Islam

A nurse who claims she survived being attacked by a man armed with a crowbar in a hospital waiting room declared today: ‘I’m so, so, so lucky I’m still alive and I’m so lucky I ran when I did.’

Meg Lynch, 28, said she was ‘nearly beaten to death’ while stood getting a drink from a vending machine.

The district nurse, who suffered ‘a few blows to the head’ before running and hiding from her alleged attacker, told how she was left bloodied and bruised.

France seems to be witnessing more gratuitous attacks and stabbings. On Boxing Day afternoon, in the middle of central Paris, a man went on a knife rampage through the metro. He struck out at random, stabbing women on station platforms at République, Arts et Métiers and Opéra. There was screaming. There was blood. One of the victims was pregnant. There was no argument, no robbery, and no apparent motive. The attacks were entirely indiscriminate.

After each assault, the attacker didn’t run, he boarded the next train. Passengers recoiled. Doors closed. The train moved on. Station by station, through some of the busiest metro stations in the city, he continued.

When the ball drops in Times Square tonight in New York City, revelers will scream “Happy New Year,” kiss the girl (or guy) next to them, blow horns, and prepare for the traditional drop of a massive “tidal wave” of 3,000 pounds of confetti as it’s released from the rooftops of eight surrounding buildings at the stroke of midnight.

Thousands of heavily armed police officers are patrolling the streets of Sydney as people mark the new year – a rare and stark sight in Australia, following the Bondi Beach mass shooting.

Some officers were authorised to carry high-grade weapons as part of heightened security measures. The attack on 14 December targeted Australia’s Jewish community and killed 15 people at a Hanukkah festival.

New South Wales (NSW) Police said more than 2,500 officers would be on duty across the city.

I remember a time not in the too distant past when our societies had no fear of today’s routine Muslim killing sprees.

REMIGRATION.

Britain’s Labour government has ordered an internal review into what it has admitted were serious failures of vetting and information handling in the case of Alaa Abd El-Fattah, a British-Egyptian man whose return to the UK has sparked a fierce political backlash.

The suspected gunmen who killed 15 people on Sydney’s Bondi Beach spent almost a month in the Philippines, but were likely to have acted alone in an Islamic State-inspired massacre.

There is no evidence that the father and son, Sajid Akram, 50, and Naveed Akram, 24, trained with terrorist cells known to be active in the southern Philippines, Krissy Barrett, the Australian federal police commissioner, said on Tuesday.

In June 1976, fortnightly newspaper Gay News featured a now infamous poem, ‘The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name’. It described a Roman soldier making love to Jesus after his crucifixion, accompanied by a sexually explicit illustration. In July the following year, thanks to a legal case brought by conservative activist Mary Whitehouse, Gay News editor Denis Lemon was found guilty of blasphemous libel and handed a suspended prison sentence.

What kind of person gets the awarded UK citizenship, accolades as a “pro-democracy activist,” massive efforts to be released from an Egyptian prison, and an effusive welcome when he is finally released and flown to the UK?