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| CIA chief confirms Afghan deaths The CIA chief confirms seven officers - reportedly including a mother-of-three who was station chief - were killed in Afghanistan. news.bbc.co.uk |
Cardinal blames Christians for 'Islamisation' of Europe Christians have become too selfish and pagan to defend spiritual heritage of the continent, says Miloslav VlkMuslims are conquering Europe because Christians have become too selfish and pagan to defend the spiritual heritage of the continent, a Vatican cardinal said this week.Miloslav Vlk, who has served as archbishop of Prague since 1991 and was considered as a successor to John Paul II, launched an outspoken attack on Christians living in Europe and accused them of allowing Muslims to "Islamise" the continent.He warned that Europe would "fall" to Islam if people continued to deny their Christian roots.In an interview published on his website, Vlk blamed immigration and high birth rates among Muslims for filling "the vacant space created as Europeans systematically empty the Christian content of their lives".The 77-year-old said: "Europe has denied its Christian roots from which it has risen and which could give it the strength to fend off the danger that it will be conquered by Muslims – which is actually happening gradually. If Europe doesn't change its relation to its own roots, it will be Islamised."At the end of the Middle Ages and in the early modern age, Islam failed to conquer Europe with arms. The Christians beat them then. Today, when the fighting is done with spiritual weapons which Europe lacks while Muslims are perfectly armed, the fall of Europe is looming."It was Muslims and not Christians, said Vlk, who were shaping the spiritual outlook of Europe. "The Muslims definitely have many reasons to be heading here. They also have a religious one – to bring the spiritual values of faith in God to the pagan environment of Europe, to its atheistic style of life."In a separate interview, a second cardinal criticised Islam for repressing religious freedom.Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, who served as the Vatican's foreign minister from 1990 to 2003 and was appointed president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue in 2007, urged countries to protect the right of religious freedom in their laws.He told the Italian newspaper L'Osservatore Romano that such protection was assured in various Muslim countries with the exception of Saudi Arabia, where nearly 2 million Christians were deprived of public prayer gatherings. "They feel tolerated rather than a partner in public dialogue. And this does not do anyone any good."He also commented on the Swiss referendum to ban the construction of new minarets, and seemed to approve of the outcome. "Naturally it is necessary to harmonize construction with the atmosphere in which it comes to be a part, with the city landscape, the cultural context, and the complex of the laws and norms that regulate the life of the society."ReligionIslamChristianityCatholicismRiazat Buttguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Inga Haag obituary German socialite and spy who conspired to overthrow HitlerThe German socialite, consumer champion, journalist and spy Inga Haag, who has died aged 91, was an enigma to many who met her for the first time. But for her large circle of friends on both sides of the Atlantic, she was a brave and tenacious woman who had acquired a reputation as the Mata Hari of Marylebone, the area of central London where she was based during her final years. Belatedly, in 2003, the German government awarded her the Cross of the Order of Merit, reassuring sceptics that tales of her wartime exploits were not fantasy, but fact.Born into a comfortable, upper-middle-class Prussian family towards the end of the first world war, Inga was sent by her liberal banker father to school in England after the rise of Adolf Hitler, because her father was convinced that all German schoolteachers were potential Nazis. Inga was soon fluent in English, later becoming trilingual by adding French, though her use of all three languages was idiosyncratic. She gained entry to the London School of Economics, where she studied under the political theorist Harold Laski, but her family summoned her back to Berlin before the outbreak of the second world war.Glamorous and intelligent, she was talent-spotted by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris as a useful recruit to German military intelligence. He nicknamed her "the painted doll" and sometimes assigned her to sit in the public rooms of the Adlon hotel in Berlin to listen in to the guests' conversations. Canaris's loyalty to the new regime was ambivalent, to say the least, and Inga soon became a sort of double agent, feeding information about Hitler and his circle to those in the German army and intelligentsia who considered him a jumped-up but dangerous little squirt."He had very bad skin," she recalled, many years later, in an interview in the Observer. "He had bad manners and no charm. He had a chicken-skin neck with large pores."Inga hid her disgust when face-to-face with the Führer, whom she met during the course of her diplomatic duties. But her situation soon became precarious. After the fall of France, Canaris took her to Paris, where she began one of her major wartime undercover operations – supplying false passports to Jews. However, in 1942 she found the perfect cover – as well as a degree of personal happiness – when she accepted a proposal of marriage from a much older, senior army officer, Werner Haag. Like herself, he was a secret dissident, whom she always referred to by the pet-name "Buffalo". The Haags were posted first to Hungary (which Inga hated) and then to Romania (which she loved). Decades later, she proudly displayed on the mantelpiece of her Upper Wimpole Street flat a photograph of Buffalo in full uniform, his Iron Cross to the fore, chatting amiably to the Romanian fascist dictator Ion Antonescu.In Romania, Inga dutifully played the role of charming hostess to the local hierarchy and Nazi dignitaries while carrying on her clandestine activities, notably keeping contact with a network of well-connected Germans – including the anglophile Adam von Trott zu Solz, to whom she was distantly related – who were plotting to get rid of Hitler. On 20 July 1944, when there was a botched attempt to blow up the Führer, Inga was entertaining two Gestapo officers to lunch in her husband's absence. She knew about the so-called Stauffenberg plot but had to feign surprise and relief at Hitler's survival. Suspecting the witchhunt that would then follow, as soon as the Gestapo officers had left, she gathered all potentially incriminating papers and threw them on the fire, telling her butler that she was destroying letters from a secret lover about whom her husband was becoming suspicious.Werner was briefly interned by the Americans at the end of the war, but soon released when the true nature of his and Inga's allegiances was verified. They were then posted to Paris, where they worked for Nato, which launched Inga into a new field of engagement, promoting transatlantic relations. The Haags acquired a ground-floor flat in the smart 16th arrondissement and adopted a French boy, Luc Blivet.Inga was not at all happy about Nato's 1967 move from Paris to Brussels, finding the Belgian capital boring, so she resigned and became a freelance journalist for the International Herald Tribune, among others. Her social life was increasingly rooted in the diplomatic and political worlds of Paris and London. Inga's striking looks and flirtatiousness made her a popular dinner guest. She was thrilled when François Mitterrand played footsie with her under the table, but the future French president was only one of many distinguished admirers who played court to her after Buffalo's early death and the beginning of her long and very merry widowhood.By the time I met her, more than 20 years ago, when I was summoned by mutual friends to make up the numbers at a weekend luncheon party at her cottage in Lasham, near Alton in Hampshire, she was at the zenith of her social powers, entertaining regularly at her homes in Paris, London and the country, as well as making annual trips to New York, where she operated out of the Harvard Club. In London, one never knew who one would sit next to at table, from Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia, through numerous members of the House of Lords, to leading journalists and various paramours.I was quickly integrated into what she referred to as her "kindergarten" – a group of younger writers and academics, including Michael Bloch, Giles MacDonogh and, less frequently, Andrew Roberts – who would be summoned to add some youthfulness to the table. The menu was almost always the same, starting with "Bubble" (Spanish cava, served with Ritz crackers), followed by a dry German white wine (and Swedish herrings) and finally claret (to go with the Waitrose main course and cheese). Coffee was always black; Inga was scathing about the supposedly noxious effects of "cow juice".As the years went by, the guests got fewer and she tended to dominate the conversation, not just with reminiscences but, more often, with details of her latest "mounting the barricades" for some social or environmental cause, such as attacking supermarkets for allegedly forcing up food prices, championing voluntary euthanasia and urging everyone to follow her intended example of having her body disposed of in a black plastic bin-bag.She appointed me her literary executor: we bonded because we both loathed Christmas, and had become Quakers as a result of our experiences of war. Luc survives her.• Ingeborg "Inga" Helene Haag, socialite, journalist and spy, born 3 August 1918; died 10 December 2009Adolf HitlerUnited StatesSecond world warGermanyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Afghan capital's day of terror • Suicide bombings and gun battles engulf Afghan capital• Shopping centre, cinema, bank and hotel targetedThe daily business of government was already in full swing by the time a man wearing a white shalwar kameez walked towards the front gate of Afghanistan's central bank. Close by, deep inside his presidential palace, Hamid Karzai was finally getting round to swearing-in members of his new cabinet. It was just before 10 o'clock in the morning.The guards at the central bank were already on high alert after recent intelligence warnings suggested a spectacular attack was on the cards and the man in white was behaving extremely suspiciously."He was about 10 metres away from the main gate of the bank and the guards told him to stop," said Ahmad, a plain clothes member of the elite counterterror group Task Force 24, who was at the bank at the time. "But he didn't say anything or explain himself, he just carried on walking and tried to climb over the barrier."Convinced they were being approached by a suicide bomber, the guards opened fire. The man's device detonated, causing a huge explosion that narrowly missed killing a group of British bodyguards, sheltered from the main force of the blast by another vehicle.That was the first assault of the day. efore too long a fire, triggered by two bombers detonating their explosive vests, ripped through a nearby shopping centre, sending a plume of smoke high into the sky above central Kabul.And minutes after the foiled central bank attack, explosions and gunfire could be heard from the nearby ministry of justice, on the other side of Pashtunistan Square, as the insurgents mounted another attack. Either from there or from a nearby vantage point the attackers fired three rocket-propelled grenades into the ministry of finance, which hit reinforced shelters in its grounds where government security forces had taken cover.After the first blast all that was left of the attacker, says Ahmad, were his two legs lying on the ground. Attached to them were a pair of size 41 shoes that in Ahmad's view were clearly of a "Pakistani" design, hinting at the already widely held view among the country's counter-terrorism chiefs that this was a plot that originated from outside Afghanistan's borders.Hanif Atmar, the softly spoken interior minister, added to that sentiment , saying: "There is no school for training suicide bombers in this Âcountry" – although there are plenty of radical madrasas that do so in the borderlands of Pakistan.And, in his view, it was the quick-Âwittedness of his security forces at the central bank that forced the team of insurgent gunmen and suicide bombers to leave and instead run amok in the nearby shopping centre, a far softer target."Our officer who was killed, he was the one who detected the first suicide bomber trying to enter the bank," Atmar said. "He detected him and before [the bomber] was able to get to the front gate he was killed. That detection forced the others to go and choose the shopping centre."At a joint briefing with Afghanistan's other security chiefs Atmar said the day also saw attacks on the former Bamiyan hotel, an explosion near a mosque and fighting in the Ariana cinema. He said an intelligence agent was killed, two policemen, two civilians and a child. He said 71 other people were wounded, including 35 civilians and that most of the injuries were caused by insurgents triggering hand grenades.For the hundreds of civil servants and international consultants trapped in the government buildings there was little to do but listen to the five hours of explosions and raging gun battles and hope that their offices had not been penetrated by insurgents. Security officials told them to lie on the floor and not look out of their windows.Others did not have the advantage of such sensible advice. Khalid Stanekzai, 23, the boss of Afghanistan's main Nokia dealership, stood at his office window high up in the recently built Gulbahar shopping centre. He was captivated by the scene below him."I had never seen the face of the war before, but I could see it all from there," he said. "I took my phone and got a picture because it was amazing to me. I filmed it all on my mobile phone."At around 11 o'clock, amid all the pandemonium, he noticed an ambulance approach his building. On the ground the security forces were suspicious after the driver failed to respond to their challenges. One of them was close enough to see that he had some sort of a detonation device strapped to his right leg, and yelled to his colleagues to dive for cover.But Stanekzai did not hear the warning as the ambulance blew apart on the street below him, leaving behind a deep crater in the road."The soldiers were running and they were shooting at the ambulance and then it made a very big explosion," – the last thing he remembered as shrapnel and glass tore into his face.Meanwhile the police force was rapidly shutting down the city, sending thousands of people streaming away from the epicentre of violence as shopkeepers Ârapidly boarded up their houses.In Shar-e-Naw, a considerable distance from the fighting, cars turned back on themselves into the one-way system. People who tried to walk towards the fighting, including a few foreign photographers, had pistols waved angrily in their faces.After it became clear that the attackers were using police uniforms, the Afghanistan National Army and the National Directorate of Security ordered the withdrawal of police from the centre of town and took over the counter-offensive, according to western officials.They manned positions at the top of the ministry of finance from where they opened fire on the insurgents in the ministry of justice, across Pashtunistan Square.It was only a matter of time before all the attackers were dead and the situation was brought back under control, leaving relatives to wait anxiously outside the city's hospitals for the wounded, many complaining bitterly about the government's failure to secure the capital.By early evening Stanekzai was finally discharged from Kabul's Italian-run emergency hospital with 52 stitches in his left cheek and six in his right hand where he had been clutching his mobile phone in front of him.He left for home sitting bare-chested in the back of a friend's car – the shalwar kameez that he had been wearing earlier reduced to a torn and crumpled mass of thickly bloodstained cloth.AfghanistanTalibanJon BooneJulian Borgerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Kerrigan's dad dies; brother accused of assault WOBURN, Mass. (AP) -- The brother of figure skater Nancy Kerrigan pleaded not guilty Monday to assaulting their 70-year-old father, who died over the weekend after a disturbance at the family's Massachusetts home.... hosted.ap.org |