Blatant Reality

Recently, British Airways has stopped serving beef on board their flights partly to ensure they do not offend their Hindu customers. Many people are all up in arms about how this is outrageous and that they shouldn’t do this. I, however, feel that British Airways should be able to do whatever they want.

Lets look at the facts. According to the article, British Airways wasn’t doing this because of a government regulation, a court order, a complaint or anything else for that matter. They decided to institute this change on their own free will.

Now there are two reasons that I see they could be doing this. 1) According to the article, one of their larger markets is India. Therefore, British Airways obviously feels that whatever customers they will lose from not serving beef will be replaced with customers that see BA as “Hindu friendly.” 2) Even though the article says that the airline isn’t discontinuing beef because of its increasing cost, that could very well be the case.

Either way, the bottom line the company is doing this is because of the potential increase in profits. Without anything other than the market influencing the company’s choices, I really don’t see why people are complaining about this so much.

If you want to eat beef on your flight, just change airlines. It’s not like it is going to taste that great anyways.

(Hat tip Drudge Report)

Yeah, you remember Kosovo? The country that declared its independence back in February? Well its still independent and now Britain is sending roughly 600 troop battalion to strengthen the NATO peacekeeping mission there.

“We are … well prepared to meet NATO’s request and I have agreed to deploy our Operational Reserve Force battalion until June 30, 2008,” Defense Secretary Des Browne said in a written statement to parliament.

 

“The deployment will demonstrate our commitment to the security of the region and will provide NATO with extra flexibility in maintaining peace and stability for all communities within Kosovo,” he said.

 

The soldiers from the 2nd Battalion, The Rifles, will spend about a month in Kosovo, from late May until the end of June, a Ministry of Defense spokesman said.

 

The battalion had been on standby since January to go to Kosovo, where they will supplement 16,000 NATO-led peacekeepers.

And these troops may very well be needed quite soon considering the large weapon’s cache discovered near Kosovo’s border with Macedonia.

The Kosovo Police Service (KPS) said on Monday (April 28th) that it arrested four people after stopping a car carrying weapons near the Kosovo-Macedonian border.

 

“We suspect that the weapons and ammunition were meant for the Macedonian market,” KPS spokesman Veton Elshani told the DPA.

 

The arsenal seized in a village near the town of Gnjilane on Sunday night reportedly included rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds, anti-aircraft machine guns and ammunition of different calibres. Police delivered the seized munitions to the NATO-led force operating in this part of Kosovo.

 

Police believe the intended recipients were ethnic Albanian extremists in Macedonia. The country endured a seven-month inter-ethnic conflict in 2001.

Remember where World War I was started? Yeah, they call this area a powder keg for a reason.

You might as well just add this to the long list of other disturbing trends that are happening in England.

With Russia about to experience “leadership” from two sources (Putin and Medvedev), some are predicting that the power sharing won’t last too long.

Russia is heading for a crisis if President Vladimir Putin and his successor, Dmitry Medvedev, try to share the country’s leadership, the leader of the biggest opposition party said on Tuesday.

 

Putin, whose presidency ends next month, has said he will serve as prime minister under his protege Medvedev. This will create a power-sharing arrangement unusual for a country accustomed to having a single, strong leader.

 

“I find it hard to imagine a Russia in which there are two tsars,” Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov told a news conference.

 

Russian history showed that when there was no clear leader, “feuds and serious disorder always began, so we need to understand how they are going to divide up power between them,” he said. “If they rule together it will not work out.”

Well you know what they say about trying to serve two masters. There very well may come a day when the Russian people have to pick a side.

In a new book by Switzerland’s Ambassador to Argentina claims that several of Kosovo’s current leaders were responsible for kidnapping Serbians and selling their organs.

Carla del Ponte, a former prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague, now Switzerland’s Ambassador to Argentina, made a sensational announcement. Her autobiographical book “The Hunt” reveals that Serbian men have been kidnapped and their organs were sold to international traffickers.

 

Carla del Ponte’s announcements have already caused the criminal case institution in Serbia. District Court of Belgrade has already started the hearing of 300 young Serbians being kidnapped in the summer of 1999, who as del Ponte claims, were transported to Albania and had there their internal organs removed.

 

These villainous crimes, compared just to the horrors of Third Reich, were held by the leaders of Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) whose co-leader was the present-day prime minister of Kosovo Hashim Thaci. His profile, gathered by his opponents, contains the evidence of dozens of crimes made by him as a field commander against the Serbians in Kosovo.

 

According to Simo Spasich, the head of the Missing in Action Families Union, he met Carla del Ponte several times and gave her the documents, containing evidence of Kosovo’s Serbians kidnapping and killing in concentration camps. However even after the prosecutor visited the house where the organs have been removed, in the town of Burel in the north of Albania, to see herself medical equipment and blood that proved del Ponte was right, no further investigation was proposed.

Hmmm…. Who would buy organs off the black market and is near enough to Kosovo to make it happen? The Russians! Well, I really have no evidence for that but wouldn’t that be a twist of fate if it were true?

As I stated back in October, Egypt is looking to make a deal with Russia to get nuclear reactors. Now it seems that they are just a couple days from signing a deal that would allow Russia to build reactors in Egypt.

The document will be signed during a forthcoming visit by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to Moscow on March 24-25, Gheit said.

 

“This agreement will enable Egypt to use Russia’s extensive experience in the peaceful use of nuclear energy,” Gheit said.

 

A source in Egypt’s electricity and energy ministry earlier said the document will lay the foundation for nuclear energy cooperation between Egypt and Russia and will strengthen relations between Russian companies and Egypt.

You know why they picked Russia over the US to build these reactors? Its because the United States imposes “tough restrictions, including regular inspections and control.” And you know why we do all those “tough restrictions” and “inspections?” It’s because we want to be sure that this nuclear technology doesn’t fall into the wrong hands that could use it against our strategic ally, Israel.

You would think that something as big as this would be getting a lot more media attention.

The answer, according to Michael J. Totten, is yes.

There has been a lot of arguments for and against the new state of Kosovo and a lot of the reason against it are taken from a national security standpoint. The main question refers to whether or not we want to have a Muslim country in Europe that could turn into a powder keg waiting to explode.

Totten’s article compares the two countries along with pointing out the the predominant Muslim sect in Kosovo is the exact opposite the sects that brought about Al-Qaeda and the like. Now, the article doesn’t bring up the topic about whether or not Kosovo has the right to secede or not. The article strictly focuses on whether Israel should recognize Kosovo because it can be seen as somewhat of a “brother in arms” with the same situation. To get what I am saying, read this excerpt:

The irrelevance of Kosovo to the Arab-Israeli conflict is underscored by the fact that not a single Arab country has recognized Kosovo. The only Muslim countries which so far have bothered are Turkey, Malaysia, Senegal, Albania, and Afghanistan. The governments of all these countries are, to one extent or another, either moderate, in the pro-Western camp, or both. All aside from Albania have sizeable ethnic minorities of their own. Turkey especially frets about its own separatists – the Kurds in the east – but still went ahead and recognized Kosovo almost instantly.

 

Many in Kosovo are well aware that they have more in common with Israel than with the West Bank and Gaza. “Kosovars used to identify with the Palestinians because we Albanians are Muslims and Christians and we saw Serbia and Israel both as usurpers of land,” a prominent Kosovar recently told journalist Stephen Schwartz. “Then we looked at a map and woke up. Israelis have a population of six million, their backs to the sea, and 300 million Arab enemies. Albanians have a total population of eight million, our backs to the sea, and 200 million Slav enemies. So why should we identify with the Arabs?”

If you liked that part, read the rest of the article. It’s just as good.

Whats the difference between a terrorist and a person who likes to detonate things in public areas? A terrorist’s aim is to hurt people. The Basque terrorist group ETA seems to have forgotten how this terrorism stuff works. Instead of calling in 30 minutes after an explosion to claim it, they called 30 minutes before it detonated in order to warn people away.

State radio said ETA had issued a warning stating the location of the bomb and the make, model and colour of the car.

 

Media reported the police station and surrounding area had been cleared and cordoned off before the explosion.

 

State television said the warning had been received about 30 minutes before the explosion and there had been scenes of panic as the area around the police station was crowded with people attending a Holy Week religious procession.

Today, in the wee hours of the morning, violence erupted between Serbians and UN/NATO troops in Kosovo.

International forces pulling Serb demonstrators from a U.N. courthouse were attacked Monday by hundreds of furious protesters who massed outside, setting off an hours-long battle with rocks, grenades and live ammunition.

 

U.N. and NATO forces responded with tear gas, stun grenades and gunshots. At least 42 U.N. and NATO forces and 70 protesters were wounded in the worst violence in Kosovo since its declaration of independence last month.

 

The U.N. police stormed the courthouse just before dawn to arrest dozens of Serbs who had occupied the U.N. building since Friday to protest Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia.

 

Hundreds of Serbs surrounded the courthouse as the police tried to leave with the arrested demonstrators. Polish, Ukrainian and Bulgarian members of the U.N. force and NATO troops backing them up were pelted with rocks, Molotov cocktails and hand grenades. Some demonstrators fired guns at the international forces. Witnesses said others surrounded and attacked three U.N. vehicles, pulling out and freeing about 20 of the 53 protesters who had been arrested in the courthouse. The rest of the 53 were freed after questioning.

For those of you who thought all this violence had died down, you were wrong.

Well, Kosovo isn’t going to waste any time and plans of opening twenty embassies in the year 2008 alone.

Kosovo’s government is planning to open almost 20 embassies all over the world, Deputy Prime Minister Hajredin Kuqi said Wednesday.

 

“Within this year Kosovo is trying to open its embassies in different countries of the world,” said Kuqi in Pristina.

 

He did not elaborate in which countries Kosovo is seeking to have the first diplomatic missions. It is expected that Washington, Brussels and capitals of some leading European countries would be the first host cities for Kosovo embassies.

Hmmm…we shall see if this goal is met.