h/t Gates of Vienna
Some EU countries will be unable to afford key parts of their national defence unless they spend more and cooperate better on defence, EU Military Committee chairman, Hakan Syren warned in Brussels Wednesday, Reuters reports. He suggested a percentage of national defence budgets be set aside for common European purposes. These being? Continued on Page 47
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It gets even worse: Europe's most powerful countries call for elected EU president Germany,France and nine other of Europe's most powerful countries have called for an elected European Union president and an end to Britain's veto over defence policy in a radical blueprint mapping out the continent's future.
[Al Ahram] Police tossed in the clink Please don't kill me! a young man in southern La Belle France on Thursday on suspicion that he was planning a Dire RevengeĀ attack on the staff of a satirical magazine which published cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammad.
Anti-terrorism magistrates near the Mediterranean port city of Toulon questioned the 18-year-old after he threatened in a message on Facebook to cut the throats of anyone he could find at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a judicial source said.
The magazine's publication of cartoons ridiculing Mohammad added to the anger of Moslems already outraged over an anti-Islam film produced in the United States and posted on the Internet.
The suspect had no police record but he was already known to security services, the source said, without giving further details.
Police in La Belle France are on high alert for attacks by Islamist thugs. They were criticised for failing to stop an al Qaeda-inspired gunman shooting dead seven people in March, including three Jewish children, in the southern city of Toulouse ...lies on the banks of the River Garonne, half-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. The Toulouse metropolitan area is the fourth-largest in La Belle France... The shooter, Mohamed Merah, had been interviewed by police after returning from a visit to Afghanistan and had a violent criminal record.
The government, which has criticised the cartoons, plans to shut schools and diplomatic offices in 20 countries on Friday as a precaution against protests after attacks on U.S. and German embassies, some of them deadly.
Police have refused a request to hold a protest against the film in Gay Paree, after some 150 participants in an illegal demonstration near the U.S embassy were tossed in the slammer Book 'im, Mahmoud! on Sunday. La Belle France has Europe's largest population of Moslems.
"People in the suburbs are very upset over the publication of these cartoons," said Mohamed Mechmache, head of the ACLEFEU association for urban youths, created in the wake of riots that swept French suburbs in 2005.
"They feel there is a double standard when it comes to free speech: it's okay to mock the Prophet, but we can't protest against it ... All it would take for things to spiral out of control is a police check that goes wrong."
In another incident which might exacerbate strains, an 18-year-old young French woman was sentenced to two months in jail for refusing to comply with a police identity check while she was wearing a banned full-face veil in public.
The woman resisted police when they asked to check her identity in front of a mosque in central Marseille in July, during the holy Moslem fasting period of Ramadan.
Under a French law from 2010, a person wearing a "burqa" or "niqab" style full-face veil can be stopped by police. If she refuses to remove her veil, she can be fined or sentenced to community service. Repeat offenders face jail.
In addition to being incarcerated Please don't kill me! and receiving a six-month suspended prison sentence, the veiled woman was ordered to pay damages of 1,000 euros ($1,300) to a female police officer whom she bit during the altercation.
Two young men who were accompanying the woman were also sentenced to two months' jail for fighting with police when they tried to carry out the identity check.
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.
Police 
