Latest news with #ShiaMuslims
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Deadly blast rocks police station in eastern Syria, killing three: Report
At least three people have been killed in a blast targeting a police station in the eastern Syrian town of Al-Mayadeen, the SANA state news agency has reported, citing a security source. The explosion in the Deir az Zor countryside on Sunday also injured several people, the report said, without providing further details. A video verified by Al Jazeera's fact-checking unit Sanad shows the aftermath of the explosion. The incident took place a day after Syrian authorities said security forces killed three ISIL (ISIS) fighters and arrested four others in Aleppo. It was the first time the interim government announced such an operation against the armed group. The raids, launched by the General Security Department in coordination with the General Intelligence Directorate, targeted multiple ISIL sleeper cells operating across Aleppo, Syria's Ministry of Interior said in a statement on Saturday. One security officer was killed in the operation, it said. Interim Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who assumed power in Damascus in December, has long opposed ISIL. His forces battled the group's self-declared caliphate during the Syrian war. Al-Sharaa seized power after his Hayat Tahrir al-Sham armed group led a lightning opposition offensive that toppled Syria's longtime President Bashar al-Assad. Al-Sharaa cut ties with al-Qaeda in 2016. The recent operation comes just months after Syrian authorities said they had foiled an ISIL bombing plot near the Sayeda Zeinab shrine, a key pilgrimage site for Shia Muslims south of Damascus. This also comes after US President Donald Trump stunned the world by announcing on Tuesday that the United States was going to lift sanctions on the country – a move that Syrians hope will help their nation reintegrate into the global economy, and bring much-needed investment.
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
At least three killed as Syrian forces raid ISIL hideouts in Aleppo
Syrian security forces have killed three ISIL (ISIS) fighters and arrested four others in Aleppo, authorities said, the first time the interim government has announced such an operation against the group in Syria's second city. The raids, launched by the General Security Department in coordination with the General Intelligence Service, targeted multiple ISIL sleeper cells operating across Aleppo, Syria's Ministry of Interior said in a statement on Saturday. One security officer was killed in the operation, it said. Forces stormed the site and seized 'explosive devices, an explosive vest and a number of General Security force uniforms', the statement UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the operation took place in Aleppo's Haidariya district and that clashes also broke out in another neighbourhood. Interim Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who assumed power in Damascus in December, has long opposed ISIL. His forces battled the group's self-declared caliphate during the Syrian war. US President Donald Trump met al-Sharaa this week in Saudi Arabia and described him as an 'attractive guy with a very strong past'. Following the meeting, Washington announced that it would lift sanctions on Syria – a major policy shift and boost for al-Sharaa's transitional government. Al-Sharaa seized power in Damascus in December after his forces toppled Bashar al-Assad in a lightning offensive. Al-Sharaa cut ties with al-Qaeda in 2016. The recent operation comes just months after Syrian authorities said they had foiled an ISIL bombing plot near the Sayeda Zeinab shrine, a key pilgrimage site for Shia Muslims south of Damascus.
India.com
17-05-2025
- Politics
- India.com
Man Who Blinded Rushdie In One Eye Sentenced To 25 Years
The man who attacked author Salman Rushdie, blinding him in one eye, was sentenced on Friday to 25 years in prison, the local prosecutor said. Judge David Foley gave an unrepentant Hadi Matar at court in Mayville in New York State, near where the attack took place, for attempted murder. He was convicted under state laws in February, and he faces separate terrorism charges under federal laws. Matar, 27, also received a sentence of seven years that would run concurrently with the main sentence. The district prosecutor for Chautauqua County, Jason Schmidt, said after the sentencing, "I'm pleased with the sentence that was imposed by the judge." Matar's lawyer Nathaniel Barone said that he planned to file an appeal. Matar rushed to the stage and attacked Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institution in August 2022 when the author, who was under a fatwa from Iran's Ayatollah, was about to speak. Rushdie was stabbed several times, including in his right eye, which he lost and now wears an eye patch. Henry Reese, who runs a programme to give persecuted writers asylum, was also injured during the attack. Rushdie detailed the attack and its aftermath in a memoir published in 2024, "Knife". The origins of the attack go back to 1989, when Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa calling for Rushdie's death, saying that his novel published the previous year, "The Satanic Verses," was blasphemous. This forced Rushdie to hide under the protection of British authorities for several years, before he moved to New York and began to appear in public. Before the sentencing, Matar told the judge Rushdie "wants to be a bully, he wants to bully other people. I don't agree with that". Rushdie was disrespectful to other people, Matar said in a rambling statement in which he spoke incongruously about freedom of speech and religion. "There's an irony to all of this," Schmidt said. "His value system is that he can impose his own sense of justice and sentencing upon somebody who violates, you know, his value system." Barone said Matar was trying to let the court know that "he felt very strongly about his Muslim religion". He noted that while some may have agreed with Matar, other Shia Muslims said, "What happened is wrong." When federal charges were filed against Matar in July, Merrick Garland, who was then the Attorney General, said he "committed an act of terrorism in the name of Hezbollah, a designated terrorist organisation aligned with the Iranian regime". Barone said that a hearing in the case was expected in July, and he expected the trial to start early next year. In the US legal system, there are separate -- and sometimes overlapping -- federal and state laws with separate state, local and federal court systems, and people can be tried on different charges in those courts.
The Guardian
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Brian May nearly choked on his goats cheese: my adventures with the cosmic dads of rock'n'roll
Young musicians have so little to say. Give me a rocker in his later years any day. Ask him about his childhood, his relationship with his mum, his painful lifelong love affair with his lead guitarist. Many belong to a specific anthropological group: born after the war, they got their first guitars on hire purchase and went on to date the aristocracy. They became my specialist subject as a journalist: it was impossible to resist the combination of vulnerability, extreme oddness and sharp business nous I found in so many, while others were living in strangely compromised circumstances despite years of deathless hits. I was particularly drawn to those who had continued a career under the radar, or who had slipped under it but hadn't quite noticed. It was a strange subject to pursue, but always a labour of love – because on some level, I felt a strange identification with these 'cosmic dads' of rock'n'roll. The obsession has culminated in a book, Men of a Certain Age. Here are 10 things I learned in the course of writing it. According to guitarist Jeff Beck, the rock star's distinctive 'egg-timer' face (sunken cheeks, faintly simian) was the result of bad 1960s dentistry and a teenage lust for sweets. A man on a flying horse would be hard-pressed to pull Beck out of a lineup with Ronnie Wood, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. He was the inspiration for Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap and his stage gear was designed by Hilary Wili, who did the costumes for Downton Abbey. ('She still finds time to stitch me something.') With their little legs, narrow hips and mysterious 'proceeding' hairlines, rockers often look like pickled versions of the boys they were when they first picked up a guitar. Greg Lake, talking about Emerson, Lake & Palmer's biggest gigs, once told me: 'I've never seen so many people together in one place, apart from in a war.' Paul O'Neill, of the US prog outfit Trans-Siberian Orchestra, claimed to have walked in disguise among his audience before a show in Germany like Henry V before Agincourt. There he met two Sunni Muslims from Iraq and, 90ft away, two Shia Muslims from Iran: 'God forbid, two years from now, they end up in two different militias and recognise each other,' he told me. 'They would unchamber their weapons and say, 'Hey, weren't we at a TSO concert together?'' Many US rockers see themselves as quasi-political figures, ambassadors of western might. This is why Sting is beloved in America. He grew up in the shadow of a 10,000-tonne ship in the docks of Wallsend. One was built and launched every year, a constant cycle of constraint and departure. The Queen Mother attended one of the launches and waved at him from her car. He told himself: 'One day, I'll be on the inside of a car like that.' His father was a milkman, and Sting and his brother would be at the dairy at 4am. The class divide between him and his bandmate Stewart Copeland, son of a CIA diplomat, fuelled much press in the early days. 'I developed no accent,' he told me. 'Now I only speak Geordie when I'm angry – and I can speak it well.' Rock wives correct mistakes, monitor manners and oversee the business side of things. Gene Simmons claims to have slept with 4,600 women. By the time I met him in Moscow, he was married to Shannon Tweed, a former erotic-thriller actor known for her work in Meatballs III. She was there at the table, flicking through Time magazine. Gene talked about the postwar British diet, citing faggots (lowgrade meatballs) in gravy. Tweed read a definition of faggots from her phone in a slow, Beverly Hills voice: 'A bundle of pieces of iron or steel to be welded, rolled or hammered together at high temperature.' 'It's a question of semantics,' said Gene. 'Though I'm not anti-semantic.' She told him to finish his porridge. 'You're burping while talking,' she added. 'I was?' he said. 'At least I didn't fart.' 'You find the truth by ridiculing yourself,' Johnny Rotten told me. Punk is the most exhausted story in pop music but Rotten speaks in strange, fresh phrases, as though he's found a way to keep himself interested. 'Vivienne's clothes were always awful,' he volunteered of Westwood. 'All those zips – she had no concept of men's dangly bits.' Shaun Ryder was similar, spectacularly engaged for someone so blasted by drugs, and strangely amused by the interview and portrait process. His hair had recently fallen out after testosterone injections for an underactive thyroid – head, eyebrows, chest and nethers. He could have been self-conscious, but he made it part of the act as he peered at the photographs and said: 'I look like Uncle Fester.' Rock stars are from another age, when journalists and musicians hooked up on sheepskin rugs and wrote features together in blissful, claret-fuelled symbiosis. After four days with the Soft Machine exile Kevin Ayers in Carcassonne, he made a little bed up for me in his large, empty house. Later, as his manager explained that no romance was to take place, I heard a brief crashing of pots and pans. It's a shame this all sounds a bit #MeToo in hindsight. It really wasn't. Sign up to Sleeve Notes Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week after newsletter promotion Rock journalism is the only place where writers are obsessive fans – though usually pretending not to be. From the late 1960s on, it was a male domain, and male journalists were often at pains to compete with them and disguise their admiration, making statements such as: 'Let me tell you why your second album tanked.' Time and again, I have seen relief on the face of a rocker as I enter the room, a loosening of the shoulders. He would then tell me things he wouldn't tell a man, probably thinking: 'Ah, it's just a girl!' Bruce Hornsby had a big hit in 1986, The Way It Is, and found a way to live well off it by allowing lucrative cover versions by various rappers, most notably Tupac Shakur. These helped finance his life of bluegrass, jazz and atonal pointillism in the concert halls of middle America. 'Look, if you really hate it, don't come back,' he said of this new material. 'You should not come back, because I am not going to be a vehicle for your stroll down memory lane.' I love these figures who found a way to play only the music they wanted. Jeff Beck was asked to join the Stones once, but told me: 'I wouldn't have been my own master – and that would be my whole being truncated.' The artist formerly known as Terence Trent D'Arby, now Sananda Maitreya, made plenty of records but struggled to listen to them. His exit from the industry, after his second album flopped, was too painful to recall. Yet like all the best rock stars, he knew the value of his story and exaggerated his musical rivalries. Claiming that Lenny Kravitz was a 'cheaper model' of himself, he announced: 'Record companies say, 'Hey, if you like this asshole, you're going to like this asshole, plus we're making a higher margin on this asshole!'' I even found a poem on his website to his old nemesis. It was called Lenny K and read: 'Fear not / Your girls are safe! / I've got an Italian girlfriend now / And my leash is pretty short.' Queen were always suspicious of journalists, ever since the NME ran a piece about Freddie Mercury with the headline: 'Is this man a prat?' I chose a clumsy moment to ask Brian May why the press hated Queen: he was trying to swallow a piece of goat's cheese. 'I don't know,' he winced. 'Why don't you ask them what their problem was?' Sitting in his dressing room, Paul Stanley of Kiss put it like this: 'The press's dislike of Kiss was so out of whack, so out of proportion, you almost have to look at someone and go, 'Who beat you as a child?'' Kate Mossman is senior writer for the New Statesman. Men of a Certain Age: My Encounters With Rock Royalty is published by Bonnier (£22). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Sun
30-04-2025
- Politics
- The Sun
UN experts urge Saudi to release child offenders facing execution
GENEVA: UN rights experts called on Saudi Arabia Wednesday to release five people sentenced to death and facing 'imminent execution' for offences committed when they were minors, including protesting the government's treatment of Shia Muslims. 'We call for the immediate release of the five individuals, to prevent any irreparable harm to their lives or personal integrity,' the eight independent United Nations experts said in a statement. They were highlighting the cases of Abdullah al-Derazi, Jalal al-Labbad, Yusuf Muhammad Mahdi al-Manasif, Jawad Abdullah Qureiris and Hassan Zaki al-Faraj, who have all been sentenced to death over terrorism-related and other offences committed when they were under 18. The men, who were each charged in connection with protesting the Saudi government's treatment of the country's Shia minority and for attending funerals of those killed by authorities, 'face imminent execution', the statement said. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, whose members were among the experts behind the statement, ruled last year the detention of the five was 'arbitrary', saying the men were being held for exercising their rights to free speech and peaceful assembly. The experts, who are mandated by the UN Human Rights Council but do not speak on behalf of the United Nations, highlighted that they had previously communicated to the Saudi government about the cases. They said the trial had been 'tainted by ill-treatment and torture', raising allegations of forced confessions. The experts suggested that the five -- all members of the Shia minority -- had been prosecuted due to their religious affiliation. The experts said the five young men's situation was 'particularly worrying' given a sharp increase in executions in Saudi Arabia -- one of the world's most prolific users of the death penalty. They put the number of executions in the country since the start of the year at around 65. Rights group Amnesty International put it even higher, saying last week that at least 88 people had been executed in Saudi Arabia since January -- nearly double the figure during the same period last year.
