Taliban to West: Release frozen funds, or be flooded with wave of migrants

Millions of Afghans could face starvation this winter, according to director of U.N.'s World Food Program.

With Afghanistan facing a humanitarian crisis this winter in the wake of the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from the country, Taliban officials are warning — or threatening — that unless Western governments and financial institutions release frozen foreign reserves and aid funds, the West could be flooded with a tide of Afghan migrants.

Roughly $430 million is being held at the German Commerzbank and $94 million in the Bundesbank, Germany's central bank. Another $660 million is being held by the Bank for International Settlements, a conglomerate of worldwide central banks located in Switzerland.

The bulk of the contested funds, roughly $9.5 billion held by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is frozen by the U.S. Treasury Department and is unlikely to be released any time soon.

In 2020, Afghan reserves including gold and U.S. dollars held in U.S. and European banks totaled $9.6 billion, according to the World Bank.

"Total reserves comprise holdings of monetary gold, special drawing rights, reserves of IMF members held by the IMF, and holdings of foreign exchange under the control of monetary authorities," the World Bank explains.

Since the Taliban takeover, the World Bank has withheld financial aid. The International Monetary Fund has also withheld drawing rights to $347 million.

The IMF is "guided by the views of the international community," the fund said in August. "There is currently a lack of clarity within the international community regarding recognition of a government in Afghanistan, as a consequence of which the country cannot access the Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) or other IMF resources."

At the end of August, Taliban leaders attempted to access its central bank's reserves, only to learn that they couldn't access them, the Financial Times reported.

"The money belongs to the Afghan nation," Afghanistan's Finance Ministry spokesperson Ahmad Wali Haqmal told Reuters. "Just give us our own money. Freezing this money is unethical and is against all international laws and values."

Despite a windfall of billions of dollars' worth of U.S. military equipment and weaponry left behind by the Biden administration, the "situation is desperate, and the amount of cash is dwindling," Afghan Central Bank board member Shah Mehrabi told Reuters.

Compounding the economic crisis is a drought, and more than half of the country is facing starvation heading into winter.

A record 22.8 million people will face acute food insecurity, the U.N.'s World Food Program recently warned.

https://justthenews.com/government/security/montaliban-west-release-frozen-funds-or-be-flooded-wave-migrants

Mom brought knife to police station to kill man who admitted necrophilia crime on daughter

An enraged UK mother was arrested after she brought a knife to a police station to kill a necrophiliac who admitted he committed vile sex acts on her daughter’s corpse.

Nevres Kamal was told by authorities last month that her daughter, 24-year-old Azra Kamel, was one of possibly hundreds of victims whose lifeless bodies were sexually abused by former hospital electrician and confessed murderer David Fuller.

Kamal allegedly grabbed a knife and headed toward the nearby police station where she believed Fuller — whom she only knew at that point as “Dave” — was being held.

“The rage …” she told the Daily Mail. “My only thought was, ‘He is not going to get away [with] this.’ I’d just been told he’d raped her in hospital when she was dead. It was incomprehensible. I felt I had to take things into my own hands — find him, punish him. I’m her mother.”

She added that if she found him she was “99.99 percent sure I’d have put that knife straight through his heart because he’d put a knife through mine,” she said.

“The thought of him violating her — of touching her hair, touching her skin …”

When she arrived at the Colindale police station, officers pounced on her and cuffed her, unaware of who she was. Kamal told the Daily Mail that the officers that had been to her house had told the department that a woman had run out with a knife, but did not say why.

“I was crying: ‘My daughter was raped in hospital and she’s dead.’ They were looking at me, going, ‘Does this woman need psychiatric help?’ ” she told the paper.

She added, “They read me my rights but I had this rage. I was shouting, ‘What are you doing? I need to put an end to this. No one is violating my child. I am her mother. I’m here because I’m looking for Dave. He needs to be punished.’”

She was tossed into a cell and held for 34 hours until officers learned the details of her case, she told the Daily Mail. She said they kept her so long out of caution she might have been in danger of harming herself.

“When they knew what had happened to Azra they were softer to me. One officer in the custody area was crying as she took my fingerprints, photographs and DNA. She said, ‘It’s awful. We can’t believe it. We’ve never heard anything such as this,’ ” Kamal said.

In reality, Fuller had been locked up in Belmarsh Prison in South-East London.

On Thursday, Fuller, 67, pleaded guilty to killing then sexually assaulting two women in 1987 and committing dozens of other sex attacks on female corpses in mortuaries where he worked on the course of 12 years.

https://nypost.com/2021/11/07/mom-brought-knife-to-police-station-to-kill-necrophiliac/

JOHN KIRIAKOU: CIA Torture Finally Rebuked, By Military Jury

The sentencing hearing, and Khan’s two hours of graphic testimony, marked the first time that details of the C.I.A. torture program were laid bare in public.

The New York Times reported last week that a military jury at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo issued a sharp rebuke against the C.I.A.’s treatment of al-Qaeda prisoner Majid Khan, calling the Agency’s torture program “a stain on the moral fiber of America.”

The jury recommended that Khan receive a 26-year sentence, the shortest possible under the court’s rules. Seven of the eight jurors—all U.S. military officers—then hand-wrote a letter to the military judge urging clemency for Khan.

The sentencing hearing, and Khan’s two hours of graphic testimony, marked the first time that details of the C.I.A. torture program were laid bare in public.

Khan testified that during the course of his interrogations, after he was captured in Pakistan in 2003, he told the C.I.A. “literally everything” he knew. He was truthful with the information, but “the more I told them, the more they tortured me.” Khan said that his only alternative was to make up information about threats, anything to get his interrogators to stop torturing him. When the information then didn’t pan out, Khan was tortured yet again.

Khan was born in Saudi Arabia to Pakistani parents and raised in suburban Baltimore, Maryland. After his mother died in 2001 and his father sent the family back to Pakistan for an extended visit, Khan’s relatives radicalized him and he formally joined al-Qaeda after the Sept. 11 attacks.

He was trained in the organization’s camps in southern Afghanistan and was made “operational” shortly thereafter. Khan confessed to delivering $50,000 from al-Qaeda to an associated extremist group in Indonesia that was used to finance the deadly 2003 bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta. Eleven people were killed and dozens more were injured.

Khan also admitted to working closely with Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. Khan said that in one case he wore a suicide vest in a failed effort in 2002 to assassinate Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. The vest, however, failed to detonate. Musharraf never knew how close al-Qaeda had come to killing him.

Full Disclosure

When I served as chief of C.I.A. counterterrorist operations in Pakistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, one of my top priorities was to find and capture Majid Khan. We believed that he was particularly dangerous because he had spent almost his entire life in the United States, he spoke English like an American, his father and siblings were all American citizens, and we believed that al-Qaeda would use the handsome teenager to recruit other American citizens and green card holders into the group.

My team searched literally all over Pakistan for him, but he eluded us. Finally, in late 2003, my successor found and captured him in Karachi, Pakistan. Khan was immediately turned over to a C.I.A. rendition team, which took him first to the infamous Salt Pit torture center in Afghanistan and then to a series of secret C.I.A. prisons around the world. He finally arrived in Guantanamo in 2006, where he has remained ever since.

There was no doubt, at least in my mind, that Majid Khan was a very bad young man. He was a terrorist and a murderer, and he meant continued harm to Americans everywhere.

But he didn’t deserve—nobody deserved—the treatment that he received at the hands of the C.I.A.

Hose in Rectum

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/11/06/john-kiriakou-cia-torture-finally-rebuked-by-military-jury/

Rocket Attack Hit Large Turkish Military Base In Northern Iraq

Late on November 7, a rocket attack targeted a Turkish military base near the town of Zaylkan in Bashiqa district in the northern Iraqi province of Nineveh.

At least seven Grad 122 mm rockets targeted the base which is located 20 kilometers to the northeast of Mosul city and more than 60 km to the northwest of Erbil city, the capital of the Kurdistan Region.

The rockets were fired from an improvised launcher that was uncovered by Iraqi security forces a few minutes after the attack.

According to the Sabereen News channel on Telegram, a fire erupted in the Turkish base after the rocket attack. It remains unknown if any Turkish service members were killed or wounded. The Turkish Ministry of National Defense has not commented on the attack, yet.

The attack came less than a day after an attempt to assassinate Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi in Baghdad with armed drones.

The rocket attack may have been carried out by Iranian-backed forces who have been growing frustrated with Turkey’s military presence and activities in the northern region.

In April, the Turkish military launched Operations Claw-Lightning and Thunderbolt in northern Iraq against the remnants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The operation is still ongoing. Ankara claims that 142 PKK fighters have been killed, wounded or captured, so far.

https://southfront.org/rocket-attack-hit-large-turkish-military-base-in-northern-iraq/

Hickory High teacher arrested on 28 counts involving a child

A former Hickory Public Schools teacher was arrested in late August and charged with 28 counts of sexual offenses involving a child, some of which date back to 2015.

DELFIO DELGADO - HICKORY - QUIET EPIDEMIC 2

DELFIO LUSGARDO DELGADO

Delfino Lusgardo Delgado, age 54, was arrested on Aug. 26 and was charged with 20 Counts of Statutory Rape of a Child and Eight Counts of Indecent Liberties with a Child.

The indecent liberties charges date to alleged incidents that occurred between 2015-19, which overlaps with the time period Delgado was employed as a teacher. It is unclear if any of the charges involved a student.

Statutory rape of a child is a class B1 felony with a sentence of 144 months to life without parole per instance. The indecent liberties charges are a Class F felony with a possible sentence of 10 to 41 months in prison per offense.

Delgado was issued a $450,000 secured bond, which he has not posted, and remains in custody at the Iredell County Detention Facility.

Statesville Police Department indicted at the time of Delgado’s arrest that the investigation had been triggered by a Jan. 2021 report of sex offenses involving a child.

Hickory Public Schools employed Delgado from Aug. 2017 through June 2019. Delgado had taught at Hickory High School. The district indicated Delgado resigned when he apparently moved to Statesville in 2019.

At least one report claims Delgado is a Mexican national, however, this website has been unable to confirm the claim beyond a reference related to teaching in Winston-Salem found in a PTSA memo. The memo had no year listed, only that it was a Sept. 23 update.

“Delfio Delgado joins our foreign language department as a Spanish I instructor,” says a PTSA memo from R.J. Reynolds High in Winston-Salem. “Mr. Delgado comes to RJR after teaching for three years in his native Ecuador and 11 years in Iredell County. He graduated with a B.A. from Technical University of Manabí, Ecuador.”

The memo excerpt implies that Delgado went to work in Winston-Salem after leaving Hickory in 2019. A search of the Winston-Salem district’s website did not locate Delgado as an active employee.

Delgado does have an active teaching license on file with the state:

Current Date: 11/07/2021 10:13 AM

License Number: 962822

Name: DELGADO, DELFIO LUSGARDO

License Type: Educator

License Status: Current

Expiration Date: 06/30/2024

Effective Date: 07/01/2019

License Area(s): Spanish K-12

Delgado also has no North Carolina voter registration record on file, either active or denied.

Including Delgado, this website has tracked 20 educator arrests in 2021.

https://ladyliberty1885.com/2021/11/07/hickory-high-teacher-arrested-on-28-counts-involving-a-child/

13 Nov

IBAC: Adem Somyurek accuses Daniel Andrews, Bill Shorten, Stephen Conroy and Richard Marles of branch stacking

A former Labor powerbroker has told an anti-corruption hearing the party’s most senior leaders engaged in branch stacking.

Disgraced powerbroker Adem Somyurek has told an anti-corruption inquiry that branch stacking has consistently been rife within Labor, accusing the party’s most senior leaders of engaging in the notorious practice to sway power in Victoria.

The former Andrews government minister told the inquiry that he went head-to-head with the now Premier when Mr Somyurek first entered politics in the mid-90s.

His bombshell evidence at the Independent Broad-Based Anti-Corruption Commission (IBAC) on Monday also accused former senator Stephen Conroy of “building an empire” and named federal Deputy Opposition Leader Richard Marles as a key member of the continued grab for power.

Mr Somyurek said former opposition leader Bill Shorten changed membership requirements when he became leader in 2013 that encouraged branch stacking across the state — an organised method of collecting internal power by recruiting, and often paying fees, for new members.

In evidence given to the IBAC investigation into the misuse of taxpayer staff and resources, Mr Somyurek said he was “totally naive” when he first joined Victoria’s ALP branch in the mid-90s.

But he was soon acquainted with the notorious practice of branch stacking while working with Anthony Byrne to unseat his factional rival Gareth Evans.

During this power grab, Daniel Andrews was collecting memberships among ethnic minority groups to retain Mr Evans in the seat of Holt, Mr Somyurek told the hearing.

He said “branch staking was rife” in the ALP throughout the ’90s, adding “the Left invented ethnic branch stacking” in Melbourne’s southeast, where “it was the Left and the Right going at it hammer and tong”.

“You had Anthony Byrne as the chief recruiter from the Right and I think Daniel Andrews was organising from the Left,” the former minister said.

“Raiding of the branches, in particular, was very toxic — tempers were frayed and it got nasty.”

Mr Somyurek told the hearing that he took part in branch stacking, which he admitted was an improper way to rig preselection for a seat that he described as a “hostile takeover”.

But he offered a curious explanation for his involvement, saying non-ethnic politicians such as Mr Marles and Mr Conroy who engage in branch stacking are “cheats” because, as white privileged citizens, he said they had no barriers to winning preselection.

“But if you’re a person of an ethnic minority, there might be a rationalisation,” Mr Somyurek said.

“A sort of affirmative action by stealth because even though the Labor Party is of the left and we talk about policy, we still have a lot of unconscious bias in the Labor Party membership.”

https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/news/ibac-adem-somyurek-accuses-daniel-andrews-bill-shorten-stephen-conroy-and-richard-marles-of-branch-stacking/news-story/f67729fdf8228d461187c2ce94a81eeb

https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/news/ibac-adem-somyurek-accuses-daniel-andrews-bill-shorten-stephen-conroy-and-richard-marles-of-branch-stacking/news-story/f67729fdf8228d461187c2ce94a81eeb