Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho is thought to be the highest-ranking Chaldean Catholic clergyman to be killed in the violence in Iraq. He was the Archbishop of Mosul which, along with Baghdad, has been one of the worst places for attacks on Christians. For the Christians still remaining in Mosul the reaction may very well be that this death is neither the first nor likely to be the last. The Barnabas Fund, a charity in the UK that has tried to help Iraqi Christians, says there have been some very nasty cases of Christians being abducted, tortured and then killed and it says many Christians in Iraq are now deadened to the violence. Bombs But on the other hand the Archbishop was very high-profile and that will have a shock value. What might make a difference to the reaction to this news is whether the Archbishop, who was elderly, just died of the stress of being kidnapped or was actively tortured and murdered. He was reported to be on medication for heart problems. Exactly how he died is not clear yet. But his death is the latest in a string of attacks on churches, […]
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba — A U.S. military commander altered a report on a firefight in Afghanistan to cast blame for the death of a Delta Force commando on a Canadian youth who was captured after the shooting stopped, a defense attorney said Thursday. The attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, made the allegation at a pretrial hearing as he argued for access to the officer, identified only as ‘Col. W,’ as well as details about interrogations that he said might help clear his client of war-crimes charges. The U.S. military has charged Omar Khadr with murder for throwing a grenade that killed Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer during a U.S. military raid on July 27, 2002, on an al-Qaida compound in eastern Afghanistan. Khadr’s case is on track to be the first to go to trial under a military tribunal system at this U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba. The military commander’s official report the day after the raid originally said the assailant who threw the grenade was killed, which would rule out Khadr as the suspect. But the report was revised months later, under the same date, to say a U.S. fighter had only […]
In September 2007, the Inspector General of the Justice Department reported that the Terrorist Screening Center (the FBI-administered organization that consolidates terrorist watch list information in the United States) had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007 – and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month.1 At that rate, our list will have a million names on it by July. If there were really that many terrorists running around, we’d all be dead. Terrorist watch lists must be tightly focused on true terrorists who pose a genuine threat. Bloated lists are bad because * they ensnare many innocent travelers as suspected terrorists, and * because they waste screeners’ time and divert their energies from looking for true terrorists. Small, focused watch lists are better for civil liberties and for security. The uncontroversial contention that Osama Bin Laden and a handful of other known terrorists should not be allowed on an aircraft is being used to create a monster that goes far beyond what ordinary Americans think of when they think about a ‘terrorist watch list.’ […]
Using a virtual pendulum and its real-world counterpart, scientists at the University of Illinois have created the first mixed reality state in a physical system. Through bidirectional instantaneous coupling, each pendulum ‘sensed’ the other, their motions became correlated, and the two began swinging as one. ‘In a mixed reality state there is no clear boundary between the real system and the virtual system,’ said U. of I. physicist Alfred Hubler. ‘The line blurs between what’s real and what isn’t.’ In the experiment, Hubler and graduate student Vadas Gintautas connected a mechanical pendulum to a virtual one that moved under time-tested equations of motion. The researchers sent data about the real pendulum to the virtual one, and sent information about the virtual pendulum to a motor that influenced motion of the real pendulum. When the lengths of the two pendulums were dissimilar, they remained in a dual reality state of uncorrelated motion and both soon came to rest. When the lengths of the pendulums were similar, however, they ‘suddenly noticed each other, synchronized their motions, and danced together indefinitely,’ said Hubler, who also is affiliated with the U. of I. Center for Complex Systems Research. In […]
JERUSALEM — When is a truce not quite a truce? Hamas is once again offering Israel a cease-fire, but the language that the Islamic movement has chosen reveals a deep reluctance to talk about any real peace with the Jewish state. Ismail Haniyeh, Gaza’s Hamas prime minister, on Wednesday proposed a ‘tahdia’ - which in Arabic means a loosely defined period of calm that falls short of a formal cease-fire. Still, this semantic nuance could well determine the success of Mideast peacemaking. As long as Israelis and the Islamic militants are killing each other in Gaza and southern Israel, a U.S.-sponsored drive to forge an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal by year’s end stands little chance. Israel is formally rejecting the truce talk, and on Wednesday its army killed four militants in the West Bank town of Bethlehem after opening fire on their car. Israel sees a broad Iranian-driven effort to besiege it from the north through Hezbollah in Lebanon and from the south through Hamas, and fears a truce will simply give Hamas time to regroup and strengthen its fighting forces. But other signs on the ground indicate that Israel and Hamas are moving closer […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
