Photo Credit: Reuters/Mohammad Ismail
Security sources said the bomb had targeted a military convoy near Camp Eggers, an ISAF base in the diplomatic quarter of the capital close to both the German and Italian embassies.
Reuters reporters heard sirens and helicopters flying overhead, and a loudspeaker announcement ordered troops at the base to load their weapons and take up defensive positions.
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: REUTERS/Pauline Askin
The Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica and its associated sea ice shelf is closely watched: this is because unlike most of the sea ice around the austral continent, its melt rate has seemed to be accelerating quickly since scientists first began seriously studying it in the 1990s.
Many researchers had suggested that this was due to human-driven global warming, which appeared to be taking place rapidly at that time (though it has since gone on hold for 15 years or so, a circumstance which science is still assimilating).
However back in 2009 the British Antarctic Survey sent its Autosub robot probe under the shelf (famously powered by some 5,000 ordinary alkaline D-cell batteries on each trip beneath the ice, getting through no less than four tonnes of them during the research). The Autosub survey revealed that a previously unknown marine ridge lay below the shelf, over which the icepack had for millennia been forced to grind its way en route to the ocean. However in relatively recent times the ice had finally so ground down the ridge that the sea could flow in between shelf and ridge, freeing the ice to move much faster and warming it too…
Now, the latest BAS research has revealed that rather than accelerating, “oceanic melting of the ice shelf into which the glacier flows decreased by 50 per cent between 2010 and 2012”.
Read more from this story about the Antarctic ice shelf HERE.
Photo Credit: Martyn Williams/Rodong
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un fed his once-powerful uncle to 120 hungry dogs, according to a detailed report in a newspaper with close ties to China’s ruling Communist Party and reported by the Straits Times.
The report is impossible to verify, but can’t be completely discounted.
China lost an important link to North Korea’s leadership with the purge of Jang Song Thaek, and may have published the account in Wen Wei Po to express its displeasure.
Read more from this story HERE.
_______________________________________________________________________
Kim Jong Un ‘fed uncle to pack of 120 ravenous dogs’
By Sean Piccoli and Post Wire Report.
The uncle of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un was ripped to pieces by a pack of starving dogs in a slow, barbaric execution that Kim himself watched, an official Chinese newspaper reported.
Jang Song Thaek, the 67-year-old family member once considered Kim’s right-hand man, died horribly with five other condemned officials in a capital punishment ritual called “quan jue”— execution by dogs, according to the Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Po, a mouthpiece for China’s government.
The ghastly account of Jeng’s execution could not be independently verified, but its publication in an official Chinese daily signaled Beijing’s growing disgust with Kim, according to a Singapore daily, the Straits Times, which suggested the Chinese might have leaked the gory tale to further embarrass and marginalize Pyongyang’s reigning madman.
Read more from this story HERE.
photo credit: _skender_
The announcement at St. Peter Church in Tehran, reported by the independent Iranian Christian news agency Mohabat News, is the latest in a stepped-up campaign by the regime aimed at curbing the growth of Christianity in Iran, especially among former Muslims.
Mohabat News said churches in Iran are coming under pressure to stop all activities in Farsi, including sermons.
Critics say that despite the election of a president last year viewed as reform-minded, the situation has, if anything, gotten worse.
“Conditions are at levels not seen since the early years of the [1979] revolution,” U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom chair Katrina Lantos Swett wrote in an op-ed last weekend.
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Inquisitr
The Syrian civil war, which has already entered its third year, has left more than 130,000 dead and millions of people homeless or displaced. This new edict issued by Sheikh Abd al-Rahman Ali al-Dala, aide to the chief mufti of Syria, who is loyal to President Bashar Assad, will only make matters worse.
When asked about how Syrian soldiers should treat rebel women, Al-Dala said that soldiers loyal to President Bashar Al-Assad have permission to marry unmarried and married women who are sisters and mothers of rebel soldiers. He said that the Syrian soldiers are not required to perform any type of official ceremony to be considered “married” to the women. Al-Dala said that the edict of rape is intended to serve as the women’s punishment for not reporting the rebels to the government. Now rape has religious approval, as well as secular.
Read more from about the Syrian Mufti’s actions HERE.
Photo Credit: S. Solberg J
Palestinians are directly funded by the EU through a program called “Pegase DFS (direct financial support).” Between 2007 and 2012, the Palestinians received 1.4 billion Euro – not in some lousy trifles as flour or diesel fuel, but in hard cash.
According to the report, since 1994, the EU and some of its country-members have provided the Palestinian people (to be precise, some certain representatives of the Palestinian people) with financial support of nearly €5.6 billion.
Only after 18 years, in 2012, was an audit held. UNRWA, a UN agency of similar persuasion, had its first independent audit at its jubilee 50th anniversary. These audits are no doubt a Zionist plot.
The auditors, admittedly, do show compassion to Palestinians and condemn vile crimes of the Zionist regime. For instance, the report finds that the PA’s fiscal difficulties “are to considerable degree due to the continuing restrictions placed on it by Israel.” But the report does reveal some startling truths.
Read more about how the Palestinian Authority Fleeced the European Union HERE.
Photo Credit: AP/Alex Brandon
U.S. officials told CNN at least one AK-47-style gun that could be traced back to the failed gun-walking scheme was found at the scene.
The shootout on Dec. 18 left five alleged cartel members dead in Puerto Penasco, a popular tourist site in Mexico.
The now-defunct Fast and Furious program began in 2009 and was run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Agents allowed low-level weapons purchasers to cross the Mexican border in an attempt to expose trafficking routes used by Mexican cartels. But the agency ultimately lost track of some weapons, including two found at the scene of the killing of a border patrol agent in 2010.
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: WND
Sister Hatune Dogan told WND in a Skype interview that members of the Syrian opposition are draining the blood of Christians they behead and selling vials to Islamic radicals for $100,000 a piece.
The Syrian Orthodox nun explained that the blood is used in a ritual washing of hands in the belief the act atones for sins and provides privileged access to heaven.
The Christians, she said, are beheaded in ceremonies in which they are forced to kneel, with their hands and feet bound, as the Muslim radicals read a death sentence imposed because the victim refuses to renounce Christianity and embrace Islam.
She detailed how the head of the victim is brutally severed with knives. The blood spurting from their necks is captured in basins and then bottled.
_____________________________
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Getty Images
Kim’s comments, delivered in a lengthy New Year’s Day address, were his first since Jang was accused of plotting a coup and stripped of all his posts. Although Kim did not mention Jang by name, he described the purge as the “correct decision.”
Kim also said the North must be more vigilant in stamping out dissent and called for intensified ideological education for Workers’ Party members and citizens to “ensure that they think and act at all times and in all places in line with the Party’s ideas and intentions.”
North Koreans “should wage a vigorous struggle to stamp out any sort of alien ideology and decadent lifestyle that may undermine our system,” Kim said.
The acknowledgment of potential dissent is noteworthy because the Pyongyang government has for decades used its propaganda to project a sense of unquestioned loyalty to the Kim family. Some analysts say that under Kim, the North has abruptly abandoned that kind of mythmaking and is instead highlighting the punishment that disloyalty will bring.
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Reuters
In his traditional New Year’s Eve address, which was broadcast at midnight from the Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk, (5pm in Moscow), he praised Russia’s unity in the face of both terrorism and natural disasters and promised to continue an unrelenting fight against the bombers.
“In the past year we have faced problems and serious challenges including the inhuman terror attacks in Volgograd and unprecedented disasters in the Far East,” he said.
“Dear friends, we bow our heads in memory of the victims of these terrible attacks. We will strongly and decisively continue the battle against terrorists until their total annihilation,” he said.
Mr Putin earlier provoked a storm of condemnation on the Russian internet on Sunday after the message broadcast an hour earlier in Kamchatka, Russia’s most easterly timezone, made no mention of the attacks.
Read more about Putin vows to annihilate terrorists HERE.