The Wall Street Journal is reporting a relatively happy ending to a terrorist attack. Officials reportedly believe that the man who died after being sucked out of a Somali passenger jet in midair on Monday was the man who set off the explosion. He succeeded only in blowing himself out of the plane. Problem solved.
Continue reading “Alleged Terrorist “Deplanes” After Blowing Hole Through Side of Airbus in Somalia”
It seems like our allies in Egypt and Turkey have a particular intolerance for cartoonists and satirists in their parallel crackdowns on free speech. In Turkey, the Miss Turkey was arrested for repeating a satirical comparison of President Erdogan to Gollum. In Egypt, a teenager was jailed for cartoons of Muhammad and a leading businessman was attacked for a cartoon of Micky Mouse with a beard. Then there was the three-year sentence given Amr Nohan, a 22-year-old law graduate for posting a Facebook image of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi with Mickey Mouse-style cartoon ears (shown left). Now a leading cartoonist Islam Gawish, 26, has been arrested in Egypt by the hyper sensitive el-Sisi government.
Continue reading “Leading Egyptian Cartoonist Arrested After Satirizing Ally Of President El-Sisi”
We have another close ally this month attacking the most fundamental principles of freedom of religion. While Kuwait was only too happy to see non-Muslim U.S. troops fight (right) and die to save its country from the Iraqi invasion, it announced a few days ago that it would not allow new churches to be built in the country as an insult to Islam and Sharia law.
Continue reading “Kuwaiti Legislators Move To Ban Construction of New Churches As Insult To Islam”
There was a very disturbing scene at Rome’s famous Capitoline Museum recently during a joint press conference between Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Italian Premeir Matteo Renzi. The museum had nude sculptures covered up so not to insult the Islamic sensibilities of Rouhani and his staff. One of the statues was the “Capitoline Venus,” a Roman copy of a legendary fourth century B.C. work by Praxiteles. Ironically, it is piece that symbolized the modesty of Venus in covering up after a bath. Not modest enough, it appears, for the Iranians.
Continue reading “Roman Museum Covers Up Nude Works To Avoid Insulting Iranian President”
We have followed the rapid decline of civil liberties under the authoritarian rule Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the past few years as well as his empowering of Islamic parties in the once secular state. This trend was evident recently with the rounding up of dozens of professors for simply signing a petition denouncing military operations against Kurds in the south-east of the country. Now, his government has announced that it will seek life sentences for two journalists who reported on the gun smuggling operations of Turkey to Syria. Erdoğan has been gradually arresting or threatening the dwindling number of independent journalists in Turkey and this prosecution may succeed in forcing the remaining reporters into silence or living in exile.
Stories of this kind leave me baffled. With all of the money and harsh measures imposed on the public by the Transportation Security Administration, the TSA itself seems barely accountable for continual stories of bungling and gross negligence. Recently, it was revealed that an international flight was allowed to simply go directly from the aircraft to the streets without passing through customs. People were horrified. Now it has happened again with American Airlines Flight 1223 from Cancun, Mexico and one passenger even alerted the TSA at the time and was told to just leave with the rest of the passengers from Mexico. The only reassuring thought is that any drug mule or terrorist would have assumed that this was a trick since no one is this dumb.
Continue reading “Kennedy Airport Allows Another International Flight To Skip Customs”
I have long admired Bill Gates for his incredible philanthropy around the world. It is for that reason that I was astonished by the news that Gates had sold the rights to a huge number of photos to the Visual China Group. The sale will now placed images from Tiananmen Square, including the iconic Tank Man photo, in the hands of the Chinese who hope to bury them and any memory of the uprising. The sale of Gates’ Corbis likely made a tidy profit but it is a political bonanza for the censors of the Chinese government.
Even in our crime infested world, there is occasionally a crime that takes your breath away. In Sweden, this guy took that distinction when he combined the pickpocketing of an elderly woman and an assault on another woman with children who tried to help her. He punched the mother in front of her children and spat on her.
By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
An open letter to Vladimir Putin, President of Russia
President Putin,
As you are certainly aware, a great controversy is roiling here in the United States where a former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, maintained, diverted, and in some cases destroyed official email correspondence associated with her duties. She hosted these records on a personal home-brew email server maintained under her control. We are encountering difficulty obtaining these records and we ask for your assistance.
Continue reading “Mr. Putin, Please Release Hillary Clinton’s Email”
Iran’s idea of an election has always been something of a curiosity. No more so than this week. The Guardian Council, an unelected group composed of Muslim clerics and hardliners, disqualified all but 30 of the 3,000 reform candidates seeking to appear on ballots for the parliamentary elections. Six of the 12 members of the Council are clerics selected by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Continue reading “Iranian Council Disqualifies Virtually All Reformers From Running For Office”
We recently discussed the latest authoritarian move by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in rounding up dozens of academics who signed a peace petition. The move was denounced throughout the world, but Erdogan is clearly unmoved. Now, those who objected to the crackdown and loss of the freedom of speech are themselves being targeted by the government. Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu is facing arrest after saying that “Academics who express their opinions have been detained one by one on instructions given by a so-called dictator.” Prosecutors launched an investigation into Kilicdaroglu’s comments on charges of “openly insulting the president.”
There is a truly horrific story out of Pakistan that reveals the sheer insanity that can be instilled in an entire community through religious orthodoxy. News reports indicate that Mohammad Anwar, 15, cut off his own hand after being told that he had committed blasphemy by failing to pray enough. His act was reportedly celebrated by the community as a wonderful testament to his Islamic faith.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian rule is again evident this week with the rounding up of dozens of professors for simply signing a petition denouncing military operations against Kurds in the south-east of the country. The signatories of the petition included famous linguist Noam Chomsky and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Erdoğan responded angrily to the letter, which was denounced as “terror propaganda” and he called on the judiciary to act against their alleged treachery. Supporters of Erdoğan and nationalist students have been intimidating academics by marking their doors and threatening professors who signed the petition calling for peace.
There is an interesting ruling out of Germany where the country’s highest court declared Facebook’s “friend finder” feature to be unlawful as a deceptive marketing practice. The case was filed by the Federation of German Consumer Organisations (VZBV).
China has conducted another round up of human rights lawyers, including Wang Yu, the country’s most prominent woman human rights lawyer. Adding an Orwellian element to this latest outrage was China’s state media which accused Wang last year of “blabbering about the rule of law and human rights.” Wang and her colleagues have long been symbols of courage in the face of authoritarian rule, including prior detentions designed to scare them into silence.