A British nuclear-powered submarine that sustained damage after colliding with a merchant vessel off Gibraltar a week ago is being stripped of its weapons.HMS Ambush will leave the British overseas territory “as soon as the ongoing work is completed,” said a spokesman for the Royal Navy, without specifying a date or the nature of the operation.But on Wednesday, a jib crane could be seen removing the Tomahawk cruise missiles, the Spearfish torpedoes and the Harpoon anti-ship missiles from the attack vessel, which returned to Gibraltar for examination after the collision on July 20.
Category Archives: Global Politics
Trump invites Russia to meddle in the U.S. presidential race with Clinton’s emails – The Washington Post
The candidate and several of his top advisers have business connections to Russia. Campaign chairman Paul Manafort has made millions of dollars in business deals with pro-Russia oligarchs as well as advised the Putin-aligned president of Ukraine whose 2014 ouster triggered Russia’s intervention there.
British police report over 6,000 hate crimes in month since Brexit vote | News | DW.COM | 22.07.2016
The National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) said it had recorded 6,193 incidents of hate crime from mid-June to mid-July, figures obtained from police forces in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.The most commonly reported crimes were harassment, assault and other violence such as verbal abuse or spitting. The second and third most prevalent incidents were public order offences, followed by criminal damage.Since the EU referendum result was declared on June 24, Muslims and Eastern Europeans have said they have been particularly targeted.
Source: British police report over 6,000 hate crimes in month since Brexit vote | News | DW.COM | 22.07.2016
Purvi Patel has 20-year sentence for inducing own abortion reduced | US news | The Guardian – The world that Trump’s VP candidate is proud of – putting women in jail if they have a stillborn child
Patel’s conviction, in 2015, made her a national symbol in the debate swirling around abortion. Last week, when Donald Trump selected the Indiana governor, Mike Pence, as his partner on the Republican presidential ticket, many abortion rights groups invoked Patel’s name as a cautionary tale. Trump has said women who have illegal abortions ought to face “some form of punishment”. And activists had prevailed upon Pence to clarify the 2009 law used to convict her, without success.The ruling was not a uniform victory for Patel. The court held that the state had mounted sufficient evidence to show Patel knew the infant was born alive. Patel’s appeals team had challenged the integrity of the forensic test, the controversial “lung float test”, that prosecutors used to argue the infant was not stillborn. But the court agreed with Patel that the state did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the infant could have survived. It reduced her child neglect conviction from a class A felony to a class D.“The Indiana court of appeals … ultimately failed Purvi Patel,” Yamani Hernandez, the director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, said Friday. “People of color are bearing the brunt of unscientific laws and misplaced moral outrage against abortion, which is blurring into the territory of miscarriage, putting any pregnant person at risk of prosecution and incarceration. It needs to stop, and the decision didn’t go far enough to restore full justice for Purvi Patel.”AdvertisementA jury convicted Patel in 2015, and in May of this year, a team of volunteer attorneys appealed against her conviction.Prosecutors argued at trial that Patel gave birth to a 25-week-old live infant that could have survived if Patel had sought medical attention instead of abandoning the infant. Patel’s attorneys, who disputed the infant’s gestational age, argued the infant was stillborn, and not developed enough to survive outside the womb no matter what Patel did.Patel’s case quickly became a flashpoint in the country’s heated debate over abortion access. The prosecution painted Patel as hard-hearted and calculating. Women’s rights advocates countered that Indiana’s numerous restrictions on abortion had prevented Patel from terminating her pregnancy in a clinic, and they fingered her trial as part of a pattern of overzealous prosecutions against women who suffer miscarriages.
Source: Purvi Patel has 20-year sentence for inducing own abortion reduced | US news | The Guardian
Attacks on Dalits leave Gujarat government wounded – Times of India
Initiating the discussion, senior JD(U) member Sharad Yadav sought a ban on ‘gau rakshaks’ (cow vigilantes) operating in some parts of the country . He said it was a matter of shame that even after 70 years of Independence, atrocities against Dalits, especially women, were increasing.”Who created these ‘gau rakshaks? Why doesn’t the government ban them? What is this tamasha? We talk about Taliban … our caste system has a Taliban-like attitude, we need to discuss that,” he said. Congress and other members joined him, saying the incident only exposes the real face of the `Gujarat model’ promoted by PM Narendra Modi. Observing that youths were joining such groups because of rising unemployment, Yadav said that “in Gujarat, these gau rakshaks say 33 crore gods and goddesses live in the cow. Such superstitions are being spread in this country.”
Source: Attacks on Dalits leave Gujarat government wounded – Times of India
Trump captures GOP nomination as convention speakers focus their fire on Clinton – The Washington Post – “Focus fire? A shooter’s term – wtf. And the e-mail version headline was: “In Trump’s moment of triumph, Clinton is in the crosshairs” Who is suggesting that Hillary Clinton should be assassinated or that Trump wants her shot?”
The Republican National Convention’s first two nights have been striking for the unusual amount of time spent demonizing Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee.
We killed Qandeel Baloch – The Ladies Finger
What Qandeel did was represent a changing Pakistan: a Pakistan where a viral celebrity could engage with mainstream media and thus the rest of the country, despite being provocative. We began to witness a nation that was now questioning its own conscience as a result of her growing popularity, presence in TV shows and rise to becoming a household name despite being labelled a ‘slut’.The irony of Qandeel is that she came home for just one week, before leaving for abroad (presumably Dubai) with her parents to seek safety from the death threats she was receiving. Little did she know that the biggest threat to her, as is the case with most women in Pakistan, is the threat at home. Threat from the ones you love and love you back from the ones you grew up and the ones who have known you since you were a baby and the ones who are supposed to protect and nurture you from the hate that is often found swirling around in our toxic society: Your family.Fariha Altaf, tweeted that she spoke to Qandeel the night she was killed and she sounded so happy and excited. Just like that — a woman loved by many, a human with a life of hopes and dreams, was taken away from us. She died at the hands of her brothers for living her life on her own terms.The murder of Qandeel Baloch sends a very frightening message to every woman in Pakistan: WE WILL CONTINUE TO BE KILLED. They will find a reason for all of us, one by one until we can challenge this toxic brand of masculinity and honour.
Source: We killed Qandeel Baloch – The Ladies FingerThe Ladies Finger
Nazi Art Loot Returned … to Nazis – The New York Times
Hitler’s private secretary, Henriette von Schirach, and her family pleaded with officials of the Bavarian State Painting Collections to turn over nearly 300 works, including a small landscape, “View of a Dutch Square” by the Dutch artist Jan van der Heyden.Before the war, the painting had been owned by Gottlieb and Mathilde Kraus, Jews who fled their Vienna penthouse, leaving behind a carefully packed collection of art that was then confiscated by the Gestapo in 1941.Mrs. von Schirach persuaded the Bavarians to give it back to her for a pittance — 300 Deutschmarks, which was roughly $75 then or nearly $600 now.“The basic element of this story is this: They stole from my family,” said John Graykowski, 62, the Krauses’ great-grandson, “and then they gave it back to the guy who stole it from them. How does that work?”It turns out, the archives show, that hundreds of works were actually sold back at discounted prices in the 1950s and the 1960s to the very Nazis who had taken possession of them, including the widow of Hermann Goering, a senior aide to Hitler who pillaged art to amass a collection of more than a thousand works.Continue reading the main storyFROM OUR ADVERTISERSThis murky chapter of history came to light because of Mr. Graykowski’s search for some 160 missing works from the Krause collection. In 2009, Mr. Graykowski, a Virginia lawyer, enlisted the help of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, a London-based nonprofit that researched the archives for him and made key discoveries.Anne Webber, a founder of the commission, said her researchers concluded that the resale of looted art to Nazi-tied families had hardly been isolated. “They called them a ‘return sale,’” she said. “Why were they returned to them rather than the family from whom they were looted? Nobody knew.”
Source: Nazi Art Loot Returned … to Nazis – The New York Times
Saudi Scapegoats | Inter Press Service
In the days since the attack Saudi authorities have been busy rounding up suspects. According to a report published by Al Jazeera, 19 people had been arrested by July 9. Of these 19, 12 are Pakistani and the remainder are Saudi citizens. In addition, Saudi authorities claim that the Jeddah bomber was also a Pakistani named Abdullah Gulzar Khan, who had been working in the kingdom for the past 12 years. The suspect was reported to have worn a suicide belt before he blew himself up.The inordinate scrutiny placed on Pakistanis working in Saudi Arabia is likely to become an even larger problem. Even when criminal charges are not terrorism-based, the Saudi legal system is opaque, providing few explanations of charges or records of proceedings. Owing in part to their inferior status in the kingdom and the intractability of its legal system in general, over 2,000 Pakistanis already languish in Saudi jails with 10 or more executed every year. The 12 arrested last week will simply join their ranks, the truth of the allegations against them never properly explained, the details of trials and prosecutions never communicated to the consulates of a poor country like Pakistan.There are good reasons for the Saudi effort to pin the blame on Pakistanis. For instance, it permits Saudi Arabia to deflect the truth that in past years its propagation of an orthodox version of Islam via countless religious schools around the world has contributed to the creation of the jihadi mindset, whose pupils increasingly if not always provide cannon fodder for suicide bombers who have struck targets across the world.According to an article published last year in World Affairs Journal, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, (either officially or via private donors) has funded madressahs and religious centres that have then been used for recruitment by extremist groups. The article quotes US Vice President Joe Biden as estimating the Saudi contribution to jihadi groups as being at “hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons”. Increasingly defensive about its own contribution to the very threat that is now at its doorstep, Saudi royals like King Salman have tried to deflect blame by saying that they cannot be held responsible if the money they gave for good causes is appropriated into the cause of extremism and ‘jihad’.
For Whites Sensing Decline, Donald Trump Unleashes Words of Resistance – The New York Times
This year, for the first time in decades, overt white nationalism re-entered national politics. In Iowa, a new “super PAC” paid for pro-Trump robocalls featuring Jared Taylor, a self-described race realist, and William Johnson, a white nationalist and the chairman of the American Freedom Party. (“We don’t need Muslims,” Mr. Taylor urged recipients of the calls. “We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture. Vote Trump.”) David Duke, the Louisiana lawmaker turned anti-Semitic radio host, encouraged listeners to vote for Mr. Trump.Modern political convention dictates that candidates receiving such embraces instantly and publicly spurn them. In 2008, when it was revealed that a minister who endorsed the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, had made anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim remarks, Mr. McCain forcefully repudiated them.Mr. Trump did something different.Asked about the robocall, Mr. Trump seemed to sympathize with its message while affecting a vague half-distance. “Nothing in this country shocks me; I would disavow it, but nothing in this country shocks me,” Mr. Trump told a CNN anchor. “People are angry.”Pressed, Mr. Trump grew irritable, saying: “How many times you want me to say it? I said, ‘I disavow.’”Asked six weeks later about Mr. Duke’s support, he said he had been unaware of it: “David Duke endorsed me? O.K. All right. I disavow, O.K.?” Later, on Twitter, he repeated the phrase: “I disavow.”Mr. Trump has often used those words when confronted by reporters. The phrase is comfortingly nonspecific, a disavowal of everything and nothing. And whatever Mr. Trump’s intentions, it has been powerfully reassuring to people on the far right.“There’s no direct object there,” Mr. Spencer said. “It’s kind of interesting, isn’t it?”Mr. Trump’s new supporters took his approach as a signal of support. In an interview on a “pro-white” radio show called “The Political Cesspool,” Mr. Johnson, of the American Freedom Party, praised Mr. Trump’s handling of the controversy.“He disavowed us,” Mr. Johnson acknowledged, “but he explained why there is so much anger in America that I couldn’t have asked for a better approach from him.”
Source: For Whites Sensing Decline, Donald Trump Unleashes Words of Resistance – The New York Times









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