GRENADE THROWN AT ASYLUM HOSTEL IN GERMANY.

 

 

Unidentified attackers threw a live hand grenade at a migrant hostel in south-western Germany, officials say.

The grenade was found during the night near buildings housing 170 people in the town of Villingen-Schwenningen. Its pin had been pulled out but the explosives failed to detonate.
Justice Minister Heiko Maas said it was a new level of "hate and violence".
There were 1,005 attacks on refugee homes in Germany last year - five times more than in 2014.
Some of the migrants at the Villingen-Schwenningen hostel were evacuated while bomb disposal experts carried out a controlled explosion.
Police spokesman Thomas Kalmbach said it was "just luck" no-one was hurt.

 

 

 

Officers said the grenade still contained its explosives but it was not clear whether it still had a detonator.
Mr Maas said he was summoning his regional state counterparts to crack down on hate crime.
"Grenades are already flying towards refugee homes. We can't wait until there is someone dead," he said.

Spike in attacks

News of the grenade incident came as new figures showed five times more attacks were carried out on migrant hostels in Germany last year than in 2014.
The total for 2015 was 1,005, compared with 199 in 2014, the police report said. Far-right activists are suspected in 90% of the cases.
Last year a record 1.1 million people sought asylum in Germany - many from war-torn Syria. Many local authorities have struggled to house them.
Germany is expanding its list of safe countries of return, hoping to curb the influx.
The governing coalition plans to declare Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia safe countries of origin, making it easier to send migrants back, said Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel.

 

 

Last year Germany did the same for several Balkan nations - including Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo - to cut the large numbers of migrants claiming asylum. Very few of their applications are granted.
The police say the biggest rise in attacks on migrant hostels last year was registered in the mainly industrial state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
State Interior Minister Ralf Jaeger said "investigators have noticed a marked increase in aggressive language" towards migrants on the internet.
Most of the thousands of migrants arriving daily on Greek islands hope to get asylum in Germany.

Where Europe is failing on migrants

• The 28 member states have not agreed on an EU-wide mechanism for relocating migrants, to ease the burden on Greece and Italy; only small groups have been relocated so far - and several states in Central and Eastern Europe refuse to accept migrants
• The Schengen agreement on freedom of movement is in jeopardy - Hungary fenced off its borders with Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia; meanwhile Germany, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and France have also reimposed border controls
• The Dublin regulation, under which refugees are required to claim asylum in the member state in which they first arrive, is not working effectively; countries are no longer sending back migrants to their first point of entry to the EU
• Thousands of migrants - many of them Syrian war refugees - still arrive daily from Turkey
• Processing of asylum applications is slow and there is a big backlog - so reception centres are overcrowded
• Germany - the main destination for migrants - is rethinking its open-door policy, partly because of outrage over assaults on women in Cologne at New Year

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LIFT-OFF FOR EUROPE'S SPACE LASER NETWORK.

 

 

Europe has begun to roll out a data superhighway in orbit above the Earth.

The first node in the network is a telecommunications satellite that has just launched from Kazakhstan.
It will use a laser to gather pictures of the planet taken by other spacecraft and then relay them to the ground.
One benefit will be to put information on natural disasters, such as flooding and earthquakes, into the hands of emergency responders far faster than has previously been possible.
Currently, it can take hours to get the pictures taken by Earth observation satellites down on the ground.
Part of the reason is that spacecraft can only transmit their images when they pass over a receiving dish, and they will have visibility of this antenna for just 10 minutes in most cases during every 90-minute tour around the globe.
The European Space Agency's (Esa) answer is to fire the pictures upwards instead, via laser, to another satellite much higher in the sky that has a constant view of the ground station.
In the past couple of years, the agency has put up two Earth observers that are equipped with optical transmission equipment. These will now be able to offload their data through the new relay satellite, which will be positioned 36,000km above the equator at 9 degrees East.
Testing by Esa's industrial partner, Airbus Defence and Space, shows it should be possible for the system to put pictures on the desks of the people who need them within 20 minutes of those images being acquired.
 

 

For some applications - such as the monitoring of pollution incidents, or illegal fishing or ocean piracy - the time saved could be critical to achieving an effective response.
The European Data Relay System, or EDRS for short, has been more than 10 years in development. Getting satellites to talk to each other via a narrow laser beam is no easy task, says Esa project manager Michael Witting.
"The difficulty is basically that you have to hit another satellite with your laser beam over a distance of over 40,000km, which is akin to hitting a two-euro coin over the distance of the Atlantic," he told BBC News.
With a successful connection, data will move at a rate of up to 1.8Gbps.
EDRS will debut with the European Commission as its anchor customer. Brussels has a series of satellites called Sentinels that are systematically mapping the Earth, to help inform and enforce EU policies.
Prodigious volumes of data are expected from these satellites in the coming years and the traditional downlink solutions are no longer regarded as adequate to the task.
Esa officials will only declare Friday's launch a success when they get confirmation that the relay satellite survived its ride to orbit.
The spacecraft, which is owned by the Paris-based commercial operator Eutelsat, left the Kazakh Baikonur cosmodrome atop a Proton rocket at 22.20 GMT on Friday (04:20 local time Saturday).
The drop-off high above the Earth was not expected to occur until nine hours and 12 minutes after lift-off, meaning it would be 07:32 GMT on Saturday, at the earliest, before ground controllers could assess the status of the mission.
Many weeks of testing lie ahead. EDRS should go into full service in the summer.
A second relay satellite will go up in 2017. Further platforms will be required to provide fully global, round-the-clock laser connections.

 

 

 

 

 

BRITISH WOMAN GUILTY OF JOINING ISIS.

 British woman Tareena Shakil guilty of joining IS

 

A British mother who took her toddler son to Syria, has been found guilty of membership of so-called Islamic State.

Tareena Shakil, 26, is the first British woman to return from the self-declared caliphate to be convicted of the offence.
Shakil, of Birmingham, has also been found guilty of encouraging acts of terrorism through messages posted on Twitter. She denied the charges.
She had admitted travelling to Syria.
But following a two-week trial at Birmingham Crown Court, the jury rejected her claim that she had only wished to live under Sharia law.

'Martyr' wish

The jury was shown her tweets, messages and photographs, including images of the black flag of IS and passages calling on people to "take up arms".
She had also stated her wish to become a "martyr".

 


Shakil, of Beechfield Road in Birmingham but formerly of Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire, posed with her son for pictures wearing an IS-branded balaclava after secretly running away to Syria in October 2014.
She told the court it was because he "loved hats".
Her defence team maintained she went to Syria with the toddler to escape an "unhappy family life".

 

Analysis by Dominic Casciani, Home Affairs correspondent
Tareena Shakil was charged with "membership" of the self-styled Islamic State organisation - but she never had a membership card. She says she deeply regrets going to Syria and, in a courtroom twist, told the jury she'd even been debriefed by MI5 on her return.
So why did she face this very serious charge?
Terrorism legislation basically says that membership of a banned group means to "belong".
Some organisations, such as Irish paramilitaries, had formal procedures for membership. With IS, men swear an oath, but the situation with women is less clear.
The jury was told to not think about membership in terms of belonging to a library or a gym. Instead, they had to decide whether Tareena Shakil voluntarily went to be with IS in Syria, knowing its aims, how it would achieve them and, crucially, seeking to associate with like-minded individuals.

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An NSPCC spokesman said: "It is inconceivable that a mother would be willing to put her child in such a dangerous situation, potentially exposing him to harm and even death."
Shakil left IS territory in January 2015.
Her defence said she was unhappy in Syria and she told the court: "I came back of my own free will. I came back because I realised I had made a mistake."
Shakil said she caught a bus to escape the terror group's clutches, bribing a taxi driver to take her part of the way before dashing across the Turkish border under the noses of an IS patrol.
She is due to be sentenced on Monday.

ISRAELI VULTURE CLEARED OF SPYING.

 Lebanon returns Israeli vulture cleared of spying

 

 Image caption The vulture is now being treated at a wildlife clinic near Tel Aviv for minor injuries

A huge vulture detained in Lebanon on suspicion of spying for Israel has been returned home after UN peacekeepers intervened, Israeli officials said.

The bird, which has a 1.9m (6ft 5in) wing span, flew over the border from an Israeli game reserve and was caught by Lebanese villagers on Tuesday.
They became suspicious as the griffon vulture had a tracking device attached to its tail.
It is part of a conservation project to reintroduce raptors to the Middle East.
Wildlife officials say the vulture was brought from Spain last year and set free about a month ago in the Gamla Nature Reserve in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Tel Aviv University is involved in tracking the bird, and as well as a GPS transmitter, it had tags on its wings and an engraved metal ring on its leg saying: "Tel Aviv Univ Israel".

'Discreet operation'

Wildlife officials in Israel were alerted to its capture when photos of the tied-up bird appeared on social media.

 


"In a discreet operation with the Lebanese and with the great help of UN forces and the UN liaison unit, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority was able to return the vulture that was caught a few days ago by villagers of Bint Jbeil, Lebanon," an Israeli statement released on Friday said.
The Lebanese media says the villagers freed the vulture after it became clear it was not on a spying mission.
After its ordeal the bird was weak and was being treated for minor injuries, officials said.
It is not the first time a griffon vulture has been taken to be an agent of the Israeli spy agency Mossad.
Saudi Arabia captured one, also with a Tel Aviv University tracker, in the desert city of Hyaal in 2011, sparking rumours of a "Zionist plot" that were dismissed by Israeli officials.

WHY IS THE U.S OBSESSED WITH GUNS?
 
 

The Sundance documentary Under the Gun dives into the debate about guns in the US, and hearing that description might make you think you don’t want to see it. Mass shootings, background checks, gun shows, the National Rifle Association: those buzzwords – do they ever leave the news feed? – can, by now, be wearying. The sheer omnipresence of the debate can make it seem like you’ve heard all the arguments before, and that there’s nothing new to learn.
Under the Gun, though, opens your eyes– and not just because it brings you close to the families of some of the victims from the Newtown and Aurora massacres in the US. The film’s achievement is its deep understanding of the people who worship guns.


Under the Gun presents two shocking facts. The first is that the sheer number of gun shops in the US is greater than the number of McDonald’s restaurants and Starbucks stores… combined. If this statistic is true, it’s a nightmarish scenario. The message isn’t just that gun stores are as ubiquitous as fast food. It’s that they are fast food, offering a cheap meal of sensory abandon.
But here’s the real jaw-dropper from the film. In 1986, when the NRA was first feeling its power as a lobbying organisation, it strong-armed the US Congress into passing a law that forbade the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the government branch that regulates guns, from storing its information on computers. Thirty years later, that law remains on the books. In Under the Gun, we see what the inside of a typical ATF office looks like: mountains of boxed papers. Most background checks are routine, but if a potential gun buyer needs to be investigated beyond the usual screening procedures, the ‘check’ consists of some poor slave of a bureaucrat hunting through the files – a process that would take mereminutes if it were done on computer. With the current system, it takes days. And if the check isn’t completed within 72 hours, the person in question can simply buy the gun without it.
Bullet points
Under the Gun reveals that the system, in other words, is engineered to operate in slow motion. It’s designed not to work.  Stephanie Soechtig, the director of Under the Gun, takes us inside the NRA, and for perhaps the first time in any film we get a full sense of their psychology – the secret vulnerability that drives their give-me-firearms-or-give-me-death stance. Soechtig stages a group therapy session with NRA members, and what they reveal is the anxiety behind their absolutism: the fear that if they ever backed down and allowed one rule that restricted guns, the government would bust down their doors and take away their weapons. They defend their Second Amendment rights, but what Under the Gun reveals is that guns, to the NRA, aren’t just a right. They’re the key to identity. We see citizens in supermarkets with machine guns slung across their backs, and the message is, “I pack heat, therefore I am.”

They’ve turned life into a Dirty Harry movie, and politics into a cult of firearms

Watching Under the Gun, you may think that no sane society would allow this. But the grand paradox of the NRA is that they have all the power with nothing close to a majority. They can cajole congressmen into voting their way – not because most US citizens share their view, but because gun-control advocates don’t vote en masse. Whereas gun-rights advocates turn out to vote as if their very existence depended on it. They see no shades of grey. There are ‘bad guys with guns’ and the ‘good guys’ who can stop them. They’ve turned life into a Dirty Harry movie, and politics into a cult of firearms.
Soechtig interviews the parents of mass-shooting victims, and though that’s a fair subject, the way the film showcases their heartbreak and rage can’t help but seem a touch exploitative. Trying to turn tragedy into an argument feels both right and wrong. Yet in the last part of the film, when we witness the Aurora movie-theatre massacre as it was recorded – outside the cinema itself – on the multiplex surveillance cameras, we feel a little like those families: helpless, torn by terror and thinking, “How could this happen?” Under the Gun acknowledges that gun control won’t solve everything, but it makes a profound target of the gun fetishists who seem to value their rights more than they do life itself.

TEEN ACCUSED OF ISIS PLOT TO BOMB COPS USING KANGAROO.

A teenager discussed packing a kangaroo with explosives, painting it with the ISIS symbol and setting it loose on police, according to prosecutors.
Sevdet Besim, 19, is accused of plotting a terror attack in Melbourne on Anzac Day — an annual public commemoration of Australia's war dead.
 

Besim denied four charges of planning a terrorist act during a court appearance on Thursday, the Melbourne Age newspaper reported.
Prosecutors also accuse Besim of communicating with a teenager overseas, as well as planning to run over and behead a police officer on Anzac Day, it said.
A prosecution summary presented to Melbourne Magistrates Court included an account of alleged communication between the two teenagers, including a conversation about using a kangaroo as part of an attack, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. (ABC) reported.
"The conversation continues with Besim detailing what he did that day and they have a general discussion around animals and wildlife in Australia including a suggestion that a kangaroo could be packed with C4 explosive, painted with the [ISIS] symbol and set loose on police officers," the prosecution summary said, according to the ABC.


Copies of the summary document were not available early Thursday on the court's website.
At the time of Besim's arrest in April, police said the alleged Anzac Day plotters had links to Numan Haider, an 18-year-old who stabbed two Melbourne police officers in 2014 and was subsequently shot dead.
Anzac Day is the annual April 25 commemoration of the 1915 Gallipoli landings — the first major military action fought by the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps during World War I.

THE ONE-WAY TICKET TO ISIS CENTRAL.

 

Beirut, Lebanon (CNN)It's a pretty normal bus -- windows slightly cracked, dust, the occasional button missing on the dashboard. But when its passengers say they take it knowing they could be on a one-way ticket to death, they aren't exaggerating.

From the dark and dank underpass that is Charles Helou bus station in central Beirut, leaves the bus to Raqqa. It has done so for years, but now that Raqqa is the capital of ISIS' self-declared caliphate, the bus crosses the most dangerous border in the world. And people do pay to get on it.

In a 24-hour journey, it travels from Beirut, across the border to regime-held Damascus. Then it heads to Palmyra, held by ISIS, before moving north toward Raqqa.

 

 

The nine passengers we met were adamant about two things. First that ISIS would most likely let them in to Raqqa. That suggests they know someone there, and they didn't want to go into details. Second, nobody wanted to have their face filmed or name used.

The fear was overpowering and that permeates exactly how you get ready for the trip.

Last cigarettes are smoked. Not as people worry they may not survive the trip, but because ISIS has banned smoking. They've also banned music, and much else that's part of normal lifestyles in the modern world. If you break their atavistic, moral code, you can be flogged, even beheaded.

ISIS checks

So there is a strange cleansing process on the ride. Smokers douse their fingers in perfume and jettison their cigarettes. Music, racy pictures, numbers of friends close to the Syrian regime -- all are deleted from mobile phones. ISIS check these things thoroughly.

The manager of the bus explains the rules for the trip, though it's a journey he never makes.

"A woman that's not dressed right will be sent to Islamic training," he said. "She, of course, needs a male relative to escort her. Men need to leave their beards grown long in their natural state, with mustaches trimmed. Trousers should not be tight and a certain height over shoes. But ISIS realizes when people travel, they can't always look like that, so it's OK."

The bus always comes back empty. ISIS rarely lets people out. Which begs the question, why are they surrendering themselves to life under ISIS? Surely they know what they are getting in to?

One group of passengers has a specific reason to travel. They are accompanying the body of their relative back to be buried in his hometown.

Some shed tears. He died of a heart attack. The process of repatriation is a nightmare. The bus's eventual departure will be delayed, we learn later, by 24 hours, because they have to wait for the appropriate paperwork to be able to take the body out of Lebanon.

Passengers smoke at the ticket office in Beirut's Charles Helou bus station. Cigarettes are banned by ISIS, so this may be their last for a while.

Dangers

The hazards of the route are relayed in the most matter-of-fact chatter.

Sometimes a fighter jet will buzz the coach, flying low. Sometimes the buses are hit by sniper fire. Most of the time they keep on driving.

The manager tells us: "A plane might [drop a bomb] some distance from the bus. It's normal! No one can really pin down where the sniper fire is coming from. That's when the passengers get afraid."

Can people ever leave Raqqa on the bus? We hear two stories that suggest it is possible. One man tells us the sick are sometimes given 15 days' leave to seek medical treatment. If they come back late, their property and home is confiscated by ISIS.

A woman, we are told, has a daughter in Raqqa, who she is trying to get out. When we talk to her, she insists she has been on a trip to the Gulf region and is just on her way home. Dissimilation is a necessary part of life on this bus.

One man tells us, though, of his sorrow for his hometown, where his children have not left the house in the daytime to go to school for four years.

"It used to be my heaven," he says, before ISIS rule. The war against them, the poverty that it caused and now even the trash littering the streets "has made it my hell."