Bucky and Zemo: *planning* And most importantly, Sam can’t find out
Sam: *walks in* Sam can’t find out about what?
Zemo: *shoves stack of notes out of Sam’s line of sight*
Bucky: Nothing. It’s fine. Absolutely nothing you need to worry about!
Sam:
Zemo: I’m home, tired, and wealthy
The real reason the Dork Squad doesn’t have sleepovers:
Jonathan: Good night, Ed. Good night, Jervis. Good night, monsters only I can see.
Edward and Jervis:O.O
Riddler (at GCPD): I’m turning myself in
Receptionist: You’re… what?
Riddler: I said I’m turning myself in! Where are the handcuffs?
Receptionist: W-why are you doing this?
Riddler: I met this nice widow over in Kansas who made me rethink everything I’ve done. Are you going to cuff me or what?
Lawyer: Surely there must be something you can deny
Harley Quinn: *reading list of charges* Nope. So far I’ve done everything it says I did
Jason: Clearly you didn’t clean up like you said you did. If it were me I’d have actually done it.
Dick:Oh,you’d clean it up if it were you? Was that how you killed Damian’s goldfish?
Damian (in distance): That was you?!
Bruce: *checks watch* Hey, Harvey? I’m going to be late for a PTA meeting, can we do this a different time?
Two-face: You want to reschedule a kidnapping?!
Jervis: Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble!
Jonathan: *stirring pot* You had to show him Macbeth, didn’t you
Edward: The Alice In Wonderland references were getting annoying, okay? I didn’t know he’d get obsessed!
Damian:I hear Two-face is tearing the sewers apart.
Jason: Why would he do that?
Dick: It’s not exactly his MO…
Bruce: Isn’t it obvious? He lost his coin down the grate.
Whirl and Cyclonus:*arguing*
Tailgate:Guys?
Tailgate:Guys?!
Tailgate:GUYS!
Whirl and Cyclonus:WHAT?!
Tailgate: WE’RE BEING SURROUNDED!
Gamora: What do you think Quill will do for a distraction?
Rocket: I dunno, throw a rock, be himself? Probably play some of his obnoxious music.
*Explosion in distance*
Rocket: Or he could just do that.
As Eid approaches, Kashmiris sacrifice their rights and their bodies
Srinagar — Ward number eight of the SMHS Hospital wears a desolate look. In a corner lies Waheed Ahmad – his right eye blue and swollen.
The Indian government decided to ease the strict curfew in the Kashmir yesterday so Waheed and his friends went out to play cricket in a field in Parimpora within the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, Srinagar.
“A huge procession [of protesters] passed - suddenly, security forces appeared and fired teargas shells and pellets at the protesters,” Waheed said.
Waheed said he and his friends tried to flee when the protesters started scattering. Suddenly, something hit Waheed in the eye and he fell on the ground, unconscious. He was rushed to SMHS hospital on a scooter by his friend.
The curfew was re-imposed soon after. With all modes of communication blocked, his family, who were just a few yards away, had no idea their son was lying wounded in the hospital.
Waheed was struck by multiple pellets on his face. Most of the splinters hit his right eye, causing severe damage. These pellets are from ‘non-lethal’ weapons that discharge hundreds of metal pellets, or 'birdshot’ and were used to lethal effect in 2016 to cause what some call the world’s first 'mass blinding’.
“What sin have we Kashmiris committed? Kashmir is facing great difficulty. They’ve shut down the landline as well. What will they achieve from this? They’ll silence the sentiments of Kashmiris? How long will they silence us? It’s better to kill us Kashmiris all at once.”
“We live in Srinagar. Yesterday our child was supposed to come back from Delhi. He didn’t come. We’re worried today as well. I haven’t slept all night because there’s a curfew in place. We are very troubled. What sins have we committed? They don’t even let us go out. With great difficulty we got out of our house in the morning and had to go to the police station to take a curfew pass. We were stopped and questioned everywhere. What will they achieve by removing this article? The poor are dying, there isn’t any milk for children, there aren’t any vegetables, there’s nothing. They’ve just declared a curfew. What will this achieve? There are kids studying outside, they can’t phone back home. Everyone is distressed. God do something, do something about this Kashmir.”
No phone calls, no groceries: Kashmir on edge under lockdown
The communication blackout — with landlines, cellphones and internet all down — means that people within Kashmir can’t call one another or speak to friends and relatives outside the region, relying only on limited cable TV and local radio reports.
In a nationally broadcast address Thursday night, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said his government made the move to free the region of “terrorism and separatism.” He added that the situation will soon “return to normal gradually,” although he gave no specifics.
At the Shri Maharaja Hari Singh hospital in Srinagar, doctors told The Associated Press on Thursday that at least 50 people had come in with wounds from pellet guns and rubber bullets, the ammunition security forces often use to disperse protests.
Razir Mir, 32, described hearing a loud bang on Monday and opening his front door to find his wife, Rabiya, “face down on the street. Blood was pouring from her eyes,” he said.
Rabiya, who was left with blurred vision, said that after hearing the government’s announcement that Kashmir’s special status had been stripped, she thought to buy vegetables, anticipating a long curfew period in Srinagar.
“The moment I came out from my house, the soldiers out there shot at my direction,” she said, as the couple’s 2-year-old cried.
Rubeena Mehraj from central Kashmir was convalescing at the hospital after giving birth.
“When I called for an ambulance, I started traveling to Srinagar because I was expecting, but the ambulance was stopped at so many (checkpoints) along the route that I gave birth inside the vehicle,” Mehraj said.
Outside the busy hospital, people struggled to communicate with family and neighbors.
A woman peering out of a window asked a group of reporters if they could find out about a sick person from a family living nearby. “We’ve no contact,” the middle-aged woman said before she could give her name as soldiers ordered journalists to move on.
No news was coming from elsewhere in the tense region.
Police and paramilitary officials enforcing the restrictions said they were clueless about how long the curfew would continue. “We know only about what’s going on in the street we’re deployed. We don’t know how it is in the next street,” said a police official in Srinagar’s city center who could not be named in accordance with standard practice.
Adding on to my silence as someone who is half kashmiri (we all live in Delhi we migrated): i can’t talk about this at any media platform without being labeled as terrorist aligned. even tumblr is risky. Please non kashmiris reblog because we cannot speak up so easily without our community shunning us.
In each of these cases, mainstream media—especially the country’s influential TV news channels—functioned largely as government mouthpieces, with only a few exceptions. Perhaps the best example of how journalists have become accustomed to not challenging the government is the fact that Modi failed to hold a single press conference in his first term in office. (On May 17, days before he was reelected, Modi invited the press to his party headquarters and delivered a prepared speech. Amit Shah, then-president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, fielded questions from reporters as Modi looked on.) During both state and national elections over the last five years, television news channels frequently carried live campaign speeches by Modi without challenging his assertions or matching the free airtime with coverage of his opponents.
One way in which the government exerts control over domestic media is through advertising. In June, New Delhi cut off state advertising with at least three publishers of prominent English-language newspapers. Senior executives of those groups and opposition leaders contend that the ad freeze was retaliation for news reports critical of the government. According to a Reuters report, these newspaper groups—the publishers of the Times of India, the Hindu, and the Telegraph—have a combined monthly readership of more than 26 million.
Humiliating Kashmir is part of Modi’s plan to remake India | Kapil Komireddi
The solidification of the cult of Modi has been accompanied by an aggressive erosion of the legal and constitutional foundations on which the Indian republic stands. Last week the government arrogated to itself powers to designate individuals as terrorists. Presumption of innocence, legal representation and the right to judicial appeal – everything that distinguishes a civilised democracy from an autocracy – is severely restricted. Muslims and other minorities, favoured quarry of the lynch mobs emboldened by the regime, will be the principal targets of the new measures.
Lest there was any doubt, Amit Shah, Modi’s dreaded enforcer and the minister responsible for law and order, clarified in parliament that “urban Naxals” – a label that encompasses everyone from leftwing intellectuals to rootless cosmopolitans sceptical of the Modi regime – “will not be spared”.
Organised political opposition to Modi and the ruling Bharatiya Janata party is being meticulously wiped out. July ended with the collapse of a coalition government in Karnataka, one of the few states where the BJP was not in power, after opposition legislators dramatically switched sides and joined Modi’s party.
Now August has begun with the partition and abolition of the troubled state of Jammu and Kashmir – which acceded to India in 1947 on the assurance that it would be granted special constitutional safeguards – by a presidential decree. Kashmir is now under the thumb of the union government, and the region’s elected leaders have been thrown in jail. Communications, including land lines, have been cut off. Ordinary Kashmiris have no means of speaking to the rest of India. The most monumental redesign of Delhi’s constitutional arrangement with India’s sole Muslim-majority state, hatched in secrecy, occurred without a debate in parliament.
Modi’s willingness to take the risk was no doubt dictated by the reward. He has in one stroke ground down and humiliated Kashmiris, and held them up as an example to other Indian states, a demonstration that nobody is immune from his untrammelled authority. The termination of Kashmir’s special status is simultaneously a culmination of a longstanding Hindu nationalist yearning to domesticate the region’s dissenting Muslim majority and a successful test case for the project to remake the entirety of India in accordance with Modi’s ideology. What has happened there will be repeated elsewhere. A spike in militancy or even an outbreak of hostilities with Pakistan can only boost the fortunes of a leader who, presiding over a decelerating economy, has little to offer besides demagogy.
Academics and activists have also been arrested
Carol Schaeffer: Gods, Guns, and Country
