The Indian-Pakistani dispute over Kashmir is near explosion. In an effort to subdue tensions efter India air striking an alleged terrorist camp, Pakistan has promised to release a captured pilot.

The terrorist organisation known as the Islamic State has nowhere left to go, Bethan McKernan and Mohammed Rasool of the Guardian report. Good! Now the surviving terrorists need to be put on trial.

Leader of Irish far-left Saoradh party believes Brexit will fuel violent resistance to British rule in Northern Ireland.

Unfortunately, I, too, think a hard border on the island will trigger some terrorism.

The message read, “Warsaw free from faggots”, followed by the crossed-over “LGBT” acronym, Pink News reports.

One of the extremist organisations behind the anti-Reform campaign has, among other things, made a fictitious newspaper page including fabricated citations from non-Orthodox worshipers celebrating their victory, and articles titled “the Rabbinate is done with”, and “Assimilation is no longer a slur”.

This is absurd. The Reform movement is the largest Jewish denomination in the Diaspora. This is an assault by the extremist few against mainstream Jewry. The ultra-Orthodox seems bent on creating a devision in Judaism similar to that of Sunni and Shia in Islam.

It used to be a dogma that Yazidis who left the religion, by force or by choice, couldn’t return to the faith. This changed when Yazidi women and girls began escaping from the Islamic State’s enslavement across the so-called caliphate. The terrorists had forced the women and girls to convert to Islam, kept them in prisons, sold them at slave markets, and raped them. Therefore, in 2014, the Yazidi spiritual leaders ruled that the faith group would welcome back former captives using a baptism rite.

Read Cathy Otten’s informative article at The Atlantic. She is the author of With Ash on Their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State (New York, 2017).

CrowdStrike, an American cyber-security company, has published a report that includes a ranking of the West’s cyber-foes. Russia’s cyber-spies were the best at attacking Europe and America.

Source: The Guardian

How the MPs voted on May’s bill
Yes	242
No	391

At a Palm Beach luncheon yesterday, Coulter said that speaking out against Trump at moments when she doesn’t find him sufficiently racist has caused a rift in her social life. At least that’s Jezebel’s take on it, and anyone knowing of Coulter must think it’s funny.

Source: The Guardian

How the MPs voted on Brexit delay
For	413
Against	202

Norwegian rapper Kaveh Kholardi said “fucking Jews” on stage at an event in Oslo promoting multiculturalism. Now a prosecutor has decided that he will not be charged with hate speech because his words may have been criticism of Israel.

Not even the most obvious anti-Semitism is considered as such nowadays. It’s frightening. I’m not suggesting the rapper should be put under lock and key, but this isn’t criticism of Israel.

A terrorist by the name of Brenton Tarrant opened fire at mosques in New Zealand yesterday. He killed 49 people and injured 48. He videotaped his terror attacks. Before the shootings, Tarrant, who is an Australian citizen, published a manifesto online that a security analyst describes as “straight out of the white supremacist playbook”.

The similarities to Anders Behring Breivik’s terror attacks in Norway in 2011 are too obvious to be ignored. We have a threat of terrorism on two fronts—the Islamist jihadis who think all westerners are Christian crusaders, and the white supremacists who think all Muslims are Islamist jihadis. These extremists hate one another, but they unite in a contempt for liberal democracy and human rights.

When a journalist asked Donald Trump about the terror attacks in New Zealand that killed 49 people, I heard him say that he doesn’t view white nationalism as a rising threat around the world. It might be a good thing to remind him and us of some recent occurrences:

• Canada, 2017: Six people during evening prayers at a Quebec mosque in 2017 by a gunman who said he feared refugees would kill his family.
• Britain, 2017: A man shouting “I want to kill all Muslims” drove a van into worshippers outside a mosque in London, killing one and injuring twelve others.
• America, 2018: A shooter with far-right views killed eleven people at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

“Terrorism has largely been perceived in the West as the work of Islamists,” Ines Pohl of Deutsche Welle writes. “The attack on Muslims in Christchurch shows that Islamophobic hate has equally deadly consequences.”

Simply, heartbreaking.

Fifty people are now confirmed dead. Victims’ age range from 2 to older than 60 years.

From The Local:

“…he wakes me up every morning miaowing to death because he wants to go out, and then when I open the door he stays in the middle, undecided, and then gives me evil looks when I put him out.”

It made my afternoon.

The mayor of Utrecht says that at least three people were killed and nine injured in today’s shooting, according to Dutch News.

With eleven days before Britain is due to leave the EU, the Speaker of the House of Commons says the government cannot ask Parliament to pass the same deal that has been rejected twice by huge margins.

Jeebus! The drama just goes on and on.

Charles Maynes of Business Insider writes:

Once on the inside, Savchuk was stunned to see hundreds of mostly younger Russians working as paid trolls in rotating shifts.

Roaming the halls when she could—cameras were everywhere—Savchuk discovered the IRA was full of different “departments”. There was the “news division”, the “social media seeders”, and a group dedicated to producing visual memes known as “demotivators”.

Despite the division of labor, the content was remarkably uniform. The US, the EU, Ukraine’s pro-European government, and Russia’s opposition were regular targets for scorn. And then there was Russian President Vladimir Putin—seemingly no Russian triumph under his rule was too small to warrant a celebratory tweet, meme or post.

Read the whole thing, it’s frightening. What makes it worse is that so many European “anti-establishment” politicians use Russian propaganda to make the EU fragment into small and vulnerable states that are easily manipulated by Moscow.

We Europeans need to boost our confidence and not let ourselves be influenced in this way. Russia is, after all, a dwarf compared to us. The EU has half a billion citizens and the second highest GDP in the world. Russia is a poverty-stricken nation with 145 million citizens. Russia is only good for nuclear weapons, natural gas, and troll factories.

Oliver Norgrove, is a former Vote Leave staffer, writes in Irish Times:

As a former Brexit campaigner, I find much to reflect on. I take the view that central to the unravelling of Brexit has been the Irish Border, whose frictionless state is informally tied to the ambitions and objectives of the 1998 Belfast Agreement. Those of us who made the case for leaving the European Union did not sufficiently take into account the interests of Northern Ireland, nor indeed did we estimate the significance of the role played by the Border within the Brexit negotiations.

As historical errors go, this is pretty large. And an error it most definitely was. An argument is often presented by Remainers that the Leaver exclusion of Northern Ireland from Brexit discussion before and during the referendum was a deliberate, strategic decision. I do not buy this. I think the omission of Northern Ireland from Leaver thinking was far less conscious and, in some ways, symptomatic of a much wider political issue.

“Mr Tusk said he believed all 27 other EU members, who must sign off on the extension, would agree but it depended on a ‘positive’ vote in the House of Commons,” BBC News reports.

But that third vote on May’s deal has, as we learned yesterday, been stopped by the Speaker of the House of Commons.

Britain is about to leave the EU in nine days. No one knows how it will turn out. I predict even more chaos.

From National Geographic:

Davila-Ross was studying orangutans at a wildlife rehabilitation center in Sabah, Malaysia, on the island of Borneo, when she became intrigued by the bears at the nearby Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Centre, a rescue and rehabilitation organization. After watching the bears play with each other, she noticed something curious about their interactions: They seemed to be mimicking each other’s facial expressions.

Read More

It’s long been assumed that animals are less capable of communication that humans. I have always found this strange as communication has played such an important part of our evolution. The ability to cooperate is depending on this, and even though other forms of communication is possible, facial expression and speak is vital for us. I think that the development of artificial intelligence will eventually show that animals like the Sun bear not only mimic but also has a spoken language of their own.

It’s another day in the Brexit drama:

• Theresa May faces coup as Parliament finally lose patience
• Nigel Farage returns to British politics as leader of the newly established Brexit Party
• A million people march in central London calling for another referendum

I can’t understand why Theresa May wants to stay in office. Any sane person would say “fuck this” by now.

“The woman behind the petition, Margaret Georgiadou, said on Saturday she had received death threats,” the Guardian writes. “Georgiadou tweeted that on Friday night she had received three such threats via telephone.”

“An amendment tabled by former Tory minister Oliver Letwin passed, by 329 votes to 302, defeating the government, as MPs expressed their exasperation at its failure to set out a fresh approach,” Heather Stewart and Jessica Elgot of the Guardian write.

The carousel goes another spin…

A government spokesperson has issued the following statement after the defeat:

It is disappointing to see this amendment pass, as the government made a clear commitment to provide a process to find a majority in parliament for a way forward this week.

This amendment instead upends the balance between our democratic institutions and sets a dangerous, unpredictable precedent for the future.

While it is now up to parliament to set out next steps in respect of this amendment, the government will continue to call for realism – any options considered must be deliverable in negotiations with the EU. Parliament should take account of how long these negotiations would take, and if they’d require a longer extension which would mean holding European parliamentary elections.

The Facebook group contains propaganda glorifying National Socialism as well as quotes from the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson under headlines such as “Not a single Jew has been killed in a gas chamber”, Liam Hoare of the Jewish Chronicle reports.

Revolting stupidity.

Despite massive protests, the European Parliament has voted in favour of a new copyright directive. I’m not sure what to think of it. On the one hand, I think it’s vital that copyright holder get paid for their work. On the other hand, free speech in an open debate is paramount. We’ll now have to wait and see what national legislators make of this. My guess is that that most Europeans will never notice the new rules.

“A first attempt by MPs to find a consensus route forward for Brexit has ended in deadlock and confusion after the Commons rejected every option put forward,” Peter Walker of the Guardian writes.

It’s not new, but its fascist and racist ideas are gaining ground, Jason Wilson of the Guardian warns.

At the core of so-called Identitarianism is the concept of the great replacement, meaning white Europeans are about to be become minorities in their own homelands due to immigration and multiculturalism. As is the case with traditional fascists, identitarians oppose capitalism, universal human rights, and liberal democracy. In Europe, Yann Fouéré’s idea of “Europe of 100 Flags” is popular among identitarians.

Homosexuality is already illegal in Brunei and can bring a punishment of up to ten years’ imprisonment. However, the new laws allow for penalties including whipping and stoning.

Needless to say, stoning is one of the most torturous execution methods. Scholars say death can take up to half an hour, and Sharia courts often force family members to watch their loved ones as they are being killed.

The World Congress of Families (WCF), an American coalition that promotes the values of the Christian right, today began a three-day conference in Gran Guardia Palace in Verona. The congress is funded by local authorities and has the backing of the far-right League, a partner in Italy’s coalition government. The list of participants includes:

• Brian Brown, the WCF president who fought against same-sex marriage in America.
• Theresa Okafor, a Nigerian activist who likened gay people to the Boko Haram terrorist group.
• Lucy Akello, a Ugandan politician who helped pass an anti-gay law that sets life imprisonment as the maximum penalty for homosexuality in Uganda.
• Alexey Komov, the Russian extremist who claims banning information about homosexuality is a human rights.

Matteo Salvini, the leader of League and Italy’s deputy prime minister, will speak at the conference on Saturday, as is Marco Bussetti, the education minister, and Lorenzo Fontana, who was Verona’s deputy mayor before being appointed family minister.

“Theresa May hopes to bring her Brexit deal back to parliament again next week after it was rejected for a third time by MPs,” Heather Stewart and Jessica Elgot of the Guardian report.

It’s ironic that May repeatedly dismisses a second referendum and talk about how Parliament must respect the outcome of the first one. When it comes to her withdrawal agreement, there seems to be no limit to the number of times it’s rejected.

The former mayor of London also denies any anti-Semitism in Labour, even though the most recent incidents include party members writing about a Jewish ritual of Jews drinking blood and about how Jews use the Holocaust to make money. These are classic anti-Semitic ideas. Jews drinking blood was a popular racist myth used by the church in the Middle Ages. The thought of greedy Jews thinking only about money also has mediaeval origin, but can also be found in more recent propaganda, such as the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion.