-
The government has added dozens of people to the ominous lists of suspected terrorists and those barred from U.S.-bound flights, a crackdown that comes as President Barack Obama prepares to personally question and challenge his team about the state of national security.
At the White House on Tuesday, Obama planned to meet with the high-ranking officials charged with the two reviews he ordered after the botched Christmas airliner attack over Detroit — one on air-travel screening procedures and another on the nation's terror watchlist system.
-
"The two solar panels and bio-gas unit on the roof of Soliman's building in Darb El-Ahmar provide hot water and cooking gas to his two-bedroom apartment, [..]. The clean energy appliances, made mostly from recycled material, have reduced his household's waste and have [..] shaved nearly 50 percent off the utility bills."
[..]
– The bio-gas digester [..] assembled on his roof [..] converts organic garbage into cooking gas. Moldy bread and table scraps are soaked in water overnight, then poured into a 1,000-litre plastic tank to decompose. A pipe carries the gas to a burner in the kitchen, while a spigot drains the effluent, which Soliman sells as organic fertiliser to upscale garden shops.
[..]
The bio-gas unit's capacity for processing organic waste has taken on added value since the Egyptian government's decision last year to cull the country's pig population. [..]"My garbage man kisses me because I have the cleanest garbage on the block," Soliman boast
-
"Balawi was sent off to the borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan to infiltrate al-Qaeda in an attempt by Jordanian and US officials to find out the location of al-Qaeda number two man Ayman al-Zawahri.
But Taliban spokesmen now say that Balawi never actually “reformed” and that he had been operating as a double agent for them for a year, building up trust before hitting one of the CIA’s most important installations in Afghanistan.
Balawi reportedly set up the meeting, calling his Jordanian handler to claim he had “urgent” information for the CIA about Zawahri. He arrived with a suicide vest on, killing eight people, including his handler and seven CIA agents."
-
Pffff:
"- The prominent U.S. Koran scholar, Sobhy Mansur, described the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak as, “the person who holds the strings of reform in Egypt… not only because of the powers conferred by the Constitution, but because reform in Egypt, historically, has always been centralized and achieved by the person ruling the country.”
– Mansour also commented on the need to for the president to have a, “safe exit from power before it’s too late.” He called on political activists in Egypt, singling out Dr. Abdel-Halim Kandil, to follow the principle of: “let bygones be bygones” and to embark upon a new era of tolerance in the hope of saving what can be saved.
Fuck that noise! He should hand over Egypti's swiss accounts first.
“We want a national reconciliation, in which Hosni Mubarak and his family leave authority safely, without any persecution, in return for handing over power to an interim government that will institute constitutional, political and economic reform. "" -
Colombian guerrillas have entered into "an unholy alliance" with Islamic extremists who are helping the Marxist rebels smuggle cocaine through Africa on its way to European consumers, a U.S. official told Reuters.
Interdiction efforts have made it more difficult to send cocaine straight from Colombia and other Andean producer nations to the United States and Europe.
So criminal organizations including the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, are going through Africa to access the European market. And they are doing it with the help of al Qaeda and other groups branded terrorists by Washington, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
"In the mid to late 1990s when the Europeans became better at maritime interdiction, off the coasts of Portugal and Spain for example, traffickers started moving their routes southward. So the next progression was to Western Africa," said Jay Bergman, DEA director for the Andean region of South America.
-
In light of the first year in which Police Day is a national holiday, this cartoon is pretty funny.
-
"- Yet, despite Jordan's critical role, officials from both countries have insisted that its participation remain virtually invisible, in part to avoid damaging Amman's standing among other Muslim nations in the region, former intelligence officials said.
– Critics of the country's pro-U.S. policy say the closeness stems in part from Jordan's receipt of about $500 million worth of economic and military aid from the United States each year and from Jordan's status as one of only two Arab states to have signed a peace agreement with Israel. But Jordanian officials say the cooperation with the CIA is motivated by a mutual understanding of the danger posed by al-Qaeda and the religious extremism and violence it espouses. -
Foreign passengers flying into the United States from 14 mostly Muslim countries deemed to have links with terrorism are to face extra security checks at airports from today amid increased nervousness in the US after the failed attempt to blow up a passenger jet on Christmas Day.
The US transportation security administration announced that everyone flying into the US from or through these countries would go through "enhanced screening" at airports.
The list includes Nigeria, home of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the failed suicide bomber who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound passenger plane using an explosive device hidden in his underpants. It also includes Yemen, where it is claimed he was trained.
The other "countries of interest" are Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Somalia, and four countries the US regards as state sponsors of terrorism: Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria.
-
Of all the crises that threaten to shake Barack Obama's presidency, [..] Egypt [is] especially terrifying for the very reason that no one knows when it might explode. Hosni Mubarak, [..] who has ruled Egypt as a police state since 1981, might leave office sooner than anyone is expecting, opening a power vacuum that could send this U.S. ally, its 83 million citizens, and the regional political order spiraling into a fragile and potentially paralyzing tailspin.
Or he might not. [..] Either way, the time bomb will be looming over Egypt for the foreseeable future, and Obama's fortunes in the Middle East will be determined in large part by whether this bomb explodes or gets detonated gently. It's not likely that Mubarak will go down voluntarily. In 2004, he told the Egyptian parliament that he will serve as president "until the last breath in my lungs and the last beat of my heart." Despite incessant rumors of his ill health, he doesn't seem close to those eventualities.
-
The conviction of a youth found guilty of murdering a three-year-old boy and sentenced to 15 years imprisonment has been quashed.
Ramy Ibrahim was 17 at the time the Tama El-Amadeed Criminal Court handed down the sentence in April last year. In total, Ibrahim spent almost 18 months in prison for the crime that the Mansoura Appeals Court last week on Dec. 30, 2009 decided he did not commit.
Throughout the investigation, Ibrahim’s family and lawyers from the Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Violence had protested his innocence and called for an investigation into the torture allegedly used in order to extract Ibrahim’s confession.
links for 2010-01-05
Tuesday, 5 January 2010 by Cairene
Leave a comment