Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Our Civil World

Australia
Four men suspected of having links to a radical Islamic group from Somalia were arrested yesterday for what authorities said was a plot to storm a military base in the Sydney suburbs and shoot as many soldiers as possible. The men, Australian citizens of Somali and Lebanese descent, were detained when hundreds of police officers swept through 19 houses in Melbourne before dawn. The raids were the culmination of a seven-month investigation involving state and federal officials and the Australian government's spy agency. Police said the men, whose ages ranged from 22 to 26, planned to arm themselves with automatic weapons and stage an attack on Holsworthy Barracks, a military complex southwest of Sydney. The New York Times
England
The death of eight Christians burned alive in clashes with majority Muslims has diminished Pakistan and injured the Muslim faith, the spiritual head of the world's 77-million Anglicans said yesterday. Four women and a child were among those killed in Punjab, central Pakistan, on Saturday, after Muslims torched Christians' homes following allegations one had desecrated the Koran. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual head of the Anglican church, called on the Pakistan government to protect the "vulnerable" Christian minority. "The recent atrocities against Christians in Pakistan will sear the imaginations of countless people of all faiths throughout the world", he said. Reuters
Iraq
An Iraqi rebel admitted to the 2006 rape and murder of a journalist in a video confession aired yesterday. Yasser al-Takhi, a member of the Jaish Mohammed group behind the 2003 truck bombing of the UN headquarters in Iraq, and his two brothers were shown confessing after being arrested for the kidnap and murder of Atwar Bahjat, an Al-Arabiya television presenter and two colleagues. Ms. Bahjat, her cameraman Adnan Abdallah and sound engineer Khaled Mohsen were snatched in Samarra in February 2006, where they had been reporting on the bombing of a Shiite shrine. Takhi, 25, told interrogators his group kidnapped the trio and drove them to a side street where they were killed. Agence France-Presse
United States
Nearly two-thirds of Americans think the United States was right to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 64 years ago, ending the Second World War, a poll showed yesterday. Only 22% of those polled said then-U.S. president Harry Truman was wrong to order the devastating bombings of the two Japanese cities in August 1945, according to the survey by Quinnipiac University. The poll showed support for the bombings rises significantly with age, with nearly 75% of respondents aged 55 and older supporting the devastating bombings, compared with just half of 18- to 34-year-olds and six in ten of those aged 35 - 54. "Voters who remember the horrors of the Second World War overwhelmingly support Truman's decision", said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. "Support drops with age, from the generation that grew up with the nuclear fear of the Cold War to the youngest voters who know less about the Second World War or the Cold War." Agence France-Presse
Iraq
A girl caught wearing a vest packed with explosives in an aborted suicide attack in Iraq last year has been jailed for seven and a half years, a court official said yesterday. Rania Ibrahim, then 15, was arrested last August in Diyala province. U.S. military officials had described her as an "unwilling" suicide bomber, as did the girl herself in a television interview. Television footage at the time showed Iraqi forces gingerly approaching a visibly distraught Ibrahim to remove the suicide vest. She said her husband had introduced her to someone claiming to be her relative, who had put the vest on her. She said she had felt dizzy and sick for days, and police said she seemed drugged by a sedative when they arrested her. Reuters
Sudan
Police used tear gas yesterday to disperse protesters rallying in support of a Sudanese woman facing 40 lashes for wearing trousers in public, a case that has become a test of the country's indecency laws. Lubna Hussein, a former journalist and UN press officer, was arrested with 12 other women in a Khartoum restaurant in July and charged with being indecently dressed. Ten of the women arrested with Ms. Hussein had pleaded guilty and were whipped the following day. Indecency cases are not uncommon in Sudan, where there is a large cultural gap between the mostly Muslim and Arab-oriented north and the mainly Christian south. Reuters
Venezuela
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Tuesday defended his crackdown on independent media after criticism that he was waging an all-out attack on dissent. "There's grumbling today because we are democratizing the communication media and ensuring true freedom of expression", he said in a televised speech. Chavez's government last week stripped 32 radio stations and two television outlets of their licenses after accusing them of "abusing" media freedom. The president argued the independent media was concentrated in the hands of a few. But the closures, and plans to draft a law that would imprison anybody diffusing information deemed harmful to the state, have been slammed by media and rights groups around the world.

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posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, August 05, 2009

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