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wmulnea

Exxon Chief Expects Oil Prices to Stay Low for 2 Years - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-to-stay-low-for-2-years.html

shared by wmulnea on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • wmulnea on 09 Mar 15
     
    Rex T. Tillerson, chief of Exxon Mobil predicts that due to slow global economic growth and higher than normal oil production, oil prices will remain low for the next two years.
amarsha5

Chief of Libya's new UN-backed government arrives in Tripoli | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...t-fayez-sarraj-arrives-tripoli

libya government UN

shared by amarsha5 on 31 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • amarsha5 on 31 Mar 16
     
    "The chief of Libya's new UN-backed government has reached Tripoli, defying threats from city militias, to proclaim a new order for the conflict-ravaged country in a move that could eventually pave the way for international forces to provide troops and air support."
wmulnea

Libya's civil war: That it should come to this | The Economist - 3 views

www.economist.com/...factional-chaos-it-should-come

shared by wmulnea on 11 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • It is split between a government in Beida, in the east of the country, which is aligned with the military; and another in Tripoli, in the west, which is dominated by Islamists and militias from western coastal cities
  • Benghazi is again a battlefield.
  • The black plumes of burning oil terminals stretch out over the Mediterranean.
  • ...69 more annotations...
  • Libya looked like the latest fragile blossoming of the Arab spring
  • Army commanders, mostly of Arab Bedouin origin, refused orders to shoot the protesters
  • the revolutionaries cobbled together a National Transitional Council (NTC) claiming to represent all of Libya
  • Volunteers from students to bank managers took up arms, joining popular militias and only sometimes obeying the orders of defecting army commanders trying to take control
  • In August Western bombing of government bases surrounding Tripoli cleared an avenue for the revolutionaries to take the capital.
  • Recognised abroad, popular at home and enjoying the benefits of healthy oil revenues—97% of the government’s income—the NTC was well placed to lay the foundations for a new Libya
  • he judges, academics and lawyers who filled its ranks worried about their own legitimacy and feared confrontation with the militias which, in toppling Qaddafi, had taken his arsenals for their own.
  • militia leaders were already ensconced in the capital’s prime properties
  • The NTC presided over Libya’s first democratic elections in July 2012, and the smooth subsequent handover of power to the General National Congress (GNC) revived popular support for the revolution.
  • Islamist parties won only 19 of 80 seats assigned to parties in the new legislature, and the process left the militias on the outside
  • The Homeland party, founded by Abdel Hakim Belhad
  • tried to advertise its moderation by putting an unveiled woman at the head of its party list in Benghazi
  • The incumbent prime minister, Abdurrahim al-Keib, a university professor who had spent decades in exile, fretted and dithered
  • He bowed to militia demands for their leaders to be appointed to senior ministries, and failed to revive public-works programmes
  • which might have given militiamen jobs
  • Many received handouts without being required to hand in weapons or disband, an incentive which served to swell their ranks
  • the number of revolutionaries registered with the Warriors Affairs Commission set up by the NTC was about 60,000; a year later there were over 200,000. Of some 500 registered militias, almost half came from one city, Misrata.
  • In May 2013 the militias forced parliament to pass a law barring from office anyone who had held a senior position in Qaddafi’s regime after laying siege to government ministries.
  • In the spring of 2014, Khalifa Haftar, a retired general who had earlier returned from two decades of exile in America, forcibly tried to dissolve the GNC and re-establish himself as the armed forces’ commander-in-chief in an operation he called Dignity
  • The elections which followed were a far cry from the happy experience of 2012. In some parts of the country it was too dangerous to go out and vote
  • Such retrenchment has been particularly noticeable among women. In 2011 they created a flurry of new civil associations; now many are back indoors.
  • Turnout in the June 2014 elections was 18%, down from 60% in 2012, and the Islamists fared even worse than before
  • Dismissing the results, an alliance of Islamist, Misratan and Berber militias called Libya Dawn launched a six-week assault on Tripoli. The newly elected parliament decamped to Tobruk, some 1,300km east
  • Grasping for a figleaf of legitimacy, Libya Dawn reconstituted the pre-election GNC and appointed a new government
  • So today Libya is split between two parliaments—both boycotted by their own oppositions and inquorate—two governments, and two central-bank governors.
  • The army—which has two chiefs of staff—is largely split along ethnic lines, with Arab soldiers in Arab tribes rallying around Dignity and the far fewer Misratan and Berber ones around Libya Dawn.
  • Libya Dawn controls the bulk of the territory and probably has more fighters at its disposal.
  • General Haftar’s Dignity, which has based its government in Beida, has air power and, probably, better weaponry
  • the Dignity movement proclaims itself America’s natural ally in the war on terror and the scourge of jihadist Islam
  • Libya Dawn’s commanders present themselves as standard-bearers of the revolution against Qaddafi now continuing the struggle against his former officers
  • Ministers in the east vow to liberate Tripoli from its “occupation” by Islamists, all of whom they denounce as terrorists
  • threatens to take the war to Egypt if Mr Sisi continues to arm the east. Sleeping cells could strike, he warns, drawn from the 2m tribesmen of Libyan origin in Egypt.
  • Yusuf Dawar
  • The struggle over the Gulf of Sirte area, which holds Libya’s main oil terminals and most of its oil reserves, threatens to devastate the country’s primary asset
  • And in the Sahara, where the largest oilfields are, both sides have enlisted ethnic minorities as proxies
  • ibya Dawn has drafted in the brown-skinned Tuareg, southern cousins of the Berbers; Dignity has recruited the black-skinned Toubou. As a result a fresh brawl is brewing in the Saharan oasis of Ubari, which sits at the gates of the al-Sharara oilfield, largest of them all.
  • Oil production has fallen and become much more volatile
  • oil is worth half as much as it was a year ago
  • The Central Bank is now spending at three times the rate that it is taking in oil money
  • The bank is committed to neutrality, but is based in Tripoli
  • Tripoli may have a little more access to cash, but is in bad shape in other ways
  • Fuel supplies and electricity are petering out
  • Crime is rising; carjacking street gangs post their ransom demands on Twitter
  • In Fashloum
  • residents briefly erected barricades to keep out a brigade of Islamists, the Nuwassi
  • “No to Islamists and the al-Qaeda gang” reads the roadside graffiti
  • Libya’s ungoverned spaces are growing,
  • Each month 10,000 migrants set sail for Europe
  • On January 3rd, IS claimed to have extended its reach to Libya’s Sahara too, killing a dozen soldiers at a checkpoint
  • The conflict is as likely to spread as to burn itself out.
  • the Western powers
  • have since been conspicuous by their absence. Chastened by failure in Afghanistan and Iraq, they have watched from the sidelines
  • Obama washed his hands of Libya after Islamists killed his ambassador
  • Italy, the former colonial power, is the last country to have a functioning embassy in Tripoli.
  • Even under Qaddafi the country did not feel so cut off
  • Dignity is supported not just by Mr Sisi but also by the United Arab Emirates, which has sent its own fighter jets into the fray as well as providing arms
  • The UAE’s Gulf rival, Qatar, and Turkey have backed the Islamists and Misratans in the west
  • If oil revenues were to be put into an escrow account, overseas assets frozen and the arms embargo honoured he thinks it might be possible to deprive fighters of the finance that keeps them fighting and force them to the table
  • Until 1963 Libya was governed as three federal provinces—Cyrenaica in the east, Fezzan in the south and Tripolitania in the west
  • The old divisions still matter
  • the marginalised Cyrenaicans harked back to the time when their king split his time between the courts of Tobruk and Beida and when Arabs from the Bedouin tribes of the Green Mountains ran his army
  • Tensions between those tribes and Islamist militias ran high from the start.
  • July 2011 jihadists keen to settle scores with officers who had crushed their revolt in the late 1990s killed the NTC’s commander-in-chief, Abdel Fattah Younis, who came from a powerful Arab tribe in the Green Mountains. In June 2013 the Transitional Council of Barqa (the Arab name for Cyrenaica), a body primarily comprised of Arab tribes, declared the east a separate federal region, and soon after allied tribal militias around the Gulf of Sirte took control of the oilfields.
  • In the west, indigenous Berbers, who make up about a tenth of the population, formed a council of their own and called on larger Berber communities in the Maghreb and Europe for support
  • Port cities started to claim self-government and set up their own border controls.
  • Derna—a small port in the east famed for having sent more jihadists per person to fight in Iraq than anywhere else in the world
  • opposed NATO intervention and insisted that the NTC was a pagan (wadani) not national (watani) council
  • Some in Derna have now declared their allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the so-called Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq.
  • In December the head of America’s Africa command told reporters that IS was training some 200 fighters in the town.
irede123

Hezbollah sent fighters to Iraq in secret to fight ISIS: Nasrallah | News , Lebanon New... - 0 views

www.dailystar.com.lb/...otecting-israel-nasrallah.ashx

ISIS hezbollah iraq

shared by irede123 on 25 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • irede123 on 25 Mar 16
     
    "Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah Sunday announced that Hezbollah had covertly sent fighters to combat ISIS in Iraq, saying that his party had fought under local command and not interfered in the country's internal affairs as Saudi Arabia had in some Arab states."
fcastro2

Russia's Putin, Egypt's Sisi say committed to fighting terrorism | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...pt-syria-idUSKBN0LE1O020150210

russia putin egypt terrorism ISIS Syria politics

shared by fcastro2 on 02 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • United by a deep hostility toward Islamists, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Russia's Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday they were both committed to fighting the threat of terrorism.
  • Sisi, who is fighting a raging Islamist insurgency in the Sinai region, said Putin had agreed with him that "the challenge of terrorism that faces Egypt, and which Russia also faces, does not stop at any borders
  • utin, making his first state visit to Egypt in a decade, said they agreed on "reinforcing our efforts in combating terrorism
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The Kremlin chief was the first leader of a major power to visit Egypt since former army chief Sisi became president in 2014
  • Sisi has repeatedly called for concerted counter-terrorism efforts in the Middle East and the West. Egypt has fought Islamist militancy for decades, mostly through security crackdowns that have weakened, but failed to eliminate, radical group
  • Putin has also resorted to force against Islamists, sending troops to quell a separatist rebellion in Chechnya, but still confronts insurgents in parts of the predominantly Muslim North Caucasus region
  • Egypt and the Soviet Union were close allies until the 1970s when Cairo moved closer to the United States, which brokered its 1979 peace deal with Israel.
  • Sisi has since opened up to Moscow, describing Russia on Tuesday as a "strategic friend"
  • Putin, facing Western isolation and sanctions over his support for pro-Russian separatists in neighboring Ukraine, received a grand welcome in Cair
  • Putin said he expected a new round of talks on the Syrian conflict, following on from a meeting of some opposition figures and the Damascus government in Moscow last month
  • The Moscow talks, which ended on Jan. 29, were not seen as yielding a breakthrough as they were shunned by the key political opposition in Syria and did not involve the main insurgent groups fighting on the ground
  • Moscow has been a long-standing ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad
  • fcastro2 on 02 Mar 15
     
    Not only is Russia aligning with Syria, but it is also getting closer to Egypt and its government. Egypt's president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi believes that its relationship with Russia is a "strategic alliance" which is what other middle eastern countries, such as Syria, believe. 
alarsso

SNC chief reassures minorities on post-Assad Syria - Your Middle East - 0 views

www.yourmiddleeast.com/...rities-on-postassad-syria_8251

syria post-assad minorities 2012

shared by alarsso on 09 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • "A future Syria will be pluralist, middle-class and democratic," Abdel Basset Sayda told German radio and television network Deutsche Welle.
  • We want to reassure all people,"
  • We see this as a national necessity."
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Syria's Muslim Brotherhood, a key opponent of Assad's
  • regime
  • "There will be no room for ideological, nationalist or religious extremism."
  • vetoed a UN Security Council resolution on Syria
  • Western nations calling for sanctions against Assad,
  • The Syrian National Council
  • "We have a concrete plan and keep contact with all opposition groups inside and outside Syria.
  • Syrian forces launched an all-out assault on opposition strongholds in Damascus Friday, a day after rebels seized crossings on the Iraqi and Turkish borders on the 16-month conflict's deadliest day so far.
mharcour

King Bibi Says No State - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nyahu-campaign-settlement.html

Israel Israeli-Palestinian conflict Palestine No State Netanyahu King Bibi

shared by mharcour on 11 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • mharcour on 11 Apr 15
     
    In this New York Times article, the author covers the final statements made by both front runners during the recent Prime Minister elections in Israel. Chief among the comments was Netanyahu's strong statement against a Palestinian state.
natphan

Netanyahu says UN chief Ban Ki-moon \'encouraging terror\' - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-middle-east-35414822

Netanyahu UN Security Council terrorism

shared by natphan on 28 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • natphan on 28 Jan 16
     
    Netanyahu isn't happy with UN Chief Ban Ki-moon. At the UN Security Council, Mr. Ban condemned recent stabbings of Israelis by Palestinians.
ralph0

Ankara blast: At least 28 dead in Turkish capital explosion - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-35599323

turkey explosion ankara blast dead capital bbc

shared by ralph0 on 17 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • ralph0 on 17 Feb 16
     
    An explosion just happened in Ankara, Turkey. The explosion has left at least 28 dead and almost 50 injured according to reports. The PKK is currently the chief suspected organization responsible for this but it will be interesting to see what reports show over the next few days.
micklethwait

ISIS Barber "Pardon me, chief… has my head rolled... - Oum Cartoon أم كرتون - 3 views

oumcartoon.tumblr.com/...er-beheading-execution-cartoon

shared by micklethwait on 05 Oct 14 - No Cached
micklethwait liked it
    • micklethwait
      micklethwait on 09 Oct 14
       
      Testing to see if Katharina can see this comment.
  • klweber2 on 05 Oct 14
     
    A blog post from Oum Cartoon questioning an Egyptian cartoon on ISIS executions. Briefly questions the importance of the cartoon and its symbolism.
diamond03

Efua Dorkenoo fought against female genital cutting - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

www.theglobeandmail.com/...article21421316

female genital cutting mail egypt revolution

shared by diamond03 on 03 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Efua Dorkenoo fought against female genital cutting
  • successful 30-year campaign against the tradition of genital cutting of girls and women,
  • Efua Dorkeno
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • ied Oct. 18 in London. She was 65.
  • Equality Now, a London-based women’s rights organizatio
  • Dorkenoo started organizations to battle genital cutting and co-ordinated the effort more broadly as acting director of women’s health at the World Health Organization in the late 1990s.
  • She wrote articles and an influential book – Cutting the Rose: Female Genital Mutilation (1996) –
  • “warrior in chief
  • “She inspired a generation of feminists across the world to take up the cause of banning the procedure,
  • Last year, the UN General Assembly voted unanimously to recognize female genital cutting as a human-rights violation.
  • British government prosecuted it as a crime for the first time,
  • African-led organization she helped found, The Girl Generation: Together to End FGM, began work this month.
  • practice is declining in many countries
  • teenage girls were less likely to have been cut than older women in half of the 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East where the practice is concentrated.
  • In Egypt, where more women have been cut than in any other country, surveys showed that 81 per cent of 15- to 19-year-olds had undergone the practice, compared with 96 per cent of women in their late 40s.
  • Female genital cutting involves pricking, piercing or amputating some or all of the external genitalia
  • vulva is closed, leaving a small hole for the passage of urine and menstrual blood.
  • The practice is believed to have originated about 4,000 years ago in Egypt or the Horn of Africa.
  • 27 countries in Africa
  • Adherents come from a spectrum of faiths, including Christianity, Islam and African religion
  • often ages 4 to 8
  • pathway to womanhood
  • The World Health Organization says female genital cutting has no health benefits and can cause severe bleeding, problems urinating and, later in life, cysts, infections and infertility.
  • intended to reduce women’s sexual pleasure
  • preserve a woman’s virginity until marriage.
  • 125 million women living today in the countries where it is concentrated have experienced such cutting.
  • The mother was so badly scarred, she said, that she could not deliver her baby through natural childbirth.
  • Ms. Dorkenoo began campaigning against the practice in the early 1980s
  • Foundation for Women’s Health and Development to promote the health of African women and girls, with a focus on abolishing female genital cutting
  • co-ordinated national action plans against female genital cutting in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Cameroon, Kenya, Somalia and Sudan.
  • In 1994, Queen Elizabeth II named Ms. Dorkenoo an honorary officer in the Order of the British Empire.
  • diamond03 on 03 Nov 14
     
    Efua Dorkenoo recently passed away. She was a women who fought for women's rights and the ban of FGM. She was an inspiration to feminists to take action. 
agomez117

Egyptian graffiti artists protest Sisi - 1 views

www.al-monitor.com/...t-art-sisi-graffiti-cairo.html

shared by agomez117 on 21 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • agomez117 on 21 Nov 14
     
    His face is on posters, shirts, cupcakes and now campaign banners and billboards across the country. The image of Egypt's next likely president, ex-army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, was iconized well before he declared his candidacy by propagandists, opportunists and supporters soon after he led the military ouster of President Mohammed Morsi last summer amid the nationalist fervor sweeping the country.
sheldonmer

Timeline: What's Happened Since Egypt's Revolution? | Egypt in Crisis | FRONTLINE | PBS - 0 views

www.pbs.org/...ppened-since-egypts-revolution

egyptian egyptian revolution social media aftermath

shared by sheldonmer on 10 Nov 14 - No Cached
    • sheldonmer
      sheldonmer on 10 Nov 14
       
      This article lays out what has happened in Egypt since the 2001 revolution. Starting from when Mubarak stepped down, the article gives a timeline of significant events up until September 12th of 2013. It highlights events such as Morsi being voted into presidency in 2012, The first draft of the constitution on Nov. 29th 2012, when protestors return to Tahrir Square on Jan. 25 2013, to when Sisi warns Mubarak of military intervention, to when Morsi is removed from office, to when Supreme Court Chief Justice Adly Mansour is chosen by Sisi to step in as Egypt's interim president, etc.
klweber2

Egypt chief editors pledge support for state institutions - Politics - Egypt - Ahram On... - 0 views

english.ahram.org.eg/...114013.aspx

egyptian media freedom

shared by klweber2 on 09 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • stop publishing "statements undermining state institutions"
  • major deadly attacks on security forces in Sinai.
  • ejection of attempts to doubt state institutions or insult the army or police or judiciary in a way that would reflect negatively on these institutions' performance,"
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • support" for all procedures the government
  • no longer publish statements "supportive of terrorism or that undermine state institutions directly or indirectly."
  • "total confidence" in state institutions
  • 30 security forces were killed in two attacks
  • media
  • essential role against any attempts at undermining state policies. 
  • klweber2 on 09 Nov 14
     
    This is an article from ahramonline that discusses how newspapers are supporting the government and censoring certain topics. This article briefly illustrates the restrictions on freedom of speech in Egypt. 
klweber2

Egypt's 1984 - Sada - 1 views

carnegieendowment.org/...hsxz

egyptian media freedom

shared by klweber2 on 09 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • silence opposition voices, and consolidate control over the body politic
  • unprecedented authoritarian measures into law.
  • military tribunals to try civilians accused of offenses such as blocking roads or attacking public property,
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • llows the military to assist police in guarding public facilities, including power stations, gas pipelines, railway stations, roads, and bridges.
  • NGOs in Egypt are bracing for a crackdown next month.
  • ew powers to expel students or fire professors suspected of “crimes that disturb the educational process”
  • at least eleven journalists are behind bars in Egypt,
  • professors and deans to choose their own leadership through elections.
  • media outlets also continue to come under fire from the government.
  • hauled before state security prosecutors and interrogated for fourteen hours after the paper declared it would publish investigation records into alleged fraud in the 2012 presidential election.
  • halting the publication of Al-Masry Al-Youm’s
  • veto their board decisions, and it imposes harsher penalties of up to three years in prison for such infractions as operating
  • privately owned daily newspapers signed a statement supporting the government in its war on terror and pledging not to criticize state institutions.
  • Privately-owned Al-Nahar station banned television host Mahmoud Saad from his nightly show,
  • klweber2 on 09 Nov 14
     
    This is an article from sada discussing how Egypt is comparative to the book "1984". In it is discusses how the government is not allowing for the media to criticize state institutions, and taking many journalists into custody.  
alarsso

Syria after Assad: Heading toward a Hard Fall? - The Washington Institute for Near East... - 0 views

www.washingtoninstitute.org/...sad-heading-toward-a-hard-fall

syria post-assad heading institute outcome

shared by alarsso on 16 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • To a certain extent, the nature of the transition will be i
  • nfluenced by how the Assad regime leaves the scene.
  • forces retain their cohesion
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • control
  • whether the opposition moves to purge regime employees
  • offices are trashed and looted
  • violent power struggle
  • unitary state with a strong central government is unlikely to emerge from the civil war.
  • great challenges exerting control over local leaders who fought the regime
  • ederation of warlords (probably former military and security chiefs) ruling over fiefdoms
  • unitary entity
  • Syrian army
  • opposition will have more time to set up rudimentary institutions
  • provide humanitarian aid for Syrian refugees
  • likely be accompanied by a new round of massacres and ethnic cleansing
  • Sunni extremist groups.
  • new opportunities for external actors, especially Iran and Hizballah, both of which would seek allies among the former regime's Alawite security elite
  • Iran's
  • remain a major player in the Levant
  • hostile to Iran and more closely aligned with Turkey, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia.
  • revolutionary Sunni government in Syria
  • Iran and Hizballah
  • support to former regime
  • Washington should continue with preparations to contain spillover from the conflict
  • enabling it to collect tariffs on imports
  • Washington will need to know as much as it can about the key players,
ysenia

Iran awards medals to team that clinched nuclear deal | The Times of Israel - 0 views

www.timesofisrael.com/eam-that-clinched-nuclear-deal

iran nuclear program Tehran

shared by ysenia on 08 Feb 16 - Cached
  • President Hassan Rouhani awarded the “Medal of Merit” to Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and the “Medal of Courage” to Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan and Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, who is also the country’s nuclear chief.
  • ysenia on 08 Feb 16
     
    Medal of Merit and Medal of Courage awarded to members who helped reduce the nuclear activities taking place in Iran. Helped to lift economic sanctions placed by UN because Iran met the commitments required.
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