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Twin bombings at churches in Pakistan kill 14, wound 78

Mubasher Bukhari
Yahoo! News
Sun, 15 Mar 2015 13:35 UTC
Lahore suicide attack
© REUTERS/Mohsin Raza
Women mourn the death of their relative who was killed in a suicide attack on a church in Lahore March 15, 2015.
Bombs outside two churches in the Pakistani city of Lahore killed 14 people and wounded nearly 80 during Sunday services, and witnesses said quick action by a security guard prevented many more deaths.

A Pakistani Taliban splinter group claimed responsibility.

Islamist militants in Pakistan have attacked Christians and other religious minorities often over the last decade or more. Many Christians accuse the government of doing little to protect them, saying politicians are quick to offer condolences after an attack but slow to take any concrete steps to improve security.

Sunday's blasts occurred minutes apart in a majority Christian suburb of the eastern city. Police said it seemed they targeted two churches, one Catholic and one Protestant, that are very close to each other.

After the explosions, enraged residents protested and lynched two suspects, police said.
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Heart - Black

Elderly nun gang raped in India, sparking outrage


Aljazeera
Sat, 14 Mar 2015 13:59 UTC
a nun
© File photo: K. Murali Kumar
A nun who resisted a group of dacoits that broke into a convent was gang-raped in West Bengal's Nadia district.
The attack at Convent of Jesus and Mary School is the latest in a string of high-profile rape cases in the country

A group of bandits gang raped an elderly nun on Saturday when she attempted to stop them from robbing a Christian missionary school in eastern India, police said, the latest crime to focus attention on the scourge of sexual violence in the country.

The nun, who is in her 70s, was hospitalized in serious condition after being attacked by seven or eight men at the Convent of Jesus and Mary School in Nadia district, 50 miles northeast of the West Bengal state capital of Kolkata, a police officer said.

Police Inspector General Anuj Sharma told Agence France-Presse that "two people have so far been arrested." The others remain at large.

The robbers tied the school's security guards with ropes early Saturday and entered the nuns' room, where the women were sleeping. They took one of the nuns to another room when she tried to block their way and then raped her, the officer said.
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Cow Skull

Shame on India - 'India's Daughter' gang rape documentary banned by Indian Government

Stephanie March, Jessicah Mendes
ABC Online
Sat, 14 Mar 2015 13:40 UTC
Image
© AFP: Sajjad Hussain
Protests and outrage over crimes against women in India
India's decision to ban a documentary about the gang rape and murder of a woman in Delhi has been described as "uncivilised" by the film's director. The Indian government obtained a court injunction last week to stop the documentary, India's Daughter, from being broadcast in the country.


Comment: It is clear that the officials in Indian Government condone this behaviour. See this article here.


The documentary examines the horrific gang rape and murder of a 23 year old medical student in Delhi in December 2012.

"You cannot bury your shame and think you're going to deal with it somehow," the documentary's maker Leslee Udwin said. "India is part of the civilized world. I don't believe this ban was a civilised move."

The film contains confronting and explicit interviews with one of the men convicted of the rape, Mukesh Singh, and two of his lawyers. All three men repeatedly blame the victim and the Indian legal system for the crime. "A decent girl won't roam around at 9 o'clock at night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy," Singh said during an interview conducted in a prison.
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People 2

Oklahoma just said you can only get married if you're religious

M. David
Counter Current News
Fri, 13 Mar 2015 22:25 UTC
gay_wedding_priest
© Unknown
What say should the state have in marriage? That's a great question that many have been asking for a long time. But now the State of Oklahoma has answered that question in a fairly bizarre way...

Instead of saying that the State will have no role in marriage, instead of recognizing any agreement between consenting adults related to marriage, the State has mandated that it will back away just enough to allow clergy and clergy alone to conduct marriages. It will recognize marriage conducted only by officially recognized members of religious clergy.

So you can be gay or straight... as long as you go to church... or temple, or a mosque. Get the picture?

That means if you aren't particularly religious, the State of Oklahoma will not recognize any marital contract formed between consenting partners, whether heterosexual or homosexual.

House Bill 1125 was approved by a Republican majority, and now goes to the state Senate for consideration. Many glossed over this important detail about the State's refusal to recognize marriage rights if the marital contract was not conducted via a religious ceremony and clergy. Instead, initial reactions from many who wanted to see the state removed from policing marriages, was one of gratefulness.

But the State was never saying it would back off of marriage. The State still ultimately decides what marriages it will or won't recognize. Far from making marriages more free of State imposition, the Oklahoma just forced everyone who wants state-recognition of their marriage to undergo a religious ceremony.

Rep. Dennis Johnson, a Republican, said "Marriage was not instituted by government. It was instituted by God. There is no reason for Oklahoma or any state to be involved in marriage."
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Red Flag

Why aren't Americans spending? Is it because they have nothing to spend?

James Quinn
Investment Watch Blog
Fri, 13 Mar 2015 13:53 UTC
shopping cart
© aptuda
I thought all those Obama jobs, the millions of Obamacare enrollees getting "free" health insurance, and the plunge in gas prices would lead to billions of excess disposable income being spent on stuff. Considering consumer spending accounts for 68% of GDP, this juggernaut of jobs would propel the US economy to new heights. Keynesianism at its finest. But something went awry on the road to prosperity. The American people have stopped spending money they don't have on shit they don't need. The blathering boobs on the tube will use the tried and true weather excuse, except last winter was the winter of the polar vortex. The very same morons who reported that this past winter was the 15th warmest in recorded history, will use cold and snow during winter time as the reason the American sheeple didn't shop. How could they possibly get to the mall in their leased four wheel drive SUVs, pickups, and minivans?

Retail sales have fallen three months in a row. The last time this happened was at the beginning of the 2008 financial collapse. Do retail sales fall three months in a row when the economy is booming, or does it do that when we are in a recession? And these haven't been miniscule drops: December -0.9%, January -0.8%, February -0.6%. If we dig into the numbers we can assess the truth of our current situation:

Comment: The US economy is in shambles and is being propped up by smoke and mirrors.

The massive lie behind the U.S. unemployment numbers

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Book

Ukraine war crimes report: Torture and inhumane treatment of civilians


Colonel Cassad
Sun, 15 Mar 2015 00:42 UTC
The second report about the war crimes of the armed forces and security forces of Ukraine by The Foundation for the Study of Democracy (the director - M. S. Grigoryev), in which the data is given about large-scale and systematic violation of the European convention of human rights by the representatives of the Ukrainian armed forces, the National Guard, and other units of the Ministry of the Internal Affairs, and also of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). We give some quotes from the report that we obtained.

ukraine torture report
War crimes of the armed forces and security forces of Ukraine: torture and inhumane treatment. Second report

Yana, victim's wife on SBU officials:
They have beaten him to death simply. When they came — they took him away to torture him. When they brought his body back — the heels were blue, the feet were blue. He's got some traces of punctures on his hands... I don't know... what they did to him, punctured him or drove the needles under his nails — there were holes on his hands. Each bone has a hole in it. They tortured him like... when there was a real war no one has tortured people the way they tortured him.
The data that has been accumulated since the first report by the Foundation for Democracy Studies provides ground to conclude that torture and inhumane treatment inflicted by the Security Forces of Ukraine (SBU), by the Ukrainian armed forces, the National Guard and other formations within the Interior Ministry of Ukraine, as well as by illegal armed groups, such as Right Sector, have not only continued but are gaining in scale and are becoming systematic.

Comment: The full report can be downloaded here. The first report is available here.

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Info

Operation 'Vigilant Guard' drills take place in North and South Carolina complete with door to door wellness checks

Brandon Turbeville
Activist Post
Mon, 09 Mar 2015 12:35 UTC
vigilant guard
© unknown
In yet another example of the growing trend of the process of acclimatization of the general public to an open military presence on American streets as well as greater cooperation between the US Military and civilian law enforcement, South Carolina was recently the scene of a statewide "emergency preparedness" drill that incorporated both of these aspects in a visible form.

On March 7, 2015, the state-wide drill, entitled Operation Vigilant Guard, took place under the pretext of preparation for the inevitable destruction a hurricane would bring to South Carolina. According to reports in the local media, the drills were based on the premise of the landfall of a Category 4 hurricane and "how they'd respond to get citizens help" in such an event.

The training involved the South Carolina National Guard as well as National Guard units from Georgia in addition to participants from local and state law enforcement agencies as well as local and state "officials."

Comment: Responsible preparation, or is it paranoia to think that something big might be in the works?

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X

Selma, Obama and the colonization of black resistance

Ajamu Baraka
Counterpunch
Fri, 13 Mar 2015 00:00 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Barack Obama, master of propaganda, co-opting a civil rights event in Selma Alabama and building bridges to nowhere.
"To cleanse history in the name of a false patriotism that celebrates a new illiteracy as a way of loving the United States is a discourse of anti-memory, a willful attempt at forgetting the past in the manufactured fog of historical amnesia."

— Henry Giroux
I tried! In my capacity as a member of the Center for Constitutional Rights' Board of Directors (CCR), I traveled to Selma on Friday to attend the induction of Arthur Kinoy and William Kunstler, two of the founding lawyers of CCR, into the Selma National Voting Rights Museum. And even though I knew that I would have to endure Obama's presence in Selma on Saturday, my plan was to stay in Selma until Sunday to catch up with friends and participate in the peoples' crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday.

But I never saw the sun come up in Selma. Before Air Force One ever entered Alabama airspace, Obama's presence overshadowed the commemoration. In conversations on Friday, I heard over and over again about how Obama was coming to town to symbolically "close the circle" on the struggle for voting rights. And though it shouldn't have, I could not shake the deep sadness that I felt every time I heard this and similar comments from so many of my people who still had so much invested in this cheap pro-imperialist hustler that after the induction on Friday I found myself on Highway 80 heading out of Selma toward Montgomery.

I made the right decision.

Comment: So, in addition to being the new boss (same as the old boss), the oh so cynical and clever power-meisters chose Obama to the throne of the U.S. presidency precisely because they knew he would have the "talent" to hoodwink a certain percentage of blacks. Institutionalized racism and corporeal punishment towards blacks has reached a new plateau in Amerika. As the author of the article notes, extrajudicial killings by a psychopathic and militarized police force, the abominable numbers of blacks unfairly incarcerated and subsumed by the prison-industrial-complex, and an economy that is designed to keep the black working class and poor stuck in their place, all contribute to making blacks prisoners of a system with no way out. And brand Obama is the one of their wardens.

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Roses

Man killed taking pictures of his first snowfall in Dallas after fleeing violence in Iraq


The Blaze
Fri, 13 Mar 2015 23:58 UTC
Al-Jumaili
© AP Photo/Courtesy of Zahraa Atlaie
Atlaie, left, and her husband Ahmed Al-Jumaili
Police say a suspect arrested Friday in the killing of an Iraqi man taking photos of his first snowfall said he was looking for whoever shot at his girlfriend's home when he randomly came upon the victim and opened fire.

Nykerion Nealon, 17, was being held without bond on a murder charge in last week's death of Ahmed Al-Jumaili, who in February moved to Dallas to escape violence in his homeland.

"We don't believe he knew Mr. Al-Jumaili. We don't believe he knew Mr. Al-Jumaili's ethnicity," police Maj. Jeff Cotner told a news conference Friday. Cotner had earlier said police do not believe the killing was a hate crime.

Al-Jumaili was outside his apartment complex taking snapshots of snow on the night of March 4 when he was shot.

"Mr. Al-Jumaili was enjoying the snowfall with his wife and brother when he was shot, then he ran toward his apartment and collapsed in the breezeway," Cotner said.

Comment: This is just tragic. And there's a cruel irony that he left war-torn Iraq (courtesy of the U.S.), only to be killed in the U.S. American society is sick to the core.

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Pistol

Cops sell man drugs then kill him, shoot one of their own cops in the process

Matt Agorist
Free Thought Project
Wed, 11 Mar 2015 22:14 UTC
Image

Anthony Andrew Williams
A man is dead, and a deputy has been shot after the Putman County Sheriff's Department relentless carries out the state's immoral war on drugs.

The incident happened as cops were driving around in a neighborhood Friday night looking for otherwise completely innocent people to purchase their drugs, so they could arrest them. Prior to setting up and killing Anthony Andrew Williams of Hawthorne, police arrested 10 people in this entrapment scheme.

However, after Williams voluntarily bought a substance for his own personal consumption from deputies, he realized their scheme and tried to run.

According to police, Williams then took off in an SUV and swerved to avoid hitting deputies which sent him crashing into a nearby tree.

Police then claim that Williams, who just crashed because he tried to avoid hitting deputies, tried to hit the deputies. At this point, four officers began to unload their pistols at the man.

During their ridiculously violent display, these trigger happy deputies shot one of their fellow cops. Deputy Robert Nelson is currently recovering from a gunshot wound he received from his "highly trained" co-workers.

The man whose tree was damaged during this debacle, Gilbert Randall, expressed his disappointment with police to WJAX News.

"They set the scene for this to happen, and he lost his life. I'm saddened," Randall said.

Comment: Day in day out the stories pile up of police violence against basically nonviolent citizens. In this case, the cops set up and killed a black man who was minding his own business.

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