[AlAhram] The Czech parliament on Wednesday passed a constitutional amendment that challenges EU gun control rules by allowing legal firearms holders to use them when national security is threatened, including during terrorist attacks.
The amendment, which passed by a large majority, is expected easily to gain approval from the senate and President Milos Zeman, still needed for it to take effect.
The Czech government also said earlier this month it would ask the European Court of Justice to strike down new EU gun control rules that have its hunters and gun collectors up in arms.
Both moves come as parties jockey for support ahead of the October general election, when the centrist ANO junior coalition partner is tipped to oust the Social Democrats as government leader.
Wednesday's Czech amendment was submitted by government and opposition parties and approved by 139 out of the 168 deputies present in the lower house of parliament. Nine voted against.
"We don't want to disarm our citizens at a time when the security situation in Europe is getting worse," Interior Minister Milan Chovanec, a senior Social Democrat, told parliament Wednesday.
"Show me a single terrorist attack in Europe perpetrated using a legally-owned weapon," he said.
Passed in mid-March by the European Parliament, the new EU gun control directive bans civilians from possessing certain semi-automatic weapons as part of counter-terrorism measures.
EU members are supposed to incorporate the new rules, which passed in June, within 15 months.
The Czech interior ministry said the directive would affect nearly all 300,000 legal firearm licence holders in the country of 10.6 million people.
The Czech Republic, where there is no recent history of terrorism, has been pushing for softer rules on gun control, unlike other countries like Luxembourg and La Belle France which asked for strict legislation.
Besides banning short semi-automatic firearms with loading devices over 20 rounds and long semi-automatic firearms with loading devices over 10 rounds, the EU directive prohibits long firearms that can be folded or concealed in other ways.
The EU rules make it easier to trace firearms. They also require registration of converted firearms that only fire blanks, which are used in theatres or on television, under the same category as the original weapons.
#2
It would be a major mental shift for the EU cops, that is for sure. American cops know there are legal carriers out there and act accordingly, but their European brethren would need to be retrained.
[AnNahar] A US judge has halted deportations of all Iraqi nationals -- some set to be removed as early as Tuesday -- on the grounds they could be tortured or killed if returned to the Middle Eastern country.
US District Judge Mark Goldsmith on Monday expanded nationwide an earlier order affecting mostly Chaldean Christians who were nabbed Drop the gat, Rocky, or you're a dead 'un! in immigration raids in the state of Michigan, alarming local Iraqi communities.
The judge said his latest order temporarily halts removal proceedings against as many as 1,444 people, including in Tennessee and New Mexico, of whom 85 faced removal as early as Tuesday.
The order comes as the federal government prepares to block certain citizens from six predominantly Moslem countries from traveling to the US, after the Supreme Court Monday partially reinstated President Donald Trump ...New York real estate developer, described by Dems as illiterate, racist, misogynistic, and what ever other unpleasant descriptions they can think of, elected by the rest of us as 45th President of the United States... 's controversial travel ban ahead of a hearing on the case.
In a March deal between the US and Iraq, the Trump administration agreed to remove the Middle Eastern country from the initial version of its proposed ban, in exchange for Iraq agreeing to take in deported immigrants colonists.
More than 100 Iraqi immigrants colonists with criminal records were arrested in the bankrupt, increasingly impoverished, reliably Democrat, Detroit ... ruled by Democrats since 1962. A city whose Golden Age included the Purple Gang... area in an immigration raid earlier this month -- prompting a lawsuit.
They were slated for deportation back to the war-torn Middle Eastern country with a history of religious animus.
"The community was caught off guard," Nathan Kalasho, a member of the Iraqi Chaldean Christian community in the Detroit area told AFP.
"We have not faced a crisis like this in the United States for several years," said Kalasho, an operator of a charter school who is helping in a joint legal effort with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Judge Goldsmith last week granted a temporary restraining order to pause any impending removals to give immigrants colonists a chance to show that they would be in danger if sent back.
"The substantiated allegations made here are that detainees face extraordinarily grave consequences: death, persecution, and torture," Goldsmith wrote in expanding the order nationwide for 14 days.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) responded to an AFP inquiry by saying the agency intended to comply with the order.
"ICE is currently reviewing the judge's order to determine the appropriate next steps," front man Khaalid Walls told AFP via email.
Earlier this month, the agency pointed out that those arrested in Michigan all had criminal convictions which qualified them for deportation.
But advocates claim many of those targeted have lived in the US for decades and led responsible lives after brief brushes with the law.
"It's unfair to term them as criminals after they've served their debt to society," Kalasho said.
"There were people who were swept up over marijuana possessions as far back as the '80s," he said.
#1
"It's unfair to term them as criminals after they've served their debt to society," Kalasho said.
I don't recall any law addressing the concept of 'debt to society'. Nice piety, but felony convictions and punishment today more often simply reflect we're rich enough to warehouse people who otherwise in earlier times would have been hung.
[DAWN] The Pakistain Army has called for a unified response to what it said was a "malicious" campaign by hostile intelligence agencies and anti-state elements to give a sectarian and ethnic colour to a recent string of terrorist incidents in the country that mainly targeted minority Shias.
"Having failed to divide us through terrorism, our enemy is now trying to target and fragment us along sectarian/ethnic lines which merits a unified national response," said an Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) blurb on Wednesday.
The people of Pakistain need to be cognisant of the campaign, which is also "unwittingly" being spread on social media, said the statement, adding that the army is closely following the situation.
"For us every shaheed [martyred]/injured is equal, regardless of sect/ethnicity and indeed is a great loss," it quoted Chief of Army Staff Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa as saying.
"We all are Paks and Moslems who fully respect the religious rights of our Pak minorities."
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#1
Pakistan, land of Sectarian color. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
[IsraelTimes] Mazen Faqha’s Gazoo-based successor is said to have extensive connections in the West Bank.
Hamas, a contraction of the Arabic words for "frothing at the mouth", has replaced a top commander who was responsible for planning the terror group’s attacks in the West Bank, Israeli intelligence sources told Channel 2 on Wednesday.
Mazen Fuqha was rubbed out on March 25 near his home in Tel el-Hawa, a neighborhood in southwestern Gazoo City, with a silencer-equipped weapon. Hamas blamed Israel for the killing.
The TV report did not provide the name of the new Hamas commander, saying only that he grew up in the West Bank, has extensive contacts there, but now lives in the Gazoo Strip.
He is believed to be taking on a central role in an organization, which the Israeli defense establishment says has recently redoubled its efforts to recruit individuals in the West Bank to carry out attacks against Israel.
Faqha is believed to have been responsible for Hamas terror cells in the West Bank, most notably the squad that planned the kidnap and murder of Israeli teenagers Eyal Yifrah, Naftali Fraenkel and Gilad Shaer in June 2014.
[Iran Press TV] Critics have questioned intentions of some senior Israeli officials who have long pushed the idea of building an artificial island off the coast of the besieged Gazoo Strip. They say the Israeli regime is desperately attempting to sever Gazoo from the rest of the occupied Paleostinian territories.
The first, dubbed the "separation plan" from Gazoo, which Israel’s minister for intelligence, Israel Katz, has been advocating for the past few years, includes the construction of an island adjacent to the Gazoo coast.
The island would sit roughly three miles off the coast of Gazoo and be connected to the enclave by a bridge.
Now Katz has made a new video showing how his idea would work. The nearly three-minute animated clip says the island would provide Paleostinians with "humanitarian, economic and transportation gateway to the world without endangering Israel’s security."
If an artificial island was to be created, Katz’s video tells us that the Tel Aviv regime would remain in control of security in the sea around the island and be responsible for security inspections in the port.
The proposed plan is reportedly estimated at $5 billion.
The Israeli minister has indicated in the past that Soddy Arabia ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face... or the Chinese might be interested in investing in the venture.
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#1
Seems simpler to just bulldoze Gazoo into the Med.
[Iran Press TV] Russia has said it will react "in proportion" to any US military actions against Syria on the pretense of preventing a chemical attack.
"We will react with dignity, in proportion to the real situation that may take place," said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday during a presser.
Lavrov added that he hoped the US would not use its intelligence assessments concerning the Syrian government's alleged intentions to further provoke the country.
"I expect that our partners in the region - American, European - will also have an open and comprehensible approach aimed at de-escalation through normalization of the humanitarian situation," he added.
[IraqiNews] U.S. assertions that the Syrian government may be planning a chemical weapons attack complicate peace talks on Syria, RIA news agency quoted Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov as saying on Wednesday.
U.S. officials said on Tuesday Washington’s warning to Syria’s leadership against staging a chemical weapons attack was based on intelligence about what appeared to be active preparations at a Syrian airfield used for such an attack in April.
Gatilov warned the United States not to take unilateral actions in Syria.
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[Al Jazeera] Three years ago on Wednesday, ISIS leader His Supreme Immensity, Caliph of the Faithful and Galactic Overlord, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi ...formerly merely the head of ISIL and a veteran of the Bagram jailhouse. Looks like a new messiah to bajillions of Moslems, like just another dead-eyed mass murder to the rest of us... stood at the pulpit of djinn-infested Mosul ... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn... 's Grand Al Nuri mosque, which was destroyed last week amid fighting between the gang's fighters and US-backed Iraqi forces, and announced the creation of a Sunni caliphate.
Continued on Page 49
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#1
A ban on all weapons alchemical?
Take Allah's Koran so polemical:
The lead that its readers are shooting?
A mountain of gold it's transmuting.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[AlAhram] The Czech parliament on Wednesday passed a constitutional amendment that challenges EU gun control rules by allowing legal firearms holders to use them when national security is threatened, including during terrorist attacks.
[AnNahar] A US judge has halted deportations of all Iraqi nationals -- some set to be removed as early as Tuesday -- on the grounds they could be tortured or killed if returned to the Middle Eastern country.
[IsraelTimes] Mazen Faqha’s 
[Al Jazeera] Three years ago on Wednesday, 
