“… in the early months of the Arab revolts, Hamas’s fortunes seemed to be changing in a way the movement could have only dreamed of, offering what it hoped would be an unprecedented chance to advance its goals in the region, as well as in Gaza, the West Bank and Palestinian society generally…”
- a map and an excerpt from Crisis Group’s latest report on Hamas and the Arab Uprisings
Lucius Fox
Chief Executive Officer of Wayne Enterprises
Reblogged from theatlantic|296 notes
Pride in the Face of Death: A Clandestine Gay Rights Rally in Tehran
It’s not easy to be gay in the Islamic Republic of Iran. A recent United Nations report decried ”harassment, persecution, cruel punishment and even the death penalty.” Because Islamic law requires four adult male witnesses to prosecute sodomy, Iranian police typically seek confessions, often through torture. Women, easier to convict, are given 100 lashes for each case. Outside of the legal system, LGBT Iranians face widespread and socially accepted discrimination, bullying, and an elevated risk of suicide, according to a UK-based study. “Loneliness is killing me,” a 27-year-old man from Qazvin told researchers.
So it was an act of special significance when a small group of young people gathered in a hilly park overlooking Tehran to show, for a few brief but public moments, their support for Iranian gay rights. It was far from the biggest LGBT rights rally on May 17, the International Day Against Homophobia commemorating the World Health Organization’s 1990 decision to remove homosexuality from its catalog of mental diseases, but it carried its own significance.
Read more. [Images: fa.news.joopea.com]
Israelis awoke on Tuesday to the news that they have a new government—one of “national unity”—which immediately pledged to push through a raft of sweeping reforms.
They went to bed on Monday night believing they had a broken-down government and were headed for elections. As far as they knew the Knesset (parliament) was in the process of dissolving itself and arranging, by consensus, for early elections on September 4th.
Reblogged from pewresearch|1 note
Mitt Romney needed 15 weeks once the primary contests began to gain a secure hold over his party’s nomination for president. But he emerged as the conclusive winner in the media narrative about the race six weeks earlier.
Iraq, cut off from decades of technological progress because of dictatorship, sanctions and wars, recently took a big step out of isolation and into the digital world when its telecommunications system was linked to a vast new undersea cable system serving the Gulf countries.
The engineers who designed and installed the cable that made shore in Al-Faw, near Basra, had to deal with an unusual number of challenges. There were more than 100 oil and natural gas pipelines to cross; stretches of shallow water where the cable had to be buried; and unexploded ordnance from the Iraq war that had to be avoided.
“It was not easy,” said Ahmed Mekky, chief executive of Gulf Bridge International, the company that built the system. “But this could be a significant foundation stone for the country’s recovery.”
Reblogged from sunfoundation|133 notes
Level of freedom and democracy in the Middle East and North African countries
Israel cut working relations with the United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday and will bar a U.N. team from entering Israel or the West Bank for a planned investigation of Jewish settlements, the Foreign Ministry said.
Israel accuses the council of having a pronounced anti-Israel bias because of what it says is its disproportionate focus on Israeli policy toward the Palestinians.
Israeli leaders have been in an uproar over the council’s adoption of a resolution last week condemning Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem and its decision to send a fact-finding mission to investigate.
On Monday, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman announced Israel was severing working ties with the council.
Afghanistan policy is in crisis, at least in the United States. With Osama bin Laden now dead, some are wondering whether it’s time to declare this mission accomplished — or with Afghanistan so troubled, perhaps it’s mission impossible? In fact, it is mission incomplete: The Afghanistan mission is going worse than we had all hoped, but better than many understand. With patience and perseverance, we can still struggle to a tolerable outcome.
There is no denying that the past weeks have represented a setback for NATO efforts. Afghans, angered by the desecration of Qurans at a U.S. base, recently demonstrated violently against the NATO forces in their country, and the March 11 massacre of 16 Afghans by an apparently deranged U.S. soldier will only increase popular anger. These resentments have been further fueled by Iran and Pakistan and have rightly raised doubts that international forces have sufficient support in Afghanistan to complete the mission they have embarked upon.
Reblogged from theatlantic|69 notes
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As president of the United States, I don’t bluff.
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Reblogged from utnereader|839 notes
BORDERLAND This satellite image shows a pipeline fire in Homs, Syria. The pipeline, which runs through the rebel-held neighbourhood of Baba Amr, had been shelled by regime troops for the previous 12 days, according to two activist groups, the Local Coordination Committees and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The state news agency, SANA, blamed “armed terrorists” for the pipeline attack. (Photo: Digital Globe / AP via the Telegraph)
Reblogged from crisisgroup|7 notes