MFS - The Other News

                       Morning Posting.

• Syria Live Blog - June 16. Here .(Al-Jazeera).

• Libya Live Blog - June 16. Here (Al-Jazeera). 

• Yemen Live Blog - June 16. Here. (Al-Jazeera).

• Updated !Earthquakes in the last 24 hours in the world seismic activity in Japan  today 5.1 ,increased activity in Turkey! More info here.

• Japan - Latest official Situation Update No. 131.On 15.06.2011 at 19:17 GMT+2
  
  Two minke whales hunted off Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido were found to be contaminated with radioactive caesium. The whales were harpooned 650 km north-east of a nuclear plant damaged by the disastrous earthquake and tsunami that struck last March. Researchers examined six of the 17 whales in Hokkaido’s Kushiro city and found 31 Bq and 24.3 Bq of radioactive caesium per kg in the two whales, reports SAPA. The limit for radioactive substances is of 500 Bq per kg, such that the whales’ caesium content is far below Japan's maximum safe limit for marine products. "There is no data available to compare whether the readings for radioactive materials are higher than normal," a fisheries agency official said this week, reports Times LIVE. "We will continue to monitor the development, as we do for all seafood and marine life caught in the Pacific." Officials from the country's Fisheries Agency blamed the contamination on the ongoing radioactive crisis at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which continues to leak radioactive substances into the surrounding environment, including the Pacific Ocean. The latest results on caesium come just days after strontium was found in groundwater near the plant's Number One and Number Two reactors. The compound can build up in bones and cause bone cancer and leukemia; it has been confirmed that strontium up to 240 times the legal limit was found in ocean waters adjacent to the plant, reports ABC News. This month, radioactive caesium was detected in leaves at a tea factory in the city of Shizuoka some 360 km from the stricken plant in Fukushima. Moreover, conservation group Greenpeace last month communicated findings of massive levels of radioactive contamination in seaweed and other marine life in the Pacific roughly 20 km off Fukushima. The high levels of radioactive caesium and iodine were 50 times higher than official limits. 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 - 55 Source.

• Al-Zawahiri named new al-Qaeda chief.(Al-Jazeera).(Video) - Group's second-in-command appointed leader following killing of Osama bin Laden.Al-Qaeda has named Ayman al-Zawahiri as its new chief following the killing of Osama bin Laden, the group has said in a statement issued in the name of the group's general command."The general command of al-Qaeda announces, after consultations, the appointment of Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri as head of the group," the statement, posted online on Thursday, said.US special forces killed bin Laden in a raid on the Pakistani city of Abbottabad on May 2.Al-Qaeda under the new leadership of al-Zawahiri will pursue its fight against the US and Israel, the group said in the statement."We seek with the aid of God to call for the religion of truth and incite our nation to fight ... by carrying out jihad against the apostate invaders ... with their head being crusader America and its servant Israel, and whoever supports them," it said.Al-Zawahiri has been al-Qaeda's number two for years.His whereabouts are unknown but he is widely believed to be hiding along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The United States is offering a $25m reward for any information leading to his capture or conviction."Only a few weeks ago when the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was here in Pakistan she reportedly gave Pakistan what's been described as a hitlist", Al Jazeera's Imtiaz Tyab, reporting from Islamabad, said."It listed five names and Zawahiri's name was on the list. Whether that means the new al-Qaeda leader is here we don't know for sure, but it certainly raises some questions".Believed to be in his late 50s, al-Zawahiri met bin Laden in the mid-1980s when both were in Pakistan to support fighters battling the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.Al-Zawahiri, who was born in Egypt, vowed earlier this month to press ahead with al-Qaeda's campaign against the US and its allies, in what appeared to be his first public response to bin Laden's death."The Sheikh [bin Laden] has departed, may God have mercy on him, to his God as a martyr, and we must continue on his path of jihad to expel the invaders from the land of Muslims and to purify it from injustice," he said in a video message posted online."Today, and thanks be to God, America is not facing an individual or a group ... but a rebelling nation which has awoken from its sleep in a jihadist renaissance challenging it wherever it is."In Thursday's statement, al-Qaeda voiced its "support [to] the uprisings of our oppressed Muslim people against the corrupt and tyrant leaders who have made our nation suffer in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya Yemen, Syria and Morocco."The group urged those involved in the uprisings to continue their "struggle until the fall of all corrupt regimes that the West has forced onto our countries."Read and see the full story here.

• Rep. King Files Amendment to Block Pigford II Funds.(BigGovernment).Congressman Steve King (R-IA) released the following statement after filing an amendment today to H.R 2112, the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2012, that prevents any funds appropriated under the act from being used to settle claims associated with the controversial and fraud-plagued Pigford II program.“In the 2008 Farm Bill, Congress limited taxpayers’ exposure to the Pigford II settlement program at $100 million, a figure that was deemed sufficient to resolve the racial discrimination claims leveled against the United States Department of Agriculture by black farmers,” said King. “Since that time, a lame-duck Democratic Congress agreed to President Obama’s request to pump an additional $1.15 billion into the Pigford II settlement program, doing so even though the program is rife with credible allegations of massive fraud that have not been fully investigated. This was an irresponsible act, and it violated Congress’s responsibility to be good stewards of taxpayers’ money.”“The new majority in the House of Representatives should not ratify the lame-duck Congress’s decision to increase American taxpayers’ exposure to Pigford II fraud. I believe that an investigation into the program will reveal that the majority of the claims that have been filed are fraudulent, and Congress should not turn a blind eye to the real possibility that the money is being used primarily to build political goodwill for the President instead of being used to properly redress the much smaller universe of people who have actually suffered harm. If passed, my amendment would put the brakes on Pigford II funding, and it would prevent the Secretary of Agriculture from paying fraudulent claims one $50,000 check at a time.”Hmmmm.......A whole lot a stench coming from this heap.Read the full story here.

• Weiner’s In-Laws and the Secret Muslim Brotherhood Connections Revealed.(floydreports).Was Huma Abedin, the wife of Anthony Weiner and the Deputy Chief of Staff to Hillary Clinton, unaware that her mother was reported as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood? Is it possible she does not know that her brother is tied to the Brotherhood’s radical leadership? Did Western media miss what has been revealed in several Arab newspapers, which has remained secret in American government circles?Neither Huma nor any major Western media outlet even mention what is common knowledge in the Arab world. Yet, Arab sources have confirmed that Huma Abedin has a brother named Hassan Abedin who works at Oxford University. Oxford University, which has long been infiltrated by Islamists who founded the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (OCIS), lists Huma’s brother as a fellow and partners with a number of Muslim Brotherhood members on the Board, including al-Qaeda associate Omar Naseef and the notorious Muslim Brotherhood leader Sheikh Youssef Qaradawi; both have been listed as OCIS Trustees. Naseef continues to serve as Board Chairman.In 2009, Qaradawi’s role within Oxford and the Muslim Brotherhood was championed by the notorious Sheikh Rached Ghannouchi of Al-Nahda – a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate now active in Tunisia. OCIS has even presented an award for great scholarly achievement to Brotherhood member Shaykh Abd Al-Fattah Abu Gudda, whose personal history goes back to the Brotherhood’s founder, Hasan al-Banna.Even the Sunday Times acknowledges that the cradle of Islamic Jihad – Al-Azhar University – actively attempts to establish links with OCIS, where Huma’s brother serves.Was Huma unaware of all this as she accompanied Hillary Clinton to the Dar El-Hekma women’s college in Saudi Arabia? Huma’s mother is the co-founder and a Vice Dean at the college and an active missionary on issues regarding Muslim women. The “Women’s Division” can be found at the Muslim Brotherhood’s official website; an excerpt from its goal, translated from Arabic, states:The Womens Organization’s goal in accordance with the Muslim Brotherhood rules, is to gain and acquire a unified global perception in every nation in the world regarding the position of women, and the necessity of advocacy work at all levels in accordance with the message of the Brotherhood as written in Women in Muslim Society, and the rearing of women throughout the different stages of life.True to this cause, another member listed as belonging to the Sisterhood mentioned by Al Jazeera is Suheir Qureshi. She spoke alongside Huma’s mother, Saleha Abedin as well as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was brought in due to her connection with Huma. All three women spoke on issues of women in Muslim society. An Arabic news report of what happened during Hillary’s visit stated:Suheir Qureshi spoke of how elated she was of Hillary’s historic visit…Saleha Abedin spoke after Suheir Qureshi and beamed in the presence of Secretary Clinton. Saleha’s speech preceded the former First Lady’s. Then Hillary stood. She donned a broad smile as she approached the podium… Clinton started with a strong word and she spent a long time complimenting Dr. Saleha Abedin regarding her daughter. Hillary explained that Huma holds an important and sensitive position in her office. She ended her speech by speaking of Saleha Abedin’s daughter (Huma), that a person must be happy if mentioned in a positive light but there is no happiness that equals the compliment given to children in front of a parent.It is sacrilege in Islam for Huma’s mother to accept the reality that her daughter is married to a Jew. Yet, neither Saleha nor Huma’s brother Hassan have denounced her marriage to Weiner, although it is considered null and void by some of the highest authorities on Islamic Shari’a rulings.Huma’s brother has been key in furthering the Islamic agenda and has worked with Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal on a program of “spreading Islam to the West.” A detailed report from 2007 shows that Naseef was identified as the likely force behind the Abedin family’s departure from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia circa 1977 – the same year that the Muslim Sisterhood was established.Strangely, Hillary Clinton signed a document less than one month prior to her trip to Saudi Arabia with Huma that lifted the ban on Tariq Ramadan, allowing him entry into the United States. Ramadan is the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna and has ties to Islamic terrorist groups.Huma Abedin’s charm, family connections and access to highly sensitive state secrets (as Hillary has admitted), can have significant consequences. What absolutely must be known is if our distinguished public servants were made aware of all these ties to potential enemies of the State.Hmmmm......."The philosophy of our service is that we open a house somewhere and, with the patience of a spider, we lay our web to wait for people to get caught in the web; and we teach those who do."Read the full story here.

• Who Checked Out Leon Panetta?(Aim).In a new revelation in the Panettagate scandal, CIA Director Leon Panetta inserted a tribute in the April 11, 1984, Congressional Record to one of his constituents, Lucy Haessler, calling her a “woman of peace” for her work in the pro-Soviet Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). This is when Panetta was a California Congressman representing Santa Cruz.Panetta declared that Haessler participated in “peace conferences” sponsored by the Women’s International Democratic Federation “in France, the Soviet Union, Poland, and East Germany.” One has to wonder about the “peace conferences” being held in such places as the Soviet Union. But Panetta put the tribute in the record without displaying any indication of its Soviet sponsorship or casting doubt on the organization’s commitment to “peace.”Panetta’s praise for Haessler got the attention at the time of Human Events, the national conservative weekly, which noted that WILPF “appears to take the Soviet line on virtually every issue that comes up, ranging from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and yellow rain [communist chemical warfare] to the issue of new U.S. missiles in Europe.” The Women’s International Democratic Federation was an outright Soviet front organization.Panetta told Human Events that he was unaware of the extremist nature of the WILPF and other groups, but indicated it wouldn’t have mattered that much to him anyway. He said, “Let me tell you something. I don’t know if you know about Santa Cruz, but Santa Cruz is a center for people who’ve been real activists in all kinds of organizations. If I started doing those kinds of checks on people who help out…I’d never stop. It’s just that kind of place.”But his tribute to identified Communist Party member Hugh DeLacy, inserted into the Congressional Record in 1983, suggests that Panetta did have keen knowledge of these “real activists,” by virtue of his praise for DeLacy’s stand against “McCarthyism.” Hence, it appears that Panetta did indeed “check” on these people, completely understood they had been accused of membership in the Communist Party or having communist sympathies, and found them totally acceptable and praiseworthy.After visiting Nicaragua, Panetta declared (Congressional Record, October 3, 1984) that he and his fellow members of Congress saw “real accomplishments” under the communists and that “The goal of the U.S. Government should be to normalize U.S.-Nicaraguan relations…” Panetta denounced what he called the “counter-revolutionary groups,” the Marxist term for those Reagan had praised and supported as “freedom fighters.”After Reagan liberated Grenada from a band of communist thugs and rescued American students on the island, Panetta said in the Congressional Record (November 2, 1983) that support for the action from the American people should not be seen as a “blank check” and that it should remain “limited.” Panetta said that he was very concerned that the Reagan Administration had dispatched a U.S. naval task force to the vicinity of Cuba as a show of force. Hence, Panetta was clearly concerned that the U.S.-backed forces of liberation would undermine and threaten the Castro dictatorship.The lines were drawn and they were clear: Panetta was on the other side—the wrong side—of the historical struggle between freedom and communism. This tendency was reflected in his tribute to Lucy Haessler, who with her husband Carl Haessler were sponsors in 1966 of the Herbert Aptheker Testimonial Dinner. Aptheker was a leading theoretician of the Moscow-funded Communist Party USA.Had Panetta “checked out” the IPS? He most certainly did. But who “checked out” Panetta when he was nominated by Obama for CIA director? And who will check him out now that the full Senate is on the verge of voting on his nomination as Secretary of Defense?It is natural that The Washington Post and other liberal media would protect left-wing nominees like Panetta. But how does one explain the silence of the conservative media? Do they fear being charged with McCarthyism for telling the truth?Hmmmmm.......Dictatorship or democracy?Read the full story here.

• Oh my: Dem caucus meeting turns angry over Weiner.(HotAir).That’s the good news. The better news? They’re meeting again tomorrow and may call for a vote to strip him of his committee assignments, which will only further antagonize the left’s dumb “you’re only hating on Anthony because he stands up for our ideals” wing.Hopefully he’ll find comfort in the fact that some people are giving his ideological “package” due credit.Those tensions spilled out in a private Democratic Caucus meeting Tuesday when New Jersey Rep. Bill Pascrell laid out his views on the right and wrong ways to handle allegations of wrongdoing by a member of the caucus. He said he understands the need for certain Democrats — party leaders and those whose reelections could be affected by the scandal — to call on Weiner to resign, but then, by implication, scolded Pennsylvania Rep. Allyson Schwartz for jumping ahead of leadership last week when she told POLITICO that Weiner should step down and followed up with a round of national television interviews…It grew so heated that many lawmakers left the meeting voluntarily, and aides were kicked out to try to prevent leaks…Schwartz, the clear but unidentified target of Pascrell’s remarks, rose to defend herself during the meeting. She explained that she had been in a lawyer’s office in New York, dealing with her recently deceased father’s will, when she heard that Weiner had acknowledged “sexting” with six women over the course of three years. Schwartz, who is an advocate for women’s rights, was disgusted by Weiner’s behavior and felt he should resign. Without checking in with House leaders, she said, she decided to make her feelings public.That made Pascrell even more upset: He would have preferred coordination — at least an effort to make sure it was the message party leaders and Weiner’s rank-and-file colleagues wanted.National Journal looked at his financial disclosures tonight and concluded that the poor guy is sufficiently bad off that he can’t cruise into early retirement. He needs to work, assuming he can find a job in Hopenchange America. Which makes me wonder: Isn’t there a mutually satisfactory solution in the offing here? The Democrats want him out of Congress; Weiner wants a steady income. There’s one person who’s perfectly positioned to cut a check and make both sides happy. How about it, Nancy?Hmmmm.....Read the full story here.

• Levin: Obama only president not to comply with War Powers Act.(TheRightScoop).Levin acknowledges that no president since the veto of Richard Nixon has believed that the War Powers Act is constitutional, but they still complied with it. But Obama is fighting the War Powers Act saying that they are operating under the United Nations and he has the authority to continue it. He’s trying to sidestep Congress.Levin says he is the only President not to comply with it and is clearly undermining our constitutional system, all while the left stays quiet.Hmmmm......I'm the 'Messiah' laws don't apply to me?Read and see the full story here.

• O Canada!Former American radical Bill Ayers again denied access to Canada.(NationalPost).Mr. Ayers was scheduled to deliver a keynote address at the Worldview Conference on Media and Higher Education this Thursday in Toronto. Conference organizers say Mr. Ayer’s refused entry should “should raise red flags for citizens concerned with free and open debate.”“Bill Ayers is a respected academic, and in no way a threat to the peace and security of Canada. There is no reason why he should be kept out,” said Mark Langer, President of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA), who is hosting the event.Mr. Ayers was barred from entering Canada in 2009 after touching down at Toronto City Centre Airport. At the time, he said he had entered Canada dozens of time before without incident.Mr. Ayers has hired Canadian and American lawyers in unsuccessful attempts to lobby the Canadian Border Services Agency for passage into the country. Advised by his lawyers that he would likely be held at the border, he did not attempt a crossing this time around.In the late 1960s, Mr. Ayers co-founded the Weather Underground, a radical group that collaborated on a series of bombings aimed at banks, monuments and government buildings, including the Pentagon and US capitol.Nobody was killed in Weather Underground attacks, although members did paralyze at least one man.Mr. Ayers was never convicted of any felony related to the group’s activities.During the 1990s, Mr. Ayers was involved in educational reform in Chicago.According to Citizenship and Immigration Canada, foreign nationals are barred from entering Canada if they were involved “in criminal activity, in human rights violations or in organized crime.”During the 2008 presidential campaign, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was criticized for once serving on a Chicago charitable board with Ayers. Then-Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin accused Mr. Obama at the time of “palling around” with an “unrepentant domestic terrorist.””I don’t regret setting bombs,” said Bill Ayers in a New York Times interview, coincidentally published on September 11, 2001. He added that he would not “discount the possibility” of doing it again.In a later statement, Mr. Ayers maintained that he was not a terrorist. “We were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends,” he wrote.Read the full story here.

• Syria Pursues Scorched Earth Policy, Amid Rumors Of U.S. Military Intervention.(BigPeace).As thousands of families in northern Syria flee from their homes, many across the border into Turkey, army tanks widened the military campaign to crush protests against President Bashar al-Assad, according to Reuters. More than 8,500 Syrians have now fled to refugee camps in Turkey.According to an analysis by Debka, an analyst group that has contacts within Israeli and American intelligence but sometimes gets things wrong, the deployment of the Monterey in the Black Sea is just one part of a major realignment of American forces in the region. The purpose of this redeployment is to be prepared in case a decision is made at some point in the future for U.S. military intervention in Syria.“debkafile’s military and intelligence sources report that Monday, June 13, the US deployed the USS Bataan amphibian air carrier strike vessel opposite Syria’s Mediterranean coast with 2,000 marines, 6 war planes, 15 attack helicopters, including new V-22 Ospreys, and 27 choppers for landing forces aboard.Also this week, US naval units went operational in the Aegean, Adriatic and Black Seas as part of the joint US-Ukrainian Sea Breeze 2011 exercise. …This huge concentration of naval missile interceptor units looks like preparations by Washington for the contingency of Iran, Syria and Hizballah letting loose with surface missiles against US and Israeli targets in the event of US military intervention to stop the anti-opposition slaughter underway in Syria.”According to the analysis, the threat of US military intervention in Syria is being taken seriously by Iran and by Hizbollah, Assad’s two major allies in the region. Furthermore, although Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyep Erdogan does not wish to be seen working closely with the U.S. military, it’s believed that Washington is coordinating its military movements with Turkey, and that Erdogan quietly agreed to place Turkish bases at US disposal for an operation in Syria.Soooooooooooooo, where is all this going? Barack Obama promised us that if he were elected President, then he would make sure that we would no longer be fighting in two foreign wars. As we appear to be approaching war number 4, it looks like that campaign promise is being kept.Read the full story here.

• Bedouin sheikh jailed for imprisoning, raping girl.(Ynet).Uncle who kidnapped girl to punish her for violating 'family honor' said to be a champion of women's rights, sent to jail for five years. The Beersheba District Court on Wednesday sentenced a Bedouin sheikh to 13 years in prison for imprisoning, raping, and beating a teenage girl because she violated "family honor". The girl's uncle, convicted of kidnapping her, was sent to prison for five years.The indictment against the two says that in 2008 the Bedouin girl, a twelfth-grader, began to date a man against her family's orders. The girl ran away from home, but was soon found by police and transferred to the care of social workers. The authorities then passed her on to a local sheikh, who eventually returned her to her family. She continued to meet with the young man she had been seeing, to her family's ire. Eventually she ran away again. According to the indictment, her uncle found her together with the aforementioned sheikh, and the two interrogated her on her relationship with the young man. One of them told her he would "burn her" if she didn't tell the truth. The two then passed the girl on to the convicted sheikh and his wife, who imprisoned her in a cave for two months. During this time her hands and feet remained tied with chains, and the sheikh periodically raped, abused, and performed indecent acts on her, the indictment says. It adds that the sheikh's wife beat her when the girl tried to report the abuse. Occasionally her uncle would also visit, and attempt to force her to marry someone else. During the sentencing hearing the prosecution demanded a harsh sentence for the men. "Violations carried out due to 'family honor' are serious crimes that harm women's rights in society and oppress them," the prosecution claimed, adding that a harsh sentence would serve as deterrence. However the uncle's attorneys claimed that he saved the girl's life by setting up her marriage to another man. They added that the defendant is a known women's rights activist in the Bedouin sector. The sheikh was sentenced to 13 years in prison because "instead of protecting the complainant he took advantage of his proximity to her in order to violate her," the judges wrote in their verdict. He was also ordered to compensate her with the amount of NIS 50,000 ($14,700).The sheikh's wife, a Palestinian woman, was sentenced to one year suspended prison sentence for attacking the girl and preventing her from escaping. The sheikh who helped the girl's uncle kidnap her was also sentenced to one year in prison. His attorney said he, too, is known in the Bedouin sector as a champion of liberalism and women's rights. "These acts were committed in a gray area," the defense stated.Hmmmmm........."champion of liberalism and women's rights"....yeah whatevah.Read the full story here.

• IHH may not take part in flotilla.(Ynet). Turkish organization announces it will make final decision by end of the week, but other groups slated to take part in Gaza sail determined to go. The Turkish IHH organization is rethinking the Gaza-bound flotilla set to depart later this month while other participating groups remain determined to set sail as planned. On Wednesday, Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported that the IHH is considering canceling the flotilla following developments in the region, particularly in Syria. "We think we can achieve our goals regardless of whether we send the Marmara ship to Gaza or not. We shall make a final decision by the end of the week," the IHH spokesman said.IHH senior official Hussein Uruç confirmed the report saying the group is rethinking the departure date but that preparations are still underway. "Tomorrow we shall make a final decision on the matter, but right now there is still one date and there are no problems with the flotilla," he said.Israeli expat Dror Feiler, who heads the Gaza movement in Sweden, stressed that despite the IHH's statements the other organizations participating in the flotilla have no intention of postponing it. "The IHH have their own reasons, internal reasons. It won't stop us from going. We're going because we think it's important, not because of any organization," he told Ynet.He stressed that the members of the IHH, a Muslim organization which Israel considers a terrorist group, continues to support the flotilla and wish to make the journey to Gaza. "We shall be sorry if they can’t go, but it doesn’t pose a threat to the flotilla. "Maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Thus far Israel has claimed that the Turks are terrorists. What will they say now – that the Swedes, Danes, Americans and all the world's nations are all terrorists?"Feiler, who took part in the previous flotilla, said that the IHH had shared its problems with the other groups meant to take part in the sail. "We knew there were question marks, we've been working together for more than a year and a half, we count on each other. We may come from countries with different cultures but we're all working toward the same goal. We won't give up."Others in the Free Gaza movement were however surprised to hear of the IHH's announcement. Adam Shapiro said: "This is news to me. I shall talk to Hussein and get an update," he told Ynet. "We still don't know what we'll do if they decide not to participate." Read the full story here.

• Women drivers to circle Washington Saudi embassy in protest.(Ynet).Unusual Washington rally remonstrates Saudi Arabia's opressive ban on female drivers.An unusual protest is planned for Washington as women plan to drive around the Saudi embassy to protest the kingdom's ban on female drivers. The Institute for Gulf Affairs, which is sponsoring Wednesday's rally, accuses Saudi Arabia of practicing a system of gender apartheid that oppresses women – most noticeably by refusing to allow women behind the wheel.The protest will run from noon to 4 pm outside the embassy in Washington. It is designed to support a protest planned for Friday inside the kingdom itself.Senior Saudi clerics have issued fatwas, or religious edicts, banning women from driving, claiming it protects against the spread of vice and temptation because women drivers would be free to leave home alone and interact with male strangers.Read the full story here.

• French flotilla ship won't sail.(Ynet).Members of Jewish community in France band together, send 500 letters of protest against Gaza flotilla, effectively preventing ship bought by organizers for €530,000 from docking in Marseille. One of the ships slated to participate in the flotilla to Gaza later this month will not set sail, Ynet has learned, less than a day after the Turkish IHH organization announced it was reconsidering its participation in the flotilla as well. The ship was to set sail from the port of Marseille, but a lengthy battle by the French Jewish community has apparently succeeded in preventing it.Organizers of the flotilla issued a statement thanking participants Wednesday and urging them to seek other transportation, such as on ships departing from Greece and Turkey. The French ship – one of 15 participating in the flotilla – was intended to carry a few dozen activists. Organizers bought the vessel for €530,000. Ynet learned Wednesday that the ship was being prevented from docking in France thanks to pressure applied by parliament members and organizations on insurance local companies and authorities. The vessel is currently anchored in waters outside of Marseille, where it has been for the past four days. "It's fantastic. Even we didn't believe this battle would lead to victory," a member of the French Jewish community told Ynet. He said he and other Jewish representatives had decided to join together to try to prevent the flotilla, and subsequently wrote letters of protest to 500 MPs and organizations. On Tuesday the battle came to a hilt when Jewish MP Jacques-Alain Bénisti but a query to French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, asking to learn France's official position on the flotilla. The move was said to have put pressure on local insurance companies and helped to cancel the French ship's participation. "We feel great joy, but we know that this is just a small battle in a larger war. There are many battles left until September. We must not claim victory, only rejoice in the united front we have presented and move on," a source from the Jewish community said. "The next goal is to take control of the online field, appeal to youths, explain to them our position, and offer incentives to work with us."Hmmmm........How about the US position on "The Audacicity of Hope"?Read the full story here.

• Iranian female University Student Writes on Violence Against Women: “Invisible Wounds”.(Persian2English).You know, violence is not always about swollen eyes, broken teeth, and bloody noses. Violence can be the humiliation that comes from a dirty look; when a man looks down upon the fallen collar of a woman’s shirt while she is serving tea or the look of a brother when his sister is laughing out loud at a dinner party. These are looks that are invisible to us. We have no idea what [these looks] lead to once we leave the dinner party. Violence is the fear that has slowly crept into the psyche of women. It is a silent violence void of any physical contact. It is when the man opens the door and the woman becomes agitated at once and becomes sad. She doesn’t know why. It’s as if she is uneasy in the presence of her man. It’s as if she is not herself. She has the fear of not being able to live up to his expectations. She thinks less of herself; perhaps she needs to be skinnier or fatter or more beautiful or happier or more conservative or sexier or more of a homemaker…or wiser.

Violence is what a woman thinks she should be rather than what she actually is. Violence is a mask that the woman wears so that she can be something different than what she is; something that satisfies her man. A man can crush a woman without even touching her; without even intending to crush her. This is the heritage passed down to men from their fathers and grandfathers: violence, harassment, and humiliation are continuations of common profanities directed toward someone’s mother and sister; be it vocalized in a serious or joking tone. This is when we teach our children to not “cry like a woman”.

Violence, harassment, and humiliation begin when a man asks her not to wear something or not to socialize with certain people…just because! This is considered ‘love’; a ‘love’ that soon turns into a tool to control. The result is women who lack self-confidence and feel, powerless, sad, humiliated, fearful, dependent, and threatened to be left alone. These women may also get beaten up. The women believe that these wounds are wounds of love. They believe a loving man must create wounds and wounds will heal over time. A man’s violent behaviour is often legitimized by stating that he was drunk. When a man harasses, humiliates, and beats up a woman, being drunk is used a good excuse.

You know, physical abuse is not the worst type of violence against women. Swollen body parts, physical wounds, and broken bones heal with time. But the power, liveliness, and self belief that is taken away from women may never heal.Violence is the heavy hand of a father that is raised against his nine-year-old daughter but never comes down on her. Violence is the bullying by a brother who forever puts a stop to the innocent love of a neighbour’s boy; frustrating his sister of pure neighbourly love. Violence is when a man burps out loud instead of thanking his wife for imprisoning herself in a kitchen all day to cook a delicious meal. Laws which enable a grandfather to inherit all of a woman’s inheritance when her father passes away are violence. The mother’s rights are ignored. Violence is when a brother inherits twice the inheritance of his sister and she is expected to appreciate the fact that he is the bread winner of the home.Violence is about all of us women who accept all of the [above] without even protesting. And when one of us does protest, we ridicule her and call her names. We, ourselves are the embodiment of violence and we have no one to blame.Read the full story here.

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.

MFS - The Other News

                       Afternoon  Posting.

• Syria Live Blog - June 09. Here .(Al-Jazeera).

• Libya Live Blog - June 09. Here (Al-Jazeera). 

• Yemen Live Blog - June 09 . Here. (Al-Jazeera).

• Updated !Earthquakes in the last 24 hours in the world seismic activity in Japan  today 4.8 ! 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 47- Source.

• Video - HDN exclusive: Hospital footage shows injured protesters in Syria.(HurriyetDaily).WARNING: This footage contains graphic content that might not be suitable for children or sensitive people.This video was obtained by the Hürriyet Daily News from a Syrian who took refuge in Turkey, escaping from the turmoil in the neighboring country. The Daily News was unable to verify the authenticity of the video.Read the full story here.

• Obama regime making a mockery out of Congress?(BigPeace).Obama Administration Shrouding Our Role In Libya.Yesterday, NATO aircraft pounded the Libyan capital Tripoli in what has been reported to have been the heaviest bombing of Tripoli since the initiation of western airstrikes in March. Reuters reported that the city was struck “several times an hour” as opposed to “at most a few times a day” in the past. Already over the weekend, NATO announced that it was carrying out “intensive and sustained” strikes on Tripoli. Were American aircraft involved in the assault?According to a report in the French daily Libération, France and Great Britain have each been carrying out 25% of the “offensive” flight missions in the NATO bombing campaign. Who is carrying out the remaining 50%? Only a handful of other NATO countries are known to be participating in the air campaign and none of them have anything like the military capacity of the United States. It is hard to imagine that NATO could undertake “intensive and sustained” strikes on Tripoli without American involvement.Already on April 13 – this is to say two weeks after the so-called “handover” of the Libya mission to NATO – the Pentagon quietly admitted that American aircraft were still attacking Libyan targets. Overall, the US was reported to be assuming some 35% of flight missions at the time, including reconnaissance and refueling missions. This means that US forces minimally constituted the logistical backbone of the air campaign.President Obama has refused to comply with the War Powers Act and seek congressional authorization for the Libyan campaign. The administration has attempted to justify this stance by claiming that American forces are merely serving a limited “support” role. Should not the American media and members of congress be demanding to know in just what this “support” consists?Hmmm......Dictatorship or Democracy...last chance in 2012!Read the full story here.

• Related - Time Running Out in Libya?(Cato).By John Samples.Even defenders of broad presidential prerogatives are starting to conclude that Obama’s war in Libya violates the original legal justification for it offered by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the Department of Justice.Briefly put, the OLC said the Libyan war was not a war because the operation would be limited as to means, objectives, and duration. Thus, the OLC argued, neither the Constitution nor the War Powers Resolution constrained the president’s prerogatives.The objective has changed from protecting civilians to regime change. The war itself has gone on now for as long as the unauthorized war in Kosovo in 1999. Jack Goldsmith concludes: “as the days drag on, and as our deep involvement persists, it becomes harder and harder to represent that this mission is limited in nature, duration, and scope.”Hmmmm.......Dictatorship or democracy?Read the full story here.

• Hallelujah the 'Messiah' will speak!White House says it will answer Congress on Libya.(Msnbc).The White House now says it will respond to detailed questions on the U.S. mission in Libya within a two-week deadline set by the House in a resolution approved last week.Aides to President Barack Obama had previously brushed off the non-binding resolution, calling it unhelpful and unnecessary. The White House suggested earlier this week it had no plans to formally respond to the questions posed in the measure because officials were already providing details in dozens of briefings with lawmakers on Capitol Hill.While officials maintain that those briefings are sufficient, the White House now says it will also respond specifically to the questions in the resolution, which was sponsored by House Speaker John Boehner."We will answer the questions in that resolution within the time frame that he specifies," White House spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday.The deadline for providing answers on the operation's objective, its costs and its impact on the nation's two other wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is June 17.Carney said the White House decision to directly respond to the House resolution is "in the spirit that we have answered questions that members have had in the past." He would not say how the White House would go about providing its response.The House resolution calls on the president to send Congress a detailed written report with answers to more than 20 questions. The resolution also chastised Obama for failing to provide a "compelling rationale" for the Libyan mission. Forty-five Democrats joined the Republican majority in passing the measure.Hmmmm.....Don't be all excited, he'll make again a mockery out of Congress,frankly speaking they deserve it for their lack of 'guts'.Read the full story here.

• Pentagon: Cost Of Obama’s Time-Limited, Scope-Limited, Kinetic Military Action In Libya Soars To $750 Million.(WZ).US military operations in Libya are on course to cost hundreds of millions of dollars more than the Pentagon estimated, according to figures obtained by the Financial Times.Robert Gates, the outgoing secretary of defence, said last month that the Pentagon expected to spend “somewhere in the ball park of $750m” in the 2011 fiscal year as part of efforts to protect the Libyan people.But according to a Pentagon memo which includes a detailed update on the progress and pace of operations, by mid-May US operations in Libya had cost $664m, a figure confirmed by the Department of Defence.The document, entitled the “United States Contribution to Operation Unified Protector’’, adds that US costs are running at a rate of about $2m a day or $60m a month. The memo has been circulating on Capitol Hill since last week. The DoD declined to comment on the increased costs of the operation.Hmmmm......Costly to stand with your Muslim Brothers,i'm sure Al-Qaida will refund the US in Natura.Read the full story here.

• Are these people for real?Video - Napolitano: Screening Muslim Males Under 35, Not Good Common Sense.(BarracudaBrigade).Hmmmm.....Yup statistics show the average terrorist is an middle aged Italian decent woman.Read and see the full story here.

• Russia - Muslim priests to give spiritual guidance to servicemen.(RT).Muslim muftis will soon be sent to the Russian Army for spiritual guidance of Muslim servicemen, according to Russia’s Supreme Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin. Currently, only Orthodox priests are present among Army staff.In an interview to the Echo of Moscow radio station, the Supreme Mufti said that the Russian Muslim University has launched a special course for priests who will work in the Army.Soon, around a dozen Muslim priests will start their jobs in various military units. But this is only the beginning as more will follow. The work in the Army requires some special skills so this category of clergy should have specific training, Tadzhuddin explained.“We think that retired officers could take special-purpose courses in the Russian Muslim University,” he said. “We should send to the Army those people who understand its specifics. At the same time, they should be able to make their spiritual contribution.”He added that heads of regional spiritual centers have already started attracting people.Talgat Tadzhuddin also said that those priests and their activities will be controlled by Russia’s Interconfessional Council. Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, head of the Russian Orthodox Church’s public relations, said on Wednesday that it is a common world practice to send representatives of major religions to the Army. He observed that the Church is now renewing the practice of assigning staff spiritual counselors to the military. He added that around 1,000 Orthodox priests have been working in the Army as volunteers.Deputy head of the State Duma Committee for Defense Yury Savenko told Echo of Moscow that representatives of the main confessions in the Army can reduce the number of interethnic and inter-religious conflicts.Islam is the second largest religion after Orthodox Christianity in Russia, with around 8 million believers. Most of them are concentrated in the North Caucasus, the republics of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Western Siberia and also Moscow.Hmmmm.......Estimated total population of Russia :141,896,685.A minority dictating a huge majority.How things changed since Stalin's days ?Read the full story here.

• Hamas Says “Nothing Will Prevent Them” From Joining New Government With US-Funded Palestinian Authority.(Haaretz).Hamas will participate in any future Palestinian government, a senior official from the Islamist group said Thursday, refuting press reports that it might opt not to take part in a future administration.“Nothing would prevent us” from participating in any government after new elections, Salah al-Bardaweel, a high-ranking Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip told the German Press Agency DPA.The comments came after earlier media reports Thursday that Hamas might exclude itself from a future government – even if it won in elections – if that helped such a government to avoid international isolation.“This is totally incorrect and totally untrue,” said al- Bardaweel, arguing that the reports were intended to isolate Hamas politically and diplomatically.Hamas in April agreed to a reconciliation with the secular Fatah, the other major Palestinian bloc, after years of a sometimes bloody stand-off between the two, clearing the way for the two to form a unity government.But Hamas’ participation in any future government could turn into a diplomatic stumbling block for any Palestinian government, as Hamas’ refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist and its refusal to honor past Israeli-Palestinian agreements keeps entities like the United States and the European Union from recognizing it.Hmmmm.....Will the Obama regime 'out' itselves and openly fund a terrorist organisation,against the will of Congress?Read the full story here.

• Did Anthony Weiner, a Jew, convert to Islam to marry a Muslim?(BNI).Omar Abu-Namous is the imam of the Islamic Cultural Center in New York and he is encouraging Huma Abedin – a practicing Muslim – to stand by her husband, New York congressman Anthony Weiner. Why would this imam support Anthony Weiner, who was raised Jewish, in a marriage with a practicing Muslim woman?EVERY ISLAMIC SCHOLAR agrees that it is forbidden for a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim. Former Muslim Walid Shoebat has translated the Arabic declarations relative to the validity of the marriage between Weiner and Abedin last year. One such publication Shoebat translated was the Al-Marsid newspaper, which reported on the Weiner/Abedin marriage specifically:Dr. Anwar Shoeb of the faculty of Islamic law in Kuwait declared that the marriage between Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin is null and void, considering it adultery as confirmed in the Sharia position, prohibiting the marriage of a Muslim woman to a non-Muslim, regardless of whether he is a Jew or a Christian. In this case, he assured the invalidity of the marriage certificate between them.Abu-Namous is in direct opposition to his Islamic superiors? Why? Huma Abedin was raised in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In 2007, the New York Observer wrote (in an article no longer available but cross-posted at FreeRepublic.com) that her mother is a professor in Saudi Arabia and that her father was an Islamic scholar before his death.Weiner was raised Jewish but admitted to growing up in a non-religious household. If Abedin remains a practicing Muslim and her religion forbids her from marrying a non-Muslim, isn’t she failing to practice Islam? Wouldn’t that be the case unless Weiner converted to Islam? The New York Times reported that Weiner “sometimes fasts with her (Abedin) during Ramadan.” This would indicate that the congressman is more amenable to practicing Islam than Abedin is to practicing Judaism.Did Abedin reject Weiner because he was not Muslim? Why is a New York imam with ties to the ISNA and Feisal Abdul Rauf defending a non-Muslim male with a Muslim female?Perhaps there is a more important question that needs to be answered. Did a secular Jewish man convert to Islam or did his (still) practicing Muslim wife abandon her religion by marrying him?Read the full story here.

• The Beginning of the Panic.(DailyWealth).In the next few weeks, our country will enter a period without precedence in our experience.On June 30, the Federal Reserve has pledged to cease buying U.S. Treasury bonds. This is the second time since the financial crisis it has intervened in the Treasury market in a major way. The program of buying new Treasury issues has been dubbed "quantitative easing II" (QE2).We'd wager not one in 1,000 Americans has any idea (or at least any real understanding) of what has been going on in the market for U.S. Treasury bonds since the financial crisis. For the last nine months, the Fed has been printing up new dollars and buying huge amounts of newly issued debt from the U.S. Treasury – $600 billion of bonds. And these purchases followed a $1.75 trillion program of quantitative easing that ran from March 2009 to March 2010.It is no exaggeration to say that a printing press has kept our economy going for the last two years. But what will happen when the printing stops?While we honestly don't know, we're going to speculate that, in the short term, the U.S. dollar will rally and commodities will suffer a serious correction. We will see a dramatic slowdown in the rate of monetary inflation. People will think prices will stop going up. Economic activity will begin to decline. Fear will lead a lot of investors to "go to cash." That means buying short-term U.S. Treasury bonds because they're the most liquid, most frequently traded form of cash.As this process unfolds, we expect to see another global panic. Especially if Bernanke's decision to stop the presses coincides with a Republican political gambit – refusing to raise the debt ceiling, which could cause a default on U.S. Treasury bonds.Whether the debt ceiling is raised or not, it's only a matter of time before the Fed will have to turn on the presses again. And when "QE3" begins, it will send our creditors an unmistakable message: You will never be repaid in anything other than massively devalued paper.All around the world, more and more central banks are selling dollars and buying gold. They're doing so because they can plainly see America's credit has become unreliable and the value of the dollar is likely to decline.If you think you might be trading in something other than U.S. dollars in the future, you might not want to be holding U.S. dollars. You might want to be holding that currency.And if you can't hold that currency, consider holding gold.Good investing,Porter.Read the full story here.
• Related video - Must see! WARNING: THE FOLLOWING PRESENTATION IS CONTROVERSIAL AND MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO SOME AUDIENCES. Viewer discretion is advised.Read and see the full story here.

• Enterohaemorrhagic E. coli, or EHEC - 'A Totally New Disease Pattern'.(Spiegel).Doctors Shaken By Outbreak's Neurological Devastation.The patient at the Hamburg-Eilbek Hospital describes to doctors how she first had diarrhea, and then grew progressively weaker to the point where she could no longer eat and barely make it to the toilet. When blood appeared in her stool, she became terrified. The young woman at the hospital's intensive-care unit in the northern German port city suspects that lettuce was responsible for putting her in this deadly situation. She then breaks out in tears, completely distraught.

Thanks to several dialysis procedures, she will most likely survive her case of hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS), a particularly aggressive complication related to the enterohaemorrhagic E. coli, or EHEC, that has appeared in more than one-quarter of the patients infected by the bacteria. So far, around 2,800 people have been infected in the dramatic outbreak of this rare strain of E. Coli, with at least 722 contracting HUS and 29 dead so far in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. The number of new cases has diminished this week, but the outbreak has left doctors pondering serious questions about the new epidemic. Rolf Stahl, a nephrologist at Hamburg's University Clinic Hamburg-Eppendorf, explains that, "Neurologists are being confronted with a totally new disease pattern." Never before has an EHEC germ been as aggressive -- and many consider this to be a new epidemic.And although the majority will survive, some patients will have lasting and serious health problems. "A considerable number of the patients will permanently lose their kidney function and will be dependent on dialysis for the rest of their lives," says Stahl.Although the number of infections is slowing, no single treatment has been found that can be effective for the majority of patients. And that leaves people asking what will hapen the next time this super strain of E. coli infects a large number of people. Indeed, O104:H4 is giving the medical world a feeling of powerlessness it hasn't felt in a long time. Wertheimer compares it to the AIDS outbreak in the 1980s. "In the era of antibiotics, we suddenly had an infection that we couldn't treat. That was a shock."As in the AIDS epidemic, microorganisms are recapturing terrain once again, and doing so in a perfidious manner. The EHEC bacteria produce even more of their toxin when they die off. If antibiotics were used against the bacteria, the toxin would literally flood the body.And what of the appealing view of mankind triumphing over the infectious diseases of medieval times? A myth, says Wertheimer.Hmmmm.....A candidate for ' biological warfare'?Read the full story here. 

• Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood Democrats to Form ‘Perfect Slavery to Allah Party’.(BigPeace).Dr. Mohamed Badi, Chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood, now best described as The “Perfect Slavery to Allah” (hurriyya), or “Zabibah Party” (see discoloration from repeated prayer-induced skin trauma on his forehead) From Ikhwan Web:

Egypt’s largest political opposition the Muslim Brotherhood, has confirmed that it is preparing to establish a political party calling it the Freedom and Justice Party, or Horeya and Adala.”

Horeya or Hurriyya, Arabic for “freedom,” and the uniquely Western concept of freedom are completely at odds. Hurriyya “freedom” — as Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) the lionized “Greatest Sufi Master”, expressed it — “being perfect slavery.” And this conception is not merely confined to the Sufis’ perhaps metaphorical understanding of the relationship between Allah the “master” and his human “slaves.”

The late American scholar of Islam, Franz Rosenthal (d. 2003) analyzed the larger context of hurriyya in Muslim society. He notes the historical absence of hurriyya as “…a fundamental political concept that could have served as a rallying cry for great causes.”

An individual Muslim

…was expected to consider subordination of his own freedom to the beliefs, morality and customs of the group as the only proper course of behavior…

 Thus politically, Rosenthal concludes,

…the individual was not expected to exercise any free choice as to how he wished to be governed…In general, …governmental authority admitted of no participation of the individual as such, who therefore did not possess any real freedom vis-a-vis it.

Bernard Lewis, in his analysis of hurriyya for the venerated Brill Encyclopedia of Islam, discusses this concept in the latter phases of the Ottoman Empire, through the contemporary era. After highlighting a few “cautious” or “conservative” (Lewis’ characterization) reformers and their writings, Lewis maintains,

…there is still no idea that the subjects have any right to share in the formation or conduct of government—to political freedom, or citizenship, in the sense which underlies the development of political thought in the West. While conservative reformers talked of freedom under law, and some Muslim rulers even experimented with councils and assemblies government was in fact becoming more and not less arbitrary….

Lewis also makes the important point that Western colonialism ameliorated this chronic situation:

During the period of British and French domination, individual freedom was never much of an issue. Though often limited and sometimes suspended, it was on the whole more extensive and better protected than either before or after.

And Lewis concludes with a stunning observation, when viewed in light of the present travails of the so-called “Arab Spring,” and throughout the Muslim world, delusively optimistic assessments notwithstanding:

In the final revulsion against the West, Western democracy too was rejected as a fraud and a delusion, of no value to Muslims.Lastly, the pronounced prayer bump or “zabibah” on Mr. Badie’s forehead is pathogonomomic reminder of Islam’s Manichaen nature as described in Koran 48:29, and its mainstream understanding (Koranic commentary or “tafsir”):

[Pickthall translation] Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. And those with him are hard against the disbelievers and merciful among themselves. Thou (O Muhammad) seest them bowing and falling prostrate (in worship), seeking bounty from Allah and (His) acceptance. The mark of them is on their foreheads from the traces of prostration.

Tafsir on this verse from Maariful Quran, pp. 104-105: The first quality of the Companions mentioned here is that they are hard against the unbelievers, and merciful to one another. It was proven time and again that they were harsh against the unbelievers. They sacrificed all their ethnic and tribal relations for the sake of Islam. This was especially demonstrated on the occasion of Hudaibiyah….In a Hadith recorded by Bukhari, the Holy Prophet has said, “He who loves for the sake of Allah and hates for the sake of Allah has attained the highest degree of faith”Hmmmm.....The 'People' the Obama regime supports with Billions of tax payer Dollars!Read the full story here.

• Christian girl being sexually abused to make her convert to Islam.(Very graphic video).Read and see the full story here.‏

• The Sultan of Istancool.(Spiegel)One supporter of the Turkish prime minister says that he admires how the irascible Erdogan now manages to keep his temper under control. At the same time, it is interesting that the man is unwilling to be quoted on the record. It offers a small insight into a serious liability in Erdogan's Turkey: Its leader has a problem with authority. He can't get enough of it.The premier, says Sedat Ergin, the head of the Ankara office of the Turkish daily newspaper Hürriyet for many years, entered his first term eight years ago with great caution. He took stock of his adversaries in the army, the economy and the press, says Ergin, but he also treated them with respect. "He was decisive in advancing his policies, but he also exercised restraint," he says. According to Ergin, this changed after Erdogan's second election victory in 2007. "That was when he started using the power of the state more indiscriminately."

Ergin knows what he's talking about. The more critical newspapers were in their reporting on the government, the more sharply did the prime minister's office, the Basbakanlik, strike back. A cartoonist who took the liberty of portraying the prime minister as a cat found himself facing charges in court. The same thing happened soon afterwards to another cartoonist, who had drawn Erdogan as a blood-sucking tick on the back of a respectable citizen, as a comment on the government's taxation policies.The Dogan Group, which owns the secular Hürriyet and the Turkish division of the US news broadcaster CNN, was particularly hard-hit. In 2009, a dozen tax inspectors descended on the company. When they were finished with their audit, Dogan was slapped with an order to pay the government the equivalent of €2.2 billion ($3.2 billion)."That's the problem with Erdogan," says Ergin. "He is using the power of the state more and more arbitrarily to promote his political interests. There is no one left to keep him in check."

In 2008, a group of former senior military leaders were put on trial for allegedly plotting to overthrow the Erdogan regime in its early years. The so-called Ergenekon trial, named, like the group of conspirators, after the mythical ancestral home of the Turks in Central Asia, had a cathartic effect on the people. For the first time, the previously untouchable officers were facing charges in a court of law.But the longer the trial dragged on, the wider the government cast its net, arresting professors, civil servants, attorneys and journalists opposed to the regime. In March, the astonished nation realized that what had been an important trial had turned into a vehicle with which the regime was eliminating its influential critics. That was when the police arrested and filed terrorism charges against investigative reporter Ahmet Sik, the journalist who had been one of the first to report on the Ergenekon group's alleged plans to overthrow the government, but then also looked at the pro-government Islamist network. Sik, along with 67 other journalists and dozens of professors, is still in prison today.In his self-aggrandizement, the premier who introduced historic change to Turkey, could become a growing liability for his country. His critics say that there is now little difference between Erdogan and Russia's strongman, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Of course, Russia hasn't applied for EU membership, but Turkey has. The prime minister's power trip is now backfiring on the Turks, increasing opposition to Turkey joining the bloc.

"This man is dangerous," says Celal Sengör, 56, a renowned seismologist. He experienced firsthand how the AKP intervenes in the autonomy of academia. In 2009, Sengör, the dean of Istanbul Technical University who holds a critical stance toward Islam, was told that he was being let go -- without any explanation or dismissal procedure. It was only the intervention of the president of the International Academy of Science that saved him from losing his job. Since then, Sengör has been even more disillusioned than he was before. "Europe shouldn't be naïve," he says. "Turkey simply isn't ready to be a true democracy."

• People like Sengör, who belong to Turkey's urban elite, are shocked when they open their morning newspapers to read horror stories from the provinces: of religious fanatics who sprayed acid onto the exposed legs of schoolgirls in Mersin; of a young woman near Malatya who was buried alive because she allegedly had a boyfriend; and of the rapes of two sisters in Siirt by almost 100 men.The brutality with which women are treated is as old as Turkey itself, and the previous regimes failed just as miserably when it came to protecting the victims. But between 2002 and 2009, the number of violent acts and so-called honor killings rose from 66 to 953. A woman dies every day, say human rights activists. The AKP argues that the figures are so high because more murders are now being reported and documented.Sociologist Binnaz Toprak acknowledges this as a possibility, but she also has another explanation: "The pressure to behave devoutly, to pray regularly, to fast and not to drink alcohol, has gone up. Society has become more conservative." A climate has developed in which women are no longer seen on the streets after dark outside the big cities, a climate in which some feel emboldened to interpret verses of the Koran in a misogynistic way.Toprak's analysis confirms the suspicions of secular Turks and skeptical Europeans that a broad segment of Turkish society espouses a view of the world and of women that is incompatible with that of the West. This casts a dark shadow over Turkey as an EU candidate.It's more likely that the Europeans and the Turks will continue to spend years talking at cross-purposes, but without expressing the two truths that everyone knows by now: that Europe doesn't want Turkey -- and that soon Turkey will no longer need Europe.Hmmmm......Keep the "Sultan and Teacher" Erdogan out of the European Union.Read the full story here.

• Syrian Website: Turkish Fighters Operating Against Syrian Security Forces.A Syrian website reports that in clashes in the Jisr Al-Shughur region in northern Syria, bordering the Turkish province of Alexandretta, 4,000 Turks are also participating, and so far some 200 of them have been captured by Syrian security forces. 'It was reported that the Syrian army was concentrating many forces in the region, anticipating a lengthy conflict, and that many residents had fled.Read the full story here.

• Iranian Website: Ahmadinejad Visit To Armenia Prevented Due To Ban On Entourage Members.The Iranian website Fararu said that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Armenia, set for June 6, had been suddenly cancelled due to Iranian authorities' ban on leaving the country for two members of his entourage. Mojtaba Samareh Hashemi,senior advisor to Ahmadinejad, staid that the visit had been postponed for technical reasons, but it is thought that the matter is connected to the rift between Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Ahmadinejad.Read the full story here.