1. First on CNN: Five Iranian boats fire shots in the Persian Gulf
(Video at link. Add this to all the hostile actions by the IRI in the past couple of weeks and it makes you want to watch Master and Commander again at the very least)
2. Terror arrests reach record level, says Metropolitan Police
Terror-related arrests in England, Wales and Scotland reached record levels last year, when 338 people were held, Scotland Yard has said.
More than half of those arrests were related to Syria, Met Police assistant commissioner Mark Rowley said.
Police said more than 700 potential terror suspects are now thought to have travelled to Syria.
About half of those people – said to be of “significant concern” – are believed to have since returned to the UK.
(This is just one of hundreds of excellent contemporary examples of how sharia works in fact on a day to day basis. Each believer is accuser, police, judge, jury and executioner.
Here is how this often works. Say you owe a guy, Let’s call him Mohamed, 5 minutes with your sheep. A retail value of maybe a dollar and a quarter USD. You decide you don’t want to pay. So you float the rumor that Mohamed said something bad about islam or any of its icons or avatars or fetish objects. Next thing you know as he is off to the mall to get some new boots for his sheep session, he is mobbed by a raging throng of people, each of whom are certain they have been elevated in the eyes of allah for having committed this act of irrational violence on the slightest hint of an unsubstantiated accusation that he might have murmured a victimless crime against the usual crew. Now lets say instead of Mohamed his name was Chris. That same mob would have rocks.)
Shocking footage has emerged of a hundreds-strong mob in Qatar attacking an Indian man they believe has posted anti-Islamic comments on Facebook.
The short clip, filmed on a mobile phone last Friday, shows the man cowering outside a mall in Doha as he’s assaulted and jostled by shoppers while surrounded by a huge crowd.
At one point a man rushes in and hits him on the head.
4. Three Algerians escape from Alitalia jet in Rome
Three Algerians forced open the emergency exit of an Alitalia passenger plane while it was heading for take-off at Rome’s Fiumicino airport, slid down the safety slides that were activated and escaped from the airport late on Wednesday night, an Alitalia spokesman said.
“When the plane was taxiing, in the preliminary stages of approaching the runway, these people forced open a door and slid down the slides that were activated, and then they escaped,” the Alitalia spokesman told The Local.
The three Algerians had departed from Algiers and were due to fly to Istanbul after a layover in Rome, the spokesman said.
They are still missing. They were among a group of Algerians on the Alitalia AZ702 flight who had been denied entry to Italy, according to media reports.
5. Ex-Nat’l Guardsman Given 20 Years for Trying to Join ISIS
Donald Morgan, a 44-year old North Carolina man and former National Guardsman, was given a prison term of more than 20 years, after he tried to join the Islamic State in Syria.
A convert to Islam, Morgan was arrested at New York’s JFK airport last June for the illegal possession of a gun that he had been trying to sell online. He had travelled to Lebanon and on to Turkey from where he was planning on crossing the border to Syria. However, his plans went awry when authorities at the Istanbul airport sent him back to Lebanon.
6. North Korea executes defence chief with an anti-aircraft gun: South Korea agency
(One might think that would be a spectacular, but probably very fast and relatively painless way to die compared to the three generations of slavery and torture that the average North Korean can expect if they are accused of mishandling a piece of paper from a magazine that contains a photo of one of the ruling dynasty)
North Korea executed its defence chief by putting him in front of an anti-aircraft gun at a firing range, Seoul’s National Intelligence Service told lawmakers, which would be the latest in a series of high-level purges since Kim Jong Un took charge.
Hyon Yong Chol, who headed the isolated nuclear-capable country’s military, was charged with treason, including disobeying Kim and falling asleep during an event at which North Korea’s young leader was present, according to South Korean lawmakers briefed in a closed-door meeting with the spy agency on Wednesday.
The BBC is under fire after the Home Affairs Editor appeared to compare notorious hate preacher Anjem Choudary to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.
Following a lengthy report on last night’s BBC News at Ten about Choudary’s ‘radicalising force’, Mark Easton appeared to question whether there were similarities between Britain’s most famous extremist and two of history’s greatest civil rights campaigners.
Referring to Theresa May’s pledge to clamp down on extremism, the journalist said Gandhi and Mandela had been seen as extremists and that those stances ‘are sometimes needed to challenge very establish values’.
But outraged viewers slammed the comparison as ‘disgusting’ while campaigners said the ‘ludicrous’ comments gave credence to Choudary’s ‘complete rejection’ of democracy and tolerance.
(Regular folks of Great Britain, your on your own)
Thank you Draculea, Tundra T., M., CB Sashenka, Buck, and all who sent in materials. Lots more to post and edit today. Please check back soon.
3. Crowd-sourcing.