Free Republic

Rajendra Pachauri, one of the world’s most famous climate officials, is being investigated under three sections of the Indian Penal Code relating to sexual assault, harassment, and stalking. He has resigned as longtime chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), resigned from the Indian Prime Minister’s climate council, and has been disinvited from speaking at a conference at Harvard University. Currently on leave from The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the New Delhi-based entity he has led for three decades, Pachauri has been banned by the courts from entering TERI facilities and from contacting anyone who works...

Since January 15 the French army’s “Opération Sentinelle” has protected 722 Jewish schools and synagogues, some 24/7 even when the establishments were empty. The operation came to be regarded as too dangerous for the soldiers who were regularly targets of attacks. Over time the men were worn out. (snip)

Drones have been seen flying over several sensitive landmarks in Paris in a night-time mystery that French police say is being taken seriously. At least five of the unmanned aerial machines were spotted between midnight on Monday and 0600 on Tuesday, and none of the operators has been caught. The first appeared over the US embassy and there were later sightings near the Eiffel Tower and Place de la Concorde. French police believe the drone flights could be linked. Small drones are easy to buy but their appearance in recent months over sensitive locations has worried French authorities.

Can better urban planning help prevent terrorist attacks? The idea sounds fanciful, even disrespectful to victims of extremist violence. But officials in Paris, still reeling from last month’s deadly terrorist attacks on a satirical magazine and a kosher deli, are putting some hope in a plan to re-zone the city and annex the notorious inner suburbs, or banlieues, where the terror plot was born. In what would be perhaps the greatest redesign of Paris since Baron Haussmann laid out its famed boulevards in the mid-19th Century, the “Métropole du Grand Paris” would attempt to bring the poor, heavily immigrant neighborhoods...

Inspired by a YouTube video in which a New York woman filmed all the sexist remarks she experienced while walking through the streets of her city, Zvika Klein, a reporter for Jewish news outlet NRG decided to walk the streets of Paris. In the wake of the attack on the kosher supermarket last month, Klein wanted to see if anti-Semitism was really just “random” (as President Obama would have us believe). Klein wore a yarmulke (skullcap) and tzitzit (ritual tassles) as he walked around Paris with a bodyguard while photographer Dov Belhassen documented his day using a GoPro camera hidden...

errorism: As in Paris, where the White House insists four Jews in a kosher market were randomly selected for slaughter, the statement condemning IS beheading 21 Egyptians omits a key fact: all were Christians. Speaking of the Chapel Hill, N.C., murder of three Muslims, President Obama, as his FBI began an investigation into whether it was a "hate crime," issued a statement saying that "no one in the United States of America should ever be targeted because of who they are, what they look like or how they worship." Indeed not. Yet, we could find no such sentiment or statement...

Saverne (France) (AFP) - French prosecutors said Monday they had taken five teenagers into custody suspected of vandalising hundreds of Jewish graves, an act that prompted fresh pleas for Jews not to turn their back on France. The boys are aged between 15 and 17 and all come from Sarre-Union in Alsace, eastern France, where around 300 tombs were defaced and damaged on Thursday. The youngest came forward after seeing the scale of the reaction across the country to the vandalism, prosecutor Philippe Vannier said. "Apparently, he was very, very affected by the scale of the reaction to this affair,...

PARIS—French police detained five teenage boys for questioning in relation to the desecration of a Jewish cemetery in the eastern part of the country, an incident that has raised anxiety among French Jews about their security. Philippe Vannier, a French state prosecutor in Saverne in the Alsace region, told a news conference on Monday that one teen had turned himself in, which then led the police to four others who are suspected of knocking over and vandalizing about 250 out of the 400 tombstones at the cemetery. Mr. Vannier said the five youths “had no known ideological views that could...

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls on Monday slammed the attacks in Denmark by Islamist terrorist Omar Abdel Hamid Hussein on Saturday, in which two people were murdered, as being an act of "Islamo-fascism." Responding to the attacks in Copenhagen and the attacks on Paris last month, Valls said "to combat Islamo-fascism, for that is what it should be called, our strength must come from unity," reports AFP. Valls also responded to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's call for European Jews to come home to Israel in the face of widespread anti-Semitism and violence on the continent, noting Netanyahu is "in the...

Five adolescents aged 15 to 17 have been taken into custody in eastern France for questioning over a massive vandalism attack against Jewish graves, a local prosecutor said on Monday. All five are from the region of Sarre-Union in Alsace, where around 300 tombs were defaced over the weekend. The youngest came forward after being shocked by the massive reaction across the country to the vandalism, prosecutor Philippe Vannier said. "Apparently, he was very very affected by the scale of the reaction to this affair, including the statements from the highest state authorities," Vannier told reporters. The boy, who was...

France’s interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve described act in Sarre-Union as “despicable” France’s interior minister said several hundreds of tombs had been defaced at a Jewish cemetery in the east of the country, in what he called “a despicable act”. “The country will not tolerate this new injury which goes against the values that all French people share,” said Bernard Cazeneuve, without giving further details of the incident in the town of Sarre-Union. “Every effort will be made to identify, question and bring to justice the person or persons responsible for this ignominious act,” he added. France’s prime minister Manuel Valls,...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AltyhmrIFgo

...Al-Muhallab said, “You must use deception in war, for it is more effective than reinforcements.” Some methods of deception include: a. Planting spies. b. Reconnaissance. c. Feigning an intent to attack an area other than the actual target, for when the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam) wanted to attack one area, he would give his army the impression they were going to attack another. “If a man’s chest is too narrow to hold his own secret, then the chest of the one with whom he stores the secret is even narrower” [Poetry]. And be on guard against your enemy at...

I'm coming out of a week-and-a-half of sub-par health, and playing catch-up on the last few days' news. Much of it is just new trees in the same old forest: the remorseless retreat of American power in the world - ie, "Yemen Rebels Seize U.S. Embassy Vehicles As Diplomats Flee". But some of it is almost too cute. In Paris, the street artist Combo has been beaten up by four "young people" who objected to his "Co-Exist" poster: Combo declined to discuss the identity of his assailants. "It would only add fuel to the fire," he told the French newspaper......

I don’t understand why folks are giving President Obama and his spokes-minions such a hard time over his insistence that Ahmedy Coulibaly, the terrorist who just happened to be Muslim committing terrorism that had nothing to do with Islam, was just “randomly” picking out folks in Paris to kill when he randomly came upon a grocery that just happened to be Jewish and, coincidentally, to have Jews in it, whom he randomly killed. Sure, we know Coulibaly called a French TV station during the siege, said he was loyal to the Islamic State that has nothing to do with Islam,...

Josh Earnest        ✔ @PressSec Follow Our view has not changed. Terror attack at Paris Kosher market was motivated by anti-Semitism. POTUS didn't intend to suggest otherwise. 1:30 PM - 10 Feb 2015 So now Obama is trying to walk back his foolish statement that the Paris Kosher supermarket terror attack was a 'random' attack. Does he really mean it? Or was the outrage over such an obviously anti-Semitic and wrong statement too much for the Obama PR machine to leave it out there? I'm inclined that he meant to say 'random' just like he meant to compare 'Palestinian suffering' since...

France is looking at the sophisticated propaganda, indoctrination and other methods used to recruit terrorists, including social media and video games, as part of its wide-ranging campaign to eradicate “the devastating force of terrorism,” the country’s justice minister said Tuesday. Christiane Taubira told an open meeting of the U.N. Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee that following last month’s attacks on the Charlie Hebdo weekly newspaper and a kosher supermarket that killed 20 people, including three gunmen, France is also asking what draws recruits to view terrible violence as “a noble cause.” And it is examining the fascination with crime and death,...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House and State Department struggled Tuesday to clarify President Barack Obama's suggestion that last month's deadly shooting at a kosher deli in Paris was random, despite the administration's earlier assertions that the attack was anti-Semitic. Obama, in describing terror threats during a lengthy interview with the online news site Vox, said the American people were right to be concerned "when you've got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris." Administration officials at first defended Obama's comments, with White House spokesman Josh...

President Obama has raised some eyebrows by suggesting that the shooting at a Kosher supermarket in Paris last month was “random.” It was a comment the president made in making the case that the media overstates the terrorist threat and that his job fighting terrorism is akin to a big-city mayor fighting crime. Asked about the president's suggestion that the market was not targeted by the group because it was Kosher, White House spokesman Josh Earnest doubled down on Obama's characterization that the selection of target was "random." Here's my exchange with Earnest at today's White House press briefing:

President Barack Obama has called the terror attack on Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris last month an act of random violence, rather than a terror attack or an antisemitic attack. Obama’s remark appears in an interview with Matt Yglesias of Vox.com. The president calls the attackers “violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.” He elides past the religion of the attackers or the victims in an attack that claimed four innocent lives. Obama was responding to a sympathetic question by Yglesias about whether “the media sometimes overstates...