Author: Mick Hartley

hich contains nine lessons in approximately 80 pages in Arabic, was published under the title “The Nuclear Bomb of Jihad and the Way to Enrich Uranium” and was presented as “a gift to the commander of the Jihad fighters, Sheikh Osama bin Laden, for the purpose of Jihad for the sake of Allah.”

…

The “Encyclopedia,” states:

“Perhaps nuclear weapons represent a technology of the 1940s. However, the Crusaders – the allies of Satan, Allah’s curse be upon them – insist upon depriving the Jihad fighters of the right to [have] these weapons. But now the Jihad fighters have acquired technological skills that enable them, with Allah’s help, to understand this [nuclear weapons] technology. Thus, they are able to make a major leap forward in producing this kind of strategic weapon, even in the kitchens of their homes.

Oh good.

Mum comes in….Ahmed, I’ve told you before, I will not have you playing around with this enriched whatever-it-is all over the kitchen table.

Um sorry Mum, I’ll just clear it away….oh shit…..

BOOM.

Half of Leeds disappears.

Private Eye have struck a rich vein of humour this week. On the cover, under the headline BUSH MISSION LATEST, there’s a photo of Bush looking out of a plane window saying “Stop the plane. God’s on that cloud over there waving at me!”

Thank God for Britain’s leading satirical magazine!! – giving us every fortnight a fresh irreverent look at (cont p94).

Wiping the tears of laughter away, we turn to the inside pages, and…..there’s more! A Just Fancy That! juxtaposes a page from the Enfield Advertiser about a crazed knifeman under the headline “GOD TOLD ME TO KILL” with the Indie front page from last Friday, “Bush: God told me to invade Iraq”. Some jokes are just so funny they need to be told over and over again in slightly different formats.

The hilarity isn’t over yet! Further on, a photo of Bush with hands clasped, DUBYA’S PRAYER TO GOD, has him saying “Give us this day our daily dead”. Dead..Bread…geddit? This may be a spoof on the Daily Mail but it’s hard to tell.

(Craig Brown’s on good form though, doing Eric Idle’s diary)

fering from microcephaly, which stunts brain growth, as some scientists have argued. It is highly unlikely that nine microcephalics would have been found without any remains of humans of normal stature. The bones’ dimensions are also wrong for a pygmy Homo sapiens.

The discoveries, by a team from the University of New England and the University of Wollongong in Australia, are published in the journal Nature.

Carl Zimmer has more details.

al missionary, a respected surgeon, Meg Ingram.

Patterson now lives near the Lanarkshire town of Lesmahagow, but still goes for long walks every day, continues to write, and recently gave a lecture at Cambridge University. His books on Tibet are being republished by the Long Riders Guild, the international association for equestrian explorers.

While Patterson has not visited Tibet since 1987, his views on the country’s fate at the hands of the Chinese are as strong as ever. “Time, millions of Chinese colonisers, and international unconcern will confirm their rape of Tibet,” he says.

locks, but it’s a story that keeps running in certain parts of “the journo-stream”, because it fits their preconceptions.

The meta-narrative is still of a Government/Establishment that bullies dissenters, manhandles Jewish refugees, and terrorises the BBC into subservience. In this situation almost everything can be read as fitting the same template. The BBC reviews coverage of the Middle East? It’s been bullied by the Israeli Government, says Kampfner. Grade believes some BBC coverage is too pro-EU? Then it is cosying up to some part of the Establishment as yet unspecified and undiscovered.

jazz/breakdancers, and delving into the history of Michael Jackson’s moonwalk. Again, some great archive footage.

Why don’t they do more on modern dance? I mean, black-influenced dance, the stuff that people do in clubs, like salsa? – not the sort of art-dance of Merce Cunningham or whoever, which I have nothing against but which is always going to be a very minority taste. It’s great to watch, it’s popular, and, as this programme showed, there’s loads of superb footage available, going back to lindyhoppers and before. Instead they try and revive the ghastly sequinned days of Come Dancing, with the renaissance of a presenter who should have been put out to pasture years ago.

Well….what do I know? Strictly Come Dancing is massively popular, and so, it seems, is Bruce.

The Religious Policeman decides to preserve for future generations the art of the Saudi cartoon.

From the Guardian:

One of China’s leading democracy activists has been beaten, possibly to death, in front of a Guardian journalist. Lu Banglie was last seen lying unconscious on the side of the road on Saturday night after an assault by a mob which had joined forces with police to stop a car containing him, the Guardian’s Shanghai correspondent, Benjamin Joffe-Walt, and two other people.

They were on their way to Taishi, a village in the southern province of Guangdong which has become the latest flashpoint in a growing wave of rural unrest that is proving the greatest threat to the rule of the Communist party since the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.

Mr Lu, one of a new breed of peasant leaders elected without the support of the party, had been in the area on the outskirts of Guangzhou city since August, encouraging residents to vote out officials accused of corruption.

With Taishi seen as a symbol of the movement for peasant rights, this was an increasingly dangerous activity. Several academics, lawyers and human rights campaigners have been arrested by police and threatened by a mob that villagers say has been hired to keep visitors away. Several journalists who have entered the area have been detained or beaten, most recently last Friday, when correspondents for Radio France and the South China Morning Post were assaulted.

Here’s Benjamin Joffe-Walt’s account:

The last time I saw Lu Banglie, he was lying in a ditch on the side of the street – placid, numb and lifeless – the spit, snot and urine of about 20 men mixing with his blood, and running all over his body.

I had only met him that day. He was to show me the way to Taishi, the hotspot of the growing rural uprisings in China. It felt like heading into a war. Taishi is under siege, I was warned. The day I arrived a French radio journalist and a Hong Kong print journalist were rumoured to have been beaten somewhere around Taishi.

(via RConversation)

Update: The activist is not dead after all, which throws some doubt on the reliability of Guardian journalist Benjamin Joffe-Walt. RConversation has further links on this affair, including some far-from-complimentary comment from a Chinese blogger.

The top five leaders of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army have been indicted as war criminals by the International Criminal Court.

The LRA is accused of widespread murder and torture during nearly 20 years of fighting against the army. They have kidnapped thousands of children.

Human Rights Watch welcomed the move as an “historic development”.

“It stamps the accused… as indicted war criminals by an international court. That has not happened before,” International Justice Programme director Richard Dicker said.

Not everybody’s pleased:

The Roman Catholic Church in Uganda has warned that the warrants jeopardise efforts to mediate an end the rebel insurgency.

Many northern Ugandans had hoped negotiations would solve the conflict, in which thousands have been killed and 1.5 million people forced from their homes.

But, sadly, these aren’t reasonable people:

The LRA are known for abducting young children, to become fighters or sex slaves.

Human rights groups also accuse them of murder, mutilation, torture and rape.

As I wrote a few weeks back, how do you negotiate with a group of crazed millenarian cultists?

slamists, not Basques, had attacked Madrid. Without pausing for breath, Mair duly wanted to know if the presence of Spanish troops in Iraq was the root cause of the atrocity. The identity of the bombers was irrelevant. The Spanish had to be the cause of their own suffering.

Perhaps it is too easy to mock. When confronted with an ideology which mandates indiscriminate killing on an industrial scale, it is natural to seek rational explanations of the irrational; to pretend that Islamism is merely a reasonable, if bloody, response to legitimate concerns which could be remedied if we elected wiser leaders.

Yet the masochism – ‘Kill us, we deserve it!’ – the subliminal dislike of democracy and the willingness to turn al-Qaeda into the armed wing of every fashionable campaign from sustainable tourism to the anti-war movement will in the end disgrace the liberals by making them ridiculous.