UN Security Council Votes to Eliminate Syria’s Chemical Weapons

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Friday night to secure and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, a landmark decision aimed at taking poison gas off the battlefield in the escalating 2 1/2-year conflict.

The vote after two weeks of intense negotiations marked a major breakthrough in the paralysis that has gripped the council since the Syrian uprising began. Russia and China previously vetoed three Western-backed resolutions pressuring President Bashar Assad’s regime to end the violence.

“Today’s historic resolution is the first hopeful news on Syria in a long time,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the council immediately after the vote, but he and others stressed that much more needs to be done to stop the fighting that has left more 100,000 dead.

“A red light for one form of weapons does not mean a green light for others,” the U.N. chief said. “This is not a license to kill with conventional weapons.”

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the “strong, enforceable, precedent-setting” resolution shows that diplomacy can be so powerful “that it can peacefully defuse the worst weapons of war.”

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How Did the Pakistan Earthquake Create a Mud Island?

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Photo Credit: Gwadar Government/AP

Photo Credit: Gwadar Government/AP

On Tuesday, a 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck a remote part of western Pakistan, killing more than 260 people and displacing hundreds of thousands. It also triggered formation of a new island off the coast, which has quickly become a global curiosity.

But scientists say the island won’t last long.

“It’s a transient feature,” said Bill Barnhart, a research geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey. “It will probably be gone within a couple of months. It’s just a big pile of mud that was on the seafloor that got pushed up.”

Indeed, such islands are formed by so-called mud volcanoes, which occur around the world, and Barnhart and other scientists suspect that’s what we’re seeing off the Pakistani coast.

News organizations have reported that the Pakistani island suddenly appeared near the port of Gwadar after the quake. The island is about 60 to 70 feet (18 to 21 meters) high, up to 300 feet (91 meters) wide, and up to 120 feet (37 meters) long, reports the AFP.

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Russia Bans the Quran?

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Photo Credit: Free Patriot

Photo Credit: Free Patriot

In an unusual court ruling, the “October” district court in the Russian port city of Novorossiysk, on the Black Sea, [held] that the “Meaning of Qur’an” in the “Russian Language” is “recognized as extremist”. After the ruling the Russian court made a bold move to ban the Qur’an from Russia and not allowing it to be translated or distributed in Russian. It also recognized possession and distribution of the Qur’an as extremist.

The court cited expert testimony from Forensic Centre at the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation (MVD) for the region who stated that the book contained:

…statements in which a person or group of persons (in particular, non-Muslims ) is portrayed negatively on grounds related to a particular religion; …. statements which address talking about the advantages of a single person or group of persons to other people on the grounds of religion (particularly the Muslims over non-Muslims ); … statements containing the positive assessment of hostile action of one group of people against another group of people on the basis of religion, specifically, Muslims towards non-Muslims; …statements of an inciting character, which can be understood as calling for hostile and violent actions by one group of people against another group of people on the basis of religion, in particular the Muslims towards non-Muslims.

The [court] cited a 2002 translation into Russian from Elmir Kuliev, who is the Director of Department of Geoculture at the Institute of Strategic Studies of the Caucasus. He was considered the leading contemporary on Russian Muslim Philosophy, and his translation is used and cited in several resources including Quransearch.org for the definitive Russian translation of the Qur’an.

The lawsuit leading to the ban was brought by the transport prosecutor’s office in Novorossiysk under general procedure article 45 of the Russian civil procedure code (which allows a prosecutor to act in the interest of unspecified citizens even where no complaint has been filed). The transport prosecutor is believed to have challenged the refusal of a different prosecutor’s office to institute criminal proceedings on the grounds of an offense under Art. 282 of the Criminal Code (incitement of National, Racial, or Religious Enmity), after the book was delivered by mail order to a local address.

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Interpol Issues International Arrest Warrant for Samantha Lewthwaite, the “White Widow’

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Photo Credit: REX

Photo Credit: REX

Interpol has issued an international arrest warrant for Samantha Lewthwaite, the British woman dubbed the “white widow” who has been linked to the Kenyan shopping centre attack, in connection with suspected terrorist offences in 2011.

The international police agency said its red notice had been issued at the request of Kenya and circulated to police authorities in 190 countries around the world, activating “a global tripwire” for the Briton.

The warrant does not relate to the terrorist attack at the weekend on the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi, despite intense speculation linking Lewthwaite, the widow of one of the July 7 London bombers, to the atrocity, for which the al-Qaida-linked Somali group al-Shabaab has claimed responsibility.

Instead, said Interpol, the 29-year-old is being sought on charges of possession of explosives and conspiracy to commit a felony dating back to December 2011.

That month Kenyan police raided a property in Mombasa that had been linked to Lewthwaite, arresting another Briton, Jermaine Grant from east London. Grant is currently on trial for the offences in a secure Mombasa court.

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Benjamin Netanyahu Warns of Iran ‘Honey’ Trap

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benjamin-netanyahu-speech__13223894__mbqftemplateidrenderscaledpropertybildwidth465Prompted by growing alarm over the prospect of rapprochement between Iran and the West, the Israeli prime minister will warn that Mr Rouhani’s conciliatory tone conceals the same hostile intent voiced explicitly by the combative Mr Ahmadinejad when he addresses the UN general assembly on October 1.

He will also warn the West to avoid being caught in a honey trap laid by Mr Rouhani, who was elected in June on a promise to end Iran’s international isolation. “This is not honey, this is venom,” the prime minister will say, according to Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, which claimed to have seen a preview of his planned delivery.

Israeli officials have been trailing excerpts from Mr Netanyahu’s speech more than a week in advance in a desperate effort to counteract the effects of Mr Rouhani’s arrival in New York, where he is expected to call for a fresh diplomatic engagement in his own UN speech today.

By contrast, the Israeli leader will respond to Iranian overtures seeking a resolution to the impasse over its nuclear programme by warning that no deal is better than a bad agreement. He will remind diplomats that a deal was struck in 2005 over North Korea’s nuclear activities only for the Communist regime to test a bomb a year later.

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Number of Dutch Killed by Euthanasia Rises by 13 Per Cent

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Photo Credit: ALAMY

Photo Credit: ALAMY

Voluntary euthanasia or physician assisted suicide, where a doctor is present while a patient kills themselves, usually by drinking a strong barbiturate potion, has been legal in the Netherlands since 2002.

Requests have risen steadily since 2003 when 1,626 people applied for medically administered euthanasia, in most cases by a lethal injection, or assisted suicide.

As previously controversial “mercy killings” have become socially and medically acceptable, the number of cases, the vast majority of medical euthanasia, have more than doubled over the decade to 2012.

One explanation for the steep rise of Dutch cases is the introduction last year of mobile euthanasia units allowing patients to be killed by volunatry lethal injection when family doctors refused.

Around 80 per cent of people who request euthanasia die at home and are killed by doctors on the grounds that they are suffering unbearable pain and are making an informed choice. The opinion of a second doctor is also required.

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Iranian President Rejects Meeting with President Obama

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani declined to talk to President Barack Obama after White House aides offered to arrange “an encounter” between the two leaders.

“What we indicated was we were open to the two leaders having an encounter here on the margins, officials said,” according to the White House pool report.

“The Iranians have an internal dynamic that they have to manage and the relationship with [the] United States is clearly quite different than the relationship that Iran has with other Western nations,” the pool report quotes a senior administration official as saying.

The official explained that the meeting was just “too complicated for Iranians to do at this point.”

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7.7 Magnitude Quake in Pakistan Just Created a New Island

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Photo Credit: io9

Photo Credit: io9

A massive, 7.7 magnitude quake struck south-central Pakistan on Tuesday afternoon local time. The USGS warns that there will high casualties and economic losses, requiring international response. Seismologists have also confirmed that the quake raised a new island, about 30-40 feet high, off the coast.

The island is about half a mile off the coast of Gwadar, in the Arabian Sea. Already, reports the International Herald Tribune, crowds have gathered to see the mountainous, rocky island. Some are claiming it is 100 feet long.

t’s not unusual for earthquakes of this magnitude to change the coastline, or even deform the shape of the planet. In 2010, an 8.8 magnitude quake in Chile created new coastlines in that country and changed the shape of the Earth enough to shorten our days by a fraction of a second.

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Netanyahu Is Said to View Iran Nuke Deal as a Possible Trap

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Photo Credit: Iranian Ministry of Defense

Photo Credit: Iranian Ministry of Defense

WASHINGTON — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, stepping up his effort to blunt a diplomatic offensive by Iran, plans to warn the United Nations next week that a nuclear deal with the Iranian government could be a trap similar to one set by North Korea eight years ago, according to an Israeli official involved in drafting the speech.

Mr. Netanyahu is scheduled to address the General Assembly next Tuesday, a week after President Obama and Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, are to speak at the United Nations.

But the Israeli government, clearly rattled by the sudden talk of a diplomatic opening, offered a preview Sunday of Mr. Netanyahu’s hard-edged message, in which he will set the terms for what would be acceptable to Israel in any agreement concerning Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“A bad agreement is worse than no agreement at all,” the Israeli official said, reading a statement from the prime minister’s office that he said reflected Mr. Netanyahu’s remarks.

President Rouhani, in advance of his arrival in New York this week, has signaled a willingness to negotiate. The Obama administration, while professing wariness, is clearly intrigued by the possibility of resolving a problem that has bedeviled President Obama as long as he has been in office. And that, in turn, has deeply unsettled the Israelis.

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The Climate-Change Circus

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picture - Earth - climate changeFor the first time, an assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be widely judged more for what it says about the IPCC than for what it says about the climate. Its 2007 predecessor bombed during the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference as a number of errors came to light. “The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact,” Bob Watson, a former IPCC chairman, conceded. “That is worrying.”

The IPCC fifth assessment report is being published in the run-up to the Paris climate conference in 2015, when the governments of the world are meant to do what they signally failed to do at Copenhagen: agree. Advertised as summaries of scientific knowledge, IPCC reports — note that the “I” stands for “intergovernmental” — are subject to review by governments and by scientists, many of them employed by governments, making the reports politico-scientific documents.

Their function is to serve as canonical texts for global-warming orthodoxy, providing an updated climate-change catechism for its followers. Writing in the Times of London last week, the current chief scientific adviser to the British government and his three predecessors stated that the IPCC will present “even greater confidence” that the climate is warming as a result of human activities. Only, as the rest of the world knows, observed temperatures haven’t risen for at least a decade and a half.

Climate scientist Judith Curry of Georgia Tech has described the IPCC’s position as “incomprehensible.” The IPCC has increased its confidence in attributing the cause of global warming to greenhouse gases when there has been less warming and more greenhouse gases.

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