Bharat Rakshak

Millions of YouTube viewers have been captivated by the 'Syrian hero boy' who manages to rescue a little girl while under gunfire. Now a group of Norwegian filmmakers have told BBC Trending they are behind it. They say it was filmed on location in Malta this summer with the intention of being presented as real.

Lars Klevberg, a 34-year-old film director based in Oslo, wrote a script after watching news coverage of the conflict in Syria. He says he deliberately presented the film as reality in order to generate a discussion about children in conflict zones

In fact the film received funding from the Norwegian Film Institute (NFI) and the Audio and Visual Fund from Arts Council Norway in October 2013. The filmmakers say their application for funding made clear they wanted to upload the film to the internet without making it obvious it was real or fiction. They also claim that those who financed it were aware of, and supported, these intentions.

Cosmo_R wrote:^^^Spain v Catalonia

Popcorn time.

RSoami wrote:Spain and Italy`s economy are contracting. And this is causing enormous strain in the Eurozone.

DRESDEN (Germany): A record 15,000 people marched in eastern Germany against "asylum cheats" and the country's "Islamisation" in the latest show of strength of a growing far-right populist movement.

Chancellor Angela Merkel earlier cautioned Germans against falling prey to xenophobic "rabble-rousing", reacting to the nascent movement called "Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident" or PEGIDA.
...
Since the protests have rapidly grown in size and spawned smaller clones in half a dozen cities, a debate about immigration and refugees has gripped Germany, a country whose Nazi past makes expressions of xenophobia especially troubling.

Politicians have been stunned by the emergence in the city of Dresden of the nationalists who march against what they consider a broken immigration and asylum system and who vent deep anger at the political class and mainstream media.

The demonstrations have flared at a time when Germany, Europe's biggest economy, has become the continent's top destination for asylum seekers, and the world's number two destination for migrants after the United States.

The influx of refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and several African and Balkan countries has strained local governments, which have scrambled to house the newcomers in old schools, office blocks and army barracks.
...
"We don't want a flood of asylum seekers, we don't want Islamisation. We want to keep our country with our values. Is that so terrible? Does that make us Nazis? Is it a crime to be a patriot?"

While several known neo-Nazis have been spotted in the PEGIDA crowds, the rallies have been dominated not by jackbooted men with shorn heads but by disenchanted citizens who voice a string of grievances.

S Gurumurthy ‏@sgurumurthy 48s48 seconds ago

"@Serene_Meadows: Man shouting 'Allahu Akbar' drives into crowd in France, injures 11 http://ln.is/www.firstpost.com/wo/TmTRo …" secular driving!!!!

BBC Breaking News ‏@BBCBreaking 35m35 minutes ago

France to deploy up to 300 soldiers on patrol after three city attacks that injured more than 20 people, PM says http://bbc.in/1vjuHxb

The Independent ‏@Independent 44s44 seconds ago

Arsonist sets fire to Swedish mosque, injuring five http://ind.pn/16TElBu

The immigration debate has pitted the far right, which wants to cut the number of asylum seekers allowed into Sweden by 90 percent, against mainstream parties intent on preserving the Nordic country's liberal policy.

MH370 was 'shot down by US military', claims former French airline boss
Published time: December 22, 2014

Flight lieutenant Jayson Nichols looks at a map as he flies aboard a Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion aircraft searching for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 over the southern Indian Ocean on March 27, 2014 (AFP Photo / Pool)

A former French airline CEO Marc Dugain claims that the US may have shot down Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 and then covered it up, adding to a rash of conflicting theories about the missing plane.

In a six-page article published by French weekly Paris Match, Dugain claims that the Boeing 777 may have got into trouble and as it was approaching the US military base on the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, it was shot down. US forces may have feared the plane was attempting a 9/11 style attack on the base, Dugain said.

“It’s an extremely powerful military base. It’s surprising that the Americans have lost all trace of this aircraft. Without getting into conspiracy theories, it is a possibility that the Americans stopped this plane,” Dugain said, English-language website The Local reported Friday.

Dugain said there were witness in the Maldives, the nearest islands to Diego Garcia about 500 kilometers to the north, who claim to have seen a “huge plane flying at a really low altitude” with Malaysian Airlines colors flying toward Diego Garcia.

A graphic of the area being searched for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 (AFP Photo/ Pool / Greg Wood)

In August, the UK Daily Mirror reported that the MH370 was heading for the tiny Indian Ocean atoll of Diego Garcia, but the US Embassy in Kuala Lumpur denied this. A spokesperson for the US Embassy in Malaysia told the local Star newspaper at that time that there was “no indication that MH370 flew anywhere near the Maldives or Diego Garcia.”

He added: “MH370 did not land in Diego Garcia.”

READ MORE: MH370 flight satellite data released shows how Malaysia Boeing 777 went missing

Dugain writes that the aircraft, which disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board, while on a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, could have been hijacked remotely and then steered toward Diego Garcia.

Another explanation, he says, is that an onboard fire forced the crew to turn off all electronic devises without damaging the plane’s exterior, allowing it to continue on autopilot with everybody on board asphyxiated.

The testimonies of witnesses in the Maldives have been suppressed, Dugain claims, adding he was approached by a British intelligence officer, who warned him he would be taking “risks” by trying to find out what really happened to the MH370. As the British own the island, it would figure they would cover up any incident, Dugain said.

READ MORE: Four hours of confusion: Malaysia releases MH370 report

The US has consistently denied it has had any knowledge of the fate of the airliner, but Dugain doubts the US, which is “equipped with the best technology in the world” could have completely lost track of “a 63-meter-long object.”

Sir Tim Clark, CEO of Emirates Airlines, the world’s largest, said in October that he thought information on what happened to the doomed airliner was being withheld by some people and that even with all its electronic communications systems turned off the plane would still be traceable by powerful military radar.

There have been a host of theories about what could have happened to the missing airliner, some them seemingly more the stuff of thrillers than air crash investigators.

British journalist and author Nigel Cawthorne said that it may have been shot down by military exercisesbeing conducted by Thailand, Japan, Indonesia, the US and personnel from China in the South China Sea.

Even more far-fetched is that MH370 could have been flown north in the shadow of another plane and would have avoided detection on radar before branching off and landing at an airfield in north east China, Kyrgyzstan or Turkmenistan.

A third claims there could have been a botched hijack attempt. Analysis of radar data shows the plane began to fly erratically and climbed to 45,000 feet before dropping to a very low altitude.

The pilots could have flown like this to disorientate the hijackers or the hijackers themselves could have flown the plane up to this altitude to kill the passengers by starving them of oxygen by depressurizing the cabin, while they had access to another oxygen supply. Under this theory the attempts fails and the hijackers accidentally kill themselves.

In October, the investigation was focused entirely around an underwater search. As of December 17, 11,000 square km of the seafloor had been searched. The search of the southwest Indian Ocean is being conducted by three vessels and is expected to be completed by May 2015.

JE Menon wrote:Yes it has turned into a sort of Islamofrancais tradition... But this year, less than 2013 and I daresay 2012 too.

I'm surprised at the lackadaisical approach of the gendarmerie. Perhaps the arsonists should wear a burqa to get some attention?

Associated Press files this update:
A French police official says 11 people are dead in a shooting at a satirical weekly newspaper in central Paris.

Xavier Castaing, head of communications for the Paris police prefecture, confirmed the deaths.

French President Francois Hollande was headed to the scene of Wednesday’s shooting at Charlie Hebdo, a satirical weekly that has drawn repeated threats for its caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, among other controversial sketches.

Pegida's sudden popularity has caused deep divisions within the country's recently formed Eurosceptic and xenophobic AfD party

Tony Paterson
berlin
Tuesday 06 January 2015

Germany’s growing anti-Islamic protest movement has ignited a furious leadership battle within the country’s new right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, prompting charges that the organisation is “tearing itself apart” less than two years after it was founded.

The AfD’s blistering internal dispute has coincided with fresh mass street protests by Germany’s anti-Islamic Pegida movement, which drew a record crowd of 18,000 supporters in Dresden on Monday night despite harsh criticism of its xenophobic aims by politicians and celebrities. There were similar but less well-attended protests by Pegida, which stands for “Patriotic Europeans against Islamisation of the West” in Berlin, Stuttgart and Cologne, where the Catholic Church switched off floodlights playing on the city’s famous cathedral in protest.

An estimated 30,000 Germans were reported to have staged anti-Pegida protests across the country on Monday. Today, 80 celebrities and leading political figures, including the 96-year-old former Social Democrat Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, launched an anti-Pegida campaign. “The movement appeals to hollow prejudice, xenophobia and intolerance,” Mr Schmidt said.

Pegida’s sudden popularity, which appeared to mushroom in early December, has shocked Germany’s established political parties. Chancellor Angela Merkel has condemned it outright. But the movement has caused deep divisions within the country’s recently formed Eurosceptic and xenophobic AfD, prompting a bitter fight between the party’s three co-leaders over its future political course.

The AfD, which was founded in 2013, won its first seats in European elections last spring with public opposition to the euro. It went on to make big and unexpected gains in key state autumn elections in East Germany where it secured up to 12 per cent of the vote with an anti-foreigner campaign that focused on tough border controls and repatriation for “criminal” immigrants. Pegida has since shifted the AfD further away from mere opposition to the euro and helped thrust the party towards the far right. Alexander Gauland, the AfD’s leader in the eastern state of Brandenburg recently attended a mass Pegida rally in Dresden and insisted that the movement’s members were his party’s “natural allies” and that the AfD had to “listen” to their concerns.

His views are echoed by Frauke Petry, the AfD’s leader in the eastern state of Saxony, who has scheduled a meeting with Pegida leaders in the state’s capital, Dredsen, on Wednesday in a gesture which has been taken as a clear sign of her solidarity with the movement. Ms Petry’s support for Pegida was given “intellectual” backing at the weekend by the right-wing journalist Konrad Adam, who along with Ms Petry is one of the three co-leaders of the AfD together with the party’s founder, the former economics professor Bernd Lucke.

Mr Adam, who in the past has accused Muslims of having an “aggressive special self-consciousness”, published a lengthy article in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung at the weekend on the eve on Monday’s mass Pegida protest. The article was entitled: “How the Christians defeated the Turks once before.” It gave an account of the battle of Lepanto in 1271.

But the AfD’s sudden lurch to the far right and its espousal of Pegida values has alarmed Mr Lucke, who demanded last week that his more xenophobic co-leaders should renounce their posts and allow him to lead and speak for the party on his own. Mr Lucke has said that it is legitimate to talk to protest movements like Pegida but he has ruled out the idea of joining forces with them. He is backed by the AfD’s deputy leader, the former German Federation of Industry boss, Hans-Olaf Henkel, who has warned his party against backing Pegida.

By contrast, Mr Adam, Mr Petry and Mr Gauland want the AfD to “open itself to people who fear being swamped by Islam”, according to an internal memo leaked to the media. In a furious letter addressed to Mr Lucke, they accused the party’s founder of behaving like “the lord of the manor” with his demand that they renounce their co-leadership posts. The dispute prompted Der Spiegel to ask whether the AfD was already “tearing itself apart”. Recent opinion polls have suggested that Pegida has not helped the AfD. Support for the party has dropped from around 10 to 5 per cent since last September.

Aditya_V wrote:Yup, compared to India these countries have a very small issue, some of this pure racism. I don't think Europe is under threat , India faces a far greater threat with Pakis going full tilt.

prahaar wrote:[100K+ immigrants from Syria/Lebanon/Eritrea per annum and super strict hiring of skilled professionals from places like India.

PARIS: Muslims places of worship in two French towns were fired upon overnight, leaving no casualties, prosecutors said on Thursday.

Three blank grenades were thrown at a mosque shortly after midnight in the city of Le Mans, west of Paris, and shots were fired in the direction of a Muslim prayer hall shortly after evening prayers in the Port-la-Nouvelle district near Narbonne in southern France.

An explosion at a kebab shop near a mosque in the eastern French town of Villefranche-sur-Saone on Thursday morning also left no casualties.

Surya wrote:this is a big failure on part of the french

Even missing the intel was one

then allowing them to get past cramped paris roads with police unable to stop 2 guys??

and all this why they were already on alert

yup our own media let alone the western one would have savaged our intel and cops

Parker said that the extremists in Syria are making 'complex and ambitious plots' to target western transport networks and iconic landmarks. Mumbai style shootings and aviation bomb plots are among the plans being developed by the group, reported News.com.au.

nawabs wrote:Seems the terrorists have taken hostages at a printing business in a town where they have been cornered. The whole town is under siege. Mobiles not working, schools closed with pupils still inside.

Varoon Shekhar wrote: I hope that there are no repercussions for Indians and people of Indian origin living in France, and in other parts of Europe.

Cosmo_R wrote:

nawabs wrote:Seems the terrorists have taken hostages at a printing business in a town where they have been cornered. The whole town is under siege. Mobiles not working, schools closed with pupils still inside.

Note how this compares with 26/11. Mobiles working, media providing GPS guidance to terrorists, crowding into 'sanitized zone'.

One of the huge tasks in India is to get respect for the law enforcement agencies. Our reposne too often relies on Bollywood, jugaad and carnival atmosphere.