Sunday Post

The terrorist attack in Barcelona which claimed the lives of fourteen people was supposed to be much larger:

In the suspected extremist cell's final days, the group accumulated more than 100 gas canisters, blew up a house in a botched effort to make bombs, drove a van through Barcelona's storied Las Ramblas promenade, and attacked beachside tourists, Spanish authorities said.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attacks that killed at least 14 people and left scores wounded. Five of the dozen were shot dead by police. ...

Police have identified 12 members of the cell, but three remained unaccounted for Sunday. Two are believed to have been killed when the house where the plot was hatched exploded Wednesday, Catalan police official Josep Lluis Trapero told reporters Sunday.

Complicating the manhunt for the suspected fugitive and any other possible accomplices, though, was the fact that police so far have been unable to pinpoint who remained at large. The explosion in Alcanar, 300 kilometres (186 miles) south of Ripoll, nearly obliterated the bomb makers along with the house. A police official has said the imam, Abdelbaki Es Satty, is thought to be one of them.

**

The Spanish newspaper El Español has noted that the jihadist cell had a stockpile of explosives at a nearby property in Alcanar (Tarragona) and intended to use three vans to detonate them in three different points of the city in order to inflict the greatest possible damage. An accidental explosion at the Alcanar estate on Wednesday left the terrorists without ammunition and forced them to improvise the vehicle attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils, the report states.

“They were preparing one or several attacks in Barcelona and an explosion in Alcanar stopped this as they no longer had the material they needed to commit attacks of an even bigger scope,” said Josep Lluis Trapero of Catalonia’s police.

The explosion killed one jihadists and left another in serious condition.

The prime target of the attack was meant to be the Catholic Sagrada Familia (Holy Family) basilica, an enormous neo-gothic structure designed by Spanish artist Antoni Gaudí, which draws huge numbers of visitors and pilgrims each day. Construction of the still unfinished church began in 1882 and is projected for completion in 2026.

According to reports, the terrorists had chosen the Basilica of the Sagrada Familia as their main target because it is a symbol of the city and of the Christian religion, as well as for the massive flow of visitors. During 2016, the church was visited by some 4.5 million people, and more than 20 million people came to view the structure from the outside.

Also:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has a message for asylum seekers: crossing illegally into the country doesn't offer an advantage when it comes to obtaining refugee status in Canada.

"If I could directly speak to people seeking asylum, I'd like to remind them there's no advantage," Trudeau said at a news conference Sunday in Montreal. 

Yes, about that:

Are you one of the millions of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. afraid of being deported? Come to Canada! An asylum-seeker worried your refugee claim will be denied in America? Welcome to Canada! Paid a paltry wage in Mexico? Head on up to Canada!

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau began broadcasting this heart-warming message in late January as a not-so-subtle subtweet about President Donald Trump's travel ban.

"To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada" he tweeted on Jan. 28, followed by a picture of him greeting a refugee family.

And:

A Toronto man is named on an Interpol list of individuals suspected to belong to an ISIS suicide brigade, according to a Canadian expert on radicalization and foreign fighters.

Tabirul Hasib first disappeared five years ago when he booked a flight to the Middle East along with three other Toronto men: Malik Abdul (better known as Abdul Malik) and two others — Nur and Adib — whose last names are not known.

How could this "removing the doors altogether" policy ever go wrong?


(Sidebar: Trudeau, as usual, was nowhere near anything construed as work or even present at something for all Canadians like the seventy-fifth anniversary of the failed Dieppe raid. He was too busy at the pervie parade in Montreal.)




The man described as an asylum-seeker deliberately targeted women:

A Moroccan man who was arrested for killing two women in a knife rampage was an asylum seeker who appeared to have targeted women in Finland's first terrorism-related attack, police and a Red Cross official said on Saturday.

The 18-year-old suspect, arrested in the city of Turku following Friday's attack in which eight other people - six of them women - were wounded, arrived in Finland last year, police said. Police shot the suspect in the leg before his arrest.

Police also arrested four other Moroccan men over possible links to him and issued an international arrest warrant for a sixth Moroccan, they said.

Finnish broadcaster MTV, citing an unnamed source, said the main suspect had been denied asylum in Finland, although police said only he had been "part of the asylum process".

Lebanon has begun its offensive against ISIS:

Lebanon’s U.S.-backed army on Saturday launched its biggest military operation yet against Islamic State militants who in 2014 gained a foothold along the tiny Mediterranean country’s border with Syria.

That would only work if: (a) people could read the material and (b) they were interested in reading the material:

For tens of thousands of refugees stuck in Greece for the past two years after European states shut their borders in rapid succession, survival is no longer an issue.

Instead, boredom and creeping despair about their future are their new enemies as they wait for months, even years, for their applications to relocate elsewhere in Europe to be processed.

Now, at least two separate initiatives have emerged to help refugees fill the long hours of their day.

One of them is Echo Refugee Library -- a minivan fitted with shelves carrying over 1,000 books that does a weekly round of refugee camps in the greater Athens area, plus poorer districts of the capital where many refugees live in UN-rented flats.

The goal of the initiative is to "make culture accessible to all," says Esther Ten Zijthoff, 25, the Dutch-American coordinator of the project.

The books -- in English, Greek, French, Arabic, Kurdish and Farsi -- have been provided by benefactors in Greece, Belgium, Britain and Lebanon or purchased with money donated online.

Ali, a 26-year-old Syrian, is among those who never misses a delivery at the food market.

"I really love having something to read. It does me good," he tells AFP, an Agatha Christie novel under his arm.

The English mistress of the whodunit is proving a top draw for refugees, says Zijthoff.

"The mystery and romance present in her stories are well-liked by Arab speakers. We would like to have her whole collection."

Language dictionaries are also in demand, with many readers borrowing them to photocopy and keep close at hand.

The widow of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo has re-surfaced after her husband's death:

The widow of Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo has appeared for the first time since her husband's funeral in an online video in which she said she was recuperating and asked for time to mourn.

Liu Xia had been under effective house arrest since her husband, a prominent dissident since the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, won the Nobel prize in 2010. He died on July 13 after being denied permission to leave the country for treatment of late-stage liver cancer.

Liu Xia had been allowed to visit him in prison about once a month and to remain with him while he was treated in his final days.

However, friends of the couple have told Reuters that they have been unable to speak with her since after her husband's funeral, after which they say she returned to Beijing and has been staying with a friend.

In a roughly one minute-long video posted on YouTube on Friday, Liu Xia speaks directly to the camera while holding a lit cigarette. She was sitting on a white sofa in front of a pot of tea in what appeared to be the living room of a home.

"I am outside recuperating, everyone please grant me time to mourn, time for my heart to heal and one day I will be able to face you all in a healthy state," she said. It was not immediately clear what she meant by "outside".

And:

Traders from North Korea visit Yuan Huan's shop in the Chinese border city of Dandong several times a month to place orders, bringing their own translators and wads of cash.

Yuan, manager of Sangle Solar Power, said sales to North Koreans have soared in the past two years, one of the border businesses still thriving despite growing US pressure for China to limit commerce with the Stalinist regime.

Since North Korea mostly relies on outdated generators, blackouts are common and solar panels are prized for their role as backup power.

This failed technology is just compacting the sorrow.




I'm surprised someone isn't threatening to tear these down. That seems to be all the rage these days:

The ongoing controversy over Confederate statues, which has seen these monuments removed from public spaces in more than a dozen locations in the past couple years, is the renewal of a historical tradition that has been going on for as long as humans have erected such monuments: the symbolic removal and recontextualization of artifacts from the past that are no longer relevant or welcome.

Putting aside antiquity, in the recent past, this has included the removal of statues of a seemingly endless march of former leaders, all over the world: Alberto Stroessner, Josef Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Muammar al-Qaddafi, Chiang Kei-shek, Saparmurat Niyazov, Hafez al-Assad, Hosni Mubarak, Enver Hoxha, Saddam Hussein, and more. Some of these statues are destroyed—symbolically, even ritually—but others are relocated, as is the case with most Confederate statues today.