The reason I am not saying more about it, is because I’ve said my peace about it before.
Category: World News
Uncle Jay Explains – Feb. 9, 2009
Absolute Courage – 7 Year old boy dies trying to protect sister from Rapist
This comes via Breit Bart:
The Back Story via Russia Today:
Just over two months ago Galina lost her son and she’s still struggling to get over the shock.
Zhenya was brutally murdered by a robber, as the boy was trying to save his 12-year-old sister from being raped.
It all happened in late November, in the small military town of Noginsk-9 – a place where even small crimes are rare.
Around midday, a man rang the bell of the flat where Zhenya and his family lived.
“I asked who it was. The man said he was the postman, and he needed to give us a telegram and get a signature. So I opened the door,” recalls Zhenya’s sister Yana.
The little girl says the man held a knife to her throat, and demanded that her brother bring him all the money he could find. Zhenya did as he was told. But when the man started undressing his sister it was more than the boy could bear.
Zhenya seized a knife from the kitchen and plunged it into the man’s back. This didn’t kill the attacker, but it was enough to set Zhenya’s sister free. She ran for help. But it was too late for her brother – he was stabbed eight times.
Thirty-five-year old Sergey Kiyashko is in custody accused of the murder. Police say they have all the evidence they need to convict him.
There is indeed a special place in Heaven for young boys like this. May he rest in the Holy Peace of Christ. May the foul beast that committed this horrible crime to this young boy never see the outside of a jail cell again. 😡
Sickening Report: World Bank Destroys Albanian Village and then Covers it up
This is absolutely sickening to read. 😡
Managers at the World Bank provided false information to the agency’s board of directors about a $39 million, politically-connected European “coastal cleanup” project that led to the destruction and destitution of a powerless village in Albania in 2007 — and then spent nearly two years trying to cover it up, FOX News has learned.
Bank insiders also misled and stonewalled a panel of independent investigators commissioned by the board to investigate the scandal, according to the investigators themselves.
World Bank sources tell FOX News that the panel’s report, submitted to the 24-member board in late November, is one of the most damning independent assessments of the anti-poverty agency’s behavior in the bank’s 60-year history. The bank, the world’s largest and most influential anti-poverty institution and part of the U.N. system, is doling out $100 billion over the next three years for development projects.
For its part, once the report leaked in Albania last week, the bank announced that further disbursements of the loan for the Albanian project had been temporarily suspended on Jan. 9 “due to certain outstanding policy and operational issues.” A World Bank spokesman did not comment to FOX News by press time.
via MyFox Springfield | World Bank Spent More Than a Year Covering Up Destruction
I hope like hell, whomever was responsible for doing this, is brought to justice. The very notion that the organization like the World Bank can just come in and destroy someone’s home is disgusting. May whomever carried this out rot in the Devil’s hell.
Don’t expect our Government to say anything about this, as it is well-known that the World Bank controls much of what goes on in this country as well.
(H/T Freedom’s Phoenix)
Fire strikes Beijing Hotel Complex
Holy Moses…. This is wild…:
Via the New York Times:
A fierce fire engulfed one of the Chinese capital’s most architecturally celebrated modern buildings on Monday, the last day of festivities for the lunar new year when the city was ablaze with fireworks. By late evening the blaze was still raging and the cause remained unknown, but it seemed clear that the 34-story structure, not yet completed, had been rendered unusable. The building, a luxury hotel and cultural complex designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, is part of China Central Television’s new headquarters, an angular two-legged behemoth built to coincide with the Beijing Olympics last year.
Firefighters, their ladders only reaching up a dozen or so floors, could do little to contain the blaze, a spectacular wall of flames eerily reflected in the glass skin of the adjacent CCTV tower.
The CCTV complex was a hugely expensive trophy of the pre-Olympics building boom, the result of many billions of dollars that the ruling Communist Party had devoted to making Beijing a city of the future. The main CCTV tower appeared untouched by the fire.
The 241-room Mandarin Oriental hotel, which had been due to open this summer, was unoccupied at the time, hotel executives said.
According to Chinese television, the fire began at 8:27 p.m., although witnesses said they spotted flames as early as 7:45 p.m. Within 20 minutes, they said, the fire had spread from the lower floors to the building’s crown. Black smoke drifted across the night sky, obliterating a full moon.
The authorities blocked off a thoroughfare known as the Third Ring Road, which runs adjacent to the complex. Subway cars running underneath the site were briefly halted, stranding thousands of passengers. Frantic police officers tried to shoo away huge crowds as sirens wailed and fireworks lit up the skyline. People watching noted that the timing of the fire — coming at the end of the spring festival — was inauspicious.
While errant fireworks were suspected as a possible cause, fires of such magnitude are nonetheless highly unusual in Beijing.
Videos:
Of course, the Alex Jones crowd is trying to compare it to WTC-7. Proving that you cannot fix stupid. What happened at WTC-7 was that airlines destroyed the Twin Towers and the falling debris from the towers damaged key structural members and the resulting uncontrolled fires led to the collapse hours after the rest of the complex. Anyone who says otherwise is insulting the dead. Which is something Alex Jones is good at. 🙄
Why can’t people just accept the damned truth and be glad they even got it. Damned morons. 😡
Australian Fires Devastate
I have not blogged about this, because it really didn’t not hit close to home. However, I was over reading in the comments section at Rachel Lucas’s Blog.
It seems that Australian Conservative Blogger Tim Blair has really been covering this story big time:
Here are his postings:
FIRE LATEST
STATE RALLIES
BRIAN NAYLOR
FIRE WITHOUT END
STATE ABLAZE
It my understanding that some of the blazes were intentionally set.
Google News has much more on the fires.
The Australian Red Cross is taking donations.
Japan could serve as a lesson to the United States
Barack Obama could learn a lesson from Japan. There’s a very good article in the New York Times today, on the mistakes made by the country of Japan in the 1990’s to fix their failing economy:
The Hamada Marine Bridge soars majestically over this small fishing harbor, so much larger than the squid boats anchored below that it seems out of place.
And it is not just the bridge. Two decades of generous public works spending have showered this city of 61,000 mostly graying residents with a highway, a two-lane bypass, a university, a prison, a children’s art museum, the Sun Village Hamada sports center, a bright red welcome center, a ski resort and an aquarium featuring three ring-blowing Beluga whales.
Nor is this remote port in western Japan unusual. Japan’s rural areas have been paved over and filled in with roads, dams and other big infrastructure projects, the legacy of trillions of dollars spent to lift the economy from a severe downturn caused by the bursting of a real estate bubble in the late 1980s. During those nearly two decades, Japan accumulated the largest public debt in the developed world — totaling 180 percent of its $5.5 trillion economy — while failing to generate a convincing recovery.
Now, as the Obama administration embarks on a similar path, proposing to spend more than $820 billion to stimulate the sagging American economy, many economists are taking a fresh look at Japan’s troubled experience. While Japan is not exactly comparable to the United States — especially as a late developer with a history of heavy state investment in infrastructure — economists say it can still offer important lessons about the pitfalls, and chances for success, of a stimulus package in an advanced economy.
The Lesson to be learned here is:
“It is not enough just to hire workers to dig holes and then fill them in again,” said Toshihiro Ihori, an economics professor at the University of Tokyo. “One lesson from Japan is that public works get the best results when they create something useful for the future.
But the real lesson to be learned here is the follow and pay special close attention to what is said here:
In the end, say economists, it was not public works but an expensive cleanup of the debt-ridden banking system, combined with growing exports to China and the United States, that brought a close to Japan’s Lost Decade. This has led many to conclude that spending did little more than sink Japan deeply into debt, leaving an enormous tax burden for future generations.
Gee, is that not what Ron Paul said ALL ALONG, while he was running for President of the United States? For Ron Paul’s troubles and hard work he was slandered, maligned and marginalized by the Neo-Conservatives who hated him and the Liberal Democrats who were sacred to death of him.
I highly suggest that you read the rest of this article. The United States could learn much from this lesson that Japan had to learn. We could very well end up causing more harm than good to our economy.
Others: Glenn Thrush’s Blogs, Hot Air, A Blog For All, Cafe Hayek, Weekly Standard and QandO
Panasonic to eliminate 15,000 Jobs
Another victim of the worldwide economic collapse:
Panasonic on Wednesday said that it was shedding 15,000 jobs, the second significant layoff in Japan’s electronics industry in less than a week, and the latest example of how Japanese companies, exporters in particular, are scrambling to cut costs as demand evaporates.
Panasonic, along with Mitsubishi Motors and Mazda, also joined the rapidly lengthening list of companies to sharply revise their full-year outlooks Wednesday, with Panasonic now projecting a net loss of 380 billion yen or $4.2 billion for the year ending March 31, rather than the 30 billion yen profit it forecast on Nov. 27. Mitsubishi expects a net loss of 60 billion yen and Mazda 13 billion.
The speed of the demand downturn in recent months has taken manufacturers and economists by surprise, and forced many companies to sharply lower profit warnings made only months or even weeks ago.
I hate to sound like I am repeating myself. But this is more damage done by the Clinton Administration and the inaction of the Republican Majority of 2003. The easing of the housing loan regulations is what created all this, thus creating a economic bubble. Which has now burst. Of course, throwing money at it, will not fix it. Now, we have the tech sector taking the hit, because of the downturn in the economy. Expect more of this to come as time goes on.
India warns that Obama "is barking up the wrong Tree" when it comes to Kashmir
This might present a challenge to the new President:
India has warned US President Barack Obama that he risks “barking up the wrong tree” if he seeks to broker a settlement between Pakistan and India over the disputed territory of Kashmir.
MK Narayanan, India’s national security advisor, said that the new US administration was in danger of dredging up out of date Clinton administration-era strategies in a bid to bring about improved ties between the two nuclear armed neighbours.
“I do think that we could make President Obama understand, if he does nurse any such view, that he is barking up the wrong tree. I think Kashmir today has become one of the quieter and safer places in this part of the world,” Mr Narayanan said in an interview with CNBC TV18.
“It’s possible that at this time there are elements, perhaps in the administration who are harking back to the pre-2000 era.”
The warning comes as Richard Holbrooke, Mr Obama’s special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, prepares to come to the region for the first time in his new capacity. Mr Narayanan is close to Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, and Sonia Gandhi, the president of the ruling Congress Party.
It seems that Obama is not going to the force that rights all the wrongs that are in the world after all. This will another in a series of challenges for the new President. I wonder what he will do in response?
(H/T Drudge)
Trackposted to The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Wingless – Alastair Crooke on Gaza & Hamas – living in the twilight zone!, DragonLady’s World, Wingless – Sura 5:32 – When Killing isn’t Murder, Leaning Straight Up, Cao’s Blog, Democrat=Socialist, Conservative Cat, Nuke’s, Allie is Wired, third world county, Faultline USA, Woman Honor Thyself, Wingless – What Lead to Cast Lead, The World According to Carl, Walls of the City, Wingless – Cuba: Beautiful Country, People…Not so Beautiful System…, Rosemary’s News and Ideas, The Pink Flamingo, Wingless, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
Ouch: US Loses two major supply lines to Afghanistan
This is not good, at all:
The U.S.-led campaign against the Taliban suffered two logistical blows Tuesday as the president of Kyrgyzstan announced that he’d shut a U.S. airbase in his country and insurgents in Pakistan blew up a bridge, disrupting the main U.S. supply route into Afghanistan.
The developments were the latest reminders of the vulnerability of the long and complex transportation system on which the 60,000 U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan depend for fuel, ammunition, construction materials and a great deal more.
The announcement by Kyrgyzstan President Kurmanbek Bakiyev that he will close the Manas Air Base also gave President Barack Obama a first taste of the challenge he faces from Russia, which is trying to restore its clout in countries that were part of the former Soviet Union.
Bakiyev made his announcement in Moscow, not in his own capital, shortly after the Russian government reportedly agreed to lend Kyrgyzstan $2 billion, write off $180 million in debt and add another $150 million in aid. The timing and place of the announcement indicated the Kremlin’s involvement.
“It’s a direct challenge to the new American administration. Russia is going out of its way to close an American base,” said Pavel Felgenhauer, a Moscow-based military analyst.
via McClatchy Washington Bureau — U.S. supply routes to Afghanistan suffer two huge blows.
I tend to agree with Ed Morrissey who writes:
The problem was never in Krygyzstan. Biden predicted that world leaders would challenge Obama and his inexperience within the first few months of the adminstration, but they’ve already started to line up in the first few days. Iran launched a satellite on an ICBM to show they could go ballistic once they have nuclear weapons. North Korea reportedly has set up another ICBM for a test to threaten Seoul. Now Russia has flipped an ally in the war on terror — and all of this in the first 14 days of Obama’s presidency.
Indeed, I believe this is simply Russia trying to test Obama, to see how he will react. Also, Russia is having problems with it’s people. They are bit angry about the problems with the economy. As I so blogged about yesterday. It could very well be that Putin is attempting to save face with the citizens of Russia by trying to show a little aggression towards Obama and by proxy; America.
