27 Saturday Sep 2014
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“Muslims have a role, too, by collaborating with authorities, by reassuring their neighbors, by being good community citizens, so that there is confidence restored that the vast majority of Muslims reject this totally and will participate in safeguarding our whole community,” Ahmed concluded.
http://foxnewsinsider.com/2014/09/27/radical-impact-what-causing-westerners-turn-radical-islam – 9/27/2014.
25 Thursday Sep 2014
Iran’s Prosecutor of the Special Court, Mohamad Mohavadi, continued that the punishment for these crimes of “anti-government views” is execution, and stated that all those who had a hand in publishing [his] book will also be killed.
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4731/breaking-news-iran-executing-iran-mandela – 9/25/2014.
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24 Wednesday Sep 2014
Posted in Anti-Semitism
The unity Israel showed during the Gaza conflict was deeply moving. It reminded us that in a profound existential sense we remain one people. Whether or not we share a covenant of faith, we share a covenant of fate. That is a good state to be in as we face the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe, when we stand before God not just as individuals but also as a people.
As for anti-Semitism, rarely has it been more self-evident that the hate that starts with Jews never ends with Jews. The most significant enemies of the Jews today are the enemies of freedom everywhere. Worldwide we may feel uncomfortable, anxious, but there are parts of the world where Christians are being butchered, beheaded, driven from their homes and living in terror.
http://forward.com/articles/206189/on-rosh-hashanah-a-breath-of-life/#ixzz3EF9i7b5u – 9/23/2014.
11 Thursday Sep 2014
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The courtship between Eastern European far-right parties and Russia has been going on for years, of course. In 2008, Eastern Europe’s far right supported the Russian war against Georgia. In May 2013, leaders of Jobbik, the Hungarian far-right party with dubious fascist origins, met with Russian Duma leaders and academics at Moscow State University. The neo-Nazi Bulgarian Ataka party has vocally supported Putin and Russian foreign policy. In 2012, Ataka’s leader, Volen Siderov, traveled to Moscow, reportedly at his own expense, to celebrate Putin’s sixtieth birthday and express admiration for the Russian president’s strong leadership. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Siderov threatened to withdraw his party’s support from the coalition government if it supported further sanctions against Russia.
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/strange-bedfellows-putin-and-europe%E2%80%99s-far-right – September/October 2014.
05 Friday Sep 2014
And yet, freelance reporters like Sotloff and Foley are at the core of every foreign story. From 2003 to 2012, newspapers axed 16,200 full-time newsroom jobs and magazines cut 38,000 jobs. A survey conducted by the American Journalism Review of 10 major newspapers and one chain found that between 2003 and 2011 the number of foreign correspondents dropped from 307 to 234. But in 2011 that number would have been much lower had AJR not also included contract reporters, who often perform the same duties as staffers but without the same benefits or pay. Freelancers working on a story-to-story basis are left to fill the void left by laid off staffers.
04 Thursday Sep 2014
(9/4/2016)
To be sure, this has been Mr. Putin’s war from the beginning. After Victor Yanukovych fled Kyiv in late February and the parliament appointed an acting government in his place, it was Mr. Putin’s order that sent “little green men”—professional soldiers in Russian-style combat fatigues but without identifying insignia—to seize the Crimean peninsula, the most blatant land grab in Europe since World War II.
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/mr-putin%E2%80%99s-war%E2%80%94-why-he-continues-deny-it-11205 – 9/5/2014.
The ragtag battalion was hurriedly put together from a group of civilians including a piano teacher, bulldozer operator, steel worker and bodybuilding instructor as pro-Russian rebels advanced on Mariupol over the past week.
Renewed shelling of the city on Thursday, despite hopes that a ceasefire might be agreed on Friday, meant Ukrainian troops continued to organise defences in case of an all-out assault by pro-Russian separatists Kiev says are backed by Moscow.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/04/ukraine-crisis-mariupol-idUSL5N0R52BV20140904 – 9/4/2014.
A day before a planned ceasefire in east Ukraine, Russia-backed rebels edged closer to Mariupol, threatening a final push against the strategic port city, which the Ukrainians have promised to defend at all costs.
It was unclear whether the rebel advance was merely a show of force, or the prelude to a proper attack on the city, but as night fell, shelling was audible from the city centre.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/04/russia-rebels-ceasefire-approaches-ukraine – 9/4/2014.
“Ukraine exists,” was the understated but undeniable election slogan of the (failed) 2010 Yushchenko presidential campaign. Crimea, Ukraine’s most restive and most beautiful area, was finally settling in for the long haul—better to be a strange, anomalous, mostly Russian-speaking Ukrainian appendage than to be inside a paranoid, authoritarian Russia. That the revolution against Yanukovych, a triumph of human fortitude, should result in the loss of territorial integrity is sad but comprehensible. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and here is this one.
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/the-intellectual-situation/ukraine-putin-and-the-west/ – Spring 2014.
http://en.inforesist.org/russian-soldier-published-a-photo-made-near-illovaisk-in-ukraine/ – 9/4/2014.
Gazprom’s natural gas production fell 19.6 percent last month compared with the same period last year, as the state-owned behemoth struggles in the face of increasing competition at home and declining exports that are due in part to a breakdown in the political relationship between Moscow and Kiev.
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ukraine-crisis/fighting-shows-no-sign-ebbing-eastern-ukraine-n195636 – 9/14/2014.
“The open aggression from the Russian side against sovereign countries means the there is an attack not only against Ukraine, it is an attack against the peace in Europe,” Grybauskaitė said in Tallinn on Wednesday.
Weekly update from the OSCE Observer Mission at the Russian Checkpoints Gukovo and Donetsk, 28 August until 08:00, 3 September 2014:
http://www.osce.org/om/123151 – 9/3/2014.
03 Wednesday Sep 2014
I argue that:
Russia is a revisionist power; It has the means to pursue its objectives; It is winning; and Greater dangers lie ahead.
I recommend that the United Kingdom and its allies:
Give up any hope of a return to business as usual; Boost the defence of the Baltic states and Poland; Expose Russian corruption in the West; Impose sweeping visa sanctions on the Russian elite; Help Ukraine; and Reboot the Atlantic Alliance.
03 Wednesday Sep 2014
The usual set-up goes like this: the empath is forced to make a stand on seeing the sociopath say or do something underhand. The empath challenges the sociopath, who straight away throws others off the scent and shifts the blame on to the empath. The empath becomes an object of abuse when the apath corroborates the sociopath’s perspective.
The situation usually ends badly for the empath and sometimes also for the apath, if their conscience returns to haunt them or they later become an object of abuse themselves. But, frustratingly, the sociopath often goes scot free.
http://www.addictiontoday.org/addictiontoday/2013/10/empathy-trap-sociopath-triangle.html – 10/30/2013.
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