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Three U.S. service members were killed Monday in fighting in southern Afghanistan, underscoring the unrelenting violence in the Taliban heartland as the Obama administration steps up efforts to rout the insurgents.
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L'"attaque meurtrière" a été perpétrée lundi "contre des militaires français qui patrouillaient avec une section de l'armée nationale afghane dans la vallée d'Alasay, au nord-est de Kaboul", a déclaré le président français Nicolas Sarkozy dans un communiqué. "Un sous-officier a payé de sa vie l'engagement de la France au service de la paix et de la sécurité du peuple afghan, tandis qu'un officier a été très grièvement blessé", a poursuivi Nicolas Sarkozy, en s'associant à "la douleur de leurs familles et de leurs proches" et en faisant part de sa "vive émotion".
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A video about Google and privacy… -
In these controls, known as “unmotivated mosque checks,” the police are not seeking any specific person or investigating any particular crime. Rather, they are acting under a 2003 state law that empowers them to question and search individuals in public places regardless of any suspicion of wrongdoing in the interest of preventing crimes of "grave and international concern."
“The police say they’re protecting us from terrorists,” said Avni Altiner, regional head of the umbrella Muslim advocacy organization Shura. “But we don’t feel protected. We feel discriminated against and degraded.”
Daily Archives: 01/12/2010
Abu Dhabi: Member of Royal family accused of torture acquitted
This marvellous Islamic justice…
A court in Abu Dhabi acquitted Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, a member of the UAE royal family accused of beating an Afghan grain trader in 2004. The Sheikh claimed he was drugged by two other men, and therefore unaware of his actions, which included torturing the man with electric prods, driving over him and raping him.Thee men who released the tape have been given five years in jail.
via Gateway Pundit.
“we deny that anything happened as it was prooved by this videotape…”
The poor "drugged" sadistic Sheikh
Yeah, right…
The defense is laughable, if it weren’t for the poor tortured man:
[The lawyer] has also stated that the tribunal “has accepted our defense that supported that the Sheikh was under the influence of drugs which had made him unconscious of his acts“.
Well, in the video we can see him acting quite consciously, can’t we?
The defense had supported that the Sheikh issa had been drugged by two men, the Lebanese-American Ghassanet Bassam Nabulsi and his brother, that had recorded the violences to make him speak.
Always the others are at fault. Poor sadistic sheik, who tortured brutally a poor Afghan man because others had let him unconscious by drugging him, accused so unjustly in a video which his own lawyer said it “prooved” the tortures! Splendid.
AQIM: 20-day dayline for French hostage’s life
What will they ask for the three Spanish volunteers also in their power?
Al-Qaida’s North Africa offshoot demanded the release of four of its members in exchange for a French hostage it kidnapped two months ago, in a message posted on militant Web sites Monday that gave a 20 day deadline.Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb said that their only condition for the freeing of Pierre Camatte is the release of four members of the group arrested by Mali several months ago.
“We give France and Mali 20 days from the date of issuing this statement to respond to our legitimate demand otherwise the two governments will be fully responsible for the French hostage’s life,” it said in a statement dated Sunday.
The group announced last month its kidnapping of Camatte in Mali Nov. 25 and three Spaniards in Mauritania five days later.
… The group has not yet set conditions for the release of the three Spaniards who had been travelling at the tail end of a convoy distributing aid to poor villages along the coast of Mauritania when they were abducted.
In its earlier statement, the group said the kidnapping was in retaliation for “the Crusaders’ war against Muslims and Islam everywhere and the killing of innocent people and occupying their lands.”
http://teaandpolitics.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/aqim-the-kidnapped-volunteers-will-be-treated-according-to-islamic-law/
Portugal: Our Lady of Fatima’s sanctuary vandalised
Pope John Paul II's statue ouside Our Lady of Fatima sanctuary, vandalised
Our Lady of Fatima announced, in an official press release, its unhappiness after the building was vandalised on Sunday Jan 10th.
The responsibles of the sanctuary explain that, in this occasion, the four statues that are situated around the sanctuary of the Saint Trinity Church (Popes Paul VI, John Paul II and Pio XII and Bishop José Alves Correia da Silva) and the church building were vandalised with black graffitis, with words such as “Islam”, “Moon”, “Sun”, “Muslim” and “Mosque”.
“This morning, Jan 11th, we will begin the difficult removal of the inscriptions”, has said in a press release the speaker to Agência ECCLESIA.
“After acknowledging the vandalism on our church and being the authors unkown, the Sanctuary speaks publicly about our unhappiness and announces the matter is now in police’s hands”, concludes the press release.
via Fátima lamenta actos de vandalismo – Agência Ecclesia.
(via).
Portuguese authorities have remarked “this has been an isolated incident and that it seems that it wasn’t organised nor related to any organisation“. It would be helpful if, instead of speaking about what could or couldn’t be, they investigate first, then, when evidence is gathered and logical conclusions are reached, they speak.
It certainly can only be a very bad taste joke or some Islamic extremists Islamic peaceful guys who just didn’t have anything better to do.
Related: Our Lady of Fatima @ Wikipedia.
(Translation: T&P)
Yemen: President open to dialogue with al-Qaeda
Because speaking with terrorists always results well, hein? 
Yemen’s president said he is ready to talk to al Qaeda members who renounce violence, suggesting he could show them the same kind of leniency he has granted militants in the past despite US pressure to crack down on the terror group.Yemen is moving cautiously in the fight against al-Qaida, worried over a potential backlash in a country where anger at the US and extremism are widespread. Thousands of Yemenis are battle-hardened veterans of past “holy wars” in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and Iraq, and though most are not engaged in violence now they preserve a die-hard al Qaeda ideology.
“Any movement against al Qaeda will lead to the fall of the Yemeni regime,” warned Ali Mohammed Omar, a Yemeni who fought in Afghanistan from 1990-1992 and says he met Osama bin Laden twice during that time.
via Yemen’s president open to dialogue with al-Qaeda | Stuff.co.nz.
More Al-Qaeda “fighters” are arriving at Yemen, seen now as the “new Afghanistan:
In the gloomiest internal assessment of Yemen’s security yet, he said jihadis from across the Arab world are hiding in the lawless hills of Shabwa province where the so-called Christmas Day “underwear bomber” is thought to have been trained, its governor, Ali Hasan al-Ahmadi, said.
Meanwhile, the Yemeni teacher of Jihadi cleric Al-Awlaki is denying links with Pantybomber:
An influential Yemeni cleric on Monday denied having links with a Nigerian suspect of a foiled Christmas Day bombing attempt on a U.S. airliner or a U.S.-born Yemeni imam suspected of involvement in the attack, local News Yemen reported.
Sheikh Abdul-Majid al-Zindani, who was branded by the United States as “a global terrorist”, said he was never “a direct teacher” for Anwar al-Awalqi, a Yemeni-U.S. radical preacher who is a staunch supporter of jihad, or holy war, against the United States. Awalqi is believed to be hiding out with terrorists in southern mountainous areas of Yemen which saw recently a growing presence of al-Qaida terrorist group.
Yemeni official said Awalqi may have inspired Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian, to try to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day as it approaches Detroit. Abdulmuttallab told FBI that he was in Yemen six months before the attack. Later, Yemen’s offshoot of al-Qaida claimed responsibility for the attempt.
But this video from Al-Jazeera raises some other questions. In fact, Al Awalqi is from one of the most powerful tribes in the region and his father is one of the main advisors to Yemeni president. Will the Government try to imprison him, daring to arise the “wrath” of his family upon the Government?
Related: German FM Westerwelle has visited Yemen…
[He] was concerned that destablilization in Yemen could help fuel the spread of terrorism, the official said. Westerwelle has previously warned that Yemen is a sanctuary for terrorists.
Philippines: Grenade thrown at Jolo cathedral
Violence against non-Muslims (in this case Catholics) in the Philipines is daily. Normally they don’t get to the front pages of international MSM but the climate of tension, specially in Jolo area, is unstoppable. They even have their own terrorist groups, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and Abu Sayyaf. Of the foreign terrorist groups, Jemaah Islamiyah is the one who has seen its influence grow stronger these last years.
For the second time in three months, a grenade has exploded at the cathedral of the Vicariate Apostolic of Jolo in the southern Philippines. No one was injured in the blast, which took place before the first Sunday morning Mass, though some of the cathedral windows were shattered.While 81% of the nation’s 88.7 million people are Catholic, the Jolo area is heavily Muslim: fewer than 3% of the area’s 1 million residents are Catholic. Jolo’s previous ordinary, Bishop Benjamin D. de Jesus, was slain in front of the cathedral in 1997.
via Catholic Culture : Latest Headlines : Grenade thrown at Philippine cathedral.
Australia and Canada: More gang-rapes
Certainly no recent news:
When a number of teenage Australian girls were subjected to hours of sexual degradation during a spate of gang rapes in Sydney that occurred between 1998 and 2002, the perpetrators of these assaults framed their rationale in ethnic terms. The young victims were informed that they were “sluts” and “Aussie pigs” while they were being hunted down and abused.
So when I read this (via):
Two youths (who are described as “Middle Eastern”, an euphemism very broadly used in Australia to describe Muslims, as most of them come from the area) are wanted by police over the sexual assault of a teenage girl at a western Sydney shopping centre on Christmas Eve. …”The girl went with the males to a nearby shopping centre where she was taken to a fire stairwell in a car park on level seven,” police said in a statement.
And this:
In the first case of sexual assault in the New Year, the five men allegedly gang-raped the women in their early 20s in their hotel in downtown Toronto on New Year’s Day.They had met the two women at a New Year’s party in the city. At the end of the party at 3 a.m., the five men accompanied the women uninvited to their hotel in the heart of the city where they overpowered them and allegedly gang-raped them….. And they fled after the sexual assault.
But they were identified by the women from the photos taken at the event. When their pictures appeared on TV channels and in newspapers, the five men surrendered to police Wednesday.
I just think: this is far from over.
