Happy New Year!

May what you see in the mirror delight you, and what others see in you delight them. May someone love you enough to forgive your faults, be blind to your blemishes, and tell the world about your virtues.

Happy New Year!!!

Merry Christmas!

Christmas wish is the ideal way to pray for love and peace for all. Wishes can be given to anyone, whether you know a person or not. It is the way to share your feelings and happiness with all those whom you come across on this sacred occasion. You never know; you might make a lonely person smile because of your Christmas wish. 
The idea of Christmas wishes can go a long way in maintaining relationships and creating a bond that can only become stronger with time. Christmas wishes come in many different forms but have one single essence - To spread peace and happiness on this sacred occasion.

Love, Peace and Joy came down on earth on Christmas day to make you happy and cheerful.

May Christmas spread cheer in your lives! May all your days be merry and bright and may your Christmas be white! Merry Christmas!

May your world be filled with warmth and good cheer this Holy season, and throughout the year! Wish your Christmas be filled with peace and love.

                     
              

► Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

► Feliz Navidad y Feliz Ano Nuevo!

► Joyeux Noël et nouvelle année heureuse!

► Glad jul och lyckligt nytt ar !

► Frohe Weihnachten und glückliches Neues Jahr!

► Spokojnych Świąt Bożego Narodzenia oraz Szczęśliwego Nowego Roku!

John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 

 

I Hope that you will feel free to share these video with family and friends the world over.

My Pink Floyd hit and this tragedy, by ROGER WATERS

By ROGER WATERS FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 23 December 2014



The revelations about the Americans’ torture of terror suspects have rightly caused outrage across the world.
The U.S. government has owned up to the shadow of institutionalised brutality that has hung over ‘The Land Of The Free’ since the inception of the War On Terror after 9/11.

The sense of disquiet should extend to the political establishment in Britain, given the mounting evidence that our own intelligence and security agencies may have colluded with the CIA in rendition, torture and a disregard for international human rights law including the Geneva Conventions.

Nothing illustrates our own national disgrace more graphically than the case of Shaker Aamer, a 46-year-old family man from London, who has now been held for almost 13 years in the notorious detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, having been seized by the U.S. military in Afghanistan in November 2001.

During Mr Aamer’s long spell of incarceration, he has never been put on trial or even had any charges levelled against him.

He has been subjected to systematic torture, humiliation and degradation, deprived not just of his liberty, but of all rights normally afforded to those in custody yet to be proven guilty of any crime.
The time has surely come for a judge-led inquiry to find out the true extent of Britain’s role in the barbaric treatment of Mr Aamer.

Yesterday, the Daily Mail reported on the growing pressure on David Cameron from nine human rights groups for just such an inquiry into the CIA’s torture of prisoners, including Mr Aamer.

No human being should be subjected to such monstrous and prolonged treatment — 13 years, with no evidence produced to suggest a crime!

It is little wonder that one recent medical report stated Mr Aamer is now suffering from a host of serious health problems, including failing eyesight, kidney damage and depression.

This is, after all, a man who has been incarcerated for so long without trial that he has never even seen his youngest child, a 12-year-old son.
His experience is a scandalous affront to justice, making a complete mockery of respect for the law and due legal process.

Even cold-blooded murderers rarely serve as lengthy a sentence as Mr Aamer has had to endure, and, if they do, they will at least have been convicted in a court by a jury of their peers.

I have a deep personal involvement in the campaign to release Mr Aamer, ever since his case was brought to my attention by the renowned defence advocate Clive Stafford Smith.

With a spirit of selfless determination, Clive runs the organisation Reprieve, which campaigns for the rights, among many others, of British prisoners held overseas. Appalled by Mr Aamer’s plight, Clive had contacted him and lent him his support.

That is how I became involved. In one letter to Clive from Guantanamo, Mr Aamer began with the opening lyrics of one of my songs, Hey You, from the 1979 Pink Floyd album The Wall. Mr Aamer said the lyrics captured his experience in Guantanamo. These lyrics run:

‘Hey you! Out there in the cold
Getting lonely, getting old. Can you feel me
Hey you! Standing in the aisles
With itchy feet and fading smiles. Can you feel me
Hey you! Don’t help them to bury the light
Don’t give in without a fight.’

Clive was able to pass Mr Aamer’s letter on to me, and I was profoundly touched that Hey You had had such a resonance with him. Other parts of his letter reinforced how much this man was suffering. He explained that for most of the time, he had to stay in his tiny cell and was denied access to a computer, books, journals or even stationery.

He was occasionally allowed to write a letter, but even this was difficult because the pens provided by the guards were wobbly and soft, like a ballpoint with the plastic outer casing removed.

Apparently, this was a security precaution to stop the detainees attacking their guards — an obviously ridiculous measure, given that the guards outnumbered the prisoners ten to one and were armed with M16 rifles.

On a more uplifting note, in his letter Mr Aamer paid tribute to an American Christian pastor who had been in touch with him and had spoken of his work to build an understanding between Christianity and Islam.

This highlighted Shaker’s attachment to the idea of understanding between peoples and faiths, to the idea of reconciliation and peace, and his fundamental opposition to extremism.

But then, his entire story seemed to undermine the American claims that he was a dangerous extremist embedded with Al-Qaeda and bent on the destruction of Western civilisation.

Born in Saudi Arabia and trained as a nurse, he came to Britain in the mid-1990s, married a British woman and started a family.

In 2001, he moved with his family to Afghanistan, where he began work for a humanitarian charity. This fact is disputed by the Americans, who claim he became an Al-Qaeda fighter.
Really? Where is the evidence?

Shaker has never been allowed to defend himself in a court of law. In effect, he has been held purely on the whim of the U.S. authorities.

This abuse of power exhibits all the hallmarks of despotism. Either we believe in freedom to live under the law, including the law of Habeas Corpus, or we don’t. Either we, the so‑called enlightened West, are law-abiding or we are a tyranny.

Strangely, the U.S. government, the ‘tyranny’ that guards the rest of us from Shaker Aamer, now appears all the more culpable with the extraordinary news that the British Government has repeatedly called upon them to release him.

The failure to heed this request must raise suspicions that American and British intelligence are worried that, if Mr Aamer is set free, he might reveal the shocking complicity of British intelligence in the savage interrogation of prisoners at Guantanamo, and at secret rendition sites elsewhere in the world.

Last month, I attended a gathering in Parliament Square in support of a movement to free Shaker Aamer. Among the others present was the campaigning journalist Andy Worthington. Andy, to his eternal credit, has devoted much of his recent working life to exposing the horrors of Guantanamo.
I was proud to be there, standing as I did alongside other Brits who still care about the law, about standards, about justice, about fair play.

Thanks to the recent Senate report into CIA torture, the public mood has changed, maybe even dramatically, in the past few days.

It is possible people are coming to see that justice is important and that the British legal principles dating back to Magna Carta in 1215 enshrine the rights of the individual and are to be defended at all costs.

Detention and incarceration without trial have absolutely no place in the legal system which we, the British people, are all rightfully proud to call our own.

From dailymail.co.uk

Roger Waters Recording First Rock Album in Over Two Decades

BY ANDY GREENE | November 13, 2013





Concept record is 'a quest,' says the Pink Floyd co-founder

David Wolff - Patrick/Redferns via Getty Images

Roger Waters wrapped up his three-year Wall tour in September, and since then he's turned his attention toward his first rock album since 1992's Amused to Death. "I finished a demo of it last night," he tells Rolling Stone. "It's 55 minutes long. It's songs and theater as well. I don't want to give too much away, but it's couched as a radio play. It has characters who speak to each other, and it's a quest. It's about an old man and a young child trying to figure out why they are killing the children."

He's not sure if he'll support the disc with a tour. "I'm suffering a little bit of withdrawal after ending the Wall tour," he says. "It's sort of a relief to not have to go out and do that every night, but they're such a great team. There were 180 of us together everyday. That piece was very moving every night."

The massive show was staged 219 times at stadiums and arenas all over the globe, grossing upwards of $458,000,000. "I can't top that tour," Waters says. "First of all, you have to accept the fact that I'm not going to live forever. I'm 70 years old. You just have to accept that when you do something as enormous as that tour. The hardest thing in the world is thinking of something to do, so going and doing it is a reward in itself." 

The memory of the tour still brings a big smile to his face. "I found that the loudest fans in the world are in Istanbul," he says. "I remember standing there with the band during 'Hey You.' We were behind the wall, so nobody could see us playing. We started looking at each other going, 'What is that sound?' When they sang 'Don't give in without a fight,' you could feel it. It was like the roof was coming off, even though there was no roof. It was amazing." 

With that in mind, he refuses to rule out the possibility of reviving The Wall tour at some point in the future. "I'm not thinking about that right now," he says. "But that's not to say I won't. I think there's an audience there. We did do 219 shows, which is a lot." 

From rollingstone.com

Roger Waters Reminds Curious Fans: 'I Am Not Part of Pink Floyd'

BY KORY GROW | October 2, 2014




"I have nothing to do with [new album] 'Endless River,' singer writes. "Phew! This is not rocket science, people. Get a grip"

Founding Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters left the group bitterly in 1985 and famously sued his ex-bandmates at the time for wishing to carry on with the group's name, but some of his fans appear to have forgotten this. The singer-songwriter has issued a note on Facebook to remind his fans that, while Pink Floyd are indeed issuing their first record in 20 years – the instrumental record The Endless River – he had no role in making it.

"Some people have been asking Laurie, my wife, about a new album I have coming out in November," Waters wrote. "Errhh? I don't have an album coming out, they are probably confused. David Gilmour and Nick Mason have an album coming out. It's called Endless River. David and Nick constitute the group Pink Floyd. I on the other hand, am not part of Pink Floyd. I left Pink Floyd in 1985, that's 29 years ago. I had nothing to do with either of the Pink Floyd studio albums, Momentary Lapse of Reason and The Division Bell, nor the Pink Floyd tours of 1987 and 1994, and I have nothing to do with Endless River. Phew! This is not rocket science people, get a grip."

Waters lost his lawsuit over the band name in 1987, and that same year the band issued A Momentary Lapse of Reason. In recent years, Waters has revisited his Pink Floyd past. On July 2nd, 2005, Waters, Mason, Gilmour and keyboardist Rick Wright performed together as Pink Floyd for the first time in nearly a quarter century at the Live 8 concert at London's Hyde park. Waters has mounted solo tours in recent years, performing the Floyd albums Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall in their entirety, and reunited again with Gilmour and Mason in London at a tour stop for the latter in 2011.

"It was really nice to be part of it and to show support for Roger, not that he really needs it," Mason told Rolling Stone after their 2011 reunion. "I suppose it's nice to have Roger wanting to register David and myself as part of it, in a way. It was a mutual thing: it was nice to be recognized but also very nice to lend support to Roger and make it clear that we're not punching it out in these auditoriums. We're not critical of him doing it."

In 2013, Waters told the BBC he regretted his lawsuit over the band name. "I was wrong," he said. "Of course I was. Who cares?"

In the same Facebook note, Waters also criticized the role of some countries in the Israel-Palestine conflict. "On another subject, my recent trip to Bruxelles was very moving," he wrote. "To listen to the testimony of some of those present in Gaza during the euphemistically named Operation Protective Edge, July and August 2014 was deeply disturbing. I am still non plussed by the acquiescence of the governments of the USA, UK and EU to the policies of the current Israeli administration. Should we encourage our leaders to sue for a peaceful solution or not?"

The Endless River – which does not feature Waters – will come out on November 10th. The band decided to put out the record after discovering recordings they had made with Wright, who died in 2008, during the sessions for The Division Bell. "We listened to over 20 hours of the three of us playing together and selected the music we wanted to work on for the new album," Gilmour said in a statement. "Over the last year we've added new parts, re-recorded others and generally harnessed studio technology to make a 21st century Pink Floyd album. With Rick gone, and with him the chance of ever doing it again, it feels right that these revisited and reworked tracks should be made available as part of our repertoire."

From www.rollingstone.com