The Pulp Ark Gazette

A British soldier was hacked to death by two men shouting Islamic slogans in asouth London street on Wednesday, in what the government said appeared to be a terrorist attack.

A dramatic clip filmed by an onlooker just minutes after the killing showed a man with hands covered in blood, brandishing a bloodied meat cleaver and a knife.

"We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you. The only reason we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day," the black man in his 20s or 30s, wearing a wool jacket and jeans and speaking with a local accent, shouted in the footage obtained by Britain's ITV news channel.

"This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

The Department of Defense confirms to NBC 5 Investigates that accused Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hasan has now been paid more than $278,000 since the Nov. 5, 2009 shooting that left 13 dead 32 injured. The Army said under the Military Code of Justice, Hasan’s salary cannot be suspended unless he is proven guilty.

Meanwhile, more than three years later soldiers wounded in the mass shooting are fighting to receive the same pay and medical benefits given to those wounded in combat.

The Army has categorized the shooting as a case of “workplace violence.”

A wave of attacks killed at least 95 people inShiite and Sunni areas of Iraq on Monday, officials said, pushing the death toll over the past week to more than 240 and extending one of the most sustained bouts of sectarian violence the country has seen in years.

The bloodshed is still far shy of the pace, scale and brutality of the dark days of 2006-2007, when Sunni and Shiite militias carried out retaliatory attacks against each other in a cycle of violence that left the country awash in blood. Still, Monday's attacks, some of which hit markets and crowded bus stops during the morning rush hour, have heightened fears that the country could be turning back down the path toward civil war.

The escalation of Muslim attacks on Christian churches in Egypt continues unabated. This week two attacks were carried out, one in Alexandria and one in Menbal in Upper Egypt — both allegedly prompted by harassment of Muslim women. Yesterday the church of St. Mary, in the Dakhela district, west of Alexandria, was attacked by Molotov cocktails and bricks, causing the gate to burn and the breaking of most of the stained glass windows. One Copt was killed and several injured.

According to the official police explanation, the Copt Basem Ramzy Michael was seen by the Muslim Hamada Alloshy, a registered criminal, allegedly extending his body from his balcony to gaze at the flat of Alloshy’s sister, who lives on the ground floor. A quarrel broke out and when the church was attacked, hundreds of Copts hurried to the area to defend the church, among whom was 36-year-old Sedky Sherif, a father of three children.

According to his nephew Rabah, who was with him at the time of his death, 1000 Copts were present and were attacked by over 20,000 Muslims, who were firing bird shots at them and throwing bricks. While the church was being attacked the Muslims were shouting “Allahu Akbar.” Security forces were sent out to diffuse the situation and disperse the crowd. They made several arrests on both sides.

On Sept. 12, 2012, President Barack Obama vowed to "bring to justice" the perpetrators of the deadly attack in Benghazi, Libya. On Oct. 26, 2012, Obama said his "biggest priority" was bringing the "folks" in Libya responsible for murdering four Americans to "justice." Tick, tock, tick, tock.

While White House press secretary Jay Carney sneers at the GOP's "obsession" with what went wrong at the besieged Libyan consulate, Obama continues to ply his emptiest talking point. On May 13, 2013, more than eight months after the bloody disaster, Obama snippily reminded reporters that he had told us all back in September that "we would find out what happened, we would make sure that it did not happen again, and we would make sure that we held accountable those who had perpetrated this terrible crime."

Woulda, coulda, shoulda. Justice delayed is justice denied.

Fighters of the Al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front in Syria executed 11 men they accused of taking part in massacres by President Bashar al-Assad's forces, a video published on Thursday showed.

A man whose face was covered in a black balaclava shot each man in the back of the head as they kneeled, blindfolded and lined up in a row in the eastern province of Deir al-Zor.

"The sharia court for the eastern region in Deir al-Zor has sentenced to death these apostate soldiers that committed massacres against our brothers and families in Syria," the executioner said on the video.

Islamist militants with black flags shouted "God is great" as each man was shot. The executioner returned to some victims, firing more bullets into them to make sure they were dead.

The extraordinary ban has been imposed in Labour-dominated Radstock, Somerset, despite the town having just 16 Muslims within its population of 5,620.

The ruling came after a councillor on the local authority said the red and white emblem could still cause upset because it was used during the Crusades - a thousand years ago.

Eleanor Jackson, a university lecturer and Labour councillor, said: "My big problem is that it is offensive to some Muslims, but even more so that it has been hijacked by the far right.

"My thoughts are we ought to drop it for 20 years."

Officials agreed with her proposal not to buy a new St George's flag for the town's repaired civic flagpole in its memorial garden.

Instead, a Union flag will be flown on Armistice Day - and the rainbow flag of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender pride movement - at 'appropriate' times of the year.

Bomb attacks in Shi'ite areas of Baghdad and in northern Iraq killed more than 35 people on Wednesday, following weeks of violence by Sunni Islamist insurgents determined to unleash sectarian confrontation.

A string of car bombings hit Shi'ite neighborhoods across the capital Baghdad on Wednesday evening, including one outside a cafe and another at a market, killing at least 22 people and wounding dozens more, police said.

Catastrophic failings by police and social services allowed a child sex ring to sexually torture girls as young as 11 for eight years, despite victims repeatedly telling officers they had been raped or abused.

Last night – after the vicious and 'medieval' predators were convicted at the Old Bailey – the police and social services apologised for failing to answer the girls’ desperate pleas for help.

The victims – aged 11 to 15 – were befriended with gifts of perfume, alcohol and drugs before being subjected to a ‘living hell’ of extreme physical and sexual violence for eight years.

Yesterday five men of Pakistani origin and two of Eritrean heritage were facing lengthy jail terms after being convicted of a string of crimes.

Their offences included 23 rapes, 15 rape conspiracy charges, nine charges of arranging child prostitution, five of internal trafficking for sexual exploitation and four of sexual activity with a child.

They gave the girls large amounts of drugs including heroin and crack cocaine so that they would yield to their depraved demands.

At times the girls were so ‘wasted’ they ‘were barely aware of what was going on’, the court heard.

The girl was just 8 years old and everybody understands the fact that she knows nothing about sex or wedding or making love or virginity or sexual related topics; not even at a basic level for two reasons, one being that she’s just a child – not even a teenager and that in that part of the country, nobody knows anything about these things nor they are given trainings or education about a healthy sexual life.

Naturally, she started to bleed in a very bad amount, but the mullah was too annoyed for not being able to have sex with her, to care for what he did or her bleeding or her wounds that he gave her.

The girl had her scarf stuffed in her mouth, crying and trying to not raise her voice because others were there in the room adjacent to or outside.

The girl was bleeding and there was nobody to help her, neither could the Mullah ask for help as it was a shame for him. Our 8-year-old bride bled and went into traumatic shock from blood loss and early in the morning around 5 when the sun was about to rise, she passed away.

One car bomb was discovered by a police patrol, who called in a unit to defuse it. Before that could be done, the bomb went off, but the explosion was minor, security officials said. Then, as a crowd of people gathered, a second, more powerful device detonated, causing the casualties.

Minority Christians were among those suffering Sunday, May 19, after at least 140 people died during four consecutive days of violence in Iraq, raising fears that sectarian conflicts could lead the troubled Middle East nation into civil war.

Since the fall of leader Saddam Hussein a decade ago, about 1,000 Christians are known to have been killed, a relatively high number compared with percentages killed from other groups in Iraqi society, according to Open Doors, a Christian aid and advocacy group.

Attacks on Sunni and Shi'ite Muslim mosques, security forces and tribal leaders have spread since security forces raided a Sunni protest camp near Kirkuk a month ago, igniting clashes and fuelling fear of a slide back into all-out inter-communal war.

Iraq has grown more volatile as the civil war in neighboring Syria strains fragile relations between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims. Tensions are now at their highest since the last U.S. troops pulled out at the end of 2011.

The Bible is a historical narrative. It is this narrative framework that constrains the range of interpretations that the text lends. It is the Bible’s sequential ordering of events, its meticulous attention to details, to context, that informs its message regarding the One, True God. 

The Koran has no narrative. Rather, it is essentially a collection of divinely issued moral precepts that, devoid as they are of context, are meant to pertain to all peoples—everywhere. In ignoring the context of its emergence and development, Islam also neglects the contexts of those upon whom it seeks to impose itself. 

This explains why Islam has not, cannot, assimilate to any institutional arrangements that allow a separation of some sort or other between the eternal and temporal spheres. It is this that accounts for why Islam appears incapable of co-existing for long with any and all potential competitors.

A suicide car bomb targeted a foreign military convoy in Kabul on Thursday, killing 15 people including five Americans in the deadliest attack in the Afghan capital for nearly a year, officials said.

The powerful explosion, which struck at 8:00 a.m. (0330 GMT) in the Shah Shaheed southeastern residential district, also injured 37 passersby including many children going to school, officials said.

In total eight Afghans died, along with two two US soldiers and four NATO contractors who were travelling through the city's busy rush hour traffic.

"I was at home when I heard a terrible explosion and our whole building shook," Mustafa, a witness, told AFP. "All our windows are shattered. I rushed outside to bring my little brothers and sisters from school. I saw five or six people covered in blood who were being taken away in police vehicles."

Afghan health ministry official Sayed Kabir Amiri said local hospitals confirmed eight Afghans had died and 37 were wounded.

Two children aged six and 10 were among the dead.

"Some of the bodies are badly damaged and can't be identified," Amiri added.

75 injured in West Bank demonstrations; Abbas calls for sovereign state on pre-1967 lines; MK Ilatov: Palestinians do not want peace.

“Marking the day Israel was established as a day of mourning, together with the Palestinian riots and attacks on IDF soldiers proves to us and the international community, year after year, that the Palestinians do not want peace,” Ilatov said.