunition." Furthermore he adds that, "no direct proof of this has ever been offered, but it would be more naïve to believe that the tanks, rockets, howitzers, pieces of ordnance, and other heavy weapons that the anti-Georgian coalition forces were increasing using in their war had been captured from the enemy." 

Mulder repeated most of her accusations, and added that her agency had encouraged her to use cocaine and heroin. She told the Daily Mail, "They tried to turn me into a prostitute because they thought it would be so easy. I was raped by two bookers. I reported them and they were fired. Another time I was shut in the office of [a high-profile man from the modeling world] for a whole day. All these people who betrayed me I used to love very much. Then I realized how big the conspiracy was. It brought in the government and police, who both used Elite girls. People have tried to kidnap and poison me." Her suicide attempt came after she was packed off to Montsouris hospital and heavily sedated for five months of treatment for depression and anxiety. (Gerald Marie, the head of Elite Paris and one of the men Mulder had accused of raping her, paid.) It came after Marie was filmed on hidden camera by the BBC trying to give a 15-year-old model £300 for sex, and bragging of how many entrants to the Elite Model Look competition — average age 15 — he was going to sleep with that year.

To most people Portugal's state-run orphanages seemed like a safe haven for thousands of children who had been robbed of their parents. They were called the Casa Pia, or Houses of the Pious. But for an elite paedophile ring, which included a former ambassador and a prominent television celebrity, Casa Pia orphanages were something entirely different. They were supermarkets stocked with children to abuse.

A victim of the Westminster paedophile abuse scandal has claimed he saw a Conservative MP murder a young boy during a depraved sex party. And the Sunday People can reveal that detectives are investigating THREE murders allegedly linked to a network of VIP perverts.

2014

ISIS’ Islamic justice condemns women for the immorality of having their faces uncovered. Meanwhile they’re raping young boys. That’s not surprising as their Taliban cousins in Afghanistan are doing the same thing. This is what the perfect Islamic system looks like.

A 26-year-old Iranian woman convicted of murdering a man she accused of trying to rape her as a teenager was hanged on Saturday, the official news agency IRNA said

Shahzad and his wife Shama were laborers in Chak 59 village near Kot Radha Kishan. Both were set on fire by an angry mob on a minor conflict.

Mexico is a country that has become used to violence, horrific crimes and monstrous statistics. More than 100,000 people have been killed in the ongoing drug war since 2006 with upwards of 25,000 more listed as missing. The bloodletting, the mass graves, the beheadings and the arrests of drug bosses have become so normal that they hardly manage to make it onto the front pages anymore.

When a police force arrests 43 students and hands them over to narco-gangsters who kill them as a “lesson”, then the police work for a narco-state that entwines organised crime and political power. The same police force also machine-gunned students, killing six and seriously wounding six more; it seized a student, tore the skin from his face, ripped out his eyes and left him lying in the street. This is a narco-state that practises terrorism.

Luxembourg: one of the EU’s smallest states helped multinationals save millions in tax, to the detriment of its neighbours and allies

The state prosecutor has ended up deciding not to prosecute anyone in the submarines case, which has been subject to eight years of investigation, all amounting to nothing.
...

The archiving of this massive case is based on the fact that none of the alleged crimes have been proven by the prosecution team which 'inherited' the case a little over a year ago and struggled from day one, hampered by a lack cooperation from the German court which refused to send transcripts of the successful Ferrostaal prosecution ‘unless authorised by Angela Merkel.’

Portugal: over the past ten years, some 398 woman have lost their lives as a result of domestic violence; 32 have died so far this year. (40 in the beginning of December!)

[high level corruption is only an aspect that shows how blatantly rotten is the Portuguese society]

In Portugal 52.8% of women say that they have been violently treated by their husbands or partners.

Angolan regime is among the most corrupt on earth and its people among the poorest. Over 40% of the Angolan population live on less than $2 a day and the majority have little access to running water, sanitation or electricity. But the Angolan president is one of the richest men in Africa and his eldest daughter, Isabel, is the richest woman in Africa [also Portugal's richest woman: shes lives and does high level business in Portugal] 

while there had been plentiful images of New York under water from Hurricane Sandy in 2012, there was little coverage or pictures of victims of the 10-year famine in the Horn of Africa, although both disasters are related to climate change. 

At least 132 students and nine staff members were killed on Tuesday after Taliban gunmen broke into a school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar and opened fire, witnesses said, in the bloodiest massacre the country has seen for years.

The reports you've heard of cultural genocide are true. China is obliterating the ideas, traditions and habits of the Tibetan people.

2015

Today, newspapers carry the case of a monitor at a Santa Casa da Misericórdia children’s home in Lisbon who is suspected of having abused more than 10 babies and children up to the age of seven for over a decade.

Telemann - Fantasie nr. 3 - Brüggen

Willem de Fesch - Sonate in G - Frans Brüggen / Gustav Leonhardt

Frans Brüggen (30 October 1934 – 13 August 2014)

Portugal' State Corruption, Mr Barroso, the EU, etc

Would EU imagine that choosing Mr. Barroso (one of the main responsible for Portuguese huge institutional corruption, blatant inequalities, culture of the promiscuity, resilient brutality, general stupidity and inescapable decadence, whom may be embroiled in the not yellow submarine case)* as EC's president, for more than a decade, and Constâncio, who was the portuguese central bank governor (for more than 10 years...) and didn't see nothing on the portuguese bank system corruption, as ECB's vice-president, comes without any consequence?

* only the Submarine and Pandur cases had 40 million euros "under the table". Him (the fag who - with the other one - represents the worst of the Portuguese State Mafia) holds still Portugal's vice prime-ministery, after all... So, it was a terrific &(almost) complete parliamentary cleaning of the 40 millions "gloves" for the submarine and Pandur's deal. How... very... terrific... country... Glup...


In the framers’ view, corruption in the broader sense of using public office for private ends was essentially the opposite of public virtue, and was therefore a central threat to the life and health of the republic. 

The parties of the centre-left and the centre-right are allowing Europe to drift into the economic equivalent of a nuclear winter.

Islamic State insurgents in Iraq have carried out mass executions, abducted women and girls as sex slaves, and used child soldiers in what may amount to systematic war crimes that demand prosecution


Originating in Romania and eventually spreading to the U.S. and presumably other countries, the Romani had been around for years and years, killing families and abducting the young girls as wives for their sons, and possibly the inverse as well since at least 1909. 


GDP in Italy has declined by 9% since 2000. It’s unimaginable! I don’t think communist Czechoslovakia would have survived such a long-term decline. At the same time, industrial output declined in the same period by 25%! One quarter of the economy simply disappeared.’


Where Mario Draghi now wants to start buying up Greek and Cypriot junk loans, simply because that’s all they have left to sell. That’s where we stand today. We’re back to toilet paper as the only thing that represents any value.


The "liberal system": London property company is charging £255 a week for 'studio apartments' as small as three metres by three metres

"In areas of Syria under [Isis] control, particularly in the north and north-east of the country, Fridays are regularly marked by executions, amputations and lashings in public squares," 

"Despite Moscow's hollow denials, it is now clear that Russian troops and equipment have illegally crossed the border into eastern and south-eastern Ukraine,"

Despite the failures in financial regulation evident during the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis and calls for improvement of relevant regulatory structures, proponents of TISA aim to further deregulate global financial services markets. The draft Financial Services Annex sets rules which would assist the expansion of financial multi-nationals – mainly headquartered in New York, London, Paris and Frankfurt – into other nations by preventing regulatory barriers. 

“If instituted, the TPP’s IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you’re ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs.”

"France is a free country which shouldn't be aligning itself with the obsessions of the German right," he said, urging a "just and sane resistance".

From the moment it became clear that the anti-independence campaign had secured a modest win, people in the Yes camp started asking themselves : "Will we get another chance? If so, when?" Well my instinct is to advise the SNP to be cautious on this question, because we know from Quebec that there is indeed a public tolerance for a repeat referendum on independence, but only if the circumstances and timing are right.
...
After all, the (bogus) argument that a No vote was the only way to keep Scotland in the EU was a key part of the anti-independence campaign's pitch. The SNP would still have to be careful to ensure that it was not running ahead of what the public is willing to tolerate, but it's conceivable that in those circumstances there might be considerable sympathy for a much earlier repeat referendum to get an independent Scotland back into the EU (and out of a Tory/Ukip hell-hole) as soon as humanly possible. (if the EU still exists...)

Australia bans reporting of multi-nation corruption case involving Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam

A senior member of India’s Socialist Party, Abu Azmi, apparently said he wanted women who were forced to have sex against their will to be put to death at the same time as their attackers.

Tiananmen Square, 25 Years Ago

The protests began in April of 1989, gaining support as initial government reactions included concessions. Martial law was declared on May 20, troops were mobilized, and from the night of June 3 through the early morning of June 4, the PLA pushed into Tiananmen Square, crushing some protesters and firing on many others. The exact number killed may never be known, but estimates range from several hundred to several thousand. China's censors are blocking Internet access to the terms "six four," "candle," and "never forget," broadening extensive efforts to silence talk about the 25th anniversary of China's bloody June 4 crackdown. 

Farewell

If God, for a second, forgot what I have become and granted me a little bit more of life, I would use it to the best of my ability.

I wouldn’t, possibly, say everything that is in my mind, but I would be more thoughtful l of all I say.

I would give merit to things not for what they are worth, but for what they mean to express.

I would sleep little, I would dream more, because I know that for every minute that we close our eyes, we waste 60 seconds of light.

I would walk while others stop; I would awake while others sleep.

If God would give me a little bit more of life, I would dress in a simple manner, I would place myself in front of the sun, leaving not only my body, but my soul naked at its mercy.

To all men, I would say how mistaken they are when they think that they stop falling in love when they grow old, without knowing that they grow old when they stop falling in love.

I would give wings to children, but I would leave it to them to learn how to fly by themselves.

To old people I would say that death doesn’t arrive when they grow old, but with forgetfulness.

I have learned so much with you all, I have learned that everybody wants to live on top of the mountain, without knowing that true happiness is obtained in the journey taken & the form used to reach the top of the hill.

I have learned that when a newborn baby holds, with its little hand, his father’s finger, it has trapped him for the rest of his life.

I have learned that a man has the right and obligation to look down at another man, only when that man needs help to get up from the ground.

Say always what you feel, not what you think. If I knew that today is the last time that that I am going to see you asleep, I would hug you with all my strength and I would pray to the Lord to let me be the guardian angel of your soul.

If I knew that these are the last moments to see you, I would say “I love you.”

There is always tomorrow, and life gives us another opportunity to do things right, but in case I am wrong, and today is all that is left to me, I would love to tell you how much I love you & that I will never forget you.

Tomorrow is never guaranteed to anyone, young or old. Today could be the last time to see your loved ones, which is why you mustn’t wait; do it today, in case tomorrow never arrives. I am sure you will be sorry you wasted the opportunity today to give a smile, a hug, a kiss, and that you were too busy to grant them their last wish.

Keep your loved ones near you; tell them in their ears and to their faces how much you need them and love them. Love them and treat them well; take your time to tell them “I am sorry,” “forgive me, “please,” “thank you,” and all those loving words you know.

Nobody will know you for your secret thought. Ask the Lord for wisdom and strength to express them.

Show your friends and loved ones how important they are to you.

Send this letter to those you love. If you don’t do it today…tomorrow will be like yesterday, and if you never do it, it doesn’t matter either, the moment to do it is now.

For you, with much love,

Your Friend,

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

‘Losar’

“Traditionally, we Tibetans would celebrate Losar — or the Tibetan New Year — through dancing, music, feasts, praying in monasteries or visiting relatives and friends. However, since 2008, Tibetans around the world have stopped celebrating the holiday, as the Chinese government violently cracks down on Tibetans protesting against Chinese repression,” Regional Tibetan Youth Congress (RTYC) Taiwan vice president Tennamda said. “It is also a tradition that we would not celebrate Losar if someone in the family passes away, and we consider those Tibetans who sacrificed their lives as our own brothers and sisters.”

Claudio Abbado (26 June 1933 – 20 January 2014)