Tens of thousands of Islamists have gathered to push for the creation of a single state across the Muslim world. The dull roars of a football match, the twanging music of a youth group concert – from a distance it is not always easy to tell an Islamic conference from a holiday crowd. Inside Jakarta’s Gelora Bung Karno stadium the clues get easier. There are about 100,000 people inside, and everyone is in Islamic dress. The women’s section – by far the biggest – is a pitter-patter of ice-cream colours. On their parasols, one word is printed over and over again: Khilafah, caliphate. This is the reason why people have come here. To show their support for a single, unified, Islamic state. They have been invited by the international Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir. Not everyone believed they would fill the stadium, but Hizb ut-Tahrir is good at bringing in supporters – and keeping them. Milling around outside the stadium we found 24-year-old Akbar. He was not a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, but he said: ‘This conference is not just for one group. In my opinion, if you support there being sharia law in Indonesia, […]
BAGHDAD — Exhaustion and combat stress are besieging US troops in Iraq as they battle with a new type of warfare. Some even rely on Red Bull to get through the day. As desertions and absences increase, the military is struggling to cope with the crisis. Lieutenant Clay Hanna looks sick and white. Like his colleagues he does not seem to sleep. Hanna says he catches up by napping on a cot between operations in the command centre, amid the noise of radio. He is up at 6am and tries to go to sleep by 2am or 3am. But there are operations to go on, planning to be done and after-action reports that need to be written. And war interposes its own deadly agenda that requires his attention and wakes him up. When he emerges from his naps there is something old and paper-thin about his skin, something sketchy about his movements as the days go by. The Americans he commands, like the other men at Sullivan – a combat outpost in Zafraniya, south east Baghdad – hit their cots when they get in from operations. But even when they wake up there is something tired and […]
LONDON — Driving an SUV in Britain already has a certain stigma, thanks to a growing climate-change clamor. But now it’s set to become wildly expensive in addition to uncool. London mayor Ken Livingstone intends next year to triple the daily toll on driving in the city for gas guzzlers – or ‘Chelsea tractors’ as they are sniffily known – to $50 a day. He also plans to scrap a residents’ exemption, meaning that instead of paying about $350 annually, locals who drive cars over a certain engine size could be hit for $10,000. ‘This new charge will try to affect the choices people make in terms of the cars they are buying,’ says a spokesman for Mayor Livingstone. Indeed, amid a number of current and planned measures targeting gas guzzlers across Britain, sales of environmentally friendlier cars are rising dramatically. Figures provided by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), an industry association, show that more than 9,500 were sold in the first six months of 2007 – more than for the whole of 2006. ‘The market has doubled this year,’ says SMMT economics manager Matthew Croucher. ‘This is in response to a number […]
A lower percentage of Mexican workers in the U.S. is sending money to family members back home, a report showed Wednesday. The percentage of workers who regularly sent remittances home fell to 64% in the first half of 2007 from 71% in the same period last year, the Inter-American Development Bank said in a study of remittance patterns. The reduction was deepest in 40 U.S. states where Latin American immigration is a more recent trend, such as Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, where it plunged to 56% this year from the average 80% in 2006. ‘In the new destination states, around half a million migrants have stopped sending money home,’ said Donald F. Terry, the bank’s Multilateral Investment Fund official who commissioned the survey. ‘This means that over the past years 2 million people in Mexico have lost a vital lifeline,’ he said. Mexico is the primary destination for U.S. immigrant remittances. Remittances to Mexico grew 23% from January to June of last year but grew only 0.6% in the same period this year, according to the Central Bank of Mexico. Remittances sent by Central American immigrants grew 11% in the same period. […]
African-Americans are victims of nearly half the murders committed in the United States despite making up only 13 percent of the population, a report published Thursday showed. Around 8,000 of nearly 16,500 murder victims in 2005, or 49 percent, were black Americans, according to the report released by the statistics bureau of the Department of Justice. Broken down by gender, 6,800 black men were murdered in 2005, making up more than half the nearly 13,000 male murder victims. Black women made up 35 percent, or 1,200, of the nearly 3,500 female homicide victims. Young black men aged between 17 and 29 bore a disproportionately high burden in the grim statistics, making up 51 percent of African-American murder victims. The percentage of white male murder victims in the same age group was 37 percent. More than half the murders of blacks took place in densely populated urban areas. Firearms were involved 77 percent of the time in homicides involving black people and around 60 percent of the time in murders of whites. Most murder victims — 93 percent of blacks and 85 percent of whites — were killed by someone of their own […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
