Society's ChildS


Red Flag

'Teenage bomb maker' bought IED supplies off AMAZON for Pulwama terror attack that killed 40 & nearly triggered India-Pakistan war

Site of the suicide bombing on the Jammu-Srinagar highway
© Hindustan Times via Global Look PressSite of the suicide bombing on the Jammu-Srinagar highway
Two more suspects have been nabbed in the deadly Pulwama terror attack - which killed 40 Indian troops and spiked hostilities between India and Pakistan - including a 19-year-old bomb maker who supplied chemicals from Amazon.

The two men - Waiz ul Islam, 19, and Mohd Abbas Rather, 32 - were arrested by India's counter-terror force, the National Investigation Agency (NIA), on Friday, alleging Islam procured bomb ingredients such as ammonium nitrate from the online retail titan. The teen, whose father is a government employee, is also accused of personally bringing items to the terror cell that carried out the attack, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).

Rather, for his part, is said to have harbored the militants in his home in the leadup to last year's attack, including IED builder Mohammed Umar and the suicide bomber himself, Adil Ahmed Dar.

The two men are set to appear before the NIA Special Court in Jammu on Saturday.

The attack - which took place in the disputed Kashmir territory - brought tensions between India and its nuclear-armed neighbor Pakistan to a boiling point, resulting in an Indian bombing raid on a JeM training camp, in turn triggering a reprisal by Islamabad which saw an Indian fighter jet downed and its pilot taken prisoner.

Comment: Previously:


Health

SXSW submits to coronavirus fears: Austin cancels biggest tech, film & music festival for the first time EVER

SXSW coronavirus
© SXSW.com
The South by Southwest music, film and technology conference, is the latest victim of coronavirus concerns.

The city of Austin declared a local disaster Friday that will prevent the event from taking place, Austin Mayor Steve Adler said at a news conference, even though there have been no confirmed cases of the virus in the Austin area.

SXSW, as it's known, had vowed to go on, despite recent developer conferences that were canceled by Facebook and Amazon.

Officials of SXSW described themselves as "devastated" by this development.

"This is the first time in 34 years that the March event will not take place," the company said in a written statement. "We are now working through the ramifications of this unprecedented situation."

Airplane

Congress slams 'fundamentally flawed' Boeing 737 MAX & 'grossly insufficient' FAA in scathing report

boeing 737 max
© REUTERS/Lindsey Wasson
Boeing's 737 MAX aircraft was doomed by the manufacturer's "culture of concealment" that prioritized cost-cutting over safety, while the Federal Aviation Administration's poor judgment sealed its fate, the US House has concluded.

A software glitch that should have been discovered and repaired instead shipped by default with all new 737 MAX planes, resulting in a pair of horrific crashes that killed a total of 346 people and forced the grounding of 737 MAX planes worldwide. The error had been concealed by Boeing executives and ignored by FAA regulators, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee found in its preliminary report delivered on Friday.

The scathing results of the committee's investigation came just days before the anniversary of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302's disastrous demise shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa. Less than six months before that, Lion Air flight 610 had also crashed immediately after takeoff from Jakarta.

NPC

College #MeToo: Since when is kissing and not dating a sex crime?

me too
© Reuters / Christian Hartmann
Williams College, a school in Massachusetts, has suspended a male student after some kissing and touching with a female student, accusing him of 'sexual misconduct.' His crime? He says it was refusing to date her afterwards.

The college boy kissed and touched a female student (both of whom are anonymous in the reports), and the boy ended up being suspended because the girl says their encounters (more than one) were without her "affirmative consent."

But now the boy is suing the college, telling his side of the story. He says the girl really filed the Title IX complaint because he hurt her "conservative religious values" by not pursuing a romantic relationship with her after they got all smoochy. She says he "emotionally manipulat[ed]" her and took "advantage of [her] lack of knowledge of American cultural norms." She allegedly even told him that she had "lots of people ready to hurt him" for it.

Arrow Up

Russia's inflation headed towards lowest level in post-Soviet history

russia
© Sputnik / Maxim Blinov
Annual inflation in Russia has eased to 2.2 percent in February, according to the median estimate of 20 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. Statistics show that price growth briefly fell to that level in 2018.

The Central Bank of Russia has cut its key rate in February by 25 basis points, from 6.25 percent to six percent. It left inflation outlook for 2020 unchanged, at 3.5-4 percent.

The Ministry of Economic Development and Trade expects inflation this year at three percent. Experts say that the possibility of inflation easing to a record low increases the likelihood of a seventh consecutive interest rate cut later this month. They also point to the global spread of coronavirus, which has sparked a sell-off in Russian assets.

Comment: Meanwhile economies in the West are looking increasingly precarious:


Pistol

Death squad massacres 32 at political rally in Kabul: Random chaos, or is there method to the madness in Afghanistan?

kabul attack march 2020
© Anadolu Agency/Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesAn ambulance transports the wounded to hospital after the attack in Kabul.
Gunmen opened fire on Friday at a ceremony in Afghanistan's capital attended by prominent political leaders, killing at least 32 people and wounding dozens more before the two attackers were killed by police, officials said.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement on its website.


Comment: 'ISIS' has no 'website'. This claim of responsibility was probably 'found' by SITE Intelligence, the Israeli media coordinator for terrorists.


Militants from Isis have declared war on Afghanistan's Shias, and many of those at the ceremony were from the minority sect. The ceremony commemorated the 1995 slaying of Abdul Ali Mazari, the leader of Afghanistan's ethnic Hazaras, who are mostly Shia Muslims.

The Taliban said they were not involved in the attack, which came less than a week after the US and the group signed an ambitious peace deal that lays out a path for the withdrawal of American forces from the country.


Comment: Throughout this 18-year-long 'war', there has been a third force shooting and bombing both the Taliban and their supporters, and NATO troops and their supporters.


Comment: This is how empires ensure their continued military occupation of foreign countries. The British dealt with a 3-year-long Irish insurgency in the 1970s by setting up death squads that attacked both Protestant and Catholic civilians. As a result they 'had to stay to protect them'.

The Americans in Iraq in the 2000s 'had to stay' when they transformed Iraqi resistance to their invasion into a 'civil war' between Sunni and Shia Iraqis by running death squads who would randomly attack both sub-groups. Same thing in Afghanistan with 'ISIS', a name they've just recently appended to the death squads they've actually been running there for about 15 years:
CIA death squads responsible for spike in Afghan civilian casualties
Bill Van Auken, wsws.org, 2 November 2019
UNAMA (United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan) has also pointed to so-called "kill-or-capture" or "night raids" carried out by a network of shadowy militias that have been organized, financed and directed by the US Central Intelligence Agency as a growing and disturbing cause of civilian casualties.

Operating outside of the chain of command of either the Afghan or US military, these militias include the so-called Khost Protection Force, which was formed by former Northern Alliance militias after the US 2001 invasion, working in close collaboration with the CIA. Others are known simply as NDS 01, NDS 02, NDS 03 and NDS 04, ostensibly under the command of the Afghan National Directorate of Security, but in reality answering to no one besides the CIA's operatives in Afghanistan. All of them have carried out a reign of terror in rural areas where the US and its puppet regime are contesting the Taliban for control.
The way it's meant to work in Afghanistan is that they'll send out one of their squads to massacre a bunch of civilians, ideally making it look like a Taliban or Taliban-supported attack. This will then dampen and even break popular support for the Taliban, upon which its fighters have of course relied all these years in order to be able to withstand the most powerful and technologically advanced empire in all history.

But by this point, most people there have figured out the game. That's why there is likely sincerity on the US govt's part to now begin scaling down the 'war'/occupation. They sort of realize that no matter how many iterations of their 'win hearts and minds' psy-ops they undertake, it all just serves to make the target population see them as repulsive psychopaths with whom they want nothing to do with whatsoever.


Bomb

US embassy in Tunisia target of mystery 'suicide' bomb attack - One police officer killed


Comment: Remember, 'suicide' bomb attacks may not be such at all. Very often intel agencies coerce or blackmail people into 'being at this spot at this time', then remote detonate bombs and quickly tell the press 'Mohammed X was a suicider'...


One policeman killed and others wounded in capital Tunis, interior ministry says, as bombers blow themselves up.
bomb embassy tunisia
© REUTERS/Zoubeir SouissiPeople gather at the scene of Friday's suicide attack near the US embassy in Tunis.
Two suicide bombers have blown themselves up outside the United States embassy in the Tunisian capital, killing a policeman and injuring six other people, authorities said, in the most serious attack in months.

An explosion at around midday on Friday rocked the Berges du Lac district, where the highly fortified embassy is located, causing panic among pedestrians and motorists.

"Two individuals targeted a security patrol... in the street leading to the American embassy," the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

Photos posted on local news websites showed damaged vehicles on the road outside the embassy.


Comment: 'ISIS', of course, doesn't exist. At least, it doesn't exist in the way it's portrayed in the media (as a self-contained outfit with a single organizing principle or mission). The Russians' pulling back of the curtain in Syria exposed 'ISIS' there to be proxy forces - paid mercenaries - answering to command-and-control directions from their paymasters in Western intel agencies and regional govts.


Eye 2

Erdogan vows to keep migrants flowing as THOUSANDS being bussed to storm the Greek border

turkey migrants greece border
© AFP / Bulent KilicMigrants chant slogans as they demonstrate in the Turkey-Greece border buffer zone, near Pazarkule crossing gate in Edirne, Turkey, on March 6, 2020.
Turkey's border will remain open for migrants seeking to reach the EU, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says. Thousands of illegal migrants have amassed at the border with Greece, facing off with police and trying to break through.

Ankara will not try to stop the refugees flowing to Europe, Erdogan told reporters Friday, as he was flying home from Moscow, where he had agreed a ceasefire document on Syria's Idlib with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
Are the borders open or closed? We don't have time to discuss it anymore. It is done.

Health

Chaos in Bethlehem: 7 confirmed cases of coronavirus

Hospital
© APA/Abedalrahman HassanBelt Jala governmental hospital, West Bank, Bethlehem
Palestinians, for lack of a better word, are freaking out. And much like the rest of the world, they're worried about the current outbreak of coronavirus disease. While the global hysteria surrounding the coronavirus gained traction in Palestine in recent weeks as Palestinians looked to a growing number of confirmed cases in Israel, it reached new heights on Thursday, as multiple suspected cases were reported in the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem.

COVID-19 is the name of the disease caused by the new coronavirus. It is a respiratory illness spread primarily person-to-person, and is related to the SARS and MERS viruses that have had outbreaks in recent years.

Locals woke up to the initial news reports that four people, alleged to be foreigners, were being held at the Beit Jala governmental hospital on suspicions that they had been infected with the virus. People were initially wary to believe the reports, as fake news surrounding the virus reaching Palestine has been circling around social media for weeks.
Tourists&masks
© APA/Abedalrahman HassanForeign tourists wearing masks as a preventive measure against the coronavirus during a visit to the Church of the Nativity, in the West Bank city of Bethlehem on March 05, 2020.
But by Thursday afternoon, the Palestinian Ministry of Health announced that there were seven confirmed cases of the coronavirus in Bethlehem, and had declared a state of emergency in Bethlehem and Jericho, another popular destination for tourists visiting Palestine.

Comment: See also:


Better Earth

Zarif adviser & former envoy to Syria dies of coronavirus, first death in UK, 'Bollywood Oscars' cancelled

Hossein Sheikholeslam
© Wikipedia / Tasnim News Agency; Reuters / UK Health Protection Agency Handout
Hossein Sheikholeslam, adviser to Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, has died of coronavirus, becoming the third government figure to perish in the epidemic which has infected thousands in Iran.

Sheikholeslam, whose previous political posts have included ambassador to Syria and assistant to the parliament speaker for international affairs, first rose to prominence in the country while still a student for his role in the US-Iran hostage crisis.


He died on Thursday in Tehran's Masih Daneshvari Hospital.

Comment: Israel has banned its servicemen from traveling abroad due to the virus (one good thing to have come out of all of this!), and shut down the city of Bethlehem. The UK saw its first death as its total number of cases doubled to 116 yesterday, and today it's at 163. Two British Airways baggage handlers tested positive and have been sent home to self-isolate. Russia has cancelled SPIEF 2020 over concerns. And the International Indian Film Academy indefinitely postponed this year's "Oscars of Bollywood".

See also: