Kenya mall attack: Did terrorists rent shop to hide weapons in advance of massacre?
Highly unlikely that the bulky machine-guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and explosive devices could have been carried in
After their initial spree of killings a group of the Islamists who had stormed Westgate dived into the multi-storey Nakumatt supermarket. Security forces pursuing them began to come under steady fire: six of them were shot dead before, outgunned, they pulled out.
The stream of bullets had not come from just Kalashnikov AK-47 rifles the fighters had been carrying, but heavy calibre machine-gun. Later, there were booby-trapped bombs; some police officers also reported the 'whoosh and boom' of grenades being aimed towards them striking walls.
It is highly unlikely that the bulky versions of GPMGs (General Purpose Machine-Guns) IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and RPG (Rocket Propelled Grenade) launchers could have been carried into the shopping mall by the terrorists who had initially gained entry pretending to be tourists even if some of them were, as the authorities claimed, men enveloped in niqabs.
French rebuked over treatment of Roma
‘Illusory’ to think Roma can be integrated into French life, says minister Manuel Valls
The French government has been rebuked for its treatment of some 20,000 Roma in France by the European Commission and by human rights group Amnesty International.
Viviane Reding, the EU commissioner for justice, said the presence of Roma is being exploited by French politicians for political gain.
“If I’m not mistaken, there’s an election around the corner. Every time people don’t want to talk about important things like the budget or debts, they discover the Roma,” said Ms Reding said yesterday, referring to the March 2014 municipal elections and May 2014 European elections.
In a report to be published today Amnesty denounces “the vicious circle of repeated forced evictions of Roma”, more than 10,000 in the first half of this year and the rights organisation calls on the French government to ban all forced evictions.
DEVELOPMENT POLICY
UN goals fight for a better world
The UN set an ambitious plan for itself back in 2000: Cut the number of poor in half and stop the spread of HIV/AIDS by 2015. In New York, the General Assembly looks at the progress of the Millennium Development Goals.
There's no contest as to what issues top the agenda at the UN General Assembly. They are the war in Syria and Iran's nuclear ambitions. But at the same time, there's another issue the delegates from some 193 countries will be discussing in their meetings: The eight Millennium Development Goals the UN agreed on back in 2000, which setting targets for the developing world to be reached by 2015.
The aim included reducing the number of poor by 50 percent, providing a primary school education for every child, cutting the death rate of children under five by two thirds and to halve the number of people without access clean drinking water. The money for implement the goals was to come from development aid.
Limited success so far
When it comes to what has been reached so far, UN Under-Secretary General David Malone drew a divided conclusion.
Chinese street vendor's execution prompts online backlash
September 26, 2013 - 6:31PM
Philip Wen
China correspondent for Fairfax Media
For a country that sentences more people to death than the rest of the world combined, there is something to be said about the spontaneous outpouring of sympathy over the execution of Xia Junfeng, a convicted double-murderer.
But Xia's death, on Wednesday, may well have gone unnoticed, if not for a series of chilling posts from his wife, Zhang Jing, which quickly went viral on Weibo, a popular social networking and messaging platform.
“Early this morning, the court sent people to take me to meet Xia Junfeng for the last time,” she said. “I’m going crazy. Getting ready to go.”
A few hours later, authorities confirmed the execution had been carried out, but not before one last insult.
Advertisement
Officials rejected Xia’s final request to be photographed in his final moments for his son’s memory.
Getting a grip: How some frogs hold on in a torrent of water
Torrent frogs have an amazing ability to climb in wet environments near waterfalls, where ordinary tree frogs would be washed away.
Researchers compared the gripping ability of torrent frogs, a class of frogs that live in fast-flowing mountain or hill streams, to that of tree frogs, and found that torrent frogs were much better at gripping wet, steep and rough surfaces.The frogs' sticky secret, the researchers found, involves hugging wet and rough surfaces with their toes, belly and thighs.
"Torrent frogs adhere to very wet and rough surfaces by attaching not only their specialized toe pads (like many tree frogs do), but also by using their belly and ventral (inner) thigh skin," study researcher Thomas Endlein of the University of Glasgow in Scotland wrote in a statement. [40 Freaky Frog Photos]
26 September 2013 Last updated at 02:20 GMT
Singapore domestic workers' day off
It is Sunday, and a chorus of Tagalog and Bahasa Indonesia greets shoppers at the Lucky Plaza mall along Singapore's Orchard Road. Hundreds of foreign domestic workers from the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere come here every Sunday to catch up with friends and send money home via the many remittance shops. They make up the 200,000-plus workers employed in Singapore's households.
Liza Padua is among them. She is here to meet friends and celebrate her 49th birthday. Her friends have brought cake and presents, and she is looking forward to a day of festivities. She has spent 20 years in Singapore as a domestic helper and has always enjoyed her day off.
"It's so good to have Sunday off and be able to reconnect with your friends and keep in touch with the Philippine community," she said.
"Many of us have families we left behind back home, so meeting with friends is a nice way to have a sense of having a family too here in Singapore."
No comments:
Post a Comment