France Riots After Socialist Government Legalizes Homosexual Marriage

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Photo Credit: Irish Examiner Clashes have broken out between protesters and riot police near France’s National Assembly building, hours after the country legalized gay marriage.

Some protesters opposed to the measure clearing same-sex marriage hurled petrol bombs, and riot police responded with tear gas at the Invalides memorial and museum complex, near the National Assembly in Paris.

Hours earlier, French politicians concluded a wrenching national debate that exposed deep conservatism in the nation’s heartland and tapped into intense discontent with the Socialist government…

Following the vote, members of the gay and lesbian community flocked to a square in central Paris, just behind City Hall, to celebrate.

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Naked Feminist Protesters Drench Catholic Archbishop as He Prays

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A group of naked women bum-rushed Belgian Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard while he was speaking in Brussels and doused him with water from bottles shaped like the Virgin Mary on Tuesday.

The women were reportedly feminist protesters from the Ukranian-based FEMEN group, which is known for organizing topless protests against the Catholic Church and others.

According to AFP, the four protesters charged the archbishop during “a debate on blasphemy and freedom of expression held at the Brussels’ Free University (ULB) campus Tuesday evening, baring their breasts and squirting water at Archbishop Andre Leonard as they accused him of homophobia.”

Photos of the event show Leonard patiently sitting quietly with his eyes closed and hands folded in prayer as the women empty bottles of water on his head and clothes.

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Epic Fail: North Korea Rejects U.S. Offer of Direct Talks, Demands Withdrawal From Region

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WASHINGTON – North Korea has upped the ante in response to a U.S. call for direct negotiations to lessen tensions on the Korean Peninsula by demanding that the U.S. first withdraw from that part of the world altogether.

However, the tensions are not likely to recede right away because such a position is judged to be a non-starter in the dispute over Pyongyang’s development of nuclear weapons and missile capabilities.

While U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry recently said that the U.S. is prepared for direct talks with Pyongyang to lessen tensions, a North Korean statement said that the pre-condition that it first dismantle its nuclear weapons program is unacceptable.

“The U.S. should understand that a dialogue will begin only when the DPRK’s demand for the withdrawal of strategic offensive means in the vicinity of the peninsula aimed at realizing the U.S. world domination strategy is met,” the statement said.

This statement follows a North Korean rejection of talks on which WND recently reported.

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UN Official Blames Boston Marathon Bombings on American 'Domination'

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Photo Credit: APA United Nations official known for blaming the U.S. for unrest in the Middle East has angered critics again by blaming the Boston Marathon bombings on “American global domination.”

“The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world,” Richard Falk, the UN Human Rights Council’s Palestine monitor, wrote in an article for Foreign Policy Journal titled, “A Commentary on the Marathon Murders.”

“It is soon to tell, and the somewhat hysterical Boston dragnet for the remaining at large and alive suspect does suggest that the wounds of 9/11 are far from healed,” he wrote. “We should be asking ourselves at this moment, ‘How many canaries will have to die before we awaken from our geopolitical fantasy of global domination?’”

Falk also blamed Israel for the unrest he believes prompted two brothers of Chechen descent to set bombs that killed three innocent people and injure nearly 200, then kill a police officer.

“The war drums are beating at this moment in relation to both North Korea and Iran, and as long as Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment, those who wish for peace and justice in the world should not rest easy,” he wrote.

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Now That Syria Has Crossed Obama's 'Red Line' with Nerve Gas, What Next?

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Photo Credit: Reuters Israel’s top military intelligence analyst said in Tel Aviv on Tuesday that Syrian government forces had used chemical weapons – probably the nerve gas sarin – in their fight against rebels trying to force out President Bashar al-Assad.

He cited photographic evidence of victims foaming at the mouth, their pupils contracted.

The Israeli allegations, which came during a week-long visit by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to the Middle East, followed similar concerns of chemical weapons use voiced by Britain and France.

But so far, those assessments appear to lack the concrete proof Washington would need to accept the kind of deeper U.S. involvement in Syria’s civil war that Obama has resisted. That, in turn, raises questions about just how well-defined the president’s “red line” is.

White House spokesman Jay Carney walked a cautious line speaking to reporters, making clear that Washington was taking the Israeli accusations seriously but would require “conclusive evidence” before deciding whether to move forward.

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New Persian Rulers: Iran's Military has Apparently Supplanted the Clerics

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Photo Credit: APIranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “has become a hostage” of an elite branch of Iran’s army that has quietly consolidated its economic and political power, a top analyst said Tuesday.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) appears to have supplanted Khamenei and other top clerics in a significant power shift that has left Iran a “military dictatorship,” according to Ali Alfoneh, who has spent years investigating the IRGC.

Khamenei “has become a hostage in the hands of his own praetorian guard,” Alfoneh said Tuesday during a discussion hosted by the American Enterprise Institute.

Thirty-four years since the Iranian revolution installed an extremist Islamic leader, the country has “degenerated into a military dictatorship which is disguising itself. … They want to preserve the illusion the regime” is still in power, he said.

The IRGC, Iran’s principal fighting force in its 1980 war with Iraq, has quietly seized control of Iran’s economy and political bodies and controls around $80 billion in private economic assets, according to Alfoneh.

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Syria: Two Prominent Christian Leaders Kidnapped by Rebels

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Photo Credit: FreedomHouseTwo prominent Syrian bishops, who had warned of the threat to religious tolerance and diversity from the two-year conflict in their country, were kidnapped on Monday by armed rebels in the northern province of Aleppo, state media said.

SANA news agency said the Syriac Orthodox and Greek Orthodox Archbishops of Aleppo, Yohanna Ibrahim and Paul Yazigi, were seized by “a terrorist group” in the village of Kfar Dael as they were “carrying out humanitarian work.”

A Syriac member of the opposition Syrian National Coalition, Abdulahad Steifo, said the men had been kidnapped on the road to Aleppo from the rebel-held Bab al Hawa crossing with Turkey.

Several prominent Muslim clerics have been killed in Syria’s uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, but the two bishops are the most senior church leaders caught up in the conflict which has killed more than 70,000 people across Syria.

Christians make up less than 10 percent of the country’s 23 million people and, like other religious minorities, many have been wary of the mainly Sunni Muslim uprising against Assad, whose Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

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Kerry Equates Deaths of Marathon Victims with Deaths Of Anti-Israel Terrorists

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Speaking on April 21 in an ongoing effort to get Turkey to cooperate with the U.S. and bridge relations with Israel, Secretary of State John Kerry said the Boston Marathon bombings reminded him of Turks who lost family during “the 2010 IDF raid on the Marmara.”

Kerry was referring to the 2010 boarding of the Mavi Marmara, one of the ships in the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” that attempted to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip, by IDF commandos. The soldiers were attacked by militants recruited by The Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH), a Turkish charity accused of having ties to Islamic terrorist organizations, when they boarded the ship.

Nine militants were killed during attempts to rescue Israeli commandos who had been severely wounded and captured by activists abord the vessel; seven Israelis were wounded during the operation.

Without mentioning the alleged terrorist ties of the Turkish members of the flotilla, Kerry said the Boston Marathon bombing made him “acutely aware of the emotions felt by the families of the nine Turks who died” during the raid.

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N. Korea Denies Any Tie to Boston Bombing

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North Korea has denied a WND report that it had any links to the Boston Marathon bombing which killed three people and wounded some 180 people on April 15, the day of North Korea’s commemoration of the 101st anniversary of the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung.

The North Korean news agency, KCNA, or Korean Central News Agency, dismissed the report, saying it was an attempt by “hostile forces” to damage the country’s reputation and raise “false propaganda which does not deserve even a passing note,” even though KCNA devoted an entire commentary to it.

“We stress again that we have no links to al-Qaida and by signing on to international anti-terrorism agreements, continue to maintain a stance against any form of terrorism,” KCNA said in a commentary.

The KCNA commentary added it will not hide behind terrorism if it ever feels the need to strike the U.S.

“When (North Korea) feels necessary to strike the U.S., it would not resort to such heinous terrorism in hiding,” KCNA said.

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Saudi Students in U.S. Up More Than 500% Since Sept. 11, 2001

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(CNSNews.com) – The number of Saudi Arabian students in the United States has increased by more than 500 percent since Sept. 11, 2001–when Hani Hanjour, a Saudi national who came here on a student visa flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, killing 189 people.

According to the Institute of International Education–whose numbers on foreign students in the United States are used in official reports published by the U.S. Department of Education–there were 5,579 Saudi nationals enrolled in U.S. institutions of higher education in the 2001-2002 school year. The Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks took place near the beginning of that school year.

In the 2011-2012 school year, the most recent year for which data are available, there were 34,139 Saudi nationals enrolled in institutions of higher education in the United States.

The 34,139 Saudi Arabian students in the United States for the 2011-2012 school year was more than the total of 30,256 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in the University of Connecticut this school year.

From the 2001-2002 school year to the 2011-2012 school year, the number of Saudi nationals enrolled in U.S. institutions of higher education increased by 28,560.

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