The left wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz says that Egyptian army officers in Cairo’s central square have tossed aside their helmets and joined the crowd. “The Army and the people are one,” they chanted. MSNBC’s photoblog shows protesters jubilantly perched on M1A1 tanks. The real significance of these defections is that the army officers would not have done so had they not sensed which way the winds were blowing — in the Egyptian officer corps.
After three decades of Mubarak rule, a window of opportunity has opened for various political forces — from the moderate to the extreme — that preferred to keep the spotlight on the liberal face of the demonstrations while they maneuver from behind. As the Iranian Revolution of 1979 taught, the ideology and composition of protesters can wind up having very little to do with the political forces that end up in power.
Facebook currently stores over 260 billion images, which translates to over 20 petabytes of data. Users upload one billion new photos (~60 terabytes) each week and Facebook serves over one million images per second at peak. via muratbuffalo.blogspot.com That's unreal.
I read somewhere online that part of King Tut's curse meant that you had to wear a pink tutu for the rest of your life. This is supported by many scholars and is documented extensively in the archaeological literature.
PS - explaining to your kids that not everything that's online is true is hard.
We've all dated someone who didn't pass our parents' approval meter, but nothing, not even Dad's "rules for courting my little girl" lectures, can beat how this 47-year-old German man taught his daughter's older boyfriend a lesson. Helmut Seifert, father of a seventeen year-old girl, castrated Philip Genscher, 57, with a bread knife after an anonymous tipper notified him of their relationship. via yourtango.com
[[posterous-content:BfsiAEdwCeGDgmlFEcmi]] via owni.eu Oh my.
Riot police in black body armor forced striking workers away from blocked fuel depots in western France, restoring gasoline to areas where pumps were dry after weeks of protests over the government proposal raising the age from 60 to 62.
Riot officers in the Paris suburb of Nanterre and the southeastern city of Lyon sprayed tear gas but appeared unable to stop the violence.
After months of largely peaceful disruptions, many protests erupted into violence this week over the government's push to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62.
Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. A culture that celebrates femininity and considers women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that mutilates girls’ genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs and stones them for falling in love.
I testified before the Commission in July that Obama political appointee Julie Fernandes made it clear that the Voting Section at the Justice Department would not be bringing any more cases against traditional national racial minorities, like the members of the New Black Panthers. Under oath, Coates corroborated my testimony.
The public has been wondering for over a year why the case was dismissed. Coates testified why today:
[There is a] deep-seated opposition to the race-neutral enforcement of the Voting Rights Act against racial minorities and for the protection of whites who have been discriminated against.
After all," he said, "it was the ancient Israelites who built the first food pyramids. But this is America. I don't want a tomato picked by a Mexican. I want it picked by an American, then sliced by a Guatemalan, and served by a Venezuelan in a spa where a Chilean gives me a Brazilian. via cnn.com