US Marines on Facebook today were applauding the owner of this shield which bears the marks of most of a magazine of AK-47 rounds and a fair amount of suicide vest shrapnel.(picture source: iTele French TV)
Airman First Class Spencer Stone, National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos, U.S. student Anthony Sadler, and British businessman Chris Norman who took down the Moroccan terrorist on the high-speed train to Paris have been made Knights of the French Legion of Honor, France’s highest award for valor.
The Daily Mail has a more detailed account of the action on the train than any I’ve seen previously.
Apparently, it was an unnamed French banker who first confronted the gunman. A 51-year-old American musician came to his aid and wrestled the AK-47 out of the Moroccan’s hands, whereupon the terrorist took out a Luger pistol and shot him in the neck. It was after all that that the three younger Americans piled in, restrained the gunman, and beat him unconscious.
Mr Moogalian, 51, originally from Virginia in the U.S., came to aid of a French banker known only as ‘Damien A’ who was initially confronted by El-Khazzani during the attack on Friday.
Acting instinctively to protect his wife Isabella Risacher, he ripped the Kalashnikov assault rifle from El-Khazzani who then drew a handgun and shot him in the back of the neck.
Mr Moogalian, a musician in a band called Secret Season, feared he was going to die after suffering massive blood loss.
His sister, Julia, told The Daily Telegraph: ‘He made sure his wife was hidden behind a seat.
‘He did manage to get the weapon away from the gunman. But the gunman then pulled another gun and shot my brother.
‘There’s a video of him saying ‘help me’ – he thought he was losing so much blood he would die.’
Mr Moogalian, a keen cyclist, is being treated in hospital and may have lost some use his left arm after suffering nerve damage.
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I think it was right that the Government of France made these awards, but I think the Republic of France really has sufficient manpower and resources to have arranged for Airman Stone and Guardsman Skarlatos to have been provided with dress uniforms to be worn at the ceremony, and I think the French Republic could have afforded to buy Mr. Sadler a suit and tie.
Deutsche Welle reports that the French Terror Alert Meter has reached the Surrender level.
Charlie Hebdo” editor Laurent Sourisseau has told “Stern” magazine he will no longer draw cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad. Souriseau’s statement comes six months after a deadly attack on the magazine’s offices.
During an interview with the Hamburg-based news magazine “Stern,” editor of the French weekly “Charlie Hebdo” said he would no longer draw comics of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.
“We have drawn Muhammad to defend the principle that one can draw whatever they want. It is a bit strange though: we are expected to exercise a freedom of expression that no one dares to,” Sourisseau told “Stern.”
The editor said that the magazine had done what it set out to do.
“We’ve done our job. We have defended the right to caricature,” Sourisseau said. …
Sourisseau, who owns 40 percent of the company’s shares, survived the deadly terrorist attack on the offices of “Charlie Hebdo” on January 7 by playing dead.
“The biggest find at the site was a huge wine cauldron. Standing on the handles of the cauldron, is the Greek god Acheloos. The river deity is shown with horns, a beard, the ears of a bull and a triple mustache.”
The tomb of an Iron Age Celtic prince has been unearthed in a small French town.
The ‘exceptional’ grave, crammed with Greek and possibly Etruscan artefacts, was discovered in a business zone on the outskirts of Lavau in France’s Champagne region.
The prince is buried with his chariot at the centre of a huge mound, 130 feet (40 metres) across, which has been dated to the 5th Century BC.
A team from the National Archaeological Research Institute, Inrap has been excavating the site since October last year. …
Its discovery could shed light on Iron Age European trade, researchers say.
The Telegraph quotes French newspapers, detailing the cries of indignation at this kind of Americanization of French “surrender monkey” culture.
A controversial far-right mayor in France has been accused of turning the local police force into “Dirty Harry” after a poster campaign trumpeted their “new friend”: a 7.65-calibre handgun.
Bernard Cazeneuve, the interior minister, called the posters “deliberately provocative”. He said: “The best friends of the police are not their weapons … but the French citizens who respect republican values.”
The decision to arm local police followed a national debate on whether all French police should be armed with lethal weapons after Clarissa Jean-Philippe, an unarmed municipal officer, was gunned down by Islamist terrorists during the Paris attacks in January that killed 17 people.
All this fuss over cops carrying a Beretta 92 chambered in the antiquated and anemic .32 ACP/7.65 Browning cartridge.
DEBKAfile says the last of the suspects being hunted by French authorities is long gone, and the al-Qaeda-Arabian-Peninsula stuff may have all been disinformation.
French intelligence failures over the Charlie Hebdo terror attack will not be upstaged by the Unity March of millions that President Francois Hollande leads in Paris Sunday, Jan. 11, to dramatize the free world’s protest against Islamist terror. The case of Hayat Boumeddiene, the 26-year old wife of the terrorist Amedy Coulibaly who murdered four Jews in cold blood at the kosher supermarket, stands out.
Friday, Jan. 9, after the police assault on the store, French security sources reported she had escaped with a stream of rescued hostages and reached Syria via Spain and Istanbul.
In fact, she never was in the Paris store.
The female terrorist had skipped France and arrived in Syria on Jan. 1-2, more than a week before the wave of terror first struck Paris at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
This could have been discovered simply by examining the records at French, Spanish and Turkish border posts. …
Western security sources have been playing up the three terrorists’ connection to the Yemeni headquarters of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). That is because, if ISIS was able to pull the strings for multiple terror in the heart of Europe, the air campaign that the US-led coalition of 20 countries including France is conducting in Iraq and Syria would look pretty tame. And its leader Abu Baqr al-Baghdad would be laughing.
But was it really ISIS or AQAP which set up the three attacks which claimed 17 lives in three days?
That is the big question.
Said and Cherif Kouachi told French television shortly before they were shot dead that they belonged to Yemen Al Qaeda, whereas Coulibaly claimed he was acting for ISIS.
This apparent contradiction raises the scary suggestion that the two murderous Islamic groups may have collaborated for the first time to hit France. That scenario assumes an even more ominous dimension in the light of the chatter picked up Sunday by US intelligence indicating that all Al Qaeda’s branches are preparing to follow up the Paris operations with a major campaign of terror in Europe.
Boumediene’s arrival in Syria ahead of the Paris attacks appears to part of a comprehensive plan for setting up a command and control center for this campaign or, possibly, to prepare safe asylum for the gunmen who manage to get away. If that is so, then the center of this campaign would be situated on ISIS – not AQAP – turf.
The sight of many thousands of gendarmes and security officers rushing around in combat gear to chase the female terrorist may have helped reassure a frightened population, who were not to know the guardians of security were on a fool’s errand.
But the truth was that France’s external security service (DGSE), anti-terror police branches and border authorities, who were supposed to operate in concert, fell down on the job and revealed their weakness to the enemy. Homegrown and foreign jihadis were shown to have established safe exit routes for reaching the Islamic battlegrounds of the Middle East and returning home – well trained, heavily armed and filled with hatred for the societies which bred them.
Underground jihadist networks spent months undiscovered by the internal security service (DGSI) in the setting up of complicated multi-site operations, like the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish supermarket.
And the Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN) took too long to run them to earth and eliminate them.
After murdering the top journalists and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, the two Kouachi brothers emerged from the building packing two submachine guns, but none of the dozens of armed police outside was able to cut them down.
And finally, thousands of French police and soldiers from various units put to siege the print works outside Dammartin-en-Goele, where Said and Cherif Kouachi were holed up for hours, with nearly 100,000 security officers mobilized across France. Still, they hesitated to break in.
All this provides fodder for the trainers to inspire the next generation of jihadi terrorists for action that is guaranteed to win them prime time on all the world’s television screens.
Our friends at Mossad’s mouthpiece, DEBKAfile, report:
In the three days since the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, the French authorities have rounded up 900 individuals across France on suspicion of involvement in Islamic terror. The detentions on an unprecedented scale for France continues.
“If there was a distinctive modern style in torture, it was French modern: the field telephone magneto adapted with alligator clips, usually conjoined with water torture…”
The security forces of the French Republic have been historically unconstrained by the kind of sentimental humanitarianism which has so conspicuously afflicted counter-terrorist interrogation efforts by US Intelligence. The French have traditionally wired up the interrogation subject to a field telephone and happily turned the crank until he talked.
One wonder if they have 900 field phones available these days.
The Poitevin donkey almost became extinct, living specimens having dwindled down to about 40 world-wide just a few decades ago, but a combination of public and private efforts to save this ancient breed got the numbers up to over 450 by 2005.
The Baudet du Poitou is one of the largest breeds of donkey and was kept for breeding mules. The origins of the breed are thought to go back to Antiquity when the Romans introduced mule breeding as a specialty of the region.
Mechanization of agriculture caused the decline of the breed. But, starting in 1977, patriotic efforts to save the locally famous breed were underway.
