RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — A government-run Saudi Arabian newspaper reports that for the first time in the conservative Muslim country, women will be allowed to attend soccer matches in one of the country’s stadiums.

Al-Sharq newspaper on Saturday quoted unnamed officials as saying that women will be able to watch the matches in a new facility that will be completed in 2014 in the western port city of Jeddah.

The officials say that the new stadium will include a family section with private cabins and balconies for women who wish to attend the games.

Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islam prohibits unrelated men and women from mingling. Women and men in Saudi Arabia remain highly segregated and are restricted in how they are allowed to mix in public.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

A man who was locked in solitary confinement for two years without a trial, has been awarded a $22m payout.

Stephen Slevin, 58, from New Mexico, won the mammoth compensation package for violation of his constitutional rights.

Slevin was arrested in August 2005.

According to Sky News, he was charged withpossession of a stolen vehicle, aggravated driving while under the influence, driving with a suspended licence, possession of an open container of alcohol in a vehicle and improper use of registration.

He was imprisoned in a small padded cell in Dona Ana County, where he remained until May 2007, never once seeing a judge.

Earlier this week, a Santa Fe federal court handed Slevin one of the largest settlements in federal civil rights history.

Speaking to NBC-DFW, Slevin said prison officials were “walking by me every day, watching me deteriorate. Day after day after day, they did nothing, nothing at all, to get me any help.”

After nearly two years, the charges against Slevin were dropped and he was finally released.

During his incarceration, the victim claims to have pulled out his own tooth due to lack of access to a dentist. He is currently on anti-depressants. The reason why Slevin was detained for so long without trial remains unclear.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

It will be “impossible” to tell how deep the level of fraud will go at this year’s Olympics until the event takes place, an official has told The Huffington Post UK.

There are already 103 known email scams identified by the Olympic organisers, as well as fake lotteries and prize draws.

Fake merchandise has been seized by councils in London, Birmingham, Coventry and other cities, and almost 100 arrests have been made by Scotland Yard in a pre-emptive strike at organised crime networks gearing up for the Games.

So before you get ready to hop out of the door in your Team GB T-shirt – clutching your tickets to the judo semis and a four-night stay at travel tavern – how sure are you that any of those things are exactly what they seem?

“When you actually think about the amount of people that may come to this country, we’re talking 200 plus nations, 17,000 athletes, 500,000 spectators a day. It’s supposed to be giving a £2.1bn boost to the economy. I can’t believe there won’t be someone out there who won’t want to make some money by scamming people,” John Peerless, the lead officer for scams at the Trading Standards Institute (TSI) told The Huffington Post UK.

“A lot of times people aren’t going to realise they’ve been scammed until the Olympics come along,” he said. “Determining the scale of the problem is virtually impossible.”

Anti-scam officials have cited a need for a more aggressive use of statistics and data to stop con artists in their tracks.

“We seem to be one step behind people,” Peerless added later. “The organised network don’t have organised processes and procedures to follow under Data Protection rules and things like that.

“They work on the basis of trust, and you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours. The speed at which they become knowledgeable about potential frauds is frightening. I wouldn’t want to applaud someone but sometimes they re extremely skilful in what they do.”

That skill and speed of the con artist is what drives organisers of the games in their quest to ensure the London Olympics is – if not fraud free, then at least safer for consumers than previous games.

The organising committee, Locog, has had a recent awareness push, working with TSI, Citizens Advice and the UK ECC as well as the Metropolitan Police and other services around the country for years ahead of the Games to try and break organised crime networks.

For many consumers, however, the message about scams hasn’t yet sunk in. An online survey run by TSI recently showed that around a third of all respondents would try to buy tickets to sold out events, even though 25% had previously been stung with online orders.

Of those who had experienced problems with ordering tickets online almost half said their items never arrived, just under a quarter said the tickets were fake and 17% said they never showed up at all.

At the last Olympics even the athletes themselves were hit. Famously Rebecca Adlington’s parents thought they had passes for the swimming, only to learn they were fraudulent.

The official Olympics website already lists dozens of scam email attempts, fraud websites and other swindles, as well as providing a website checker, fraud information and customer advice.

Some of the scams listed on the website include:

• A ‘BBC Olympic Prize’ email, in which recipients are told they have won £18m, which had been sent to them for collection by the BBC Finance Dept. Recipients are asked to quote claim number 98654752, and provide full personal details. “This is a scam, do not provide the any personal details or send any money to the people who sent this email,” said Locog.

• ‘Weymouth and Portland ‘Investment Proposal’. This email purports to be from ‘Seb Coe’. It refers to the sailing facilities at Weymouth and Portland for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympics sailing events and claims that the contract for the facilities was to be awarded and executed under budget. It asks the recipient to present its business as the second foreign contractor to enable the transfer of the remaining (£14,500,000) into his or her account. This is a scam.

• ‘Your Lloyds TSB account has won 2 Tickets for London Olympics 2012′ This email purporting to be from Tickets@London2012.co.uk informs the recipient that their Lloyds TSB Bank account has won their lottery of a couple of tickets for London Olympics 2012 Opening Ceremony. This is a scam and personal details should not be provided.

Locog strongly encourages people to study the list and only trust official ticketing sources, including its own resale service, which is currently accepting submissions from those with tickets to sell, and is set to launch fully in April.

Fake hotel tickets and other kinds of fraudulent accommodation are another problem increasing in virulence as the Games move closer.

TSI says that “false bargains” are usually clues that accommodation is risky, and tells consumers to “watch out for bogus websites that have been set up by criminals to steal personal details or money from genuine sports fans and visitors”.

VisitEngland’s director of business development Jeremy Brinkworth said in a previously released statement: “We urge visitors to book accommodation that has been star-rated by either VisitEngland or the AA. There are 30,000 star-rated accommodation businesses across the country and around 700 of these are in and around London.

“The recognised ratings act as a benchmark for quality and value for money which means visitors can book with the peace of mind that a four star hotel means a four star hotel.”

And it’s not just hotels. A recent investigation by the Independent newspaper highlighted the inherent risks of using short-term letting services instead of official hotels.

Among the schemes uncovered by the paper included scam artists posting listings for non-existent properties, copying and pasting listings from other companies and pocketing the proceeds and selling accommodation more than once – and only revealing the fraud when it’s too late.

Fake merchandise is another problem which is likely to increase in scale the closer to the Games London comes.

Apart from predictable moans about prices, however, it hard to know why you’d to go through unofficial channels.

With the official ticket website opening in April disappointed sports fans have another good chance to see an event. Moreover, the official merchandise website is resplendent with official tat for the discerning Olympic fan.

Whether its an official glass mug (£6.00), an official neoprene iPad sleeve (£16.00) or the recently announced limited edition boxed poster commemoration set (£120), if it’s Olympic merchandise you want then you should be golden.

Still, councils in Westminster, Coventry and Birmingham are among those who have already reported seizing fake Olympics-branded goods from retailers in the past twelve months.

While the numbers are currently relatively small – Westminster Trading Standards told The Huffington Post UK that in the last twelve months around 20 T-shirts, four lighters and two phone covers have been seized – they point to a larger organised criminal network involved in producing and selling illicit items that is poised to go into overdrive as the summer event approaches.

Trading Standards said that consumers have to apply common sense and stick to official channels to ensure they will not be conned.

“You’ve got to look for the official website and the official tour operators, because they’re the ones who you know if something did go wrong you’ve got someone to go back to,” said John Peerless.

“The fraudsters who set up these websites make mistakes – in typing, in spelling,” he said. “They don’t want to be identified so you don’t see that information. These are things people can think about.”

Recently it was announced that the Met has already been making arrests as part of Operation Podium, the official name for the anti-organised crime effort ahead of the Games.

Part of the Specialist Crime Directorate, the operation “has been formed based on previous experience of proactively investigating and dealing with a range of crime from money laundering and fraud to organised ticket crime, across a range of industries and major events”, said Scotland Yard.

A total of 97 arrests have been made as part of the national Operation Podium, including alleged ticket touts, people setting up bogus websites, and those accused of selling bogus hotel rooms said Home Secretary Theresa May in a speech on 25 January.

A spokesperson for Scotland Yard told The Huffington Post UK that the arrests include offences not directly related to the Olympics but which were considered to represent a similar threat.

They include two arrests made against organised ticket touts at a Premiership football stadium.

Detective Superintendent Nick Downing who is leading the Metropolitan Police’s anti-organised crime efforts before and during the Games, said in a statement released with the TSI survey in November:

“Next year there are going to be lots of people coming to London and the rest of the UK to watch the Olympic and Paralympic Games and be a part of the greatest sporting event in the world.

“Unfortunately this also presents opportunities to criminals who will try to sell fraudulent tickets, accommodation or hotel rooms that don’t exist, and steal personal details from genuine sports fans and visitors.”

TSI say that while it leaves cracking organised crime networks to the police, its work clearly indicates that the scams are more than the work of a few rogue traders.

“The organised criminal is set up to clean their money, they set up pseudo-legitimate businesses to launder their cash,” scams official John Peerless said. “They do have extensive networks.”

Later he added: “Throughout the games people will feel let down and it can actually have a detrimental impact on the country,” he said. “We are a reasonably small nation. It is about Team GB.”

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Twitterers have a message: Tomorrow, turn off the tweets.

Users of the social media site are planning a Twitter boycott to protest the company’s new ability to censor tweets on a country-by-country basis.

Twitter announced Thursday that it can now block tweets, as well as individual accounts, from appearing to users in specific countries, and that it may use the feature to comply with governments’ request to censor information. Before, Twitter could only block tweets and accounts globally.

Some users are calling on fellow Twitterers to silence their tweets on January 28 as a way of expressing their opposition to Twitter’s plan. They are using the hashtag #TwitterBlackout to organize the boycott, and tweets tagged with the hashtag are rolling in at a clip of about 12 per minute. The tweets span a range of languages, including English, German, Spanish and Arabic.

“Twitter starts deleting tweets, I stop posting tweets. Join the #twitterblackout tomorrow!” tweeted @HousseinyRita.

Another user, @Fadi_alshehri, wrote,“#twitterblackout if i cant talk freely then i don’t wanna talk.”

The protest follows less than two weeks after thousands of websites, including Wikipedia, Google, and Reddit, protested two controversial anti-piracy bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, by shutting down or posting notices outlining the downsides of the proposed legislation. Google alone managed to secure more than 7 million signatures for an online petition opposing the bills, and tweets about SOPA and PIPA numbered in the hundreds of thousands the day of the protest.

Yet this online protest, and others like it, have relied on Twitter as a means of communicating between protestors and buttressing support for their movements. It remains to be seen whether silencing tweets will call attention to the cause, or whether the mute accounts will go unnoticed.

Twitter defended its plan to offer the ability to block tweets in certain countries by noting that it remains committed to free speech online.

“One of our core values as a company is to defend and respect each user’s voice. We try to keep content up wherever and whenever we can, and we will be transparent with users when we can’t. The Tweets must continue to flow,” Twitter wrote.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

KANCHAN G BURATHOKI

Ngima Tendup Sherpa drives us through Sukedhara, into one of the alleys of Kapan, to meet his artist brother-in-law Ang Tsherin Sherpa (Tsherin).

On Wednesday, January 4, Tsherin had been in town for nearly a month and was returning to San Francisco a week later. But even during his short trip, Tsherin had shipped in stacks of canvases to work on, and at Kapan, he had set up his temporary studio.

A 100” x 72” canvas, laid out on a pair of wooden panels, leans against the wall in one of the rooms. A work in progress, we are faced by a large female demonic figure in blue.

Bright orange flames lick her and butterflies, in their under painting, flutter all around. The painting is very similar to Tsherin’s first contemporary work made in 2008, titled ‘The Butterfly Effect/Chaos Theory.’ Only then, it was a blue male figure painted on a much smaller scale of 22.5” x 28”.

“The Butterfly Effect/Chaos Theory was my response to the then financial meltdown in the US, where the blue figure represents the corporate giant,” Tsherin states.

Within the figure is a corporate chart, in Tibetan, outlining the eight worldly concerns of Buddhism.

“It is about how the corporate giant’s actions would impact the general public,” he adds and further expresses, “The butterfly effect, where one action can affect something totally different, is very much tied in to the Buddhist view of cause and effect, and to karma.”

Tsherin’s new painting, although similar in composition, refers to the more recent Occupy Wall Street movement.

The female version of the butterfly effect will be one of the 17 works at his upcoming solo exhibition in London, in October this year. 

Rossi & Rossi, a leading Classical and Contemporary Asian Art gallery in London, has been the artist’s agent since 2008.

Tsherin, 43, stands today as an emerging contemporary Asian artist in the world, but his beginnings started in Kathmandu.

Born and raised in Boudha, not too far from Kapan, Tsherin began training under his father Urgen Dorje as a traditional Tibetan thangka artist at the age of 14.

Alongside, he also started studying Buddhist philosophy at a monastery.

“It was forced on me,” he laughs and admits that he left for Taiwan, when he turned 16, to “run away.” From 1988 to 1992, he studied computer science and Mandarin, but only to return to Kathmandu and work with his father on thangka projects – painting murals in remote monasteries in Tibet and working on individual commissions.

“I wasn’t really keen on being a painter and I took it more as a profession than a passion,” Tsherin says over coffee.

After six years in Kathmandu, Tsherin left for San Francisco where he is also currently settled with his wife.

He began working as a Tibetan thangka painting instructor at a Buddhist center and slowly started exploring museums and galleries.

“I began exploring into secular subjects, but was a bit reluctant and intimidated because I didn’t go to an art school,” he shares and adds, “And I was still more concerned with paying my rent.”

In 2003, Tsherin was commissioned to make marketing posters for Jamba Juice in which he replaced the image of a deity with a cup of juice.

The ‘Enlightened Smoothies’ received its inevitable share of criticisms, but he clarifies, “I didn’t intend to demean our tradition.”

Eventually Tsherin would question his own motivations of painting. What is just for paying the rent? he would question, through his works, the obsession with the Buddha’s image, its relationship with Buddhist philosophy and debate between dualities such as what is holy and unholy.

Two installations made during his residency at Vermont Studio Center in 2010 explore such duality. ‘Self Portrait’ is a work made from garbage the artist collected from some 80 residency mates.

In another artwork, he stenciled a line of Buddha heads on a toilet paper roll.

Whether one can find and experience the ultimate truth without images is something Tsherin mulls over.

“For instance, we symbolize ‘compassion’ with the image of Avalokiteshvara but if I were to see a homeless man next to an image of Avalokiteshvara, I would pick up the image and negate the homeless person,” he puts in a scenario. He therefore feels that extreme attachment to images sometimes doesn’t help in enabling compassion.

“In my works, I’m projecting what I’m experiencing,” states Tsherin who is constantly exploring and trying to find meanings in his own knowledge and practice of Buddhism.

These experiences also include his assimilation into different societies, influences of urban culture and his identity as a Tibetan.

‘Preservation Project # 1’ (2009) features limbs and a head ‘preserved’ in a specimen jar. The painting depicts the need for preserving the Tibetan tradition.

The date on the jar, at the bottom left corner, reads 1959 – a significant year for the Tibetan Uprising. Tsherin asks, “But how do we preserve traditions in a manner that not only preserves the visuals, but also the essence of it?”

“Two Spirits” (2010) shows the artist’s interpretation of Tibetans who grew up abroad and can’t speak Tibetan. “In addition, some monasteries in Tibet are now teaching in English,” he informs. The work, which was exhibited at the Songzhuange Art Center in Beijing, China, explores these two aspects.

Spirits are an integral part of Tibetan paintings. “There are spirits of mountains, water, rocks and of a specific region. What happens to these spirits when people leave and travel?” Tsherin once again questions. In his works, these spirits are assimilating into new environments and transforming.

Red and blue colors drip away from their bodies to reveal their flesh beneath. “They could be transforming into a demon or a deity,” he leaves the interpretation open ended. So his spirits could be turning into human beings too.

In another series of spirits, he has three paintings titled ‘Red Spirit’, ‘Blue Spirit’ and ‘White Spirit.’ ‘Red Spirit’ is currently a part of group exhibition ‘What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding?” at Rossi & Rossi, London.

“There was so much news of violence and chaos in the radio and I made this work while I imagined these events in the shadow of my mind,” reveals Tsherin.

The colors red, blue and white are references of him taking up American citizenship. “The colors are from the flag,” he says. Coincidentally, the same colors are in Nepal’s flag too. “I hadn’t noticed that,” he laughs.

On the other hand, ‘Modern Prayer Flag’ (2009) is a visual juxtaposition of prayer flags that Tsherin was surrounded by in Boudha to the billboards he saw in Oakland, California.

Inventing his own script – which looks Tibetan, but is actually English – Tsherin has inscribed advertising slogans onto this modern prayer flag.

Tsherin doesn’t like to be classified into a certain criterion of identity and feels that he is a global person. “I grew up in Nepal and I can’t deny that I’m Nepali, but I can also relate to the Tibetan side and now I’m an American citizen,” apprises the artist who, however, is aware that people put him into a category because his works are ethnically Tibetan.

Contemporary in content, Tsherin does retain the Tibetan thangka technique of painting but also hopes to explore into installation and sculpture works.

In 2010, Tsherin was a part of a major exhibition titled ‘Traditions Transformed – Tibetan Artists Respond,’ along with eight other artists, at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City.

The title of the exhibition does summarize his works in simple words. “There are hundreds of thangka students and artists already preserving the tradition,” he states and asserts, “What we need are people with new concepts and thoughts to take traditions and transform them into a language of today.”

Burathoki is the contributing Arts Editor for The Week

@My Republica

By Renee Parsons,  Fmr. lobbyist for Friends of the Earth in Washington, D.C. focusing on nuclear energy issues

The “Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” suggested a “new approach to peace’ premised on a ‘clean break’ from the Oslo peace process of the 1990′s. Oslo would have withdrawn Israeli troops from the occupied territories while affirming Palestine’s right of self-determination. Rather than pursuing a ‘comprehensive peace’ with the Arab world, Clean Break advocated an aggressive pre-emptive military strategy to destabilize Iraq and eliminate Saddam Hussein. In addition, Clean Break retained the ‘right of hot pursuit’ anywhere within the occupied territories and encouraged ‘seizing the initiative’ by “engaging” Hezbollah, Syria and Iran to trigger ultimate regime change.

The key authors of that document, American neo-cons Richard Perle, David Wurmser and Douglas Feith (who Gen. Tommy Franks called the ‘f… stupidest guy on the face of the earth” ie Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack, pg 281), soon found themselves influential national security positions within a receptive Bush Administration from which to proselytize their recommendations.

A decade later, the authors of that study are gone in name but their spirit of unending wars is alive and well within the Obama Administration’s recently announced “Defense Strategic Guidance” as part of “Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense,” Where Clean Break offered what was then a radical Middle East military strategy, Obama’s DSG identifies US military priorities for the 21st century to “confront and defeat aggression anywhere in the world” with an emphasis on the Middle East and Asia-Pacific region as the “greatest challenges for the future.” (Panetta, 1-5-2012)

Even prior to announcement of the DSG, the American military is still pursuing WMD’s as combat troops have been deployed to chase local ‘terrorists’ that pose no threat to the US; such as the Lord’s Army in Uganda and escalating a US military presence dispatching 2,500 Marines to Australia to protect US ‘national interests’ in the South China Sea and Indian Ocean.

Addressing a January 5th news conference at the Pentagon, the president cited ’enduring national interests’ as he read a prepared ten minute statement and left the podium without taking any questions; attending reporters remained in their places with bright, shiny faces leaving Defense Secretary Panetta and Joint Chief Martin Dempsey to carry on. With his usual eloquence, the president pledged that the United States is going to “maintain our military superiority … ready for the full range of contingencies and threats” and that ‘the US faces a complex and growing array of security challenges across the globe.”

The president’s grim pronouncements failed to reassure a US commitment to international law or to provide an analysis to justify a future of perpetual armed conflict and, as both Obama and Panetta postulated the pretense of victory in Iraq, neither acknowledged the 800-pound gorilla in the room that if the systematic destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan as a result of U.S. interventions was an example of providing for a ‘safer, more stable, prosperous world,’ then perhaps the world would be better off if the United States stayed at home and minded its own business..

In a questionable grip on reality, the president recounted the ‘extraordinary’ growth of country’s military budget since 9/11 as he acknowledged that “global responsibilities demand leadership, the defense budget will still be larger than it was toward the end of the Bush administration.” Obama went on to make the prediction that the American people will “accept a defense budget” that ‘continues to be larger than roughly the next ten countries combined.” As the news networks almost entirely allowed the implications of DSG to slide under the radar neglecting to inform the American public of the president’s generosity regarding his new military strategy, the average American taxpayer remains unaware of Obama’s future foreign policy objectives and its consequences for social programs that millions of Americans rely on. Nor has the American taxpayer benefited from a presidential explanation of how a budget ‘larger than it was’ will affect the country’s fragile economic stability.

With passage of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is required to prepare budget projections for all Federal departments. Those projections are premised on a baseline budget process that predicts future budget increases based on inflation, new programs, increased administrative costs, etc. In a bi-partisan game of smoke and mirrors intent on tricking the taxpayer, it is reductions to this baseline budget projection that the Pentagon is now heralding as ‘cuts.’ Therefore, the $487 billion in ‘cuts’ over the next ten years are, in reality, coming out of the projections prepared by the CBO which explains why there are no cuts to any major weapons program.

In addition, with the Pentagon’s four-year baseline budget cycle of 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 at $515 billion, $533 billion, $549 billion and $531 billion, respectively; for the president and Panetta to claim that the proposed ‘baseline’ budget for 2013 of $525 billion is a dramatic cut representing significant savings does not meet the straight-face test or their ethical obligation to the country.

Neither the president nor Panetta felt any need to articulate a credible global threat that requires eternal armed vigilance as the country continues to dismantle its People Programs and as its infrastructure continues to crumble — nor did either provide the American people with a thoughtful rationale for who, why, when, where and how.

In sync with Clean Break’s principles, DSG provides a framework for reassuring any nervous Nellies of the US ability to sustain multiple wars simultaneously in multiple global locations as Secretary Panetta suggested ”from a land war in South Korea and at the same time, threats in the Strait of Hormuz” (1-5-2012 news conference Q&A).

As DSG transforms the nature of US combat realigning its forces beyond the Mideast, the US will “of necessity” rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region in recognition of the ‘growth of China’s military power….to avoid causing friction in the region.” Recognizing that ‘over the long term, China’s emergence as a regional power will have the potential to effect the US economy and our security in a variety of ways,” refers to more than just the US missing an interest payment on its debt or China knocking on our door to demand payment.

DSG eschews diplomacy as a viable alternative in favor of a military response to international tensions with a reduction in the need for ‘boots on the ground’ while relying on an increase in a leaner, meaner new generation of remote-powered guilt-free drones, the weapon that Ron Paulsuggests are unconstitutional, and more agile, flexible Special Op troops.

After the president’s departure, Panetta, once known as a liberal House Democrat from California, began to morph into a gnarl-faced Dr. Strangelove with every utterance of war, enemies, threats, death and destruction as he touted U.S. military dominance and its ability to “decisively prevail in any conflict.’

With the world’s largest military force including an incomparable nuclear arsenal and a budget to match, exactly who are we protecting the Homeland from — and what condition will it be in when they arrive? If al Qaeda’s goal was to destroy the country’s quality of life, its economic prosperity or its high regard for the First Amendment and civil liberties while creating a second-rate banana republic, they have done a terrific job.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

BEIRUT — Two days of bloody turmoil in Syria killed at least 74 people, including small children, as forces loyal to President Bashar Assad shelled residential buildings and fired on crowds in a dramatic escalation of violence, activists said Friday.

Video posted online showed the bodies of five small children, five women and a man, all bloodied and piled on beds in what appeared to be an apartment after a building was hit in the city of Homs. A narrator said an entire family had been “slaughtered.”

Much of the violence was focused in Homs, where heavy gunfire hammered the city Friday in a second day of chaos. A day earlier, the city saw a flare-up of sectarian kidnappings and killings between its Sunni and Alawite communities, and pro-regime forces blasted residential buildings with mortars and gunfire, according to activists.

At least 384 children have been killed, as of Jan. 7, in the crackdown on Syria’s uprising since it began nearly 11 months ago, the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF said Friday. The count, based on reports from human rights groups, included children under age 18.

Most of the deaths took place in Homs and most of the victims were boys, UNICEF said. It said 380 children have been detained, including some under age 14. The United Nations estimates that more than 5,400 people have died in the turmoil.

The U.N. Security Council met in a closed-door session to discuss the crisis, which diplomats said was a step toward a possible U.N. resolution against the Damascus regime.

However, any resolution faces strong opposition from China and Russia, and both nations have veto power. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said Friday that Moscow will oppose any resolution because it does not exclude the possibility of outside military interference.

The Syrian uprising, which began last March with mostly peaceful protests, has become increasingly violent in recent months as army defectors clash with government forces and some protesters take up arms to protect themselves. The violence has inflamed the sectarian divide in the country, where members of Assad’s Alawite sect dominate the regime despite a Sunni Muslim majority.

Activists said at least 35 people were killed in Homs on Thursday and another 39 people were killed across the country Friday.

The video posted Friday by activists showed the bodies of five young children, their faces bloodied, wrapped in orange plastic bags. It said the children were believed to be from two families, the Akras and the Bahadours. Brown cardboard placards with the children’s names written in Arabic were placed on their chests, identifying them: Thanaa, Ali, Najm, Abdul-Ghani and Sidra.

The video could not be independently verified.

Hilal Khashan, a political science professor at the American University of Beirut, said the spike in violence was linked to increasing pressure from the international community, the Arab League and the United Nations.

“The regime is trying to finish the matter through military means as soon as possible,” and for that reason the level of violence increased,” he said.

On Tuesday, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem insisted that Damascus will continue its crackdown and said Syria would not accept any international interference in its affairs.

Assad’s regime claims terrorists acting out a foreign conspiracy by the U.S., Israel and Gulf Arab countries are behind the uprising, not protesters seeking change.

The head of Arab League observers in Syria said in a statement that violence in the country has spiked over the past few days. Sudanese Gen. Mohammed Ahmed al-Dabi said the cities of Homs, Hama and Idlib have all witnessed a “very high escalation” in violence since Tuesday.

A “fierce military campaign” was also under way in the Hamadiyeh district of Hama since the early hours of Friday, according to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and other activists. They said the sound of heavy machine-gun fire and loud explosions reverberated across the area.

Some activists reported seeing uncollected bodies in the streets of Hama.

Elsewhere, a car bomb exploded Friday at a checkpoint outside the northern city of Idlib, the Observatory said, citing witnesses. The number of casualties was not immediately clear.

Details of the wave of killings in Homs emerged Friday from an array of residents and activists

“There has been a terrifying massacre,” Rami Abdul-Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told the AP on Friday. He called for an independent investigation.

Thursday started with a spate of sectarian kidnappings and killings between the city’s population of Sunnis and Alawites, a Shiite sect to which Assad belongs as well as most of his security and military leadership, said Mohammad Saleh, a centrist opposition figure and resident of Homs.

There was also a string of attacks by gunmen on army checkpoints, Saleh said. Checkpoints are a frequent target of dissident troops who have joined the opposition.

The Observatory said at least 11 people, including eight children, died when a building came under heavy mortar and machine-gun fire in the city’s Karm el-Zaytoun neighborhood. Some residents spoke of another massacre that took place when shabiha – armed regime loyalists – stormed the district, slaughtering residents in an apartment, including children.

“They are killing people because of their sect,” said one Sunni resident of Karm el-Zaytoun, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

Thursday’s death toll in Homs was at least 35, said the Observatory and the Local Coordination Committees, an umbrella group of activists. Both groups cite a network of activists on the ground in Syria for their death tolls.

The reports could not be independently confirmed. Syria tightly controls access to trouble spots and generally allows journalists to report only on escorted trips, which slows the flow of information.

Also Friday, Iran’s official IRNA news agency said gunmen in Syria kidnapped 11 Iranian pilgrims traveling by road from Turkey to Damascus.

Iranian pilgrims routinely visit Syria – Iran’s closest ally in the Arab world – to pay homage to Shiite holy shrines. Last month, seven Iranian engineers building a power plant in central Syria were kidnapped. They have not yet been released.

The Free Syrian Army, a group of army defectors fighting the regime, released a video on its Facebook page claiming responsibility for the kidnapping and saying the Iranians were taking part in the suppression of the Syrian people.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

DARREN MCCOLLESTER / GETTY IMAGES Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg could take take his social networking site public as early as next week, according to a published report.

Social networking juggernaut Facebook could file the paperwork for its much-anticipated initial public offering as early as next Wednesday, according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal. If previous reports are correct, the eight-year-old company could seek to raise as much as $10 billion, making the offering the largest technology IPO in history. Facebook is looking at a valuation of between $75 billion and $100 billion, the paper reported.

Although the IPO filing could come next week, the actual offering wouldn’t be until some time in the spring.

Facebook, which has amassed over 800 million users worldwide, had revenue of about $4 billion last year, according to published reports. Its public debut would be the capstone for a series of Internet IPOs that have occurred since the beginning of 2011. The company would be hoping to avoid the less-than-successful performance of some of the other offerings. For example, discount sales website Groupon and web-radio service Pandora both saw their stock prices fall below their IPO levels.

(More: Is Facebook Really Worth $100 Billion?)

Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, who was a student at Harvard at the time. Zuckerberg owns an estimated 24% of the company, so if the IPO succeeds in valuing the company at $100 billion, he would be worth $24 billion on paper. Over the last several years, the company has assumed a dominant position in the social-networking world. Morgan Stanley is said to be the top candidate for lead underwriter for the IPO, with Goldman Sachs also participating. In January of 2011, Goldman organized a $1.5 billion private placement for its investors. But after running afoul of SEC rules, the bank was forced to limit the placement to investors outside the United States.

(More: Mark Zuckerberg, TIME’s 2010 Person of the Year)

FBI Develops Facebook Spy Tool

The FBI is seeking to develop an early-warning system based on material “scraped” from social networks.

It says the application should provideinformation about possible domestic and global threats superimposed onto maps “using mash-up technology”.

The bureau has asked contractors to suggest possible solutions including the estimated cost.

Privacy campaigners say they are concerned that the move could have implications for free speech.

The FBI’s Strategic Information and Operations Center (SOIC) posted its “Social Media Application” market research request onto the web on 19 January, and it was subsequently flagged up by New Scientist magazine.

The document says: “Social media has become a primary source of intelligence because it has become the premier first response to key events and the primal alert to possible developing situations.”

It says the application should collect “open source” information and have the ability to:

• Provide an automated search and scrape capability of social networks including Facebook and Twitter.
• Allow users to create new keyword searches.
• Display different levels of threats as alerts on maps, possibly using colour coding to distinguish priority. Google Maps 3D and Yahoo Maps are listed among the “preferred” mapping options.
• Plot a wide range of domestic and global terror data.
• Immediately translate foreign language tweets into English.

The FBI says the information would be used to help it to predict the likely actions of “bad actors”, detect instances of people deliberately misleading law enforcement officers and spot the vulnerabilities of suspect groups.

Privacy permissions

The FBI issued the request three weeks after the US Department of Homeland Security released a separate report into the privacy implications of monitoring social media websites.

It justified the principle of using information that users have provided and not opted to make private.

“Information posted to social media websites is publicly accessible and voluntarily generated. Thus the opportunity not to provide information exists prior to the informational post by the user,” it says.

It noted that the department’s National Operations Center had a policy in place to edit out any gathered information which fell outside of the categories relevant to its investigations.

It listed websites that the centre planned to monitor. They include YouTube, the photo service Flickr, and Itstrending.com – a site which shows popular shared items on Facebook.

It also highlighted words it looked out for. These include “gangs”, “small pox”, “leak”, “recall” and “2600″ – an apparent reference to the hacking-focused magazine.

‘Dragnet effect’

The London-based campaign group, Privacy International, said it was worried about the consequences of such activities.

“Social networks are about connecting people with other people – if one person is the target of police monitoring, there will be a dragnet effect in which dozens, even hundreds, of innocent users also come under surveillance,” said Gus Hosein, the group’s executive director.

“It is not necessarily the case that the more information law enforcement officers have, the safer we will be.

“Police may well find themselves overwhelmed by a flood of personal information, information that is precious to those it concerns but useless for the purposes of crime prevention.”

The group noted that it was seeking information from the UK’s Metropolitan Police Service about its use of social networks.

@BBC

By Alexei Oreskovic

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – YouTube, Google Inc’s video website, is streaming 4 billion online videos every day, a 25 percent increase in the past eight months, according to the company.

The jump in video views comes as Google pushes YouTube beyond the personal computer, with versions of the site that work on smartphones and televisions, and as the company steps up efforts to offer more professional-grade content on the site.

According to the company, roughly 60 hours of video is now uploaded to YouTube every minute, compared with the 48 hours of video uploaded per minute in May.

YouTube, which Google acquired for $1.65 billion in 2006, represents one of Google’s key opportunities to generate new sources of revenue outside its traditional Internet search advertising business.

Last week, Google said that its business running graphical “display” ads – many of which are integrated alongside YouTube videos – was generating $5 billion in revenue on an annualized run rate basis.

Still, most of the 4 billion videos that YouTube now streams worldwide every day do not make money. Three billion YouTube videos a week are monetized, according to the company.

YouTube recently redesigned its website to more prominently showcase specialized “channels” organized around different types of content. In October, YouTube announced that it had struck 100 original video programming deals with media partners including Madonna and Jay-Z. Thomson Reuters and YouTube recently announced a partnership to create a Reuters TV channel for the website.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

By Gordon Brown, Former prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The world is currently at risk of falling woefully short of the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education by 2015. If we are to avoid this fate, a game-changing reform is needed. I believe that a Global Fund for Education is that game-changing initiative.

As you’ll see in the report below, I propose that World Bank’s Global Partnership for Education (formerly, the Fast Track Initiative) should be converted into an independent Global Fund for Education (GFE) that draws on the experience of the global funds in health, and that serves as a focal point for a renewed drive toward getting another 68 million children into school by 2015. The GFE would engage the business sector, and have the flexibility to make grants to NGOs and private companies, as well as national governments and multinational agencies.

It is time for governments around the world to take urgent action on behalf of the millions of children in need of a decent primary education. A Global Fund for Education would be a bold step in the right direction.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Photo: Marcus Benigno/IRIN A girl drinks from a public tap installed last year in Nepal's Nawalparasi District

27 January 2012 (IRIN) – After the discovery of unsafe levels of arsenic in Nepal’s groundwater more than a decade ago, government officials and aid groups are finally taking a critical look at whether their efforts have made a difference. 

“We didn’t raise money for broken filters,” said US-based geologist Linda Smith, expressing frustration during a recent visit to Nawalparasi District in the southern Terai region, one of Nepal’s hardest-hit areas by arsenic-contaminated groundwater, when she came across abandoned water filters. 

At one home, two broken cement water filters were being used as planters, while another filter distributed by the NGO she heads, Filters for Families (FFF), sat dismantled in the yard. 

At a neighbouring home, parts were missing from a two-bucket filtration system from Bangladesh known as a Sono. The filter stand had been converted to a clothes-drying rack. 

Smith retrieved unused filters and reimbursed families for the US$5 they had paid per filter, which has an actual cost of $70. 

“There are people who need filters, and they need to realize this,” she said. 

Some 2.7 million people in Nepal – nearly 10 percent of the population – are drinking water with arsenic concentrations above the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended 10 parts per billion (ppb), according to 2011 government estimates. 

In Nawalparasi District alone, a 2008 government survey of tube wells (shallow wells 14-24m deep controlled by hand pumps) found almost 4,000 wells had arsenic that exceeded national standards (50ppb). 

Another 4,418 met national standards, but not the international 10ppb threshold – altogether affecting nearly 140,000 people who depend on those tube wells for drinking water. 

Not a priority?

More than half of the country’s 33,000 tube wells that contain unsafe levels of arsenic have been addressed with the distribution of filters, but it does not mean the filters are used or maintained properly, said Madhav Pahari, water and sanitation specialist for the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Kathmandu, which supports the government with arsenic containment. 

“We have been providing temporary solutions through filters, but that requires changing behaviour, [which does not] occur overnight.” 

A 2007 UNICEF-funded study of 1,000 tube wells in Nawalparasi found that while the filters technically worked, people were not maintaining them properly, which then rendered them faulty and then, ultimately, useless. 

Little has been done to address the problem, in part because arsenic is not seen as a high priority for the government, said Pahari.

Photo: Shamsuddin Ahmed/IRIN

Hands of an arsenicosis patient in southern Bangladesh

“Microbial parasites are more important,” says Pahari. “Because if your kids have diarrhoea today, they’ll die tomorrow. But arsenic, of course, will take 10 years. It’s dangerous, but slow.” 

Prolonged exposure to unsafe levels of the metal arsenic in drinking water can lead to poisoning, or arsenicosis. 

Symptoms include skin problems, cancers of the skin, bladder, kidneys and lungs; diseases of the blood vessels of the legs and feet; and possibly, diabetes, high blood pressure and reproductive disorders – but the cancer can lay dormant without spreading for years, even decades, notes WHO. 

According to a senior engineer in the government’s Department of Water Supply and Sewerage (DWSS), Dan Ratna Shakya, arsenic is indeed a priority, but the government has lacked funding and the right technology to figure out what works best. 

What works?

Pahari as well as Shakya said UNICEF and the government have both lagged in evaluating the filters, used for the past six years. 

DWSS has never conducted a comprehensive water quality testing programme before, said Shakya. 

“It’s not a one-time business. It should be periodical. But this is also linked to funding. There are so many… districts that are affected by arsenic and to go to each household for monitoring would be expensive.” 

Pahari said there is a plan to compare the efficacy of Sono filters produced in Bangladesh with locally produced Kanchan arsenic filters. 

Today, the Sono filter remains one of six technologies certified for sale in Bangladesh – one of the most affected countries worldwide in terms of arsenic-tainted drinking water, according to WHO; the Kanchan one failed local certification. 

Until there are scientific tests, Pahari said, he cannot pass judgment on the best way to contain the arsenic crisis, but those tests have languished, as has the government committee in charge of water quality. 

Deeper wells

The government’s recently reconfigured National Water Quality Steering Committee has only in recent months started “thinking about” permanent solutions to solve arsenic contamination, said Ram Lakhan Mandal, the head of water quality at DWSS. 

“We thought the arsenic problem had been solved because of all these organizations that have implemented temporary mitigation measures like filters.” 

The committee, which includes 19 government and civil society members, has been “passive” and has not met in the past three years, said the government engineer Shakya. 

But things will change soon pledged Mandal. 

“In the past, everyone came for mitigation and they did as they wished. But there was no set distribution of responsibilities. Now we are defining what we must do: tube wells and piped deep boring.” 

Photo: Marcus Benigno/IRIN

A 29-year-old man in Nawalparasi District shows his blotched chest, a symptom of arsenic poisoning

The government is investing in a pilot project of “deep boring” wells that go at least 100m deep, below the arsenic threshold, estimated to be at most 55m deep in Nepal, according to Smith. 

An entire deep boring (up to 150m) and water tank (25,000 litres capacity) construction can cost $16,000, of which 20 percent is paid by the community, which is also responsible for building the water tank which funnels the water to village public taps. 

At one water tank construction site IRIN visited in a section of Nawalparasi known as Kunwar-Ward 13, villagers complained that without cash incentives, volunteers who were supposed to be building the tank were, instead, in their fields harvesting sugar cane. 

As permanent solutions still prove elusive, families continue to line up for subsidized filters, said Smith. 

“At the moment we have a waiting list of 700 [requests for] Sono filters,” said Smith. 

Since 2007, FFF has assembled and delivered up to 1,000 filters to households and schools in villages across the district, replacing Kanchan filters previously installed by FFF and DWSS – an example of how a solution can become part of a greater problem, noted Pahari from UNICEF. 

Poor coordination

Pahari said the number of agencies working to fight arsenic is unclear – as well as the total aid invested in arsenic containment – and the government has little oversight. 

Mandal told IRIN a law in place for the past 20 years requires that any agency or NGO working in the water sector report its activities to the district office, which then informs DWSS. 

“But this is not happening,” he said, while his colleagues cited stumbling on a Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA)-funded project of which they were not aware that is raising awareness about arsenic contamination in Nawalparasi. 

“The government is not aware of how this money comes and how it goes. There are no reporting channels… JICA and ENPHO [local NGO, Environment and Public Health Organization] have a mutual understanding, but they don’t pass on the information.” 

But a senior programme manager with ENPHO, which is implementing a 28-month $400,000 local capacity building project for arsenic mitigation, said government officials at both the national and local levels had signed off on the project and have been apprised at every step. 

Photo: Marcus Benigno/IRIN

An abandoned arsenic water filter stand- turned-planter

“We had informed [the water quality improvement and monitoring section at DWSS] about our project to responsible personnel there. As far as I know, the chief [of the section] has changed a few months back. At DWSS there are many staff, so it is important whom you had contact with.” 

Meanwhile, in Manari village in Nawalparasi, Smith and her NGO’s technicians visited the family of Ramesh Chaudhary, who died last November from stomach cancer at age 32, six months after his brother Ram Chaudhary, 40, died from similar causes. 

In 2011, arsenic levels in tube-wells in Manari were 600 ppb, 60 times the limit WHO deems safe to drink. 

FFF tested the water filter in use in front of surviving family members to quell their doubts as to its efficacy. Ramesh’s mother, widowed wife and son stood by as a technician tested the water. 

A slip of paper sensitive to arsenic fumes alters in colour to measure the metal in parts per billion. The result was clean, indicating arsenic at less than 10 ppb. 

As the group left the village, a 29-year-old man approached Smith and showed her what has become an image far too familiar in the district: dark spots blotting his chest, a visible symptom of arsenicosis. 

In an August 2011 survey by ENPHO in three sections of Nawalparasi, including Manari, 25 percent of those surveyed had similar symptoms. 

DWSS estimates solving the arsenic crisis here and elsewhere in the country, including the health fallout, will cost an estimated $18.6 million. 

IRIN Asia | Analysis: When aid meets arsenic in Nepal | Bangladesh | Nepal | Aid Policy | Environment | Health & Nutrition.