[video:www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6KqarWbN7A]

I'm surprised anyone was "brave" enough to post something like this, even if it was only on BBC 3.

A female suicide bomber has been blamed for killing 15 people and leaving dozens more injured at a railway station in the southern Russian city of Volgograd.

Police identified the bomber as a Dagestan national called Oksana Aslanova - who had been married to two Islamists killed by Russian forces.

She apparently detonated a bomb in front of a metal detector inside the main entrance of the station. Russian television is suggesting there may have been two attackers.

Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered law enforcement agencies to take "all necessary measures".

Federal police spokesman Vladimir Kolesnikov said security would be stepped up at train stations and airports.

One witness, who gave his name as Vladimir, told a Russian TV station: "I heard the blast and ran toward it. I saw melted, twisted bits of metal, broken glass and bodies lying on the street."

rain station store attendant Valentina Petrichenko said: "It was a very powerful blast. Some people started running and others were thrown back by the wave of the blast. It was very scary."

The attack comes just weeks before the start of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, a town 430 miles southwest of Volgograd.

Sky News Moscow producer Yulia Bragina said: "It's very concerning with two months to go to the Sochi Olympics.

"The Russian security services are working 24/7 to make the Games safe for the sportsmen and people who want to visit the Olympics in Russia. There will be a big investigation into what has happened."

FULL STORY

Hate crimes against Muslims have soared in the UK this year, figures show.

Hundreds of anti-Muslim offences were carried out across the country in 2013, with Britain's biggest force, the Metropolitan police, recording 500 Islamophobic crimes.

Many forces reported a surge in the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes after the murder of soldier Lee Rigby by two Islamic extremists in Woolwich, south-east London, in May.

But the figures could be much higher as nearly half of the 43 forces in England and Wales did not reveal how many hate crimes had targeted Muslims. Some forces admitted they did not always record the faith of a religious hate-crime victim.

Freedom of Information requests were sent by the Press Association to every police force in England and Wales. Of the 43 forces, 24 provided figures on the number of anti-Muslim crimes and incidents recorded.

Tell Mama, a group which monitors anti-Muslim incidents, said it had dealt with 840 cases since April, with the number expected to rise to more than 1,000 by the end of March. This compared with 582 anti-Muslim cases it dealt with from March 2012 to March 2013.

Fiyaz Mujhal, director of Faith Matters, which runs the Tell Mama project, said the reaction to the murder of Rigby had caused the number of Islamophobic crimes to jump significantly.

"The far right groups, particularly the EDL [English Defence League], perniciously use the internet and social media to promote vast amounts of online hate," he said.

Mujhal said tougher sentencing was needed to tackle Islamophobic crime and that guidelines by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to monitor social media were not fit for purpose.

"They raised the bar of prosecution significantly. Now, unless there is a direct threat to somebody on Twitter or Facebook, the CPS will not prosecute. The CPS is just plainly out of sync with reality.

"We also need more robust sentencing. In one case, a pig's head was left outside a mosque and the perpetrator came away with a community sentence. When you target a mosque, you are targeting the whole community."

Tell Mama has called for police forces to improve monitoring of Islamophobic crimes.

"There are three problems we come across," Mujhal said. "Firstly, there is a lack of understanding of the language of Islamophobia thrown at victims in any incidents. Secondly, there is very little training on how to ask relevant questions to pull out anti-Muslim cases.

"Thirdly, recording processes are not in line with each other. One force will allow an officer to flag an incident as anti-Muslim, another force will flag it as religious hate crime. There is no uniformity.

"There must be guidelines for all forces so we can know the level of the problem."

A CPS spokeswoman said: "Online communication can be offensive, shocking or in bad taste.

"However, as set out in CPS guidelines on prosecuting cases involving communications sent via social media, content has to be more than simply offensive to be contrary to the criminal law.

"In order to preserve the right to free speech the threshold for prosecution must be high and only communications that are grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or false are prohibited by the legislation."

The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) has previously said 71 incidents were reported to its national community tension team over five days after Rigby's murder on 22 May.

FULL STORY

Question

1) Backbiting is wrong

2) And then I came across as: They are to hide the faults of man and the rest of creation, not only from others, but even from themselves and to have compassion and forgiveness for even the worst of sins

3) And whilst I understand both, my question is, Im sure we all know there are situations where you have to expose a persons faults for the better picture? 

4) How does it work? What is the best approach?

Im thinking of many different situations and getting a bit muddled

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XPjQrQs3JY]

A team of physicists has provided some of the clearest evidence yet that our Universe could be just one big projection.

In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed1 that an audacious model of the Universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity.

Source: Nature.com

Interesting.  I wonder what impact this has on philosophy.

Also, they skimmed past this, but 9 dimensions of space?

Salaams sisters,

I am currently doing some research for a documentary about Samantha Lewthwaite. This is a documentary told through the people that knew her, and the aim is to get full testimony about her life, not what the tabloids have given us.

If you would like to contribute, off the record, to our research, please get in touch. We would like to know what happened to this beautiful sister, her story, or anything that you may know about reverts and converts like Sam. This is an opportunity to make the story right.

Again, everything is off the record, so please get in touch.
Jazakallah

Metro

Three Muslim vigilantes who recorded their attempts to impose sharia law on the streets of London before posting the clips on YouTube have been jailed.

The trio, members of a self-styled ‘Muslim Patrol’ group, threatened strangers for holding hands, drinking alcohol and other behaviour they deemed ‘un-Islamic’.

Jordan Horner, 19, Ricardo McFarlane, 26, and a third man who can’t be named for legal reasons yesterday pleaded guilty to a variety of charges, including actual bodily harm and affray.

Video footage shows the group telling one couple not to walk down the street holding hands in ‘a Muslim area’ and ordering others to move away from a mosque.

‘These men routinely threatened and intimidated innocent members of the public,’ said prosecutor Baljit Ubhey.

‘They would roam the streets, seeking out victims whom they could target, and chanting threats to “kill the non-believers”.

‘On the nights in question they confronted and aggressively intimidated a couple who were holding hands in the street, a group of friends who were drinking alcohol, and a girl whom they deemed to be dressed provocatively.’

They were sentenced to jail terms of between 24 weeks and 17 months.

 

FULL STORY