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European banks, spotting a lucrative business opportunity that American rivals shunned, opened their doors to countries under sanctions and ultimately exposed their reputations to the stain of criminal cases.

The banks chose to cooperate, producing reams of records that laid bare a scheme to disguise how Bank Melli was funneling money into the United States. To avoid detection, the records showed, Credit Suisse and Lloyds falsified money-transfer paperwork, replacing Bank Melli’s name with their own.

The cases benefited from a trove of internal emails from Credit Suisse that showed how bank executives strategized ways to capture business from Iran once Lloyds left the market. If Credit Suisse did not act fast, the emails warned, it might lose out to other European banks.

Tunisia... Egypt... Bahrain... Iran... Libya... Yemen... Sudan... Jordan... and even Morocco... Who knows there the mania will go

next? The street revolts in these places seemed initially to recall 1968. But they are now looking more like 1848.

what’s missing to turn poor places into rich places isn’t more information, money, technology, workshops, programs, evaluation or any of the other things that development organizations normally provide.  What’s missing are motivation and confidence.

What Matta means is that usually the obstacle to development is not that we don’t have the tools, but that we don’t use the tools we have. People drag their feet. The next step is someone else’s problem.  Budget approval takes forever.  The money disappears.  People won’t try because it never works.  The goal is too pie-in-the-sky. The parts aren’t available.  The bricks get stolen.  The project gets started and then the leadership changes and it sits, abandoned.   Every villager fumes:  nothing gets done around here.

“The biggest issue is that people don’t actually mobilize,” said Matta.  “The last mile is where solutions need to come together in specific ways.   We think we have part of the answer to the last mile problem.”

The gang rape of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi sets off an unusual burst of national outrage in India. In South Sudan, women are assaulted by both sides in the civil war. In Iraq, jihadists enslave women for sex. And American colleges face mounting scrutiny about campus rape.

Despite the many gains women have made in education, health and even political power in the course of a generation, violence against women and girls worldwide “persists at alarmingly high levels,” according to a United Nations analysis that the Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is scheduled to present to the General Assembly on Monday.

About 35 percent of women worldwide — more than one in three — said they had experienced physical violence in their lifetime,

f you are a bank in Paris or Jakarta or São Paulo, you can’t really serve your clients unless you are able to connect them to the global market for dollars. And you can’t do that unless you are in good standing with United States regulators. And you will very much not be in good standing with them if there is evidence you facilitated financing of terrorism or governments that the United States considers global threats.

That’s one of the important reasons that United States-led economic sanctions against Sudan or Iran carry weight. Those countries cannot easily gain access to the global financial system by going to a bank in a more sympathetic country.

the potential rivals for this position have problems of their own. The euro is only a couple of years removed from an existential crisis.China is pushing to internationalize the renminbi, and while its currency is being used more for trade within Asia, it has a long way to go to become a truly global currency. (Among other things, China would need to develop a much deeper market for bonds denominated in its currency than now exists, and start allowing the freer transfer of capital into and out of the country.)

As Republicans squabbled over Donald Trump’s controversial proposal to bar all Muslims from traveling to the United States, the House on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a bill imposing new restrictions on a visa waiver program that currently welcomes roughly 20 million people into the country each year.

The bill, which was approved on a 407 to 19 vote, would increase information sharing between the United States and the 38 countries whose passport-holders are allowed to visit the country without getting a visa, while also attempting to weed out travelers who have visited certain countries where they may have been radicalized.

The strong vote in the House could put momentum behind efforts to include changes to the program in the omnibus spending package – a must-pass bill that lawmakers are trying to finalize before government funding expires on Friday

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia's eastern Shiite heartland prepared to hold a funeral service Thursday night to honor the executed Shiite cleric, Nimr al-Nimr.

Somalia joined Saudi allies such as Bahrain and Sudan and entirely cut diplomatic ties with Iran

Iranian protesters responded by attacking the Saudi Embassy in Tehran and its consulate in Mashhad.

A controversial plan by the Ethiopian government to expand the capital, Addis Ababa, is set to be scrapped after a key member of the ruling coalition withdrew its support.

Rights groups say that at least 150 protesters have died and another 5,000 have been arrested by security forces. Similar protests in May 2014 left dozens of protesters dead.

Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn had vowed on 16 December that his government would be "merciless" towards the protesters, who he described as "anti-peace forces".

he Justice Department charged two Virginia men on Saturday with terrorism-related offenses, one day after F.B.I. agents arrested one of them at an airport where officials believe he was planning to begin a journey to Syria to fight with the Islamic State.

The department did not cite any evidence that the two men had direct contact with operatives for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and seemed to base the terrorism charges in large part on conversations they had with three F.B.I. informants.

The prospect that the Islamic State might incite its American followers to attack in the United States has led the F.B.I. to drastically escalate surveillance — including electronic eavesdropping — of people suspected of having ties to, or sympathies for, the Islamic State.

In 1905, British archaeologists descended on a sliver of eastern Africa, aiming to uncover and extract artifacts from 3,000-year-old temples. They left mostly with photographs, discouraged by the ever-shifting sand dunes that blanketed the land. “We sank up to the knees at every step,” E. A. Wallis Budge, the British Egyptologist and philologist, wrote at the time, adding: “[We] made several trial diggings in other parts of the site, but we found nothing worth carrying away.”

The first traces of the Nubian kingdom called Kush date to roughly 2,000 B.C. Egyptians conquered parts of the Kushite Kingdom for a few hundred years, and around 1,000 B.C., the Egyptians appear to have died, left, or mixed thoroughly with the local population. At 800 B.C., Kushite kings, also known as the black pharaohs, took over Egypt for a century—two cobras decorating the pharaohs’ crowns signified the unification of kingdoms. And somewhere around 300 A.D., the Kushite empire began to fade away.

“Only now do we realize how much pristine archaeology is just waiting to be found,” says David Edwards, an archaeologist at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.“But just as we are becoming aware it’s there, it’s gone,” he adds. Within the next 10 years, Edwards says, “most of ancient Nubia might be swept away.”

Ethiopian Israelis have taken to social media to share stories of discrimination. In posts on Facebook, with the hashtag #Face_It, they describe racist experiences in every sphere of life — at the workplace, in the education system, on the street and even in stores. 

One woman, who did not reveal her name, recalled inquiring as to the price of a pair of shoes in a Jerusalem store only to be told, “This is not the same for people like you!” Another wrote about overhearing a conversation in her local grocery store, with comments such as “Israel should never have allowed the Ethiopians to come,” “they’re animals” and “they should all be sent back to Africa.”

Most Ethiopian Jews arrived in Israel in secret immigration operations that took place in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. In Operation Moses, during the 1980s, about 8,000 people were smuggled out of Ethiopia via Sudan and taken to Israel on clandestine flights organized by the Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service. In Operation Solomon, in 1991, about 14,500 people were airlifted to Israel in less than 36 hours.

President Donald Trump has signed a new executive order placing a 90-day ban on people from six mainly Muslim nations.

Iraq - which was covered in the previous seven-nation order - has been removed from the new one after agreeing additional visa vetting measures.

Citizens of Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, the other six countries on the original list, will once more be subject to a 90-day travel ban.

Germany Calls for 10 Billion Euro Permanent U.N. Crisis Fund

BERLIN (Reuters) - German Development Minister Gerd Mueller, citing hunger crises in eastern Africa, said the United Nations should create a permanent 10 billion euro ($11.19 billion) crisis fund, with contributions to be based on a country's financial strength. "The catastrophe is already upon us," Mueller said in an interview with the German newspaper Passauer Neue Presse, published on Saturday. He pointed to dire conditions in countries such as Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan and Ethiopia. Mueller said the United Nations estimated the financial needs in eastern Africa alone amounted to $4 billion to $5 billion. Creating a fund that would be continually restocked would make it easier to respond to recurring humanitarian crises, he said. "We need to accomplish this as a world community," he said.

The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, led by Abu Mazen, was dealt a significant blow when President Donald Trump last year managed to get the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan to each normalize relations with Israel — without waiting for a Palestinian-Israeli peace deal.

Israel managed to keep a lid on all of it. But it is not hard to imagine, had it continued or if it flares up again, that this would severely stress Israel’s army and police and economy. Israel has not faced that kind of multi-front threat since the Jewish state was founded in 1948.

s the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland put it last week, a new connected generation of progressive left-wing activists in America and in Europe is reframing the Israeli-Palestinian struggle not as a conflict between two national movements, “but as a straightforward matter of racial justice. Note the placards at last weekend’s demonstration in London: Palestine Can’t Breathe and Palestinian Lives Matter.”

One Ethiopian journalist was taken away by police officers as his distraught 10-year-old daughter clung to him. Another fled the country after she said armed men ransacked her home and threatened to kill her.

Six months into the war in Tigray, where thousands have died amid reports of widespread human rights abuses, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia has sought to quell critical coverage of the conflict with a campaign of arrests, intimidation and obstruction targeting the independent news media, according to human rights campaigners and media freedom organizations.

“It’s a sharply disappointing state of affairs given the hope and optimism of early 2018 when Mr. Abiy became prime minister,” said Muthoki Mumo, representative for sub-Saharan Africa for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed gave Tigrayan regional forces 72 hours to surrender before the military begins an offensive on the regional capital of Mekelle.

Ethiopian troops plan to surround Mekelle with tanks and may shell the city to force surrender.

The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF),

The newest Social Progress Index, shared with me before its official release Thursday morning, finds that out of 163 countries assessed worldwide, the United States, Brazil and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than when the index began in 2011. And the declines in Brazil and Hungary were smaller than America’s.

The index, inspired by research of Nobel-winning economists, collects 50 metrics of well-being — nutrition, safety, freedom, the environment, health, education and more — to measure quality of life.

Norway comes out on top in the 2020 edition, followed by Denmark, Finland and New Zealand.

At least 600 civilians were killed during an attack in northern Ethiopia in early November because of their ethnicity, a state-appointed human rights commission said Tuesday.

the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said an informal group of Tigrayan youths, aided by local officials and police, "carried out door-to-door" raids, killing hundreds they identified as ethnic "Amharas and Wolkait."

"The unimaginably atrocious crime committed against civilians for no reason other than their ethnicity is heartbreaking," said EHRC chief Daniel Bekele in a statement. "It is now an urgent priority that victims are provided redress and rehabilitation, and that perpetrators involved directly or indirectly at all levels are held to account before the law."