Four or five scary articles
Nov. 5th, 2005 04:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solarbirdThe first four are the big ones; the fifth is interesting just because the rioting isn't really slowing down. France gets to face some serious, serious problems now.
South Korea to dissolve the Combined Forces Command?
"Why Paris is Burning"
Sarkozy touches nerve over 'unFrench' future
Military dumped thousands of tons of chemical weapons and nuclear waste off American shores before 1970; they don't know how much; they don't remember where; it's starting to show up.
Rioting spreads across France
----- 1 -----
U.S. officer's private memo paints a doomsday scenario for Korea
Special to World Tribune.com
EAST-ASIA-INTEL.COM Friday, November 4, 2005
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/05/front2453679.1506944443.html
SEOUL — U.S. military officers in Korea are privately saying that North Korea has succeeded in its campaign to turn the South Korean public against the United States and break up the once rock-solid U.S.-Republic of Korea military alliance.
A senior U.S. officer, in a private memorandum to a network of friends and pro-U.S. contacts in Korea, predicted that in the next one to five years the Combined Forces Command, responsible for U.S.-ROK operations and training, will be dissolved while the United Nations command, set up in 1950 at the outset of the Korean War, will move to Hawaii.
The implications, he suggested, are dire for South Korea's ability to cope with a crumbling, heavily-armed communist North Korea with powerful anti-U.S. allies in the neighborhood.
The forecasts in the communication lead a list of major shifts that he and other officers view as the logical result of pressure on U.S. forces to leave this now prosperous nation, as well as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s program for downsizing and realigning U.S. forces in Korea.
[More at URL]
----- 2 -----
Why Paris is Burning
By AMIR TAHERI Fri Nov 4, 6:00 AM ET
Long URL here
AS THE night falls, the "troubles" start — and the pattern is always the same.
Bands of youths in balaclavas start by setting fire to parked cars, break shop windows with baseball bats, wreck public telephones and ransack cinemas, libraries and schools. When the police arrive on the scene, the rioters attack them with stones, knives and baseball bats.
The police respond by firing tear-gas grenades and, on occasions, blank shots in the air. Sometimes the youths fire back — with real bullets.
These scenes are not from the West Bank but from 20 French cities, mostly close to Paris, that have been plunged into a European version of the intifada that at the time of writing appears beyond control.
The troubles first began in Clichy-sous-Bois, an underprivileged suburb east of Paris, a week ago. France's bombastic interior minister, Nicholas Sarkozy, responded by sending over 400 heavily armed policemen to "impose the laws of the republic," and promised to crush "the louts and hooligans" within the day. Within a few days, however, it had dawned on anyone who wanted to know that this was no "outburst by criminal elements" that could be handled with a mixture of braggadocio and batons.
By Monday, everyone in Paris was speaking of "an unprecedented crisis." Both Sarkozy and his boss, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, had to cancel foreign trips to deal with the riots.
How did it all start? The accepted account is that sometime last week, a group of young boys in Clichy engaged in one of their favorite sports: stealing parts of parked cars.
Normally, nothing dramatic would have happened, as the police have not been present in that suburb for years.
The problem came when one of the inhabitants, a female busybody, telephoned the police and reported the thieving spree taking place just opposite her building. The police were thus obliged to do something — which meant entering a city that, as noted, had been a no-go area for them.
Once the police arrived on the scene, the youths — who had been reigning over Clichy pretty unmolested for years — got really angry. A brief chase took place in the street, and two of the youths, who were not actually chased by the police, sought refuge in a cordoned-off area housing a power pylon. Both were electrocuted.
Once news of their deaths was out, Clichy was all up in arms.
With cries of "God is great," bands of youths armed with whatever they could get hold of went on a rampage and forced the police to flee.
The French authorities could not allow a band of youths to expel the police from French territory. So they hit back — sending in Special Forces, known as the CRS, with armored cars and tough rules of engagement.
Within hours, the original cause of the incidents was forgotten and the issue jelled around a demand by the representatives of the rioters that the French police leave the "occupied territories." By midweek, the riots had spread to three of the provinces neighboring Paris, with a population of 5.5 million.
[More at URL]
----- 3 -----
Sarkozy touches nerve over 'unFrench' future
By Bronwen Maddox
The Times of London
November 04, 2005
Foreign Editor's Briefing
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-1856834,00.html
THE fight within the French Cabinet brought to a head by the riots may go on longer than the images of 250 burning cars. It is even possible that Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister, blamed for inflaming the rioters and looking like a casualty this week, may emerge ahead.
A week of riots in the suburbs has exposed the split in the Cabinet about how to deal with France’s immigrants. It has pitted Sarkozy against his rival to succeed Jacques Chirac as President in 18 months’ time — the Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin.
But it is also a philosophical rift. De Villepin stands for those who would preserve the principles of equality and “Frenchness” in dealing with immigrants: demanding that they remove their headscarves and fit in with the culture.
Sarkozy has spun a complicated, twin-stranded message. He has advocated tough action against violence, in an appeal to the right.
But he has also backed affirmative action in jobs and education, in an appeal to the centre-left. He has provoked a row in his own party by suggesting that immigrants should be able to vote in local elections.
On Monday morning it looked as though this saga might be the downfall of the endlessly ambitious Sarkozy. His weekend remarks that criminals were “scum” and his vow to “hose down” the lawless estates were taken as a declaration of war by some immigrants, and shocked centre-left commentators.
[More at URL]
----- 4 -----
Decades of dumping chemical arms leave a risky legacy
BY JOHN M.R. BULL
Daily Press (Newport News, Va.)
November 3, 2005
http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/nation/13070288.htm
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. - In the summer of 2004, a clam-dredging operation off New Jersey pulled up an old artillery shell.
The long-submerged World War I-era explosive was filled with a black tarlike substance.
Bomb disposal technicians from Dover Air Force Base, Del., were brought in to dismantle it. Three of them were injured - one hospitalized with large pus-filled blisters on an arm and hand.
The shell was filled with mustard gas in solid form.
What was long feared by the few military officials in the know had come to pass: Chemical weapons that the Army dumped at sea decades ago finally ended up on shore in the United States.
It's long been known that some chemical weapons went into the ocean, but records obtained by the Daily Press show that the previously classified weapons-dumping program was far more extensive than ever suspected.
The Army now admits that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste - either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels.
[More at URL]
----- 5 -----
Rioting Spreads From Paris Across France
Nov 5, 10:39 AM (ET)
By JAMEY KEATEN
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20051105/D8DMD4DG0.html
AUBERVILLIERS, France (AP) - Marauding youths torched nearly 900 vehicles, stoned paramedics and burned a nursery school in a ninth night of violence that spread from Paris suburbs to towns around France, police said Saturday. Authorities arrested more than 250 people overnight - a sweep unprecedented since the unrest began.
For the first time, authorities used a helicopter to chase down youths armed with gasoline bombs who raced from arson attack to arson attack, national police spokesman Patrick Hamon said.
The violence, which was concentrated in neighborhoods with large African and Muslim populations but has since spread, has forced France to address the simmering anger of its suburbs, where immigrants and their French-born children live on the margins of society.
With 897 vehicles destroyed by daybreak Saturday, it was the worst one-day toll since unrest broke out after the Oct. 27 accidental electrocution of two teenagers who believed police were chasing them. Five hundred cars were burned a night earlier.
In a particularly malevolent turn, youths in the eastern Paris suburb of Meaux prevented paramedics from evacuating a sick person from a housing project, pelting rescuers with rocks and torching the awaiting ambulance, an Interior Ministry official said.
[More at URL]
South Korea to dissolve the Combined Forces Command?
"Why Paris is Burning"
Sarkozy touches nerve over 'unFrench' future
Military dumped thousands of tons of chemical weapons and nuclear waste off American shores before 1970; they don't know how much; they don't remember where; it's starting to show up.
Rioting spreads across France
----- 1 -----
U.S. officer's private memo paints a doomsday scenario for Korea
Special to World Tribune.com
EAST-ASIA-INTEL.COM Friday, November 4, 2005
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/05/front2453679.1506944443.html
SEOUL — U.S. military officers in Korea are privately saying that North Korea has succeeded in its campaign to turn the South Korean public against the United States and break up the once rock-solid U.S.-Republic of Korea military alliance.
A senior U.S. officer, in a private memorandum to a network of friends and pro-U.S. contacts in Korea, predicted that in the next one to five years the Combined Forces Command, responsible for U.S.-ROK operations and training, will be dissolved while the United Nations command, set up in 1950 at the outset of the Korean War, will move to Hawaii.
The implications, he suggested, are dire for South Korea's ability to cope with a crumbling, heavily-armed communist North Korea with powerful anti-U.S. allies in the neighborhood.
The forecasts in the communication lead a list of major shifts that he and other officers view as the logical result of pressure on U.S. forces to leave this now prosperous nation, as well as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s program for downsizing and realigning U.S. forces in Korea.
[More at URL]
----- 2 -----
Why Paris is Burning
By AMIR TAHERI Fri Nov 4, 6:00 AM ET
Long URL here
AS THE night falls, the "troubles" start — and the pattern is always the same.
Bands of youths in balaclavas start by setting fire to parked cars, break shop windows with baseball bats, wreck public telephones and ransack cinemas, libraries and schools. When the police arrive on the scene, the rioters attack them with stones, knives and baseball bats.
The police respond by firing tear-gas grenades and, on occasions, blank shots in the air. Sometimes the youths fire back — with real bullets.
These scenes are not from the West Bank but from 20 French cities, mostly close to Paris, that have been plunged into a European version of the intifada that at the time of writing appears beyond control.
The troubles first began in Clichy-sous-Bois, an underprivileged suburb east of Paris, a week ago. France's bombastic interior minister, Nicholas Sarkozy, responded by sending over 400 heavily armed policemen to "impose the laws of the republic," and promised to crush "the louts and hooligans" within the day. Within a few days, however, it had dawned on anyone who wanted to know that this was no "outburst by criminal elements" that could be handled with a mixture of braggadocio and batons.
By Monday, everyone in Paris was speaking of "an unprecedented crisis." Both Sarkozy and his boss, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, had to cancel foreign trips to deal with the riots.
How did it all start? The accepted account is that sometime last week, a group of young boys in Clichy engaged in one of their favorite sports: stealing parts of parked cars.
Normally, nothing dramatic would have happened, as the police have not been present in that suburb for years.
The problem came when one of the inhabitants, a female busybody, telephoned the police and reported the thieving spree taking place just opposite her building. The police were thus obliged to do something — which meant entering a city that, as noted, had been a no-go area for them.
Once the police arrived on the scene, the youths — who had been reigning over Clichy pretty unmolested for years — got really angry. A brief chase took place in the street, and two of the youths, who were not actually chased by the police, sought refuge in a cordoned-off area housing a power pylon. Both were electrocuted.
Once news of their deaths was out, Clichy was all up in arms.
With cries of "God is great," bands of youths armed with whatever they could get hold of went on a rampage and forced the police to flee.
The French authorities could not allow a band of youths to expel the police from French territory. So they hit back — sending in Special Forces, known as the CRS, with armored cars and tough rules of engagement.
Within hours, the original cause of the incidents was forgotten and the issue jelled around a demand by the representatives of the rioters that the French police leave the "occupied territories." By midweek, the riots had spread to three of the provinces neighboring Paris, with a population of 5.5 million.
[More at URL]
----- 3 -----
Sarkozy touches nerve over 'unFrench' future
By Bronwen Maddox
The Times of London
November 04, 2005
Foreign Editor's Briefing
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-1856834,00.html
THE fight within the French Cabinet brought to a head by the riots may go on longer than the images of 250 burning cars. It is even possible that Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister, blamed for inflaming the rioters and looking like a casualty this week, may emerge ahead.
A week of riots in the suburbs has exposed the split in the Cabinet about how to deal with France’s immigrants. It has pitted Sarkozy against his rival to succeed Jacques Chirac as President in 18 months’ time — the Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin.
But it is also a philosophical rift. De Villepin stands for those who would preserve the principles of equality and “Frenchness” in dealing with immigrants: demanding that they remove their headscarves and fit in with the culture.
Sarkozy has spun a complicated, twin-stranded message. He has advocated tough action against violence, in an appeal to the right.
But he has also backed affirmative action in jobs and education, in an appeal to the centre-left. He has provoked a row in his own party by suggesting that immigrants should be able to vote in local elections.
On Monday morning it looked as though this saga might be the downfall of the endlessly ambitious Sarkozy. His weekend remarks that criminals were “scum” and his vow to “hose down” the lawless estates were taken as a declaration of war by some immigrants, and shocked centre-left commentators.
[More at URL]
----- 4 -----
Decades of dumping chemical arms leave a risky legacy
BY JOHN M.R. BULL
Daily Press (Newport News, Va.)
November 3, 2005
http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/nation/13070288.htm
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. - In the summer of 2004, a clam-dredging operation off New Jersey pulled up an old artillery shell.
The long-submerged World War I-era explosive was filled with a black tarlike substance.
Bomb disposal technicians from Dover Air Force Base, Del., were brought in to dismantle it. Three of them were injured - one hospitalized with large pus-filled blisters on an arm and hand.
The shell was filled with mustard gas in solid form.
What was long feared by the few military officials in the know had come to pass: Chemical weapons that the Army dumped at sea decades ago finally ended up on shore in the United States.
It's long been known that some chemical weapons went into the ocean, but records obtained by the Daily Press show that the previously classified weapons-dumping program was far more extensive than ever suspected.
The Army now admits that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste - either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels.
[More at URL]
----- 5 -----
Rioting Spreads From Paris Across France
Nov 5, 10:39 AM (ET)
By JAMEY KEATEN
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20051105/D8DMD4DG0.html
AUBERVILLIERS, France (AP) - Marauding youths torched nearly 900 vehicles, stoned paramedics and burned a nursery school in a ninth night of violence that spread from Paris suburbs to towns around France, police said Saturday. Authorities arrested more than 250 people overnight - a sweep unprecedented since the unrest began.
For the first time, authorities used a helicopter to chase down youths armed with gasoline bombs who raced from arson attack to arson attack, national police spokesman Patrick Hamon said.
The violence, which was concentrated in neighborhoods with large African and Muslim populations but has since spread, has forced France to address the simmering anger of its suburbs, where immigrants and their French-born children live on the margins of society.
With 897 vehicles destroyed by daybreak Saturday, it was the worst one-day toll since unrest broke out after the Oct. 27 accidental electrocution of two teenagers who believed police were chasing them. Five hundred cars were burned a night earlier.
In a particularly malevolent turn, youths in the eastern Paris suburb of Meaux prevented paramedics from evacuating a sick person from a housing project, pelting rescuers with rocks and torching the awaiting ambulance, an Interior Ministry official said.
[More at URL]
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-06 04:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-06 08:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-06 08:44 pm (UTC)http://www.jp.dk/aar/artikel:aid=3354408/
It's not in english, so here are some translations from it:
Rosenhøj Mall has several nights in a row been the scene of the worst riots in Århus for years. "This area belongs to us", the youths proclaim. Sunday evening saw a new arson attack.
Their words sound like a clear declaration of war on the Danish society. Police must stay out. The area belongs to immigrants.
Four youths sit on the wall in Rosenhøj Mall sunday afternoon, calling themselves spokesmen for the groups, that three nights in a row have ravaged and tried to burn down the restaurant and other stores.
Around the parking lot, cars with youngsters from the immigrant community are swarming, and many are walking around, greeting each others with a sense of victory after the worst riots in Århus in years.
Every night 30-40 youts took part, especially immigrants.
Only two were arrested.
That was a victory.
"We knew, you would be coming. We are spokesmen", said a young man with a black knitted hood on his head, when JP (Jyllands-Posten - Henrik) visited Rosenhøj Mall sunday. He was angry. Very angry. Behind him the pub Hot Shot has scars after the attacks with cobble stones, and the stores along the parking lot besides the small mall have their windows covered with adhesive tape in a spiderweb pattern.
Four hours after the short meeting, Falck (Danish privat emergency service - Henrik) sent a group of fire engines under police escort to the nursery Kjærslund on Søndervangs Allé, right across the street from Rosenhøj Mall.
Gasoline through the window
A window had been shattered at the back of the house, and the fire had been blazing, apparently because of gasoline poured onto the floor, then lit.
Falck stopped on Viby Square, a couple kilometers from the site of the arson attack, waiting for the police to turn up so they could be escorted to the nursery. Two nights earlier, other Falck-employees were threatened, when they were covering up broken shop-windows.
Cobblestones had smashed the shop-windows from one end of the mall to the other. The police wrote in their report saturday night, that the youths had their stones with them in bags, when they came to Rosenhøj.
Cobblestones against bakery.
Saturday morning a 16-year-old somali boy was incarcerated, accused of aggravated assault, as he friday evening threw a cobblestone through a window in the bakery. The stone passed closely by baker Børge Svaløs face. ..
He calls himself 100 percent Palestinian, born in a refugee camp in Lebanon 19 years ago, and now out of work in Denmark.
"The police has to stay away. This is our area. We decide what goes down here".
And then the bit with the drawings of the prophet Muhammed comes around:
We are tired of what we see happening with our prophet. We are tired of Jyllands-Posten. I know it isnt you, but we wont accept what Jyllands-Posten has done to the prophet", he says aggressively, and the others nod approvingly.
Planned for three weeks
To of them are Turks, and it is the first time, that Turks and Palestinians act together, the 19-year-old says.
"We have planned this for three weeks. That is why only two were arrested saturday nigh. The police will cordon off it all. But we know the ways out", he claims, and then disappears, munching on a piece of pizza from Fun Pizza.
The pizzerias windows are also held together by adhesive tape after the attacks with cobblestones.
Thanks to http://viking-observer.blogspot.com/2005/10/war-in-france-war-in-denmark.html for the translation.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-06 11:01 pm (UTC)Wow, a whole 30-40 people rioting. There’s a nation-wide catastrophe for you.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-06 11:08 pm (UTC)This stuff is also going on in Sweden and The Netherlands.
The point is, the police and the fire departments are afraid to go to these places without protection, and regular people and businesses are being run out. Be as politically correct as you want and just brush it off, but sooner or later they'll be coming after you too.
Ignorance is not bliss.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-07 12:48 am (UTC)In my experience, news media exaggerate this sort of thing, not minimize it. Just because you’d like to see all of mainland Europe go up in flames to vindicate your opinions of Muslims, doesn’t mean it’s actually going to happen. Learn to separate out your wishful thinking from the facts on the ground.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-07 06:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-07 02:53 pm (UTC)Same in France, everything I've read, heard and seen from there (and norwegian media gives fairly comprehensive coverage) indicates that the only thing all the rioters have in common is that they are young, poor and unemployed. Religion and immigration status varies.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-07 10:16 pm (UTC)The downside is that this makes entry into the middle class difficult for everyone, particularly recent immigrants or children of immigrants. The poor aren't likely to starve or go homeless in France, but they have no opportunity to advance their position by entering the middle class. This builds resentment, and social decay, and crime. The scary thing to consider is that even before these riots began, the burning of cars was a nightly occurrence in the suburbs. The status quo was desperate enough.
There are no easy answers. Assimilation is a two-way process, and it's broken in both directions. Some immigrants don't want to become more French (though most immigrant families become more French over the generations even if they don't want to), and just as many people in the mainstream don't want them to. Economically, becoming more like Britain or the US isn't likely to help, as we each have our own problems with culturally motivated violence within the more free market model. France's challenge, and that of the world as a whole, is to find a way to create a sustainable middle class lifestyle for a much larger number of people.
Paranoid fears that this is a Muslim conspiracy to bring down Western civilization just make things worse. This is a Western problem that goes to the heart of our indigenous economic, social, and cultural systems. There are no easy answers, and we can't blame this on non-Westerners.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-06 04:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-10 07:51 am (UTC)