I was trying to work my way through the latest voluminous post from my buddy Binks over at Free Canuckistan, and I thought that I would share some links with you from stories around the world. Warning, these are pretty depressing.

Brazil: Brazilian President Will Seek to “Criminalize Words and Acts Offensive to Homosexuality”.

In a written address delivered to the Third Congress of the Brazilian Association of Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transvestites, and Transsexuals (ABGLT), Lula denounced groups, most of them Christian, who have objected to plans to outlaw such speech, calling them “hypocrites.”

“Some backward as well as hypocritical sectors … have criticized our government for supporting initiatives that criminalize words or acts that are offensive to homosexuality,” he wrote. “That has no importance.  I will continue, with the support of the entire government, to maintain that attitude.”

As LifeSiteNews has reported in the past, Lula has for several years sought to pass a “homophobia law” that would make it a crime to criticize homosexual behavior.

India: India is in peril. Obama is making it worse.

The real threat is of an Islamist takeover of Pakistan. Yet Obama’s strategy on Afghanistan and Pakistan (or ‘Af-Pak’ in Washingtonese) inspires little confidence. Throwing more money at Pakistan and keeping up the pretence that the badly splintered and weakened al-Qa’eda poses the main terrorist threat risks failure.

…As Bush’s national security adviser Stephen Hadley pointed out just before leaving office in January, ‘You can’t really solve Afghanistan without solving Pakistan.’

…Yet to mend a broken policy on Pakistan, Obama is doing more of what helped to create the failure — dispensing rewards upfront.It’s no wonder that even as the Taleban’s sway in Pakistan spreads, the US defense secretary Robert Gates declared in Krakow that the United States ‘would be very open’ to an agreement in Afghanistan similar to the one Pakistan made with the Taleban which ceded control of the Swat Valley to the Taleban. All this is music to the ears of the Pakistani military and its offspring — the Taleban.

Venezuela: In Venezuela, political opposition has a price.

In 2002-2004, almost 5 million Venezuelans signed one or more in a series of three petitions calling for an election to remove President Hugo Chavez from office. After Chavez survived the recall vote of August 2004, the names of those who had signed the final petition were compiled into a database using software called Maisanta.

Now economic analysis has found evidence that petition signers paid a price in lost employment and wages. This tends to corroborate long-held suspicions that the Chavez government used the Maisanta database as an enemies list. The analysis also quantifies the loss to Venezuela’s economy due to the regime’s apparent indulgence of political vendettas.

Middle East: Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, Jihadic Style.

…there were three carefully organized explosions on one day in Iraq, which killed a total of 80 civilians. One explosion was carried out by a woman in a black abaya, holding a 5 year-old child’s hand, (probably not her own). She killed herself and 28 other Muslims in a crowded market in a Baghdad slum. The civilians, many of whom were other women, were waiting on line for free flour, cooking oil, tea, macaroni, and other staples that the police were handing out. Of course, police officers died as well.

I have written a number of articles about Muslim mothers who have participated, both directly and indirectly, in the honor killing of their daughters; and about female Muslim suicide-homicide bombers who have specifically targeted other women and children.

For example, in 2008, in Iraq, one of four female homicide bombers entered a tent that provided shelter to weary female religious pilgrims. She sat down, read the Koran with them, and left a bag behind that, moments later, blew them all up. Please note that she targeted weary, religious Muslim women.

Thus, I was dismayed but not surprised when a Sunni, Al-Qaeda plot emerged, one in which male terrorists raped eighty Muslim girls and women, then turned them over to Samira Jassim who patiently, persistently, “maternally,” persuaded the rape victims, (many of whom had been targeted because they were depressed or mentally ill), to “cleanse” their shame by blowing themselves and other Muslims up. Twenty eight women did so.

Middle East: Nine Muslim countries among top 13 “egregious” violators of religious freedom. (Quote below is from CNN)

A U.S. government panel listed 13 countries Friday as “egregious” violators of religious freedom.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s annual report named Myanmar, North Korea, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

Cuba: What Bob Gates Should Do With the Gitmo Uighurs.

So, Defense Secretary Gates now confirms for the first time that, yes, the Obama administration intends to release “some” Uighurs into the US–said Uighurs being the 17 Chinese Muslims at GItmo whom Andy McCarthy describes as being “steeped in jihadist ideology, trained in explosives and assassination tactics, and anxious enough to get that way that they high-tailed it from China to Afghanistan to become more lethal terrorists.”

Egypt: Coptic Priests and Women Assaulted.

The Egyptian State Security forces attacked and demolished on 26/04/09 at 7.30 am the services building belonging to the Coptic Orthodox Diocese of Masrah Matrouh, assaulting the Coptic priests and Coptic women and men. More than 1000 Copts have surrounded the remains of the demolished building, ready for martyrdom, said a church member.

Scotland: Scottish Schoolchildren to Attend Government Funded “Islamophobia Workshops”. (from UK Press)

The Scottish Government is to back efforts to challenge Islamophobia in schools across the country.

More than £81,000 will be spent on holding more than 150 workshops in secondary schools over the next two years.

The move was announced by the Education Secretary Fiona Hyslop and welcomed by the charity Show Racism The Red Card, which will put on the 90-minute workshops.

And here’s one from Laura over at Pursuing Holiness…

Europe: Hey, Europe – don’t like U.S. control of the internet? Then build your own.

ICANN is a non-profit organization that coordinates things like the system that allows you to type hotair.com instead of 67.192.179.13 into your browser’s address bar.  It has that authority thanks to a Joint Project Agreement with the Department of Commerce.  It also manages domain name disputes like the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals vs. People Eating Tasty Animals fight over peta.org.  (The carnivores lost.) That JPA is going to expire on September 30th, and the United Nations and the European Union are continuing their ongoing fight to gain control.

I’m not a big fan of ICANN for a number of reasons.  But turning control of basic internet functions that we’ve come to take for granted over to the nanny-state Europeans is even worse.  People who “issue binding regulations governing all aspects of public life on all member states, right down to the sizes of apples and oranges in street markets” are not fit guardians of the internet.

They micromanage business and their impulse is to criminalize and control dissenting opinion…

Commenter ECM sent me this article from the UK Times featuring a video of actual torture.

The 45-minute tape shows a man that the Government of Abu Dhabi has acknowledged is Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahyan — one of 22 royal brothers of the UAE President and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince — mercilessly and repeatedly beating a man with a cattle prod and a nailed board, burning his genitals and driving his Mercedes over him several times. He is assisted by a uniformed policeman.

This act, by a member of the United Arab Emirates Royal Family, is actually torture. When the USA waterboards a terrorist, it’s not torture, and we potentially save thousands of lives from future terrorist attacks. Check out this article from the Weekly Standard regarding the Democrats’ politicization of national security and foreign policy.

Excerpt:

…In a letter to his intelligence community colleagues last Thursday, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair described those briefings. “From 2002 through 2006 when the use of these techniques ended, the leadership of the CIA repeatedly reported their activities both to Executive Branch policymakers and to members of Congress, and received permission to continue to use the techniques.”

That passage from Blair’s letter – along with another confirming that the interrogations produced “high-value information” that provided a “deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization attacking this country” – was dropped when language from the letter was released publicly. A spokesman for Blair attributed to the omission to normal editing procedures.

In an interview this morning, senior Bush administration official accused the DNI of “politicizing intelligence” by attempting to hide his judgment that the program had produced valuable results. This official also accused the Obama administration of double standards, citing its professed belief in transparency and its unwillingness – at least so far – to declassify memos that demonstrate the value of the interrogation techniques Obama has banned.

I have an idea. Let’s kick these bums out in 2010!