Arab-American activists chased and threatened with beheading in Brooklyn

A drunken man chased two female Arab-
American community organisers in Brooklyn,
New York , threatening to behead them and
throwing a large metal garbage can at them.
Despite two separate 911 calls, the New York
police department took more than 45 minutes
to respond. The department sent top hate
crime investigators after one of the women, a
prominent activist, told her story at an NYPD
community relations meeting that happened
soon after the incident on Wednesday.
Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab
American Association of New York, said she
initially found the man leaning against the wall
near her social services agency.
“I was leaving to a meeting and I went outside
and found a man leaning up against our
storefront,” said Sarsour. “So, I went back
inside and I said to my deputy director, ‘Hey,
can you call 911 and just tell them there’s a
man in front of our storefront and can they
remove him?’”
“I’m literally giving these instructions, next
thing you know — boom! He gets up out of
nowhere, like a surge of energy, and he starts
chasing me and my colleague up the street,”
said Sarsour. “He’s like, ‘You’re cutting
people’s heads off! I’m going to cut your head
off and see how your people feel about it!’”
While running, Sarsour said, she and her
colleague again called 911, saying the man they
had requested be removed was violent and
chasing them down busy 5th Avenue in Bay
Ridge, Brooklyn. While chasing them, the man
picked up a department of sanitation metal
garbage can and threw it at the women.
Sarsour said she believed the man may have
had a tool in his back pocket.
She and her colleague fled into a nearby
business and locked the door, where they
stayed until the man wandered off, on to a
residential street. “Just literally walked away,
went up a residential street because of course
law enforcement didn’t show up,” said Sarsour.
The AAANY is little more than half a mile from
the police precinct. Again on her way to a
public meeting with top NYPD leaders, Sarsour
said she saw a police car in front of a bagel
store, and confronted two police inside, asking
why they had not responded. After she left it
took police another 15 minutes to respond to
the AAANY.
“Anyway, I walked into the meeting late,” said
Sarsour, “and I just told my story. And NYPD
top brass was horrified — they were like
‘What?’”
A man, 45-year-old Brian Boshell, has since
been arrested in connection with the incident.
He was charged with criminal possession of a
weapon — for throwing the trash can —
aggravated harassment as a hate crime,
aggravated harassment, menacing and three
counts of menacing as a hate crime. The NYPD
said there was no information on the specific
threats the man used or how long it took the
NYPD to respond.
An internal investigation into the NYPD
response was launched after Sarsour told her
story.
“The point, what I really want to get across in
this story, is I just happened to be a well-
known activist in New York City,” Sarsour said.
“But what about when it’s ordinary people
who don’t know how the system works? Who
call 911 in cases of emergency? And also people
for whom English is not their first language?”
The dispatcher, Sarsour said, was not told that
the man was screaming Islamophobic epithets,
but that a violent man was chasing two women
down a street.

'Poverty Is A Bastard!!' -Paul Okoye Shares Old Photo Of Himself 17 Years Ago...You Won't Believe It!

'Poverty Is A Bastard!!' -Paul
Okoye Shares Old Photo Of
Himself 17 Years Ago...You Won't
Believe It!

This Is Too Bad! Beautiful 18year old Girl Forced To Marry a Dog (Photo)

The Indian girl you see in the photo above is
18year old Mangli Munda who has been forced
by her family to marry a stray dog found by
her father to fight off evil spirits. The Groom
(dog) arrived in chauffeured car and was
elegantly dressed.
The wedding was funded her parents.
However, Munda wasn't pleased with her
parents' selection of the dog as her groom,
saying;

OMG!! Is this real? Meet the woman with the World's Smallest Waist - Cathie Jung

The smallest waist in the world on a living person
belongs to a woman from Connecticut. While it
might look Photoshopped, Cathie Jung's waist
really is just 15 inches around. She calls herself
the "Queen of Corsets" and has worn tight-fitting
garments for years to achieve the look.
See more pics below + Xray confirmation:

London flats 'worse than prison cells' condemned by council

A London property company is charging £255 a
week for "studio apartments" as small as three
metres by three metres that tenants claim are
"worse than prison cells" and that breach
statutory overcrowding regulations.
Nineteen tiny, dilapidated rooms above a
McDonald's in Islington, north London, are
earning a multi-millionaire landlord and a sub-
letting company an estimated £400,000 a year
in rent, a Guardian investigation has revealed.
The rent per square metre is more than twice
that for other one-bed privately rented flats in
the same area. Recently built studios on the
same road for students are double the size but
cost less. Rent on the unfit housing was being
paid largely by the taxpayer through housing
benefit, although Islington council has now said
it will no longer pay as the units represent a
"category one hazard" under health and safety
regulations in terms of crowding and space. It
said the taxpayer was being "ripped off". The
council has now issued an order rendering the
tenancies void in two months. It follows a
series of door-to-door inspections of private
rented properties in the borough over the
summer.
The flats represent a new low in London's
housing crisis, where at least 42,000 new homes
are still needed each year to meet demand and
prices are rising at almost 20% a year. The
owner is Andrew Panayi, a wealthy landlord
with 250 properties in north London. He
bought the former hostel in 2004 and, after
fitting plastic showers, two-ring hobs, small
fridges and a toilet, marketed them as studios.
Some tenants have described life in the flats as
"unsafe and inhumane" and have complained of
a lack of hygiene caused by the proximity of
cramped toilets, showers and cooking facilities.
Darren Ricketts, 39, a new occupier who
arrived this week despite the banning order
said he could not believe the lack of space and
cost.
"When I signed the papers I saw the rent was
£258 a week," he said. "I said to the lady,
'That's a mistake: £58, yes, but not that much.'
The landlord must be raking it in. I was
shocked. I am grateful to have a roof over my
head, but this morning I woke up and thought:
'What am I going to do with all my stuff?'"
Another tenant, Nejat Mohamed Ali, 45, said: "I
have bruises on my legs from constantly
pushing the bed around so I can get to the
shower or the kitchen. The hot cooking plate is
less than 60cm from my bed." She added: "I am
very depressed. I used to live with dignity...
councils are supposed to invest in property and
not spend £255 a week on prison cells. It is
abuse of the taxpayer."
Panayi blamed the tenants for making the
homes too cramped by piling in too much
furniture.
"These places are designed for single people,"
he said. "They should have a single bed but
they asked for double beds and the beds are
too big. There's more than enough room for a
single person."
James Murray, Islington council's executive
member for housing, said: "This shows how
appalling the housing crisis has got, where
people who are desperate for accommodation
are being crammed into tiny units and tenants
and the taxpayer is being ripped off by a rich
landlord and a property company who are
skimming off handsome profits."
Harry Lewis, 54, an unemployed father of three,
said the cramped dimensions of his home
meant he could never entertain his children or
family. He said he survived on takeaways and
was suffering from depression.
"I have been here three years and I am
suffering health problems," he said. "You have
to eat, go to the toilet and wash all in this small
space. There are huge issues."
"I'm stressed," said his neighbour, Evzen
Kessel, an unemployed street-cleaner from the
Czech Republic. "All I can do here is sleep. I
spend all day outside because there's no room
here to live."
Panayi has sub-let the properties to Investing
Solutions Limited (ISL), which describes itself
as a rent guarantee company. Many of the
tenants were referred to ISL by Fresh Start
Housing, a charity that sets out to provide
"support for homeless people and those about
to be homeless". ISL receives the £255-a-week
payment from the government's housing
benefit pot and then pays Panayi around £150 a
week. The maximum the government will pay
in housing benefit for a one-bed property in
that part of London is currently £258 a week.
A spokesman for ISL said it was "very, very
shocked" by the decision to declare the flats
unfit for human habitation. It said the high
rent was to reflect the "high-risk tenants" who
often do not have money for rent advances or
deposits and can sometimes have their housing
benefit frozen at short notice. "The ones I saw
were normal studio sized," said Gerry Sandhu,
a manager at the firm. "We don't measure
them. That's the landlord's responsibility."
John van Someren, trustee of the Fresh Start
charity, said it would prioritise rehousing the
people it referred.
Nineteen of the tiny, dilapidated rooms are
being let out above a McDonald’s restaurant in
Islington. Photograph: David Levene
"We will have to ask the landlord what the
heck he is doing placing our tenants into
accommodation below legal requirements," he
said. "Then we will have to ask Islington why
they are paying housing benefit on properties
that they say are in breach of size regulations."
Islington said there is no inspection before
housing benefit is paid out, although an
environmental health officer did visit in 2012
when it was assured the property was a hostel
rather than studios.
Panayi attacked Islington for not consulting
him before issuing the closure orders.
"Islington will have to rehouse these people in
boarding houses once they have been evicted
through bailiff action," he said. "The council
should have come to speak to me first."
He said that from next week he will begin a
redesign to add around a third to the space of
each unit and make them "larger and more .
'I don't understand what they are afraid of'
Behind a battered purple shopfront advertising
accountancy services on Caledonian Road,
north London, works Andrew Panayi – one of
London's most controversial landlords. The 67-
year-old Cypus-born Briton owns 250
properties in the area, including hundreds of
flats and studios as well as shops including a
McDonald's. It has made him, he claims, a
fortune in the "tens of millions".
He became the star of a BBC documentary
about the area in which he boasted of flouting
planning procedures and talked of "milking" his
properties. Hanging on the wall of his scruffy
office is a picture of him slitting the throat of a
wild boar in Cyprus, a set of heavy dumbbells
rests in the corner and a side table groans with
bottles of whiskey and red wine. Pride of place
is given to an icon of Zeus and a faded poster
of a glamour model.
Among his assets is the hostel on Holloway
Road that he bought in 2004 and turned into a
£220,000-a-year cash machine by cramming
already tiny rooms with flimsy shower cubicles,
kitchenettes and WCs and renting them as
studios to desperate home-seekers on housing
benefit. The local council started investigating
his properties after he offered a tiny studio on
a different street for £170 a week.
"I single-handledly improved Caledonian
Road," he said in his defence. "I provided so
much accommodation. I don't understand what
they are afraid of."
He is likely to survive the criticism. The
balance sheet of his rental business, Ploughcane
UK, looks very strong. Accounts filed this year
showed it has net assets of £17m and a
turnover in 2013 of £2.7m, of which £2.3m was
operating profit.

Nigeria sends in warplanes against Boko Haram

ABUJA: Nigerian warplanes are carrying out
airstrikes against Boko Haram militant bases in
northeast Borno state, a senior official said
Friday, in a government counterattack against
the group’s apparent drive to create an Islamist
enclave.
The official, who asked not to be named, told
Reuters Nigeria’s military was battling Boko
Haram fighters at Bama, 70 km southeast of
the Borno state capital Maiduguri.
Airstrikes have been carried out “on all the
Boko Haram bases,” the official said, adding
this reflected President Goodluck Jonathan’s
order for a “fully fledged war” against the
group which has waged a bloody insurgency
since 2009.
Military spokesmen have denied reports Bama
was overrun by heavily armed militants earlier
this week after they attacked it with captured
military vehicles and pickup trucks mounted
with machine guns, all part of a growing Boko
Haram arsenal.
“Bama today is the center of the military battle
with the terrorists ... Boko Haram is being
repelled by the Nigerian troops as we are
talking now,” the government official said,
without giving details of the operations or
casualties.
Nigeria’s air force and defense headquarters
did not respond to requests for comment and it
was not immediately possible to obtain
independent confirmation of the fighting.
The battle over Bama, and Boko Haram’s
storming of towns and villages to the north,
east and south of Maiduguri in recent weeks,
has raised fears of an attack on the Borno
state capital, prompting hundreds of civilians to
flee.
“Even today, we can see so many people
leaving ... the buses are going out plenty now,”
Musa Sumail, a human rights activist in
Maiduguri who reports on the violence in the
northeast, told Reuters. He said he had seen at
least one or two Nigerian government fighter
jets in the skies above Maiduguri.
Boko Haram, whose leader Abubakar Shekau
last month declared a “Muslim territory” in the
northeast after capturing the town of Gwoza on
the Cameroon border, is believed to be trying to
mimic ISIS in Syria and Iraq which announced
the creation of a separate caliphate.
Jonathan’s government, which faces an
election in February, has come under public
criticism for its apparent inability to check Boko
Haram’s five-year insurgency, which has
ravaged the poor northeast corner of Africa’s
biggest economy.
The group has also claimed shootings and
bombings across the north and, more
sporadically, in the federal capital Abuja and
even in the southern commercial hub Lagos.
The attacks have not reached the southern oil
fields of Africa’s No. 1 producer.
The U.S. is among several western allies
helping Nigeria’s military with training and
intelligence support. This was stepped up
following international outrage over Boko
Haram’s brazen abduction in mid-April of more
than 200 schoolgirls in the northeast. The girls
are still missing.
In a speech to a security meeting in Abuja
Thursday, the top U.S. diplomat for Africa said
Bama’s “apparent capture” by Boko Haram and
the threat of an assault on Maiduguri was a
“sober reality check” for Nigeria and its allies.
“We are past time for denial and pride,”
Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs
Linda Thomas-Greenfield said, adding that
Shekau’s announcement of an ISIS-style
“caliphate” showed how much the security
situation had worsened.
U.S. officials say more extensive security
cooperation has been hampered by persistent
allegations of human rights abuses leveled
against Nigeria’s army, which it denies, and
Nigeria’s sensitivity about outside meddling in
its affairs.
“The reputation of Nigeria’s military is at
stake,” Thomas-Greenfield said, pledging U.S
support for a border security initiative involving
Nigeria’s neighbors Cameroon, Chad and Niger
which will try to prevent Boko Haram from
extending its control over these remote frontier
zones of the lower Sahel.
The Sunni jihadist movement, whose name
means “western education is forbidden,” has
killed thousands since launching an uprising in
2009. Counterterrorism experts say links exist
between it and other Islamist groups, such as
Al-Qaeda’s North African franchise and
Somalia’s Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabab, but
there has been little evidence so far of
extensive cooperation.
In Nigeria’s February polls, southerner
Jonathan is expected to seek re-election.
Many believe political tensions stemming from
the historic rivalry between Nigeria’s mostly
Muslim north and largely Christian south is
also stoking the violence.
A version of this article appeared in the print
edition of The Daily Star on September 06,
2014, on page 11.

Maiduguri: 12,000 Civilian Volunteers Demand Permission From Government To Go After Boko Haram

Some of the ex-servicemen, who had
served in the military, the police, and with
the SSS, said today that they wished to
join youths in the civilian joint task force
(JTF) to stop Boko Haram’s incessant
attacks and recent string of triumphs
over demoralized Nigerian soldiers based
in the violence-ravaged northeast of
Nigeria.
With military officials and the government of Borno
State quietly backing away from claims that the
strategic town of Bama was still in the control of
Nigerian soldiers, at least 12,000 volunteers
gathered today in Maiduguri to offer their services
in the war against the Islamist terrorist group,
Boko Haram. The volunteers, who gathered at the
Maiduguri palace of the Shehu of Borno, Abubakar
Umar Ibn- Garbai Elkanemi, urged the Nigerian
government to accept their services in the war
against terror.
SEE ALSO
Our correspondent reported that thousands of ex-
service men, hunters, and youths said they were
ready to become part of the increasingly critical
war against Boko Haram, which recently has
captured several towns in Borno and Yobe States
and killed more than 2,000 civilians in the first half
of 2014, according to Human Rights Watch.
Some of the ex-servicemen, who had served in the
military, the police, and with the SSS, said today
that they wished to join youths in the civilian joint
task force (JTF) to stop Boko Haram’s incessant
attacks and recent string of triumphs over
demoralized Nigerian soldiers based in the
violence-ravaged northeast of Nigeria.
The prospective volunteers trooped today to the
palace of the Shehu of Borno to seek his support
and cooperation in their desire to combat the
seemingly energized and increasingly more brutal
Islamist insurgents. Some of the vigilante
volunteers vowed to enter Sambisa forest and
other hideouts to hunt down Boko Haram militants
and bring an end to the ongoing insurgency.
Over the last three weeks, Boko Haram insurgents
launched a series of attacks on several towns in
Borno and neighboring states, including Damboa,
Gamboru Ngala, Bama and Banki. The terrorists
have seized numerous towns and engaged in
widespread slaughter of civilians. Thousands of
people have been displaced, some of them taking
refuge in neighboring west African countries.
Some of the volunteers said their goal was to resist
Boko Haram’s reign of terror and to reverse the
insurgent group’s seizure of important towns.
Ex-staff sergeant Yahaya Suleiman, who fought in
Nigeria’s civil war, urged the Nigerian government
to accept the offer from him and others. “We are
fully ready to join the military in fighting against
terrorism. Enough is enough. All we need is
support from the federal government to stop this
madness.”
The dramatic gathering came a day after the
Shehu of Borno suggested that people of different
faiths observe three days of alms, prayers and
fasting in order to restore peace to the state and
the country at large.
The Shehu also called on members of the vigilante
youth, popularly known as 'Civilian JTF,' to always
abide by the rule of law while discharging their
civic responsibilities.
Addressing the volunteers, the traditional ruler
commended the effort of the civilian JTF in tackling
the Boko Haram insurgency. He urged them to
always follow the directives of the military and
other security agencies. He added that the civilian
JTF had helped to dislodge the sect from Maiduguri
and surrounding areas. He encouraged other
besieged towns and communities to set up their
own volunteers to help fight terrorism.
“I want to thank you for this visit and the effort you
are collectively and voluntarily making in order to
fight Boko Haram who are bent in not only
destroying our social and economic structures, but
also killing innocent lives. I want to also appeal to
you that you should desist from politics, religious
or ethnic considerations while discharging your
duties.”
The Borno State coordinator of the civilian JTF,
Abba Aji, said the residents of the beleaguered
states had suffered enough at the hands of Boko
Haram. He said he and other volunteers were
determined to go after the insurgents “even if we
are not well armed. We are optimistic that, with our
sticks, Dane guns and other local arms, we will
raid all terrorist hideouts and kill them when given
permission by the federal government.”
Mr. Aji added that members of the civilian JTF were
now more motivated with the support and
assurance they received from retired military men,
local hunters and other patriotic citizens who have
expressed their willingness join the group to end
the madness perpetrated by Boko Haram
terrorists.
The passion displayed by the volunteers came as
US authorities tacitly confirmed that the insurgents
had indeed seized the town of Bama, contrary to
earlier denials by the Nigerian military and Borno
State officials. Bama is less than 45 miles from
Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State. Its capture by
Boko Haram raised fears that the group might try
to seize Maiduguri as well.
A top US official announced plans to offer a border
security initiative designed to help Nigeria and
other threatened West African countries to contain
the Islamists.
Speaking in Abuja, Assistant Secretary of State
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, described the situation
on the ground in Nigeria as “worsening.” Noting
that attacks by Boko Haram insurgents had “grown
more acute,” Ms. Thomas-Greenfield added, “This
is a sober reality check for all of us. We are past
time for denial and pride.”
The official stated that the US was “very troubled
by the apparent capture of Bama and the prospects
for an attack on and in Maiduguri.”
Speaking to SaharaReporters, an official of Borno
State backed away from earlier claims that Bama
was still in the hands of Nigerian soldiers. The
source blamed the deputy governor for spreading
the misleading information, admitting that Bama
was under the control of Islamist insurgents. The
official said he was confident that Nigerian troops
and civilian volunteers would drive the terrorist
fighters out of Bama and other seized towns in
Borno State.