Lebanon ( Lebanese army fires at Assad's " Syrian helicopters " used to kill women and children )

BAALBEK, Lebanon: The Lebanese army used its air defense systems against Syrian helicopters on Monday after they carried out a raid inside Lebanese territory, a military source told AFP.
It was the first time the Lebanese army has responded to Syrian attacks on its territory, which have multiplied as the conflict in its eastern neighbor has intensified, the source said.
“In accordance with the orders of the army command, anti-aircraft guns were fired in the direction of Syrian helicopters that bombed Khirbet Dawud near Arsal,” in the area near the Syrian border, the source told AFP.

“It is the first time that the Lebanese army has used its anti-aircraft defense systems” to respond to Syrian raids, the source added.
Lebanese officials reported no casualties from the Syrian raid. It was not clear whether the retaliatory fire had hit the Syrian aircraft.
The Lebanese army has in the past threatened to respond to cross-border fire from Syria but has not previously done so.
On June 12, it issued a rare warning to the Syrian government, saying it would respond “immediately” to any new “violation” after a raid by the army on the Arsal area, a hub of support for the rebels, which is also home to tens of thousands of Syrian refugees.
But it had not previously carried out its threat, despite repeated spillovers from the fighting over the border.
The anti-aircraft fire came a day after Lebanese President Michel Sleiman announced that Saudi Arabia had pledged $3 billion for the under-equipped army to buy French weapons.
Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah militia, which controls much of the border region apart from the mainly Sunni Arsal district, is a leading ally of the Syrian regime.
Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries have denounced the Assad regime for waging war against Syria's Sunni population

Arab News ( Middle East cartoons - Lol )

2014 ( Happy New Year Cartoon - 2014 ) Arab News Lol

Bangladesh ( 1 Dead in protest over parties ties to " War Crimes " )

DHAKA: Security forces and opposition activists clashed in Bangladesh’s capital, leaving at least one person dead, as thousands of police took to the streets to foil a mass rally calling on Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to cancel upcoming elections.
Hasina’s rival, former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, was expected to address the rally later Sunday in defiance of a government ban on large political gatherings.
Reports said authorities had detained hundreds of people in a crackdown ahead of next weekend’s elections, further deepening the impoverished South Asian nation’s political crisis.


Security officials surrounded Zia’s home in Dhaka’s upscale Gulshan area, where most foreign embassies are located, and parked sand-laden trucks in an apparent effort to obstruct Zia from leaving her home. Police denied that the measures were taken to stop her from joining the rally.
Zia attempted to come out of her home, but police built a barricade that prevented her from getting to her car. TV video showed an angry Zia condemning Hasina’s government, saying, “Stop this.”
Meanwhile, thousands of security forces, mainly police, tried to prevent the activists from rallying.
A 21-year-old student was killed in Dhaka’s Malibagh area when security officials fired rubber bullets to disperse the activists, said police official Mozammel Haque.
Witnesses said the violence broke out after a group of activists from the opposition Jamaat-e-Islami party began marching in the streets.
Stick-wielding ruling party supporters chased stone-throwing opposition activists on the premises of the Supreme Court. Witnesses said dozens of people were injured in that violence.
Public transportation in Dhaka was suspended, cutting the capital off from the rest of the country. The opposition blamed police for preventing buses and other vehicles from traveling to the city. Traffic was thin on Dhaka’s usually clogged streets, with many people staying home in fear of violence.
Local media reported that more than 650 people had been detained since Friday as part of a nationwide crackdown ahead of the Jan. 5 elections, which the opposition is boycotting. Opposition parties said those detained are their activists, but police said they were taken in on specific charges to prevent acts of sabotage.
The opposition insists Hasina should resign and hand over power to an independent caretaker to oversee the polls. Hasina has rejected the demand and vowed to go ahead with the elections.
Sunday’s rally was seen as the last major attempt by the opposition to derail the election, but the protest was unlikely to succeed because of the government’s hard-line approach.
More than 150 people have died in political violence in Bangladesh since the crisis intensified in October. The conflict pits an opposition alliance led by Zia’s opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party against Hasina, who accuses Zia of protecting people being tried or convicted of war crimes involving the nation’s 1971 independence war against Pakistan.
Jamaat-e-Islami, the main partner of Zia’s party, wants the government to halt the war crimes trials of its leaders. Zia says the trials initiated by Hasina are politically motivated to weaken the opposition, an allegation the government has denied. Jamaat-e-Islami is banned from taking part in the election.
Many citizens are frustrated by the raging chaos in Bangladesh, which is struggling to overcome poverty, establish democracy and increase per capita income.
“Too much blood has been spilled in these past many weeks. We demand a stop to such bloodletting,” Dhaka’s Daily Star newspaper said in an editorial Sunday.
Businesses have also expressed their concern, saying the conflict is affecting the country’s progress in the manufacturing sector, including a burgeoning garment industry that earns more than $20 billion a year from exports

Syria ( Assad the " Child killer " drops TNT bombs on market ) Russia backs " Mad man"

BEIRUT: Regime airstrikes on the northern Syrian province of Aleppo have killed at least 517 people since Dec. 15, including 151 children, a monitor said on Sunday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a string of regime aerial attacks on the province, including second city Aleppo, with raids using explosives-packed barrels, had also killed 46 women.
At least 46 opposition fighters, including 34 rebels and 12 jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, but the majority of the dead were civilians, the Observatory said.
Recent weeks have seen a relentless aerial campaign targeting towns and villages across Aleppo province.

On Saturday, helicopters dropped TNT-packed barrels on a vegetable market and next to a hospital in Aleppo city, killing at least 25 civilians, including children.
The Britain-based Observatory, strongly condemned the raids, and urged the international community to intervene. “The Observatory considers all those who remain silent in the international community as complicit in the massacres that have been committed and continue to be committed by the Syrian regime,” it said.
Meanwhile, the leader of the eurosceptic UK Independence Party Nigel Farage said Sunday that Britain should take in Syrian refugees.
The comments are unexpected from Farage, who has led opposition to the lifting of limits on migrants from Bulgaria and Romania on January 1, 2014.
British Prime Minister David Cameron’s government has rejected calls from the UN and rights groups to resettle some of the most vulnerable of the estimated 2.3 million people who have fled the Syrian war.
“I think refugees are a very different thing to economic migration and I think that this country should honour the spirit of the 1951 declaration on refugee status that was agreed,” Farage told the BBC.

Syria ( Behind the numbers: Researching Syria's killed journalists )

By Jason Stern and Mark Robson/CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program

Mourners carry the coffin of Yasser Faisal al-Jumaili, who was killed on assignment in Syria, at his funeral in Falluja, Iraq, on December 8. (Reuters/Thaier Al-Sudani)

This year, CPJ researchers confirmed that at least 29 journalists died while covering the Syrian conflict. How did we arrive at that number?

Our research begins with the collection of possible cases to investigate. By closely following reports from news outlets, local journalist associations, press freedom groups, social media accounts, and human rights organizations, CPJ compiled a list of 159 names of potential cases where journalists died covering the conflict this year. This means CPJ learns of a new potential killed journalist in Syria almost every other day.
Every case must then go through a rigorous research process to ensure it falls within our mandate: journalists killed as a direct result of their work. This year, less than 20 percent of the cases that we reviewed made it through that process.
The first step is to ensure the individual is a journalist. CPJ does not distinguish between professional and amateur journalists like some organizations. We also do not fixate on labels commonly used in the Syrian conflict such as "media activist" and "citizen journalist." Instead, we care only about what the individual was doing. Did he or she show a consistent effort in gathering, producing, and publicly disseminating the news? That's a journalist in our book. 
Especially in highly polarized environments such as Syria, so-called journalistic objectivity does not factor into our decision whether to consider an individual a journalist. We have documented the killing of journalists in Syria from across the political spectrum, including those employed by pro-government and opposition outlets. We draw the line at direct incitement to violence or participation in violence.
But not every journalist falls within our mandate. The second step is to confirm the journalist died as a direct result of his or her work. In Syria, where more than 75 percent of journalists have been killed as a result of crossfire, that task is usually straightforward. It becomes much more difficult in cases where journalists were targeted individually. In those cases, CPJ looks for a motive that would link the murder with the individual's work.
All this can admittedly lead to what can only be described as arbitrary categorization in the chaotic brutality of war. Take for example the case of Syrian photographer Murhaf al-Modahi, who contributed to Agence France-Presse. He survived countless shells and bullets on duty, only to be killed by a rocket attack while returning home from a family party. We therefore did not include him in our list of journalists killed for their work--even though his death is no less tragic.
Even in a perfect reporting environment, our strict mandate leads to difficult debates over what constitutes journalism. We're constantly rehashing questions with no easy answers. You tell me: just how many YouTube videos does a journalist make?
And Syria is anything but a perfect reporting environment. Rumor, exaggeration, and mistruth fill the vacuum of reliable information. As much as possible, CPJ sticks to a strict journalistic standard of confirming our information with two independent sources. That means we have great confidence in what we report, but it also means we sometimes cannot confirm cases for a lack of trustworthy information. For many of the 159 cases we reviewed this year, we could not corroborate vital pieces of information, and they remain under investigation today.
If the motives behind a killing are unclear, but it is possible that a journalist died for his or her work, CPJ classifies the case as "unconfirmed." For example, Abdullah Sobhi al-Ghazawi, a videographer for SMART News Agency, was killed on his way to cover clashes in the southern city of Daraa on November 8, 2013. His record of journalism is undeniable, with work documenting the intense fighting and shelling all around Daraa. But CPJ found photographs of al-Ghazawi with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder as he is filming. His colleague, Jawad al-Musalama, told CPJ that al-Ghazawi was only posing with the rifle, but we are still investigating to determine whether he was carrying a weapon the day he died; if so, this would undermine his protected status as a non-combatant under international law.
CPJ's combination of a strict mandate, difficult reporting environment, and stringent journalistic standards means that our data are conservative and likely underestimate the true number of journalists killed for their work in Syria. But our data are reliable precisely because of that conservatism.
Other organizations that do similar reporting, like Reporters Without Borders, SKeyes, and the Syrian Journalists Association, all do tremendous work. They face the same challenges and debate the same questions we do, even as they may differ in mandates and methods. As a result, we have all arrived at different numbers of journalists killed in Syria this year. But ultimately we all agree on one fact: Syria is the deadliest country in the world to work as a journalist.

Saudi Arabia ( Prince to be " Executed " for Murder - Maybe NOT ) Blood money

Crown Prince Salman, deputy premier and minister of defense, has cleared the way for the possible execution of a prince convicted of murdering a Saudi citizen. This follows the refusal by the victim’s father to pardon the killer.
“Shariah shall be applied to all without exception,” said Prince Salman in a message to Interior Minister Prince Muhammad bin Naif.
“There is no difference between big and small, rich and poor. The powerful are weak before God’s law until others get their rights from them while the weak are powerful until their rights are protected.”
The directive further read: “Nobody is allowed to interfere with the judiciary’s decision. This is the tradition of this state. We are committed to following the Shariah.”
According to a report carried by sabq.org, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah had issued a Royal Decree to pronounce capital punishment for the prince if the reconciliation bid failed. The governorate of the region was instructed to mediate between the victim’s relatives and the killer.
But if they refused, the person shall be executed, the king said, stressing that the victim’s family should be under no pressure to win the pardon.
Prince Salman’s message followed a statement from the victim’s father that he was not ready to pardon the killer and that the reconciliation committee was not fair to him.
The father stated that he was not happy with the amount offered as blood money.
The crown prince attached the father’s statement with his message to the interior minister.
Saudis and expatriates applauded the crown prince’s stand, saying it gives them greater confidence in the Kingdom’s judiciary. “We are happy that the Shariah is enforced in the Kingdom,” one Saudi said, adding that it would ensure justice for all.
He praised Saudi leaders for their strong commitment to the enforcement of Shariah laws.