Nigers interior minister said a body fell from an Air France plane as it approached the West African countrys capital, Niamey, and was discovered lifeless.
They usually are quite lifeless-like after falling out of a plane...
Abdou Labo said a resident was standing just a few metres from where the body landed around 5am on Thursday. He said police arrived and found the lifeless body of a black person, lying in blood.
He also said blood had been spotted on the left wing of the plane.
Labo said the plane was coming from Burkina Fasos capital, Ouagadougou, and was scheduled to continue to Paris.
Officials were holding the plane in Niamey so crew members and passengers could be interviewed. Investigators in Ouagadougou are also looking into the conditions in which the passengers boarded.
Sounds like someone wanted to smuggle himself to Europe and hid in a wheel-well...
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/26/2013 00:00 ||
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#1
they usually freeze to death rather quickly
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/26/2013 10:04 Comments ||
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LOS ANGELES - A California gang member was convicted Wednesday of first-degree murder after authorities say a tattoo on his chest depicting the murder scene led to his apprehension. 25-year-old Anthony Garcia (pictured above) could face life in prison for his role in the 2004 shooting at a Pico Rivera liquor store.
Garcia eluded police until 2008 when he was picked up for driving with a suspended license. Suspecting that he was an active member of the Rivera-13 gang, police then photographed his tattoos and took a mugshot.
While looking for leads on an entirely different crime, Det. Sgt. Kevin Lloyd came across Garcia's picture in the mug book when something struck him: "it looked like a murder from way back when." He then drove to the liquor store named on Garcia's tattoo and cross-referenced with the old case file.
Lloyd was so struck by the detailed accuracy of the tattoo that he called it a "crime scene sketch and a confession."
Garcia's tattoo captured the night of the shooting, from the Christmas lights outside the liquor store to the bent light post in the store's parking lot to the convalescent home called the Rivera, next door to the liquor store. The scene shows a chopper spraying bullets on a victim. Garcia's gang nickname is "Chopper." The victim, John Juarez, is depicted as a Mr. Peanut. The peanut is commonly used as a symbol of a rival gang in Pico Rivera, Lloyd said. The crime scene is under a tattoo on Garcia's neck that reads "Rivera Kills."
Garcia was arrested in October of 2008 and charged with the murder. While behind bars, he reportedly confessed to officers posing as gang members.
Deputy District Attorney Brock Lunsford called Garcia's tattoo a "non-verbal confession."
"It was offensive, the brazenness of it," Lunsford said. "I would never say that he's not intelligent. He was able to avoid detection for four years ... his arrogance got the better of him, not a lack of intelligence."
Los Angeles police and experts on gang tattoos said they can't recall another example of a criminal tattooing such a literal depiction of a crime.
#2
Well, this is good but how do you pick Today's Idiot?
1) The Kaboom guy
2) The flying without an airplane guy
3) The Jewish guy at the Jew hater's concert
4) The WMD guy in Syria
They're all classics
On Thursday afternoon, a man walked into Discount Gun Sales in Beaverton, Oregon. He was carrying a baseball bat and a knife. He proceeded to smash a display case with the bat, and grab a handgun. The manager promptly grabbed his own gun, told the suspect to drop the weapon, the bat, and the knife, and then held the suspect at gunpoint until the police came and arrested the 22-year-old. Either he's got an IQ lower than a geranium or it's a call for help.
Arson investigators were called to the scene of an explosion and fire at a vacant Akron house on the city's north side Thursday morning. There was no one in the residence when it caught fire, officials said.
Investigators had not determined there had been an explosion, but said witnesses described hearing "a kaboom" before they saw flames. He noted it was strange to get that kind of call in the middle of the day.
[AnNahar] Fears of an outbreak of the deadly MERS virus in Soddy Arabia ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face... and construction in the holy city of Mecca have forced cuts in the numbers of pilgrims permitted to perform this year's hajj.
Millions of Musselmens during the annual pilgrimage head to Mecca and Medina, Islam's two holiest sites, providing a possible means for MERS to spread around the globe as pilgrims who may become infected return to their home countries.
Fearful of such a scenario, the authorities have reduced by half the number of pilgrims coming from within Saudi Arabia, and by about 20 percent those from abroad.
"This is an exceptional and temporary decision," Hajj Minister Bandar Hajjar announced last month.
MERS, short for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus which can lead to acute pneumonis and renal failure, claimed its first victim in Saudi Arabia in June 2012.
Saudi Arabia, which has already recorded 69 MERS cases, 38 of whom have died, has urged the elderly and chronically ill, as well as children and pregnant women, not to perform the annual hajj that falls this year in October.
But the health ministry so far has not taken any special measures at airports to detect visitors who may be infected with MERS, deputy health minister Ziad Memish told Agence La Belle France Presse.
"We have not taken any precautionary measures at airports since the World Health Organisation has not recommended them," he said.
WHO health security chief Keiji Fukuda said the organization would issue general guidelines aimed at minimizing the risk of infections spreading.
"We do recognize that this is a risk for travelers and that there are certain steps that individual travelers and countries can take, for example for people who have serious medical conditions," Fukuda told news hounds.
Since then, a total of 90 cases and 45 confirmed MERS deaths have been recorded worldwide, in countries including Jordan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Tunisia, Britannia, La Belle France and Italia.
But most cases have been reported in Saudi Arabia.
Experts are struggling to understand MERS, for which there is no vaccine.
MERS does not appear to spread easily but currently has an extremely high fatality rate of 55 percent. It is a cousin of SARS, which erupted in Asia in 2003 and infected 8,273 people, nine percent of whom died.
Like SARS, MERS is thought to have jumped from animals to humans, and shares the former's flu-like symptoms -- but differs by causing kidney failure.
The 2012 hajj drew 3.1 million people -- and this year's event likewise occurs in October, as the northern hemisphere slides into the season for coughs and sneezes.
-- 'We have to be worried' --
So far, MERS has essentially been found in nations with health services capable of tracing and tackling such diseases. But the hajj draws a broad spectrum of Musselmens, including from poor countries which struggle to cope even with commonplace diseases.
The hajj has successfully ridden out two previous viral episodes in the past decade -- SARS in 2003 and H1N1 influenza in 2009.
The difference this time is that Saudi Arabia itself is the apparent incubator of MERS.
Leading virologist Laurent Kaiser of Geneva University Hospitals told AFP: "It's really a balance between too much precaution and no precaution. At this time, we have to be worried, we have to be careful."
So far no outbreaks of the virus have been reported in Mecca where millions of Musselmen faithful have for months been performing the minor pilgrimage umrah that takes place all year round.
"Their numbers have reached five million since the beginning of the umrah season" 10 months ago, Mecca governor Prince Khaled al-Faisal said on Sunday.
"There are currently 400,000 pilgrims" in the kingdom's holiest shrines Mecca and Medina, Faisal added.
Aside from the virus fears, Saudi authorities have also cited construction work to expand the Grand Mosque in Mecca as reason to keep down the number of pilgrims being allowed to perform this year's hajj.
Hajjar said the expansion work would increase the area of the mosque by 400,000 square meters (4.3 million square feet), raising its capacity to accommodate 2.2 million people at the same time.
The mosque houses the Kaaba -- the cube-shaped structure towards which Musselmens worldwide pray.
Hajj officials have also reported a decrease in the numbers of pilgrims performing umrah during the Musselmen fasting month of Ramadan that began on July 10, compared with past years, due to the expansion work.
"Companies here have received permits for 500,000 pilgrims from all over the world for Ramadan, while this number was one million last year," a board member of the Mecca Chamber of Commerce, Saad al-Qurashi, told AFP.
#1
The broadest probe yet into the deadly MERS virus that erupted in Saudi Arabia last year says older patients, men, and people with underlying medical conditions are particularly at risk.
[DAILYMAIL.CO.UK] Being rude to the President of La Belle France is no longer an automatic criminal offence, La Belle France's parliament agreed today.
In the interests of free speech, MPs revoked legislation dating back to 1881 when anything judged to have 'offended the head of state' risked an automatic fine.
The change followed the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling in March that La Belle France violated a demonstrator's right to freedom of expression when he referred to Nicolas Sarkozy ...23rd President of the French Republic. Sarkozy is married to singer-songwriter Carla Bruni, who has a really nice birthday suit... as a 'jerk'.
Mr Sarkozy, the notoriously aggressive 5ft 5ins conservative, became the butt of numerous jokes during his five years in office, which ended last year.
But when a demonstrator held up a placard reading 'Get Lost Jerk' at a Sarkozy meeting in western La Belle France in 2008, he received a criminal conviction and a fine of around 25 pounds.
This was despite exactly the same expression being used by Sarkozy himself months earlier while he was attending an agricultural show in Gay Paree.
Last year ECHR deemed the punishment handed down to Sarkozy's tormentor as being disproportionate and a violation of freedom of expression, as the act was a 'satirical remark.'
The ECHR acknowledged that the insult constituted 'criticism of a political nature' for which 'freedom of expression was of the highest importance.'
Posted by: Fred ||
07/26/2013 00:00 ||
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On Saturday night, Israelis were among those who attended a British musician and former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters' concert in Belgium. Even as Waters is a known activist pushing for the boycott of Israel, Israelis were still amazed to see that the show included a blatantly anti-Semitic display.
Toward its end, a black balloon in the shape of a wild pig was released to the sky, on it a Star of David, in the company of symbols of dictatorial organizations and regimes from around the world.
"I came to the concert because I really like his music, without any connection to his political stance toward Israel," says Alon Onfus Asif, an Israeli living in Belgium. "And I had a lot of fun, until I noticed the Star of David, on the inflatable pig. That was the only religious-national symbol which appeared among other symbols for fascism, dictatorships and oppression of people. Waters crossed the line and gave expression to an anti-Semitic message, beyond all his messages of anti-militancy." Pic of Pig with Star of David at link
#1
That's idiocy, but it's not anti-semitism. We shouldn't imitate liberals by grandstanding and making false accusations of bigotry.
By the way, I hate Waters. He hasn't done anything good since Dark Side. The Wall and Wish You Were Here are overrated. Even as an ignorant, apolitical junior high schooler, I recognized that The Final Cut was awful dreck with its mewling about evils of Margaret Thatcher. He's a dumb lefty and an overrated artist.
But I'm against accusing people of bigotry for actions that can be ascribed to (bad) ideology. It's sad that he and other musicians feel the need to oppose the one country in the region where their music is appreciated. But that's what leftardism does.
[AnNahar] Turkey sent a new signal of pressures squeezing its economy on Wednesday, warning it may cut the growth outlook a day after a juggling act with interest rates to shore up the lira.
The moves came just a week after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan sought to reassure investors that their capital was safe in Turkey, where weeks of deadly protests had posed the biggest challenge faced by the Islamic-rooted government during its decade-long rule.
It's not the protests that threaten the Turkish economy, it's Erdogan's policies...
Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek said that the growth forecast of 4.0 percent this year, half the rate two years ago, might have to be lowered because of U.S. monetary policy and recession in the eurozone. The minister, speaking on news channel NTV, referred to signals from the United States that the Federal Reserve will eventually wind down special injections of money to stimulate the U.S. economy.
Some of this money had gone into emerging markets in search of higher returns, but has now begun to flow out, pushing down emerging stocks and currencies and raising their borrowing rates.
Simsek said: "Fed decisions and the international market conditions have triggered risks for a (growth) downgrade."
Weak demand from the debt and recession-hit eurozone, Turkey's biggest trading partner, was also hurting Turkish exports, he said.
Turkey, which has grown to become about the 17th-biggest economy in the world in the past decade after a severe financial crisis and IMF rescues, remains extremely vulnerable to rapid flows of foreign capital. Investors were also jittery after weeks of protests which began on May 31 after police brutally broke up a peaceful sit-in in Istanbul.
The minister's warning came the day after the central bank raised the overnight rate by 0.75 percent to 7.25 percent but held the key rate at 4.5 percent to which it was reduced in May.
The lira then rallied.
The bank had already signaled a change of direction on rates, which would normally raise the attractions of the lira and retain capital but also crimp economic activity, and its solution had been broadly expected by analysts. The policy statements are seen as reflecting various pressures: the government wants low rates to support growth, while some circles in Turkey have argued for a rate rise to support the lira.
In May, the prime minister attacked them as "speculators" and the "interest rate lobby".
Boy howdy I bet that reassured the investors...
But foreign analysts have been strongly skeptical for weeks that Turkey is on top of external pressures, a balance of payments deficit and unease over serious civil unrest in May and June.
Meanwhile the bank, formally independent on monetary policy, is committed to selling foreign currency to bolster the lira and reassure investors. This unorthodox measure was launched two weeks ago when the lira fell to a record low level of 1.9740 to the dollar. Late on Wednesday the lira was being traded at 1.9171 to the dollar.
The latest reported figure for the amount of this intervention was about $6.0 billion.
Analysts at Societe General bank in London said on Wednesday that this policy had "appeared unable to stop" heavy selling pressure while depleting valuable reserves of foreign exchange, which another analyst had put at about $45 billion when the intervention began.
Analysts at Barclays bank said that the central bank might now hold its rates in August. But if the U.S. Fed began to tighten its policy in September, Turkey may have to raise its rates by 1.0-1.5 percentage points in the following months.
Capital Economics commented that the lira and Turkish dollar bonds had switched from being among the best performers in the emerging Europe region earlier this year to become the worst performers.
"We think rising external financing needs will keep the lira under pressure and we expect it to drop to 2.05 to the dollar by the end of 2014."
Capital Economics had noted on Tuesday "government pressure to keep interest rates down" and that "a severe sell-off in the currency could see rates raised by up to 500 basis points (5.0 percentage points) in this cycle."
Well yes, some of the Erdogan appointees have turned out to be crooks also. However, it took them a few years to learn the ropes and during that time the economy operated pretty well.
Posted by: lord garth ||
07/26/2013 17:46 Comments ||
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#5
LG, ahhh that explains it. The rookies, be they ball players or crooks, need some seasoning to learn the ropes.
[AnNahar] Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region is preparing to host a conference that will bring together Kurdish parties from Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey, an official said on Wednesday.
In all of which countries the Kurds have a significantly higher birthrate than the majority population. President Erdogan and former President Ahmadinejad are keenly aware if this, though possibly not other non-Kurdish leaders, what with having more important things to worry about than babies not being conceived.
"The general conference will be held within a month from now," Adnan al-Mufti, a senior member of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party, told Agence La Belle France Presse.
A preparatory meeting was held in Arbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, on Monday, and was attended by 39 Kurdish parties.
"We want a complete agreement and a just and peaceful solution for the Kurdish issue," Kurdistan region president Massud Barzani told the meeting.
Major Kurdish populations are spread across four countries -- Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran.
One of the most pressing issues is that of the Kurds in war-torn Syria, where they make up about 15 percent of the population and are mostly concentrated in the north.
Kurdish regions of Syria have been run by local Kurdish councils since Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneck al-Assad One of the last of the old-fashioned hereditary iron-fisted fascist dictators... 's forces withdrew from the areas in mid-2012.
The Kurds have walked a fine line, trying to avoid antagonizing either the Assad regime or the rebels seeking its overthrow, but fierce fighting has recently broken out between Kurdish forces and jihadists opposed to Assad.
And Syrian Kurdish officials said last week that they are planning to create a temporary autonomous government to administer Kurdish regions in the north of country.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- A spooked cow killed a Palestinian man who was trying to slaughter the beast on Saturday during the Muslim celebration of Eid al-Adha, a Gaza health official said.
Muslims around the world slaughter sheep, cows and goats, during the four-day holiday that began Friday, giving away much of the meat to the poor. The Muslim holiday commemorates the sacrifice by the Prophet Ibrahim, known to Christians and Jews as Abraham.
But accidents are common as people frequently buy animals to slaughter themselves instead of paying professional butchers. The festive atmosphere at the site of the slaughtering also tends to make the animals fidgety.
The 52-year-old man who died was trampled to death, and another three people were seriously injured when the cow ran wild in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah, said health official Ashraf al-Kidra
#9
A serious point: if replacing lead with [insert material here] means a better and lower-cost bullet (won't weigh less because its mass is an integral part of its stopping power), and along the way it turns out to be eco-friendly, who's to complain? Not me.
That's the way technology works.
But if it's a more expensive bullet that doesn't work as well then it's a problem.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/26/2013 16:34 Comments ||
Top||
#10
Did some quick research.
M855A1 - Enhanced Performance Round. It replaces the M855.
From Guns&Ammo: They juiced the round up so that it will fly at 3,100 fps. This would be a great achievement except for the fact that they did it by increasing the chamber pressure from 55,000 psi to 63,000 psi... I would be remiss if I didnt mention that the new round cuts barrel life by almost 50 percent.
But no amount of tuning is going to alter the fact that the EPR has a 5.5 MOA accuracy standard. 5.5 MOA? Seriously? The Mk 318 SOST round that the USMC has fielded in Afghanistan is held to a 2 MOA standard, but the latest and greatest round that its being replaced by is held to a 5.5 MOA standard?
Additionally, the Mk 318 has better terminal ballistics against soft targets, holds together better through intermediate barriers and costs half what the M855A1 costs. In this era of dramatic cost-cutting, it is absolutely mind-boggling as to why they are insisting on fielding a round so inferior in just about every aspect to one thats already in theater and pay twice as much for it! ... fares very poorly against windshield glass and other intermediate barriers. It also does not penetrate SAPI body armor or its equivalent.
You do know the California Assembly passed a resolution to ban lead ammo. J.Brown IIRC only needs to sign it.
Lastly if I read correctly, the slug is copper with a steel core. I hope it is - environmentalists be damned, muhahahaahaha. My grandfather warned me not to use copper nails when building my tree forts. Copper nails kill trees. And yup - a quick www search shows its true.
The report states that the gas exhausted from the rifles contained high levels of copper and zinc which account for all the symptoms suffered by the riflemen. A few, quite comical, short term solutions have been recommended. These include only shooting outside, slower rate of fire and spacing the shooters out more when at the range!
Most of these rounds will be fired on the range, and keeping lead out of them will avoid a lot of problems. However, in the field, I am not so sure they are a good deal for the solder.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Killer Tattoos Murder Scene On His Chest
On Thursday afternoon, a man walked into Discount Gun Sales in Beaverton, Oregon. He was carrying a baseball bat and a knife. He proceeded to smash a display case with the bat, and grab a handgun. The manager promptly grabbed his own gun, told the suspect to drop the weapon, the bat, and the knife, and then held the suspect at gunpoint until the police came and arrested the 22-year-old.
[AnNahar] Fears of an outbreak of the deadly MERS virus in 
On Saturday night, Israelis were among those who attended a British musician and former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters' concert in Belgium. Even as Waters is a known activist pushing for the boycott of Israel, Israelis were still amazed to see that the show included a blatantly anti-Semitic display.
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir 
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- A spooked cow killed a Palestinian man who was trying to slaughter the beast on Saturday during the Muslim celebration of Eid al-Adha, a Gaza health official said.
