At last, good news from the Middle East. Democracy has been overthrown in Egypt. The generals taking over promise new elections in a few months, but with any luck they are lying.
...And that is the beauty of military dictatorship. If we must have a republic, I recommend the banana variety. Generals, in the main, are men of little imagination, & simple tastes. They love order, to be sure, but in the balance of public vices, a little order is seldom a bad thing. They are not easily infected by ideology, or any other form of intellectual ambition; even those who acquire some may lose it after a while. They dont much care what one is doing, so long as it will not threaten the peace, or otherwise interfere with their breakfast. Should the general be smart enough to fully understand his need to avoid free elections, he will become unobtrusive. He wont go out of his way to antagonize anyone. He may line his own pockets, & those of his friends for as Valéry said, Power without abuse loses its charm. But the odd billion into a Swiss bank account is a small price to pay for freedom.
It is the officer who may not be lining his own pockets whom we need to fear; the one possessed by revolutionary zeal, associated from the start with Party. Those, let me admit, give Generalissimos a bad name. No, it is only the career general Im proposing to push forward: the sort already used to giving orders & having them obeyed; who will not feel the need to redesign his own uniform. Real generals, a little on the plump side, & entirely without charisma: thats where to turn in a pinch. Not to hothead colonels.
...For a real general is a man with a trade. He understands the value of elementary professionalism. Hell appoint boring accountants to the budget office, prosecuting attorneys to every judicial bench the sort of men who have some vague idea what they are doing. They wont be like the czars in the Obama administration. A few technocrats here & there wont do much harm. Better them than the bug-eyed idealists.
Granted, real generals have their foibles, too, that go with the tendency to be stupid. Alas, perfection is not available in this world. But while they may be rough & somewhat brutish in their ways, may eat ice cream with a fork & so on, there is usually some underlying decency in them.
Two weeks ago, I wrote that the transit system would look silly if it let perish 1,000 flowers planted secretly at the Dupont Circle station by local garden artist Henry Docter, the self-described Phantom Planter.
I feared that Metro would merely neglect the flowers. Instead, last Sunday, it sent workmen to yank them out.
The transit system regularly pleads poverty, yet employees devoted supposedly valuable time to remove more than 1,000 morning glories, cardinal flowers and cypress vines that Docter donated to the city albeit without permission. The plants would have bloomed from August to October in a patriotic display of red, white and blue.
Docter, known as The Phantom Planter had taken it upon himself to plant Morning Glories, Cardinal Flowers, and Cypress Vines on Metro property at the Dupont Metro North Station. He was told that he would be arrested if he watered or tended to them in any way.
[Strategic Culture Foundation]
The US return to Asia, boosting the number of exercises and military presence in the Asia-Pacific, the Middle East involvement and drone strikes, the gradual intensification of efforts to reinvigorate the African policy all are the issues in focus. Training, assisting, and subsidizing armed forces of other countries is another significant aspect of US foreign policy, which is often overlooked or underestimated. But it is an important tool used to strengthen the countrys global clout. The last Quadrennial Defense Review report, which saw light in 2010, puts great emphasis on military-to-military coordination
The US has a vast number of military training and assistance missions globally; it is the largest world contributor of military aid to foreign countries, providing some form of assistance to over 150 countries in 2013. It was 134 in 2012, or 75 percent of the states on the planet Earth. There has been almost zero discussion of how military assistance is organized and how effective it is. The administration requested $9.8 billion in security assistance funding for fiscal year 2013 against the background of sequester.
There are three main programs designed for foreign military aid:
- Foreign military financing for the acquisition of U.S. defense equipment, services, and training;
- Peacekeeping operations provide voluntary support for international peacekeeping activities;
- The International Military Education and Training program (IMET) offers military training on a grant basis to foreign military officials.
To avoid problems with Congress, inclined to blacklist the states with poor human rights record, the Department of Defense also uses other, less transparent, programs. For example, the Joint Combined Exercises and Training (JCET) program has allowed special operations forces to train Indonesian troops used to oppress the population of East Timor, as well as those of many other repressive states, under the pretext of providing U.S. soldiers with training in foreign terrain. They also train African soldiers in "peacekeeping" under the African Crisis Response Initiative. Today the U.S. Special Forces are operating in over 70 countries. Lengthy article follows:
#2
Alternate title:
"Clueless US Administration continues to throw good money after bad, hoping somebody will FINALLY hold Champ's football so he can kick it and not Lucy-ize him (again)"
#3
SCF works to broaden and diversify expert discussion by focusing on hidden aspects of international politics and unconventional thinking. Benefiting from the expanding power of the Internet, we work to spread reliable information, critical thought and progressive ideas.
Wonder if they sponsor all-expense paid trips to Russia for aspiring journalists?
But the Proton M/Block DM-03 that veered off course and destroyed three Russian Glonass M navigation satellites in a fiery explosion near its Baikonur Cosmodrome launch pad July 2 comes at a particularly vulnerable moment for Russia's space program, which has suffered a spate of launch vehicle failures in recent years, including five in the past 30 months. GPS is a military system, and later got declassified for civilian operation. As such, GPS provides an encrypted, high-accuracy military signal and an open civilian signal which is free-for-all. GLONASS behaves in pretty much the same way, just much more ineptly.
Russia's apparent nosedive in the quality of its space efforts has so far not affected launch vehicles serving the International Space Station (ISS). However, Proton quality control could have implications for Reston, Va.-based International Launch Services (ILS), which annually launches half of the world's largest commercial telecommunications satellites atop the Proton. ILS was formed in 1995 as a private spaceflight partnership between Lockheed Martin (LM), Khrunichev and Energia. In 2006, LM beat a hasty retreat and sold its shares in ILM to Space Transport Inc. In May 2008, Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center, a Russian company, acquired all of Space Transport's interest and is now the majority shareholder in ILS.
United Launch Alliance (ULA) is a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing formed in December 2006. ULA provides launch services using three expendable launch systems -- Delta II, Delta IV and Atlas V.
Russia rents the Baikonur Cosmodrome from Kazakhstan for military and commercial satellite launches and for Soyuz missions that ferry astronauts and cosmonauts to and from the ISS. This year, however, the Kazakh government restricted the number of Russia's commercial satellite missions in a dispute over launch debris, which falls into Kazakh territory.
GAYA: Nine serial explosions rocked the Mahabodhi Temple complex in Bodh Gaya on Sunday morning, leaving at least five people injured. Union home secretary Anil Goswami confirmed that the Bodh Gaya blasts were a terror attack.
According to Gaya Police, the blasts took place in quick succession between 5.30 am and 6 am in the temple complex and near the Mahabodhi tree. While four blasts took place inside the Mahabodhi Temple complex, three occurred in Karmapa monastery, one each near near the 80-ft Buddha statue and at the bus stand near bypass, DIG Magadh range Nayyer Hussnain Khan said.
Arvind Singh, a member of Mahabodhi Temple Management Commitee said two other bombs, one near the 80 feet statue and one at bus stand have been defused.
The two injured tourists, including a national of Myanmar and another of Tibet, are being treated at hospital, police said.
Additional director general of police (Law and Order) SK Bhardwaj said prima facie it seems the serial blasts have been done by some terrorist organisation.
The ADG said that there was a general alert about possibility of terrorist attacks in Bihar and the state police had tightened security.
"At Bodh Gaya temple, the police security arrangements are only outside the temple while the security inside is looked after by temple trust officials," he said.
"A team of NIA officers is coming to Bodh Gaya from Kolkata," DIG special branch Parasnath said.
The DIG said, "The sanctum sanctorum of the Mahabodhi Temple is intact. The temple premises have been sanitised."
The secretary of the Bodh Gaya committee Dorji said, "There were four blasts inside the temple premises. Fortunately, there was no damage to the Bodhi Tree or the main temple structure."
"In the first blast which took place near the Bodhi tree, a table was blown up because of which two persons were injured. The second blast, I think, was inside the enclosure where books were kept. The furniture was damaged but there was no damage to the monuments or statues," he said.
Asked about the nature of explosives used, S K Bharadwaj, ADG (Law and Order) said they were low intensity time bombs. He said, "We got information about six-seven months back that there may be a terror attack on the Mahabodhi temple. After that we had beefed up secuirty and deployed extra forces".
Bodh Gaya Buddhist temple, around 10 km from Gaya and 100 km from capital Patna, is world famous. Lord Buddha had attained enlightenment here under the Mahabodhi tree in the temple premises.
Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama makes frequent trips to Bodh Gaya and Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa had visited it six months back. A total of 52 countries have established their monasteries here.
EL-ARISH, Egypt Egyptian security officials say suspected Islamic militants have bombed a natural gas pipeline to Jordan south of the city of el-Arish in the Sinai Peninsula. The attacks early Sunday on two points on the pipeline started fires that were soon put out, but the flow of gas was disrupted, said the officials.
It was the first attack on Egypts natural gas pipelines in Sinai in over a year. Last year, a terror group calling itself Ansar Al-Jihad claimed responsibility for more than a dozen bombings of the pipeline, with the intended goal of blocking the flow of natural gas to Israel.
The pipeline, designed to carry Egyptian natural gas to Israel, Jordan, Syrian and Lebanon, has functioned intermittently since the aftermath of the 2011 Egyptian revolution caused the security situation in the Sinai to deteriorate. Due to shortages in Egypt, it currently only supplies gas to Jordan.
Very long piece at WaPo on how the government has demanded, over the past decade access to the underseas fiberoptic cables for surveillance work, and how the companies, some foreign-owned, have complied.
Coupled with the other piece just uploaded about the reach and power of the FISA court, one begins to see just how it is that NSA and other intel agencies can obtain and read just about anything they want.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013
11:19 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[1 views]
Top|| File under:
WASHINGTON -- In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.
The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former officials familiar with the court's classified decisions.
You do wonder how it is that the legislature and executive created a court that doesn't answer to the highest court. Wonder if it's constitutional...
The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said.
Last month, a former National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden, leaked a classified order from the FISA court, which authorized the collection of all phone-tracing data from Verizon business customers. But the court's still-secret decisions go far beyond any single surveillance order, the officials said.
"We've seen a growing body of law from the court," a former intelligence official said. "What you have is a common law that develops where the court is issuing orders involving particular types of surveillance, particular types of targets."
In one of the court's most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the "special needs" doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment's requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said.
Wonder what the Supreme Court thinks of that? That isn't necessarily what they had in mind when they created the far more narrow exception.
The special needs doctrine was originally established in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a ruling allowing the drug testing of railway workers, finding that a minimal intrusion on privacy was justified by the government's need to combat an overriding public danger. Applying that concept more broadly, the FISA judges have ruled that the N.S.A.'s collection and examination of Americans' communications data to track possible terrorists does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, the officials said.
That legal interpretation is significant, several outside legal experts said, because it uses a relatively narrow area of the law -- used to justify airport screenings, for instance, or drunken-driving checkpoints -- and applies it much more broadly, in secret, to the wholesale collection of communications in pursuit of terrorism suspects. "It seems like a legal stretch," William C. Banks, a national security law expert at Syracuse University, said in response to a description of the decision. "It's another way of tilting the scales toward the government in its access to all this data."
Government is really, really good at tilting scales...
While President Obama and his intelligence advisers have spoken of the surveillance programs leaked by Mr. Snowden mainly in terms of combating terrorism, the court has also interpreted the law in ways that extend into other national security concerns. In one recent case, for instance, intelligence officials were able to get access to an e-mail attachment sent within the United States because they said they were worried that the e-mail contained a schematic drawing or a diagram possibly connected to Iran's nuclear program.
In the past, that probably would have required a court warrant because the suspicious e-mail involved American communications. In this case, however, a little-noticed provision in a 2008 law, expanding the definition of "foreign intelligence" to include "weapons of mass destruction," was used to justify access to the message.
The court's use of that language has allowed intelligence officials to get wider access to data and communications that they believe may be linked to nuclear proliferation, the officials said. They added that other secret findings had eased access to data on espionage, cyberattacks and other possible threats connected to foreign intelligence.
"The definition of 'foreign intelligence' is very broad," another former intelligence official said in an interview. "An espionage target, a nuclear proliferation target, that all falls within FISA, and the court has signed off on that."
The official, like a half-dozen other current and former national security officials, discussed the court's rulings and the general trends they have established on the condition of anonymity because they are classified. Judges on the FISA court refused to comment on the scope and volume of their decisions.
Unlike the Supreme Court, the FISA court hears from only one side in the case -- the government -- and its findings are almost never made public. A Court of Review is empaneled to hear appeals, but that is known to have happened only a handful of times in the court's history, and no case has ever been taken to the Supreme Court. In fact, it is not clear in all circumstances whether Internet and phone companies that are turning over the reams of data even have the right to appear before the FISA court.
Created by Congress in 1978 as a check against wiretapping abuses by the government, the court meets in a secure, nondescript room in the federal courthouse in Washington. All of the current 11 judges, who serve seven-year terms, were appointed to the special court by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and 10 of them were nominated to the bench by Republican presidents. Most hail from districts outside the capital and come in rotating shifts to hear surveillance applications; a single judge signs most surveillance orders, which totaled nearly 1,800 last year. None of the requests from the intelligence agencies was denied, according to the court.
Beyond broader legal rulings, the judges have had to resolve questions about newer types of technology, like video conferencing, and how and when the government can get access to them, the officials said.
The judges have also had to intervene repeatedly when private Internet and phone companies, which provide much of the data to the N.S.A., have raised concerns that the government is overreaching in its demands for records or when the government itself reports that it has inadvertently collected more data than was authorized, the officials said. In such cases, the court has repeatedly ordered the N.S.A. to destroy the Internet or phone data that was improperly collected, the officials said.
The officials said one central concept connects a number of the court's opinions. The judges have concluded that the mere collection of enormous volumes of "metadata" -- facts like the time of phone calls and the numbers dialed, but not the content of conversations -- does not violate the Fourth Amendment, as long as the government establishes a valid reason under national security regulations before taking the next step of actually examining the contents of an American's communications.
This concept is rooted partly in the "special needs" provision the court has embraced. "The basic idea is that it's O.K. to create this huge pond of data," a third official said, "but you have to establish a reason to stick your pole in the water and start fishing."
Under the new procedures passed by Congress in 2008 in the FISA Amendments Act, even the collection of metadata must be considered "relevant" to a terrorism investigation or other intelligence activities.
The court has indicated that while individual pieces of data may not appear "relevant" to a terrorism investigation, the total picture that the bits of data create may in fact be relevant, according to the officials with knowledge of the decisions.
Geoffrey R. Stone, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, said he was troubled by the idea that the court is creating a significant body of law without hearing from anyone outside the government, forgoing the adversarial system that is a staple of the American justice system. "That whole notion is missing in this process," he said.
The FISA judges have bristled at criticism that they are a rubber stamp for the government, occasionally speaking out to say they apply rigor in their scrutiny of government requests. Most of the surveillance operations involve the N.S.A., an eavesdropping behemoth that has listening posts around the world. Its role in gathering intelligence within the United States has grown enormously since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Soon after, President George W. Bush, under a secret wiretapping program that circumvented the FISA court, authorized the N.S.A. to collect metadata and in some cases listen in on foreign calls to or from the United States. After a heated debate, the essential elements of the Bush program were put into law by Congress in 2007, but with greater involvement by the FISA court.
Even before the leaks by Mr. Snowden, members of Congress and civil liberties advocates had been pressing for declassifying and publicly releasing court decisions, perhaps in summary form.
Reggie B. Walton, the FISA court's presiding judge, wrote in March that he recognized the "potential benefit of better informing the public" about the court's decisions. But, he said, there are "serious obstacles" to doing so because of the potential for misunderstanding caused by omitting classified details.
Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the N.S.A. director, was noncommital when he was pressed at a Senate hearing in June to put out some version of the court's decisions. While he pledged to try to make more decisions public, he said, "I don't want to jeopardize the security of Americans by making a mistake in saying, 'Yes, we're going to do all that.' "
Update at 1430 CT: Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy has a nice post on this story. He notes that appellate law has made clear that metadata are outside the protection of the Fourth Amendment and thus can be used by the government. Further, identifying terrorists meets the burden of the 'special need' created by the USSC. Kerr identifies areas in the FISA court case-law that actually suggests that the court is using the Fourth to provide protection that the USSC says isn't required. That would be remarkable.
Mr. Kerr's thoughts are, as always, worth considering.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013
11:13 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[1 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
You do wonder how it is that the legislature and executive created a court that doesn't answer to the highest court. Wonder if it's constitutional...
It does answer to the Supreme Court, but the problem is that you have to know that your rights have been violated in order to appeal.
The courts should require that all searches on US citizens and legal aliens performed within the USA should be made public at some reasonable time after the the approved intercept. You have to give We the people a chance to cry foul in order to keep the whole process in-check. The WaPo test (i.e. if your decision was to appear on the front page of tomorrow's WaPo, would you still do it?) needs to operate.
#2
The subtext here is that the author of the article is ace NYT reporter Eric Lichtblau. Lichtblau was a vocal critic of Bush's warrantless wiretapping, and even wrote a book about it called Bush's Law. Strangely (or not) Lichtblau was silent as a stone when the massive expansion of surveillance under Champ came to light. Now he finds his voice, but only to blame the FISA court, whose members were almost all appointed by John Roberts, who in turn was nominated by Bush. So not only is Bush responsible for surveillance conducted on his own watch -- he's also responsible for surveillance on Champ's watch. Meanwhile, "Obama Denies Role In Government."
Posted by: Matt ||
07/07/2013 14:54
Comments ||
Top||
#3
And you have to wonder why Snowden didn't offer his big news to Lichtblau and the NYT, who had extensivly reported on the NSA under Bush, and instead went with the relatively low-rent "Sockpuppet" Greenwald. Or did he?
Posted by: Matt ||
07/07/2013 15:05
Comments ||
Top||
#5
I'll give you a valid reason, SPAMMERS, I've received so many "You owe Money" Calls (ON A BRAND NEW TELEPHONE) they can't know who owns it.
Shut them down, there's NO ONE TO CALL AND COMPLAIN.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
07/07/2013 16:17
Comments ||
Top||
#2
I'd like to see Lerner put through the wringer.
But the point that, if you've done nothing wrong you don't have to worry is bogus.
As one attorney said, most of us commit three felonies a day.
They'd find something if they wanted to. Just need some info on her phone calls from NSA.
Posted by: Richard Aubrey ||
07/07/2013 11:28
Comments ||
Top||
#3
It's easy to ignore the constitution until you need it to save your worthless arss.
- Author Unknown
#4
No problem with granting immunity, assuming she has anything worth selling.
For all we know, it could be a move to keep her from getting fired from the IRS (or worse) for unprofessional conduct tangentially related to the scandal.
#5
if she won't testify, they should fire her, strip her pension, and let her sit in jail - as a lesson
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/07/2013 12:38
Comments ||
Top||
#6
Lerner is a "Glass Ceiling" poster child. I suspect we all know the outcome. An LGBT connection withstanding, the only thing that might insulate her further would be a claim of African American or Native American heritage.
She's relaxing, enjoying the time off, media attention, whilst plotting her next administration assignment.
If we are able to take the outcome of radicalisation away from violence, young people might be encouraged to experiment with radical views in order to shake them out of political apathy, according to a terrorism expert at Royal Holloway University. How about getting the youth interested in ideas that actually work and will help them succeed?
"There's an old adage that says: 'If you're young and you're not a radical, you've got no soul; whereas if you're old and still a radical, you've got no sense'. That sums up the important part radical politics plays in the normal political awakening of young people throughout history. It isn't something to be feared." Which is this guy?
Dear Winston Churchill phrased it differently. "Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains." Of course, those were the British versions of the things, which the terrorism expert ought to know, given the location of his university. I've never heard it said about radicals, but my education is admittedly limited.
#2
Maggie, what's with this "right wing" nationalism?
The really evil, wicked, mean and nasty nationalism is the left wing kind. Hope you're not thinking that Nazis were right wing. Corporatists, crony-capitalists, fascists and National Socialists are all firmly enconsed on the left side of the political line along with the communists and socialists.
Course the line isn't a line but if you believe that it can be so represented, the farther left you go is an increase in government control and the farther right you go is an increase in individual freedom.
The extreme of the right is "might makes right" anarchy.
#3
I'm against "right wing nationalism". I just can't find any in today's world that matters.
My own personal opinion: the big evils in the world today are
1) Progressive socialism (malignant Euro-socialism)
2) Bolshevik socialism (communists including Maoists and Bolivarists)
3) National socialism (Nazis then and now)
4) Ba'athist socialism (off-shoot of fascist socialism)
5) Corporatist socialism (crony capitalism)
6) Salafism (all the Sunni Islamic crazies)
7) Khomeinism (Shi'a fundamentalism)
All but that last two are avowedly socialist and by definition, left-wing. The crony corporatists are the true whores in all this; they'll ally with any of the others in order to preserve their standing and their boodle.
I see nothing "right wing" in any of those groups. But I'm sure Maggie will tell me where I went wrong.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013 13:50
Comments ||
Top||
#4
They want the young politically awake? Are they sure about that? Consider what got them this way: decades of control of the education system by the left, resulting in a generation that is massively ignorant about morals, massively ignorant about what their rights are and how important they are, a generation taught that nothing is worth fighting for, a generation being taught that you cannot question your teachers/professors, a generation of "everyone gets a trophy", where there are no losers (and consequently no real winners), a generation that expects to be given everything but earn nothing, a generation that has been taught what to think rather than how to think.
They've developed sheep, they want sheep, and that is what they have: sheep.
#2
And he could do little damage from the boat. I hope. Wonder if he has paid the taxes on the boat yet, he was dodging them a while back, rules being for the little people.
- To keep the value of what they have by denying it to others. [Cause if everyone else had it, it wouldn't have value to the display hierarchical ascendency]
#4
What with satellite phones and video conferencing, the need to be in the SoS office at Foggy Bottom isn't necessary.
That the State Department lied and then sequentially engaged in parsed damaged control creates some really bad optics ranging from the reflexive-political, to sheer incompetence, to deliberate avoidance of the Egypt situation.
#5
Yeah Pappy, I don't get. All the press secretary had to say was that Jahwn was in touch with the White House the entire time he was on his boat. That's what a Bluetooth headset is for, right?
What it really, really illustrates is how unnecessary Jahwn is. But we knew that.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013 13:52
Comments ||
Top||
#6
the optics of Kerry yachting were bad. Jen Psaki - only the latest in a long Obama-era line of Lying Spokesholes - reached for a facile lie for no reason as Pappy notes above. It's standard practice these chronic liars
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/07/2013 13:57
Comments ||
Top||
#7
What it really, really illustrates is how unnecessary Jahwn is
I don't know if 'unnecessary' is the right term, unless it's applied from the administration's standpoint. There are a few others in this administration that one could name, that are in the same boat.
#11
yeah. I don't wish her ill, but he's probably out shopping for the next rich wife already.
Check: "Medal-Winning War Hero seeks fulfillment, long walks on your personal beach, sailing on your yacht, and tax-free docking"
on RichCraigslist.com
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/07/2013 19:14
Comments ||
Top||
#12
under Obamacare, I'm sure she'll voluntarily undergo the same level of treatment us proles would get. .....right?
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/07/2013 20:11
Comments ||
Top||
[Dawn] Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ... served two non-consecutive terms as prime minister, heads the Pakistain Moslem League (Nawaz). Noted for his spectacular corruption, the 1998 Pak nuclear test, border war with India, and for being tossed by General Musharraf... on Saturday held meetings with delegations of China's top business executives and discussed with them energy, development and infrastructure projects in Pakistain.
The prime minister met the delegations on board a high speed train while traveling from Beijing to Shanghai, where he visited the Pakistain-China Energy Forum attended by over 50 prominent Chinese investors.
The Pak premier is on a five-day visit to China, his first foreign visit since coming to power in the May 11 general elections.
During his meetings, Sharif put special emphasis on his government's desire to utilise coal to generate low-priced electricity in Pakistain.
Jin Chunsheng, Vice President China Machinery Engineering Corporation said his company was capable of manufacturing coal turbines having the capacity to generate up to 1000 megawatts, greater than common coal turbines which generate a maximum of 500MWof electricity.
Chunsheng said his company was currently working on a power project in Jamshoro. Sharif also met the Executive President of China's Gezhouba Company, Yang Yisheng.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[1 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
#1
During his meetings, Sharif put special emphasis on his government's desire to utilise coal to generate low-priced electricity in Pakistain.
Of course the Champ and his EPA are closing down our coal industry. Wouldn't want emerging new energy markets to reverse our government controlled economic death spiral redistribution plan now would we.
[DAILYPOST.NG] Deputy Governor of Borno state, Alhaji Zannah Umar Mustapha has urged the emir of Biu, Alhaji Mustapha Aliyu to encourage youth in his domain to form vigilante group to safe guard and protect the lives and property of the people against terrorist activities. Gangs of fascisti Vigilante groups--what could possibly go wrong?
Zannah who stated this when he paid a courtesy visit on the Emir on Friday, in Biu local government, said the people can fight insurgency through collective interest.
According to him, the demonstration of courage by the youth in Maiduguri has paid off as the youth now arrest and hand over members of the sect to relevant authorities for justice.
He affirmed that an individual, prior to the current youth awakening could threaten the entire Maiduguri town, but things have changed drastically since the youth took up weapons against the bad turbans.
He said, if the people of Biu come together and form such group, they would be able to overcome the Boko Haram ... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality... challenges.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[3 views]
Top|| File under: Boko Haram
[USATODAY] Islamic Death Eaters attacked a boarding school in northeast Nigeria ... a particularly crimson stretch of Islam's bloody border... before dawn Saturday, killing 29 students and one teacher. Some of the pupils were burned alive in the latest school attack blamed on a radical terror group, survivors said.
Parents screamed in anguish as they tried to identify the charred and gunshot victims.
Farmer Malam Abdullahi found the bodies of two of his sons, a 10-year-old shot in the back as he apparently tried to run away, and a 12-year-old shot in the chest.
"That's it, I'm taking my other boys out of school," he told The News Agency that Dare Not be Named as he wept over the two corpses. He said he had three younger children in a nearby school.
"It's not safe," he said. "The gunnies are attacking schools and there is no protection for students despite all the soldiers."
Survivors at the Potiskum General Hospital and its mortuary said gunnies attacked Government Secondary School in Mamudo village, 5 kilometers (3 miles) from Potiskum town at about 3 a.m. Saturday. The gunnies are believed to be from the Boko Haram ... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality... sect whose name means "Western education is sacrilege."
They killed 29 students and an English teacher Mohammed Musa, who was shot in the chest according to another teacher, Ibrahim Abdu.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[1 views]
Top|| File under: Boko Haram
A Christian priest has been shot dead in the northern Sinai in what could be the first sectarian killing since the military overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi, as funerals took place for at least 36 people killed between Friday and Saturday in demonstrations and rioting.
Mina Aboud Sharween was attacked in the early afternoon on Saturday while walking in the Masaeed area in El Arish, which is close to the Gaza Strip.
Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood criticised Pope Tawadros, spiritual leader of Egypt's 8 million Copts, for giving his blessing to the removal of the president and attending the announcement by the head of the army, General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, suspending the constitution.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
Mali's army has re-entered the rebel-held town of Kidal as part of efforts to improve security before the presidential election, officials say.
Tuareg rebels captured Kidal after a French-led offensive forced militant Islamists out in February. But the rebels agreed in June to allow troops into the northern town as part of a peace deal.
The occupation of Kidal had been a major obstacle to organising the presidential election, due on 28 July. Around 200 Malian soldiers and police are believed to have arrived in the town on Friday.
"This is a peaceful, coordinated arrival- everything is going well," military spokesman Souleymane Maiga told news agency Agence France-Presse.
Under the terms of their agreement, the rebels returned to their barracks under the supervision of United Nations peacekeepers. They will be banned from patrolling in the town in the run-up to the elections, which are seen as key to Mali's recovery after months of conflict.
Malian troops were chased out of Kidal by the separatist National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) in 2012. The MNLA worked with Islamist groups to seize the north of the country in April of that year.
Their advance prompted France to send troops to its former colony. The MNLA later broke with the Islamist groups and backed French efforts to oust them.
The Tuaregs have been fighting for autonomy in the north since Mali gained independence from France in 1960. They say they are marginalised by the government in the capital, Bamako
The elections will be the first in Mali since the military staged a coup in 2012, accusing the government of failing to end the conflict in the north.
The Malians will elect a strongman to be president. The world will hail democracy in Mali. The strongman will set about stealing everything he can and will beset the Tuaregs with boils, locusts and bullets. The ragtag Malian army will run away at the first sign of trouble, the Tuaregs will revolt for the umpteenth time, and the French will have to intervene once again.
Then they'll call a new election...
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[1 views]
Top|| File under:
BEIRUT --The main Western-backed Syrian opposition group has elected a former political prisoner as its new president. The Syrian National Coalition says on its Twitter account that Ahmad al-Jarba received 55 votes of the 114-member council.
The council also elected three vice presidents including Mohammed Farouk Taifour, a senior official with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Who's the al-Nusra vice-president?
The voted took place Saturday in Istanbul.
The presidents post had been empty since April when former SNC President Mouaz al-Khatib resigned, citing frustration over what he called a lack of international support and constraints imposed on the body itself. Since then, senior opposition figure George Sabra served as acting president of the SNC.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[4 views]
Top|| File under:
[USATODAY] Police say enraged spectators invaded a football field, stoned the referee to death and quartered his body after he stabbed a player to death. And they say metric football's not exciting!
The Public Safety Department of the state of Maranhao says in a statement that it all started when referee Otavio da Silva expelled player Josenir Abreu from a game last weekend. The two got into a fist fight, then Silva took out a knife and stabbed Abreu, who died on his way to the hospital.
The statement issued this week says Abreu's friends and relatives immediately "rushed into the field, stoned the referee to death and quartered his body."
Local news media say the spectators also decapitated Silva and stuck his head on a stake in the middle of the field.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[1 views]
Top|| File under:
[Al Ahram] Violent festivities reignited on Saturday afternoon between opponents and supporters of deposed President Mohamed Morsi -- ousted earlier this week by the military -- in several provincial towns outside Cairo.
Street battles erupted between rival factions in the Upper Egyptian city of Luxor and the Nile Delta city of Damanhour, where gunfire has been reported, according to Al-Ahram's Arabic-language news website.
In Upper Egypt's Sohag, meanwhile, security forces -- in coordination with the army -- incarcerated Don't shoot, coppers! I'm comin' out! 20 pro-Morsi demonstrators and Moslem Brüderbund members.
Those arrested were allegedly involved in festivities outside the local governor's office that continued until dawn, during which protesters reportedly attempted to storm the building.
Dozens of others were taken into custody after street fighting in Assiut, Kafr Al-Sheikh and Damanhour.
The men were accused of assaulting police and army personnel, inciting violence and illegal possession of firearms.
At least 30 people were killed and more than 1,100 injured Egypt-wide on Friday, as Islamists opposed to president Morsi's Wednesday ouster by the military erupted into the streets in the hundreds of thousands to voice fury at what they see as an illegal military coup.
Five coppers were shot down in separate incidents in the North Sinai town of Al-Arish.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[3 views]
Top|| File under: Muslim Brotherhood
A couple days old but something to keep track of. The Gulf states are leading the charge against Hezbollah. I think it's called, "survival instinct"...
Senior Gulf Cooperation Council officials met in Riyadh on Thursday (July 4) to coordinate sanctions in the six member states against Lebanons Shiite Hezbollah movement over its support for the Syria regime. The meeting was to develop mechanisms to monitor movements, financial transactions and business operations of Hezbollah, said Bahraini deputy interior minister Khaled al-Absi.
The GCC monarchies decided on June 10 to impose sanctions on Hezbollah, targeting residency permits and its financial and business activities in reprisal for the groups armed intervention in Syria.
Absi told reporters two expert teams will be formed: one to coordinate with central banks and the second to review legal, administrative and financial matters linked to the sanctions. Last months measure was taken after the discovery in GCC states of several terrorist cells linked to the group, said Absi.
However, he did not say how many Hezbollah suspects would be affected by the sanctions or their estimated assets and financial and commercial operations in the region.
The sanctions would be implemented in coordination... with ministers of commerce and the central banks of the GCC, the councils Secretary General Abdullatif al-Zayani has said.
The GCC comprises Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Qatar expelled 18 Lebanese citizens from the gas-rich Gulf state on June 20, a government source in Beirut told AFP.
An estimated 360,000 Lebanese work in the Gulf, according to Lebanese daily An-Nahar, remitting some $4 billion (three billion euros) annually.
Lebanon has a population of just 4.1 million.
A staunch ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, of the Alawite sect of Shiite Islam, Hezbollah has backed him since protests erupted in March 2011, openly declaring its military involvement last month.
The Sunni monarchies of the Gulf back the mostly Sunni rebels, and the GCC has warned that it might add Hezbollah to its list of terrorist groups.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[6 views]
Top|| File under:
Good summary of what the news media is saying about the military coup in Egypt by David Gerstman at Legal Insurrection. Through the citation of several sources he makes a compelling point: a lot of people of Egypt voted Muhammed Morsi in 18 months ago (he ended up with 51% of the vote, the rest going either to Salafists or to the military-backed puppet) not because they believed that the Muslim Brøderbünd had the answers for Egypt, but because they couldn't bring themselves to vote for either the puppet or the crazies. They thought that the responsibilities of governance would force Mr. Morsi and the Brøderbünd to be pragmatic and govern from the center.
They were wrong. The leopard does not change his spots. The scorpion stings even when it is against its own interests because that's what it does.
That's a lesson to be learned here at home as well: when a hard-left presidential candidate tells you that of course he's going to govern from the center...
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
I guess Arab countries don't have a default "Mickey Mouse" protest voting option.
The eurozone faces a Japanese style "lost decade" unless action is taken to address the deep-seated problems of its banks, ratesetter Benoît Coeuré has warned. Troubled bank balance sheets had the potential to choke the engine of recovery in the 17-nation bloc, and exert a more persistent drag on economic growth, said Mr Coeuré, who sits on the executive board of the European Central Bank (ECB).
Mr Coeuré said ailing banks had to be repaired or shut down. Failure to do so could result in a decade of stagnant growth in the eurozone, similar to Japan in the 1990s. He said the eurozone crisis risked creating a Japanese-style wave of zombie banks in which lenders, fearful of falling foul of capital rules, chose to evergreen - or roll over - bad loans instead of recognising losses on their books.
This had led to the perverse practice of banks extending credit to insolvent borrowers, rather than lend to creditworthy firms, said Mr Coeuré. Banks then gambl[ed] on the hope that [firms] would recover or that the government would bail them out.
Mr Coeuré called on leaders to complete the steps needed to implement the eurozones banking union. He also said measures were needed to tackle youth unemployment.
[An Nahar] The Army Command announced on Saturday detaining several soldiers for attacking an placed in durance vile Please don't kill me! man involved in last June's festivities against the military institution in the southern city of Sidon.
"After viewing a video spread online that shows a number of soldiers beating and insulting a detainee, the military institution has arrested several troops involved in the incident," the Army Command's Orientation Directorate said in a communique.
The statement stressed: "The Army Command will adopt severe disciplinary measures against those proven to be involved in the attack."
"We will not disregard any violation of this kind, regardless of where and under which conditions it took place."
On Thursday, the army also handed over to the military police soldiers suspected of humiliating and beating a man suspected of ties to Salafist holy man Ahmed al-Asir.
The body was identified as Nader al-Bayoumy, whom the Association of Moslem Scholars said had "handed himself in" after the Abra clash.
Eighteen soldiers were killed and 20 others were maimed in the fierce festivities with gunnies loyal to al-Asir on June 23 and 24. Twenty members of Asir's gang were also killed.
State Commissioner to the Military Court Judge Saqr Saqr charged on Thursday 27 people for their involvement in the battles where Bilal Bin Rabah mosque is located.
Ten of them were charged in absentia, including al-Asir and a onetime prominent singer-turned Salafist Fadel Shaker.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[2 views]
Top|| File under: Salafists
[Bangla Daily Star] The defeat of the Awami League-backed mayoral candidate Ajmat Ullah Khan at yesterday's Gazipur City Corporation polls has left the ruling party leaders stunned into silence. Next general election Awami League is going to be voted out. You heard it here first, but you probably guessed it even earlier. The general election after that BNP is going to be voted out in a landslide. It's the nature of Banglapolitix. The BNP will stop complaining about the 'illegitimate' government the minute after they win. The Awami League will call the new BNP gummint 'illegitimate' the minute after that. But you guessed that also...
This is in contrast to their earlier expressions of optimism about the outcome of the election. They had been enthusiastic throughout -- from the beginning of the campaign to the end of the voting -- but the enthusiasm began to wane as the results started pouring in.
Following its humiliating defeat at the June 15 elections to four city corporations, the Awami League wanted to come up with a strong response in the Gazipur polls. It needed to win the battle here to reclaim some of the ground it had lost. It left no stone unturned to ensure a victory.
It compelled its rebel candidate Jahangir Alam, who had emerged as a factor in the polls, to quit the race in favour of Ajmat. The party tried to portray its leaders as pro-Islamic and its leaders in Gazipur tried to counter the religious propaganda against them.
Even at the last moment, the Awami League managed to get Jatiya Party chief HM Ershad to support Ajmat.
But all its efforts seemed turned out to have been in vain.
In the early hours of today, very few Awami League leaders were reachable for comments. Upset, many of them left the Awami League district office by 9:00pm. The Daily Star tried to contact at least 10 local leaders over the phone but none of them picked up the call.
Contacted, Awami League Joint General Secretary Mahbubul Alam Hanif said the party would come up with a formal reaction today.
Awami League leader AKM Mozammel Huq, election coordinator for Ajmat, termed the results unexpected.
"The religion card has influenced national politics. We will analyse all these factors in the future," he said.
Party presidium member Obaidul Quader blamed organisational weakness, behaviour of party men, and local and national issues for the defeat.
He said people do not remember the successes of a government but they do remember manners and behaviour of ruling party leaders and workers.
Although the defeat at the Gazipur city polls has put the Awami League in an awkward situation, it will give the party a chance to do what is needed and be successful at the general elections, Quader told The Daily Star at Black Rose Hotel, where around 50 leaders of the Awami League and its front organisations were holding meetings regularly on the Gazipur city polls.
Meanwhile, Awami League leaders yesterday alleged that the BNP in a planned way was trying to make the Gazipur City Corporation polls controversial.
"As with the four city corporation polls, the BNP raised allegations of vote rigging to say that free and fair elections were not possible under the government," said Awami League leader Tofail Ahmed at a press briefing at the party chief's political office around 2:00pm.
A few hours after his briefing, party Joint General Secretary Mahbubul Alam Hanif alleged that the opposition was trying to "misguide" people through spreading falsehood about the Gazipur city polls.
"All previous elections held under this government's tenure were free and fair and people realised that. The BNP has intentionally resorted to falsehood over the election to confuse people," he said.
The lights were out at the Awami League central office around 10:00pm last night as disheartened leaders and workers left for home early.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[2 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
AL leaders stunned? Me too, some of the all star fan voting is flat out stu... Oh sorry, wrong AL. Plus I'm an NL fan - to quote from Bull Durham: "I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter."
[BREITBART] The release of the June Jobs' Report Friday was something of a relief for the markets. The Labor Department reported that the economy gained 195,000 jobs in June, which beat economists' expectations. The Department also reported that the economy gained 70,000 more jobs in April and May than it originally estimated. The report, however, also provides clear evidence that the the nation is splitting into two; only 47% of Americans have a full-time job and those who don't are finding it increasingly out of reach. Some of those who do have jobs are sucking down the pricey, wine-soaked popcorn, though...
Of the 144 million Americans employed last month, only 116 million were working full-time. Friday's report showed that 58.7% of the civilian adult population of 245 million was working last month. Only 47% of Americans, however, had a full-time job.
The market's positive reaction to Friday's report is another sign of how far our economic expectations have fallen. If today the same proportion of Americans worked as just a decade ago, there would be almost 9 million more people working. Just in the last year, almost 2 million Americans have left the labor force. With a majority of the population not holding a full-time job, it isn't surprising that economic growth has been so weak.
In June, the number of Americans who wanted to work full-time, but were forced into part-time jobs because of the economy, jumped 352,000 to over 8 million.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[3 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Wow that must mean 53% are independently wealthy.
Part-time (PT) andor Less-Than-PT 9LPT) = NEW FULL TIME, + WID COMPLEMENTARY RFID CHIP, ETC. FOR THAT KINDER, GENTLER, "HELLFIRE"-LED DOMESTIC DRONE STRIKE.
Year 2015 is only the beginning for America = Amerika under OWG-NWO - prolly safe to say it will take another 2-3 decades for any + all the levels, mechanisms, protocols, + entities, etc. to be firmly = permanently entrenched widout challenge - IOW, THE ECON + WORLD IS GOING TO GET WORSE BEFORE IT GETS "BETTER".
Aren't the Amerikan Sheeple, of the OWG Mighty USSA = OWG Weak USRoA Global SSR, happy that their Soon-to-be-Global-not-National, pro-Multi-polarist Fed-State-Local Govts didn't ask them to vote on whetehr they wanted OWG or not???
[BBC.CO.UK] The presidents of Nicaragua, Venezuela and Bolivia have indicated their countries could offer political asylum to US runaway Edward Snowden.
Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro said it would give asylum to the intelligence leaker, who is believed to be holed up in a transit area of Moscow airport.
Meanwhile Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said his country would do so "if circumstances permit".
Bolivia's Evo Morales said Mr Snowden could get asylum there if he sought it.
Mr Snowden has sent requests for political asylum to at least 21 countries, most of which have turned down his request. Earlier, Wikileaks said he had applied to six additional countries on Friday.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[3 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
"bring your own toilet paper"
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/07/2013 12:37
Comments ||
Top||
#2
Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua?
Here's a free clue, Edward - pray Iceland takes you.
Posted by: Barbara ||
07/07/2013 13:36
Comments ||
Top||
#3
Still comes down to whetehr Russia will allow him to leave widout first seeing his materials, andor widout Snowden spilling the secrets in his head.
[Bangla Daily Star] A bomb hidden in a plastic bag exploded at a checkpoint in the Yemeni capital Sanaa yesterday, killing three policemen and wounding a fourth, a security services official said. The device was planted near a police checkpoint in the north of the capital and detonated as the policemen opened the bag to check its contents, the offi A manhunt has been launched for those behind the attack, the official added.cial added.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under: al-Qaeda in Arabia
[Bangla Daily Star] Mali lifted a nearly six-month state of emergency yesterday, the eve of the start of a presidential election campaign for July 28 polls in the troubled west African nation, the security ministry said. The decree enforcing a curfew and forbidding public gatherings was put in place on January 12, a day after France launched a surprise intervention to help Mali's weak army drive out Islamists occupying its north for nine months.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under: al-Qaeda in North Africa
[BREITBART] A gourmet popcorn bar in New York combined two healthy foods into a trendy snack -- wine-soaked popcorn, the artisan popcorn maker says.
Artisan popcorn maker Populence teamed up with the New Zealand winery Kim Crawford to create two new wine-soaked popcorn flavors: Pinot Noir Chocolate Drizzle and Sauvignon Blanc Kettle, ABC-News reported.
"I love combining organic heirloom and whole ingredients to create gourmet popcorn flavors. To me, the perfect snack satisfies both a sweet and salty crunch but remains low in calories, low in fat, and is gluten-free made with all-natural ingredients," Maggie Paulus, founder of Populence, said in a statement. "I began making my own gourmet popcorn flavors to satisfy my cravings in a healthy way."
The Sauvignon Blanc offers a zesty, lemony taste, while the Pinot Noir Chocolate Drizzle plays to the more indulgent. Both are meant to be paired with their respective wines, Paulus said.
A 1-gallon tin costs $28 in Populence's retail store and $35 on its website, Paulus said.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[4 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
"Zesty, lemony taste" > Mehhh, its been done. No wines need apply.
[NYPOST] Twinkie's legendary shelf life is getting even longer.
The leaner, non-union Hostess Brands -- looking to get by with fewer bakeries under new ownership -- will start freezing Twinkies and other snack cakes to extend their expiration date instead of delivering them directly to stores, The Post has learned.
It's a myth that Twinkies have an infinite shelf life. The seemingly indestructible snack cake actually expires after 45 days.
The old Hostess baked Twinkies, HoHos, Ding Dongs and other goodies at nine plants and got them on shelves within 48 hours using its own delivery drivers.
Now the plan is to bake goodies at five plants and freeze them before shipping them through independent drivers to supermarket warehouses, according to sources. Stores would defrost them and restock the shelves as needed.
While the new owners say the iconic creme-filled cake will evoke the same nostalgia, the thawing process could undermine the integrity of the product, according to sources.
"If they alter the taste, people may not buy it," one source said.
Hostess declined to comment on whether it will freeze baked goods but said, "Any suggestion that Hostess is changing the integrity of the iconic snack cakes consumers have loved is completely untrue.
"The new ownership is absolutely committed to baking top-quality snack cakes and, in fact, is making major investments to ensure that Hostess products are as good, if not even better than before."
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
only Peeps and Velveeta have infinite storage life
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/07/2013 12:34
Comments ||
Top||
#2
Peeps get better with age, to a point. After that point, they can be used as masonry.
[Al Ahram] Residents of Cairo's Manial neighbourhood were recovering Saturday from a bloody night of festivities with armed supporters of the Moslem Brüderbund who killed at least seven people and left dozens injured, they told AFP.
The violence erupted when residents tried to stop hundreds of Islamists passing through Manial to reach protests being staged in the iconic Tahrir Square against toppled president Mohamed Morsi, who hails from the Moslem Brüderbund.
"The Brotherhood attacked the area with all kinds of weapons," said resident Mohammed Yehya, who lost three of his friends in the mayhem.
Inhabitants of the Nile island of Manial reported seeing dozens of bearded Islamists armed with machineguns, machetes and sticks on Friday night before the deadly festivities broke out.
Snipers were spotted on rooftops, and medics told AFP they treated some residents of the normally quiet middle-class neighbourhood for bullet wounds with a downward trajectory.
Buildings were pockmarked with bullet holes. Rocks carpeted the floor and charred tyres showed the ferocity of the violence.
The festivities in Manial and other parts of the country came two days after the army toppled Morsi, underlining the determination of his Moslem Brüderbund to disrupt the military's plan for a political transition until new elections.
Residents say the attack began just minutes afer the Brotherhood's supreme guide, Mohammed Badie, gave a fiery ...a single two-syllable word carrying connotations of both incoherence and viciousness. A fiery delivery implies an audience of rubes and yokels, preferably forming up into a mob... speech to Morsi supporters camped out in Cairo's Nasr City, which was broadcast live on television.
"The attack came minutes after Badie's speech. They treated us like infidels. They were chanting 'holy shit! Allahu akbar' (God is greatest) as they were shooting us," said Ahmed Fattouh.
On the door of one shop hung a sign announcing that the owner, 26-year-old Abdallah Sayyed Abdelazim, had been killed.
Parts of Manial were a ghost town on Saturday, with businesses shuttered and residents devastated by the night's violence.
"The festivities started at 7:30 pm and continued until three in the morning. Their ammunition just didn't run out. They are trying to terrorise us and take over the country," said Khaled Tawfik.
Shopkeeper Mohammed Fekry, 29, who was maimed by birdshot said at least 10 people were killed and dozens injured.
"We have 10 people dead in this area, including six people who died with single bullets in the head. There were snipers on the roof of the Salaheddine mosque," Fekry said.
Hundreds of Brotherhood supporters, he said, had come from Cairo University -- where they had been camped out for days to defend Morsi's legitimacy -- with "automatic weapons, machineguns, knives, swords".
They were headed to Tahrir Square, where anti-Morsi protesters had gathered, but the Manial residents tried to prevent their passage.
Hend Taha said she saw the festivities from the window of her apartment.
"There were bearded snipers on top of Salaheddine mosque. On the ground, lots of bearded men coming from the direction of Cairo University were marching with automatic weapons," she said.
The overall toll for Friday's violence across Egypt was 30, but casualties are likely to rise.
Ihab al-Sayyed, a doctor at Qasr al-Aini hospital, told AFP that seven people he treated for injuries from the Manial festivities had died.
"I think the corpse count will be much higher.
"The injuries were all from live bullets, most of them automatic weapons. Three of the dead and dozens of the injured were shot at from a height," the doctor said.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[1 views]
Top|| File under: Muslim Brotherhood
#1
sounds like the Salaheddine mosque needs to be burnt to the ground
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/07/2013 10:54
Comments ||
Top||
More malfeasance at the IRS as an Obama top political operative gets an illegal peek at some tax records. IRS is saying they have the inspector general's report, but they won't admit its existence, or release its contents.
To clarify, Goolsbie allegedly looked at the documents while he was Obama's economic adviser. He quit two years ago declaring victory in economic policy.
From TFA:
The Treasury Department on Wednesday refused to confirm or deny the existence of an inspector general report investigating whether or not former White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee illegally accessed tax information on the Koch brothers.
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Washington Free Beacon, declined to acknowledge the existence of the report.
Information like that would tempt the White House the way the Apple tempted Eve. Champ was bound and determined to ensure that he knew who his enemies were in 2012. When Citizens United took away the ability to use the FEC, he went to the IRS. The IRS of course is filled with Democrats and they were only too happy to do as they were (indirectly) asked. If someone wanted the Koch returns, they were happy to offer them up. Goolsbie would be a great one to deliver them to; high enough in the food chain to get the word to the right people in the campaign, and yet not so high as to bring down Champ if it leaked. Witness this news now -- anyone outraged at all? Anyone? Bueller?
[Bangla Daily Star] Britannia is expected to fly radical Islamist holy man Abu Qatada to Jordan today to face terror charges, ending a decade-long legal battle over the fate of the man once dubbed the late Osama bin Laden ... who is now neither a strong horse nor a weak horse, but a dead horse... 's right-hand-man in Europe.
London is deporting the 53-year-old Paleostinian-born holy man after the two governments last month formally approved a treaty guaranteeing that evidence obtained by torture would not be used against him in any trial.
Prime Minister David Cameron ... has stated that he is certainly a big Thatcher fan, but I don't know whether that makes me a Thatcherite, which means he's not. Since he is not deeply ideological he lacks core principles and is easily led. He has been described as certainly not a Pitt, Elder or Younger, but he does wear a nice suit so maybe he's Beau Brummel ... has said he will be "one of the happiest people in Britannia" after the departure of Abu Qatada, who has been in and out of British prisons while successive British governments have tried to expel him.
British officials refused to confirm any details, but local media reported he would be driven from the high security Belmarsh jail in south London and flown out at 2:00 am (0100 GMT) Sunday from RAF Northolt airbase in west London.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[3 views]
Top|| File under: al-Qaeda
#1
...means 'no worries' for the rest of your days...
[Al Ahram]Supporters and opponents of ousted president Mohamed Morsi -- removed by the military earlier this week -- plan rival demonstrations on Sunday, with the former demanding Morsi's reinstatement and the latter supporting Morsi's overthrow.
A coalition supporting Morsi's reinstatement has called for protests on Sunday to reject Wednesday's "military coup" against the elected president by Egyptian Defence Minister Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi.
The Moslem Brüderbund-led National Alliance in Support of Legitimacy, a group formed recently to support Morsi, has called for mass rallies to "Protect the revolution."
The Egyptian Armed Forces deposed Morsi after millions erupted into the streets on 30 June to demand early presidential elections. Morsi supporters say the army's move represents a violation of "democratic legitimacy."
In an earlier statement, the National Alliance in Support of Legitimacy declared that Morsi was still president and condemned the arrest of several high-profile Moslem Brüderbund members by security forces.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under: Arab Spring
Non-WoT at this point.
Two people were killed and 130 were sent to hospitals after an Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 with more than 300 people on board crashed on landing at San Francisco International Airport on Saturday.The crash occurred as the plane was landing at a runway that began at the edge of San Francisco Bay. TV news footage showed crash debris right at the start of the landing strip where it met the water.
The plane may have been too low and descended too quickly on its approach to the runway, according to data from the last three minutes of the flight from flightaware.com, a leading flight tracking service. The plane's rate of descent dropped abruptly, then it increased its altitude to 200 feet from 100 feet, which possibly indicates the pilot tried to power up the engines and climb in the final seconds in an unsuccessful attempt to stay in the air and touch down in the landing zone of the runway.
It appeared the plane landed short of the runway. A portion of the aircraft hit a non-landing area of the runway prior to the touchdown zone. The plane appeared to hit the seawall dividing the airport runway from San Francisco Bay, possibly causing the tail to come apart. Multiple sources told The Los Angeles Times there was no reported trouble or declared emergency on the plane.
The passengers included 141 Chinese, 77 South Koreans and 61 U.S. citizens. All the 307 people on board have been accounted for, the city's mayor told reporters. Air traffic at the airport was halted immediately after the crash, but flights resumed on two runways several hours later.
Boeing expressed concern for those on board the flight and added that it will provide technical assistance to the NTSB as it investigates the accident.
#9
But let's not overlook the possibility that (1) ATC, for whatever reason, left 'em too high for the approach gate, and (2) The PIC accepted the Clearance-to-Land without having established a stabilized approach. Shared responsibility if this is the case, but, as is cynically said, "ATC means you never have to say you're sorry."....
#10
For now, we acknowledge that there were no problems caused by the 777-200 plane or engines, Yoon Young-doo [president of Asiana Airlines] said at the companys headquarters.
#12
Heard NTSB gal on the news: plane was bleeding off altitude for approach with throttles in idle position. Seconds before impact, throttles were advanced and someone in the cockpit made a call for a go-around.
Long piece in the Times of Israel on the future of tank warfare in the Israeli army. A good Sunday read that looks at both sides of the question of whether and how one uses tanks and other heavy armored vehicles in modern urban war.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[2 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Skynet-Matrix first, then can have the Great Unmanned/UV World War.
Analysis piece from Ammon News and (apparently) the Guardian, though I can't find it on the latter's website. It's as good as any "inside" look as we're going to get until the dust settles, It's worth the read so as to be ready to counter the more simple-minded progressives who will say, "but he was elected!" Yes he was, and he then proceeded to behave with complete disregard to what democracy is all about.
The army chief came to President Mohammed Morsi with a simple demand: Step down on your own.
"Over my dead body!" Morsi replied to General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi on Monday, two days before the army eventually ousted him after a year in office.
In the end, Egypt's first freely elected president found himself isolated, abandoned by allies and no one in the army or police willing to support him.
Even his Republican Guards simply stepped away as army commandos came to take him to an undisclosed defence ministry facility, according to army, security and Muslim Brotherhood officials, who gave the Associated Press an account of Morsi's final hours in office.
The Muslim Brotherhood officials said they saw the end coming for Morsi as early as 23 June a week before the opposition planned its first big protest. The military gave the president seven days to work out his differences with the opposition.
In recent months, Morsi had been at odds with virtually every institution in the country, including leading Muslim and Christian clerics, the judiciary, the armed forces, the police and intelligence agencies. His political opponents fuelled popular anger that Morsi was giving too much power to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists, and had failed to tackle Egypt's mounting economic problems.
There was such distrust between Morsi and the security agencies that they began withholding information from him deploying troops and armour in cities without his knowledge. Police also refused to protect Muslim Brotherhood offices that came under attack in the latest wave of protests.
Therefore, when Morsi was fighting for his survival, there was no one to turn to, except calling for outside help through western ambassadors and a small coterie of aides from the Brotherhood who could do little more than help him record two last-minute speeches.
So Morsi sounds like a rebel leader who suddenly finds himself in power and realizes that he's in way, way over his head. He thought it was all about issuing decrees, and didn't realize you have to convince people, work with people, and find some common ground. Then again, he was a rabble-rouser for the Brøderbünd, and leadership skills there weren't exactly transferable to running an impoverished country.
In those remarks, he emotionally emphasised his electoral legitimacy a topic that Morsi repeatedly raised in the talks with Sisi.
Which is all he had left...
Early this week, during two meetings in as many days, Morsi, Sisi and Hesham Kandil, the prime minister, sat down to discuss ways out of the crisis.
But Morsi kept returning to the mandate he won in the June 2012 balloting, according to one of the officials. He said Morsi wouldn't address the mass protests or any of the country's most pressing problems tenuous security, rising prices, unemployment, power cuts and traffic congestion.
His 24 hours a day were consumed with putting the Brøderbünd in charge of everything in Egypt, and therefore he had no time for such smaller matters of governance...
A Brotherhood spokesman, Murad Ali, said the military had already decided that Morsi had to go, and Sisi would not entertain any of the concessions that the president was prepared to make.
"We were naive ... We didn't imagine betrayal would go this far," Ali said. "It was like, 'either we put you in jail, or you come out and announce you are resigning.'"
Brotherhood officials said they saw the end coming.
"We knew it was over on 23 June. Western ambassadors told us that," said another Brotherhood spokesman. US ambassador Anne Patterson was one of the envoys, he added.
Morsi searched for allies in the army, ordering two top aides Asaad el-Sheikh and Rifaah el-Tahtawy to establish contact with potentially sympathetic officers in the 2nd Field Army based in Port Said and Ismailia on the Suez Canal. The objective was to find a bargaining chip to use with Sisi, security officials with firsthand knowledge of the contacts said.
There were no signs that Morsi's overtures had any effect, but Sisi, on learning of the contacts, took no chances. He issued directives to all unit commanders not to engage in any contacts with the presidential palace and, as a precaution, dispatched elite troops to units whose commanders had been contacted by Morsi's aides.
The end nears
On the surface, Morsi wanted to give the impression that the government was conducting business as usual. His offices released statements about meetings with cabinet ministers to discuss issues such as the availability of basic food items during Ramadan when Muslims feast on food after a day of dawn-to-dusk fasting. He had four cabinet ministers talk to TV reporters in the presidential palace about fuel shortages and power cuts.
The opposition had set its first mass protest for 30 June, the anniversary of his inauguration, but the demonstrations began early, and Morsi had to stop working at Ittihadiya palace on 26 June.
The next day, he and his family moved into the Cairo headquarters of the Republican Guards, an army branch that protects the president. Morsi worked at the Qasr El Qouba palace and continued to do so until 30 June, when the Republican Guards advised him to stay put at their headquarters.
His foreign policy aide, Essam el-Haddad, telephoned western governments to put an optimistic spin on events, according to a military official. Haddad was also issuing statements in English to the foreign media, saying that the millions out on the streets did not represent all Egyptians, and that the military intervention amounted to a textbook coup.
According to the usually authoritative newspaper Al-Ahram, Morsi was offered safe passage to Turkey, Libya or elsewhere, but he declined. He also was offered immunity from prosecution if he voluntarily stepped down.
Morsi gave a speech late on Tuesday in which he vowed to stay in power and urged supporters to fight to protect his legitimacy.
Soon after, Sisi placed him under "confinement" in the Republican Guard headquarters. The next day the military's deadline to Morsi expired. At 5am troops began deploying across major cities and the military posted videos of the movements to its Facebook page in a bid to reassure the public. Republican Guards assigned to the president and his aides walked away at midday and army commandos arrived.
There was no commotion and Morsi went quietly. That evening, Sisi announced Morsi's removal.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[2 views]
Top|| File under:
#6
"I won" devolved to "winning" in short order in both cases...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
07/07/2013 15:40
Comments ||
Top||
#7
Morsi probably thought the public elected him to be emperor.
Not emperor. Sultan. A pity that, for all his knowledge, he'd forgotten that Egypt has belonged to the Mamluks for most of its Muslim history -- and they were soldiers, not engineering professors.
[Al Ahram] Syria's fractious opposition elected a new leader on Saturday but rebel groups were reported to be fighting among themselves in a sign of growing divisions on the ground between factions trying to topple Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneck al-Assad. Oppressor of the Syrians and the Lebs... The Syrian National Coalition chose Ahmad Jarba as its president after a close runoff vote that reinforced the influence of Soddy Arabia ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face... over a perpetually divided opposition movement that has struggled to convince its Western and Arab allies that its fighters are ready to be given sophisticated foreign weaponry.
Jarba is a tribal figure from the eastern Syrian province of Hasaka who dances on Saudi strings has Saudi connections. He defeated businessman Mustafa Sabbagh, a point man for Qatar, which has seen its influence over the opposition overshadowed by the Saudis.
"A change was needed," Adib Shishakly, a bigwig in the coalition, told Rooters after the vote held at an opposition meeting in Istanbul.
"The old leadership of the coalition had failed to offer the Syrian people anything substantial and was preoccupied with internal politics. Ahmad Jarba is willing to work with everybody."
The Moslem Brüderbund, the only organised faction in the Syrian political opposition, has seen its mother organization in Egypt thrown out of power in Cairo this week along with President Mohamed Mursi.
But the Brotherhood representative, Farouq Tayfour, was elected one of two vice-presidents of the Syrian National Coalition in a sign the group still retains influence in Syrian opposition politics.
In northern Syria, rebels clashed with an opposition unit linked to al Qaeda, activists said, in a battle that signals rising tensions between local people and more radical Islamist factions.
Fighting between cannibals rebel groups and Pencilneck government forces was reported in Homs and around Damascus in a war whose casualty toll has now topped 100,000.
The rebel infighting comes as forces loyal to Assad have made gains on the battlefield and drawn comfort from the downfall the Moslem Brüderbund in Egypt.
The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a new al Qaeda franchise, has been working to cement power in rebel-held parts of northern Syria in recent months.
ISIS units have begun imposing stricter interpretations of Islamic law and have filmed themselves executing members of rival rebel groups whom they accuse of corruption, and beheading those they say are loyal to Assad.
As hostilities drag on and resources grow scarce, infighting has increased, both among opposition groups and the militias loyal to Assad, leaving civilians trapped in the middle.
The latest internecine festivities were in the town of al-Dana, near the Turkish border, on Friday, local activists said. An opposition group known as the Free Youths of Idlib said dozens of fighters were killed, maimed or imprisoned.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition monitoring group, said that the bodies of a commander and his brother, from the local Islam Battalion, were found beheaded. Local activists working for the British-based group said the men's heads were found next to a trash bin in a main square.
The exact reasons for the festivities have been hard to pin down, but many rebel groups have been chafing at ISIS's rise in power. It has taken over the once dominant Nusra Front, a more localised group of al Qaeda-linked fighters that had resisted calls by foreign hard boyz to expand its scope beyond the Syrian revolt to a more regional Islamist mission.
Residents of rebel-held territories in the north once welcomed hardline Islamist groups as better organised and less corrupt. But locals are now growing more wary of them as they impose their austere version of Islamic law.
Protests against radical Islamist groups are becoming more common. The Observatory said the al-Dana festivities were set off at an anti-ISIS protest when some Islamist forces of Evil fired at the demonstration.
But other activists said the festivities were more about local power struggles. ISIS units are believed to be buying up land and property, and they also have tried to control supplies of wheat and oil in rebel areas.
Islamist groups that support al Qaeda posted statements on social media saying that they had not started the festivities and had not tried to impose their will on locals.
In Homs, further south, fierce festivities raged as Assad's forces tried to advance in the city, the epicentre of the armed insurgency.
Activists in Homs described air strikes and artillery attacks as a "blitz" and said it was some of the fiercest fighting they had witnessed.
The United Nations ...an organization originally established to war on dictatorships which was promptly infiltrated by dictatorships and is now held in thrall to dictatorships... estimates between 2,500 and 4,000 civilians are trapped inside Homs.
Some activists decried the National Coalition meetings as a petty power struggle while the battle in Homs raged and appeared to be swinging in favour of Assad's forces.
"How dare the NC have elections and go about its normal business as Homs gets pummelled? History won't be kind to you," said one activist on Twitter, called Nader.
Fighting also took place in two southern districts of the capital, where activists reported rocket and artillery attacks.
The Observatory said that two rockets hit the military's Airforce Intelligence offices in central Damascus. The Airforce Intelligence has long been one of the most feared branches of Assad's secret services.
Heavy air strikes hammered rebel strongholds in eastern suburbs of Damascus, where rebels say the army is imposing a blockade that is choking off their supply of weapons.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[6 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Syria
#1
This article from Rooters reports on a 34-year-old who from his home in the English town of Leicester, trawls through hundreds of online videos a day from Syria's civil war to put together a picture of the weapons that the rebels are getting.
In recent months, he has noticed that the rebels have been getting much more sophisticated Chinese, Croatian and other foreign equipment, notably the anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry they have long sought.
Some appear deliberately intended to showcase new weaponry, particularly the latest types to arrive such as the shoulder mounted HJ-8 Chinese-made wire guided missile.
The Chinese-made FN-6 MANPAD also appears to have helped the rebels raise their game, with one video apparently showing one bringing down a Russian-built helicopter gunship.
Judging by the videos, he said much of the Chinese-made weaponry appeared to be going direct to Islamist groups.
The Croatian-manufactured Soviet-style weaponry thought to be supplied by Saudi Arabia, in contrast, appeared to be going almost exclusively to the Western-backed Free Syrian Army.
They included RAK 12 multiple rocket launchers, RBG-6, M79 and M60 anti-tank weapons and the RPG-22, capable of going through more than a meter of reinforced concrete.
A Philippine soldier was killed in an ambush Friday by communist rebels in the town of Guipos in Zamboanga del Sur province.
Captain Jefferson Somera said the soldiers were heading to their headquarters on a motorcycle when New People's Army rebels attacked them in the village of Magting. He said Corporal Danilo Saavedra was hit in the back and did return fire, but eventually died from his injury.
Brigadier General Felicito Virgilio Trinidad, commander of the 1st Infantry Division, condemned the killing of the soldier. He said, "This action of the enemy manifests their anti-development and anti-peace programs. Our troops were there to uplift the socio-economic condition of our fellows but were fired upon in a desperate attempt to disrupt them. This incident will not stop the 1st Infantry Division to bring peace and development in every community."
[Al Ahram] Friday's festivities across 19 governorates have left 30 dead and 1138 injured, announces Egypt's health ministry.
The festivities erupted between supporters of deposed Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, who was fielded by the Moslem Brüderbund, against opponents and security forces.
Morsi's supporters staged nationwide protests against his removal from power on Wednesday evening. The protesters accuse the Armed Forces of staging a coup against an elected president and are, therefore, violating democratic legitimacy.
Protesters died in several cities and districts, including Cairo, Giza, Alexandria, Assiut, Luxor, Al Arish and Ismailia.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under: Muslim Brotherhood
[Haaretz] Coptic priest shot dead in Sinai; shooting - believed to be sectarian strike by Islamist insurgents - follows Muslim Brotherhood condemnation of priest for supporting Morsi's removal. Paywalled article. Wait a week and USA Today might have it.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under: Arab Spring
[Al Ahram] Leading US television channel CNN has come under severe attack by Egyptians on social networking sites, accusing the channel of bias against events unfolding in Egypt.
After millions erupted into the streets across the country on Sunday for a planned demonstration calling for early presidential elections, the military intervened to oust president Mohamed Morsi after he refused to fulfil the protesters' demands.
The intervention was immediately dubbed a coup by the then-ruling Moslem Brüderbund, the group from which Morsi hails, who have been demonstrating in the hundreds of thousands in his support. The characterisation was shared by CNN, whose coverage of events was subtitled, "Coup in Egypt: Military ousts Morsi."
Opponents of the president refused the categorisation. "It's a revolution, not a coup," said a Facebook page launched Friday entitled, "Obama supports terrorism in Egypt." The group quickly gained over 35,000 subscribers.
The opposition, who filled the iconic Tahrir Square and surrounded the presidential palace in Cairo last Sunday, are generally pleased with the army's move. The political "roadmap" set forth by the army was agreed upon in discussions with the opposition.
The roadmap included instating the head of Egypt's High Constitutional Court as interim president and forming a technocratic government until early presidential and parliamentary elections are held.
The roadmap was identical to the one called for by the anti-Morsi 'Rebel' campaign, the signature drive signed by Egyptians demonstrating on 30 June. For this reason, many were infuriated by CNN's insistence on dubbing what happened a "coup," accusing it of backing US policies in support of Morsi.
On Twitter, the hash-tag titled #CNN_STOP_Lying_About_Egypt trended in Egypt, showing the extent of antagonism that has grown against the channel.
Journalist Bassem Sabri posted the CNN logo emblazoned within the emblem of the Moslem Brüderbund as a sign depicting the channel's perceived adoption of the Brotherhood line.
The Brotherhood, for its part, immediately condemned the military's move, accusing it of overthrowing a legitimately elected president.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[1 views]
Top|| File under: Arab Spring
[Al Ahram] A presidential source said on Saturday evening that Mohamed ElBaradei Egyptian law scholar and sometime Iranian catspaw. He was head of the IAEA from December 1997 to November 2009. At some point during his tenure he was purchased by the Iranians. ElBaradei and the IAEA were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for something in 2005. ElBaradei served on the Board of Trustees of the International Crisis Group, a lefty NGO that is bankrolled by the Carnegie Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as George Soros' Open Society Institute. After the fall of Mubarak he ran for president. He lost. , the general coordinator of the National Salvation Front, has already been assigned the post of prime minister. "He accepted and will be shortly sworn in," the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Ahram Online.
According to an official source, the choice of ElBaradei came after the military failed to convince Central Bank Governor Hisham Ramez to accept the job. Farouk El-Oqda, Ramez's predecessor, also declined the post.
A graduate of the faculty of law at Cairo University, ElBaradei joined the Foreign Service before he launched his international career.
In 2009, ElBaradei who was just finishing his post as head of the ineffective International Atomic Energy Agency, offered a new addition to the small number of voices calling for an end to the rule of Hosni Mubarak ...The former President-for-Life of Egypt, dumped by popular demand in early 2011... , who was later ousted by the 25 January Revolution.
Upon his arrival in Egypt, ElBaradei called on Egyptians to sign petitions to end Mubarak's rule and foil a scheme to pass power to Mubarak's son, Gamal.
His call was supported by rank-and-file Egyptians as by top intellectuals. Following the removal of Mubarak, ElBaradei was called on by his supporters to run for president, but declined, saying he did not want to join the political race, especially in the absence of a clear constitution.
Nobel peace prize laureate ElBaradei had been a leading opposition figure since the 2011 revolution, having been one of the most prominent figures to foresee and call for the uprising that put an end to Mubarak's 30-year rule.
He initially had the intention to run in last year's presidential elections, but backtracked on his decision months ahead of the polls saying there were no guarantees that elections would be fair.
During the transitional period under interim military rule, ElBaradei grew critical of the policies of the Moslem Brüderbund, which in turn had accused him of being an agent of the US.
ElBaradei has also been a staunch critic of Morsi and the Brotherhood and supported the elected president's ouster, having spoken as an opposition representative after Defence Minister Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi announced Morsi's removal and the implementation of an emergency "roadmap."
Last November, together with former presidential runners Hamdin Sabbahi and Jerry Lewis doppelgänger Amr Moussa ... who was head of the Arab League for approximately two normal lifespans, accomplishing nothing that was obvious to the casual observer ... , ElBaradei and other political figures started the National Salvation Front, a loose gathering of opposition to Morsi, Egypt's first-ever freely elected president and leading Moslem Brüderbund member.
A week before the 30 June demonstrations and the military intervention that brought about Morsi's ouster, ElBaradei called on Morsi to step down. On Wednesday evening, along with army chief Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and other civil, political and religious leaders, ElBaradei told the nation that Morsi's ouster wasn't a military coup but a power people ouster.
"We welcome the candidacy of Dr. ElBaradei. Already we insisted on his candidacy because we wanted a political figure that has freedom to choose ministers and we are confident that Dr. ElBaradei will not bow to any pressures," said Ahmed Emam, a leading member of the Strong Egypt Party.
"Dr. ElBaradei does not support the exclusion of any political force or party in Egypt," said Emam. "We need someone who believes in democracy."
Strong Egypt leader Abdel-Moneim Abul-Fotouh has already attended a meeting with interim president Adly Mansour and ElBaradei, having been among the most prominent figure to endorses ElBaradei's appointment as premier.
Rebel campaign co-founder Mahmoud Badr also revealed on his official Twitter account that the revolutionary youth movement had called for ElBaradei by name.
The Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party and Salafist Nour Party have reportedly rejected ElBaradei's appointment.
The appointment of ElBaradei, who has stressed that he would not run in upcoming presidential elections, is likely to infuriate Islamist supporters of Morsi, who have been gathering across the nation in the hundreds of thousands calling for his reinstatement. Islam. Infuriate. The two go together like ham and eggs, macaroni and cheese, feet and corns.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[6 views]
Top|| File under: Arab Spring
[Dawn] Two suspected key commanders of the outlawed Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistain were locked away Book 'im, Mahmoud! by security forces during a search operation in Charsadda district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa ... formerly NWFP, still Terrorism Central... province on Saturday.
Officials told Dawn.Com that the security forces conducted a search operation in Hesra Yousafzai area of Charsadda and arrested to suspected bully boys.
After initial interrogation, the two suspected forces of Evil were identified as Noor Muhammad and Habib Gul, said to be key commanders of the TTP Mohmand chapter, said a security official.
Station House Officer Shaifullah of Charsadda City, however, denied that police took part in the operation.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under: TTP
Set aside all the politics over the War on Terror and then ask what Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have in common.
All three are arrogant and unstable men filled with aimless grievances and animated by the sense that they never received the things that they really wanted out of life. They are in short exactly the sort of people that foreign intelligence agencies recruit when trying to spot weak links in the security chain.
Foreign intelligence agencies look for people with security clearances who go through a lot of money in short periods of time, who simmer with grudges and grievances, who are rootless and dissatisfied. Those descriptions adequately cover Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning; two men who should never have been given any kind of clearance whatsoever on personality alone.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[2 views]
Top|| File under:
ISTANBUL -- Police on Saturday fired volleys of tear gas at protesters who had gathered at the citys landmark Taksim Square with the intention of entering a park which has been cordoned off, hours after the citys governor warned that the demonstration was illegal and participants would be dispersed.
A few thousand people converged on the square, with the aim of entering the nearby Gezi Park, whose redevelopment plans sparked anger and morphed into nationwide anti-government protests in June. Organizers had planned to serve notice to authorities of a court decision that has annulled redevelopment plans for Taksim and break through police cordons.
The park has been cordoned off since June 15, when police routed environmentalists who occupied it amid the widespread demonstrations against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogans government. His opponents say he has become increasingly authoritarian since coming to power a decade ago. The nationwide protests have largely dwindled although thousands of demonstrators have been gathering at Taksim every Saturday for the past three weeks, demanding justice for a protester who was killed by police fire.
This time, some protesters argued with police standing guard at the entrance of Gezi Park. Police then pushed protesters away from the square with pressurized water and tear gas. They also chased protesters down two main streets off Taksim, firing tear gas.
Istanbul Gov. Huseyin Avni Mutlu had warned that the protest aimed at entering Gezi was unauthorized and said police would intervene. He also said authorities planned to reopen the park on Sunday or Monday.
Earlier, police also dispersed a small group of demonstrators who squirted water at each other at the square, in a passive form of protest to poke fun at polices abundant use of water cannon throughout the anti-government protests. Police used shields to shove the protesters off Taksim.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
[Dawn] More than 50 mortar shells fired from Afghanistan fell into Pak territory on Saturday.
All the shells dropped in different areas of Pakistain's South Wazoo tribal region.
According to initial reports, 10 shells fell on Angoor Adda which destroyed houses and shops. However, man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them... no casualties were reported.
Moreover, security forces cordoned off the area and started an investigation.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[2 views]
Top|| File under: Taliban
#1
Moreover, security forces cordoned off the area and started an investigation.
[An Nahar] Influential Mohammedanholy man Yusuf al-Qaradawi ...crackpot Egyptian Islamist theologian. He is best known for his program Shariah and Life on Al Jazeera, with an estimated audience of 60 million kindred souls worldwide. He is also well-known for IslamOnline, which occasionally advocates things like slavery and thumping the old lady with a rod no thicker than an inch, and has published more than 120 books, including Islam: The Future Civilization. Joe has long had a prominent role within the intellectual leadership of the Moslem Brüderbund. Some of his views have been controversial in the West, though less so among the rubes of the Mysterious East, and he was refused entry to the United Kingdom in 2008. In 2004, 2,500 Muslim academics from Saudi Arabia, Iraq and from the Palestinian territories condemned Qaradawi, and accused him of giving Islam a bad name.... on Saturday issued a religious decree, or fatwa, urging Egyptians to support tossed Islamist president Mohammed Morsi who was toppled by the army on Wednesday.
"Their every action is invalid," Qaradawi said of "those who have tossed the president, suspended the constitution and imposed another president and constitution" on Egypt.
The Qatar-based but Egypt-born holy man published the fatwa on his Internet site.
He urged "all parties and political groups in Egypt to support correctness and restore President Morsi to his legitimate post".
"Sharia (Islamic law) imposes on all believers allegiance to the elected president, to carry out his orders and conform to his directives."
Morsi "must remain president, and nobody can claim the right to remove him in the name of the people", Qaradawi added.
"I call on all Egyptians, men and women, young and old, rich and poor, Mohammedan and Christian, liberal and Islamist to join ranks to protect the gains of the revolution" that overthrew Hosni Mubarak ...The former President-for-Life of Egypt, dumped by popular demand in early 2011... in 2011.
Qaradawi, 86, is regular commentator on Al-Jazeera ... an Arab news network headquartered in Qatar, notorious for carrying al-Qaeda press releases. The name means the Peninsula, as in the Arabian Peninsula. In recent years it has settled in to become slightly less biased than MSNBC, in about the same category as BBC or CBS... satellite television and has backed the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under: Muslim Brotherhood
#1
Qatar is really stirring things up. He obviously speaks with their approval
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/07/2013 10:55
Comments ||
Top||
#2
Qatar lost out when the army stepped in.
No doubt we'll be hearing further bleatings, vaguely similar to this from Washington, now that vacation is over.
[Al Ahram] Insurance and Social Affairs Minister Nagwa Khalil has requested that the ministry's legal affairs department contact Egypt's public prosecution regarding investigations into the torching earlier this week of the Moslem Brüderbund's headquarters in Cairo's Muqattam district.
Eight were killed last Sunday in skirmishes between Brotherhood members and attackers armed with Molotov cocktails who surrounded the building.
The group's headquarters were eventually ransacked and torched by the attackers.
Over the course of the last several months, Moslem Brüderbund offices in numerous Egyptian governorates have come under attack by unknown elements.
Khalil, who was appointed by deposed president Mohamed Morsi last August, told MENA that she was concerned about whether the headquarters had contained weapons and whether there were militias or any Death Eater groups associated with the Moslem Brüderbund group.
She added that the step comes within the context of legal procedures in accordance with Law 84 of 2002, which prohibits non-government organizations and institutions from forming paramilitary groups.
Egypt's largest Islamist movement, the Moslem Brüderbund was officially registered as a non-government organization by the social security ministry in March 2011 when Khalil was in office.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under: Arab Spring
[An Nahar] Saudi banks expressed on Saturday readiness to cooperate with security agencies and hand over the bank accounts and transactions of the people affiliated with Hizbullah.
The Gulf Cooperation Council officials had met in Riyadh on Thursday to coordinate sanctions in the six member states against Hizbullah over its support for the Syria regime.
Despite that revealing bank accounts is considered prohibited, however the Saudi banks said they will cooperate "absolutely and unconditionally" with the Interior Ministry in this regards as the matter is related to the nation's highest interests and threatens the national security.
The GCC's meeting on Thursday was "to develop mechanisms to monitor movements, financial transactions and business operations of Hizbullah," said Bahraini deputy interior minister Khaled al-Absi.
The GCC monarchies decided on June 10 to impose sanctions on Hizbullah, targeting residency permits and its financial and business activities in reprisal for the group's armed intervention in Syria.
Absi told news hounds two expert teams will be formed: one to "coordinate with central banks" and the second to review "legal, administrative and financial matters" linked to the sanctions.
Last month's measure was taken "after the discovery in GCC states of several terrorist cells linked to the group," said Absi.
However, a person who gets all wrapped up in himself makes a mighty small package... he did not say how many Hizbullah suspects would be affected by the sanctions or their estimated assets and financial and commercial operations in the region.
The sanctions would be implemented "in coordination... with ministers of commerce and the central banks of the GCC," the council's Secretary General Abdullatif al-Zayani has said.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under: Hezbollah
#1
A Sunni kingdom going after Shia terrorist is not a stretch. How about bank records for Sunni Al Qaeda terrorist funding?
And remember, Jordan is a 'moderate' Arabic country...
AMMAN -- The Jordanian government said on Tuesday that it had blocked 254 unlicensed news websites, 16 of them in the previous two days, using powers under a 2012 law criticized as a threat to freedom of expression.
Fayez Shawabkeh, head of the Press and Publication Department said: 16 local news websites were blocked in the past two days after carefully examining their situation.
This brings the total number of sites the PPD blocked recently to 254, while 111 sites have obtained licenses.
On June 3, authorities said they would block nearly 300 out of 400 local news websites for failing to obtain the necessary licensing, under last years controversial legislation.
The law gave the government powers to regulate electronic publications, requiring them to register with the PPD and obtain a license. It stipulates that the chief editors of news websites must be members of the Jordan Press Association, giving the government the right to censor content and hold journalists liable for comments posted on webpages.
The PPD has insisted the decision does not seek to restrict freedoms, and that the objective is to organize the work of these websites.
I call on all local news websites to correct their status in line with the law. Operating outside the law, which we will continue to apply, will not be in their interest, Shawabkeh warned.
Journalists accuse the government of seeking to control who can publish news.
One of the sites blocked in the past two days is 7iber, Arabic for ink. Its editor, Lina Ejeilat, told AFP 7iber was an interactive website that published reports and features from contributors, and said it should not be covered by the legislation.
We are a blog and definitely not a news website, she said.
Shawabkeh disagreed, saying that 7iber is registered at the trade and industry ministry as a news website and posts news and political analyses about Jordan, which means that the law applies to it.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
[Dawn] QUETTA: Armed snuffies torched an oil tanker carrying fuel for Saindak Copper and Gold Project run by a Chinese company in Mastung district of Balochistan ...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it... on Saturday.
A senior police officer who requested not to be named since he was not authorised to speak to the media told Dawn.com that snuffies from nearby mountains opened fire on two oil tankers in Choto area of Mastung.
He said one tanker caught fire while the other tanker remained undamaged.
The police officer said there were no casualties as the drivers were quick to escape the scene.
The oil tankers were supplying fuel to Chinese run copper and gold project in Saindak area. Chinese have been operating the Saindak copper and gold project for the past few years.
This incident comes at a time when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ... served two non-consecutive terms as prime minister, heads the Pakistain Moslem League (Nawaz). Noted for his spectacular corruption, the 1998 Pak nuclear test, border war with India, and for being tossed by General Musharraf... has signed eight mega agreements with the Chinese government during his five-day visit to the country.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[1 views]
Top|| File under:
[CODEWIT] Nigeria's National Security Adviser shocked many when he boldly admitted that Aliyu Mohammed Gusau, Ibrahim Babangida(IBB) or the presidential ambition of Atiku Abubakar was behind Boko Haram ... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality... 's Sponsorship.
Shortly after his shocking revelations to the Nigerian people, General Azazi was axed from his position. A little later, he was killed when the chopper he was travelling in was exploded over Bayelsa.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[1 views]
Top|| File under: Boko Haram
#2
Its Islamic - and African. If you are expecting this terror org to be put down by the Obama administration, then I doubt we will see anything more harsh than "You're fat and your mom dresses you funny". Even that might be too much for the State Dept.
ANKARA -- Istanbuls governor warned Saturday that a planned gathering by protesters at the citys landmark Taksim Square is illegal and that police would disperse participants.
Gov. Huseying Avni Mutlus warning came hours before protesters were expected to converge on the square, intending to forcibly enter the nearby Gezi Park whose redevelopment plans sparked anger and morphed into nationwide anti-government protests in June.
Gezi Park has been cordoned off since June 15, when police routed environmentalists who occupied it amid the widespread protests against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogans government. His opponents say he has become increasingly authoritarian since coming to power a decade ago.
The protests have now dwindled although thousands of demonstrators have been gathering at Taksim every Saturday for the past three weeks, demanding justice for a protester who was killed by police fire.
Taksim Solidarity, an umbrella group of organizations representing protesters, called for Saturdays rally at the square to serve notice to authorities of a court decision that has annulled the redevelopment plans and then attempt to break through the police cordon.
Mutlu has said the protest is unauthorized and warned that police would intervene. He also said authorities planned to reopen the park on Sunday or Monday.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
[FOXNEWS] Three people were killed and 38 injured on Saturday when a bomb went kaboom! in a bustling food market in Pakistain's eastern city of Lahore, officials said.
The blast hit the street of food shops and stalls in the downtown area, days before the start of the holy fasting month of Ramadan.
"The kaboom was caused due to a bomb apparently planted somewhere in the street," Zulfiqar Hameed, a senior police official, told AFP.
"Three people have been killed in the blast. At least 38 others are injured who have been shifted to various hospital," Hasan Iqbal, a senior health department official, told AFP.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under: TTP
#1
c'mon Paks- you can do better than that!
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/07/2013 12:02
Comments ||
Top||
[Al Ahram] The Moslem Brüderbund's Freedom and Justice Party on Saturday rejected Mohamed ElBaradei Egyptian law scholar and sometime Iranian catspaw. He was head of the IAEA from December 1997 to November 2009. At some point during his tenure he was purchased by the Iranians. ElBaradei and the IAEA were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for something in 2005. ElBaradei served on the Board of Trustees of the International Crisis Group, a lefty NGO that is bankrolled by the Carnegie Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as George Soros' Open Society Institute. After the fall of Mubarak he ran for president. He lost. 's appointment as Egypt's interim prime minister, as was announced earlier the same day, according to a senior party official.
"We reject this coup and everything that results from it, including ElBaradei," he told Rooters.
A presidential source on Saturday evening said that ElBaradei, general coordinator of the National Salvation Front opposition coalition, had already been assigned the post of prime minister.
"He accepted and will be sworn in shortly," the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Ahram Online.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under: Muslim Brotherhood
[NEWYORK.CBSLOCAL] It's a proposal that could make Brooklyn a bit more mellow, a push to prevent large and unruly gatherings by forcing people to get permission to party.
Recently, a massive house party, hosting more than 200 people, took place in the borough and some residents told CBS 2's Derricke Dennis they're sick of it.
"Just too many, because after the incident you can see is like long lines of people running down the street; Yeah, just too many," one neighbor said.
Parties like that one two Sundays ago are the focus of a new proposal from City Councilman Jumaane Williams, cracking down on what he calls advertised "house clubs," where there's a cover charge, drinks are being sold, and huge crowds are in attendance.
"We think when there's 200-300 people in a backyard and this happens on a routine basis, you're really inviting trouble," Williams said.
The proposal would mean anyone hosting a party with 40 or more people invited would have to register the event with the police.
"All we said is we have to inform the precinct and inform the community aboard. You wouldn't have to ask for approval. You wouldn't have to ask for permission," Williams said.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Ummm... you don't need a new law for this. It's illegal to sell alcohol without I license, and any cop worth his salt can come up with a dozen chicken-you-know-what violations without even breathing hard.
[HOSTED.AP.ORG] President Barack Obama I am not a dictator!... on Saturday reiterated that the U.S. is not aligned with and is not supporting any particular Egyptian political party or group and again condemned the ongoing violence across Egypt.
Obama made those points during a telephone conference with the National Security Council about developments in Egypt, according to a statement issued by the White House. He was spending the weekend at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland.
"The United States categorically rejects the false claims propagated by some in Egypt that we are working with specific political parties or movements to dictate how Egypt's transition should proceed," the White House statement said. "We remain committed to the Egyptian people and their aspirations for democracy, economy opportunity and dignity. But the future path of Egypt can only be determined by the Egyptian people."
The White House statement repeated key assertions Obama and other U.S. officials have made since the Egyptian military ousted the democratically elected president of Egypt, calling for an inclusive process allowing for all groups and parties to participate, urging all Egyptian leaders to condemn the use of force and to prevent further violence, and urging demonstrators to conduct themselves peacefully.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel spoke again Saturday to Egypt's defense minister, emphasizing the need for a peaceful civilian transition in Egypt and noting "the importance of security for the Egyptian people, Egypt's neighbors and the region," the Defense Department said in a statement.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[2 views]
Top|| File under: Arab Spring
#1
I am (Technically) not a dictator!, (Not yet anyway).
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
07/07/2013 16:20
Comments ||
Top||
#2
On the surface, it would appear that the Bammer's stance reflects the correct or proper position for the US in the ME - however, iff the Bammer is indeed an anti-US Marxist-Anarchist-Globalist as many Netters claim, then his staement is actually quite dangerous as per the Globalist premise of a post-Cold War, "MultiPolar" World where the present "sole" Global Superpower US is just one Power or Superpower amongst many on par.
The Bammer's statement is dangerous because Islam nor Radical Islam accepts parity wid any + all Non-Islam - "ISLAM MUST RULE, OR ISLAM WILL BE DESTROYED", as the Mullahs like to preach.
DITTO FOR RISING CHINA AS PER ITS PERCEIVED
"MANIFEST DESTINY" AS THE WORLD'S ONE-N-ONLY "POST-US" GLOBAL SUPERPOWER SUCCESSOR TO THE US.
IOW, BOTH OWG CALIPHATE, NUKE-HAPPY RADICAL ISLAM NOR "POST-US" CHINA DESIRE A TRULY "MULTIPOLAR" WORLD AS INTENDED OR PREMISED BY THE GLOBALISTS. ITV there can be no such thing as "parity".
The anti-US Globalists + aligned are taking a very dangerous, poten catastrophic unilateral risk iff they are acting on the premise that any rollback, peaceful or violent, of US Power-n-Influence WON'T BE INTERPRETED AS DE FACTO US "WEAKNESS" BY AGRESSIVE GEOPOL = POLI/POLITITICO-NUCLEAR RIVALS.
Everyone is an Indian, + no one is a Chief, or alternately there are too many Chiefs + no Indians - IIRC, either way thats how Lilith broke up wid Adam.
TRIPOLI -- Libya's largest coalition in the national assembly said it was boycotting sessions from Thursday, protesting at delays in drafting a constitution, it said on Thursday.
The National Forces Alliance (NFA), formed last year by liberal war-time leader Mahmoud Jibril, has 36 out of around 80 party seats in the General National Congress (GNC). The rest of the nearly 200 seats are held by independents. In a news conference, its members said the GNC, the legislature voted in last July, was too slow in drafting a law for electing a constitutional committee.
The constitution is to be drawn up by 60 members elected by Libyans, but the vote is still only a distant promise because of political squabbling and administrative delays.
"We have decided to suspend our participation within the GNC except for sessions relating to the law on the election of the constitutional committee," NFA spokesman Tawfiq Shahibi said, adding the GNC had "wasted time" discussing secondary issues.
"The GNC has been sidetracked from its major goals."
Shahibi did not cite any examples. But for many months, the GNC debated a "political isolation" law, which bans anyone who held a senior post under Muammar Qaddafi from government, regardless of their part in toppling the dictator. The law was adopted in May at the demand of armed factions that helped end Qaddafi's 42-year rule.
Armed violence and lawlessness caused in part by militia groups has hobbled governance in wide areas of the oil-producing state. In the latest incident highlighting Libya's precarious security, an armed group besieged the interior ministry for a third day.
The GNC was elected in Libya's first free elections in nearly 50 years, for an 18-month term to lead the North African country to polls once it had decided what political system it wanted. It will likely extend that term, given Libya is still far off from organizing elections. Shahibi said the NFA would attend regular GNC sessions once "an agreement was reached on completing our job within the correct time frame".
The majority of GNC members are civilian professionals and former exiled opposition members with little or no political experience or knowledge of how to run a government.
Of course, there's no one in Libya with "political experience or knowledge of how to run a government." That's how Daffy was able to run the place to his liking for forty years.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[1 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Ya suppose we could get Champ to get the largest party to boycott the US Congress?
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/07/2013 8:08
Comments ||
Top||
[Al Ahram] The Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party secretary-general rejects the invitation for dialogue extended by Egypt's interim President Adly Mansour. The best way to lose is to not show up.
"The party doesn't acknowledge the coup d'etat, we stress that the legitimate president for Egypt is Mohamed Morsi," reads the statement issued by FJP Secretary-General Hussein Ibrahim, whose party fielded Morsi.
The military removed Morsi when an estimated 33 million people hit the streets nationwide to call for early presidential elections and tensions raised in Cairo with nearby counter-demonstrations.
After being sworn in on Thursday, among Mansour's first actions was to call for dialogue on Saturday in attempt to end political polarisation in Egypt.
The interim president is currently meeting with representatives of different political forces and members of the Rebel campaign that had called for the mass protests to "withdraw confidence" in Morsi.
Mansour also met with his new aides, constitutional consultant Judge Aly Awad Saleh, political consultant Mostafa Hegazy and security consultant General Rafaat Shehata.
A presidential source revealed that Adly focused his discussion with his aides and political forces on a new constitutional declaration that will soon be announced. The declaration will provide details on how the upcoming transitional period will be managed.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under: Muslim Brotherhood
The United States should stop sending military aid to Egypt following the overthrow of its democratically elected president by the military, Senator John McCain said, as [Friday] overnight street battles left at least 36 dead across the divided country. Egypt's military insists that ousting Islamist Mohammed Morsi on Wednesday was the will of the people as expressed by mass demonstrations calling for him to go.
Secretary of State John Kerry approved $1.3 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Egypt -- the second largest recipient of such help after Israel -- only two months ago. However, U.S. law prohibits financial assistance to any country whose elected head of state is deposed in a military coup.
The U.S. has avoided calling Morsi's ouster a coup, which would mean aid would have to be suspended. But, speaking in Prescott, Arizona, McCain said, "I say that with great reluctance, but the United States of America I think must learn the lessons of history and that is: We cannot stand by without acting in cases where freely elected governments are unseated by the military arm of those nations."
Even if the "freely elected government" believes in ideas and ideologies that, taken to their logical conclusion, would destroy America. I'm beginning to think that as miserable as Obama has been, we dodged a bullet by not electing McCain...
He said he believed U.S. aid had to be suspended, and called on the Egyptian military to set a timetable for elections and a new constitution.
Hypomania (literally, "below mania") is a mood state characterized by persistent and pervasive elevated (euphoric) or irritable mood, as well as thoughts and behaviors that are consistent with such a mood state. It is most often associated with the bipolar spectrum. Many who are in a hypomanic state are extremely energetic, talkative, confident, and assertive. They may have a flight of ideas and feel creative. Many people also experience signature hypersexuality. While hypomania often generates productivity and creativity, it can become troublesome if the subject engages in risky behaviors. It is generally less severe than full-blown mania.
#16
Personally, I think the only country we should aid in the Middle East is Israel. Let the rest dissolve into the failed states they are. Once they lose all veneer of civilization, they'll no longer be able to bother their neighbors or others since it's hard to project power from the bronze age.
[Dawn] Federal Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan ordered the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on Saturday to weed out its unscrupulous officers and to set up an Anti-Money Laundering Cell on an immediate basis, DawnNews reported.
Chaudhry Nisar chaired a meeting in the federal capital during which he reviewed the performance of the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) and the FIA.
FIA's Director General briefed the federal interior minister over the performance of the investigating agency, after which Khan instructed the DG to remove all unscrupulous officials of the FIA from within its ranks and said that a committee would soon be constituted in this regards.
Khan added that postings in the FIA would be based upon better performance of officials.
The federal interior minister further ordered for the setting up of an Anti-Money Laundering Cell on an immediate basis.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
Egypt's military placed forces on high alert in two parts of the Sinai peninsula Friday, hours after presumed Islamist militants launched an early morning assault on Egyptian security forces near the border with Israel, killing one. The country also shuttered its border with the Gaza Strip at Rafah, turning away some 200 Palestinians trying to leave the coastal enclave.
State TV reported that the army had declared a "state of emergency," but the military later issued a statement denying the report, but confirming the high alert status.
In the early hour of Friday, a rocket attack on a police station in the border city of Rafah left a soldier dead and two others wounded, military sources said. According to witnesses who spoke to AFP, the building attacked was a military intelligence installation. Egyptian media identified the soldier killed Friday as 22-year-old Yehia Mohammed Abu al-Magd.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[1 views]
Top|| File under:
[DAILYPOST.NG] The Yobe state Command of the Joint Task Force,JTF, has smashed a group of Boko Haram ... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality... , recovering 2 vehicles, arms and ammunition, including other items.
This was disclosed by the JTF front man, Lt. Lazarus Eli, in Damaturu while addressing newsmen.
According to him, the hard boyz attacked a JTF checkpoint in Fune and made away with a police vehicle conveying some items to Borno state.
The JTF pursued the hard boyz and engaged them in a shootout and they were overpowered. The stolen vehicle was however recovered.
Items recovered from the hard boyz include AK47 rifle, three Rocket Propelled Gun bombs, three RPG chargers, one riot gun and 485 rounds of ammunition, disclosed the Spokesman. Others are 42 police jacket, 44 police helmets, six AK 47 rifles, magazines, 80 fragmentation blades and illicit drugs.
One of the suspects according to the front man of the JTF fled with gun wounds. He appealed to the public to report anyone found with the gun wounds to security operatives.
In another development, the people of Damaturu in particular and Yobe state in general have appealed to the Federal government to relax the suspension of telephone services to enable them provide useful information to security operatives.
Residents claimed that the attack on a college two weeks ago would have been averted, if there was telephone service.
It was revealed that suspicious movement was noticed on the fateful day by the people before the commencement of the curfew, but they could not communicate same to the security operatives due to lack of telephone service.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[2 views]
Top|| File under: Boko Haram
[TODAY] Embattled celebrity chef Paula Deen can now add being the target of an alleged extortion attempt to an already full plate of legal drama.
FBI officials announced Friday that they tossed in the calaboose Drop the gat, Rocky, or you're a dead 'un! Thomas Paculis, 62, in Newfield, N.Y., in connection with an extortion scheme targeting Deen. Paculis, who previously resided in Savannah and Augusta in Deen's home state of Georgia, has been charged with attempting to extort Deen by requesting $250,000 in compensation in return for not releasing "true and damning" statements to the media made by Deen, according to a federal criminal complaint filed on June 24.
Deen's lawyer contacted the FBI's Atlanta office after Paculis sent an email and followed up with a phone call requesting the money, according to the complaint. Paculis indicated that the information he threatened to release would bring hardship and financial ruin to Deen, according to FBI Special Agent Mark F. Giuliano.
The extortion charge against Paculis comes after Deen has been dropped by a dozen companies in the past few weeks after she admitted her past use of a racial slur during a legal deposition. A lawsuit filed against her by a former employee claims the employee was sexually harassed and worked in a discriminatory environment.
Paculis was taken to Onondaga County Jail in New York and is scheduled to appear in front of a U.S. magistrate judge in Savannah on July 16, according to the FBI statement. Representatives for Deen did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
[Dawn] The Pakistain Tehrik-e-Insaf ...a political party in Pakistan. PTI was founded by former Pakistani cricket captain and philanthropist Imran Khan. The party's slogan is Justice, Humanity and Self Esteem, each of which is open to widely divergent interpretations.... leadership was told on Saturday the complexity of the bad boys' phenomenon and how difficult it would be to negotiate with a plethora of groups with varied agendas, official sources said.
PTI chairman Imran Khan ... aka Taliban Khan, who ain't the brightest knife in the national drawer... and vice chairman and deputy parliamentary leader Shah Mehmood Wormtongue Qureshi, who arrived here to full-day briefings by various government departments, were informed that Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistain was not a monolithic organization and that more than 40 groups were operating with varied agendas making the task of engaging all the more difficult if not impossible.
They were also informed that criminal gangs had also joined forces with forces of Evil and to segregate the two would be difficult, the officials said. They were advised to implement a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy prepared by provincial home and tribal affairs department and persuade the federal government to follow suit.
The PTI leadership was also advised against issuing deadlines to implement reform agendas. "The wheel is already there, you don't have to reinvent the wheel," one source quoted a senior government official as saying.
Meanwhile, ...back at the revival hall, Buford bit the snake and Eloise began speaking in tongues... journalists boycotted a briefing by Provincial Minister Shaukat Yousafzai on Imran and Shah Mehmood Qureshi's visit and engagements in Beautiful Downtown Peshawar ...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province), administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistan's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire. to protest the manhandling and torture of their colleagues by doctors at Khyber Teaching Hospital, Peshawar on Friday.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[1 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
[An Nahar] The parents of Salafist holy man Sheikh Ahmed al-Asir stressed on Saturday that their son has been a staunch supporter of the Lebanese army, considering that he survived an liquidation bid.
"Whatever I said no one will listen to us after he (al-Asir) was accused of killing army officers," the mother of al-Asir, who remained unnamed, told An Nahar newspaper.
She described the recent festivities in the southern town of Abra, near the city of Sidon, as an attempt to assassinate the controversial holy man.
"He was forced to carry arms to defend himself and his supporters... He had continuously demanded that the state controls the arms" of Hizbullah, the mother of al-Asir added.
"I am his mother and I am a Shiite... He was only against the dominance of arms," she said.
Al-Asir, a 45-year-old holy man who is no where to be found since last month's deadly gunbattles between his gunnies and the Lebanese army, resurfaced Thursday in an alleged audio message in which he described the festivities as a plot against him.
The holy man called on the Sunni community to "break the barrier of fear and fear only God," urging them to protest "in a peaceful and civilized manner" after Friday prayers "in coordination with the Musselmenholy mans."
State Commissioner to the Military Court Judge Saqr Saqr charged on Thursday 27 people for their involvement in the Abra battles where Bilal Bin Rabah mosque is located.
Ten of them were charged in absentia, including al-Asir and a onetime prominent singer-turned Salafist Fadel Shaker.
The holy man teamed up with Shaker when around two years ago he began agitating for Hizbullah to disarm.
If convinced, the suspects face the death penalty.
Hilal al-Asir, the father of Sheikh Ahmed, expressed regret the assault against news hounds in comments published in An Nahar.
"Those who attacked news hounds were shoved into (Friday's) protest," Hilal said, considering that they tarnishes the image of al-Asir family.
Hundreds of men and women supporting al-Asir marched from Bilal Bin Rabah Mosque after Friday prayers, heading to al-Karameh roundabout in the southern city of Sidon.
The protesters assaulted TV crews in Abra, smashing the windows of their cars and breaking their cameras during the march, prompting the Lebanese army to ask journalists to leave Sidon and the northern city of Tripoli ...a confusing city, one end of which is located in Lebanon and the other end of which is the capital of Libya. Its chief distinction is being mentioned in the Marine Hymn... until the end of the protest.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[4 views]
Top|| File under: Salafists
A long life reminds us of how short history is: Princess Fawzia outlived the Egyptian monarchy, and the Nasserist fascism and pan-Arabism that succeeded it, and the doomed "United Arab Republic" of Egypt and Syria, and the fetid third-of-a-century "stability" of the Mubarak kleptocracy. And she came within 24 hours of outliving the Muslim Brotherhood's brief, disastrous grip on power. Mark Steyn at his finest. As they say, RTWT.
[PREMIUMTIMESNG] The Borno State Chapter of the All Nigeria People's Party (ANPP) on Friday condemned the burning of its state chairman's house by the youth vigilante group in Maiduguri, the state capital. The group had accused the party chairman, Mala Othman, of being an accomplice of the Boko Haram ... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality... bad boys.
The ANPP said the accusation against its chairman and the burning of his house were politically motivated by extraneous forces that have infiltrated the youth vigilante.
The vigilantes, also called Civilian JTF, have been assisting the Nigerian military to identify and apprehend members of the outlawed bad boy group. They have also been victims of attacks by the bad boys.
In a press statement issued after a meeting on Friday, and signed by its state secretary, Bakura Shettima, the ANPP said it would have ignored the incident if it was not ostensibly targeted to smear the proven integrity of Othman.
"Our party chairman, Othman, is an accomplished politician who has the interest of the people and the development of the state at heart. Accusing him of such behavior is witch hunting of which the people of Borno state are never known for," the party scribe said.
Mr. Shettima argued that the attempt to implicate the ANPP chairman in the activities of the outlawed Boko Haram sect was a total contradiction of the basic facts on ground.
'In order to put the records straight, we want to establish the fact that it is on record that 99 percent of politicians killed since the Boko Haram insurgency began in the state are members of the ANPP, the ruling party in Borno State. The party has put Borno State on the path of unprecedented development under the able leadership of our State Chairman, Alhaji Mala Othman, who is a leader with unquestionable character. With this background, it is unimaginable to say that he is sponsoring the killing of his own people.
"We are appealing to the Youth Volunteers to be careful not to take the law into their hands and should be aware of politicians who might use them against their opponents in order to score cheap political goal," he said.
Mr. Shettima, who called for full investigation of the Monday assault on the ANPP chieftain, appealed that "the youth volunteers should therefore confine themselves to the areas where they live and report any suspicious people or movement to security agencies for necessary action."
On Monday, the youth vigilante attacked the New GRA, Maiduguri, home of Mala Othman attempting to arrest him, but ended up burning his house after he was helped to escape by security operatives.
The ANPP is the ruling party in Borno.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[1 views]
Top|| File under: Boko Haram
[Al Ahram] Interim President Adly Mansour met with Egypt's defence and interior ministers and intelligence chief in the presidential palace Saturday morning.
Mansour, who was sworn into office Thursday morning, also met with his new aides, constitutional consultant Judge Aly Awad Saleh, political consultant Mustafa Hegazy, and security consultant General Rafaat Shehata.
According to a presidential source, the meetings focused on ways to secure protests and ensure national security.
The source added that Adly focused his discussion with constitutional and political aides on a new constitutional declaration that will be announced soon. The declaration will provide details on how the upcoming transitional period will be managed.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under: Arab Spring
[An Nahar] Bombings north of Storied Baghdad ...located along the Tigris River, founded in the 8th century, home of the Abbasid Caliphate... on Saturday killed five people, including a police officer, police and doctors said, a day after attacks across the country left 23 dead.
A roadside kaboom killed four people west of the northern city of Kirkuk, ... a thick stew of Arabs, Turkmen, Kurds, and probably Antarcticans, all of them mutually hostile most of the time... while another bomb in Tikrit, also north of the Iraqi capital, killed a police officer and maimed two others.
The attacks come a day after 23 people died in a string of attacks across the country, including the bombing of a Shiite religious hall.
Iraq is grappling with a protracted political standoff within its national unity government and months-long protests among its Sunni Arab minority.
Analysts and diplomats worry that the standoff is unlikely to be resolved at least until general elections due next year.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under: al-Qaeda in Iraq
CAIRO -- A Cairo court has adjourned to August 17 2099 the retrial of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak over charges of corruption and involvement in the killing of protesters during the 2011 uprising that ousted him.
Mubarak and his two sons, Alaa and Gamal, who are on trial for corruption, appeared at the court session on Saturday. Mubarak is charged with both corruption and responsibility for the deaths of some 850 protesters during the early days of the 2011 revolt. The former leader was convicted in 2012 of the charges, but an appeals court granted a retrial.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
[REUTERS] Turkish police fired teargas and water cannon to disperse hundreds of protesters in an Istanbul square on Saturday as they gathered to enter a park that was the center of protests against Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan last month.
Taksim Solidarity, combining an array of political groups, had called a march to enter the sealed off Gezi park, but the governor of Istanbul warned that any such gathering would be confronted by the police.
"We are going to our park to open its doors to its real owners ... We are here and we will stay here ... We have not given up our demands," the umbrella group said in a statement.
Riot police chased protesters into side streets in what appeared to be the biggest police intervention since the mid-June protests and riots that saw Taksim Square sealed off by makeshift barricades.
"They can use Gezi Park as they wish, without gathering or demonstrating there ... If there is an illegal demonstration or march, of course we will intervene by using water cannons," Interior Minister Muammer Guler said.
Protesters in Istanbul chanted "Together against fascism" and "Everywhere is resistance". I see they've picked up on the Islamism=Fascism thing. A hundred years from now they might pick up on the Islam=Fascism thing.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under: Arab Spring
Islamist gunmen staged multiple attacks on security forces in Egypt's troubled Sinai Peninsula early on Friday, two days after the army overthrew elected Islamist President Mohamed Morsy, security sources and state television reported.
The security sources said a soldier was killed and two were wounded when a police station in Rafah on the border with the Gaza Strip came under rocket fire. The police post is close to the local headquarters of military intelligence.
Earlier, attackers fired rocket-propelled grenades at army checkpoints guarding El Arish airport, close to the border with the Gaza Strip and Israel, in the latest of a string of security incidents in the lawless region, the sources said.
It was not clear whether the attacks were coordinated and in reaction to Morsy's removal. Islamist militants believed to have links to al Qaeda have established a foothold in the sparsely populated desert peninsula, sometimes in league with local Bedouin smugglers and with Palestinian militants from Gaza.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
A number of loud explosions were heard near the southern resort city of Eilat shortly after 9 p.m. Thursday night. There were no reports of injuries. Security forces were dispatched to the area to determine the source of the blasts, but their searches yielded nothing suggesting a possible rocket attack. They resumed searching on Friday morning.
It was not clear if the explosions were the result of missiles being lobbed at the city from the Sinai Peninsula.
Reports differed as to how many blasts there were. Initial reports indicated two explosions, but an Eilat resident told Ynet news that three were heard.
"I heard three serious explosions with no whistle. I went with my brother and mother into the shelter. There was panic," the witness said.
The outlet reported that sirens did not sound before the blasts.
Eilat, which sits on the Red Sea, is wedged between Jordan and Egypt. Islamist terrorists based in Sinai have shot missiles at the city several times in past years, though most land in the sea, or open areas.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/07/2013
00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[1 views]
Top|| File under:
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Nawaz Sharif
[USATODAY] Police say enraged spectators invaded a football field, stoned the referee to death and quartered his body after he stabbed a player to death.
[BREITBART] A gourmet popcorn bar in New York combined two healthy foods into a trendy snack -- wine-soaked popcorn, the artisan popcorn maker says.
[NYPOST] Twinkie's legendary shelf life is getting even longer.
David Cameron
[Al Ahram]Supporters and opponents of ousted president Mohamed Morsi -- removed by the military earlier this week -- plan rival demonstrations on Sunday, with the former demanding Morsi's reinstatement and the latter supporting Morsi's overthrow.
[Al Ahram] Syria's fractious opposition elected a new leader on Saturday but rebel groups were reported to be fighting among themselves in a sign of growing divisions on the ground between factions trying to topple 
A Philippine soldier was killed in an ambush Friday by communist rebels in the town of Guipos in Zamboanga del Sur province.
[Al Ahram] Leading US television channel CNN has come under severe attack by Egyptians on social networking sites, accusing the channel of bias against events unfolding in Egypt.
Opponents of the president refused the categorisation. "It's a revolution, not a coup," said a Facebook page launched Friday entitled, "Obama supports terrorism in Egypt." The group quickly gained over 35,000 subscribers.
[Al Ahram] A presidential source said on Saturday evening that 
Jerry Lewis doppelgänger Amr Moussa
Wazoo
... an Arab news network headquartered in Qatar, notorious for carrying al-Qaeda press releases. The name means 
[Al Ahram] Insurance and Social Affairs Minister Nagwa Khalil has requested that the ministry's legal affairs department contact Egypt's public prosecution regarding investigations into the torching earlier this week of the 
[Al Ahram] The 
[HOSTED.AP.ORG] President 
[Al Ahram] The Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party secretary-general rejects the invitation for dialogue extended by Egypt's interim President Adly Mansour.
The United States should stop sending military aid to Egypt following the overthrow of its democratically elected president by the military, Senator John McCain said, as [Friday] overnight street battles left at least 36 dead across the divided country. Egypt's military insists that ousting Islamist Mohammed Morsi on Wednesday was the will of the people as expressed by mass demonstrations calling for him to go.
[Dawn] Federal Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan ordered the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on Saturday to weed out its unscrupulous officers and to set up an Anti-Money Laundering Cell on an immediate basis, DawnNews reported.
Egypt's military placed forces on high alert in two parts of the Sinai peninsula Friday, hours after presumed Islamist militants launched an early morning assault on Egyptian security forces near the border with Israel, killing one. The country also shuttered its border with the Gaza Strip at Rafah, turning away some 200 Palestinians trying to leave the coastal enclave.
[Dawn] The Pakistain 
Mehmood 
[An Nahar] The parents of Salafist 
A number of loud explosions were heard near the southern resort city of Eilat shortly after 9 p.m. Thursday night. There were no reports of injuries. Security forces were dispatched to the area to determine the source of the blasts, but their searches yielded nothing suggesting a possible rocket attack. They resumed searching on Friday morning.
