In recent years, alas, Britain has deviated from its commitment to liberty. Foreign critics of Islam, such as the American scholar Robert Spencer, and for a time, even the Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders have been barred from the country. Now, at least one prominent native critic of Islam, Tommy Robinson, has been repeatedly harassed by the police, railroaded by the courts, and left unprotected by prison officials who have allowed Muslim inmates to beat him senseless. Clearly, British authorities view Robinson as a troublemaker and would like nothing more than to see him give up his fight, leave the country (as Ayaan Hirsi Ali left the Netherlands), or get killed by a jihadist (as happened to the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh).
[Read the full story here, at gatestoneinstitute.org]
On Friday, as reported here yesterday, the saga of Tommy Robinson entered a new chapter. British police officers pulled him off a street in Leeds, where, in his role as a citizen journalist, he was livestreaming a Facebook video from outside a courthouse. Inside that building, several defendants were on trial for allegedly being part of a so-called “grooming gang” — a group of men, almost all Muslim, who systematically rape non-Muslim children, in some cases hundreds of them, over a period of years or decades. Some ten thousand Facebook viewers around the world witnessed Robinson’s arrest live.
The police promptly dragged Robinson in front of a judge, where, without having access to his own lawyer, he was summarily tried and sentenced to 13 months behind bars. He was then transported to Hull Prison.
Meanwhile, the judge who sentenced him also ordered the British media not to report on his case. Newspapers that had already posted reports of his arrest quickly took them down. Even ordinary citizens who had written about the arrest on social media removed their posts, for fear of sharing Robinson’s fate. All this happened on the same day.
A kangaroo court, then a gag order. In the United Kingdom, where rapists enjoy the right to a full and fair trial, the right to the legal representation of their choice, the right to have sufficient time to prepare their cases, and the right to go home on bail between sessions of their trial. No such rights were offered, however, to Tommy Robinson.
The swiftness with which injustice was meted out to Robinson is stunning. No, more than that: it is terrifying. On various occasions over the years, I have been subjected in person to an immediate threat of Islamic violence: I have had a knife pulled on me by a young gang member, and been encircled by a crowd of belligerent men in djellabas outside a radical mosque. But that was not frightening. This is frightening — this utter violation of fundamental British freedoms. Read the rest of this entry »
BREAKING NEWS: Vehicle hits pedestrians in Finsbury Park. One person arrested and “a number of casualties” as a vehicle hits pedestrians in Finsbury Park, London, police say.
#FinsburyPark Racist attacker being arrested
Man in a white van drove into a crowd of Muslims near the mosque
Cowardly attack on innocents pic.twitter.com/kSojwbe2YN— Khalid Khan (@KhanUKIP) June 19, 2017
A vehicle has struck pedestrians “leaving a number of casualties” in north London, police said. One person has been arrested following the incident on Seven Sisters Road in Finsbury Park.Officers were called at 12.20 BST, the Metropolitan Police said.London Ambulance Service said: “We have sent a number of resources to an incident in Seven Sisters Road.”
BREAKING: Reports of a van knocking over more than 10 people near #FinsburyPark mosque in London, police everywhere.pic.twitter.com/u2L5njLklY
— Tennessee (@TEN_GOP) June 19, 2017
Kurt Schlichter writes: The most significant revelation that came out of the most recent London massacre of disarmed British subjects was not the bloodshed itself, but the pathetic sissy whining, in the midst of throats being slashed, at the Brit who refused to adhere to the comforting lie that the Muslims doing the slashing in the name of Allah were not Muslims doing the slashing in the name of Allah.
The left would rather you lie and die than tell the truth and live.
It’s exhausting being lied to 24/7 about the big issues, and don’t start with the “but what about Trump?” nonsense because…well, what about Trump?
Does Trump pretend that the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam because to admit the Islamic State has something to do with Islam is an admission that the unquestionable idea underlying multiculturalism – that every culture is wonderful except the Western culture that brought about 95 percet of the learning and science that is making the grinding poverty and disease that was heretofore man’s fate a thing of the past – is an utter fraud?
Does Trump pretend that we are morally or scientifically bound by a non-treaty that was non-submitted to our elected representatives to solve the non-problem of climate change at the price of our non-employment and non-prosperity?
Does Trump blame Russians for the utter repudiation of Felonia von Pantsuit’s poisonous ideology of greed and huggy fascism? Does he contend Hillary skipped those icky workin’ folks in Wisconsin and Michigan because Putin tricked her?
I keep trying to find the big Trump “lies” and they always seem to end up being disagreements with liberal orthodoxy. Read the rest of this entry »
The June 7 issue of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo arrives on the heels of the Manchester and London Bridge terrorist attacks. Indeed, the bubble remark–‘Too much is too much’–comes from remarks made by U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May in the wake of the latter June 3 incidents.
The cover is tasteless. English-language media reaction is just starting to trickle in, but stay car-tooned. There will be lots of it. The cover line, translated, reads as ‘Multiculturalism is the British Way.’
From a U.S. perspective, it’s impossible not to think of the wrath that descended upon comedian Kathy Griffin last week … (read more)
Source: Adweek
Tragically, there have been three major terrorist attacks in the U.K. in less than three months’ time. After the second, in Manchester, May and others said they would look into finding ways to compel tech companies to put cryptographic “back doors” into their services, so that law enforcement agencies could more easily access suspects’ user data.
May repeated her stance in broaders terms Sunday, following new attacks in London. “The Internet, and the big companies” are providing “safe spaces” for extremism, she said, and new regulations are needed to “regulate cyberspace.” She offered no specifics, but her party’s line, just days from the June 8 national election, is clear: a country that already grants its government some of the most sweeping digital surveillance powers of any democracy needs more and tougher laws to prevent terrorism (see “New U.K. Surveillance Law Will Have Worldwide Implications”).
The trouble is, this kind of talk ignores how the Internet and modern consumer technology works. As Cory Doctorow points out in a detailed look at how you would actually go about creating services with cryptographic holes, the practicalities of such a demand render it ludicrous bordering on impossible. Even if all of the necessary state-mandated technical steps were taken by purveyors of commercial software and devices—like Google or Apple, say—anyone who wanted to could easily skirt their restrictions by running open-source versions of the software, or unlocked phones.
That isn’t to say that May and the Conservatives’ general idea that the government should be able to probe user data as part of an investigation should be dismissed out of hand. The balancing act between national security and digital privacy has become one of the central themes of our digital lives (see “What If Apple Is Wrong?”). And while there are advocates aplenty on both sides, simple answers are hard to come by. Read the rest of this entry »
At the site of the London Bridge attacks, June 5. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Theodore Dalrymple writes: The only man I ever met whose ambition was to be a suicide bomber was an inmate at the British prison where I worked as a doctor in the 1990s and 2000s. He was a career criminal of very nasty propensities whose father was Arab and mother English. He had reached his 30s, the age at which criminals usually turn away from crime in favor of something better—in his case the killing of as many infidels as possible, along with himself.
Coming to religion is one reason, or pretext, for abandoning crime. In the prison there was much more Islamic evangelism than Christian. I would find Qurans and Islamic pamphlets in drawers, insinuated there by I knew not whom, but never Bibles or Christian pamphlets.
I interpreted religion as the means prisoners used to rationalize giving up common crime while at the same time not feeling defeated by, or having surrendered to, the society around them—for they knew conversion to Islam gave that society the shudders.
The problem for the security services, however, is that there is no invariable profile, social or psychological, of the Muslim terrorist. Nor is there a kind of economic lever that can be pulled so that, with better material prospects, young Muslims will be less attracted to terrorism. There have, it is true, been no-hopers among the terrorists, but there have also been medical students and doctors. There was nothing (except himself) impeding the recent Manchester bomber from having a normal or even a highly successful career. As Prime Minister Theresa May rightly said after the most recent atrocities in London, what the terrorists have in common is an ideology. She rightly called it evil, but it is also stupid: It makes the Baader-Meinhof Gang look like Aristotle.
[Read the full story here, at WSJ]
An ideology, however stupid, is not easy to destroy; believing six impossible things before breakfast is almost par for the human course. One obvious thing to do would be to strangle the foreign funding of so much Islamist activity in Britain. That is no doubt complicated in many ways, but no British government, solicitous of trade relations, has dared even try. The British economy is precarious, and it is difficult to be strong when your economy is weak. Read the rest of this entry »
A white van hit pedestrians on London Bridge at about 22:00 BST on Saturday, then three men got out and stabbed people in nearby Borough Market.
The three attackers, who wore fake bomb vests, were shot dead by police.
Several arrests have been made after police raids in Barking, east London.
It is the third terror attack in the UK in three months, following the car and knife attack in Westminster in March, which left five people dead, and the Manchester bombing less than two weeks ago, in which 22 people were killed.
Most political parties have suspended national general election campaigning, but Mrs May said full campaigning would resume on Monday and the general election would go ahead as planned on Thursday.
Eyewitnesses to the attack described seeing a white van travelling at high speed along London Bridge, hitting pedestrians, before crashing close to the Barrowboy and Banker pub.
BBC reporter Holly Jones, who was on the bridge, said it was “probably travelling at about 50 miles an hour” and hit “five or six people”.
Three men then got out and began attacking people in the nearby market – an area known for its bars and restaurants, which were busy on a warm summer evening.
Terrified drinkers rushed away from the scene, some taking shelter in London Bridge Underground station.
One witness, Gerard, told the BBC he saw a woman being stabbed “10 or 15 times” by men shouting “This is for Allah”.
Another, Eric, told the BBC the men “ran towards the people that they nearly ran over”.
“I thought, ‘Oh maybe they’re worried about them and trying to comfort them…’
“[Then] they literally just started kicking them, punching them, they took out knives… it was a rampage really.”
The three suspects were shot dead within eight minutes of the first 999 call being received.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick praised the “extraordinary bravery” of her officers, on and off duty, who risked their lives by rushing to confront the attackers.
Among the main developments:
Another eyewitness, Steven Gibbs, who was drinking in St Christopher’s Inn, just metres from the scene, told the BBC: “A black cab drove past and the driver shouted, ‘Terrorist attack, run!’
“I stood up to take a look and then all of a sudden there were gunshots. Lots of people were screaming.”
Steven was taken into the basement of the bar before the police came in and told everyone inside to run. Read the rest of this entry »
LONDON – British police rushed to an incident on London Bridge on Saturday after witnesses said a van plowed into pedestrians.
Police said they were dealing with an incident but gave no further details. A Reuters reporter near the scene said she saw 10 police cars rushing towards London Bridge.
Footage from London Bridge #BreakigNews pic.twitter.com/T3KZME2QdZ
— Kaine Pieri (@PieriKaine) June 3, 2017
A witness told the BBC she saw a speeding white van veering into pedestrians. The witness said the van hit five to six people … (more)
BREAKING NEW VIDEO: several London police officers enter bar at London Bridge telling people to get down. pic.twitter.com/bjq15uVEmN
— The Rouser (@RouserNews) June 3, 2017
Source: New York Post
Assange has not returned a series of recent emails from Fox News about Rich. MacFadyen, who was considered a mentor by Assange, died of lung cancer on Oct. 22 at age 76.
D.C. police have announced a $25,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of Rich’s killer. Republican lobbyist Jack Burkman has offered a separate $130,000 reward.
Rich had been at Lou’s City Bar a couple of miles from his home until about 1:15 a.m. He walked home, calling several people along the way. He called his father, Joel Rich, who he missed because he had gone to sleep. He talked with a fraternity brother and his girlfriend, Kelsey Mulka.
Around 4:17 a.m., Rich was about a block from his home when Mulka, still on the phone with him, heard voices in the background. Rich reassured her that he was steps away from being at his front door and hung up.
Two minutes later, Rich was shot twice. Police were on the scene within three minutes. Rich sustained bruising on his hands and face. He remained conscious, but died at a nearby hospital less than two hours later. Read the rest of this entry »
The host of The Rubin Report discusses the ‘regressive left,’ his thoughts on Islam, and breaking with progressives.
Edited by Alex Manning. Cameras by Zach Weissmueller and Austin Bragg.
Queen Elizabeth II, the world’s longest-reigning living monarch, has celebrated her Sapphire Jubilee as Britain commemorates 65 years since she ascended the throne.
The 90-year-old monarch, who became the kingdom’s longest-reigning sovereign in 2015, did not publicly mark the occasion herself, but a 41-gun royal salute was fired in a central London park to honour the landmark.
“Today’s Sapphire Jubilee marks yet another remarkable milestone for our remarkable Queen,” Prime Minister Theresa May said in a statement.
“It is a testament to her selfless devotion to the nation that she is not marking becoming the first monarch to reign for 65 years with any special celebration, but instead getting on with the job to which she has dedicated her life.”
Elizabeth became Queen aged 25 on February 6, 1952, following the death of her father George VI.
She is the 41st monarch in a royal line that traces its origin back to Norman King William the Conqueror who claimed the throne in 1066.
When she overtook her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria’s record of 63 years on the throne, she remarked it was not something to which she had ever aspired.
Buckingham Palace said she would spend Monday at her residence in Sandringham, eastern England, as was usual. Read the rest of this entry »
Alex Pfeiffer reports: Progressive journalist Cenk Uygur, who hosts the popular online news show “The Young Turks” with Ana Kasparian, suggested Thursday the Wednesday riot at the University of California – Berkeley was conducted by right-wingers.
Uygur and Kasparian addressed the riot in an episode titled, “Why The Media Is Wrong On Berkeley Protest.”
[Read the full story here, at The Daily Caller]
Ugyur maintained that there is no way to know who the protesters are even though anti-fascist “black bloc” protesters have essentially taken credit for the violence.
Kasparian chimed in that it could be a “clever strategy by the right.”
[ALSO SEE – Armchair Conspiracy Theorist Robert Reich Implicates Breitbart in False-Flag Operation at Berkeley]
“Could the right-wing come in masked? Could it be 4chan guys who come in to cause trouble so they can then turn around and do exactly what they did today, ‘Oh you have to take away the funding from Berkeley?,’” Uygur asked. Read the rest of this entry »
On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “OutFront,” Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz reacted to Acting Attorney General Sally Yates’ announcement that the DOJ will not present arguments in defense of President Trump’s immigration order by saying Yates made a “serious mistake” and has “made a political decision, rather than a legal one.”
Dershowitz said, “Yates is a terrific public servant, but I think she’s made a serious mistake here. This is a holdover heroism. It’s so easy to be a heroine when you’re not appointed by this president and when you’re on the other side. She made a serious mistake. I think what she should have done is done a nuanced analysis of what parts of the order are constitutional, what parts are in violation of the statute, what parts are perfectly lawful. There’s an enormous distinction between green card holders on the one hand, people who are in the country and have to be thrown out on the second hand, and people who are simply applying to get visas. There is also a distinction between what’s constitutional, what’s statutorily prohibited, what’s bad policy. This is very bad policy, but what’s lawful. And I think by lumping all of them together, she has made a political decision, rather than a legal one.”
He added, “I think it’s — some of it’s constitutional, some of it’s not constitutional. For example, there is a statute that limits the president’s power, and says that visas may not be denied on the basis of religion. Read the rest of this entry »
Media artist Akinori Goto designed this fun 3d-printed zoetrope that when lit from the side reveals walking people. The piece was just on view at the Spiral Independent Creators Festival where it won both the Runner-up Grand Prix and the Audience Award. Video above from Tokyo Art Beat. (via Prosthetic Knowledge)
Live from the Hollywood Bowl sketch from Monty Python – Communist quiz featuring Marx, Lenin, Che, Mao.
Novelist Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) is back in Tokyo — as an android.
Nishogakusha University in Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo, and Osaka University Prof. Hiroshi Ishiguro unveiled the final product of their joint project at a press conference on Thursday, a day before the 100th anniversary of the writer’s death.
The humanoid robot sits 130 centimeters high and was made based on pictures taken when the writer was 45 years old and his death mask, among other materials. Read the rest of this entry »
Will Knight writes: The nimble-legged robots under development at a secretive Google subsidiary are getting ever more capable and clever.
At a conference in Barcelona this week, Marc Raibert, the CEO of Boston Dynamics, which specializes in dynamically balancing legged machines, demonstrated some of the progress his researchers have been making.
— Marc Raibert, the CEO of Boston Dynamics
Raibert demonstrated Spot Mini, the company’s latest four-legged robot, which is about the size of a large dog. Boston Dynamics has previously shown videos of Spot Mini operating in a mocked-up home—climbing stairs, opening doors, and even emptying a dishwasher using its gripper. The robot features a neck-like appendage and gripper that enables it to do simple, but potentially useful, manipulation tasks.
The robot is partially automated. A Boston Dynamics engineer steered a Spot Mini onto the stage during Raibert’s talk at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference. But the robot figured out for itself how to perceive and navigate the steps up to the stage, and then, once given the command, located and picked up a can from a table.
Legged robots could potentially be better than wheeled bots at navigating messy human environments, although the research robots under development at Boston Dynamics remain prohibitively expensive for now, some costing more than $1 million.
Boston Dynamics has built a reputation for developing robots capable of walking and running, even across treacherous ground using dynamic balance; that is, by constantly moving to maintain stability. The company has honed the technique over many decades to produce several stunning machines (see “The Robots Running This Way”). It makes a much larger quadruped, called Big Dog, which has been tested as a military pack mule, as well as a humanoid, Atlas, which took part in a robot rescue contest organized recently by the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (see “Why Robots and Humans Struggled with DARPA’s Challenge”).
As Boston Dynamics explores potential applications, it’s clear that manipulating objects while balancing this way will be a key focus. “Mobile manipulation is our next grand challenge,” Raibert said during his talk. Read the rest of this entry »
Dolce & Gabbana held its first fashion show outside Italy in Hong Kong to showcase some of the world’s most expensive clothing, betting that there is still demand from the ultrawealthy for jewel-encrusted tiaras and glittery dresses. Photo/Video: Eva Tam.
A “killer clown” craze is sweeping Britain, with police warning people against dressing as clowns in order to intimidate or harm people.
Now, the craze has taken a change for the strange in Cumbria, where a man is dressing as Batman and vowing to chase down the creepy clowns.
A photograph has been shared on Facebook of “Batman” seemingly chasing off a “killer clown”.
BBC Cumbria reported local company Cumbria Superheroes is behind the effort to rid the streets of clowns.
They have reassured that the costumed man is not a vigilante, but just trying to reassure local children who are scared of the “killer clowns”.
BBC Cumbria also shared a screenshot of an image, apparently from a local child, who was reassured after hearing “Batman” caught the clown. Read the rest of this entry »
Hailey Branson reports: Jonathan Fischer is never sure who’s going to be more surprised when he, as he likes to put it, comes out of the gun closet — the gun aficionados who find out he’s gay or the gay friends who find out he likes shooting guns.
— Jonathan Fischer
When the 38-year-old television editor showed up last month to a defensive handgun class near Piru with a Glock 27 pistol on his hip, he wore a T-shirt sporting a rainbow-colored AK-47. His “gay-K-47,” he said.
In the days after 49 people were fatally shot at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., this summer, Fischer wanted to do something to make his community safer. So he started the West Hollywood chapter of the Pink Pistols — a loosely organized, national LGBT gun group.
“If someone was to try and break into my home, and especially if someone were armed, I don’t want to fight back with a kitchen knife,” Fischer said. “And I don’t think that’s extremist or crazy.
It’s a stark contrast to how the overwhelming majority of LGBT activists and
organizations responded to the Orlando massacre, which has sparked calls within the community for gun control.
[Check out Emily Miller’s book “Emily Gets Her Gun” from Amazon]
In the wake of the shooting, some gay bars like the Abbey in West Hollywood beefed up security. The same day as the Orlando mass shooting, L.A.’s annual gay pride parade was rattled after a heavily armed man en route to the event was arrested.
For all the anxiety Orlando has caused, many gay activists say becoming armed is not the answer.
“Some people say you need a gun to protect yourself from the bad guys. We just fundamentally disagree with that,” said Rick Zbur, executive director of Equality California. “We don’t want to live in a world where you have to be packing heat to live your daily life.”
But for a small subset of the community, Orlando has become a call to arms.
[Read the full article here, at the LA Times]
When the firearms instructor at the range near Piru asked each person in the class why he or she was there, Fischer ticked off several reasons and mentioned the Pink Pistols.
“What is the Pink Pistols group?” a man asked.
There was a pause.
[Read the full text here, at the LA Times]
“We’re — a gay gun group,” Fischer said hesitantly. He tried quickly to explain.
“No, that’s awesome,” the man said, nodding reassuringly.
Interest in the Pink Pistols has increased since the Orlando attack, with new chapters springing up across the country, including the West Hollywood chapter and another one in North Hollywood. There was such an outpouring of support from firearms trainers, many of them straight, that the Pink Pistols’ website now has a map listing LGBT-friendly firearms instructors in every state.
[Read the full story here, at the LA Times]
The week of the attack, signs depicting a rainbow-colored Gadsden flag and the hashtag #ShootBack appeared in West Hollywood, where an estimated 46% of the population identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. City officials were outraged.
“Even during our heightened days of civil disobedience and protest, we have only advocated peaceful means, never arming ourselves and retaliating with violence,” said City Councilman John Duran, who is gay.
Gwendolyn Patton, the national spokeswoman for the Pink Pistols, has spent the summer trying to keep up with the 
all inquiries about the group and how to start new chapters.
[See John R. Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, Third Edition (Studies in Law and Economics) at Amazon]
“People don’t like to feel helpless,” said Patton, a lesbian who lives outside Philadelphia.
The Pink Pistols has received a mostly negative response from the broader LGBT community, she said. Some LGBT centers, she said, have even specifically banned the Pink Pistols from using their facilities.
The group dates to 2000 when gay author and journalist Jonathan Rauch wrote an article for Salon.com calling for gay people to “set up Pink Pistols task forces,” get licensed to carry guns and arm themselves to protect their community.”
“Not all that many gay people would need to carry guns, as long as gay-bashers couldn’t tell which ones did,” Rauch wrote.
Rauch told The Times he wrote the article at a time when the brutal murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard 
was still fresh in the public consciousness. It woke people up, he said, to what gay people had known all along: “that we were targets of day-to-day terrorism.”
[Order Nicholas Johnson’s book “Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms” at Amazon]
“There is a huge amount of anti-gay stereotype in America that has to do with weakness — people calling us limp-wristed and fairies,” Rauch said. “Over the years, many gay people came to internalize this stereotype and assume that we are weak and defenseless, and of course we are not.”
The first Pink Pistols chapter, taking its name directly from Rauch’s article, was started in Boston just after its publication, Patton said. Today, there are 50 chapters in the U.S. and Canada. Read the rest of this entry »
The 34ft boat can skim across the waves at more than 50kts to track high speed targets, while navigating and dodging other ships without the control of a human.
Naval commanders believe the Maritime Autonomy Surface Testbed (MAST) could herald a robot fleet of high-speed craft packed with sensors to carry out spy and scouting missions.
The unarmed test craft is one of 40 prototypes to be tested by the Royal Navy in a major robot war game off the coast of northern Scotland in October.
The dawn of unmanned vehicles is likely to have the same revolutionary effect on naval warfare as the birth of flight and aircraft carriers, according to the navy’s Fleet Robotics Officer.
Cdr Peter Pipkin said: “This is a chance to take a great leap forward in maritime systems – not to take people out of the loop but to enhance everything they do, to extend our reach, our look, our timescales, our efficiency using intelligent and manageable robotics at sea.”
MAST has been built for the MoD’s defence laboratories and is based on an existing Bladerunner speedboat, but fitted with sensors and robotic technology that is still largely classified.
The boat has a sophisticated anti-collision system to avoid hazards and other craft, but current laws meant that when it was unveiled on the Thames, it had to have a human coxswain on board.
While the MAST is only a test platform for new technology and will not enter service as it stands, sources said it could it pave the way for future robots vessels that can track, shadow or spy on other craft as well as loitering off coastlines.
Elizabeth Quintana, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, said the Navy was looking at unmanned vehicles to take on “dull, dirty, and dangerous” jobs. Read the rest of this entry »
British government aides have fallen victim to spying on previous official trips to China, with one Downing Street official reported to have had his mobile phone and secret documents stolen after he was seduced.
Government security chiefs are anxious to avoid a repeat of the incident, which took place during a visit by Gordon Brown in 2008, and have provided detailed guidance to Mrs May’s team.
The Prime Minister’s officials have been warned to take steps to protect themselves during the G20 summit, which begins on Sunday.
Officials travelling with Mrs May have been issued with temporary mobile phones and email addresses in an attempt to evade Chinese state hackers.
Security advisers are also warning staff not to keep gifts they receive and to be particularly wary of electronic devices, such as free computer memory sticks, mobile phone SIM cards or chargers which they are offered by their Chinese hosts.
One Whitehall source said security chiefs had warned them that hotel rooms used during the summit were likely to be bugged. “We have been told that if you feel uncomfortable about people seeing you naked, you should get changed under your bedclothes,” the source said.
Damian McBride, left, was then prime minister Gordon Brown’s special advisor CREDIT: BRUCE ADAMS/REX
British security agencies regard China as one of the most aggressive nations when it comes to launching cyber-attacks against western governments and businesses, as well as posing a major espionage threat to the UK.
Chinese technological expertise has prompted security concerns at the highest levels of government and British intelligence.
There are fears that Chinese intelligence agents will use their capability to intercept emails and phone calls and to install spy software on computers during the summit.
However, one of the gravest threats posed by foreign spies is also one of the oldest: the honey trap.
During Mr Brown’s visit to China in 2008, one of the No 10 officials accompanying the then Prime Minister reportedly fell prey to a “beautiful” female Chinese spy. She went back to his hotel room, drugged him, stole his mobile phone and documents from his briefcase.
The incident was described by Mr Brown’s former spin doctor, Damien McBride, in his 2013 memoir, Power Trip.
The No 10 team was “accosted on one side by a beautiful posse of Chinese girls and on the other side by an equivalent group of Russian blondes”, Mr McBride said.
He wrote:
Even before our resident security expert could warn us that their interest was not to be taken at face value, we looked up and saw one of our number disappearing up the stairs to the exit with one of the girls, beaming back at us.
He woke up the following morning “minus his Blackberry and half the contents of his briefcase”.
The official also had a “‘very bad headache, owning to the Mickey Finn nightcap his overnight companion had administered to him in his hotel room”.
The G20 summit in Hangzhou comes at a time of heightened tension between Britain and China. Within weeks of entering Downing Street in July, Mrs May put on hold a final decision on whether to approve a Chinese-backed new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point in Somerset. Read the rest of this entry »
Liz Crokin reports: Hillary Clinton and her media allies have been working overtime to put out numerous fires that continue to pop up and spread during the final weeks of her campaign for president. Recently, the flames have gotten more difficult to smother as reports of Clinton’s frail health have bled into the mainstream media, despite the unanimous and unilateral decision by the MSM to treat anyone who even raises a question as akin to a Holocaust denier (On Sunday night, for example, the Huffington Post fired contributor David Seaman and deleted his columns simply for linking to a Hillary health video that’s been viewed 4 million times.)
Julian Assange stoked more flames when he suggested a murdered DNC worker was the Wikileaks source for the DNC hack. Most recently, the Associated Press released a blockbuster story concluding that more than half of the people Clinton met with as Secretary of State gave donations to the Clinton Foundation.
Despite these ongoing scandals, Clinton’s close yet questionable ties to media outlets such as Google, CNN, PBS and the New York Times have seemed to pay off. These entities have gone out of their way to censor negative stories about Clinton, particularly ones involving the Clinton Foundation. There’s one common thread though these media outlets suppressing harmful Clinton stories all share: they’ve donated to the Clinton Foundation.
On Aug. 23 the Associated Press broke the story citing that more than half the people outside of the government that Clinton met with as she served as Secretary of State gave money to the Clinton Foundation, either personally or through companies or groups. The AP report concluded that 85 out of 154 people she met with from the private sector either donated to her charity or pledged commitments. The AP drew this conclusion by reviewing some of Clinton’s schedule from when she was Secretary of State. They obtained these records after a federal judge ordered the release of them stemming from a lawsuit they filed against the State Department in 2015. (The AP is reporting that the State Department won’t finish releasing the rest of Clinton’s schedule till after the presidential election despite their request for it by October 15.) This bombshell, compounded with Clinton’s use of a private server as Secretary of State, is fueling allegations that she was involved in a pay-to-play operation. This story has been suppressed by Google in its searches as it has done in the past with stories that paint Clinton in a negative light. Read the rest of this entry »
DEVELOPING: A man attacked several people with a knife in central London Wednesday evening, killing a woman and injuring five other people in what police described as a possible terror attack.
A Metropolitan Police spokesman said officers were called to Russell Square at around 10:30 p.m. local time (5:30 p.m. ET) for a report of an armed man. They found “up to six people injured”, including a woman who was pronounced dead. Read the rest of this entry »
People were seen running from the shopping mall to get away.
Munich is in lockdown tonight as at least five people have been killed and 10 injured in a shooting rampage involving three gunmen.
A huge manhunt has been launched across the city, including snipers in helicopters, to catch the gunmen who are still on the loose.
Terrified shoppers were seen running for their lives from the Munich Olympia Shopping Centre, in the district of Moosach, after hearing gunshots.
Witnesses said that the gunman screamed ‘I’m German’ and ‘f*** foreigners’ before shooting.
A video purporting to show the shooter, dressed in black, firing 20 shots has been posted on Twitter. The footage shows him outside a McDonald’s directly outside the shopping centre.
In unverified footage, a man with dark hair, wearing a black t-shirt and denim trousers, appears to take aim at people outside a McDonald’s restaurant near the Olympia-Einkaufszentrum metro station.
He raises his arms, apparently holding a shotgun, and appears to fire at people outside the restaurant, who can be seen running for cover. Read the rest of this entry »
Rhett Allain reports: Bob Riggle is 80 years old and he has a car. This car has a 2,500 horsepower engine mounted in the rear. But what happens when you have this much power? Yes, you can see in the video that there are two events. First, the car does a “wheelie” and second the car rolls over.
Fortunately no one was injured, but at least this is a great opportunity for a physics lesson.
There are some forces acting on this car so let’s start with a diagram.
There are essentially three forces on the car in this case.
But how does this car stay tilted up like that? Shouldn’t the gravitational force make it fall back down? Clearly, it doesn’t. Perhaps the best way to understand this wheelie is to consider fake forces. We normally consider forces as interactions between objects (between the ground and the car or between the Earth and the car). However, it’s sometimes useful to create other forces that are due to accelerations. Now, these are fake forces in that they are not a real interaction. But as viewed in an accelerating reference frame (like inside the car), it is as though there is this real acceleration force.
Since the car accelerates to the left (in the above diagram), the fake force is to the right and keeps the car in wheelie up position.
But what about torque? If you want to rotate an object, you need torque. One expression for torque would be (this is just the scalar form—for simplicity):
In this expression, F is the force, r is the distance from the point of rotation to the point where the force is applied and θ is the angle between these two things. For the total torque about the wheel, it’s really just the torque due to the gravitational force and the torque due to the fake force.
If you put the engine in the front of the car (where it usually is) then the center of mass moves closer to the front. This means the gravitational torque will be much larger (since r is larger). If you get the center of mass closer to the back wheel, the torque from the fake force doesn’t need to be as high to get a wheelie. Read the rest of this entry »
Thousands of motorists each day travel along the M74 motorway, to the south of Glasgow, unaware of the fascinating 1000-year history emerging from the edge of the hard shoulder.
Just opposite the Hamilton Services on the M74 in South Lanarkshire, GUARD archaeologists have discovered what could be the remains of the lost village of Cadzow. Cadzow was the name given to the community which lived on the edge of the River Clyde here in medieval times. In 1445, King James II gave his permission for the place to be renamed Hamilton and the residents were forced to move a mile or so south to the town’s current location.
The discovery was made by a GUARD Archaeology team led by GUARD Project Officer Kevin Mooney, as part of the M8 M73 M74 Motorway Improvements Project. The work was undertaken for the Scottish Roads Partnership (SRP), the company responsible for the improvements on the Central Scotland motorway network, with a construction joint venture of Ferrovial Agroman and Lagan Construction Group…(read more)
Matt Shea writes: Google image search “Edward Davenport” and you’ll see a mosaic of celebrity selfies featuring everyone from the Prince of Monaco to 50 Cent. “Welcome to the website of Edward Davenport,” the website of Edward Davenport proclaims, “one of London’s most flamboyant and best-known entrepreneurs, as well as a true English gentleman from an established British family.”
But this public persona—that of the aristocratic socialite—is Eddie’s trick. It’s how, in the past, he gained people’s trust and got what he wanted. The man behind that selfie smile—the subject of the new VICE documentary Wolf of the West End—has bankrupted business partners and made an estimated £34.5 million [$51.5 million] through fraudulent activity, according to the Serious Fraud Office (Davenport says the figure wasn’t anywhere near that much).
The 2000s were good to Eddie. After buying Sierra Leone’s London embassy—the Central London mansion, 33 Portland Place—for just £50,000 [$75,000] in 1999, he turned it into an arena for decadent sex parties, spending the next ten years entertaining celebrities and aristocracy. However, in 2011, “Fast Eddie” was convicted of engineering a multi-million pound fraud and sentenced to nearly eight years in prison, before being released in 2014 as an “act of mercy” because of ill health due to one of his kidneys failing.
So what was it like to go from a life of luxury to a South London cell? How would a serial partier cope with life between the sexless walls of Wandsworth Prison? What’s life in jail like for a wealthy white-collar criminal? I spent a fair amount of time with Eddie during the filming of Wolf of the West End, so I got back in touch to find out.
VICE: What’s your worst memory from prison?
Edward Davenport: There were occasions where there was a staff shortage or things would get canceled. So when you normally play badminton on, you know, a Saturday afternoon or something, and then suddenly it gets canceled due to staff shortages, it’s not like you’ve got a lot of other things you can arrange at short notice.
So your worst memory from being in prison was having to reschedule badminton?
[Laughs] I’ve been raided in the middle of the night before.
Why did they raid you?
I think they were looking for illegal contraband items.
What about, like, the solitary nature of it—the boredom and the lack of intimate company. Did that not get to you?
Well, it was a bit like being a virgin again when I got out. I think I had plenty of women before I went in. I mean, maybe if you’ve been into prison and you haven’t done anything before with your life, but I had a bloody busy 45 years where I had had, you know, I suppose you could say, more than anyone could ever dream of and ever want. I had been out most nights—I’d done everything, you know.
[Read the full story here, at VICE]
The staff are almost up to the standards of politeness and friendliness and professional-ness as hotels. They call you by your name, you know.
OK, but there must have been some bad bits about prison.
Well, having a kidney transplant wasn’t exactly ideal. This is supposed to be a very civilized country, a very sophisticated country, yet here I am for a white-collar crime being taken to do dialysis and, during the whole of the dialysis, left in handcuffs
The kidney story does sound quite bad, but what about the rest of it? I mean, prison can really get to some people. Are you telling me you experienced none of that?
I’ve seen none of that. I think you might have been doing articles on prisons in different countries.
OK. In that case, what was good about prison?
Well, I became quite good at badminton. There wasn’t much else there except playing badminton that was quite good.
Is the rumor true that you used to somehow get the prison guards to give you lobster for dinner?
Well, of course I’d have my own food, yeah. Read the rest of this entry »
Image © The Beekeeper by Dan Des Eynon
| The Directory of Illustration and the Association of Illustrators (AOI) bring you the World Illustration Awards 2016 – a truly global competition that honors the most creative and inspiring commercial illustration from around the world.
Work entered by February 8 will be reviewed by a jury of distinguished international industry professionals. The competition shortlist reflects exceptional work by illustrators currently making an outstanding contribution to visual culture and is published in full on theaoi.com, which receives over 100,000 hits per month, many of these from commissioners looking for the perfect candidate for their next job.
|
Victor Ferreira reports: Ehsan Abdulaziz, 46 was accused of raping the woman as she slept on his sofa after bringing her and her 24-year-old friend home from a London nightclub, the Telegraph reports.
The woman was with her friend, who was known to Abdulaziz, at the Cirque le Soir nightclub on Aug. 7, 2014. After inviting both to join him at his CA$2,000-a-night table, the millionaire brought the two women back to his home.
The court heard Abdulaziz gave the two women vodka to drink before leading the 24-year-old woman to another room to have sex. When the 18-year-old awoke the next morning, she told the court Abdulaziz was on top of her and raping her. Read the rest of this entry »
Candace Taylor reports: The former Andy Warhol estate in Montauk—a collection of white-shingled cottages overlooking the ocean—has sold for $50 million, believed to be a record for the former fishing village.
Andy Warhol bought the estate in the 1970s.Photo: Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
The buyer of the roughly 5.7-acre oceanfront compound, called “Eothen,” was Adam Lindemann, founder of the gallery Venus Over Manhattan. The property had been listed together with a 24-acre horse farm for $85 million, but Mr. Lindemann wasn’t interested in the horse farm, and it is still available, said Paul Brennan of Douglas Elliman Real Estate, who listed the property with Sotheby’s International Realty. The seller was J.Crew CEO Millard “Mickey” Drexler, who bought the property for $27.5 million in 2007, according to public records.
The deal closed Monday, according to Mr. Brennan, who said the property is the most expensive home ever to sell in Montauk.
A few weeks ago, Mr. Lindemann put another oceanfront Montauk home he owns on the market for $29.5 million, according to Rylan Jacka of Sotheby’s, who is listing the property with Compass. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lovejoy reports: The British government is considering a proposal to give iPads to prison inmates so that they can continue their education when confined to their cells, and also keep in touch with family members via FaceTime and Skype.
The Telegraph reports that the recommendation was made by an adviser to the Ministry of Justice, and is being considered by Justice Minister Michael Gove. A spokesman said that the government wanted to improve educational opportunities so that prisoners were less likely to re-offend following their release.
There does appear to be some support for the idea…
The plan is being considered by Dame Sally Coates, a former headteacher who is conducting a review of education in prisons for Mr Gove….(read more)
Source: 9to5Mac
John Broman writes: Eyad Ismoil is one of the half-dozen men convicted for carrying out the World Trade Center bombings in 1993. Born in Kuwait to a Palestinian father and Jordanian mother, he was sentenced to 240 years in prison for driving a rental van packed with a bomb into a garage, killing six and injuring about 1000 more. (During his trial, he maintained that he was innocent and did not know what was inside the truck.) But 20 years after his arrest and burial deep inside the dungeons of the ADX Super Max facility in Colorado, Ismoil was moved to the general population here in West Virginia at USP Hazelton, the high-security federal prison where I reside.
Ismoil is my coworker in one of the resource centers on the compound that gives inmates an opportunity to break free from the gambling, drugs, and violence that makes up a monotonous prison life. I find him to be an extremely intelligent and humble man; for someone who’s supposed to “hate the infidels,” he shows no signs of loathing towards the many prisoners and staff who openly despise him.
Still, Ismoil’s ethnicity and the nature of his crime make him a target. Every horrific event that pops up on the news increases the disdain for him even more, but after talking with the guy, I found myself less than shocked at the eruption of radical Islamic terrorism over the past two decades. Indeed, when I first asked Ismoil about ISIS after the Paris attacks, he asked me one question back: “Why do you think they did it?”
I responded with the only thing I knew: “They hate us.”
He smiled and rolled his eyes, as if to say I knew nothing. So it was that an unlikely acquaintanceship between a hippie bank robber from Pittsburgh and a convicted terrorist from the Middle East was born.
[Read the full text here, at VICE]
Recently I sat down at a table with the thin, bearded 44-year-old Muslim, to get his views on the Islamic State, the mass shooting in San Bernardino, and other tragedies like the Planned Parenthood attack in Colorado. He said that to resolve the conflicts between extremists in the Middle East and the West, it was important to talk “human to human,” but he also made it clear that he empathizes at least somewhat with the Islamic State. Unsurprisingly, many of his views would be considered appalling to the vast majority of Americans, but our conversation gave me a window into the worldview of people who think the US is to blame for terrorism.
VICE: As an Islamic terrorist from an earlier generation, what’s your sense of who the Islamic State’s members are and where they came from?
Eyad Ismoil: ISIS is not jihadists recruited from all over to fight. They are the Sunni Muslims that have lived through 25 years of wars, torture, and rapes. They are the Iraqi and Syrian people that have suffered from unjust wars started by the US government. And when the US government [mostly pulled out of] Iraq in 2010, the Shia and Maliki government started killing the Sunni day and night under the watch of the Americans.
The US response was, “This is an internal problem. We don’t want to interfere with their business.” The show Rise of ISIS showed this, even though they tried to spin it like ISIS are aliens from another planet trying to take advantage of the massacres that the Shia—the government of Iraq—is doing to the Sunni and to get people to pledge.
But the fact that every Arab and Muslim knows is [that] ISIS is the native people of Iraq and Syria. That’s why the head of ISIS is Abu Bakr Baghdadi. He was a prisoner in an American prison in Iraq during the occupation for about four years and is known to be a scholar from the prophet’s family. They are a very big family in Iraq. That’s why [many] of the Sunni pledge to him.
You don’t have to recruit people for ISIS. They’re Muslims from all over the world that have seen an injustice after 25 years and want to help their brothers. What you have to understand is the Iraqi people are the most stubborn of the Muslim world. They won’t accept occupation or humiliation.
Day after day, all these things add up ’til the volcano erupts, and that is what’s happening in Iraq and Syria under the name ISIS.
Were you surprised by the Islamic State attack in Paris?
People over in America ask why ISIS did this. [But] people in the Middle East ask, “Why is the US doing this to us?” Put yourself in their shoes—France is dropping bombs for a year in Iraq and [more recently] Syria, destroying everything, women, children, buildings… A bomb doesn’t discriminate between ISIS or women and children—it just destroys. Read the rest of this entry »
Model wearing a shoulder baring short black ball gown of silk paper taffeta with a large pink bow at one shoulder and an asymmetrical hooped skirt, made to order at Henri Bendel; pictured in front of a Jackson Pollock painting at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Photo Cecil Beaton
Here is a look at some past notable extremist attacks in Western Europe:
• Jan. 7, 2015: A gun assault on the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo kills 12 people. Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was revenge for Charlie Hebdo’s depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.
• May 24, 2014: Four people are killed at the Jewish Museum in Brussels by an intruder armed with a Kalashnikov. The accused is a former French fighter linked to the Islamic State group in Syria.
• May 22, 2013: Two al-Qaida-inspired extremists run down British soldier Lee Rigby in a London street, then stab and hack him to death.
• March 2012: A gunman claiming links to al-Qaida kills three Jewish schoolchildren, a rabbi and three paratroopers in Toulouse, southern France.
• July 22, 2011: Anders Behring Breivik plants a bomb in Oslo then attacks a youth camp on Norway’s Utoya island, killing 77 people, many of them teenagers.
• Nov. 2, 2011: Offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris are firebombed after the satirical magazine runs a cover featuring a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad. No one is injured.
• July 7, 2005: 52 commuters are killed when four al-Qaida-inspired suicide bombers blow themselves up on three London subway trains and a bus.
• March 11, 2004: Bombs on rush-hour trains kill 191 at Madrid’s Atocha station in Europe’s worst Islamic terrorist attack.
• Aug. 15, 1998: A car bomb planted by an Irish Republican Army splinter group kills 29 people in the town of Omagh, the deadliest single bombing of Northern Ireland’s four-decade-long conflict.
• July 25, 1995: A bomb at the Saint-Michel subway station in Paris kills eight people and injures about 150. It was one of a series of bombings claimed by Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group.
Source: The Japan Times
Two nude women dance on stage with a ‘robot’ in a show at London Casino, 1937 (General Photographic Agency, Getty)
DOUBLE INDEMNITY
It’s murder and love at first sight! Smitten insurance man Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) plots the perfect murder with femme fatale client Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck). The plan? Stage her husband’s death to collect double indemnity on his life insurance, and then abscond with the loot. But the lethal duo must first get past a crafty claims inspector who senses something isn’t kosher. That’s the cold-blooded setup in Billy Wilder’s superb film noir. New DCP Restoration courtesy of Universal Pictures.
Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray star in this gripping film noir from Academy Award-winning director Billy Wilder. A calculating wife encourages her wealthy husband to sign a double indemnity policy proposed by smitten insurance agent Walter Neff. As the would-be lovers plot the unsuspecting husband’s murder, they are pursued by a suspicious claims manager (Edward G. Robinson). It’s a race against time to get away with the perfect crime in this heart-racing Academy Award-nominated masterpiece.
The Butcher's China News Bureau
Free Expression • Humanism • Culture • Politics • Human Rights • Science
Bringing you yesterday's news from Japan and Asia, today.
Ramblings of the Cinema
もっとメディア
The pen is mightier than the sword ...unless someone is trying to stab you with a sword. Then, it's the sword ...definitely the sword.
Born Free
NAVIGATING THIS MESS
Skagit County, WA
"An age is called dark not because the light fails to shine but because people refuse to see"
Calling out media myths
News Revived
Mildly irreverent thoughts on sex, higher education, media, and my life. Did I say irreverent? I meant irrelevant.
We’re just inviting you to take a timeout into the rhythmic ambiance of our breakfast, brunch and/or coffee selections. We are happy whenever you stop by.
stories we were told
Catholicism without compromise
So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....
The Webner Family's Blog
pundit from another planet 