News and Analysis (5/8/13)

Aleppo’s Military Revolutionary Council head Col. “Abdul-Jabbar Aqidi and FSA commander Col. Abdul Hamid Zakaria will attend a special session on “[t]he situation in Syria and the war against the regime of (President Bashar) Assad … off-the record & not for publication” organized by AIPAC offshoot WINIP:

… and with Israeli support in the offing, the rebels are unenthusiastic about efforts to bring an end to the fighting and kidnap UN observers in Israeli occupied Syria …

… It’s a political Rorschach test: The rebels crossed Obama’s red line by using sarin, yet he wants to arm them, yet his Justice Department charges a young man who wants to go fight with them with terrorism, yet the judge releases the {terrorist-suspect / would-be freedom-fighter} to house arrest pending trial:

Young “men who are forming their identities … are in desperate need of older male mentors to help them channel their energy in positive directions. If mosques are intimidated into kicking out these young men …, they’ll become more alienated and will search for advice elsewhere––with potentially deadly results”:

“Morsi ignored opposition demands for a consensus Cabinet and the removal of Prime Minister Hisham Kandil” and the Muslim “Brotherhood controls nearly one-third of the Cabinet”believing “they can remain in control without the political consensus that the opposition and Western powers have been urging”:

“At least 43 people, most of them Muslims, were killed in Meikhtila, some of them hunted down and burnt to death by Buddhist mobs. Authorities have detained Buddhists allegedly involved in the attacks, but so far none have been charged with crimes”:

“Up to 40,000 protesters … filled the stadium’s stands and spilled onto the football field. They complain that indelible ink – meant to prevent multiple voting – could be easily washed off and … of a government scheme to fly tens of thousands of ‘dubious’ – and possibly foreign – voters to flood key constituencies”:

“Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the arrest, calling it ‘a flagrant challenge to the freedom of worship’. Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said it was a ‘grave escalation in Israel’s relentless violations of international law’ …

… and the world’s most famous theoretical physicist joins “a small but growing list of British personalities who have turned down invitations to visit Israel, including Elvis Costello, Roger Waters, Brian Eno, Annie Lennox and Mike Leigh” in boycotting the apartheid state:

“[L]lawyers say that in this trial, as in other trials of officials and the security forces charged with killing protesters, the police did a shoddy job of collecting evidence. They blame the conditions under which police worked[,] … sympathy for their colleagues and a legal code that is not designed to try state officials”:

A Human Rights Watch report in October documented how the military task force fighting Boko Haram in its northern Nigeria strongholds had engaged in secret detentions, extortion, burning of homes and extrajudicial killings. These have generated sympathy and fresh recruits for the militants”:

“Kurdish militants began to withdraw from Turkey on Wednesday, pursuing a peace process meant to end a three-decade insurgency that has killed 40,000 people, ravaged the region’s economy and tarnished the country’s image abroad”


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