The most ominous story of the day (besides Mad Jad’s continued determination to eradicate Israel) is the move by the UN to create a new category of refugee: “climate change refugees”. Since virtually any weather disaster may be ascribed to global warming, then refugees from, say, droughts will be the equivalent of political refugees, and UN member states will have an obligation to take them in.Thanks to ESW, JD, Reinhard, RRW, and all the other tipsters who sent these in. Headlines and articles are below the fold.
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Global Warming: the New Eugenics
Eugenics pioneer, Francis Galton, defined eugenics as “the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations.”
Global warming can be defined as: “The study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the environmental quality of future generations.”
The eugenics movement and the global warming movement are similar in many respects. Both ideas were introduced by scientists, advanced by politicians, popularized by the media, embraced as a moral necessity, resulted in severe consequences and eventually rejected as harmful hogwash.
Eugenics, thankfully, has run its course. Global warming, however, is approaching its zenith, just before imposing severe consequences, and is, perhaps, still a generation away from being rejected as the hogwash it is.
[…]
The more than 31,000 scientists who reject this vision are outcasts, and are ridiculed by the elite politicians who are caught up in the global warming movement. More than 650 climate scientists, many of whom have been a part of the U.N. global warming studies, have publicly renounced the claims of the global warming movement.
These people too, are outcasts, ridiculed by the Obama global warming elite.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Beauty Queen’s Grieving Family Ask: How Was Our Sahar’s Life Cut So Tragically Short?
Friends say Sahar Daftary had never been happier since splitting from her ex. So why did she arrange to meet him late at night at his luxury apartment — and what caused her to plunge to her death from its 12-floor balcony?
[…]
Initial reports — which suggested the police were treating the fall as either a suicide or a tragic accident — have infuriated Sahar’s family, and while they know no more than anyone else about what happened that night, they say they rue the day Sahar fell in love with Jamil and believe she’d be alive today had she never met him.
Sahar’s sister Mariya Massumi, 34, a part-time hairdresser said: ‘We are determined to find out the truth because our only wish now is for Sahar’s soul to rest in peace and she will not until we have justice for her.
‘We believe there is absolutely no way she would have committed suicide. She was a religious girl, she prayed every day, she knew committing suicide would mean going to hell and she wanted to go to heaven. She had everything to live for.’
One of Sahar’s closest friends, who was due to go on holiday to Dubai with her and has asked to remain anonymous, said: ‘She was so looking forward to her birthday and we were going to stay with her best friend Fatima in Dubai. We’d booked our flights for her birthday, Christmas Day, because it was a bit cheaper and were due to arrive that evening.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Bailiffs Get Power to Use Force on Debtors
The government has been accused of trampling on individual liberties by proposing wide-ranging new powers for bailiffs to break into homes and to use “reasonable force” against householders who try to protect their valuables.
Under the regulations, bailiffs for private firms would for the first time be given permission to restrain or pin down householders. They would also be able to force their way into homes to seize property to pay off debts, such as unpaid credit card bills and loans.
The government, which wants to crack down on people who evade debts, says the new powers would be overseen by a robust industry watchdog. However, the laws are being criticised as the latest erosion of the rights of the householder in his own home.
“These laws strip away tried and tested protections that make a person’s home his castle, and which have stood for centuries,” said Paul Nicolson, chairman of the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust, a London-based welfare charity. “They could clearly lead to violent confrontations and undermine fundamental liberties.”
[…]
It is claimed these powers are already abused. In one case, an 89-year-old grandmother returned home to find a bailiff sitting in her chair having drawn up a list of her possessions. He was pursuing a parking fine owed by her son, who did not even live at the address.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Vendée French Call for Revolution Massacre to be Termed ‘Genocide’
It was one of the most infamous episodes of the bloody French Revolution.
In early 1794 — at the height of the Reign of Terror — French soldiers marched to the Atlantic Vendée, where peasants had risen up against the Revolutionary government in Paris.
Twelve “infernal columns” commanded by General Louis-Marie Turreau were ordered to kill everyone and everything they saw. Thousands of people — including women and children — were massacred in cold blood, and farms and villages torched.
In the city of Nantes, the Revolutionary commander Jean-Baptiste Carrier disposed of Vendéean prisoners-of-war in a horrifically efficient form of mass execution. In the so-called “noyades” — mass drownings — naked men, women, and children were tied together in specially constructed boats, towed out to the middle of the river Loire and then sunk.
Now Vendée, a coastal department in western France, is calling for the incident to be remembered as the first genocide in modern history.
Residents claim the massacre has been downplayed so as not to sully the story of the French Revolution.
Historians believe that around 170,000 Vendéeans were killed in the peasant war and the subsequent massacres — and around 5,000 in the noyades.
When it was over, French General Francois Joseph Westermann penned a letter to the Committee of Public Safety stating: “There is no more Vendée… According to the orders that you gave me, I crushed the children under the feet of the horses, massacred the women who, at least for these, will not give birth to any more brigands. I do not have a prisoner to reproach me. I have exterminated all.”
[…]
The bloody events of the Vendée were long absent from French history books, because of the evil light they shed on the Revolutionaries. However, they were well known in the Soviet bloc. Lenin himself had studied the war there and drew inspiration for his policies towards the peasantry.
According to the historian Alain Gérard, of the Vendéean Centre for Historical Research, “In other parts of France the revolutionaries killed the nobles or the rich bourgeoisie. But in Vendée they killed the people.
“It was the Revolution turning against the very people from whom it claimed legitimacy. It proved the faithlessness of the Revolution to its own principles. That’s why it was wiped out of the historical memory,” he said.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
3 Palestinians Held for Raping UN Worker
Three Palestinian teens were under arrest Thursday for allegedly raping and robbing a 60-year old UNIFIL worker in her east Jerusalem home, police said.
The three suspects, including two minors, were arrested after the woman, who is from a Scandinavian country, filed a complaint with police, Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said.
A fourth suspect remains at large.
The four Palestinians, who are residents of the West Bank and are not connected with the UN institution, are alleged to have carried out the December 4 attack and robbery at the woman’s Beit Hanina home.
The two minors were remanded in custody by a Jerusalem court on Thursday for seven days, while the third suspect has been ordered held for eight days, police said.
The police plan to press charges against the suspects when they complete their investigation.
| — Hat tip: Reinhard | [Return to headlines] |
‘Consanguineous Marriages Increase Genetic Problems’
“The rate of consanguineous marriages is quite high in this part of the world and has to go down if the incidence of genetic diseases including heart problems has to come down,” Dr. John Deanfield, adviser on cardiovascular diseases at Britain’s Middlesex Hospital, told Arab News on the sidelines of a symposium on cardiovascular treatments this week. Deanfield gave lectures at various sessions here attended by consultants and physicians in the field of cardiovascular treatment from around the Kingdom. The symposium gave them an opportunity to learn about many field developments and techniques and enabled them to share their experiences with the visiting professor.
He explained that the severity of cardiovascular diseases is determined by risk factors accumulating in the patient’s body…
…The accumulation of these factors in the patient’s body causes serious disruption to the body’s activities leading to damage to the wall of the blood vessels, which in turn causes death either by cardiac infarctions or strokes, he added. “In addition, the latest clinical studies state that most cases related to high blood pressure and cholesterol levels are linked to dysfunction in the biological activities of blood vessels,” he said. Consanguineous marriages can contribute to the increase in such diseases, he added.
| [Return to headlines] |
Eradicating the “Little Satan”
The accession of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidency of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been accompanied by a sharp transformation in the Iranian attitude to, and depiction of, the state of Israel. This change includes not only an amplification of the traditional hostility toward the Jewish polity, but also — most ominously — a new conception of that polity as weak and unstable, an easy target for a united Muslim (or united Shiite) offensive.
The prevailing opinion among Middle East experts and Iran watchers, however, is that the revised rhetoric is just that — rhetoric — and that it harbors no significant ramifications for policy-making on the part of Israel or any other states in the region or the world. Vociferous Iranian declarations about the need to erase Israel from the map are seen as nothing more than a means toward achieving certain pragmatic goals, such as eventual détente with the West.
This view is wrong. Iranian-Islamist threats to Israel’s existence are sincere, and they signal the determined pursuit of tenaciously-held ends.
[…]
For this reason, among others, genuine anger and hatred, of the kind that is really “meant” and strongly felt, are inefficient tools for creating or sustaining an atmosphere conducive to long-term persecution or mass murder. That is why the truly horrific atrocities in human history — the enslavements, the inquisitions, the terrorisms, the genocides — have been perpetrated not in hot blood but in cold: not as a result of urgent and immanent feeling but in the name of a transcendent ideology and as a result of painstaking indoctrination.
The vast majority of Germans in World War II did not personally and passionately hate the Jews: they had never even met the men, women, children, and infants whom they would eventually butcher en masse. It was, for the most part, a methodically drilled-in ideology that powered the genocide machine, a machine that killed six million Jews despite the fact that the Germans did not hate them.
Similarly with the events of September 11, 2001. Did Muhammad Atta, the ringleader of the terrorists who brought down the Twin Towers, genuinely and fervently hate every single individual working there on that fateful day, let alone all of the passengers on the plane he commandeered? How could he? He had never met them, and they had never personally done anything to him. What is more, Atta had spent many years in the United States preparing for his mission, during which time he rubbed elbows with all types of Americans. Is it plausible that he managed to maintain a constant boiling rage all day every day toward every one of these acquaintances and their fellow countrymen? How could such a creature survive, or master the self-control to carry out his assigned role?
What is true for Nazi storm troopers and al-Qaeda operatives is true for today’s fundamentalist Shiites. It is not their genuine, vehement hatred that we have to fear; it is their endless, drone-like training. Their militant hostility to Israel is no more a function of immediate, genuine, blood-boiling rage than it is the result of some heinous act or other performed by the Jewish state, however frequently such purported crimes are exploited as triggers of “popular” protest. The hostility is, unfortunately, something far more durable and deeply implanted.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
China: ‘Tis the Season to Arrest Christians
China cracks down on house church believers
The arrests and threats come just a week after authorities demolished a building used by a Christian church group, leaving nearly a dozen church participants who tried to defend their facility beaten.
The government’s Christmas attacks were confirmed in two different provinces and another region, the organization said.
In Henan province, an eyewitness told China Aid officers from the Public Security Bureau raided a house church Christmas party in the middle of the day on Christmas Eve and detained nine Christian woman.
They had been re-enacting the nativity, and police charged the women with “organizing illegal religious activities,” the China Aid source reported. The women were being held at the Yucheng County Detention Center, and authorities were demanding fines from family members before they could be released,
Authorities in Anhui province were a lot more thorough in their attacks, the organization reported.
It started on Dec. 22 when authorities conducted a raid on a Shepherd Fellowship Bible training class linked to a house church in Dongzhi County. The attack force included officers from the Domestic Defense Protection Squad Branch of Chizhou Municipal Public Security Bureau of Anhui Province, the Domestic Defense Protection Squad of Dongzhi County Public Security Bureau, the Yanghu Township Police Station and the Dongzhi County Bureau of Religion.
[…]
“During the interrogation, the Public Security cadres pounded on the desk to scare the Christians and lectured the students with political propaganda in an effort to force the students to say that the church lured them to participate in the study. At about 10 p.m., the students were released, but the two church leaders were not released until about 12 a.m.,” China Aid said.
The next day police called the church leaders and warned hem to send the students home before government officials arrived at the site of the training, and authorities sealed the house church building, stating that it was an illegal school and the building would be demolished or sold.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
China to Build World’s Largest Telescope
China officially started construction of a Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), the largest in the world, in a remote southwest region on Friday.
Preparation and research for the project took some 14 years.
The dish-like telescope, as large as 30 football fields, will stand in a region of typical Karst depressions in Guizhou Province when it’s done in 2013.
[…]
FAST’s main spherical reflector will be composed of 4,600 panels. Its observation sensitivity will be 10 times more powerful than the 100-m aperture steerable radio telescope in Germany. Its overall capacity will be 10 times larger than what is now the world’s largest (300 m) Arecibo radio telescope developed by the United States, according to Nan Rendong, the chief scientist of the project and an NAO researcher.
[…]
Scientists have so far observed only 1,760 pulsars, which are strongly magnetized spinning cores of dead stars. With the help of FAST, they could find as many as 7,000 to 10,000 within a year, Nan said.
Pulsars have allowed scientists to make several major discoveries, such as confirmation of the existence of gravitational radiation as predicted by the theory of general relativity.
FAST could also be a highly sensitive passive radar to monitor satellites and space debris, which would be greatly helpful for China’s ambitious space program.
| [Return to headlines] |
Al-Qaida-Linked Islamists Set to Take Control of Somalia
‘I’m not optimistic. The future looks bleak and is likely to be bloody’
An armed group styling itself Al-Shebab is likely to take over. Already, its fighters are believed to control more than 80 per cent of southern Somalia. These radical Islamists believe in imposing Sharia law and they recently approved the stoning of a 13-year-old girl.
Al Shebab, the fanatical armed wing which broke from the Islamic Courts Union which ran Somalia for the second half of 2006, now holds more than 80 per cent of the country ? more territory than the Courts controlled during their reign.
Rashid Abdi, Somalia analyst for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group said: “They may be forced to moderate their radical line once they take over just to stay in power.
“But there are those who predict al Shebab turning into some kind of Frankenstein’s monster taken over by, or at least sympathetic to, foreign elements who have ambitions outside Somalia, to spread radical Islam or mount terror attacks, in northeastern Kenya or eastern Ethiopia.”
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
As an Atheist, I Truly Believe Africa Needs God
Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.
I used to avoid this truth by applauding — as you can — the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It’s a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.
But this doesn’t fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.
First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world — a directness in their dealings with others — that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.
At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.
We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.
Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers — in some ways less so — but more open.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Fla. Woman Claims “Merry Christmas” Got Her Fired
PENSACOLA, Fla.: A Christian woman claims she was fired from her job because she greeted callers with “Merry Christmas,” but the vacation rental company says it’s no Scrooge and the woman is just a disgruntled employee.
Tonia Thomas, 35, said she refused to say “Happy Holidays” and was fired, even after offering to use the company’s non-holiday greeting. The Panama City woman filed a federal complaint that accuses the company of religious discrimination. She is seeking compensation for lost wages.
“I hold my core Christian values to a high standard and I absolutely refuse to give in on the basis of values. All I wanted was to be able to say ‘Merry Christmas’ or to acknowledge no holidays,” she said Tuesday. “As a Christian, I don’t recognize any other holidays.”
Thomas said she is Baptist.
Her former employer, Counts-Oakes Resorts Properties Inc., said she wasn’t fired for saying “Merry Christmas,” but would not elaborate.
“We are a Christian company and we celebrate Christmas,” said Andy Phillips, the company’s president. Thomas is “a disgruntled employee,” presenting a one-sided version of what happened when she was fired Dec. 10, Phillips said.
Liberty Counsel, an Orlando-based legal group that advocates for people discriminated against because of their religion, is representing Thomas before the federal Equal Opportunity Employment Commission. Their complaint also accuses the company of harassing and taunting Thomas after she was fired by calling the police to watch her pack her belongs and leave.
Thomas could have hard time winning the case, said G. Thomas Harper, a Jacksonville-based labor attorney who writes a newsletter on Florida employment law.
“I wouldn’t think an employee has the right to insist (on saying Merry Christmas) unless that really is a tenet of their faith. She would have to make a strong case that was part of her beliefs, if not, it becomes insubordination,” he said.
Thomas has found another job, but she makes less than the $10.50 an hour she earned with the rental company. She said the trauma of being fired and the pay cut has made for a tough holiday season for herself, her husband and their 6-year-old son.
Harper said when it comes to holiday greetings, the smartest choice might be ignoring the season.
“The best option is just not to say anything,” he said.
| — Hat tip: ESW | [Return to headlines] |
Climate Change Refugees Seek a New International Deal
Millions of people are predicted to become climate refugees as global warming increases. A new international pact will be needed to protect their rights to live.
Global warming caused by human-induced greenhouse gas emissions has been linked to a host of environmental disasters. These include sea-level rise, flooding, spells of droughts and cold and other extreme weather conditions such as frequent hurricanes and cyclones. As such natural catastrophes push inhabitants to flee to safer places, environmental refugees are fast becoming an international security issue.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that there will be 150 million environmental refugees by 2050. The Institute for Environment and Human Security, affiliated with United Nations University, estimated the number of environmental refugees at 20 million in 2005 and predicted the number could be 50 million as early as 2010.
In spite of millions in danger of becoming refugees, at present there is no international law to protect their rights. UNHCR, the United Nations’ refugee agency, does not recognise climate or environment refugees as these categories are not included in the list of legal refugees under the UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention. The Convention currently defines a legal refugee as a person who has fled his or her country due to persecution by the state for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.
Anthony Simms, head of the climate change programme at UK-based New Economic Foundation, and the author of a book titled “Environmental Refugees: The Case for Recognition” argues that environmental refugees should be given UN refugee status as environmental displacement of people amounts to “environmental persecution”. Simms argues that developed nations should take responsibility as climate change comes a result of their policies.
UNHCR however says it does not want to expand the Refugee Convention to include climate refugees as that may reduce protection for the conventional political refugees.
Sources at UNHCR, who want to remain anonymous, add that UNHCR is not equipped or designed to handle hundreds of millions of refugees from climate change. It already finds its resources stressed in handling the 14.3 million political refugees in the world.
Clarifying UNHCR’s position, Yoichiro Tsuchida, UNHCR Senior Advisor on Climate Change, explains that the case for environment refugees is too complicated and disparate to fit within the current refugee framework. Justifying international migration due to natural disasters is difficult, as is the task of attributing environmental phenomena directly to climate change. “While environmental factors can contribute to prompting cross-border movements, they are not grounds, in and of themselves, for the grant of refugee status under international refugee law,” she says…
| — Hat tip: RRW | [Return to headlines] |
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