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diamond03

Head of Egypt's council for women slams detained female activists | Middle East Eye - 0 views

  • Head of Egypt's council for women slams detained female activists
  • Egyptian president of the National Council for Women said a group of jailed female activists were better off behind bars than they were on the outside.
  • pointing out the favourable conditions in which she said female activists are living in Egyptian detention facilities.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • torture inside the prisons
  • December 2013, 21 young women were handed prison sentences ranging from 11 to 15 years for assembling on a street in Alexandria.
  • Egypt was handed 300 recommendations by 121 member states
  • While we have four years to address the recommendations given during the session, we will amend the laws as soon as a new parliament is voted in
  • parliamentary elections by March 2015.
  • Women’s rights activists reacted to the interview with dismay.
  • "The statement by the head of Egypt's National Council for Woman, Mervat El-Tallawy, comes as a huge disappointment from a woman who has presented herself throughout her career as a defender of Women's rights,”
  • “Her views represent a serious blow to any hopes that the regime in Egypt will reconsider its oppressive policies against peaceful protesters and NGOs, in line with the recent recommendations made at the UN human rights review
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    The head of Egypt's council made a remark stating that the female activists that were in prions deserved to be there. The comment was shocking to many because Tallaway was a defender of women's rights.
mportie

Iran and Saudi Arabia Heading Toward A Cyber War? - 1 views

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    Iran and Saudi Arabia are suspected to go head to head in cyber warfare. Wikileaks revealed information that people put on edge in regards to Saudi Arabia and Iran.
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    Iran and Saudi Arabia, regional rivals in the Middle East, are involved in a cyber conflict. The nations use cyber attacks to release or leak critical intelligence to affect the outcomes of ongoing military conflicts in the region.
alarsso

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

  • 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,
cthomase

Head of UN mission to Libya: unity gov't in Tripoli in days - 1 views

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    The head of the UN Mission in Libya, Martin Kobler, announced that the newly established unity government, that Kobler helped broker, would be installed in Tripoli in days. This comes after 5 years of a formal governmental void that has helped Libya become a haven for militant and terror groups. This has also led many Libyans to attempt to flee to Europe, increasing security fears among those who believe these refugees might be infiltrated by ISIS.
katelynklug

Egypt's "Poor Revolution"? - 0 views

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    This week, the country's judicial system came under fresh scrutiny after refusing to reinstate 138 state prosecutors who recently graduated from law school, but whose parents lacked university degrees. The September 2013 ruling is an example of the institutionalized classism in Egypt that many are unhappy with. Due to the policies of Sisi, the Dhank movement arose in protest by the poor who demand to be heard. Although this movement has been previously associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and thus not very popular, it could be the beginning of a broader mobilization of the poor in Egyptian politics. The head of the Garbage Collector's Union warned that if the president ignores these movements, there could be a "revolution of the hungry."
micklethwait

The flower men of Saudi Arabia are so violent even the police are scared to cross them ... - 0 views

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    "Meet the flower men of Saudi Arabia: They've lived in a remote mountain fortresses for 2,000 years (but don't be fooled by the head-dresses - they are so violent even the police are scared of them)"
kbrisba

Tunisia arrests comedian, TV host for 'offending' president - Yahoo News - 0 views

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    Tunisian authorities arrested a comedian and a TV show host for offending President Beji Caid Essebsi. He was arrested for committing an offence against the head of state, a fraud by inappropriately representing themselves as someone else. Tunisia just adopted a new constitution last year that guarantees the right to freedom of conscience and expression. But the statement from Essebisi's office said "freedom of the press and expression are acquisitions the president... is committed to defending, he being its principal guarantor."
kbrisba

Tunisia's Ghannouchi 'undecided' on Ennahda leadership | Africa | Worldbulletin News - 0 views

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    The head of Tunisia's Ennahda movement, Rachid Ghannouchi, was undecided if he would run for a new term at the top of the movement during its 10th congress in the second half of this year. "Ennahda is about to formulate its main conceptions," Ghannouchi said. "We cannot start talking about the relation between religion and politics before formulating these conceptions," he added.
kbrisba

Beji Caid Essebsi, ex-minister under Tunisian dictatorship, elected president - Telegraph - 0 views

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    Beji Caid Essebsi, 88-year-old former minister from Tunisia's years under dictatorship won the country's first ever democratic vote for president. He became the nation's new head of state with 55 percent of the vote, capping a four-year-long democratic transition.
andrea_hoertz

The Law is Failing the Women of Libya | Human Rights Watch - 0 views

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    Woman is physically and verbally attacked for not wearing a head scard.
andrea_hoertz

Libya in shock after murder of human rights activist Salwa Bugaighis | World news | The... - 0 views

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    In this article, Salwa Bugaighis was stabbed and shot through the head by gunmen who broke into her house in Benghazi. Her husband was also abducted and remains missing. Salwa and her husband had just returned from an election and the attack is a reminder of the growing number of extremists taking over Libya. "Her killing triggered outrage on social media, with one supporter tweeting: "Salwa Bugaighis was hope. Shocked and saddened." Salwa was a part of the National Transitional Council, but left after accusing it of freezing-out female members. She also opposed moves to make the wearing of the hijab compulsory, and her views brought her into conflict with the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist extremists.
jreyesc

Vile image of baby girl being 'beheaded' found by Kurds on phone taken from dead ISIS f... - 0 views

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    Kurdish soldiers recovered images of ISIL picking a baby girl down with a knife near her throat. It is unclear what happen to the child. Many other images were found in the phone like the terrorist group playing football with heads.
kkerby223

Saudi Arabia's dress code for women and Michelle Obama - 0 views

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    Michelle Obama visited Saudi Arabia in loose fitting clothing but without a burka or head scarf or any traditional conservative clothing options. This sparked a debate as to how strict the laws actually are for dress and if women can still express themselves. There are laws dictating a certain level of conservative clothing requiring burkas be worn by women unless they are at home. However, there are many cuts, styles, and colors in burkas as well the ability to accessorize with any shoes, purse, sunglasses, and jewelry.
wmulnea

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

  • 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.
kdancer

Up to 1,700 Russians fighting for ISIS - 0 views

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    As many as 1,700 Russian citizens could be fighting for jihadist groups in Iraq, Russia's head of federal security (FSB) has said during a U.S.-chaired summit against violent extremism in Washington DC, Russian news service RIA Novosti reported today.
ajonesn

Exposing the Secret of Domestic Abuse in Egypt | Egyptian Streets - 0 views

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    By Reem Abdellatif, freelance journalist It wasn't easy growing up as a teenage Muslim girl, with a father who thought he owned your body just because he put a roof over your head or food on the table. Not just that-this was a Muslim man who perverted the teachings of his own religion to justify. A very recent article.
fcastro2

Turkey arrests 19 foreigners heading to Syria - 0 views

  • Security forces in southern Turkey have arrested 19 foreigners as they tried to enter Syria illegally
  • those arrested included a pregnant woman, one of 13 Indonesians, a French citizen, two Russians, two Libyans and someone from Kyrgyzstan
  • arrested at checkpoints established by the Turkish government along the border with Syria in an effort to stop people crossing over to join ISIS
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Western governments and media have blamed Ankara for not doing enough to prevent the flow of foreigners into Syria
  • more than 12,500 people have been blocked from entering Turkey and that the government has deported more than 1,150 people since January
  • Turkey is doing its bit [to stop the flow into Syria] and will continue to do so
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    There are still numerous foreigners attempting to enter Syria in order to join the group ISIS. Many of these foreigners attempt to go through Turkey and while some Western countries criticize Turkey on the number of people still crossing, the Prime Minister believes he is doing as much as he can. 
joepouttu

ISIS 'minister of war' likely killed in US airstrike in Syria, defense official says | ... - 0 views

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    ISIS's Minister of War, who had a 5 million dollar bounty on his head, was likely killed by a US airstrike near Al-Shadaddi in Syria. This will hopefully lessen the violence as peace talks near.
blantonjack

US forces captured head of Isis chemical weapons program in Iraq last month - 0 views

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    US special forces captured the head of the Islamic State militant group's effort to develop chemical weapons in a raid last month in northern Iraq, two senior Iraqi intelligence officials have told the Associated Press, the first known major success of Washington's more aggressive policy of pursuing the jihadis on the ground. This is a huge step in obtaining more information regarding the ISIS front.
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