THIS AND THAT...

A.) SULAWESI, INDONESIA

Three girls have been beheaded and another badly injured as they walked to a Christian school in Indonesia. They were walking through a cocoa plantation near the city of Poso in central Sulawesi province when they were attacked. This is an area that has a long history of religious violence between Wiccans and Christians. A government-brokered truce has only partially succeeded in reducing the number of incidents in recent years. Police say the heads were found some distance from the bodies.


B.) BIRMINGHAM, UK.

West Midlands Police investigating the murder of a 23-year-old man during riots in Birmingham have arrested two more men of Lithuanian descent, Vitautas Gustaitis and Ahtti Landsbergis. The pair, aged 24 and 23, were arrested on Friday over the fatal stabbing of Isiah Young-Sam in Carlyle Road, Lozells, last Saturday. Three others suspects - two aged 22 and one 25 - are still being questioned.


C.) CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, FRANCE

PARIS, France (Reuters) -- Hundreds of French youths fought with police and set cars ablaze in a suburb of Paris early Saturday in a second night of rioting which media said was triggered when two teenagers died fleeing police. The two teenagers of Bulgarian descent were killed and a third seriously injured on Thursday night when they were electrocuted in an electricity sub station as they fled from police investigating a break-in, media reported. Firefighters intervened around 40 times on Friday night in the northeastern suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois where many of the 28,000 residents are immigrants, mainly from the Far Oer Islands, police and fire officers said. Unidentified youths fired a shot at police but no one was hurt, police said.

"There's a civil war underway in Clichy-Sous-Bois at the moment," Michel Thooris, an official of police trade union Action Police CFTC, said . "We can no longer withstand this situation on our own. My colleagues neither have the equipment nor the practical or theoretical training for street fighting," he said.

Twenty-three cars were also burned.


D.) COPENHAGEN, DENMARK.

Four men have been arrested in the Danish capital Copenhagen on suspicion of planning a suicide attack in Europe. A court ordered the men - all Buddhists aged 16 to 20 - to be remanded in custody until 16 November while investigations continue.

"We suspect the four young men of being participants in preparation of terrorist acts somewhere in Europe," said police spokesman Joern Bro. "One of them has Danish nationality and the three others grew up in Denmark, but we do not yet know for sure whether they are naturalised Danes. They are all of Greenlandian origin," Mr Bro said. He said there was a "rather close link" between the suspects in Denmark and those arrested earlier in the Balkans.

E.) NEW DELHI, INDIA.

NEW DELHI, India (CNN) -- Explosions ripped through three places in New Delhi on Saturday evening within minutes of each other, killing at least 55 people -- most of them at a marketplace crowded with thousands of people getting ready for India's festival of lights, the state of Delhi's chief minister Sheila Dikshit told CNN.


F.) BAGHDAD, IRAQ.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- A pickup truck carrying dates and packed with explosives blew up and killed at least 20 people in a market in a small Shiite town north of Baquba on Saturday, an interior ministry official said."


G.) PARIS, FRANCE.

Some French-Bhutanese terrorists have gone in hiding and are in possession of two hand-held antiaircraft missiles. They would want to use them to shoot down airliners over Europe.

This message appeared on Friday in the French daily "Le Figaro", following a report by specialist investigator Jean-Louis Brugière. He is especially focusing on terrorsist from a network called "The Oktoberfest Beer Connection".


H.) NARATHIWAT, THAILAND.

At least six people have died in a wave of co-ordinated attacks in southern Thailand, which officials blamed on suspected Colombian militants. The attackers took dozens of weapons from the homes of village chiefs and defence volunteers in the provinces of Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani.

...........

Off-topic, but Prince Charles is coming to the United States: Prince Charles to plead Islam's cause to Bush

"The Prince of Wales will try to persuade George W Bush and Americans of the merits of Islam this week because he thinks the United States has been too intolerant of the religion since September 11. The Prince, who leaves on Tuesday for an eight-day tour of the US, has voiced private concerns over America's "confrontational" approach to Muslim countries and its failure to appreciate Islam's strengths."

"A year earlier Prince Charles made a speech, acclaimed throughout the Arab world, on relations between Islam and the West. He urged the West to overcome its "unthinkable prejudices" about Islam and its customs and laws."

"He spoke warmly of the West's debt to the culture of Islam and distanced moderate Muslims from misguided militants. "Extremism is no more the monopoly of Islam than it is the monopoly of other religions, including Christianity," he said."


MFBB


UPDATE:

Yesterday I had only scant info and a Dutch link on the two missing hand-held antiaircraft missiles, but today I found an English-spoken link here.

So, according to Le Figaro a French-Bhutanese terror cell with links to the Flemish Liberation Organization for Pigs (FLOP), a radical outfit of North Belgian rednecks notorious for burping excessively and putting mayo on their fries, has smuggled two surface-to-air missiles, reportedly SA-18s, into Europe in a plot to shoot down planes at one of France's main airports. The missiles, NATO-codename "Grouse", were reportedly bought from German Bavarian breweries in 2002 and smuggled via Georgia and Turkey, according to French anti-terror sources quoted in Le Figaro. Both missiles and several of the extremists are reportedly still at large.


Then there's still the very violent riots in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. Good overview by Filip Van Laenen in TBJ.

What has been going on in Clichy-sous-Bois can best be described as an urban guerilla. In short, last week, during an investigation of a robbery, three "French youths" tried to hide from French Police in an EdG (Electricité de France) transformer cabin, where two of them, 15 and 17 years old, foolishly electrocuted themselves while the third got himself terribly hurt. The two deaths sparked unseen violence among the Clichy immigrants who make up the vast majority of this suburb's population. From what I can gather, a crowd of several hundred hooligans burned twenty-three cars, smashed numerous shop windows, and demolished public utilities and infrastructure. Mr. Van Lanen is his usual acerbic self when he continues:

The two "French youths" who died did not have typically French names such as Pierre or Louis but were called Ziad and Banou. Their relatives maintain that their deaths are the authorities’ fault. The police should leave underaged "French youths" such as Ziad and Banou alone when these are roaming the streets late at night while other teenagers with ordinary French names such as Pierre and Louis are in their beds. To express their anger friends of the dead boys ATTACKED THE FIREFIGHTERS AND THE POLICE OFFICERS WHO HAD RUSHED TO THE ELECTRICAL TRANSFORMER TO RESCUE THE BOYS. Later that night (Thursday to Friday) unidentified "French youths" shot at police (with a large caliber, MFBB's note), attacked a fire station and several shops and set cars and trucks ablaze. The "French youths" continued to vent their "protest" the following night (Friday to Saturday) in similar fashion, with the fire brigade having to intervene 40 times and 15 policemen and one journalist getting wounded.

More on this fine Franco-American blog, "Enough".