Children's stories enhanced by US firearms

US kids are already concerned by the constitutional right to carry firearms. Since the beginning of 2016, some 50 US citizens less than 18 years old have accidentally fired a shot at somebody, often themselves.

It was inevitable, in God's Own Country, that old-fashioned stories for European children would end up being enhanced by the presence of protective firearms. Conscientious US parents certainly won't tolerate the possibility that their fat little kids might get devoured by a wolf.

Koala gets police assistance on a busy highway

Click here to see a Queensland koala taking advantage of exceptional police road-safety assistance. It would be a mistake, I fear, if koalas were to imagine that they can count upon this kind of convenient assistance. They need to realize that Australian police officers are busy individuals, who don't normally have spare time to help koalas cross the road. I feel it's the responsibility of mother koalas to get this message across to their young offspring, maybe with the help of government specialists in road safety and education. Could we imagine the creation of some kind of regular school training in this field, for juvenile koalas?

Difference between murderers and assassins ?

In my own mind, this linguistic question arises often. For example, in the case of my preceding blog post, I wasn’t quite sure whether I should designate the Taliban suicide-bomber who killed 72 people on Sunday as a murderer or rather an assassin. This question was further complicated by the fact that the killer had surely targeted Pakistani Christians, whereas his victims apparently turned out to be mostly Muslims.

The Arabic word hashishiyyin is a plural noun meaning “people who consume the drug hashish”. At the time of the Crusades, it was thought that future killers were often deliberately motivated, prior to their murderous acts, by drugging themselves with hashish. Consequently, the plural term gave rise erroneously to a singular word, assassin. Over the years, an assassin is thought of as a murderer of an illustrious victim. In the case of terrorist killers whose victims are often everyday citizens, there is no obvious reason to label such murderers as assassins. Admittedly, the case of the celebrated Charlie journalists in Paris might be thought of indeed as a strict assassination.

Murder of Christians in Pakistan

This hallucinating photo shows a devastated Pakistani mother who has just learnt that her son died in a terrorist bombing at Lahore.

Click here to access a British newspaper website with dramatic images of the slaughter perpetrated on Sunday by a Taliban suicide-bomber.

In a distant city on another continent, the New York artist Liza Donnelly has used simple strokes of her pencils to express the universal grief of Humanity's maternal civilization.

French easter eggs of a special kind

In the town of Pierrelatte, a little to the south of where I live, there's a famous crocodile farm, for tourists and lovers of these splendid Nile reptiles. Easter is their annual breeding time. Click here to access a video on this fascinating subject.

News from Belgium: video of a free man

Click here to watch the video of a man
who has just been set free in Belgium.

His name is Fayçal Cheffou. To the left of the innocent man, you can see two genuine terrorists: Ibrahim El Bakraoui and Najim Laachraoui, who would soon blow themselves to smithereens. I would imagine that the police are keeping a protective eye upon the innocent fellow, to make sure he doesn't run into harm. What a wonderful world!

In another domain, click here to watch a short video of a mother in Molenbeek, whose daughter has disappeared, probably forever, as the wife of a Daesh jihadist in Syria.

Meanwhile, in Brussels, the count of recent victims of terrorism has risen to 35 dead and 340 wounded.

What do we mean by a “Molenbeek” ?

Patrick Kanner, the French Ministre de la ville (minister in charge of townships) has said that, in France, at least a hundred neighborhoods are similar to (have the same potential problems as) Molenbeek. It's a kind of newly-invented word in our French language. So, an obvious question arises: What exactly do we mean by a “Molenbeek” ?

« It's an enormous concentration of poverty and unemployment. It's a collection of ghettos. It's a maffia system with an underground economy. It's a system in which public services have practically disappeared. It's a system in which the elected representatives of the people have ceased to react. »

The minister added that the big difference between comparable situations in Belgium and in France is that, here in France, the existence of so-called Molenbeek systems is being tackled constantly.

I've noticed indeed that, in the French press, there seems to be a mounting degree of outspoken criticism of Belgium's failure to handle her "Molenbeek" communities.

Dramatic arrest at Schaerbeek last Friday

In the following photo, taken last Friday, a wanted fellow named Abderamane Ameroud has just been "neutralized" by police at a tram stop in Schaerbeek (Brussels). He's still perfectly alive, of course, but his legs have received a good dose of a mysterious police product that prevents him from going any further.

The victim of this apparently successful neutralization operation is still holding on to his back pack (maybe because his muscles have become rigid?) while a robot vehicle is moving up to the scene. Missing from the photo is the victim's young daughter, who was calmly taken away from the scene by detectives, before the robot was brought into action. You might click here in the hope of receiving understandable images and explanations concerning this dramatic arrest.

Personally, I think I've evolved somewhat in my understanding of police techniques. And I would hope that police forces in my native land (Australia) have also evolved considerably since their shoddy handling of Sydney's Lindt Café affair in December 2014. I often said to myself, in the aftermath of that calamity, that it would be a good idea if Australian police were to seek high-level professional advice from France. I don't know whether this ever happened, but I don't think so... particularly when I notice that naive Australian political leaders are trying to give advice these days to France and Belgium.

Trivial family data that remains a mystery

Apparently my father "Bill" Skyvington, as a teenager in Grafton, had made friends with a well-known family, named Clunies-Ross. It was only recently that I acquired a little information on this friendship, from my father's sister Yvonne Tarrant, but I've never been able to obtain any confirmation whatsoever. My father himself never seems to have mentioned this friendship to any member of my generation. So, one might say that this alleged friendship is such a flimsy tale that I ended up looking upon it as an empty family legend, which somebody (not my father) had invented. Furthermore this friendship legend was trivial, unimportant. But I'll repeat the tale briefly here in my blog, in the vague hope that readers might offer me a little factual data.

Clunies-Ross history and facts

Click here to meet up with historical facts concerning the so-called King of the Cocos Islands. More recent information deals with a descendant of the family who was in charge of scientific research in Australia, and there is even an aged descendant of the family living today in Western Australia. But nowhere in this mass of data is there any mention of members of the Clunies-Ross family who might have become my father's friends.

Story of a phantom vessel in South Grafton, the Induna

On the banks of the Clarence River in South Grafton, rusty remnants of the iron hull of an old vessel, the Induna, are still visible today.

When I was a child, we could clearly observe the perfectly visible form of the celebrated ship that used to transport train elements across the Clarence River before the construction of the bridge in 1932. Click here to read this story, which even includes a vague mention of Winston Churchill.

There seems to be no doubt whatsoever that the vessel, after being towed from Sydney to the Clarence River by the tug Heroic, in late 1924, steamed upriver to Grafton under the command of a certain Captain T. Clunies-Ross. According to our family legend, the captain's family settled down in Grafton, and my father "Bill" Skyvington (born in 1917) made friends with the Clunies-Ross children. That's all I know: certainly not much of a story...

Silly fellow who thought he was funny

A humorous Jewish fellow decided to celebrate the Purim festival by getting dressed up in an Arabic djellaba, carrying a fake kalachnikov and wandering into an austere synagogue in Vincennes.

Once inside, he cried out "Allah Akbar". Ah, what an imaginative and joyous clown. He'll have an opportunity of testing his sense of humor upon a local law court.