Bin Laden’s brother killed in Madagascar

H/T to Civioc of the 910 Group

Abu Sayyaf godfather killed in Africa
(BangkokPost.com, dpa)

Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Jamal Khalifa, has been killed in Madagascar, al-Arabiya Arabic news network reported Wednesday from Cairo.

Khalifa is known as the godfather of the Abu Sayyaf, because he helped to arrange the establishment of the Philippines terrorist group in the early 1990s.

He always maintained evidence against him was fabricated.

Khlaifa, a Saudi businessman, did not have any ties with the al- Qaeda terrorist network, his brother Malek said when contacted by al-Aarabiya by telephone.

But he arrived in the Philippines in 1991, and by 1993 was listed at immigration as “financier of terrorists.”

He referred to himself as “an Arab philanthropist”. He vowed several times to return to the Philippines to clear his name, but of course never did.

He was believed to be behind a number of front “charties” used to launder money to finance the early days of the Philippines terrorist arm of al-Qaeda – some believed to be from bin Laden.

No further details were immediately available on his death.

A Cult was destroyed in Iraq

The Heaven’s Army was crushed the other day by the Iraqi Army and US troops supporting them.  This was an obscure cult that brings back memories of the Branch Davidians.  They wanted to hasten the coming of the 12th Iman (Mahdi). 

Cult had dug in for massive battle

The group, well armed and well organized, was decimated by Iraqi forces aided by U.S. air power, authorities say.

By Saad Fakhrildeen and Borzou Daragahi, Special to The Times
January 31, 2007

ZERGHA, IRAQ — The dead wore the same footwear, imitation leather dress shoes with Velcro flaps. Their mangled bodies filled the trenches. Bags of ammunition, with the names of fighters written on them, sat by their sides.

A pulpit made of bamboo stood next to a grassy field, a newspaper filled with rambling and enigmatic religious writing strewn nearby.

An unauthorized hourlong walk Tuesday through the bombed compound of a religious cult called Heaven’s Army revealed provocative clues about the group, which was decimated Sunday in a 24-hour U.S. and Iraqi offensive that authorities say left 263 alleged members dead and 210 injured. Nearly 400 members were arrested, an Iraqi defense official said.

Iraqi officials said the obscure messianic group was poised to launch an attack on Shiite clergy and holy sites in Najaf in the belief that it would hasten the dawn of a new age. Iraqi officials said they got wind of the plan and attempted to investigate but were attacked by the group’s gunmen in a battle that also killed five Iraqi troops and two U.S. soldiers, who died when their helicopter crashed.

The bulk of the damage to the group’s base was inflicted by U.S. airstrikes, which turned the tide of a fierce ground battle that pitted the fighters against Iraqi troops backed by U.S. forces.

Iraqi officials have released scant new details about the composition and aims of the group. Mohammed Askari, a spokesman for the Defense Ministry, said foreign Arabs were among those slain and captured. He declined to provide more than basic casualty figures.

But the camp itself, amid lush groves of eucalyptus and palm trees, offered a trove of details about the members of Heaven’s Army.

They had plenty of food. Each fighter had his own supply of chocolate and biscuits. They were prepared: A 6-foot dirt berm and an equally deep trench surrounded the 50-acre compound.

They were well organized. Living in at least 30 concrete-block buildings, all the fighters had identification badges. The group published its own books and a newspaper. The members apparently were enamored with their leader, a charismatic man in his 30s named Dhyaa Abdul-Zahra, whose likeness adorned the newspaper.

And they were well armed and ready for battle. High-powered machine guns, antiaircraft rockets, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and late-model pickup trucks with mounted guns were scattered around the eight farms that make up the compound, about 10 miles north of Najaf.

A wooden platform on a tree served as a sniper’s perch. The would-be shooter lay dead on the ground by the tree trunk.

"Without the bombings of the Americans we would have remained for two weeks unable to penetrate," said an Iraqi soldier, who led a Times correspondent and other Iraqi journalists through the compound.

None of the fighters wore uniforms. They wrapped black-checkered scarves around their necks and wore running suits or flowing dishdasha robes. Their bodies were contorted and burned from the bombing campaign. A few were blown to pieces. The fighters included young boys as well as middle-aged men. Some apparently held ordinary day jobs — one slain fighter, Ahmad Mohsen Kadhem, 31, had an identification card in his wallet showing he was authorized to carry weapons as a guard for a nearby company, the government-owned State Organization for Cereals.

Arabic readers described the articles in the group’s eight-page newspaper, the Statement, as little more than religiously inflected gibberish, with made-up words and references to "manifestations and sightings" of Imam Mahdi, the last in a line of Shiite Muslim saints.

A book found at the complex, called "Heaven’s Judge," also bearing the picture of Abdul-Zahra, dismisses the teaching of Shiite Muslims as well as Sunnis. "The Shiites are misled," says the book, which rebuffs central tenets of Shiite theology.

"The house of the prophet Muhammad has adopted a path using signs to point to heavenly facts, a method for considering the order of secrets," it adds, in statements that perplexed both Shiites and Sunnis who read it.

*

---

daragahi@latimes.com

Special correspondent Fakhrildeen reported from Zergha and Times staff writer Daragahi from Baghdad.

LA Times

The Flying McCoys

The Flying McCoys

Is that Liddy???

It is almost time for Spring Training

Spring Training is right around the corner and I wanted to give all of those Cubs fans a good gift for this upcoming season.

I think the whole of Canada and US should have these rules for immigrants.

If you immigrate to a country or a paticular community, you should obey the laws and customs of that country  or community.  So when a Muslim or a  Siek immigrates o the US or Canada, they should follow the local customs and laws.  But too many have given in to the multicutural BS that is eating away at Western Civilization.  IN the US and Canada, women are free to do what they want and are not owned by their male family memebers.   In North America, men and women are not segregated in most places, with a few exceptions (I.E. Country Clubs and other male only clubs).  But the majority of society is integrated.  So when Muslims come over here and demand that they shoulod have segregated swimming pools or swimming times, that goes against all of our own beliefs.  Why should we cave into thier demands, they came here.  I am getting sick and tired of our politicioners bending over backwards to accomodate immigrantss with their demands.  This is our country and the immagrants came here to live. 

Well a town in French Canada has said no to the intimidation and has posted "norms" to people who want to immigrate to their town.  Amazing people of French heritage are not surrndering.

HEROUXVILLE’S ‘NORMS’

A selection of dos and don’ts from the five-page declaration of norms by the Quebec town of Herouxville.

- Don’t stone or burn women to death.

- Don’t throw acid in women’s faces.

- Don’t carry weapons — ceremonial or otherwise — to school.

- Women are allowed to drive, dance, own property, choose what they want to wear, sign cheques and make decisions on their own.

- People aren’t segregated by sex in swimming pools.

- Female police officers can arrest and question men.

- Men can attend prenatal classes with their spouses.

- Adults can drink alcohol.

- Christmas carols are sung in schools.

Canada.com

A Centrist???

Is Barak Obama a centrist?    Well, if you listen to him speak you would think so.  But if you go into his voting record, he is very liberal.  Even more liberal than Hillary.  But the MSM and their cohorts will try and keep that under raps.  “How you come across is more important than how you vote,” Cook said. “If voters perceive you as moderate, then your voting record isn’t terribly relevant. Perception is more important than reality.” 

Perception vs. reality

Bill Sammon, The Examiner
Read more by Bill Sammon
Jan 31, 2007 3:00 AM

WASHINGTON – Although he frequently makes a point of finding something charitable to say about his opponents’ arguments, Sen. Barack Obama almost always ends up voting liberal.

“The arguments of liberals are more often grounded in reason and fact,” the Illinois Democrat wrote in “The Audacity of Hope,” a memoir published last year. “Much of what I absorbed from the sixties was filtered through my mother, who to the end of her life would proudly proclaim herself an unreconstructed liberal.”

Obama has a 95 percent liberal rating from Americans for Democratic Reform, a liberal advocacy group that ranks all members of Congress. Yet he is often portrayed as a centrist.

“His record is liberal, and his rhetoric is moderate,” explained Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

For example, Obama goes out of his way to voice approval of at least some aspects of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

“At times, in arguments with some of my friends on the left, I would find myself in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan’s worldview,” he wrote in “Audacity.” “When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, I had to give the old man his due, even if I never gave him my vote.”

But in summing up Reagan, Obama concluded that the former president’s “clarity about communism seemed matched by his blindness regarding other sources of misery in the world.”

By pointing out the merits of both sides of an argument, Obama often sounds statesmanlike, even if he almost never ends up siding with conservatives. This dichotomy can be seen in Obama’s analysis of President Bush’s foreign policy.

“I agree with George W. Bush when in his second inaugural address he proclaimed a universal desire to be free,” Obama wrote. “But there are few examples in history in which the freedom men and women crave is delivered through outside intervention.”– The Examiner

Jan 31

1606 : The death of Guy Fawkes

At Westminster in London, Guy Fawkes, a chief conspirator in the plot to blow up the British Parliament building, jumps to his death moments before his execution for treason.

On the eve of a general parliamentary session scheduled for November 5, 1605, Sir Thomas Knyvet, a justice of the peace, found Guy Fawkes lurking in a cellar of the Parliament building. Fawkes was detained and the premises thoroughly searched. Nearly two tons of gunpowder were found hidden within the cellar. In his interrogation, Fawkes revealed that he was a participant in an English Catholic conspiracy organized by Robert Catesby to annihilate England’s entire Protestant government, including King James I. The king was to have attended Parliament on November 5.

Over the next few months, English authorities killed or captured all of the conspirators in the "Gunpowder Plot" but also arrested, tortured, or killed dozens of innocent English Catholics. After a brief trial, Guy Fawkes was sentenced, along with the other surviving chief conspirators, to be hanged, drawn, and quartered in London. On January 30, 1606, the gruesome public executions began in London, and on January 31 Fawkes was called to meet his fate. While climbing to the hanging platform, however, he jumped from the ladder and broke his neck, dying instantly.

In remembrance of the Gunpowder Plot, Guy Fawkes Day is celebrated across Great Britain every year on the fifth of November. As dusk falls in the evening, villagers and city dwellers across Britain light bonfires, set off fireworks, and burn an effigy of Guy Fawkes, celebrating his failure to blow up Parliament and James I.

History Channel

The DUmmies are in morning today.

Glenn McCoy

Glenn McCoy

So you think American re-enactors are daft?

***Update at bottom

BBC has great photos of an annual event re-enacting Viking life in the Shetland Islands of Great Britain in days of yore.

Up Helly Aa               Courtesy of the BBC on-line http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/6313537.stm

Up Helly Aa, Britain’s biggest fire festival and torchlight procession, is held in Lerwick, Shetland, to celebrate the area’s Norse heritage.

The Jarl Squad marches through the streets of Lerwick for Up Helly Aa.

This Viking long ship made a very impressive sight for spectators.

Orkney and Shetland MP Alistair Carmichael was hardly recognisable at the event.

After dark the Jarl Squad paraded through the town’s streets to the burning site.

The festival sees around 900 costumed ‘guizers’ taking part.

A Viking longship is dragged through the town, then at a designated point the torches are thrown into the ship and onlookers watch as it burns.

According to the Fortean Times:   Nostalgia for the good old days of Vikingdom is raging across Shetland and as the parade gets into full swing, the brass band strikes up, and 900 guisers belt out the words to "The Norseman’s Home":

"Let us ne’er forget the race

Who bravely fought and died

Who never filled a craven’s grave

But ruled the foaming tide…

Let us all in harmony

Give honour to the brave

The noble, hardy northern men

Who ruled the stormy wave."    source:  http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/206_shetland1.shtml

The Fortean Times also says that the folks in the Shetland Islands were Viking a lot longer than they were Scottish.  In fact, "[t]he Shetlanders only joined the Scottish Crown in 1471, when the King of Norway wasn’t able to come up with the cash for Margaret of Norway’s dowry and the Scots annexed the islands as compensation."   

The author recounts a conversation with "my next-door neighbour in my B&B: Iain Raymond Mac Airt Tingstall, from Perthshire, who claims perhaps controversially to be the rightful prince and king of all the Picts, Scots and Islanders. According to his supposed Highness, when the King of Norway "sold the Good People of Shetland’s lives and land into perpetual bondage and enslavement", he did so unlawfully. Thankfully, 534 years later, Iain has come to release them, choosing Up Helly Aa as the night when he will distribute a handwritten – and subsequently photocopied – notice freeing these Good People from their mortgages, and returning them to their rightful kingdom of Norway."
   

Here’s more info about the annual event which has been going on for a long, long time and formally organized to prevent the usual chaos about 100 + years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_Helly-Aa

http://www.visitshetland.com/events/up-helly-aa-event/

Julia

****Update

I would hate to be the student of this professor.   He teaches Medievel Literature at Troy University.  And one of his hobbies is torturing students. 

Stix

Village found near StonehengeRemains of village found near Stonehenge

Remains of village found near Stonehenge

Eight small wooden houses unearthed in village two miles away

This National Geographic photo shows archaeologists as they work at Neolithic-floor level within Durrington Walls, part of the Stonehenge World Heritage site. In the foreground is the faint outline of a small, square house; the house’s hearth stands in the center.
View related photos
Adam Stanford / National Geographic via AFP-Gett

WASHINGTON – Archaeologists have uncovered what may have been a village for workers or festival-goers near the mysterious stone circle Stonehenge in England.

The village was located at Durrington Walls, about two miles from Stonehenge, and is also the location of a wooden version of the stone circle.

Eight houses have been excavated and the researchers believe there were at least 25 of them, archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson said Tuesday at a briefing held by the National Geographic Society.

The village was carbon dated to about 2600 B.C., about the same time Stonehenge was built. The Great Pyramid in Egypt was built at about the same time, said Parker Pearson of Sheffield University.  –MSNBC.com