[Khaama] The Pak officials have claimed that Tuesday’s deadly suicide kaboom has been traced back to Afghanistan as tensions remain high between the two neighboring countries who are often blaming each other for remaining reckless to act against the terror group.
"The Chief of General Staff thanked them and informed the diplomatic corps that yesterday’s terrorist attack had been traced back to Afghanistan," according to a statement by the foreign ministry of Pakistain.
No further details have been given regarding the claims made by the Chief of General Staff of Pakistain who reportedly made the remarks during a meeting attended by the foreign ambassadors and diplomats on Wednesday.
According to the Pak officials, the meeting was organized in response to the recent US decisions for blocking aid to Pakistain and with an aim to brief the diplomats regarding the steps Pakistain has taken in the fight against terrorism.
Tuesday’s incident in Quetta took place in the vicinity of Zarghoon Road close to the General Assembly of Balochistan ...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it... , leaving seven people dead and sixteen others maimed.
Balochistan’s Inspector General of Police Moazam Jah Ansari told news hounds that eight coppers were also injured in the attack.
The Afghan and Pak officials often blame the attacks on the anti-government armed elements having safe havens on the two sides of the Durand Line.
The Afghan officials often blame the Haqqani terrorist network for the large scale attacks in Kabul and other parts of the Afghanistan, claiming that the network uses its safe havens in Pakistain for orchestrating such attacks. A claim which has often been endorsed by US officials as well.
[Al Jazeera] Egypt's feared former interior minister was acquitted on corruption charges on Thursday and will be released from detention pending a retrial.
Habib el-Adly was sentenced to seven years in prison for embezzling $110m of public funds after being convicted in April 2017.
After his conviction, he disappeared and Egypt's interior ministry declared him a runaway. He was tossed in the clink Keep yer hands where we can see 'em, if yez please! in December after turning himself over to authorities.
Egypt's Court of Cassation - the country's highest appeals court - overturned the corruption verdict because of procedural errors and ordered a retrial. He did not attend Thursday's hearing, Ahram Online reported.
Adly and two other interior ministry officials had been ordered to refund $110m and were fined the same amount, Rooters news agency reported.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/12/2018 00:00 ||
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[IsraelTimes] Ambassador reportedly voices objection over having never been invited to official events, despite security cooperation between nations
Israel has reportedly lodged a formal complaint with Egypt for regularly excluding it from diplomatic events and briefings.
A recent missive from Ambassador to Egypt David Govrin said "Israel’s embassy in Cairo wishes to express its chagrin over the fact that it has never been invited" to briefings held by the Egyptian Foreign Affairs Ministry, the Kan public broadcaster reported Thursday.
According to the report, that included a briefing on Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... in Sinai, a matter on which the Egyptian and Israeli militaries are believed to cooperate closely.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Emmanuel Nahshon would not confirm the complaint, saying, "We do not comment on internal ministry communications."
Since they established diplomatic relations in 1978 after years of hostility and a series of wars, ties between Israel and Egypt have historically been civil but frosty.
In recent years the two countries have enjoyed closer intelligence and security ties over their shared enmity toward Islamist terror groups and other common regional concerns.
Official relations have remained complicated, however, and Israel is deeply unpopular with the Egyptian public.
In November Cairo’s Ambassador to Israel Hazem Khairat said the peace treaty between the nations will remains incomplete as long as a Paleostinian state has not been created.
That same month Egyptian officials declined an Israeli invitation to a ceremony marking the 40th anniversary of former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Israel in 1977, which paved the way for peace.
In September Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi in New York in the first-ever public sit-down between the two leaders. The pair had "a comprehensive discussion about the problems of the region," according to the Prime Minister’s Office.
[AnNahar] A nephew of slain Yemeni strongman former President-for-Life Ali Abdullah Saleh ... Saleh initially took power as a strongman of North Yemen in 1977, when disco was in flower, but he didn't invite Donna Summer to the inauguration and Blondie couldn't make it... , presumed dead or critically maimed in festivities with rebels last month, appeared alive and well in footage that emerged on Thursday.
A video received by AFP showed Tarek Saleh, for years the head of his uncle's forces, addressing a crowd in what a source close to the family said was the southern province of Shabwa, an area controlled by the government against which Ali Abdullah Saleh had fought since 2014.
While the video's authenticity could not be immediately verified, Tarek Saleh appeared to address the killing of his uncle and a senior aide last month. Speaking to a small crowd of men who had gathered to cheer him on, he offered his condolences over "the martyred leader" -- probably a reference to Ali Abdullah Saleh -- and "the martyr Aref al-Zouka".
Zouka, from Shabwa, was secretary general of Saleh's General People's Congress which was allied with the Houthis against the government from 2014 until the end of 2017. GPC member Nabil al-Sufi, a close friend of the Saleh family, said the video was taken after Tarek Saleh arrived in Shabwa. The commander had been presumed dead after being maimed in the festivities with Huthis last month.
The GPC, which has begun to show signs of cracking since Ali Abdullah Saleh's death, on Sunday elected former deputy premier Sadiq Amin Aburas as its new chief.
Long-time enemies, former president Ali Abdullah Saleh and the Huthis joined ranks in 2014, driving Yemen's Saudi-backed government from the capital and setting up a parallel state. But simmering tension between Saleh and the Huthis erupted in Sanaa on November 29, with Tarek Saleh's residence one of the first flashpoints in the fighting.
The Yemen ...an area of the Arabian Peninsula sometimes mistaken for a country. It is populated by more antagonistic tribes and factions than you can keep track of. Except for a tiny handfull of Jews everthing there is very Islamic... war has claimed more than 9,000 lives since a Saudi-led coalition joined the conflict in March 2015.
[Ynet] The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...just another cheapjack Moslem dictatorship, brought to you by the Moslem Brüderbund.... will not extradite any suspects to the United States if Washington does not hand over the holy man Ankara blames for orchestrating a failed 2016 military coup, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday.
Ankara accuses US-based Ottoman Turkishholy manFethullah Gülen ... a Turkish preacher living in Pennsylvania whom the current govt of Turkey considers responsible for all the ills afflicting Turkey and possibly the entire world... of criminal masterminding the putsch and has repeatedly asked Washington for his extradition.
US officials have said courts require sufficient evidence to extradite the elderly holy man who has denied any involvement in the coup.
"We have given the United States 12 turbans so far, but they have not given us back the one we want. They made up excuses from thin air," Erdogan told local administrators at a conference in his presidential palace in Ankara.
"If you're not giving him (Gulen) to us, then excuse us, but from now on whenever you ask us for another terrorist, as long as I am in office, you will not get them," he said.
[AlAhram] The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire.... on Wednesday summoned a top U.S. diplomat in Ankara to protest Washington's support of a Kurdish militia in Syria, sources in the Ottoman Turkish foreign ministry said, the latest in a long-standing disagreement between the NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It's headquartered in Belgium. That sez it all.... allies.
The Ottoman Turkish foreign ministry summoned the U.S. charge d'affaires to voice its displeasure over Washington's arming and training of the YPG Syrian Kurdish militia in Syria, the sources said.
Turkey and the United States have been at loggerheads over Washington's policy of support for the YPG, which Ankara views as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) that has waged an insurgency in Turkey's largely Kurdish southeast for more than three decades.
The YPG is the main element in a force that Washington has assisted with training, weapons, air support and help from ground advisers in the battle against Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... Last month the YPG militia said it had fully captured Deir al-Zor's eastern countryside from Islamic State with the help of both the U.S.-led coalition and Russia.
Posted by: trailing wife ||
01/12/2018 00:00 ||
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#1
The Sultan is certainly feeling too big for his britches.
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/12/2018 9:56 Comments ||
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#2
Fethullah Gülen, the gift that keeps on giving.
[DW] Akayed Ullah is facing six charges for an attempted suicide kaboom near Manhattan's Time Square. He allegedly told police after his arrest he "did it for the Islamic State."
A Bangladeshi immigrant accused of trying to carry out a suicide kaboom in a busy New York City subway tunnel in December pleaded not guilty "Wudn't me." to terrorism charges on Thursday.
said after asked for his plea in a federal court hearing in Manhattan.
What an absurd thing to say.
The 27-year old could serve a life sentence if found guilty of charges including supporting a foreign terrorist organization, using a weapon of mass destruction and committing a terrorist attack against a mass transit system.
Attempted attack
Police tossed in the calaboose ... anything you say can and will be used against you, whether you say it or not... Ullah on December 11 after he allegedly tried to detonate a pipe bomb attached to his body in a tunnel between Times Square and Port Authority Bus Terminal.
The bomb failed to completely detonate, but the partial kaboom left Ullah and three commuters with minor injuries.
Ullah, who arrived in the United States in 2011, allegedly told police after his arrest that he "did it for the Islamic State." Federal prosecutors said a handwritten note was also found in Ullah's passport with the words "O AMERICA, DIE IN YOUR RAGE."
Prosecutors accuse Ullah of radicalizing himself after he started watching pro-Islamic State internet videos in 2014.
At Thursday's hearing, Ullah's lawyer requested her client receive medical attention after not seeing a doctor for several days.
Judge Richard Sullivan said he may set a trial date at the next hearing on April 13.
Posted by: trailing wife ||
01/12/2018 00:20 ||
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#1
The 27-year old could serve a life sentence if found guilty of charges
wouldn't WMD be a Fed charge that could bring the needle?
per 18 USC 2332a, use of weapons of mass destruction only carries a death sentence if there is a fatality and even then the death sentence is not mandatory but optional
Posted by: lord garth ||
01/12/2018 7:50 Comments ||
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[AnNahar] The U.S. Justice Department is forming a team of prosecutors to investigate alleged drug trafficking and money laundering linked to Hizbullah ...Party of God, a Leb militia inspired, founded, funded and directed by Iran. Hizbullah refers to itself as The Resistance and purports to defend Leb against Israel, with whom it has started and lost one disastrous war to date, though it did claim victory... , Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Thursday. The move follows reports that B.O. regime officials thwarted drug prosecutions related to Hizbullah for fear of jeopardizing a nuclear deal with Iran.
President Donald Trump ...New York real estate developer, described by Dems as illiterate, racist, misogynistic, and what ever other unpleasant descriptions they can think of, elected by the rest of us as 45th President of the United States... and congressional Republicans have been relentless in pressuring Sessions to take a fresh look at Obama-era dealings, in an effort that Democrats contend is aimed at steering attention away from investigations into Trump campaign ties to Russian election meddling.
The new team's first task will be to examine evidence from the Obama-era Drug Enforcement Administration program known as Project Cassandra. Sessions announced a review in December, after news website Politico reported that the program had been targeting Hizbullah's alleged trafficking of cocaine into the U.S. and abroad but was stymied by Obama officials.
The B.O. regime at the time was eager to improve relations with Iran and stall its nuclear weapons program.
The U.S. considers Hizbullah to be a "terrorist group" and an Iranian proxy.
Prosecutors who specialize in terrorism, narcotics trafficking and organized crime, led by the acting head of the Justice Department's criminal division, will bring prosecutions designed to restrict the flow of money to terrorist groups, Sessions said. He said he wanted to be sure Project Cassandra and other investigations have adequate resources.
"The Justice Department will leave no stone unturned in order to eliminate threats to our citizens from terrorist organizations and to stem the tide of the devastating drug crisis," Sessions said.
Whew! Reassurance after that story of a bribe and escape yesterday.
[DailyMail] The Iraqi authorities have released a picture of the notorious White Beard ISIS executioner shorn of his facial hair to prove he did not manage to bribe his way to freedom after being captured in djinn-infested Mosul ... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn... Government officials named the holy man as Eiz Aldin Taha. Local sources said he was called Abu Omer when news of the arrest was revealed on 2 January.
Posted by: trailing wife ||
01/12/2018 00:58 ||
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[Free Beacon] The retired head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's special-operations division said on Wednesday the Obama administration squandered a chance to dismantle Hezbollah due in part to political motivations to clinch a nuclear deal with Iran.
Derek Maltz, who was in charge of a major law enforcement operation targeting Hezbollah's trafficking of cocaine, said the United States cannot again succumb to political distractions that allow the Iranian-backed terrorist to continue its narcoterrorism campaign.
"There's an old saying, opportunities come and go," Maltz testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "In my personal opinion, having been the guy in charge of the special operations for ten years, we lost a gold opportunity to crush Hezbollah."
Politico in December first reported the Obama administration's quiet dismantling of these efforts, dubbed Project Cassandra, out of apprehension over rattling Iran as President Barack Obama pursued a landmark nuclear deal with the country. The piece, written by Politico’s Josh Meyer, extensively quoted Maltz, who said he had "no doubt" multilateral negotiations with Iran sidelined ongoing operations against Hezbollah's drug trafficking network.
"There is certainly an argument to be made that if tomorrow all the agencies were ordered to come together and sit in a room and put all the evidence on the table against all these bad guys, that there could be a hell of a lot of indictments," Maltz told Politico.
Maltz echoed this sentiment on Wednesday, telling lawmakers the United States needs better interagency cooperation to confront Hezbollah's terrorism ambitions and the transnational criminal organizations that generate tens of millions of dollars for the Iranian-backed group.
"Sadly, 16 years after 9/11, we're still talking about information sharing. It's a disaster," he testified. "If terrorists are turning to criminal networks for their funding, how can we have a system where the terrorist investigators and the intelligence community and others are not communicating properly with the law enforcement agencies?"
He said the Trump administration needs to identify who in the U.S. government is responsible for bringing together federal, state, and local agencies under an interagency task force to combat narcoterrorism.
#1
....how can we have a system where the terrorist investigators and the intelligence community and others are not communicating properly with the law enforcement agencies?"
This is 'by design.' Tribal Afghanistan is a perfect example. Stamp out the opium trade and you destroy their entire economy. The narcotics trade is also the lifeblood of the US urban economy.
#8
Not "Islamic" Architecture. The goofy-looking and somewhat pretentious building:
Per Wikipedia: New York-based Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and Chicago-based Interactive Design Architects were chosen in June 2016 to jointly lead the design and engineering of the center.[15][16] For the exhibition design, Ralph Appelbaum Associates, which worked on the National Museum of African American History, will lead a team including Civic Projects, Normal, and several local artists.
So, more an homage to his roots than to those he, seemingly, roots for.
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.
...an area of the Arabian Peninsula sometimes mistaken for a country. It is populated by more antagonistic tribes and factions than you can keep track of. Except for a tiny handfull of Jews everthing there is very Islamic...
[DW] Akayed Ullah is facing six charges for an attempted suicide 
