There appears to be some sort of a deal concerning the Assad regime's chemical weapons stockpile in Syria, which is a nice bit of progress on the issue compared to where everyone was a week ago on the subject.
OTOH, just for levity's sake* Alex Jones authors a meme even a truly awful SF author might take issue with.
(*You mean he wasn't trying to be funny?)
...which is unfortunate, since these are your supposed tax dollars at work:
Tea party-backed Representatives Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Steve King (R-IA) on Saturday held a press conference in Egypt to thank the country’s military for overthrowing the elected government, and at one point even seemed to suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood had been behind the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.
In case you were wondering, this wasn't quite the case: Kommandant B. opines:
“We have seen the threat that the Muslim Brotherhood has posed here for the people in Egypt. We have seen the threat that the Muslim Brotherhood has posed around the world. We stand against this great evil. We are not for them. We remember who caused 9/11 in America. We remember who it was that killed 3,000 brave Americans. We have not forgotten.”
In fact, the 9/11 Commission determined that Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda terrorist network were responsible for orchestrating the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Following the attack, the Muslim Brotherhood “strongly condemned” the action.
Deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, who was a top Muslim Brotherhood leader at the time of the attacks, called them “a wrong act which we denounce regardless of its doer.”
Blaming the wrong guys may sound like a risky venture coming from three Congressthings with long-standing records for wackjobbery, but their targets (who, even if they ran Egypt into the ground during their one year in power still had nothing to do with 9/11. which was one of the points of this odd little press conference, right?), were convenient enough in the wake of the situation in Syra that they could hope no one took much notice or - more likely - that anyone paying attention was a fact-challenged Tea Party acolyte in the first place.
Unfortunately, everyone from Business Insider to the New York Times did notice. And when even Business Insider refers to a press conference as "surreal" and "bizarre", chances are that it was.
Earlier in the week, there was some degree of confusion as to whether CERN had actually discovered the Higgs Boson (or the "God particle", if you so choose); apparently, they did:
We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV. The outstanding performance of the LHC and ATLAS and the huge efforts of many people have brought us to this exciting stage,” said ATLAS experiment spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti, “but a little more time is needed to prepare these results for publication.”
"The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we’re seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” said CMS experiment spokesperson Joe Incandela. “The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks."
“It’s hard not to get excited by these results,” said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci. “ We stated last year that in 2012 we would either find a new Higgs-like particle or exclude the existence of the Standard Model Higgs. With all the necessary caution, it looks to me that we are at a branching point: the observation of this new particle indicates the path for the future towards a more detailed understanding of what we’re seeing in the data.”
(Also on Lurker)
In a letter dated Tuesday to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Abbott threatened to prosecute any of its monitors who step within 100 feet of a Texas polling place on Election Day. The threat came even though U.S. State Department officials earlier this year had invited the monitors to observe the election.
“If OSCE members want to learn more about our elections processes so they can improve their own democratic systems, we welcome the opportunity to discuss the measures Texas has implemented to protect the integrity of the elections,” Abbott wrote. “However, groups and individuals from outside the United States are not allowed to influence or interfere with the election process in Texas.”
We've seen this kind of nonsense before: Governor Goodhair took a pro-secessionist tone (even if he weaseled out of openly advocating it) himself a while ago when he was busy posing as a viable Presidential candidate (which he most certainly was not). If Abbott isn't following in Perry's footsteps in preparation for his own run for the Governor's mansion in Austin, I'd be surprised. He's certainly shoring up his credentials with the religious right and Solid South types. But considering that the ODIHR director seemed a little, well, perturbed by his threat, Abbott might want to rethink his tone before he causes one of the dumbest international incidents in history:
Ambassador Janez Lenarčič, the Director of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), expressed his grave concern today over the threat of criminal prosecution of OSCE/ODIHR election observers.
This threat, contained in an open letter from the Attorney General of Texas, is at odds with the established good co-operation between OSCE/ODIHR observers and state authorities across the United States, including in Texas, Lenarčič said, adding that it is also contrary to the country’s obligations as an OSCE participating State.
The ODIHR Director shared his concerns in a letter to United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“The threat of criminal sanctions against OSCE/ODIHR observers is unacceptable,” Lenarčič said. “The United States, like all countries in the OSCE, has an obligation to invite ODIHR observers to observe its elections.”
The ODIHR Director also stressed that any concerns or reports that the election observers intended to influence or interfere with the election process were groundless. He underlined that OSCE/ODIHR election observers adhere to all national laws and regulations, as well as a strict code of conduct.
“Our observers are required to remain strictly impartial and not to intervene in the voting process in any way,” Lenarčič said. “They are in the United States to observe these elections, not to interfere in them.”
So what, precisely, is Abbott going to do if ODIHR observers still want to go to Texas polling places despite his threat? Have them arrested for - what? Pollwatching without a license?
Maybe Texas does want to be considered part of the Third-World, after all.
Everybody knows that faith healers are - pretty much without exception - dangerous con artists. James Randi has exposed them as such for years (witness how he ate Peter Popoff's lunch in particular), and there are many more examples of these idiots convincing people that they have a special connection to God that the faithful can also tap into for the low, low price of a $100 contribution to their Ministry (or whatever horseshit each one is selling these days). It's bad enough when they scam people out of their hard-earned money. It's something else entirely when they give them advice that's liable to get them killed. Witness the following:
Dangerous cases of faith leaders who tell people with HIV to stop taking their life-saving drugs have been identified by African-led community groups in a number of locations across England.
Seven groups said there were instances of people being told by faith leaders they had been "healed" through prayer - and then pressured to stop taking antiretroviral medication, according to the charity African Health Policy Network (AHPN).
Cases were reported to have taken place in Finsbury Park, Tottenham, and Woolwich, in London, as well as in Manchester, Leeds and at a number of churches across the North West.
Think that's bad? As usual, it gets worse:
Last year AHPN said it believed the Synagogue Church Of All Nations (SCOAN), which has UK headquarters in Southwark, south London, may be one of those involved in such practices.
The church is headed by Pastor T B Joshua, who the Forbes richlist named as Nigeria's third richest clergyman.
SCOAN's website, which was set up in Lagos, Nigeria, now shows videos of people the church claims have been "cured" of HIV through prayer.
One video shows a woman Agnes Agnote visiting the church in Nigeria saying: "I am HIV positive. I went to the hospital and they confirmed it was HIV/Aids."
The video then shows Pastor Joshua blessing her, saying "everyone is healed".
It goes on to show Ms Agnote apparently showing a more recent medical report, with a narrator saying, "it clearly states that Agnes tested negative to HIV Aids".
Videos on the website also depict people being cured of "cancers" and "disabilities".
The church's British website now gives accounts of people reporting to be healed from conditions including arthritis and a lung blood clot after being a sprayed with "anointing water" by SCOAN in the UK.
It promotes a monthly "anointing water prayer line" in London "for any health issues" and advertises an "anointing sticker" tour of the UK and Ireland, which begins on Monday.
As usual with this glorified "evangelical" hoodoo bullshit, the goalposts can always be moved to the liking of the "healer's" particular beliefs (or what other people might refer to as "excuses for possible failure") :
Last year, when asked by the BBC if it claimed its pastors could cure HIV, SCOAN responded: "We are not the healer. God is the healer. Never a sickness God cannot heal. Never a disease God cannot cure."
But it added: "We don't ask people to stop taking medication. Doctors treat - God heals."
Apparently not through you guys, though. From another article on the phenomenon from last year:
At least three people in London with HIV have died after they stopped taking life saving drugs on the advice of their Evangelical Christian pastors.
The women died after attending churches in London where they were encouraged to stop taking the antiretroviral drugs in the belief that God would heal them, their friends and a leading HIV doctor said.
Responding to the BBC London investigation, Lord Fowler, the former health minister responsible for the famous Aids awareness campaign of the 1980s, condemned the practice.
"It's just wrong, bad advice that should be confronted," said the Tory peer, who chaired last month's House of Lords committee into HIV.
Jane Iwu, 48, from Newham, east London, described one case, saying: "I know of a friend who had been to a pastor. She told her to stop taking her medication - that God is a healer and has healed her."
"This lady believed it. She stopped taking her medication. She passed away," said Ms Iwu, who has HIV herself.
I'm sure we can all agree that Muammar Qaddafi was an irredeemable monster incapable of producing anything resembling a single humanitarian thought in his read and was incapable of alliance with anyone from the West, right? Apparently Dubya thought otherwise according to a new Human Rights Watch report:
When rebel forces overtook Tripoli in August 2011, prison doors were opened and office
files exposed, revealing startling new information about Libya’s relations with other
countries. One such revelation, documented in this report, is the degree of involvement of
the United States government under the Bush administration in the arrest of opponents of
the former Libyan Leader, Muammar Gaddafi, living abroad, the subsequent torture and
other ill-treatment of many of them in US custody, and their forced transfer to back to Libya.
The United States played the most extensive role in the abuses, but other countries,
notably the United Kingdom, were also involved.
This is an important chapter in the larger story of the secret and abusive US detention
program established under the government of George W. Bush after the September 11,
2001 attacks, and the rendition of individuals to countries with known records of torture.
But Qaddafi became our new bestest buddy ever in northern Africa by then, which means it's okay. Not like those murderous scumbags in Syria, though. Or maybe not:
In 2002, the United States reportedly transferred Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen, to Syria after having detained him in New York as he was en route from Tunisia to Montreal. On November 4 in Ottawa, Arar publicly asserted that, while held in Syrian prisons for 10 months, he was repeatedly tortured by being whipped with a thick electric cable and threatened with electric shocks. Human Rights Watch and other concerned groups are pressing the U.S. government to investigate Mr. Arar's case and the larger category of so-called "extraordinary renditions."
Let's face it; the first thing that disappears when a great power seeks allies among its former enemies is any sort of "human rights abuses" those former enemies committed in the past. It's just like members of the Politburo disappearing from Kremlin reviewing stand photos after a purge, except that these victims are far more liable to disappear off the map along with the old recriminations.
Some sort of unpleasantly worded "congratulations" needs to go out to publicity-seeking freak "Reverend" Terry Jones; not only did he and fellow half-wit Sam Bacile suceed in riling up a hornet's nest of red meat-seeking religious fanatics (different religion, same lack of anything resembling thought or self-reflection on their actions), but he managed to get a US Ambassador and three of other American citizens killed in the process.
And his response? Pretty much what you'd expect from such a thorough pantload:
"When we do our activities, when we raise our awareness of the radical element of Islam, we are posing those people absolutely no danger," We are, perhaps, insulting some people, but just because you are insulted, it gives you no right to break into someone's house, go into his yard, kill him and destroy his property. So we should by no means excuse their activities."
Okay. Let's see, now: you and Bacile intentionally publicized a "movie" that's little more than an attempt to piss off an entire religion and incite certain extremists found in that religion to violence in order to prove the bizarre point that you could actually do it in the first place.
Good going on that, fuckhead. Mission accomplished. Problem is, you actually got people killed, and the possibility remains that more are to follow if any other nuts get lucky like they did in Benghazi with the US Consulate.
I'm sure that a sorry waste of skin like Jones - who was headed for well-deserved obscurity after his previous threat to publically burn copies of the Koran (in order to - surprise, surprise! - incite people to violence in order to prove that they're violent) is getting all of this free publicity for his Florida "ministry". But considering that this is same creep who also had his followers hang an effigy of Barack Obama (for all the usual bullshit reasons, as you might guess) in front of their Gainesville, Florida headquarters in July without a trace of irony in a region where racially motivated lynchings were once commonplace, what'd you expect from him? Forethought, perhaps?
The alleged killing spree on Wednesday underlined how little outside powers, divided and pursuing their own interests in the Middle East, have been able to do to stop increasing carnage in the 15-month-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.
A day after Syrian armed forces and villagers had turned them back, the unarmed U.N. monitors reached the farming settlement of Mazraat al-Qubeir, finding it deserted but bearing signs of deadly violence.
One house was damaged by rocket fire and bullets, U.N. spokeswoman Sausan Ghosheh said. Another was burnt, with bodies still inside. "You could smell dead bodies and you could also see body parts in and around the village," Ghosheh told reporters after returning to Damascus.
BBC reporter Paul Danahar, who accompanied the monitors, said it was clear "terrible crime" had taken place.
Granted, there is supposed to be a cease-fire plan in place, but the UN observers who were intended to monitor it are currently having some serious issues of their own to deal with:
UN monitors say they were fired on and forced to turn back as they attempted to reach the town of Haffa in northern Syria, where rebel positions are being bombarded by government forces.
The monitors said stone-throwing crowds stopped them from reaching Haffa and three cars were fired on as they left.
The head of UN peacekeeping says Syria is now in a state of civil war.
Herve Ladsous told reporters at the UN in New York that large parts of Syria were now outside government control.
The monitors turned back at the last checkpoint before Haffa, judging the situation "unsafe", a UN spokeswoman said.
From the ferocity of the assault, some of the victims said it appeared to have been an organized attempt to drive women out of demonstrations and trample on the prodemocracy protest movement.
The attack follows smaller-scale assaults on women this week in Tahrir, the epicenter of an uprising that forced Hosni Mubarak to resign last year. Thousands have been gathering in the square this week in protests on a variety of issues - mainly about fears that presidential elections this month will secure the continued rule by elements of Mubarak’s regime backed by the ruling military.
After the marchers entered a crowded corner of the square, a group of men waded into the women, heckling them and groping them. The male supporters tried to fend them off, and it turned into a melee involving a mob of hundreds.
The marchers tried to flee while the attackers chased them and male supporters tried to protect them. But the attackers persisted, cornering several women against a metal sidewalk railing, including an Associated Press reporter, shoving their hands down their clothes and trying to grab their bags. The male supporters fought back, swinging belts and fists and throwing water.
Eventually, the women were able to reach refuge in a nearby building with the mob still outside until they finally got out to safety.
Underlings did not tell him how pervasive it was when he took over News Corp.'s British newspaper publishing arm, he said.
He agreed with a suggestion that the reason was because they knew he would put a stop to it.
Oh, sure he would. Just like any Fleet Street yellow journalist from any number of papers would "put a stop to" salacious material that they make their biggest money on.
On the other hand, underlings are underlings. Explain why a current minister in the British government would be this stupid:
Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, has begged the Leveson inquiry to give him a chance to salvage his reputation after emails released by News Corp appeared to show that Hunt and his office passed confidential and market-sensitive information to the Murdoch empire to support its takeover of BSkyB.
Facing calls from the Labour leader Ed Miliband to resign, Hunt urged Lord Justice Leveson to change his hearings timetable and give him a chance to clear his name.
As the day-long questioning of James Murdoch ended, Hunt rushed to a meeting with David Cameron and the cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, to explain the emails and texts that appeared to show he ignored his commitment to MPs to act in a quasi-judicial and impartial capacity over the £8bn bid, one that only failed in the wake of the Milly Dowler phone-hacking furore.
If Hunt got paid, that's one thing. That's merely greed at work. If he did it for love (translation: he was so close to the Murdochs and News Corp that questions of impropriety more or less became questions of incest, even if it's merely the corporate variety) then he's an even bigger idiot.
Labour MPs Tom Watson and Chris Bryant questioned Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks, an executive and former newspaper editor at Murdoch's News International umbrella corporation, during parliamentary hearings. And Nick Davies is the reporter for The Guardian, the paper that originally broke the phone-hacking story. Some of them were put under surveillance by private investigators hired by News International. Others were intimidated, says Bergman, through a process called "monstering," in which Murdoch's papers singled out individuals and attacked their character on a daily basis.
"[Chris Bryant] tells the story that at some time [after questioning Brooks in Parliament in 2003] he runs into her at a party, and she starts to say unkind things to him, that she knows that he's gay," says Bergman. "Then soon after, he gets 'monstered' by the tabloids, where they single out an individual and go after him day after day.
"They began to show pictures of him in his underwear — any pictures they could find of him being somewhat compromising — talking about him being a member of Parliament, being gay, etc. And leaning on him, and, he thought for a while, endangering his political career."
Bergman later states the following concerning the question of News Corp./News bribery of the police:
"I think the most important part of all of this was that there was no police investigation after a public admission [by Brooks in 2003] that '[The paper] pays the police.' We know from News Corporation, and its answers to various questions back in New York, they did not launch any investigation to find out what was going on inside. And when we asked a veteran editor about it — about whether or not he knew that his paper paid the police — he said no one ever told him."
I was going to stick a zinger at the end of this post concerning the complete lack of honesty shown by Murdoch and his minions in this scandal, but I don't need to. The unadorned truth is bad enough as it is.
Underage sexual abuse victims were castrated in Dutch Roman Catholic psychiatric wards in the 1950s, according to the Rotterdam-based newspaper NRC Handelsblad.
Castration was performed on young men who were thought to be homosexual, but also as a means of punishing those who blew the whistle on abusers, the paper quotes sources as saying.
NRC discovered proof of the forced castration of one young man and strong evidence that at least ten other abuse victims were subjected to the removal of their testicles. The proof includes court documents, medical records, letters from lawyers and private correspondence.
According to the paper, the practice was reported in 2010 to the Deetman Commission which completed its investigation of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic church last December. The commission, led by former cabinet minister Wim Deetman of the Christian Democrat party (CDA), made no mention of the castration of abuse victims in its final report.
Even without the Deetman Commission's use of this report (on grounds of "insufficient evidence"), the report itself makes for some informative - if utterly disturbing - reading:
The number of victims that grew up as Roman Catholic, spent part of their youth in a
Roman Catholic institution and reported being sexually abused by an offender
working in the Roman Catholic Church before the age of 18 during the period
between 1945 and 1981 is approximately 10,000 to 20,000 (emphasis mine).
Their experiences ranged from very mild to severe.
Likewise, in another paragraph,
A total of roughly 800 names of perpetrators mentioned in the reports could be
traced to individuals who work or worked in dioceses, orders and congregations. At
least 105 of those 800 persons are known to be still living. It is not known how many
of these individuals are still in their jobs.
Now, considering that Donohue has authored some genuinely batshit attacks on people who have dared to take issue with the RCC on the subject of sexual abuse by priests (see examples here, here and especially here) I'm hardly expecting him to produce anything but another crazed, logic-deficient attempt to defend his Mother Church regardless of any proof that crimes were committed by any of its priests in the past. In fact, I'm making a private bet that I'll see an example of Donohue's latest seizure-like huffing and puffing in a matter of days. My guess? Probably something posted on Friday.
The report estimates that 10,000-20,000 minors were abused in the care of Catholic institutions between 1945 and 1981, when the number of Church-run homes dropped. In the years between 1981 and 2011, several more thousands suffered at the hands of priests and others working for the Church.
Most of the cases involved mild to moderate abuse, such as touching, but the report estimated there were "several thousand" instances of rape.
As usual, we can probably look forward to one of Bill Donohue's predictably brain-damaged screeds (a previous example of which is dissected here) on the subject. He's never failed to disappoint before, so why should he stop now?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timeasmymeasure
