MFS - The Other News

                       Afternoon  Posting.

• Syria Live Blog - June 10. Here .(Al-Jazeera).

• Libya Live Blog - June 10. Here (Al-Jazeera). 

• Yemen Live Blog - June 10. Here. (Al-Jazeera).

• Updated !Earthquakes in the last 24 hours in the world seismic activity in Japan  today 4.6 ! More info here.

• Japan - Latest official Situation Update No. 129.Source : Here .

• Japan : For the most accurate info on the nuclear disaster go to : Paul Langley's Nuclear History Blog.Here.

• Europe - Latest official Situation Update on E-Coli epidemic 49- Source.

• Michelle Obama to appear on "iCarly", to be aired in time for 2012 'Campaign'.(Emirates247).First Lady Michelle Obama will appear on children's TV show "iCarly," -- a favorite program of her daughters -- to promote her initiative to support military families, the network behind the show said on Wednesday.Michelle Obama chose "iCarly" because the lead character, Carly Shay who is played by Miranda Cosgrove, is the daughter of an Air Force colonel, according to the cable network Nickelodeon.In the episode that will feature the first lady, Carly's father is not able to make it home for his birthday as planned. Michelle Obama will talk to Carly about how she is serving her country by being in a military family, the network said.The episode will be shot on Monday and is scheduled to air in early 2012.In the show "iCarly," which was created in 2007, Carly and her friends are constantly busy making a webcast for and about kids their age. The episode with Obama also revolves around a webcast.Michelle Obama has said that she watches "iCarly" with her daughters, Malia, 12, and Sasha, 9. The first lady, and vice-president Joe Biden's wife Jill, recently launched an initiative called Joining Forces to encourage all Americans to help soldiers and their families.Hmmmm.....Perhaps after the show they can release Osama's pictures?Campaigning never stops.Read the full story here.

• A Twitter Group Warned About Weiner.(NYtimes).Three months before Representative Anthony D. Weiner sent a photo from his Twitter account to a 21-year-old Washington State college student named Gennette Cordova, a small group of determined, self-described conservatives was warning young women on Twitter, including Ms. Cordova, to be wary of him. Calling themselves the #bornfreecrew on Twitter, members of the group closely monitored those whom Mr. Weiner was following, taking it upon themselves to contact young women they believed to be “schoolgirls,” and urging them publicly to stay away from him, according to an analysis of posts on Twitter’s public stream. By early May, members of the group were also speculating that Mr. Weiner would be caught in a sex scandal. The leader, a man who identified himself on Twitter as Dan Wolfe and used the handle @PatriotUSA76, is the same Twitter user who discovered the photograph that Mr. Weiner took of himself and sent to Ms. Cordova. He shared it with his followers and the conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who made it public the next day.As Democrats and Republicans embrace Twitter and other social media tools as a way to interact with their constituents and woo voters, many have discovered a downside to online communication: cyberstalkers, who track and criticize their every move. But even by the standards of modern politics, Dan Wolfe and other members of the #bornfreecrew watched Mr. Weiner’s account with particular ferocity, and a sharp focus on his interactions with women. In several instances the congressman dropped his online contact with women after they were identified by the crew, suggesting that Mr. Weiner might have been aware of its actions. There were at least two female high school students among the 191 people Mr. Weiner followed. There is no evidence that he engaged in private discussions with them, and he has said that to his knowledge he has not had any online sexual communications with under-age women. Mr. Wolfe, whose account vanished from Twitter last Friday, has been one of the more mysterious characters in the congressman’s saga, refusing to reveal his real name even to the other members of the #bornfreecrew. He joined Twitter on Jan. 6 and began posting multiple messages criticizing both Mr. Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.On April 14, for example, Mr. Wolfe tweeted, “Weiner’s new follow is a high school girl. LMAO! Freak!” Michael Stack, 39, of New Jersey, who describes himself on his Twitter profile as a “Republican who believes in the principles that made this country great,” said he befriended Mr. Wolfe on Twitter (they never met in person or spoke on the phone). “Soon, Dan told me Weiner was following a bunch of girls,” Mr. Stack said. “I thought it was kind of weird.” Mr. Stack said that Mr. Wolfe had told him in a private message that Mr. Weiner had been following a porn star who was later identified as Ginger Lee. “He tweeted about it and then the porn star was gone,” Mr. Stack said. “He was paying attention,” he said, referring to Mr. Weiner. On May 5, Mr. Wolfe told him that he had a friend who knew Matt Drudge who had said that a scandal involving a member of Congress was coming soon. The same day that Meagan Broussard, 26, of Texas, said that she had received an e-mail from Mr. Weiner with a photo she had asked him to take, while holding up a white piece of paper that said “me.”Throughout May, Mr. Wolfe and other members contacted other young women Mr. Weiner was following, including a 16-year-old from California who started a campaign on Twitter to get the congressman to be her prom date. The next day, Mr. Stack, posting on Twitter, sent her a message saying in part, “if you’re a minor and he’s following you, well, seems a little creepy if not in ny,” copying @RepWeiner on the post. The next day, on May 18, the girl posted: “Well @RepWeiner unfollowed me.” Michael Madden, 52, a retired Philadelphia firefighter and member of the group, said he had joined Mr. Wolfe in warning young women about Mr. Weiner. “It seems now that Dan may have had an agenda all along,” he said. “We don’t know yet what it is. But he never said to me, ‘I’m going to get this guy.’ What he said is that it was not right.”Hmmmmm.......A tweet to far?Read the full story here.

• "CHANGE" ! Many of us won’t be able to retire until our 80s.(MarketWatch).You’ll probably have to work much longer than you anticipated.BOSTON -- We all think it’s a panacea. If you don’t have enough money saved for retirement, you’ve got a few ways to close the gap between what you have and what you need in your nest egg: Save more, invest more aggressively, and/or work longer. Well, it turns out that working longer is indeed an option, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute latest study. The only problem is that the latest research shows that you’ll have to work much longer than you anticipated. In fact, many Americans will have to keep on working well into their 70s and 80s to afford retirement, according to the study, titled “The Impact of Deferring Retirement Age on Retirement Income Adequacy.”What’s more, it’s even worse for low-income workers, according Jack VanDerhei, one of the co-authors of the study. Those who earned (on average over the course of their careers) less than $11,700 per year, the lowest income quartile, would need to defer retirement till age 84 before 90% of those households would have just a 50% chance of affording retirement.

Those who earned between $11,700 and $31,200 will need to work till age 76 to have a 50% chance of covering basic expenses in retirement.

Those who earned between $31,200 and $72,500 will need to work to age 72 to have a 50% chance and those who earned more than $72,500, those in the highest income quartile, catch a break; they get stop working at age 65 to have a 50/50 chance of funding their retirement.So what can be done to make sure you have enough income in retirement? Well, the sad truth is that not working is no longer an option and working past age 65 is fast becoming a fact of life, at least for those in the lowest three income quartiles. One bright spot, according to John Nelson, co-author of ‘What Color is Your Parachute? For Retirement’ is that working works: “For those in the lower half of the income spectrum, delaying retirement from 65 to 69 has a profound effect,” he said. “It increases retirement income adequacy by 25% to 50%! That’s a powerful incentive.Hmmmm.......More "Change".Read the full story here.

• China ratings house says US defaulting: report.(Yahoo).A Chinese ratings house has accused the United States of defaulting on its massive debt, state media said Friday, a day after Beijing urged Washington to put its fiscal house in order."In our opinion, the United States has already been defaulting," Guan Jianzhong, president of Dagong Global Credit Rating Co. Ltd., the only Chinese agency that gives sovereign ratings, was quoted by the Global Times saying.Washington had already defaulted on its loans by allowing the dollar to weaken against other currencies -- eroding the wealth of creditors including China, Guan said.Guan did not immediately respond to AFP requests for comment.The US government will run out of room to spend more on August 2 unless Congress bumps up the borrowing limit beyond $14.29 trillion -- but Republicans are refusing to support such a move until a deficit cutting deal is reached.Ratings agency Fitch on Wednesday joined Moody's and Standard and Poor's to warn the United States could lose its first-class credit rating if it fails to raise its debt ceiling to avoid defaulting on loans.A downgrade could sharply raise US borrowing costs, worsening the country's already dire fiscal position, and send shock waves through the financial world, which has long considered US debt a benchmark among safe-haven investments.Foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei on Thursday urged the United States to adopt "effective measures to improve its fiscal situation".Dagong has made a name for itself by hitting out at its three Western rivals, saying they caused the financial crisis by failing to properly disclose risk.The Chinese agency, which is trying to build an international profile, has given the United States and several other nations lower marks than they received from the the big three.Hmmmmm....... Traduction:Yu-So-Phukt.Read the full story here.

• West Bank: Arabs burn Jewish holy books.(Ynet).Some 200 Palestinians armed with bats, iron chains raid illegal West Bank outpost, burn hut and tent including prayer corner. Arab municipal head: We decided to remove settlers from site.Some 200 Palestinians armed with bats and iron chains raided the illegal West Bank outpost of Gaon HaYarden Friday and burned Jewish holy books at the site, the settlers said.The Arab attackers clashed with Jewish youths at the outposts before torching a hut and a tent that included a prayer corner and holy books. Security forces rushed to the scene and broke up the violence.The Palestinians arrived at the outpost in dozens of vehicles and razed it. A leading member of the Jewish Hilltop Youth movement vowed to rebuild the outpost after the Shabbat."There were a few youths at the site when some 150 to 200 Palestinians carrying PLO flags and armed with bats and iron chains raided it," an outpost resident told Ynet. "We managed to escape unharmed." A short while later, clashes broke out between the settlers and the Palestinians, with both sides hurling stones and burning tires at each other. IDF troops at the site dispersed the crowds while sustaining stoning attacks. The area was declared a closed military zone and two settlers who defied the order were held for questioning and later released. Majed Fahim, the head of the Kfar Malek municipality told Ynet that the outpost in question was set up illegally on Arab land."Today we decided to come out after Friday prayers and reach our land, where this outpost was established, in order to remove the settlers from the site," he said. Some 200 Palestinians arrived in the area and clashed with settlers at the outpost, Fahim said, adding that one Palestinian was wounded. At one point, the settlers fled the site, he said. Read the full story here.

• Who you gonna call? "Mosque Buster"UK . Free lawyer to oppose Mosque building.(TundraTabloid).Now this is service. A British barrister has offered his services free of charge to anyone who wishes to fight plans for construction of a Mosque in England. All he needs, is for anyone who wishes his services, to contact their local planning council and see if there is a request to build a new mosque in that area, and then contact him and let him know.If he gets the request early enough to act on it, he will do so on his own dime and with a fresh and important approach. This is an exciting development I think. Someone actually willing to risk their professional careers to fight for the continuation of secular liberal Western democracy. These are the kinds of guts we need a great deal more of. If anyone reading this is aware of any plans to construct a Mosque in England, please contact Gavin right away. If anyone can afford to help him out with a few dollars to help him cover his expenses for these kinds of fights I am guessing that would be accepted gratefully as well.I will be following this man’s efforts closely. I have a suspicion there are great headlines in his future.Read the full story here , video - here.

• SEIU Forming Republican PAC To Rescue GOP From “Grip Of Extremists”.(SacBee) — One of California’s largest labor unions today advanced a plan intended to result in the election of more moderate Republicans.By creating a Republican political action committee, Service Employees International Union California officials say they hope to help send people from right-leaning areas to Sacramento who put practical solutions in front of strict conservative thinking.“Our legislators are harangued by radio talk show hosts like John and Ken and D.C. ideologues like Grover Norquist,” said Bob Schoonover, president of SEIU Local 721 in Southern California.The union says 87,000 of its 700,000 members are registered Republicans. With redrawn legislative boundaries looming and the creation of the top-two primary system, SEIU’s new leader Dave Kieffer has said this is the perfect time to start helping candidates to extricate themselves from the grip of party extremists. SEIU is expected to launch its second ad campaign this weekend in the districts of current GOP legislators its officials believe could support Brown’s tax package.“I feel the far right, the tea party, is hijacking my party, and it’s saddening,” said John Orr, a parking officer at California State University, Fullerton. “I hope through this PAC, this effort and the open primary that moderates can regain their voice.”Hmmmmm......We must save "Dass Vaterland" from the strickt conservatives?Read the full story here.

• Hamas Reports Record Turnout For Its Children’s Terror Training Camps(INN).Hamas is reporting record turnouts for its summer camps for children in 2011.The ‘summer camps,’ combining Islamic indoctrination, paramilitary training, and social activities are set to begin again this year as United Nation’s summer camps, considered competition by Hamas, are being openly denigrated by jihadists.Children and adolescents are an important target demographic for Hamas, from which its future army of terrorists will be recruited. Summer camps are an important means for indoctrinating Gaza’s youth with Hamas’ jihadist ideology.In 2010 Hamas ran camps for an estimated 100,000 campers, a number similar to 2009. The Islamic Jihad terror group ran 51 camps with 10,000 participating boys and girls.Hamas spokesman Ismail Radwan reported the objectives of the camps were to raise a generation of children with ‘genuine Islamic values.’“Children working for the interests of their homeland and to educate them to the culture of the Islamic faith so they will remember their goals, including Jerusalem and the prisoners,” Radwan said. In addition to indoctrination, Hamas terrorists give children paramilitary training. Banners are hung on the walls with slogans extolling jihad and ‘death for the sake of Allah.’Hmmmm.....Now funded by the Obama regime jihad branch?Read the full story here.

• Turkey -Muslim 'man' aks 8-month pregnant partner to have an abortion, shoots her when she refused ,then commits suicide.(TodaysZaman).A married man allegedly shot his pregnant partner and then shot and killed himself on Thursday evening in İstanbul's Fatih district.Mahmut Y. (55) and Neriman İbiş (25) were married according to religious law, which is not recognized by the Turkish state, and also had other children together. Mahmut Y. was also legally married to another woman.When an argument broke out between the two, after which Mahmut Y. had asked İbiş to have an illegal abortion, Mahmut Y. took his gun and fired three shots at İbiş, one of which was directed at her stomach.The woman was seriously injured and taken to the Haseki Education and Research Hospital by ambulance, and then transferred to the Bağcılar Education and Research Hospital, where she remains in stable condition.Following the incident, Mahmut Y. went to his older brother's coffeehouse, locked himself in a room, and shot himself in the head. Mahmut Y. was taken to the Medical Park Private Hospital, where he was unable to be resuscitated.Hmmmm.....Way to easy for 'people' like this.Keep Turkey out of the European Union.Read the full story here.

• 'Horribly Humiliating'.Egyptian Woman Tells of 'Virginity Tests'.(Spiegel).Before she describes how uniformed soldiers hit and kicked her and the other young women, ordering them to take off their clothes, lie on their backs in front of gawking soldiers and spread their legs so a man in a white lab coat could test their virginity -- before this, the hairdresser quickly lights a cigarette and pulls the smoke deeply into her lungs.

Salwa Husseini Gouda is a petite woman with gently curved lips and almond-shaped eyes. The 20-year-old looks tired this afternoon, wearing jeans and a headscarf together with a tight-fitting top. She smokes one cigarette after another. The air is heavy with shimmering heat and the Egyptian capital is dusty and loud, as always."I have no idea why they arrested me, of all people, in Tahrir Square," she says. "I was standing in front of a tank at that particular moment, maybe that's why." She attempts a grin. "Anyway, people should watch out for me -- I'm a dangerous criminal!"According to eyewitness reports, men stormed Tahrir Square, center of the Egyptian revolution, on the afternoon of March 9 and attacked demonstrators seemingly at random. They weren't wearing uniforms. "They looked like thugs," Husseini Gouda says. "They called me a whore and hit me in the face." She says she was shocked when the group dragged her and around 20 other women into the Egyptian Museum and handed them over to the military. "I couldn't believe our army was behind this attack," Gouda continues. "But then they took us to a military prison, and from then on, it only got worse."When Husseini Gouda arrived at the military prison on March 9, she says she was led to a small room together with two other women. There they were forced to undress and allow their clothing to be searched. Then they noticed a soldier standing outside the open window, photographing them naked. "I was afraid they would use the pictures to make us look like prostitutes," Husseini Gouda says.That night, the women were locked in a cell and given water and bread that stank of kerosene. The next day, they saw a stretcher in the hallway outside their cell. Here, an officer announced, a doctor would inspect the unmarried women for virginity. "We couldn't believe it," Husseini Gouda says. "We asked if it could at least be a female doctor, but he said no. One girl who tried to resist was plied with electroshocks."

Several human rights organizations are investigating the events that occurred at the military prison in Heikstep northeast of Cairo between March 9 and 13. Amnesty International has called on Egyptian authorities to "stop the shocking and degrading treatment of women protesters." The European Parliament denounced the "forced virginity tests" as torture.Psychiatrist Mona Hamed, from El Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, has documented statements from several of the women who were arrested on March 9, including Husseini Gouda. Hamed's conclusion: "What's new is that it isn't the police or the secret police behind this, but the military." The virginity tests, she says, send a message to the people, because the army wants to control citizens' freedom of movement. If a woman at a demonstration were beaten or arrested, Hamed says, her family would perhaps be able to accept that -- but not the charge that their daughter is a prostitute. "That's an unthinkable humiliation for the woman and her family," she explains.Husseini Gouda didn't resist. The man in the white lab coat reached between her legs, and it didn't take long. He permitted her to cover herself with a blanket, to shield her from the gaze of the soldiers loitering in the hallway. "It was horribly humiliating," Husseini Gouda says. After the procedure, she continues, all of the women had to sign a form that stated whether they were virgins or not. But after the doctor confirmed that her hymen was intact, the soldiers confronted her with new accusations, Husseini Gouda says. Two days later, she was sentenced by a military court to one year of probation for the alleged possession of a weapon, property damage and violating curfew."The situation for women has deteriorated continually, these last few decades," says Hala Mustafa, 52, a political scientist and the editor-in-chief of the magazine al-Dimuqratiya. "On the one hand, this is because of political Islamization by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists. On the other, it's because the regime too has done everything in its power to keep the people conservative, so they don't rebel."Mustafa, with her light brown, layered haircut, pantsuit and white gold jewelry, is one of the country's liberal, progressive thinkers. She just canceled a trip abroad because she couldn't possibly miss what's happening in Egypt now, she says. For a moment, a smile appears on her face, the same smile worn by many Egyptians these days, a mixture of amazement and pride. It's too soon to make predictions, Mustafa says, but she's not particularly optimistic: "The old regime is still functioning."

Journalist Rasha Azeb, 28, has experienced the revolution firsthand from the beginning. She too was arrested on March 9 and taken to the Egyptian Museum. "We kept protesting after February 11, because we wanted to get rid of the whole regime, not just Mubarak," Azeb explains. She wears a ribbon around her neck from which a bullet casing dangles. You can say what you want now about Mubarak and the members of his government who have been arrested, Azeb says, "but not about the military council."Azeb is sitting on a rooftop terrace in downtown Cairo, a sand-colored sea of houses below her stretching to the horizon. "The soldiers bound my hands and hit me," she says. "They said that the violence was increasing because of journalists. After four hours, they let me and my colleagues go." Azeb says she saw other women being hit and abused with electroshocks in the museum. She didn't find out until days later what happened to them afterward. It's intolerable, she says, and yet this isn't the moment to talk about sexual discrimination. "Right now it's about the Egyptian people's rights," Azeb believes, "not about men or women."Still, the women among the freedom fighters in Tahrir Square also impressed the world precisely because they disproved a cliché. The World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report, which evaluates gender equality in 134 countries, ranked Egypt 125th in 2010. Forty-two percent of Egyptian women can't read or write and most don't have a profession. Female genital mutilation has been outlawed since 1997, but is still widespread. Women out in the capital without a male chaperone must expect to be sexually harassed.Last Tuesday, nearly three months after Husseini Gouda and the others were arrested, an army general finally issued a statement. "The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine," the general told American news channel CNN. "These were girls who had camped out in tents with mail protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and (drugs)." The virginity tests, he said, were carried out so that the women couldn't claim afterward to have been harassed or raped in prison: "We wanted to show that they were not virgins in the first place."Amnesty International called this reaction "an utterly perverse justification of a degrading form of abuse" and called on Egyptian authorities to hold the parties responsible accountable. The army's reply came promptly: The women's allegations, an army spokesperson announced, are unfounded.Hmmmm.....The 'people' the Obama regime supports.Read the full story here.

• VIVA LA CONSTITUTION !!!(AmnonAndjonathan).At the first glance, after this picture popped up on my screen, I burst laughing.I thought, what a bad luck. A peaceful bunch of people are walking down the street, suddenly they hear their Muezzin from the near by Mosque calling for prayer, and instinctively they turn towards Mecca, fall on their knees and start praying.Bad Luck... Shit happens... it could have happened to anybody... etc.Read the full story here.

• And now for something completely different.Germany Women’s World Cup Team Pose For Playboy.The players decided it was the best way to drum up interest for the Women’s World Cup, which starts in the country later this month.Bayern Munich players Annika Doppler, 19, Ivana Rudelic, 19, and Julia Simic, 22, as well as Gütersloh’s Kristina Gessat and Wolfsburg’s Selina Wagner left little to the imagination as they frolicked by a lakeside.The German team is favourite to win the competition – and are clearly training hard as none of the current squad took part in the shoot.German Playboy exec Nina van Splunter said: “Everyone knows how popular football is in Germany and, just like their male counterparts, the female team are very successful.Hmmmm......No complaignts of headresses in the way off FIFA's rules?Read the full story here.Video here.