It will be announced that hacked emails were used to blackmail and extort Chief Justice Roberts. … Read More
China astronauts dock space lab
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Forty-eight hours after lift off from the Gobi desert, three Chinese astronauts have successfully docked the Tiangong-1 space lab.
Chinese media reports that it is the latest step towards the development of the country’s own space station.
The astronauts plan on spending two weeks in the lab making it China’s longest manned space mission.
The docking was fully automated, though manually docking tests will be carried out during their stay.
The mission is the latest show of China’s ambitions to breach the final frontier, space. Though they have come a long way in recent years they still lag behind Russia and the US in the space race. They aim to send a man to the moon, but not before 2020.
Wang Yaping, China’s second woman in space, will present a lecture to Chinese schoolchildren from the station.
More about: China, Space exploration, Space mission
Copyright © 2013 euronews
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Kill shot? Man linked to Tsarnaev took FBI bullet to top of head (PHOTOS)
“I can show you the photos taken after the killing of my son. I have 16 photographs. I just would like to say that looking at these photos is like being in a movie. I only saw things like that in movies: shooting a person, and then the kill shot. Six shots in the body, one of them in the head,” Abdulbaki Todashev said at the press conference at RIA Novosti news agency in the Russian capital. He explained that the photos were taken by friends of his son in the US, to whom the FBI handed the body. “I want justice and I want an investigation to be carried out, I want these people [the FBI agents] to be put on trial in accordance with US law. They are not FBI officers, they are bandits. I cannot call them otherwise, they must be put on trial,” he said. Ibragim had been questioned twice by the FBI in connection with the Boston bombings, but not about the murder in which he was allegedly suspected, his father said. The 2011 triple murder in Massachusetts, in which the Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was also implicated, was reportedly the subject of the third and final FBI interrogation of Ibragim Todashev. His friend Khusen Taramov told the father that Ibragim had refused to come in for questioning on May 22, and instead asked the FBI agents to come and question him at home. “Should something happen to me, call my parents,” Taramov quoted the last thing he heard from his friend. On the day of Ibragim’s death, Taramov was questioned by the FBI separately on the street, and was refused entry back into his friend’s house, Todashev’s father claimed. He was “sent off” to wait in a nearby café on the grounds that Todashev was still being questioned and that “the interrogation would take a long time.” After some eight hours passed since the start of interrogation and his Todashev’s phone still was not answering, Taramov returned, only to find the street cordoned off with police cars and an ambulance. “They tortured a man for eight hours with no attorney, no witnesses, nobody. We can only guess what was going on there, until there is an official investigation,” Abdulbaki Todashev said. Referring to the Boston bombings, Todashev said his son believed it was a “set-up.” But Ibragim never sympathized with radical or terrorist ideas, and was not a follower of a radical Islam, he added. Also, Ibragim was never a close friend of Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev – he and Tamerlan only “went boxing at the same gym” and “exchanged phone numbers,” the father said. So far, Todashev has received “no official explanation” of his son’s death from the US side. He said he was only told there is an ongoing investigation “inside the FBI.” Todashev called the earlier claims that Ibragim was shot attempting to attack an FBI agent “absurd,” saying four or five police and FBI officers could have easily handled such an attack without needing to kill his son. “Maybe my son knew something, some information the police did not want to be made public. Maybe they wanted to silence my son,” Todashev’s father said. Abdulbaki Todashev said his main aim now is to go to the US and get his son’s body. “My brother and I, we went to the American embassy today. We both want to fly there, we’ve applied for a visa,” he explained. ‘Indications of extrajudicial killing’ Todashev’s killing “shows signs of international human rights violations,” and “indications of an extrajudicial killing,” war correspondent, political analyst, and member of the Presidential Council of Human Rights Maksim Shevchenko, said at the RIA conference. It looks like a “cold-blooded murder,” he claimed. Ibragim Todashev was killed just two days before he was due to fly back home to Russia, Shevchenko said as he pointed to a “striking chain of coincidences” in the US. Two “key witnesses” of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s arrest have also died recently, Shevchenko said, referring to the “accidental” death of members of the FBI’s elite counterterrorism unit, who fell a “significant distance” from a helicopter last Thursday. Lawyer Zaurbek Sadakhanov of the Moscow Interterritorial Bar Association said he fully believes this is a case of an extrajudicial execution. Sadakhanov questioned why international human rights organizations, as well as Russian rights activists, have ignored the shooting. He also urged Todashev’s friend Khusen Harlamov to return to Russia as “being a witness in the US is not safe.” This is not the first time experts have questioned whether the FBI acted lawfully when shooting at Ibragim Todashev after he allegedly attacked an officer, with what some called “a use of excessive force.” But a recent report revealed Todashev was completely unarmed when the FBI agent opened fire, raising questions over why lethal force was deemed necessary to subdue the strongly outnumbered man. Investigative journalist and former Los Angeles police officer, Mike Ruppert offered his professional opinion to RT, finding two major issues with the official story (given that he himself had been in a similar predicament as an officer years before the incident). Firstly, the standard operating procedures were out the window; and secondly, the FBI itself appears to have set the situation up. “There’s an escalation-of-force scale which was obviously not followed in this case”, he said, referring to the officers’ decision to draw firearms. “But my second huge problem with the law enforcement story is he (Todashev) was supposed to be signing a confession to a triple murder…I don’t care even if you are the FBI – which doesn’t have a good reputation – you have somebody who’s about to sign a confession, you have him in a jail house, in a secure setting, and the police officers around him are not armed because he’s in a secure setting. For the FBI, this was, at best, horribly mishandled. But it sounds to me very much like they went there with the intent to provoke him and stage a shooting,” Ruppert went on, recounting a similar shooting from decades ago. And the implication of this, in Ruppert’s words, is that America is landing itself in a Stalinist, or Nazi, system of silencing people. “If we go back to [those] days, these are executions… dead men tell no tales… and I will speak as an American citizen. My country is behaving like a totalitarian state run amok.” … Read More
Excessive Use of Force or Justified Murder? – Police Shoot and Kill 72 Year Old Grandfather
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The lone arrangers: Spain deflects austerity attention on ‘jihadis’
The headline on the cover of the extremely right-wing Spanish daily La Razon was straight from the Murdoch press; The ‘lone wolves’ detained in Spain contacted the bloodiest AQIM group – as in Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. And the caption for the photo splashed on the cover, pulled from a Facebook page, dealt the killer blow. The jihadi flag in front of the Pilar in Zaragoza: Nou Mediouni, one of the arrested (image), praised the “heroes” of Islam in his Facebook page.I had just landed in Barcelona – on my way to Zaragoza – coming from London and countless hours plunged into the mysteries surrounding the Boston bombing. At the airport, this is my very first image of Spain; enough to imprint that the former Bush administration-coined Global War on Terror (GWOT) has just been rebranded The Age of the Lone Wolf.So what was really going on in Zaragoza? Was global jihad about to take over that Catholic fortress, the Pilar, along with its adoration of the Blessed Virgin Mary since the dawn of Christianity in Spain?Anatomy of a cyber-jihadiIt turned out that the local ‘jihadi’ is Nou Mediouni, 23, an Algerian student of information technology. He is accused of being a member of an AQIM cell in Spain. Evidence; mostly messages found in a forum about AQIM where he wrote about the Boston bombing that “what you feel now is what children in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq feel.”Like clockwork, only one hour after Mediouni was arrested – alongside one Hassan El Jaaouani, 52, Moroccan, arrested in Murcia, whose profile reads like a smuggler of cheap goods – Spain’s Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez classified both as “lone wolves” and compared them with the Chechen Tsarnaev brothers, accused of being the perpetrators of the Boston bombing.The Spanish judiciary, arguably hinting that Fernandez was reading too much US think tank nonsense, counter-attacked, insisting there was no conclusive proof to accuse either of being AQIM jihadis.It soon became clear that neither Mediouni nor Jaaouni had anything lone wolf about them – since certified lone wolves live in isolation (no family) and make sure they do not follow Islam’s precepts. There are very few “pure” lone wolves able to pick a target, buy the materials, fabricate a bomb and successfully detonate it, operating by themselves without taking orders from any group.Spanish police took no time to leak to mainstream media that Mediouni had extensive contacts with one El Youbi, a big shot at the katiba – combat unit – of infamous one-eyed jihadi Mokhtar Belmokhtar (who may or may not have been killed in Mali). Mediouni ‘may’ have been – digitally – recruited by a Moroccan Islamist currently in jail. And he ‘may’ have received instructions to travel to an AQIM jihadist training camp in northern Mali.The Interior Ministry itself characterized Mediouni as an “aspiring martyr” – a dangerous cyber-jihadi killing machine that was mostly an active member of the ‘Muslims in Spain’ Facebook page, from which that incriminating photo was taken. Yet the page, founded in September 2012, was mostly concerned about…Syria.The irony of NATO member Spain accusing a sympathizer of NATO-supported Syrian ‘rebels’ is too precious for words.Anyway, Omar Tambedou, the Senegalese imam of the mosque attended by Mediouni, in the popular Zaragoza neighborhood of Las Fuentes, dismissed it all: “He is a Muslim brother and I know him as a student, a normal kid. He came to pray at the mosque. He is a good person.”As for Mediouni’s father – who’s been in Spain for 14 years – he insisted, “Everything is a lie. This is not a democratic country. I thought we were well here, but it turns out we’re worse than in my own country.” He denies his son went to the Maghreb; “He went to Turkey on a package trip, didn’t even go to Syria.” But it was up to one of Mediouni’s uncles to provide the killer argument; “You’re not a terrorist if you are against the invasion of Iraq. Millions of Spaniards protested in the streets.”In the end, the judiciary took no chances, sending Mediouni to prison, accused of being integrated to a terrorist organization; as for petty thief Jaaouni, he’s free but cannot leave Spain and has to report to police every 2 weeks.Mass profiling aheadAll this had been going on for no less than over a year – with the French and the Moroccans collaborating with the Spaniards.So why now? The pretext for Mediouni’s arrest was of course Boston; to forcefully imprint on public opinion, across Western Europe, the ‘lone wolf’ narrative. EU counter-terrorism agencies are convinced Spain – especially in the southeast, in Alicante and Murcia – is the preferred transit point for jihadis coming from northern Africa to set up dormant cells across Europe.Now everyone still able to buy tapas and sangria knows that AQIM has a press office called Al Andalus – a reference to the Spanish territories once ruled by Islam; and that AQIM (and not the troika) is the utmost threat to the Spanish nation, as they’re obsessed on founding a Global Caliphate.Not by accident, in the same week of the Boston bombing – something already planned way in advance – anti-terrorist units in all EU member countries played out the possibility of simultaneous terror attacks in nine countries, Spain included. For instance, in Spain there was a simulated attack against a bus, in Austria against a school, in Ireland against an electricity plant, in Sweden against a ferry and in Belgium against a high-speed train. The exercise – the most ‘complex’ in the EU so far – was code-named Common Challenge.To divert attention from the absolute devastation of the Spanish dream, the new Lone Wolf paranoia works wonders. This past week the official unemployment rate reached a staggering 27.1 per cent, affecting 6,202,700 people (and their families). In affluent Catalonia, unemployment is at 24.53 per cent, but in some regions such as Andalusia it’s a horrid 36.87 per cent. For those under 25, unemployment reached an astonishing 57.2 per cent (and Italy is catching up fast, already at 38.4 per cent).One quarter of Spain’s population is now firmly installed at the gates of poverty. Virtually half of the population – between the unemployed and pensioners – is not productive. And the current, paralyzed right- wing government is already flirting with a drastic reform of the pension system – imposed by Brussels. Basically, people over 55 will have to work many more years in order to retire with some dignity.Doom and gloom is the norm. France’s unemployment is at 10.6 per cent, Portugal’s at 17 per cent and Greece’s at 27.2 per cent. The eurozone’s is at 12 per cent. Industrial production in Italy has fallen by 25 per cent since 2008. The number of Spanish firms filing for bankruptcy is 45 per cent higher than in 2012.Jihad against Brussels and the troika? No chance. The name of the game – and target – now is second-generation lone wolves. Pay attention to the blitzkrieg by European elites pressing the idea that social integration of children of Muslim immigrants still remains compatible with jihadi radicalization. The next step is to profile them all. They should start thinking about moving to Siberia – where real lone wolves of the non-jihadi kind freely roam. … Read More
