A ship jointly owned by Swedish, Greek, and Norwegian activists hoping to join a flotilla of activist vessels challenging Israel's economic blockade of Gaza, had its propeller cut while in Athen's harbor today.
The ship has been detained in Athens on spurious charges that it's not seaworthy. She says that charge was made by an Israeli legal group. Spurious? You don't have a friggin' propeller!
The damage was discovered at 6:30 in the evening Athens time today, and that divers probably cut the propeller in the past 24 hours. Repairing the damage will take a few days. As to who is responsible, he declined to speculate. A few days? Guess again. You're looking at major 3 shop work, or more likely dry dock.
Earlier today, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet approved using any means necessary to stop the flotilla from reaching Gaza.
The flotilla spokesman says it has no plans to enter Israeli waters, instead planning on transiting through international waters to Gaza's territorial waters. Gaza has no territorial waters.
The distinction goes to the heart of their protest. While Israel extends de facto sovereignty over Gaza's coastal waters, penning its fisherman close to shore and preventing any shipping or ferries to run to and from the Strip, it's not their territory under international law. Wrong.
The activists themselves say they want to make the point that peacefully coming and going from Gaza shouldn't be criminalized, insist that they will practice nonviolent in their attempt, and that they'd be delighted to simply sail through unmolested.
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Police in Berlin have confirmed the arrest of two Russian citizens on suspicion of belonging to a North Caucasus terrorist group.
One unidentified suspect, aged 35, is accused of being a courier for Jamaat Shariat from September 2008 to last August, accoding to the Rheinische Post. He purportedly took documents from Germany to the Czech Republic that contained information about the recruitment and weapons purchases for terror groups in Chechnya and Dagestan.
According to Ukrainian news agency Globalist, he is known as the "Iron Recruiter." German news reports said that police have also detained his suspected assistant.
German law enforcement agencies are considering an extradition request from the Czech Republic. Czech police said on May 3 that they had detained four Russians and two Bulgarians suspected of supporting Jamaat Shariat. Police said at the time that two additional suspects were being held in Germany.
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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.
