appears to go into labour outside Kafr al-Dawar Public Hospital. Two nurses later run outside, duck under the sheet and emerge with a bab
video was a ploy by the woman’s family to discredit the facility.
provincial health minister had suspended the hospital director pending an investigation.
questioned the state’s commitment to the health of its population of 85 million.
“When hospitals let women give birth in the street, it raises questions of government negligence, no matter how much the government flaunts its commitment to women’s rights,
Egyptian healthcare system were high out-of-pocket expenses required from patients and low government spending,
“Look at the human rights here, where a woman has to give birth in the street when there’s a hospital right there
urged the couple to go to Alexandria, around 30 km (20 miles) away, for treatment instead.
insisted that the hospital provide an ambulance, security officers removed the pregnant woman from the building and she went into labour while waiting for a taxi.
shows her lying on the pavement just metres away from the hospital beside a stretche
everal women who appear to be comforting her, as well as her husband and various bystanders
government has promised to improve services.
hospital denies that it asked the woman to leave.
We do not allow any patients to be turned away
“Those who were with the patient chose to have the baby outside in order to videotape it and defame the hospital.”
The Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) expressed its concern over a proposed law that would criminalise graffiti. ANHRI said on Wednesday that the law, announced by interim Minister of Local Development Adel Labib, would seek to punish those "writing abusive language on the walls of government and private buildings."
Putin is scared that the "west" will defeat Russia if Syria is defeated
not only driven by the need to preserve its naval presence in the Mediterranean, secure its energy contracts, or counter the West on 'regime change
al-Assad cannot lose because it means that one day he, Putin, might as well
The West handles the Islamic world the way a monkey handles a grenade," Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin tweeted
Russia is a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. It has the power to veto Security Council resolutions against the Syrian regime and has done so repeatedly over the past two years
religion and strategy.
Islamic Republic has provided technical help such as intelligence, communications and advice on crowd control and weapons as protests in Syria morphed into resistance
The last thing Iran wants now is a Sunni-dominated Syria -- especially as the rebels' main supporters are Iran's Persian Gulf rivals: Qatar and Saudi Arabi
proxy through which Iran can threaten Israel with an arsenal of short-range missiles
Iran counted on Syria as its only Arab ally during its eight-year war with Iraq. Iraq was Sunni-dominate
war between the front of hegemony and the front of resistance
Syrian government is a victim of international plots
Iran says the main objective of this plot is to make the region safer for Israe
Many believe Iran is Washington's greatest threat in the region, especially with its nuclear potential
the Americans will sustain damage like when they interfered in Iraq and Afghanistan
Syria's third-largest importer in 2010, according to data from the European Commission
maintain its financial tie
indicates that China sees Syria as an important trading hub
China has said foreign countries shouldn't meddle in Syria's internal affairs
Rather than siding with either Assad or the opposition and standing aside to 'wait and see,' Beijing is actively betting on both
China said it is firmly opposed to the use of chemical weapons and supports the U.N.'s chemical weapons inspectors.
It also said it wants a political solution for Syri
China is a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. And like Russia, China has repeatedly blocked sanctions attempts against the Syrian regime
Syria's allies, Russia, Iran, and China, all stand by them despite western powers opposing the Syrian government. There are different reasons to why these powers seem to stay with Syria such as Russia's ideologies, Iran's strategy, or China's trading. Either way, these government will stand by them until there is nothing left to lose.
France and Britain dismissed on Friday any suggestion of restoring relations with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, saying this would likely end all hope of a political transition and push moderates into the arms of radical Islamist groups.
With the rise of Islamic State insurgents, some European |Union member states are critical of the position in Paris and London and say it might be time to re-establish communication with Damascus given that a four-year-old revolt has failed to overthrow Assad
"In reality, Bashar represents injustice, chaos and terror. We, France and Britain, say no to all three
the French and British foreign ministers hit back at those who sought a rapprochement with Assad by saying he was using the fear of Islamic State, which has seized wide areas of northern and eastern Syria, to win back international support
countries would have to work with Assad to defeat Islamic State, while the U.N. envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said earlier this month that Assad must be part of the solution for defusing the conflict in Syria
This week a four-man cross-party delegation of French parliamentarians traveled to Syria and some met with Assad, and triggering a national debate on the issue
An initially peaceful street uprising against Assad has spiraled into a civil war that has seen a level of suffering some diplomats see as justifying contacts with Damascus in pursuit of a political solution
Britain and France see Assad's departure as a precondition of peace negotiations but the collapse of his government has become less likely as the war grinds on inconclusively
For our own security, we must defeat Islamic State in Syria. We need a partner that can act against extremists. We need a negotiated political settlement
compromise would be needed between elements of the existing government and relatively moderate opponents of Assad.
Both Britain and France have shunned Syrian President Assad in their quest to fight terrorism. They oppose all that the Syrian government stands for and this is why they will continue to dismiss the Syrian government and any ties with them.
November 10, 2014 : By Drew Menard/Liberty University News Service Rick Santorum, the one-time presidential candidate, took the stage at Liberty University's Convocation on Monday to emphasize the important role that America plays in shaping the world. In order for this influence to continue, he added, it is imperative that Americans remain grounded in morality.
How weird is that?? ^^^
So I was going to post the article that criticizes how Rick Santorum blatantly links Islam straight to violence and talks about how different they are from Christians, but its interesting to see how reframing happens in media so shamelessly. The above description is about how Santorum's speech (which took place at a conservative college) was so enlightening... even though it was totally just a political stunt because he's running for Prez in 2016 (lol other article: http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/09/29/3573218/rick-santorum-baptist-ministers-jihad/)
Voting was extended from two days to three in Egypt's presidential election on Tuesday, apparently because of an unexpectedly low turnout. The contest pits Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, until recently minister of defense and a high-ranking general, against leftist warhorse Hamdeen Sabahi, a fixed election all on its own.
This article focuses on the economic weakness that Saudi Arabia faces with its current and future workforce. Mainly focusing on the youth and future workforce of the country. "If you talk to young people now, most of them want to be entrepreneurs." Said Muhammad al-Jasser at the opening ceremony of the Euromoney Conference in Riyadh
sliding further and further into all-out civil war, with pro-government forces battling Islamist militias for power in the eastern city of Benghazi, where the revolution that ousted Gadhafi started in 2011.
renegade army general Khalifa Hifter, the man who has assembled a militia of former Libyan soldiers and is leading them on a campaign to oust Islamists from the country.
He is now at the head of a militia that supports moderate values against radical Islam in a campaign called "Operation Dignity."
The new Libyan House of Representatives, which was elected in June, has formally announced its alliance with Hifter on Monday
But other Arab nations are intervening directly in the conflict.
Hifter would now lead Libyan army soldiers as well in the fight against the Islamist militias.
Operation Dawn, seized Tripoli in August, parliament and the rest of the government have all decamped to faraway Tobruk, in the eastern end of the country close to Egypt.
Egyptian officials told the Associated Press that Egyptian warplanes, operated by Libyan pilots, were bombing Islamist militias in Libya. Both Libyan and Egyptian officials later denied those reports, and aviation experts said it was highly unlikely that Libyan pilots would have the skills needed.
On Monday, the presidents of Egypt and Sudan said they would support the Libyan military.
Prime Minister Abdullah al Thinni is planning to visit Moscow to seek Russian support for the army.
Salah Badi, an ultraconservative Islamist and former lawmaker from the coastal city of Misurata.
Mr. Badi’s assault on Libya’s main international airport has now drawn the country’s fractious militias, tribes and towns into a single national conflagration that threatens to become a prolonged civil war. Both sides see the fight as part of a larger regional struggle, fraught with the risks of a return to repressive authoritarianism or a slide toward Islamist extremism.
the violence threatens to turn Libya into a pocket of chaos destabilizing North Africa for years to come.
Ansar al-Shariah, the hard-line Islamist group involved in the assault on the American diplomatic Mission in Benghazi in 2012
Their opponents, including the militias stocked with former Qaddafi soldiers
The ideological differences are blurry at best: both sides publicly profess a similar conservative but democratic vision.
an escalating war among its patchwork of rival cities and tribes.
Motorists wait in lines stretching more than three miles at shuttered gas stations, waiting for them to open. Food prices are soaring, uncollected garbage is piling up in the streets and bicycles, once unheard-of, are increasingly common.
Tripoli, the capital and the main prize, has become a battleground
The fighting has destroyed the airport
Constant shelling between rival militias has leveled blocks
Storage tanks holding about 25 million gallons of fuel have burned unchecked for a month
with daily blackouts sometimes lasting more than 12 hours.
many Libyans despaired of any resolution
In Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, the fighting has closed both its airport and seaport, strangling the city.
the rush toward war is also lifting the fortunes of the Islamist extremists of Ansar al-Shariah, the Benghazi militant group.
The United Nations, the United States and the other Western powers have withdrawn their diplomats and closed their missions
“We cannot care more than you do,” the British ambassador, Michael Aron, wrote
Until now, a rough balance of power among local brigades had preserved a kind of equilibrium, if not stability
the transitional government scarcely existed outside of the luxury hotels where its officials gathered, no other force was strong enough to dominate. No single interest divided the competing cities and factions.
But that semblance of unity is now in tatters, and with it the hope that nonviolent negotiations might settle the competition for power and, implicitly, Libya’s oil.
In May, a renegade former general, Khalifa Hifter, declared that he would seize power by force to purge Libya of Islamists, beginning in Benghazi. He vowed to eradicate the hard-line Islamists of Ansar al-Shariah, blamed for a long series of bombings and assassinations.
General Hifter also pledged to close the Parliament and arrest moderate Islamist members
he has mustered a small fleet of helicopters and warplanes that have bombed rival bases around Benghazi, a steep escalation of the violence.
moderate Islamists and other brigades who had distanced themselves from Ansar al-Shariah began closing ranks, welcoming the group into a newly formed council of “revolutionary” militias
a broad alliance of Benghazi militias that now includes Ansar al-Shariah issued a defiant statement denouncing relative moderates like the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood. “We will not accept the project of democracy, secular parties, nor the parties that falsely claim the Islamic cause,”
the general’s blitz has now stalled, it polarized the country, drawing alarms from some cities and tribes but applause from others.
the loudest applause came from the western mountain town of Zintan, where local militia leaders had recruited hundreds of former Qaddafi soldiers into special brigades
the rival coastal city of Misurata, where militias have allied with the Islamists in political battles and jostled with the Zintanis for influence in the capital
the Misurata and Islamist militias developed a reputation for besieging government buildings and kidnapping high officials to try to pressure the Parliament. But in recent months the Zintanis and their anti-Islamist allies have stormed the Parliament and kidnapped senior lawmakers as well.
the newly elected Parliament, led at first, on a seniority basis, by a member supportive of Mr. Hifter, announced plans to convene in Tobruk, an eastern city under the general’s control.
About 30 members, most of them Islamists or Misuratans, refused to attend,
Tripoli’s backup airport, under the control of an Islamist militia, has cut off flights to Tobruk, even blocking a trip by the prime minister.
a spokesman for the old disbanded Parliament, favored by the Islamists and Misuratans, declared that it would reconvene in Tripoli
In Tobruk, a spokesman for the new Parliament declared that the Islamist- and Misuratan-allied militias were terrorists, suggesting that Libya might soon have two legislatures with competing armies
Each side has the support of competing satellite television networks financed and, often, broadcast from abroad, typically from Qatar for the Islamists and from the United Arab Emirates for their foes.
Hassan Tatanaki, a Libyan-born business mogul who owns one of the anti-Islamist satellite networks, speaking in an interview from an office in the Emirates. “We are in a state of war and this is no time for compromise.”
Fighters and tribes who fought one another during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi are now coming together on the same side of the new fight, especially with the Zintanis against the Islamists. Some former Qaddafi officers who had fled Libya are even coming back to take up arms again.
“It is not pro- or anti-Qaddafi any more — it is about Libya,” said a former Qaddafi officer in a military uniform
Beneath the battle against “extremists,” he said, was an even deeper, ethnic struggle: the tribes of Arab descent, like the Zintanis, against those of Berber, Circassian or Turkish ancestry, like the Misuratis. “The victory will be for the Arab tribes,”
Article explains the civil war that is erupting in Libya. Islamist extremists are trying to take over the country and towns and tribes of Libya are choosing sides. Tripoli has been the biggest battle ground and its airport was destroyed.
Israel Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is skeptical of the nuclear agreement that is being formulated between the major powers and Iran. Netanyahu says that it is dangerous and poses a threat not only to Israel, but to the world.
Egypt's tourism sector has plumeted since the Russian airplane crashed due to an alleged ISIS bombing on the plane. British and Russian planes had then placed a ban on all flight to Egypt, which is about 70% of tourism in Egypt. Egypt has now created a campaign called "This is Egypt" to try and revamp its tourism sector.
Education in Saudi Arabia is in the spotlight again with the appointment of a new minister for this famously problematic ministry. In fact, education has always been a main concern for Saudi officials involved in public affairs and they were about to lose hope that the ministry, and the education sector as a whole, could be fixed. Whenever unemployment, labor and terrorism issues are brought up, education becomes the main concern of parliament and the media.
The report only covers 13 Arab countries where statistical information was available. Among those countries is Saudi Arabia whose statistics reveal that about half of the male students did not succeed in acquiring basic education after four years of primary school. Girls, however, were better because one third were able to acquire the basic requirements in education and thus they recorded the highest difference between boys and girls in the Arab world.
. This is the crisis tackled by the Brookings report, a crisis manifested through protests and anger in the streets of the Arab Spring countries.
More than in any other country, Iraq's future is intimately bound up with the fate of self-styled Islamic State (IS).
Territory that was lost in a day or two is taking many months to claw painfully back.
But even if initially successful, such an ambitious project, indeed, any further moves to oust IS, could go badly wrong if the foundations are not sound
The IS fighters were able to lodge so easily in the Sunni Arab heartlands because the people there had been largely alienated by the sectarian policies and practices of the Shia Arab-dominated Baghdad government under Nouri al-Maliki, who was finally prised out of the prime minister's office in August 2014.
gislation to empower the Sunnis by devolving security and financial responsibilities to the provinces has not happened.
Nor have measures to reverse the persecution of former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, or the random arrests, detentions, and to assuage other Sunni grievances.
he US, who have about 3,500 military personnel training and advising Iraqi government forces on the ground, also seems to be aware that military muscle is not enough.
If that process continues and the militants are defeated, the way Iraq fits together - if it does - will be decided by who pushes them out, and how the resulting vacuum is filled.
osul is an almost wholly Sunni city with a population of about two million.
Some residents may still see IS - about 85% of whose fighters in Iraq are believed to be Iraqi - as their protectors against an Iranian-backed, Shia-dominated Baghdad government.
When the Iraqi army collapsed like a house of cards in the face of the IS eruption in June 2014, it was a motley array of hastily-assembled Shia irregulars, loosely banded into the Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilisation) that prevented the militants reaching Baghda
Ramadi gave a boost to the embattled Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi.He has scant support even from his own Shia Daawa party, and is seen across the board by Sunni, Shia and Kurdish politicians as weak, hesitant, lacking in leadership and unable to stand up to the militias.But there was a down-side to the Ramadi victory too: heavy destruction, and the displacement of the entire population.
Nor can the formula that finally and slowly worked in Ramadi simply be applied at Mosul. It took government forces with coalition backing seven months to regain Ramadi. Mosul is 10 times bigger.
He omitted to mention coalition air support, which would also clearly be crucial to the campaign.Some Iraqi analysts believe outside ground forces would also be needed. US military leaders, while reticent, clearly want to up the pace and have not ruled out more boots on the ground. In the absence of serious moves towards national reconciliation, one senior government figure also saw a campaign to retake Mosul as a vital way of forging national unity.
This article is about the Iraq divisions which undermine the Iraqi purpose of war. This is a result of an unstable foundation to build plans off of. They are trying to find foundation because they do not want to fall back into an IS state five years down the line.
More than 500 people, including dozens of civilians, have been killed since the assault began 10 days ago
urkey has already taken in more than 2.5 million Syrian refugees over the past five years and says it will continue to do so in a "controlled fashion".
rkey would be indirectly contributing to "ethnic cleansing" in northern Syria by the government.
urkey's president asked in a speech: "Are you on our side or the side of the terrorist PYD and PKK organisation?"
While Turkey sees the PYD and YPG as offshoots of the banned PKK, the US does not and believes they are the only effective force against IS on the ground in Syria, reports the BBC's Mark Lowen in Istanbul.
France's outgoing Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius, also questioned the commitment of the US to resolve the crisis in Syria on Wednesday, saying its "ambiguous" policy was contributing to the problem.
But he warned: "We feel that we were sold to the Russians, and that the West has abandoned us."
Turkey has denounced the United States for providing support to the Democratic Union Party, who any are calling a terrorist group. This is contributing to the bloodshed.
US support of Syrian extremist group, the Democratic Union Party, has been denounced by Turkish president Erdogan. The recent fighting has displaced 50,000 people and cut off key supply routes for bringing in aid. Turkey has vowed to continue to accept refugees.w
He is the architect and very public face behind Saudi Arabia's boldest military campaign in nearly 100 years. But Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country's young, newly-minted defense minister, remains a virtually unknown figure at home and abroad.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his visit to Moscow on Monday was aimed at preventing clashes between Russian and Israeli military forces in the Middle East. Putin, meeting with Netanyahu, said Russia's actions in the Middle East would be always "responsible."
Russia and the United States have common understanding on major groups which should be considered terrorist ones in the Middle East, RIA news agency quoted Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov as saying on Friday. (Reporting by Dmitry Solovyov; Editing by Katya Golubkova) Read the original article on Reuters.