[Sun Times] The three-day Christmas weekend in Chicago has already become more violent than it was during the entire holiday weekend last year.
Eleven men were killed and at least 32 others have been wounded in shootings across the city since Friday evening, according to Chicago Police.
Last year, a total of 30 people were shot in Chicago over the four-day holiday weekend, leaving six dead.
The weekend’s most recent homicide happened about 9:20 p.m. Sunday in an East Chatham neighborhood mass shooting that left two men dead and five others wounded, two critically, on the South Side, police said. People were gathered for a party on the porch of a home in the 8600 block of South Maryland when someone wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt walked out from an adjacent alley and opened fire. The shooter then ran away.
An 18-year-old was shot and pronounced dead at the scene. Another man, 21, was shot in the back and taken to Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, where he was pronounced dead, police said. The Cook County medical examiner’s office could not immediately provide information on the fatalities. A 35-year-old man suffered multiple gunshot wounds and was also taken to Christ, where he was listed in critical condition, police said. A fourth male was shot in the body and taken in critical condition to Stroger Hospital. Also, a 27-year-old man and 21-year-old woman both suffered a gunshot wound to the leg and were taken to Stroger, where their conditions were stabilized. A 39-year-old man shot in the foot later showed up at Roseland Community Hospital. He was listed in good condition.
[Al Jazeera] At least 22 non-combatants were killed in Democratic Republic of the Congo ...formerly the Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Zaire, and who knows what else, not to be confused with the Brazzaville Congo aka Republic of Congo, which is much smaller and much more (for Africa) stable. DRC gave the world Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Mobutu, followed by years of tedious civil war. Its principle industry seems to be the production of corpses. With a population of about 74 million it has lots of raw material... 's North Kivu province over the weekend, an official said, blaming the attacks on an gang led by Ugandan rebels.
The killings happened in Eringeti, a town 55km north of the regional hub Beni, a city plagued by a wave of deadly attacks, according to regional official Amisi Kalonda.
"Yesterday, they killed 10 civilians. Twelve other bodies were found [on Sunday] in the surrounding villages," he told AFP news agency on Sunday.
For the past two years, the region around Beni has been afflicted by a series of killings. Nearly 700 civilians have died, most of whom were hacked to death.
Congolese officials have blamed the attacks on the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a group of rebels dominated by Ugandan Moslems, but several reports have suggested that other groups - including elements within the Congolese army - took part in some killings.
A Congolese army front man confirmed the attacks saying military forces had "killed four ADF rebels" but added that "the toll on the civilian side is very heavy".
Political crisis
The violence came amid a major political crisis in the country, in which opposition leaders are trying to prevent President Joseph Kabila, who has been in office since 2001, from serving a third term.
Congolese politicians have agreed in principle to a deal under which Kabila will leave office by the end of 2017, opposition leaders said on Friday, an unexpected breakthrough after dozens were killed in anti-government protests this week.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/26/2016 00:00 ||
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[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Prince Fahad bin Sultan, the governor of the Saudi Tabuk province, has ordered a court to look into the marriage of a 16-year-old girl from a man in his 70s and rule whether it is religiously acceptable.
This comes after social media users voiced their surprise over the marriage between an elderly man and a minor.
Relevant authorities have summoned and taken the statements from the concerned parties, including the 16-year-old girl, who voiced her desire to go ahead with the marriage.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/26/2016 00:00 ||
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SANDRINGHAM, England (Reuters) - Britain's Queen Elizabeth, 90, missed a traditional Christmas church service on Sunday for the first time in decades due to a heavy cold, a Buckingham Palace spokesman said.[snip] Don't like the connected dots between this story and this one.
I say nonsense -- at least I hope it's nonsense. But if it's true it's yet another intelligence failure by American agencies. A working EM drive will truly open up space -- why aren't we in the lead?
Scientists in China claim they’ve created a working prototype of the ‘impossible’ reactionless engine – and they say they’re already testing it in orbit aboard the Tiangong-2 space laboratory.
The radical, fuel-free EmDrive recently stirred up controversy after a paper published by a team of NASA researchers appeared to show they’d successfully built the technology. If the physics-defying concept is brought to reality, it’s said the engine could get humans to Mars in just 10 weeks.
But now, scientists with the China Academy of Space Technology claim NASA’s results ‘re-confirm’ what they’d already achieved, and have plans to implement it in satellites ‘as quickly as possible.’
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/26/2016 00:00 ||
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#1
I say bullshit. Anybody who has a working model of something like this, would keep it a secret - because if you can get it to work, it makes you the master of the world.
#2
Could we not think of the gas being burned on the sun as the fuel so that this is just a way to harness that energy?
It's interesting research anyway and seemingly a better investment than the shameful way that our government has squandered trillions of dollars on stupid wars, misguided social programs and climate change (or whatever they're calling it these days) while letting NASA wither.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
12/26/2016 11:47 Comments ||
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#3
Not necessarily impossible. We have a stupid habit of every time we invent something we seem to need to overpublish details in scientific journals, put all the detailed plans on weakly protected servers connected to the internet, have Chinese engineers involved in everything important and train most of their engineers in our universities because they pay full out of state tuition without complaint.
China's first aircraft carrier has set off for the Western Pacific for an open-sea training exercise, the Defense Ministry said. State media said Sunday that it is the first time that the Liaoning, which was commissioned by the Chinese navy in 2012, has headed to "distant sea waters." The Western Pacific region stretches from China to New Zealand and encompasses countries in the Pacific, Oceania and parts of Asia.
The statement said a navy formation including the Liaoning set off Saturday for training in the Western Pacific, without elaborating on the location, as part of an annual training plan.
This is what carrier battle groups do: practice.
China said last month that its aircraft carrier, purchased as an incomplete hull from Ukraine more than a decade ago, was ready to engage in combat. The Liaoning recently completed its first live-fire exercise along with fighters in the Bohai Sea in eastern China and, on Friday, the military announced it had carried out a series of fighter launch, recovery and air combat exercises slightly farther afield in the Yellow Sea.
On Saturday morning, the Liaoning carried out training in the East China Sea, according to footage shown on state broadcaster China Central Television. A separate statement from the Defense Ministry said that several carrier-based fighter jets and helicopters took off one after another and returned after completing an air tactical confrontation and air refueling exercise.
The Japanese Defense Ministry said it spotted the Liaoning as part of a fleet of eight Chinese warships that included destroyers and frigates, in the central part of the East China Sea for the first time. It said there was no incursion into Japanese waters.
China hasn't described specifically how it intends to use the Liaoning, but it is seen as helping reinforce China's increasingly assertive claims over almost all of the South China Sea, which is home to key shipping lanes, rich fishing grounds and a potential wealth of mineral resources.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/26/2016 00:00 ||
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Is the PLAN doing all of this "cold start" without carrier familiarization / cross-training with foreign navies? Expect some costly accidents if so as the sea is unkind to amateurs.
#2
China said last month that its aircraft carrier, purchased as an incomplete hull from Ukraine more than a decade ago, was ready to engage in combat.
The carrier was purchased by a Hong Kong business man from the Ukraine, Xu Zengping, who "sold" it to the central government. However, the government never paid him even 1 yen, and practically ruined the man.
#3
All nice. Now to you have an effective escort group to increase its survivability outside of land based cover? The Argies had an aircraft carrier that didn't venture too far from home during the Falklands conflict, for good reason.
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/26/2016 12:22 Comments ||
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#5
Is the PLAN doing all of this "cold start" without carrier familiarization / cross-training with foreign navies? Expect some costly accidents if so as the sea is unkind to amateurs.
You can bet they're doing this only after poring over reams of (purloined and translated) archived material from Uncle Sam's Navy.
#6
All nice. Now to you have an effective escort group to increase its survivability outside of land based cover? The Argies had an aircraft carrier that didn't venture too far from home during the Falklands conflict, for good reason.
The Chinese have a fairly large and modern navy, thanks to decades of massive investments in new capital ships. This carrier's just the tip of the iceberg. A couple of additional carriers are on the way.
#7
re ZF: studying the purloined us papers and actually foing it is sorta like spectator sex: it aint the same. look for some "Made by China" holes in the water coming soon.
#10
The Chinese have a fairly large and modern navy,
As we're aware of, but carrier groups have to have depth to cover rotations well afar from home base. One in for maintenance, one out, and one training.
#11
re ZF: studying the purloined us papers and actually foing it is sorta like spectator sex: it aint the same. look for some "Made by China" holes in the water coming soon.
They're not just studying. They're doing. That's what the massive PLAN budget is all about - money for avgas, spare parts, simulators, training hours and the whole panoply of requirements for a blue water navy.
The product issues we get with some imported Chinese goods are the result of a low-bid process completed at rock bottom prices made feasible only by under-speccing the product delivered. At $180b, the Chinese military isn't cutting corners on cost - adjusted for salary differences (6 to 1), they're spending at least as much as the US, if not more.
The Chinese have been pretty good at ripping off extremely complicated and fast-evolving products in the tech sector. By comparison, the military is practically standing still. I expect they will have little difficulty replicating functions explained in microscopic detail the way the US military tends to do, especially since they have no shortage of funding to do it with.
#12
Bottom line is that we'd better think about what we're prepared to defend in the Western Pacific, how much money we're prepared to spend defending it and what our end game vis-a-vis China is going to be. I suspect nothing short of partition, with a China occupied by neighboring powers, will neutralize the long-term Chinese threat. Since that is not a practical possibility, short of a lucky roll of the dice (i.e. large scale multi-faction civil war in China culminating in the establishment of multiple independent countries along historical ethno-linguistic lines), we are looking at an armed truce in the wake of limited hostilities that will repeatedly flare up as China does probes in force.
[Hurriyet Daily News] Religious and politicians have marked the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah in Istanbul’s Ortaköy neighborhood, underlining the importance of the Jewish community for The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
Submissive Jews who know their place, quietly accepting the occasional "madman" torturing and/or murdering a few of them, are fine -- Iran is fond of their Jews, too, and the king of Bahrain is also marking Hanukkah. It's just when they get uppity and fancy themselves equal, a nation among nations with all the rights thereto, that it's a problem that must be eradicated from the face of the Earth.
"We’ve never had any problem with our Jewish siblings in Turkish soil, but crises may erupt between countries from time to time," Deputy Prime Minister Veysi Kaynak told journalists at the event in Esma Sultan, which was organized by Besiktas Municipality and the Turkish Jewish Community.
"We experienced the Mavi Marmara flotilla incident. After this event, we witnessed our Jewish siblings’ great efforts as intermediators," he said, referring to an Israeli commando raid in 2010 on a Gazoo-bound flotilla that killed 10 Turkish activists.
Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew, Turkish Jewish Community President Ishak Ibrahimzadeh, acting Armenian Patriarch Aram Atesyan, Israeli Consul General in Istanbul Shai Cohen and main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) Istanbul politician Sezgin Tanrikulu were among the participants at the Hanukkah celebrations.
Noting that it was impossible to separate Jews from Turkish history and Turks from Jewish history, Kaynak noted that "all who were in trouble in history found themselves in these lands."
During his speech, Kaynak also said Mehmet the Conqueror invited all Jews to Istanbul when he conquered Istanbul and guaranteed that they would be able to live their religion freely. Kaynak added that Anatolia has been the "mother’s bosom" throughout history and that 3 million asylum seekers are currently in Turkey.
"There are Arabs, Kurds, Turkmens, Sunnis and Shiites among these refugees," he said.
Turkey "never sees Jews as minorities," Kaynak said, adding that the country had been restoring synagogues and churches in addition to mosques.
"Our Jewish siblings are the owners of this geography just like us and they are its main elements," he also said.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/26/2016 00:00 ||
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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.
[Al Jazeera] At least 22 
SANDRINGHAM, England (Reuters) - Britain's Queen Elizabeth, 90, missed a traditional Christmas church service on Sunday for the first time in decades due to a heavy cold, a Buckingham Palace spokesman said.[snip]
China's first aircraft carrier has set off for the Western Pacific for an open-sea training exercise, the Defense Ministry said. State media said Sunday that it is the first time that the Liaoning, which was commissioned by the Chinese navy in 2012, has headed to "distant sea waters." The Western Pacific region stretches from China to New Zealand and encompasses countries in the Pacific, Oceania and parts of Asia.
