ISIS abducts at least 150 Christians in Syria

(Reuters) - Islamic State militants have abducted at least 150 people from Assyrian Christian villages in northeastern Syria they had raided, Christian Syrian activists said on Tuesday.

A Syrian Christian group representing several NGO's inside and outside the country said it had verified at least 150 people missing, including women and elderly, who had been kidnapped by the militants.

"We have verified at least 150 people who have been adducted from sources on the ground," Bassam Ishak, President of the Syriac National Council of Syria, whose family itself is from Hasaka, told Reuters from Amman.

Earlier the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 90 were abducted when the militants carried out dawn raids on rural villages inhabited by the ancient Christian minority west of Hasaka, a city mainly held by the Kurds.

Syrian Kurdish militia launched two offensives against the militants in northeast Syria on Sunday, helped by U.S.-led air strikes and Iraqi peshmerga.
This part of Syria borders territory controlled by Islamic State in Iraq, where it committed atrocities last year against the Yazidi religious minority.

Islamic State did not confirm the kidnappings. Supporters posted photos online of the group's fighters in camouflage attire looking at maps and firing machine guns. The website said the photos were from Tel Tamr, a town near where the Observatory said the abductions occurred.

Many Assyrian Christians have emigrated in the nearly four-year-long conflict in which more than 200,000 have people have been killed. Before the arrival of Kurds and Arab nomadic tribes at the end of the 19th century, Christians formed the majority in Syria's Jazeera area, which includes Hasaka.

Sunday's offensive by Kurdish YPG militia reached within five km (3 miles) of Tel Hamis, an Islamic State-controlled town southeast of Qamishli, the Observatory said.

At least 14 IS fighters died in the offensive, in which Assyrians fought alongside Kurds, it added. Eight civilians were also killed in heavy shelling by the Kurdish side, which seized several Arab villages from Islamic State control.

Last year, Islamic State fighters abducted several Assyrians in retaliation for some of them fighting alongside the YPG. Most were released after long negotiations.

RELIEVING PRESSURE

Military experts said militants were trying to open a new front to relieve pressure on Islamic State after several losses since being driven from the Syrian town of Kobani near the border with Turkey.

"Islamic State are losing in several areas so they want to wage an attack on a new area," said retired Jordanian general Fayez Dwiri.

Since driving IS from Kobani, Kurdish forces, backed by other Syrian armed groups, have pursued the group's fighters as far as their provincial stronghold of Raqqa.

A resident of Hasaka, jointly held by the Syrian government and the Kurds, said hundreds of families had arrived in recent days from surrounding Christian villages and Arab Bedouins were arriving from areas along the border.

"Families are coming to Hasaka seeking safety," said Abdul Rahman al-Numai, a textile trader said by telephone.

Source: Reuters

Read More

WATCH: 'Power Rangers' gets super dark in this short-film remake

This isn't the Power Rangers you grew up with.

A short film starring Battlestar Galactica's Katee Sackhoff  and Dawson's Creek's James Van Der Beek shows the Power Rangers as adults—seriously disturbed after being made to fight at a young age.

The originally no-holds-barred NSFW version of the video was posted on Vimeo, though it could no longer be automatically accessed from there as of Wednesday. However, a partially censored—but still unsettlingly violent—version is still up on YouTube:




With Sackhoff as Kimberly/Pink Ranger and Van Der Beek as Rocky/Red Ranger, the short film also includes Russ Bain as Tommy/Green Ranger, Will Yun Lee as General Klank, and Gichi Gamba as Zack/Black Ranger.


Darkly violent

So just how dark is the movie? Consequence of Sound said this is one film with "the word 'violent' extremely emphasized."

"This hard R-rated take on the kid’s action show is full of bloody deaths and adult language that makes the clip extremely NSFW and NSFSMT (not safe for Saturday morning TV)," it said.

Producer Joseph Kahn, in an interview with HitFix, said the trick he wanted to do "was to make that dark and gritty version that everybody keeps talking about, but really do it. Really see if I could totally accomplish it with essentially a really incredible incredibly silly property."

"When I was a child I had two favorite TV shows the X-Men animated series and Power Rangers. I eventually came to the realization that high school kids weaponized to fight an intergalactic threat would turn those kids into some seriously disturbed adults," said producer Adi Shankar.

Saban takedown

In the hours since POWER/RANGERS was released, Khan said the original NSFW video was taken down due to pressure from Saban Entertainment—the owners of the original Power Rangers franchise.

Saban Entertainment has not yet released an official response as of posting time.

Source: GMA News

Read More

More mystery craters appear in Siberia

Image credit: Vasily Bogoyavlensky via The Siberian Times

(NEWSER) – More mysterious craters have been spotted in Siberia, and researchers are starting to sound more than a little alarmed about the phenomenon. Vasily Bogoyavlensky, deputy director of Russia's Oil and Gas Research Institute, says at least seven suspicious craters have now been spotted—five of them in a region known as the "end of the world"—and a satellite image shows one of them has at least 20 water-filled "baby craters" around it. "I would compare this with mushrooms: When you find one mushroom, be sure there are [a] few more around. I suppose there could be 20 to 30 craters more," he tells the Siberian Times. He's calling for urgent research "to prevent possible disasters" that could affect cities and oil industry infrastructure in the region.

Bogoyavlensky and other experts believe gas emissions, possibly linked to climate change, are causing the holes to appear and suspect there are many more to be found, reports NBC News. "The processes that are causing them to form likely occur over a wide area of the continuous permafrost in this part of Siberia," the chief of the US Geological Survey's Gas Hydrates Project tells the Huffington Post. She hasn't researched the holes firsthand, but she agrees they demand further study "to determine the processes that cause their formation, how they evolve with time, and whether it is possible to predict where new ones will occur." Bogoyavlensky plans an upcoming expedition to the craters (only one of them has been studied in depth thus far) and intends to install seismic stations in the region.

Source: USA Today

Read More

CT scans reveal preserved body inside ancient buddhist statue

Photo credit: M. Elsevier Stokmans/German-Mummy-Project Mannheim. CT scans reveal this statue contains a mummy

A nearly 1,000-year-old statue has left China for the first time and the Meander Medical Center in the Netherlands thought they'd run it through a CT scanner, as you do. They confirmed that the statue holds the mummified remains of a man, while also finding some intriguing insights into the mummification process.
To inexpert eyes, the statue looks like it is of the Buddha, but it lacks most of the distinctive features that artists use to identify Gautama Buddha. Researchers believe the body inside is that of Buddhist master Liuquan, a practitioner of the Chinese Meditation School who lived around 1100 AD.

Credit: Jan van Esch/Meander Medical Center. Not the ideal posture for CT scans.

Besides the use of the scanner, the hospital had gastrointestinal specialist Dr. Raynald Vermeijden take samples of material from the thoracic and abdominal cavities. In places where organs once were, the team found paper scraps printed with yet to be deciphered ancient Chinese characters. It is unclear what role the paper played in the mummification process.

The statue was studied after being displayed at the Drents Museum as part of an exhibition of mummies revealing the similarities and differences in mummification processes from around the world. It is currently on display at the Hungarian Natural History Museum. Not only is this the first time this particular statue has left China, but it is also the only Chinese Buddhist mummy available for scientific research in the West, the Center claims.

Credit: Jan van Esch/Meander Medical Center. No need to look so anxious - he's been dead for 1,000 years.

There is speculation that Liuquan engaged in the practice of self-mummification, a gruesome process where monks from certain traditions prepare themselves to not decay after death through a combination of diet and consumption of poisonous herbs and embalming fluid. This has yet to be confirmed, however.

Credit: Jan van Esch/Meander Medical Center. Exploring ancient corpses does not always involve the best view.

Source: IFL Science

Read More

WATCH: Traffic comes to a halt as it starts raining money in Dubai

Motorists driving through Dubai could not believe their eyes when it started raining money in the middle of the UAE city.

Thousands of 500 UAE Dirham notes - worth around £88 - flew through the oil-rich city on a busy afternoon earlier this month, and officials have yet to give an explanation as to why, or reveal a source of the cash.

Drivers abandoned their cars in order to get their hands on the notes blowing down the road, and were filmed holding handfuls of notes.
It is estimated that notes valued between two and three million Dirham were loose - meaning up to £500,000 was blowing in the wind.

The notes were carried by strong winds through the Jumeirah area of Dubai for several minutes, but locals have got no idea where it came from.

One surprised local described how his wife pulled over her car to film motorists dodging cash collectors on a busy stretch of highway in the city.

He said: 'It was a very windy day. She was stuck in the traffic. She saw all this money.

'It was just raining money. It was 500 AED notes which is worth quite a lot. It was a lot of money.

'A lot of people were getting out of there care to grab this month.

'It doesn't happen every day. Everyone was amazing this was happening.'

The baffling incident happened at around 3pm on February 11 and locals have no explanation.

Police later arrived at the area and ushered people away, local media reports.

Source: Daily Mail

Read More