Really, should be no big deal.

Unless you decide to commit adultery. If the graphic content warning at the beginning of the video isn't enough, here's a graphic content warning for you.

Posted by: Alice H at 12:11 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 40 words, total size 1 kb.

The Taliban have seized a key area just miles from Pakistan's capital.

A Taliban commander said Islamic Sharia courts would soon be established in the district as they have already done in Swat. Mohammad Khalil said the main objective was to end the "sense of deprivation" among locals and provide speedy justice to the people.

Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the information minister for Northwest Frontier Province, warned that the militants' activities in Buner were in violation of the Swat peace accord. "After the agreement, there is no justification to take up arms," Mr. Hussain said in a statement Wednesday. He denied, however, that the Taliban have total control over the area.

Rehman Malik, the federal home minister, said the government has the option of using force if the Taliban did not withdraw from Buner. A senior military official said a military operation could not be ruled out to stop the Taliban advance.

In Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the Taliban advances pose "an existential threat" to Pakistan and urged Pakistanis world-wide to oppose a government policy yielding to them.

Pakistanis "need to speak out forcefully against a policy that is ceding more and more territory to the insurgents," Mrs. Clinton said in testimony before a House committee. She pointed to "the seriousness of the existential threat posed to the state of Pakistan by the continuing [Taliban] advances, now within hours of Islamabad."

Analysts said the fall of Buner to the Taliban came as a serious blow to the government's efforts to contain Islamic militancy, which poses a major threat to Pakistan's security. The people of the area had previously beaten back Taliban raids, but lack of support from the security forces broke their resistance.

The development came after Sufi Mohammed, a radical cleric who played a central role in signing the peace accord called his followers to continue their struggle for the enforcement of Islamic rule in the entire North West Frontier Province.

Addressing a large crowd in Mingora, the main town in Swat on Sunday, Mr. Mohammed declared that there was no room for democracy in Islam. "The Western democracy is infidels and should be rejected by Muslims," he said.

Posted by: eddiebear at 02:17 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 366 words, total size 2 kb.

Posted by: eddiebear at 11:22 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 44 words, total size 1 kb.

2,791 times too few, in my opinion.

Posted by: Alice H at 01:14 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 10 words, total size 1 kb.

Si.

"The relatively cheap expense and high quality of U.S. servers seems to attract jihadists," said Rita Katz, co-founder of the Site Intelligence Group, a private company that monitors the communications of Muslim extremist groups. Even al-Qaeda has sometimes paid American companies to serve as conduits for its hate-filled messages, said Katz, who has tracked such activity since 2003.

Militants' use of U.S. Web hosts has sparked occasional spats between the United States and its allies, as well as endless debates over whether it is better to shut down the Web sites when they're discovered or to let them continue to operate. By allowing them to remain online, intelligence analysts can sometimes discover clues about the leadership and structure of terrorist groups, some analysts say.

"You can learn a lot from the enemy by watching them chat online," said Martin Libicki, a senior policy analyst at the Rand Corp., a nonprofit research organization. Libicki said the bloggers rarely spill secrets, and most are "probably using this more for public affairs rather than recruitment."

"Public affairs," in many cases, means blatantly anti-Western invective and propaganda.

For instance, the Afghan group that rented Web space from ThePlanet offered daily updates on skirmishes between Taliban fighters and U.S. "invaders" and Afghan "puppet army" troops. The Web site, http://www.alemarah1.com, frequently claimed that the group's forces had killed coalition troops and even destroyed warplanes and tanks -- accounts that bear little resemblance to coalition field reports on those dates.

Another Taliban Web site, http://Toorabora.com, continues to operate, using the services of Free Web Town, a user-friendly template service run by Atlanta-based Tulix Systems. The group's site features regular updates about purported attacks on U.S.-led coalition forces and occasional interviews with Taliban leaders and commanders in English and the regional languages of Dari and Pashto.

Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't FISA intended to monitor this stuff?

Posted by: eddiebear at 10:23 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 322 words, total size 3 kb.