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Post your news articles and a link to where you found them.
Iraqi men spending 6+ hours a day searching gay chatrooms
Sitting on the floor, wearing traditional Islamic clothes and holding an old notebook, Abu Hamizi, 22, spends at least six hours a day searching internet chatrooms linked to gay websites. He is not looking for new friends, but for victims."It is the easiest way to find those people who are destroying Islam and who want to dirty the reputation we took centuries to build up," he said. When he finds them, Hamizi arranges for them to be attacked and sometimes killed.
Hamizi, a computer science graduate, is at the cutting edge of a new wave of violence against gay men in Iraq. Made up of hardline extremists, Hamizi's group and others like it are believed to be responsible for the deaths of more than 130 gay Iraqi men since the beginning of the year alone.
The deputy leader of the group, which is based in Baghdad, explained its campaign using a stream of homophobic invective. "Animals deserve more pity than the dirty people who practise such sexual depraved acts," he told the Observer. "We make sure they know why they are being held and give them the chance to ask God's forgiveness before they are killed."
The violence against Iraqi gays is a key test of the government's ability to protect vulnerable minority groups after the Americans have gone.
Dr Toby Dodge, of London University's Queen Mary College, believes that the violence may be a consequence of the success of the government of Nouri al-Maliki. "Militia groups whose raison d'être was security in their communities are seeing that function now fulfilled by the police. So their focus has shifted to the moral and cultural sphere, reverting to classic Islamist tactics of policing moral boundaries," Dodge said.
Homosexuality was not criminalised under Saddam Hussein – indeed Iraq in the 1960s and 1970s was known for its relatively liberated gay scene. Violence against gays started in the aftermath of the invasion in 2003. Since 2004, according to Ali Hali, chairman of the Iraqi LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) group, a London-based human-rights group, a total of 680 have died in Iraq, with at least 70 of those in the past five months. The group believes the figures may be higher, as most cases involving married men are not reported. Seven victims were women. According to Hali, Iraq has become "the worst place for homosexuals on Earth".
The killings are brutal, with victims ritually tortured. Azhar al-Saeed's son was one. "He didn't follow what Islamic doctrine tells but he was a good son," she said. "Three days after his kidnapping, I found a note on my door with blood spread over it and a message saying it was my son's purified blood and telling me where to find his body."
She went with police to find her son's remains. "We found his body with signs of torture, his anus filled with glue and without his genitals," she said. "I will carry this image with me until my dying day."
Police officers interviewed by the Observer said the killings were not aimed at gays but were isolated remnants of the sectarian violence that racked the country between 2005 and 2006. Hamizi's group, however, boasts that two people a day are chosen to be "investigated" in Baghdad. The group claims that local tribes are involved in homophobic attacks, choosing members to hunt down the victims. In some areas, a list of names is posted at restaurants and food shops.
The roommate of Haydar, 26, was kidnapped and killed three months ago in Baghdad. After Haydar contacted the last person his friend had been chatting with on the net, he found a letter on his front door alerting him "about the dangers of behaving against Islamic rules". Haydar plans to flee to Amman, the Jordanian capital. "I have… to run away before I suffer the same fate," he said.
According to Human Rights Watch, the Shia militia known as the Mahdi army may be among the militants implicated in the violence, particularly in the northern part of Baghdad known as Sadr City. There are reports that Mahdi army militias are harassing young men simply for wearing "western fashions".
A Ministry of Interior spokesperson, Abdul-Karim Khalaf, denied allegations of police collaboration. "The Iraqi police exists to protect all Iraqis, whatever their sexual persuasion," he said.
Hashim, another victim of violence by extremists, was attacked on Abu Nawas Street. Famous for its restaurants and bars, the street has become a symbol of the relative progress made in Baghdad. But it was where Hashim was set on by four men, had a finger cut off and was badly beaten. His assailants left a note warning that he had one month to marry and have "a traditional life" or die.
"Since that day I have not left my home. I'm too scared and don't have money to run away," Hashim said.
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Hashim should rent his anus to homeless people on the street for money. Then he could run away.
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SWORD
A Johns Hopkins University student armed with a samurai sword killed a man who broke into the garage of his off-campus residence early Tuesday, a Baltimore police spokesman said.According to preliminary reports, a resident of the 300 block of E. University Parkway called police about a suspicious person, department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said. An off-duty officer responded about 1:20 a.m. to the area with university security, according to Guglielmi. They heard shouts and screams from a neighboring house and found the suspected burglar suffering from a nearly severed hand and lacerations to his upper body, he said.
The suspect was pronounced dead at the scene.
The student told police that he heard a commotion in the house and went downstairs armed with a samurai sword, Guglielmi said. He saw the side door to the garage had been pried open and found a man inside, who lunged at the student.
Detectives were still interviewing the student and his three roommates Tuesday morning, Guglielmi said. Burglars had already stolen two laptops and a Sony PlayStation from the student's home Monday, according to Guglielmi.
Dennis O'Shea, a spokesman for Johns Hopkins, said all four residents of the house are undergraduate students at the university.
The suspected burglar, whose name was not released pending notification of next of kin, had prior convictions for breaking and entering and had just been released Saturday from a Baltimore County facility, Guglielmi said.
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Last week, attorneys for special ed student Marshawn Pitts released the security video, which shows Pitts being beaten by Christopher Lloyd, a police officer in Dolton, Illinois, who was working security at [Academy for Learning High School]. Pitts’ attorneys say Lloyd administered the beating because Pitts hadn’t tucked in his shirt, as required by the school’s dress code.
When the video first emerged last week, the Dolton police department refused to release Lloyd’s name. With good reason. Lloyd is in jail in Indiana. He was arrested last month for raping an Indiana woman at knife point. He had also threatened the woman weeks earlier, but apparently wasn’t arrested or disciplined for it.
But it gets worse. Lloyd was also fired last year from another suburban Chicago police department . . . for killing his ex-wife’s husband in front of their children. The town of Robbins fired Lloyd after the February 2008 shooting, but Chicago police bought Lloyd’s claim that the shooting was self-defense, so he was never charged. That enabled Lloyd to find work at the Dalton police department 11 months later.
According to a lawsuit filed by Lloyd’s ex-wife, autopsy reports contradict the police investigation. The autopsy shows that Lloyd shot the man 24 times. When contacted by the Chicago Tribune, a spokesman from Chicago PD said details of the department’s investigation of the shooting “could not immediately be found.”
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Inside France's secret war
For 40 years, the French government has been fighting a secret war in Africa, hidden not only from its people, but from the world. It has led the French to slaughter democrats, install dictator after dictator – and to fund and fuel the most vicious genocide since the Nazis. Today, this war is so violent that thousands are fleeing across the border from the Central African Republic into Darfur – seeking sanctuary in the world's most notorious killing fields.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/inside-frances-secret-war-396062.html -
thats nothing, you should try the conspiracies they're unveiling in Prisonbreak.
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Extraordinary scene shows chimps grieving
October 29, 2009 09:00am
chimps show genuine grief
RAW GRIEF: Chimpanzees line up to watch as Dorothy, who died of heart failure, is wheeled away. Picture: Monica Szczupider
http://www.news.com.au/common/imagedata/0,,7112641,00.jpg
UNITED in what appears to be deep and profound grief, more than a dozen chimpanzees stand in silence as the body of one of their own is wheeled past.
This extraordinary scene took place at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Centre in Cameroon, west Africa, when a chimp named Dorothy, who was in her late 40s, died of heart failure.
Her death seemed to have left her fellow chimpanzees stricken by sorrow.
Gallery: Chimpanzees show grief, human emotions
As they wrapped their arms around each other in a gesture of solidarity, Dorothy's keeper gently settled her into the wheelbarrow which carried her to her final resting place - but not before a final affectionate stroke of her forehead.
Villagers serve as "care-givers" to the chimps, all orphans whose mothers were killed in the illegal bush-meat trade.
Until recently, describing scenes such as this in terms of human emotions such as "grief" would have been dismissed by scientists as naive anthropomorphising.
But a growing body of evidence has suggested that "higher" emotions - such as grieving for a loved one and even a deep understanding of what death is - may not just be the preserve of our species.
Chimpanzees - as revealed in November's National Geographic magazine - and closely related bonobos maintain hugely complex social networks, largely held together by sex and grooming. They have often been observed apparently grieving for lost family and tribe members by entering a period of quiet mourning, showing subdued emotions and behaviour.
And such complex emotions are not the preserve of primates or even mammals.
University of Colorado ethologist Dr Marc Bekoff this month reported evidence that magpies not only appeared to grieve but they carry out something akin to a funeral ritual.
In one instance, four magpies took it in turns to approach another's corpse. Two flew off and returned with a piece of grass, which they laid down by the corpse. The birds then stood vigil.
But the most famous non-human death rituals are those of elephants which will often spend days guarding a dead body, gently prodding the remains with their trunks and giving the impression of being lost in grief. -
yeah.. beings caring about each other? crazy shit
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I wasn't going that way, wasn't being serious. Btw I heard elephants actually have their own "graveyards" where they go to die. Also I saw some videos of elephants drawing some pretty elaborate pics. Elephants are awesome.
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As they wrapped their arms around each other in a gesture of solidarity, Dorothy's keeper gently settled her into the wheelbarrow which carried her to her final resting place - but not before a final affectionate stroke of her forehead.
When I die this is exactly how I want to go.
It shall go in my will.
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when i die, i want my tombstone to read "Break yo self Riverside motheruckers, i got these cheeseburgers".
that France thing is fucked up. but i have a feeling all the old great powers (and new great powers) have dark secrets like that. the world is a fucked up place. -
BEIRUT – An unassuming college math student has become an unlikely hero to many in Iran for daring to criticize the country's most powerful man to his face.
http://d.yimg.com/a/p/ap/20091105/capt.45fa077eccb34d0888550c0d5118b078.iran_challenging_khamenei_vah106.jpg?x=213&y=156&xc=1&yc=1&wc=410&hc=300&q=85&sig=gFMydBpgAnjcyZ1swh1cHQ--
Mahmoud Vahidnia has received an outpouring of support from government opponents for the challenge — unprecedented in a country where insulting supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is a crime punishable by prison.
Perhaps most surprising, the young math whiz has so far suffered no repercussions from the confrontation at a question-and-answer session between Khamenei and students at Tehran's Sharif Technical University.
In fact, Iran's clerical leadership appears to be touting the incident as a sign of its tolerance — so much so that some Iranians at first believed the 20-minute exchange was staged by the government, though opposition commentators are now convinced Vahidnia was the real thing.
Details of the encounter were reported on the state news agency IRNA and in a pro-government newspaper, Keyhan, which gave its account with a headline reading, "The revolutionary leader's fatherly response to critical youth." Even Khamenei's official Web site mentioned the incident.
Still some of those in attendance at the Oct. 28 forum say Khamenei appeared taken aback by the questioning and left the meeting early, according to commentary posted on pro-reform Web sites.
The session began with a speech in which Khamenei told the students the "biggest crime" was to question the results of the June 12 presidential election that returned hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. Khamenei himself declared Ahmadinejad the victor despite opposition claims of widespread fraud.
After the speech, Vahidnia raised his hand, then for 20 minutes he criticized the Iranian leader over the fierce crackdown on postelection protests, in which the opposition says 69 people were killed and thousands were arrested.
In brief excerpts broadcast on state TV, the thin, bespectacled Vahidnia was shown standing behind a podium, gesturing at times for emphasis.
"I don't know why in this country it's not allowed to make any kind of criticism of you," said the student, wearing a long-sleeved blue polo shirt and appearing calm.
"In the past three to five years that I have been reading newspapers, I have seen no criticism of you, not even by the Assembly of Experts, whose duty is to criticize and supervise the performance of the leader," he said, referring to the clerical body that chooses the country's supreme leader.
Khamenei countered, "We welcome criticism. We never said not to criticize us. ... There's plenty of criticism that I receive," according to accounts in state media and on opposition Web sites.
The boldness of Vahidnia's comments underlines how Iran's postelection turmoil has undermined the once rock-solid taboo against challenging the supreme leader. During demonstrations, young protesters have frequently chanted "Death to the dictator" — referring to Khamenei — and even "Khamenei is a murderer." Several high-ranking pro-opposition clerics have also been openly critical.
The supreme leader stands at the top of the hierarchy of Iran's clerical rulers, and his word is supposed to be final on political issues. Scores of Iranian writers, bloggers and academics have been jailed for writing what authorities have deemed as insults to Khamenei.
But so far Vahidnia has been spared. The president of Sharif University even defended the student, saying he spoke within the law.
The incident has propelled the soft-spoken man in his early 20s to national prominence and inspired widespread support on the Web.
The night of the encounter, fellow students gathered, shouting, "God is great" and "death to the dictator" in support of their colleague, according to video footage posted on pro-reform Web sites.
"Vahidnia showed a new atmosphere which is the true characteristic of the Iranian people," Ataollah Mohajerani, a former pro-reform Cabinet minister, wrote on his Web site. "If from now on in gatherings in the presence of the supreme leader one finds the courage to get up and speak in defense of justice and right, the climate of tyranny will suffocate."
Speaking to The Associated Press, Mohajerani dismissed the idea that Vahidnia could have been planted by authorities, but said the state was using the incident to try to paint itself in a better light.
"Khamenei wants to show that the leader is totally prepared to face criticism," Mohajerani said in a telephone interview from London.
During the face-to-face exchange, Vahidnia also raised allegations of abuse of imprisoned opposition protesters.
"You, who have the role of a father, when you deal with your opponents in such a manner, your subordinates will likely behave similarly, as we have seen in the prisons," he told Khamenei, referring to the reports of torture and rape.
He also criticized state-run Iranian television and radio for their depiction of the protests as the work of troublemakers and pawns of Iran's foreign enemies. "Do you think radio and television have portrayed the recent events accurately or broadcast a caricature-type image of them?" he asked.
The supreme leader countered that he had his own criticisms of state media, including their failure to give enough coverage to the government's "positive achievements."
"Don't assume that because I appoint the head of state television, they bring all their programs to me for approval," the Iranian leader said, adding that state broadcasts of the situation in the country were "incomplete."
Vahidnia, a gold medalist at the country's National Math Olympics two years ago, told the pro-opposition Alef Web site that officials at first barred him from speaking, but Khamenei apparently allowed him to go ahead. He said he was interrupted several times by the event's moderator who insisted they were out of time. Vahidnia could not be reached for further comment.
The evening of the encounter, state television aired excerpts of Khamenei's speech but did not show Vahidnia or mention the exchange. Days later, however, it ran a report denying rumors he had been arrested and showed an image of him at the gathering.
In Italy, at least two parliament members have issued calls for their government to offer Vahidnia asylum if necessary.
Lawmaker Benedetto Della Vedova called the student a symbol of the "demands for change and modernity" in Iran. Another parliament deputy, Angelo Bonelli, praised Vahidnia's "courage" and urged political leaders to stand by his "fight for rights and democracy."
Vahidnia's comments were so brazen and unprecedented that many Iranians thought it was staged by the government.
"I thought it was a hoax, to show us that we have freedom here," said one young Iranian woman who has participated in the opposition demonstrations. She asked not to be identified for fear of getting into trouble with authorities.
"But now that it looks like it was real, I think it's a huge deal," she said. "Never before has anyone had the courage to do such a thing." -
276 a day
StoryBy now you will have heard of Major Nidal Malak Hasan, the US Army psychiatrist who shot 13 of his colleagues dead and wounded 31 inside the army's largest base, Fort Hood in Texas, last Thursday.
Taryale Petter, John Herman, Jason Rodriques and Marcus Gonzalez are names you may not know.
Taryale was only 15 years old. Early on Friday morning, aboard his Philadelphia school bus, he pulled a handgun from his bag and shot another child. On average guns kill or wound 276 people every day in America.
Hermann, a Minnesota cop, on Tuesday shot dead a man who ran over a plastic traffic cone in a car park.
On Friday morning, Rodriquez, 40, walked into the Florida engineering consultancy from which he had been sacked and opened fire, killing a young father and wounding five others.
Gonzalez, 29, who was jilted in love, shot dead four people on Wednesday in the North Carolina town that inspired fictitious Mayberry – the almost crime-free, one-traffic-light town, inspired by the 1960s Andy Griffith Show.
There are more, a lot more, from the past week. Such as Robert Appointee who, on Sunday, the opening day of the Maine deer-hunting season, attached a rope to his rifle and tried to haul it up to his treetop hideaway. He shot himself.
Or poor Michelle Valentine of Rhode Island who, this week, distraught over a broken love affair, held a gun to her head. When she wouldn't put it down, the police shot her.
Or New York policeman James Pileggi, who, on Thursday night, was showing his new laser-guided pistol to his best friend. It went off. His best friend died.
I could go on, of course. Another week of guns and blood across America and before a public and polity so astonishingly impervious to the carnage that it is treated almost as if it were measles.
After 15-year-old Alex Bolar was shot and killed while playing in a park near his Memphis school on Wednesday, the Reverend Joe Hunter, who helps teens in the neighbourhood, railed against the deafness.
“Give me a break,” Hunter said. “If we can't get in an uproar about that, what can we get in an uproar about?"
On average, guns kill or wound 276 people every day in America. Of those shot, about 75 adults and nine children die.
That adds up to just over 100,000 victims of gun violence a year. The rate of firearm murders in the United States is about 16 times that in Australia and 26 times that in Britain.
In 2000, Britain's Home Office published a study that compared murder rates in the world's capital cities. Canberra had 0.64 homicides per 100,000 people. London had three times that rate. Washington, DC's, murder rate was 93 times that of Canberra's.
Martin Bryant was the Tasmanian misfit who, on an April afternoon in 1996, used two military-style assault rifles to take the lives of 35 people in eight, dreadful minutes.
To his lasting credit, the then newly elected prime minister, John Howard, seized the moment and stared down the gun lobby to give Australia one of the tightest sets of gun ownership laws in the world. He declared at the time: ''I hate guns. One of the things I don't admire about America is their slavish love of guns ... We do not want the American disease imported into Australia."
Australia endured 11 mass shootings in the decade leading to the day Bryant ran amok. There have been none since.
It is, of course, wishful thinking to expect that an American president could, or would want, to intervene in the way Howard did to curtail gun ownership.
Emboldened by the Second Amendment which, they contend, still protects their right to bear arms, many Americans, in the words of one of their greater jurists, Joseph Story, consider gun ownership to be the palladium of the liberties of the republic.
Nevertheless, past presidents and the Congress have certainly tried to reduce the insanely high level of gun violence; the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King led to bans on mail order guns; the 1981 shootings of Ronald Reagan and his press secretary James Brady spawned the criminal background check and cooling-off period for handgun buyers and, when Bill Clinton became president, 20 types of assault rifles were banned.
Given the red-necked rage of the National Rifle Association whenever somebody tries to block the sieve of US gun law - and the many politicians beholden to the association's millions of dollars in funding - the changes achieved in the past are no small thing.
Just last Thursday, as the deranged Hasan pulled out his gun in Fort Hood, the leadership of America's biggest anti-gun lobby, The Brady Campaign, happened to be meeting in Washington to work how to counter the gun lobby's latest campaign to overturn a law that bans mentally incompetent and incapacitated military veterans from owning guns. There are 116,000 of them. Hasan will be one more.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is one of the very few leading politicians who has stood up to the National Rifle Association. He may be hated for it, but Bloomberg has made it very hard to own a handgun legally in New York.
New York police frisk hundreds of thousands of people annually to enforce his law. In September, Bloomberg sent out undercover investigators with hidden cameras, to prove how easy it was for people who would fail a background check for gun ownership to simply roll up to weekend gun shows in other states and buy whatever weapon they wanted.
When the undercover agents warned they wouldn't pass a background check, 19 out of 30 gun sellers took their money anyway and handed over the guns. One thing the National Rifle Association can't explain is why New York's murder rate is on track this year to dip below 500 - the lowest since 1963, when reliable figures became available. In 1990, the bloodiest year in the city's history, there were 2245 murders.
However Bloomberg can't change America's relationship with guns by himself. Will President Barack Obama help?
The likelihood, for now, is not much. Consumed by two wars, recession, and health care, there is no stomach within the Obama Administration to open up a new front with opponents as rabid as the US gun lobby.
During his campaign for the presidency, Obama promised to restore a federal ban on several of the most lethal semi-automatic assault rifles. A bill to close the gun-show loophole is stalled in Congress.
When Newsweek put questions to the White House in April about what had happened to gun law reform, it was told by White House spokesman Ben LaBolt: "There isn't support in Congress for such a ban at this time."
LaBolt said: "The President supports the Second Amendment, respects the tradition of gun ownership in this country, and he believes we can take commonsense steps to keep our streets safe."
He pointed to $US2 billion in new funding for state and local law enforcement in the stimulus package.
It doesn't help that Hasan simply walked into the Guns Galore shop in Killeen, Texas, and bought the gun he used, an FN Herstal Five-seveN, quite legally. According to the website, they sell for about $US1000 and are about the most murderous handgun it is possible to buy, designed to shred body armour and favoured by the Mexican drug cartels.
The US anti-gun lobby has been vocal for several years about why these weapons - marketed by the gun industry as elevating the power of a handgun to a high-powered rifle - should be banned.
The national anti-gun Violence Policy Centre was the most vocal and began a long report it published last year into why the weapons should be stopped, with a quote from San Jose gun dealer Jim Reed: "These new guns generate the incentive for the consumer to be the first among his buddies to own the 'biggest and the baddest' handgun on the market, which computes into sales ... The consumer who buys the big boomers will continue to purchase the new big calibres as long as manufacturers keep building them. This is good for business!"
Bernard Lagan is an Australian journalist living in New York.
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Aren't you guys worried about getting shot?
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where i live you don't get shot you get shot
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Copypasta'd from ceo:
but seriously to answer your question fox i think people are largely unaware of how much gun violence goes on. its kind of a 'itll never happen to me' thing
"If they had gun this not happen" -
"He has never been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, a Marine Corps spokesman said."
"Online photo galleries depict him flexing big muscles wearing little clothing."
lawl. -
*An exterior surveillance video of Tuesday's chase captured the two men in motion, said Tampa Police Department spokeswoman Laura McElroy:
"You see a very short, small man running, and an enormous, large muscular man chasing after him."*
I want to see that video.
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Post pic of you with large muscles and little clothing!
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thats more then minium wage! fucking a, screw krogers, i wanna be a begger!
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http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/0,39029552,49305387,00.htm
Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he's from the future -
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