Godspeed The Olympics -London Opening Ceremony 2012

Hantu Laut


The only city that have hosted the Olympics 3 times, the first in 1908 and than in 1948. Today's opening is the third. It would have hosted 4 times, but the 1944 Olympics awarded in 1939 was cancelled due to World War II.






Godspeed the Olympics.

London's Streets Of Rage

The Daily Beast

Britain’s estates are full of frustrated youth. A look inside their broken world.

On a recent night in Stockwell, an up-and-coming swath of South London, a police van prowled the streets. The neighborhood, five kilometers from Parliament and a short walk from Battersea Park, sees its Tube stop fill with young bankers at rush hour and its pubs bustle at night. But two weeks earlier its darker side had taken hold. Hooded youths took over the streets, smashing and looting at will, as the area became a picture of the chaos that swept through London during last month’s riots.

The van slowed to a stop near a scraggly patch of lawn, where a cluster of young men huddled beneath the blocks of the sprawling housing projects, or “estates,” that sit smack in the center of Stockwell. The spotlight on the van’s roof tracked toward the group, bathing them in blinding white. In unison, they turned away, and waited. The spotlight went out, and the van disappeared into the night.

“Rage,” said one of the young men, an 18-year-old with cornrows and a cold gaze. He pulled papers from his pocket to roll a spliff. “It’s everywhere. Just everything in general for the youth. How man lives. Rage is peak.”

Tensions had been running high in the Stockwell estates, and in poor areas throughout the city, since the four nights of rioting ended on Aug. 10. Some buildings in places like Peckham, another hard-hit area in South London, were still boarded up. The police reinforcements sent from across the United Kingdom remained, and the streets were full of cops, whom the kids call “feds,” though England has no FBI. Police were kicking down doors in search of pilfered riot loot, and the hated stop-and-searches were in full effect. The annual Afro-Caribbean street carnival, meanwhile, which the previous year had ended in a shower of bottles and Molotov cocktails, was set to kick off in a few days. There were whispers about more trouble to come, and authorities made plans to pump the festival with record numbers of police.Read more.

London Riots' Racial Blame Game

A former member of parliament, now, running for mayor of Birmingham, writes an anguished account of the riots that have ravaged Britain.

Few British mosques are places of mosaic or minaret. They are not fine buildings from which muezzins call. They are the adapted back rooms or upstairs quarters of working-class Muslims. The carpet I sat on in the Handsworth district of Birmingham on Aug. 10 was woven through with a religious motif, but was threadbare.

I was part of a circle of 20 barefoot men, their palms turned upward in front of their chests, making their dua for two brothers killed in “riots” the night before. The prayers were now led by the murdered men’s uncle, replacing their father, who was ushered away in distress.

Between prayers, the men took sober phone calls, talked mutedly, and sent text messages. A surviving brother, sobbing, wandered in and out. Outside, a crowd of young Kashmiri men milled. Some were in traditional dress, some in suits, most in the universal uniform of American hip-hop.

Fourteen hours earlier, at 1 a.m., the two brothers, along with a third man, had been “protecting their community” on the streets of Birmingham’s multiethnic Winson Green district. The night before had seen attacks on shops and looting in the city center and nearby Soho Road. As trouble seemed, on the second night, to be moving in their direction, Sajad, Haroon, and Abdul were part of a large group “defending” their area. In the chaos, a suspected looter drove his car directly at them. All three were killed. A 32-year-old man was almost immediately arrested on suspicion of murder.

This is my city. I grew up here. I love the place. I sat for nine years in the House of Commons as member of Parliament for the Erdington district of Birmingham. Last year I stood down in order to campaign for, and ultimately to campaign to be, our first directly elected mayor.

As a practicing politician in a city gripped by disorder, I find this article difficult to write. I have privileged access to private situations, afforded to me on the basis that I might help, not so that I can write it up in NEWSWEEK. But telling the story so widely is another unusual privilege. So I take the risk.

From the family of the dead brothers I went to a small, closed meeting of Afro-Caribbean community leaders called by one of the city’s two Muslim M.P.s, Khalid Mahmood. They are frightened. The man arrested on suspicion of the murders was black. Facebook is heavy with young Kashmiris venting fury and threatening reprisals. “We will take three blacks for the three that was took from us” is one message reported by a veteran community activist. She says it is the most scared she has been for 30 years.

Overlaid onto the fear of reprisals is the worry that such threats by themselves will provoke a response from gang-influenced Afro-Caribbean men.

"The rioters are not furious or alienated. They are bored.", Kerim Okten / EPA-Corbis

That would be a massive escalation because, hitherto, this nationwide civil unrest has been largely the work of children. The marauding bands that set London alight and shut down town centers across Britain were made up, unprecedentedly, of often very young teenagers. This has not been an uprising of the dispossessed, the unemployed, or particular ethnic groups, but a violent convulsion of kids on holiday from high school. According to the Metropolitan Police, just under two thirds of those arrested on the second day of the London disturbances were teenagers. Many were 13, 14, 15 years of age. Everyone who saw them was shocked.

“They were just kids, not more than 15,” the owner of a wrecked mobile-phone shop in Birmingham told me while waiting for the police to arrive in the cold light of that Tuesday morning. “The scarf covering his face fell down and I couldn’t believe it—he was so young,” said Miles Weaver, a young academic watching from the window of his city-center apartment as a gang looted a shop in the small hours of Tuesday night.Read more.

The Moral Decay Of Our Society

The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom

Peter Oborne

David Cameron, Ed Miliband and the entire British political class came together yesterday to denounce the rioters. They were of course right to say that the actions of these looters, arsonists and muggers were abhorrent and criminal, and that the police should be given more support.

But there was also something very phony and hypocritical about all the shock and outrage expressed in parliament. MPs spoke about the week’s dreadful events as if they were nothing to do with them.

I cannot accept that this is the case. Indeed, I believe that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up.

It is not just the feral youth of Tottenham who have forgotten they have duties as well as rights. So have the feral rich of Chelsea and Kensington. A few years ago, my wife and I went to a dinner party in a large house in west London. A security guard prowled along the street outside, and there was much talk of the “north-south divide”, which I took literally for a while until I realised that my hosts were facetiously referring to the difference between those who lived north and south of Kensington High Street.

Most of the people in this very expensive street were every bit as deracinated and cut off from the rest of Britain as the young, unemployed men and women who have caused such terrible damage over the last few days. For them, the repellent Financial Times magazine How to Spend It is a bible. I’d guess that few of them bother to pay British tax if they can avoid it, and that fewer still feel the sense of obligation to society that only a few decades ago came naturally to the wealthy and better off.

Yet we celebrate people who live empty lives like this. A few weeks ago, I noticed an item in a newspaper saying that the business tycoon Sir Richard Branson was thinking of moving his headquarters to Switzerland. This move was represented as a potential blow to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, because it meant less tax revenue.

I couldn’t help thinking that in a sane and decent world such a move would be a blow to Sir Richard, not the Chancellor. People would note that a prominent and wealthy businessman was avoiding British tax and think less of him. Instead, he has a knighthood and is widely feted. The same is true of the brilliant retailer Sir Philip Green. Sir Philip’s businesses could never survive but for Britain’s famous social and political stability, our transport system to shift his goods and our schools to educate his workers.Read more.

London Riots:Of Black Scums and White Trash

Hantu Laut

What should we call the people who ran riot,looting, destroying other people's businesses and properties for the past four days in half-a-dozen British cities?

Do you want to be politically correct and called them protesters like what the BBC and the British media did.

What are they protesting about? Asking for fair and free elections, against racial discrimination or just pure badness, madness and criminality?

A rioter in London poses in front of a burning van

Genuine protesters do not loot, attack the police, torch properties and vehicles.

The West was quick to brand any form of extremism involving Muslims as terrorism.What do they consider those black scums and white trash as? The incendiary attacks on properties and human lives, are they any different from terrorism?

Obviously, the Western type of laissez-faire parenting mixed with the black voodoo culture has muddled the gene pool of offspring mired in badness and indiscipline.

Buildings burn on Tottenham High Road, London after youths protested against the killing of Mark Duggan by armed police in an attempted arrest

I have no time for political correctness and indulge in niceties with these monsters, an evil manifestations of its nurture and conditioning.

Are they not thugs,scumbags,hooligans, criminal opportunists and last but not least terrorists? The products of bad parents and bad parenting.

Here, an eleven-year old caught for looting. He was just unlucky there were probably more of his delinquent that got away.Where were the parents of these young punks, were they also involved in rioting and looting?

I am always against any street demonstration, no matter how peaceful the organisers claimed it to be.The London riots are reminders that it takes only one man to start a feeding frenzy.

Ambiga and Bersih beware!

Anarchy In The UK:Between a Rock and A Hard Place

Hantu Laut

The rioting is no more confined to London it has spread to other cities.Manchester, Salford, Wolverhampton, Nottingham, Leicester and Birmingham with shops being looted and set alight.

A separate crowd in Manchester's Market Street has set fire to a Miss Selfridge shop. They then moved on to damage and loot other stores.

Is David Cameron "between a rock and a hard place" that till now he has not been able to make a sensible decision how to put out this flame of outrage.

If the UK government do not impose curfew in the trouble spots and order the police to shoot (with live ammo) on sight those who broke the law there will be complete anarchy in the UK as seen in Paris some 6 years ago.The one in Paris was better contained as it was only confined to the suburbs and did not touch the city proper.

The Sex Pistol's "Anarchy in the UK"



This the country that want to export and impose its brand of freedom and democracy to the third and developing world.

They prefer to let freedom prevails at the cost of massive destruction to properties and lives of innocent people rather than taking tough measures to protect lives and properties from hordes of scumbags rampaging the streets, looting, burning buildings and cars at will.

Najib did the right thing to take preemptive action against Bersih.

It is a breath of fresh air looking at what is happening in the UK right now.The sight of burning buildings and cars are just too much to ingest.People's homes and businesses being burn down all for the sake of mindless violence.

Malaysians should be relieved the government did right to stop the massive rally from taking place.

Of course, the antagonists and potential troublemakers would not agree.

The Riots Of Paris and London: A Tale Of Two Cities

Posted by Bruce Crumley

With the violence that broke out in London Saturday having spread to other English cities during a third straight night of rioting Monday, it's tempting (and probably portentous) from the comfort of Paris to offer up lessons learned from the nearly three weeks of upheaval that rocked French towns in 2005. Yet while there seem to be certain details common to both those explosions of urban fury, significant differences not only complicate directly comparing events in the U.K. to those that occurred in France nearly six years ago—but also leave the current unrest looking more serious in terms of destruction and consequence. As shocking as the images of burning cars, vandalism, and clashes with police were in 2005, the scenes today from across London inspire an even stronger, awesome fear. Here's why.

The detonators of both uprisings appear to have been similar: first, police involvement in the deaths of local youths in neighborhoods with large populations of visible minorities, followed by the fury — nourished with wider frustrations of discrimination and alienation — that those killings unleashed. And as happened in 2005 France, the initial unrest that broke out Saturday in Tottenham has gradually spread to other areas of London and to two other British cities as young people have embraced the underlying message of social protest and rage—or used them as convenient excuses for running amok. Not insignificantly, the spread of violence in both cases also provoked laments-cum-accusation that over-dramatization and voyeuristic media coverage early on led to “copy-cat” replication of the urban outrage.

From there, however, things seem to get different in important ways--starting with urban geography. The Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois that initially erupted in unrest in Oct. 2005 is just that: one of the many towns hosting huge but decrepit housing projects for increasingly disenfranchised segments of French society. Those large clusters of projects are almost invariably located in relatively remote suburbs ringing most major French cities, sparing France the kinds of intra muros ghetto areas that cities like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles have—or neighborhoods with very large non-white, often economically disadvantaged populations as London does.

(SEE: Pictures of the riots in London.)

In stark contrast to the districts in London now suffering violence, therefore, virtually all unrest that rocked France in 2005 occurred in these project-heavy outlying suburbs. And for all intents and purposes, the nightly clashes in 2005 France were never exported anywhere near the businesses, shops, and primarily white, affluent residents of French city centers. The recurring destruction that stunned wider French society in 2005 essentially involved its most disadvantaged and alienated members wrecking havoc in their own, very remote backyards.

As anyone watching the images of destruction knows, the rioting in the English capital and other cities is now surging right up to the doors of comfortable, middle and upper-middle class homes. The reasons: the sprawling nature of London makes it a much geographically larger and a far more populated city than intramuros Paris. Meanwhile, like France's blighted banlieues, the London neighborhoods now suffering turmoil have heavy immigrant and visible minority populations airing complaints of discrimination, endemic unemployment, and tense relations with police. Yet these populations are part of a wider, mixed residential pool. Indeed, unlike France 2005, the Watts or South Central riots in Los Angeles, or instances of arson and looting in New York's Harlem, objectives of “containment” by officials in reacting to violence those cities are non-starters in London—whose mixed socio-economic-ethnic demographics make the current violence an equal opportunity threat. It numbs the mind to contemplate what kinds of new attacks on multi-culturalism will surge in Britain once the waves of nightly violence subside.

Read more: http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/08/09/the-riots-of-paris-and-london-a-tale-of-two-cities/#ixzz1UZRJGQkd

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The Great Riot of London: The Stakes for David Cameron