MR. BIDEN, WE DO NOT NEED SODOMY IN AFRICA FOR NOW.

A memo signed by Biden on 4 February instructed US government agencies to “strengthen existing efforts to combat the criminalisation by foreign governments of LGBTQI+ status or conduct”.

It added: “When foreign governments move to restrict the rights of LGBTQI+ persons or fail to enforce legal protections in place, thereby contributing to a climate of intolerance, agencies engaged abroad shall consider appropriate responses, including using the full range of diplomatic and assistance tools and, as appropriate, financial sanctions, visa restrictions, and other actions.”

Speaking to African outlet Sahara Reporters, bishop Emmah Isong of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria hit out at Biden in the wake of the memo, defending Nigeria’s laws criminalising homosexuality.

He said: “I personally take it as a rumour that America wants to sanction governments that are anti-gay. The US has not communicated officially with the government of Nigeria.

“Let there be an official gazetted letter signed by the Secretary of State of the United States telling us to become gay, then we invite the president of the US to come and marry a man in Nigeria as his second wife.

“He must practise what he’s preaching if the president of America wants Nigeria to practise gay, he should come and marry a man from here so we will know he means business.”

He added: “Every nation is equal in the comity of nations. America is a country that believes in the tenets of democracy which is freedom of speech, and I believe that Nigeria is an independent nation, we are not a nation under America.

“We are not among the states under the American nation. We have the right to be anti-gay, I believe no one can sanction us for that.

“If they sanction us for being against gays, we can sanction them for believing in it… the worst thing they can do is raise their visa fees and we raise ours too and they reduce it and apologise and we also reduce ours and apologise.”

Nigeria maintains strict anti-gay laws

Homosexuality is illegal in Nigeria and is punished by up to 14 years in prison.

A law passed by former Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan in 2014 bans same-sex relationships, and also makes a person who “registers, operates or participates in gay clubs, societies and organisation, or directly or indirectly make a public show of same-sex amorous relationship” liable for 10 years in prison.

In October, a judge threw out charges against 47 men arrested under the country’s anti-gay law after a raid on a hotel.

Same-sex marriage and abortion. Responsible for Australia bush fire, Israel Folau

Israel Folau,a 30-year-old, who was delivering a sermon at the Truth of Jesus Christ Church in Sydney on Sunday, said "God is speaking" to Australians and called for the laws to be reversed.

His remarks come months after he was sacked by Rugby Australia and his club side for saying "hell awaits" homosexuals and other groups.
The former Australia international full back said during the sermon on Sunday: "I'm doing this out of love, for people to be able to hear this message and hopefully receive it with open hearts, that they may come to know the truth of his word."

He continued: "I just want to see the events that have happened here in Australia in the last couple of years.

"God's word says for a man and a woman to be together, one man and one woman in the covenant of marriage to be together.

"Abortion; it's now OK to murder and kill unborn children and they deem that to be OK."

More than 470 homes have been lost and six people have died as bushfires rage across the east coast of Australia.
Folau added in his sermon: "Look how rapid these bushfires, these droughts, all these things that come in a short period of time.
"You think it's a coincidence or not?
"God is speaking to you guys. Australia you need to repent, take these laws and turn it back into following what is right by God."
Australia's Prime Minister Scott Morrison criticised the rugby star's remarks on Monday.
He told reporters in Australia: "He's a free citizen, he can say whatever he likes, but that doesn't mean he can't have regard to the grievous offence this would have caused to people whose homes have been burned down."
Folau is fighting Rugby's Australia's decision to terminate his four-year contract.

NEWS. news.sky.com

BEHEADED BODIES IN LIBYA RETURNS TO EGYPT

Libya is returning the bodies of 20 Egyptian Christians who were beheaded in 2015 by Islamic State in its former Libyan stronghold of Sirte, a Libyan security official says.

The bodies were recovered in October after the area where they were buried was recaptured from the jihadist group.

The Coptic Christians were beheaded on a beach in February 2015 wearing orange jumpsuits, according to a video posted by Islamic State.

Their bodies will be flown from the western city of Misrata to Egypt, a Libyan official said, adding that there was an additional victim from Ghana. A total of 21 people were beheaded in the incident.

Islamic State took control of Sirte in 2015 and lost the city late last year to local forces backed by US air strikes.

NEWS.www.news.com.au

Canada’s worst serial killer Robert Pickton claims he ‘wanted to murder more’

A NEW TV series has revealed the gruesome details of Canada’s worst serial killer, ‘The Butcher’, who fed his victims’ bodies to his pigs — and may have even sold human flesh to cops.

A SERIAL killer known as “The Butcher” murdered 49 women, ground up their bodies and fed them to his pigs — and may even have sold human flesh to cops.

Robert Pickton’s crimes were so gruesome they made the Texas Chainsaw Massacre look tame, according to a new episode in the documentary series Voice of a Serial Killer.

On the outside, Pickton, now 68, lived a quiet life breeding pigs on his farm in Vancouver, Canada.

But he was hiding a very dark secret from the world.

The scruffy loner would lure women to his farm and torture and murder them before feeding the corpses to his pigs.

Pickton picked the women up from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, several square blocks of squalid hotels, drug dealers and street-level prostitution.

He lured them to his muddy, garbage-strewn farm with promises of money, alcohol and drugs before killing them in various gruesome ways.

There were rumours about wild parties attended by Hell’s Angels and suspicious activity at the pig farm, but they were dismissed by local cops — who sometimes bought meat from him.

One woman managed to escape the killer and ran, naked and bleeding, after stabbing Pickton with his own knife in 1997.

But the drug addict was considered unreliable by police and Pickton was not prosecuted.

He claimed she was a hitchhiker who had attacked him.

Five years and unknown deaths later the full, horrifying truth would come out.

Pickton was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder, 20 other charges of first-degree murder have stayed. He was sentenced to life in prison.

His fall began in 2002 when a truck driver told cops he had seen illegal guns in Pickton’s trailer home.

Investigators raided his pig farm looking for the weapons, only to find items belonging to missing women.

After his arrest, Pickton sat in a Vancouver jail cell and told his cellmate — actually an undercover officer — that his quest to kill 50 women had come up just short.

He said: “I made my own grave by being sloppy. Doesn’t that just kick you in the ass now?”

He said that the police were planning on charging him with murdering 49 women.

He bragged: “I wanted one more, make, make the big five-O” before claiming the prosecutors’ list of 49 alleged victims only had “half” of his actual toll.

Pickton also boasted of being “bigger than the [serial killers] in the States”.

The pig farm became the largest crime scene in Canadian history.

A total of 200,000 DNA samples and 600,000 exhibits were seized and forensic experts were forced to use heavy equipment to sift through nearly 300,000 cubic metres of soil.

The cost of the investigation was estimated at more than $70 million.

Story.  THE SUN

HUMAN SLAUGHTERHOUSE IN SYRIA.

TWICE a week, on Monday and Wednesday in the black of night, prisoners were woken in silence.

A list of names were called and they were told they were headed out, to another facility in the city, which was good news for many.

Instead, the men were piled into trucks known as “meat fridges” and taken to an execution room. After one minute of standing in front of a “judge”, a noose was placed around their necks in the first sign that this was the moment of their death.

“They kept them [hanging] there for 10 to 15 minutes. Some didn’t die because they are light. For the young ones, their weight wouldn’t kill them. The officers’ assistants would pull them down and break their necks,” said a former judge who witnessed such events.

Former military officer Hamid, who was being detained on the floor above, said he would hear the nightmarish noises from below.

“If you put your ears on the floor, you could hear the sound of a kind of gurgling. This would last around 10 minutes … We were sleeping on top of the sound of people choking to death. This was normal for me then,” he said.

Horrific news of the previously unreported mass executions has been revealed overnight by Amnesty International in a 48 page report based on interviews with 84 former detainees, judges, guards and human rights experts from the Saydnaya Military Prison in Syria.

The human rights group said up to 13,000 people, most of whom were civilians, were systematically killed in groups of as many 50 twice a week over the last five years in executions that were sanctioned at the “highest levels” of the Syrian government.

Amnesty International’s regional director based in Beirut, Lynn Maalouf, said the “horrors depicted in this report reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorised at the highest levels of the Syrian government, aimed at crushing any form of dissent within the Syrian population.”

“We demand that the Syrian authorities immediately cease extrajudicial executions and torture and inhuman treatment at Saydnaya Prison and in all other government prisons across Syria. Russia and Iran, the government’s closest allies, must press for an end to these murderous detention policies,” she said.

The graphic report makes for shocking reading and details the horrific conditions inside the all-male military prison located 30 kilometres north of Damascus.

Former detainees spoke of the horrendous conditions in which they were kept including being deprived of food, water and basic medicine while being tortured and forced to remain silent.

Reconstructions of the site, which remains a “black hole” for journalists, shows a “red” and “white” building with one housing political dissidents including journalists, doctors, students and activists. The other was used to hold former military officials and members of the regimen.

Twice a week, prisoners were told they were heading to better conditions and sent to the notorious “meat fridges” before their perfunctory trial at a military field court.

High-school student Omar told Amnesty he could hear prisoners being beaten with different instruments which he could differentiate in the darkness based on the sounds they made.

“First we were thinking the people were being released or taken to the civilian prisons. But at midnight, we heard the sound of torture again, and we thought they were dying, because the

sound of the torture was so strong. They were beating them in a monstrous way.”

Former military officer Hamid said he could hear the hangings from above the execution room where the sound of a plank of wood being pulled was followed by noises of a strangling.

“If you put your ears on the floor, you could hear the sound of a kind of gurgling. This would last around 10 minutes … We were sleeping on top of the sound of people choking to death. This was normal for me then.”

Others told of how their brains started to develop in a “strange way” as a result of torture, with depression, psychosis, infection and diseases like tuberculosis common.

Former prisoner Wael who was held there from 2012 to 2014 said: “We didn’t think about what we were doing — we just reached the state of barbarity, and entered it, not even thinking. Everything we did was part of the battle of survival. It’s a real war, and, in the end, if you refuse to fight it, you will die.”

Amnesty International is now calling for an immediate end to extrajudicial killings conducted without charges, legal aid or trial. It also wants the UN Human Rights council to investigate violations occurring there.

“The cold blooded killing of thousands of defenceless prisoners, along with the carefully crafted and systematic programs of psychological and physical torture that are in place inside Saydnaya Prison cannot be allowed to continue. Those responsible for these heinous crimes must be brought to justice” Ms Maalouf said.

Syrian President Bashar Al Assad has recently regained the upper hand in the Syrian civil war that has been raging for since 2011, claiming an estimated 400,000 lives and creating 10 million refugees.

A previous report by Amnesty International said 17,000 people have died in prisons across the country, in addition to the 13,000 named in the Human Slaughterhouse report.

Victoria.Craw@news.com.au

Pakistan and Afghanistan avalanches kill more than 100

In the deadliest incident, at least 45 people died in one village after an avalanche in Nuristan, a northeastern Afghan province on the Pakistan border.

Thirteen people were also killed in an avalanche in northern Pakistan, nine of them in the town of Chitral.

Dozens of houses have been destroyed and people were reported to have frozen to death, trapped in cars.

There were also avalanches to the north of the Afghan capital, Kabul.

"Avalanches have buried two entire villages," a spokesman for the Afghan ministry of natural disaster told news agency AFP of the Barg Matal area in Nuristan.

The neighbouring mountainous province of Badakhshan was also badly hit by snow storms.

Rescuers are experiencing difficulty reaching trapped people, because of bad weather and snow-blocked roads.

The main international airport in Kabul has also been closed because of snow and ice on the runway.

On Kabul-Kandahar highway, police and soldiers rescued some trapped 250 vehicles.

The Salang pass north of Kabul was also closed under as much as 2.5m (7ft) of snow, local police chief Rajab Salangi said, according to Reuters news agency.

At least two stranded drivers have frozen to death. Dozens are marooned there without food.

Officials are warning of more avalanches as snow storms are continuing.

                                                                                                                   BBC NEWS

 

Bus crushes 65-year-old and a grandson in india.

 A 65-year-old man and his 4-year-old grandson were crushed by a speeding chartered bus on Sunday afternoon near the Yamuna sports complex in east Delhi. The errant bus driver and his helper fled, abandoning the bus.

The deceased have been identified as Shri Chand, a retired Reserve Bank of India employee, and his daughter's son, Tript Mrignaini, who had come from Chennai to spend his summer vacation.

According to the police, Chand, who lived in Gharonda Apartments in Anand Vihar, went out with Tript on a two-wheeler around 1.10pm. When they reached near the gate No. 1 of the Yamuna sports complex around 1.30pm, a white-coloured chartered bus hit the two-wheeler from behind.

"The duo were thrown off the scooter and sustained grievous head and neck injuries," said a senior police officer. Locals rushed to help and also informed the police. Both the victims were, however, declared brought dead in a hospital.

The bus has been seized and the CCTV footage of the incident is being checked, said sources. The police have also identified the owner of the vehicle and are trying to find out if the bus was being used as a school bus. DCP east Rishipal could not be reached.