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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
2/7/2013 9:42:48 PM

Iran airs images allegedly extracted from US drone

This undated image taken from video broadcast on Iranian state television purports to show a U.S. drone landing in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Iran's state TV has broadcast footage on Thursday, Feb. 7, 2013, allegedly extracted from the advanced CIA spy drone captured in 2011, the latest in a flurry of moves from Iranian authorities meant to underline the nation's purported military and technological advances. (AP Photo/Iranian state TV via AP video)

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran's state TV has broadcast footage allegedly extracted from the advanced CIA spy drone captured in 2011, the latest in a flurry of moves from Iranian authorities meant to underline the nation's purported military and technological advances.

Iran has long claimed it managed to reverse-engineer the RQ-170 Sentinel, seized in December 2011 after it entered Iranian airspace from the country's eastern border with Afghanistan, and that it's capable of launching its own production line for the unmanned aircraft.

After initially saying only that a drone had been lost near the Afghan-Iran border, American officials eventually confirmed the Sentinel had been monitoring Iran's military and nuclear facilities. Washington asked for it back but Iran refused, and instead released photos of Iranian officials studying the aircraft.

The video aired late Wednesday on Iranian TV shows an aerial view of an airport and a city, said to be a U.S. drone base and Kandahar, Afghanistan. The TV also showed images purported to be the Sentinel landing at a base in eastern Iran but it was unclear if that footage meant to depict the moment of the drone's seizure.

In addition, the TV also showed images of an Iranian helicopter transporting the drone, as well as its disassembled parts being carried on a trailer.

In another part of the video, the chief of the Revolutionary Guard's airspace division, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, said that only after capturing the drone, Iran realized it "belongs to the CIA."

"We were able to definitively access the data of the drone, once we brought it down," said Hajizadeh.

He described the Sentinel's capture as a huge scoop for Iran, saying that at the time, Tehran did not rule out a possible punitive U.S. airstrike over the drone.

Iranian officials have accused the U.S. of stepping up its espionage activities against Iran as part of intensified Western efforts to force Tehran to abandon its uranium enrichment program, a key aspect of its disputed nuclear program. The U.S. and its allies suspect Iran may be trying to develop atomic weapons, a charge Tehran denies.

In an attempt to embarrass Washington, Iran has claimed to have captured several American drones, most recently in December, when Tehran said it seized a Boeing-designed ScanEagle drone — a less sophisticated aircraft — after it entered Iranian airspace over the Persian Gulf.

U.S. officials said there was no evidence that the latest claims were true.

Also Thursday, the semi-official Fars news agency published photos reportedly depicting a domestic production line of ScanEagle drones. The photos show several drones in a workshop.

Iran has said before that it's making ScanEagle copies and putting them into service, but has not offered proof for those claims.

Fars also quoted deputy defense minister, Mohammad Eslami, as saying that Iran has also established a "production line for the drones in foreign countries." He did not elaborate, and it was not clear if he was referring to Syria or Lebanon's Hezbollah group, Iran's top regional allies.

The latest Sentinel footage came as the U.S. tightened sanctions to pressure the Iranian government to limit its nuclear program and restrictions on institutions that Washington says are stifling political dissent and censoring speech.

Among the expanded measures announced Monday by the Treasury Department is a move to deny Iran access to revenue garnered from its oil exports. Under the latest sanctions, Iran would only be able to use revenue from its oil sales in a country that purchased its crude — now mostly big Asian economies such as China and India — which would significantly limit its access to the money.


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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
2/7/2013 9:52:13 PM

Iran president tells US to correct its attitude


In this picture released by the Egyptian Presidency, Mohammed Morsi, right, embraces Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, left, at the 12th summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Cairo, Egypt, Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2013. Iran's president on Wednesday offered to help rescue Egypt's failing economy with a "big credit line," another sign of improving relations between two regional powers after a freeze of more than three decades. Ahmadinejad made the proposal during the first trip to Egypt by an Iranian leader since 1979. It came at a time when his own economy is staggering from the effects of Western sanctions over Iran's suspect nuclear development program, and it was unclear how he could spare funds or credit for his new ally. (AP Photo/ Egyptian Presidency)
CAIRO (AP) — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says his country cannot hold meaningful talks with the U.S. on Tehran's disputed nuclear program if Washington is threatening his country.

His comments at a news conference in Cairo Thursday echoed those of Iran's supreme leader, who said earlier in the day American proposals for direct talks are pointless while Washington is "holding a gun" to Iran through sanctions.

"The reason is clear," Ahmadinejad said. "Talks are held to arrive at an understanding, not to impose anything. Such talks will be meaningless if someone raises a club and imposes" something on Iran, he added.

"Talks are meaningful only if they are based on mutual respect, justice and equality," he said. "Things will be fine if the Americans correct the manner in which they address us."


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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
2/7/2013 9:53:40 PM

South Africa outraged at gang rape of teenager

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — In a country where one in four women is raped and where months-old babies and 94-year-old grandmothers are sexually assaulted, citizens are demanding action after a teenager was gang-raped, sliced open from her stomach to her genitals, and left for dead on a construction site last week.

The 17-year-old lived long enough to identify one of her attackers, a 22-year-old. Police arrested him and said Thursday they have arrested a second suspect, aged 21. They promised more arrests soon.

"Kill them!" and "Cut off their penises," were some of the demands voiced on talk show radio stations Thursday.

Every few months this African nation with the highest rate of rapes of babies and young girls in the world yells its outrage at a particularly brutal attack.

Last year, South Africans were shocked when village boys gang-raped a mentally ill 17-year-old with a mental age of 4. She was attacked by six boys, the youngest who was 10, in a crime that only came to light because the boys made a cellphone video of the rape and posted it on the Internet. It went viral.

Prof. Rachel Jewkes, a doctor heading the Women's Research Unit of South Africa's Medical Research Council, said 37 percent of surveyed men in South Africa's most populated province of Gauteng said they had raped a woman or child, according to a study. Seventy-five percent of them first raped a teenager, she said.

"It's a social disaster," she said. The number of "men who try to feel better about their past by trying to make out that what they did wasn't serious or wasn't rape is obviously huge and must be a huge obstacle to getting anything done — from police making arrests to decisions in the courtroom by magistrates and so forth."

The outcry over Saturday's rape in Bredasdorp, a Western Cape town known for its giant protea flowers, led President Jacob Zuma to vow Thursday "that government would never rest until the perpetrators and all those who rape and abuse women and children, are meted with the maximum justice that the law allows."

The maximum sentence for rape in South Africa is life in prison. The death sentence has been abolished.

Zuma himself was accused of rape by the HIV-positive lesbian daughter of a close friend in 2005. Zuma said the sex was consensual and he was acquitted, but is unlikely to live down his comment in court that he had a shower afterward to cut the risk of acquiring AIDS.

In a study conducted by Jewkes in 2009, 62 percent of surveyed boys over age 11 said they believed that forcing someone to have sex was not an act of violence. One-third said girls enjoy being raped.

That study found one-quarter of South African women are raped but only one in 25 report it to the police. Of those who were not raped by a partner, one in 13 had never reported the rape, and many had been raped more than once, Jewkes said. That casts doubt on police statistics showing sexual crimes decreased from 70,514 in 2009 to 64,419 last year. Females make up half of South Africa's population of 50 million.

Official statistics show less than 10 percent of reported sexual crimes result in a successful prosecution, another reason many are reluctant to report rape.

A British documentary, "Lost Girls of South Africa," concludes girls here have a bigger chance of being raped than of completing high school.

Studies show nearly 90 percent of victims are raped by family members, friends or other people they know. Girls are not safe at home or at school, with many reports of teachers having sex with students anxious to get good examination results.

Many reasons have been given for South Africa suffering the highest incidence of rape in the world. This is a patriarchal society where many men believe they are entitled to sex. The mother of an 11-year-old girl raped by her father told a court that her husband said no man had a right to have sex with his child until he had her.

The brutality of the white apartheid regime often is blamed, with psychologists saying that humiliated men work out their anger on those nearest and most helpless, their families.

Pervasive poverty, which also disempowers men and forces children to sleep in one-room shacks with adults, also is blamed.

That excuse was angrily dismissed in a Twitter debate last weekend.

"No one can tell me that raping a 3-month baby or 87-year-old granny or burning a library or vandalizing a school is caused by poverty," tweeted Zwelinzima Vavi, head of the Congress of South African Trade Unions. "Yes, apartheid humiliated, dehumanized and made people feel valueless - its existence in the past is no excuse for current moral degeneration."

Eastern KwaZulu-Natal province last year set up day-care centers for elderly women after several were raped.

Perhaps the saddest comment came from one protesting grandmother outside a court where a man was accused of raping a 94-year-old.

"It's becoming clear that our grandchildren and great-grandsons are targeting us and it is only stiff sentences like castration and death that will stop this from happening," 68-year-old Thokozile Gcumisa was quoted as saying in The Sowetan newspaper. "We fear our own flesh and blood."


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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
2/7/2013 10:02:18 PM

Putin's anger flares over Sochi Oly cost overruns

Associated Press/Ignat Kozlov - Olympic rings for the 2014 Winter Olympics are installed in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, southern Russia, late Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2012. With the Winter Olympics a year away, IOC President Jacques Rogge praised Sochi organizers on Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2013 and defended the $51 billion price tag. (AP Photo/Ignat Kozlov))

SOCHI, Russia (AP) — A year before the 2014 Winter Olympics are to begin, President Vladimir Putin has demanded that a senior member of the Russian Olympic Committee be fired, apparently due to cost overruns in host city Sochi.

The current price tag for the Sochi Games is 1.5 trillion rubles ($51 billion), which would make them the most expensive games in the history of the Olympics — more costly even than the much-larger Summer Olympics held in London and Beijing.

The games at the Black Sea resort of Sochi are considered a matter of national pride and one of Putin's top priorities.

Putin's decision came after he scolded officials over a two-year delay and huge cost overruns in the construction of the Sochi ski jump facilities.

The Russian official involved, Akmet Bilalov, had a company that was building the ski jump and its adjacent facilities before selling its stake to state-owned Sberbank last year.

During his tour of Olympic venues, Putin fumed when he heard that the cost of the ski jump had soared from 1.2 billion rubles ($40 million) to 8 billion rubles ($265 million) and the project was behind schedule.

"So a vice president of the Olympic Committee is dragging down the entire construction? Well done! You are doing a good job," Putin said Wednesday, seething with sarcasm.

Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak told reporters Thursday that Putin had recommended that the Russian Olympic Committee fire Bilalov, one of its six vice presidents.

"As far as Bilalov is concerned the president voiced his decision yesterday: People who don't make good on their obligations at such a scale cannot head the Olympic movement in our country," he said.

Most countries that host the Olympics use public funds to pay for most of the construction of the sports venues and new infrastructure like roads and trains. The Russian government, however, has gotten state-controlled companies and tycoons to foot more than half of the bill.

Both the companies and the tycoons understand the importance of maintaining good relations with Putin, who has a lot of prestige riding on the success of the Sochi games.

Kozak said the costs constantly increased for the ski jump project because Bilalov's company did not properly check the land and, as a result, picked a geologically challenging plot.

"His calculations failed," Kozak said.

The Russian Olympic Committee was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying that Bilalov's future can only be decided by a session of its executive committee.

Despite these setbacks, Russian officials on Thursday went to great lengths to reiterate that everything in Sochi was now on schedule.

"As IOC members and we stated yesterday, it is already clear that we have succeeded with this immense and possibly the most immense project in Russia's modern history," Kozak said.

Taking a cue from Putin, however, Russian officials sought to play down the high costs. Kozak said the government spent no more than 100 billion rubles ($3 billion) on the Olympic venues and the immediate infrastructure.

The government has spent a total of $13 billion so far, and expects to spend about $18 billion overall before the games begin, Kozak has said previously.

On Thursday, Kozak said it was unfair to compare Sochi's budget to that of previous Olympic games because Russian organizers had to build most of the vital and costly infrastructure that was needed — roads, railways, tunnels, gas pipelines — from scratch.

No Russian officials went near the topic of possible corruption, even though Russian business is notoriously plagued by it. Russia last year ranked 133rd out of 176 in Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index, along with countries such as Kazakhstan, Iran and Honduras.

Although there were no documented cases of corruption directly linked to Olympic construction in Sochi, a dozen officials from the Sochi government have been slapped with charges of corruption in the past year.

Kozak and Sochi officials insist that they're keeping the situation under control and that no money is being stolen at Olympic sites.

Sochi organizers also sought to assuage fears that the 2014 Games may fall victim to a warm and snowless winter — or a howling blizzard.

Temperatures at Sochi's Krasnaya Polyana ski resort hovered at 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius) on Thursday, and reached 66 degrees F (19 C) in the coastal city of Sochi.

That's after a cold snap the previous week in which athletes competed in test events amid snowstorms as temperatures dipped to 20 degrees F (-6 C).

Dmitry Chernyshenko, head of the local organizing committee, said Sochi boasts one of one Europe's largest snow-making systems and also has equipment that can store snow throughout the summer and protect slopes and tracks from rain and fog. More than 400 snow-making generators will be deployed on the slopes.

He said Sochi has special equipment that can make snow even in temperatures up to 59 degrees (15 C).

"Snow will be guaranteed in 2014," Chernyshenko declared.

Warm temperatures and rain disrupted some of the snowboarding and freestyle skiing events at the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver.

The countdown celebrations were to culminate later Thursday in a star-studded ice show at one of the Olympic arenas, attended by Putin and IOC President Jacques Rogge.

Also Thursday, tickets for the games went on sale online in Russia. The prices range from a low of 500 rubles ($17) to a high of 50,000 rubles ($1,700). Organizers said about 40 percent of the tickets would be priced under 3,000 rubles ($100). The total number of tickets put on sale was not disclosed.

In a bid to combat ticket scalping, Sochi organizers said they would limit the number of tickets that can be bought by one person. For the most popular events, such as the opening ceremony and top ice hockey games, the limit would be four tickets per person.

Sochi organizers will also require visitors to apply for a special spectator pass without which they will not be able to access the venues.

The games run from Feb. 7-23, 2014.

___

Nataliya Vasilyeva contributed to this report from Moscow.


"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
2/8/2013 2:53:40 AM

Vatican Receives 600 Abuse Cases a Year

The Vatican's new chief prosecutor against child abuse says he receives around 600 new cases a year.Source: AAP

The Vatican’s new chief prosecutor against child abuse says he receives around 600 new cases a year.Source: AAP

Vatican Receives 600 Abuse Cases a Year

Stephen: Is this a sign that the Vatican, not known for its transparency, is now sharing its dark truths. Even the appointment of a Chief Presecutor against child abuse is a huge internal shift – and a much-awaited public admission. Thanks to Phillip.

From: AAP, The Australian – February 6, 2013

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/breaking-news/vatican-receives-600-abuse-cases-a-year/story-fn3dxix6-1226571294749

THE Vatican’s new chief prosecutor against clerical child abuse says his office is receiving around 600 new cases a year, many of them dating back to the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

Father Robert Oliver, a canon law specialist who previously worked at the archdiocese of Boston in the United States where abuse cases came to light a decade ago, was appointed in December.

Oliver, whose official title is “promoter of justice” for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said on Tuesday the peak in reported cases was in 2004 with 800 denunciations.

He said he would follow the example of Pope Benedict XVI in calling for more assistance to victims of abuse and promising zero tolerance against abusers.

Oliver said three-quarters of the world’s 112 national bishops’ conferences had responded to a Vatican request in 2011 to send guidelines on how to fight abuse.

“Each culture has a different way of confronting these issues and problems,” Oliver said, citing the example of South Korea where he said the local culture had a taboo on discussing sexual abuse.

He said Africa was a continent with “a thousand cultures” where the issue of abuse still had to be addressed in-depth.

The Vatican has stressed five key points: helping victims, forewarning minors, training future clergy, rehabilitating abusers and working together with civil authorities.

Catholic hierarchy in many dioceses including in Ireland and the US were accused of covering up abuse for decades and simply moving alleged abusers from one parish to another.


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