generalspeaking

The Global War On Terror

A suicide car bomber killed 38 people as they left a Shia Muslim mosque just outside the volatile northern Iraqi city of Mosul, officials said on Friday, while bombs in Baghdad killed another 12. Police said 140 people were wounded in the suicide bombing, one of several attacks in recent weeks targeting Shia religious gatherings.

The United States appeared on Friday to have dealt a major setback to extremist forces by killing the charismatic leader of the Pakistani Taliban. Analysts said Baitullah Mehsud, widely believed to have been killed in a missile attack on Wednesday while visiting his wife in a Pakistani tribal area, represented the top threat to Pakistan's stability.
"In the pantheon of terrorist leaders, I really have to say that (al-Qaeda leader Osama) bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri are the only other two that are higher than him", said a terrorism expert at Georgetown University in Washington.
"Information is coming from that area that he is dead", said Pakistan's Interior Minister Rehman Malik. "I am unable to confirm unless I have solid evidence", the cabinet minister added.
Mehsud was at the top of the Pakistani government's most-wanted list, having been implicated in the 2007 assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. He went on to lead a campaign of suicide bombings, assassinations and insurgent attacks that swept out of the border tribal areas into the Swat Valley, threatening Islamabad. Agence France-Presse

Indonesian police have shot dead a man suspected to be leading Islamic terrorist Noordin Mohammad Top during raids in Central Java and were trying to identify his body, police sources said today. Malaysian-born Top is a prime suspect in the near simultaneous suicide attacks on Jakarta's JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels, which killed nine people and wounded 53. Police launched a series of raids since Friday, and a police source close to the investigation into the hotel attacks said a man suspected to be Top was killed during a raid on a workshop in Temanggung, more than 400 kilometres southeast of Jakarta.
Intelligence officials say Top and fellow Malaysian Azahari Husin, a bomb-maker who was killed in a 2005 police raid, were leaders in the Jemaah Islamiah network, blamed for a series of bomb attacks in Indonesia since 2002.
Top is believed to have planned previous bomb attacks on the JW Marriott in Jakarta in 2003, on the Australian Embassy in Jakarta in 2005, and in Bali in 2005. Reuters

A leading international humanitarian agency has called the targeting of Israeli civilians by Palestinian rocket attacks a war crime. "Hamas violated the laws of war by targeting Israeli civilians and by launching rockets from populated Palestinian areas that put their own people at risk", said Bill Van Esvelt, the lead researcher on the 31-page Human Rights Watch report released Thursday.
Titled Rockets from Gaza: Harm to Civilians from Palestinian Armed Groups' Rocket Attacks, the report documents attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups since November 2008. During Israel's three-week military offensive in Gaza in December and January, hundreds of the Soviet-era and locally built Qassam rockets were launched at Israeli towns and cities, killing three civilians, damaging property and forcing thousands of people to flee.
Van Esveld's research found it was clear the rocket attacks targeted civilians because his group examined Hamas websites after the killing of the three Israelis during the conflict, and in each instance, Hamas claimed responsibility for the deaths.
"Their intent was to kill a civilian", Van Esveld said. "This is the strongest evidence of a war crime". He also said the inaccuracy of the rockets constituted a violation of the rules of war because the rockets were indiscriminate, putting both Israeli and Palestinian civilians at risk. Many of the rockets either went off course from their intended targets, or fell short, landing within Palestinian territory, the report said. It added that while 800,000 Israelis lived within range of the rockets, thousands of Palestinians were also put at risk from wayward rockets. The day before the Israeli incursion into Gaza, two Palestinian girls were killed from rockets that did not reach their targets. CanWest News Service

Psychopaths who kill and rape have faulty connections between the part of the brain dealing with emotions and that which handles impulses and decision-making, scientists have found. Psychopaths violate social norms, are manipulative, impulsive and sensation-seeking, and appear to feel no empathy or remorse.
In a study of psychopaths who had committed murder, manslaughter, multiple rape and strangulation, the British scientists found that areas linking the two crucial brain areas had "potholes", while those of non-psychopaths were in good shape. The study by a group of British scientists was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
"The most exciting question now ... is when do these "potholes" come - are people born with them, do they develop early in life, or are they a consequence of something else?"
The study used a new brain imaging technology to further analyse psychopaths' brains after previous studies found that the amygdala part of the brain, which processes emotions, and the orbitofrontal cortex, which handles impulses and decisions, are structurally and functionally different in psychopaths. Reuters

Labels: World Crises, World News

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, August 08, 2009