Eldritch Crank's List: International news

And yet informed observers have assumed for most of this century that American telephone metadata may well already be available to a foreign military-intelligence complex via hypothesized “backdoors” coded into complex commercial software.

In a stunning rebuke that provides a window into what Egypt can expect under its new leadership, politicians here say foreign groups should not help Egyptians express views that differ from the government's.

AbdulMawgoud Dardery, who belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party and is a member of the parliament's foreign relations committee, says the American non-profit groups were working toward "a type of democracy that will not bring Islamists to power, and this is wrong."

Q&A: Edward Luttwak

The military strategist talks about Israeli security, Henry Kissinger, the Arab Spring, and the death of Osama Bin Laden

The Romans could not disperse their soldiers in hundreds of cities, thousands of towns, and countless hamlets to repress riot or rebellion; the troops were needed to guard the frontiers. Instead, they relied on deterrence, which was periodically reinforced by exemplary punishments. Most inhabitants of the empire never rebelled after their initial conquest. A few tribes and nations had to be reconquered after trying and failing to overthrow Roman rule. A few simply refused to become obedient, and so they were killed off: “They make a wasteland and call it peace” was the bitter complaint of a Scottish chieftain (as reported by Tacitus).

Indisputably, it is China, whose 10-12 percent annual growth vaulted her past Italy, France, Britain, Germany and Japan to become the world's second largest economy and America's lone rival for first manufacturing power.

If we use a metric called "purchasing power parity," China overtakes America in 2016. Says the International Monetary Fund, the American era is over.

Gadhafi did not attack the West. He faced an uprising to dethrone him and rallied his troops to crush it, as any ruthless ruler would have done. We have no vital interest in who wins his civil war.

So the stupid party got together with the evil party for a bit of bipartisanship:

UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations Security Council voted Thursday to authorize military action, including airstrikes against Libyan tanks and heavy artillery and a no-fly zone, a risky foreign intervention aimed at averting a bloody rout of rebels by forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Langer argues that no single Western intelligence agency had the skills to pull this off alone. The most likely answer, he says, is that a consortium of intelligence agencies worked together to build the cyber bomb. And he says the most likely confederates are the United States, because it has the technical skills to make the virus, Germany, because reverse-engineering Siemen’s product would have taken years without it, and Russia, because of its familiarity with both the Iranian nuclear plant and Siemen’s systems.

"Israel’s actions have generated shifts in public opinion and diplomacy regionally and globally. The Israelis are calculating that these actions will not generate a long-term shift in the strategic posture of the Arab world. If they are wrong about this, recent actions will have been a significant strategic error. If they are right, then this is simply another passing incident. In the end, the profound divisions in the Arab world both protect Israel and make diplomatic solutions to its challenge almost impossible — you don’t need to fight forces that are so divided, but it is very difficult to negotiate comprehensively with a group that lacks anything approaching a unified voice."

"Last year Wikileaks published a confidential list of websites that the Australian government is preparing to ban under a proposed internet filter -- which in turn caused the whistleblower site to be placed on that list."

"A 13-year-old Yemeni girl who was forced into marriage died five days after her wedding when she suffered a rupture in her sex organs and hemorrhaging, a local rights organisation says.

Ilham Mahdi al Assi died last Friday in a hospital in Yemen's Hajja province, the Shaqaeq Arab Forum for Human Rights said, quoting a medical report.

She was married the previous Monday in a traditional arrangement known as a "swap marriage", in which the brother of the bride also married the sister of the groom, it said."

"Westergaard told his employer, the Jyllands-Posten daily, that he had locked himself and the child in the bathroom as the assailant shouted "revenge" and "blood" and tried to smash his way into the house. "My grandchild did fine," he told the newspaper. "It was scary. It was close. Really close. But we did it.""

"That said, the Israelis believe there must be an additional assessment mechanism - apart from the essential pre-flight intelligence gathering - which acknowledges that not everyone is equally likely to carry out a terrorist attack. Some call it profiling, which has become a dirty word to those who think it conjures up notions of racial, religious, or ethnic targeting. In reality, it's more sophisticated than simplistic classification."

"The last known execution for "sorcery" was that of Egyptian national Mustafa Ibrahim, on 2 November 2007. He had been arrested in May 2007 in the town of Arar, where he worked as a pharmacist, and accused of "apostasy" for having degraded a copy of the Qur'an.
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"In May, Sibat traveled from Lebanon to Saudi Arabia to make his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, and after being spotted by the kingdom's religious police, was arrested on charges of committing sorcery. Officials convinced Sibat to confess to talking to spirits-on the promise that he would be freed-and then used his confession to convict him in court last month. He's now been sentenced to death."

"GENEVA — In a vote that displayed a widespread anxiety about Islam and undermined the country’s reputation for religious tolerance, the Swiss on Sunday overwhelmingly imposed a national ban on the construction of minarets, the prayer towers of mosques, in a referendum drawn up by the far right and opposed by the government."

Through decades of mass immigration to Europe’s hospitable cities and because of a strong disinclination to assimilate, Muslims are changing the face of Europe, perhaps decisively. These Muslim immigrants are not so much enhancing European culture as they are supplanting it. The products of an adversarial culture, these immigrants and their religion, Islam, are “patiently conquering Europe’s cities, street by street.”

University of Toronto professor Shahrzad Mojab told the trial that honour killings involve a “cleansing” to restore a family’s respect after the “misbehaviour” of female relatives had brought “dishonour” upon them.

Methods to clear a family’s honour range from displacing a family member to “the act of purifying through blood”, she added.

How skillful are Chinese manufacturers at gaming the free-trade system? Think three-card monte.