Quote:WHAT NOW? ....Barry Punked by Hosni



President Obama watched Hosni Mubarak's speech to Egyptians from the conference room on Air Force One, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs tells the pool. Obama is now headed to the White House for a meeting with his national security team, moments after Mubarak said he wouldn't step down but that he had given some powers to his vice president.

Quote:Friday, February 4, 2011International

[color="#0000FF"]Tens of thousands[/color] rally in [color="#0000FF"]Yemen[/color]

Police foil protests in Aden

Afp, Sanaa



Tens of thousands of protesters massed yesterday at Sanaa University for a "day of rage" calling for the fall of Ali Abdullah Saleh's regime, while a similar number of government loyalists flooded a central square.



"We are here to bring down a corrupt and tyrannical regime," [color="#0000FF"]Najib Ghanem, a deputy from the Islamist Al-Islah party[/color] that is part of the Common Forum alliance of opposition parties, told anti-Saleh protesters.



"The revolt for justice began in Tunisia. It continues today in Egypt, and Yemen tomorrow will be free from injustice," he said, referring to a popular revolt that led to the Tunisian president's fall, and protests in Egypt seeking the departure of its president.



"We will continue our peaceful struggle until the fall of this unjust regime," various speakers from the Common Forum repeated to the massive crowd of anti-Saleh demonstrators.

(When they say "peaceful struggle" - do they mean jihad? Because that's islamania's code in English for islamic jihad.)



Meanwhile, Police fired tear gas and live ammunition yesterday to break up an anti-government protest in the southern Yemeni port city of Aden, leaving two people injured, witnesses said.



The police, who deployed in large numbers earlier in the morning, were seen by an AFP correspondent dispersing the protesters as they began to march in the Crater district of the city.



Hundreds of protesters gathered, some of them with banners with slogans such as "the corrupt and the tyrants must go" and "the time for change has come."



In another part of Aden, police arrested 30 people as they tried to stage a protest held every Thursday to demand the release of prisoners, officials of the pro-independence Southern Movement said.



Thousands of people also demonstrated in various southern towns, some responding to a call from the Southern Movement and others to an appeal from the Common Forum, witnesses said.



The protest, the biggest staged against Saleh in past weeks, came despite the president announcing Wednesday that he would not seek another term and that he had postponed controversial April elections -- two key opposition demands.

Quote:More important, what does the administration do now? We've wagged fingers and stamped feet but to no avail. There is no sign Obama has a back-up plan. And now the danger mounts. Former State Department official Christian Whiton writes:



So far, President Obama has failed the test of presidential leadership during the revolution. He seems unable or unwilling to articulate U.S. interests, much less how to use the tools of government to advance them. It is not too late for him to change course. But until he does this, his actions are making the worst-case scenario of an Islamist Egypt more likely.



The major challenges that confront Obama -- job creation, Middle East unrest, fiscal discipline -- [color="#FF0000"]all appear to be above his pay grade[/color]. His words are of limited and diminishing utility. And the distinguishing characteristic of this administration is now confusion. As Iran did to Jimmy Carter, Egypt's crisis now threatens to subsume the rest of the agenda. And even worse (as the gulf oil spill did), it may come to symbolize a presidency that lacks the skill and insight needed to manage a crisis and shape events.

Quote:Mehr said the blasts, which occurred at 5:50 a.m. locat time (2:20 GMT) outside the town of Salafchegan, 130 kilometers south of Teheran, were felt kilometers away.



Local official Majid Bojarzadeh said the blasts were not caused by technical failures, but did not elaborate if officials believed the explosions were acts of sabotage.

Quote:Egypt is among the world’s largest importers of wheat. When such commodity prices rise due to U.S. subsidy and tariff intervention, as well as speculation in the capital markets, the price of bread skyrockets. Bread is made from wheat.



In 2008, food riots broke out in Egypt, Mexico, Bangladesh and many developing countries when farmers, attracted to ethanol subsidies, abandoned food production in favor of fuel. This, along with rising oil prices, droughts, and other factors, decreased food supplies. Prices spiked.



Adding to the crisis was U.S. trade policy: Because we subsidize wheat, corn and a handful of other crops so much, we can offer them cheaper on the world market and “dump” supplies on other countries. This puts farmers in those countries out of business, as they are forced to compete with artificially low prices at the market.



Go back a little further in time in Egypt and the roots of the political crisis can be found with its 1992 land reform. Guided by what many say was U.S. and International Monetary Fund influence, the country’s small farmers who were “registered tenants” became subject to rent increases, in many cases triple what they had been paying.



As expected, these small farmers couldn’t afford the steep rent increases and were forced off their land. More than half of all Egyptians live in the countryside, and millions were forced into poverty. Moreover, Egypt itself became more reliant on imports.

Quote:(Reuters) - Hosni Mubarak had harsh words for the United States and what he described as its misguided quest for democracy in the Middle East in a telephone call with an Israeli lawmaker a day before he quit as Egypt's president.



The legislator, former cabinet minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, said on Israel TV Friday he came away from the 20-minute conversation Thursday with the feeling the 82-year-old leader realized "it was the end of the Mubarak era."



"He had very tough things to say about the United States," said Ben-Eliezer, a member of the center-left Labor Party who has held talks with Mubarak on numerous occasions while serving in various Israeli coalition governments.



"He gave me a lesson in democracy and said: 'We see the democracy the United States spearheaded in Iran and with Hamas, in Gaza, and that's the fate of the Middle East,'" Ben-Eliezer said.



"'They may be talking about democracy but they don't know what they're talking about and the result will be extremism and radical Islam,'" he quoted Mubarak as saying.



U.S. support for pro-democracy elements in Iran has not led to regime change in the Islamic Republic, and Hamas, a group Washington considers to be a terrorist organization, won a 2006 Palestinian election promoted by the United States.



Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 after a coalition government it formed with Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas collapsed in a power struggle.

Quote:Thousands of protesters gathered in Yemen's capital, Sana'a, Saturday to celebrate the resignation of Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak and call for their own president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to step down.



The protesters began marching toward the Egyptian embassy but were confronted and pushed back by a group of men armed with sticks. There were conflicting reports as to whether the armed men were police or government supporters.



Reports say the clashes came after armed men forced hundreds of protesters to stop a demonstration Friday night in Sana'a.



The gathering points for Saturday's protests were Sana'a University and the city's Tahrir Square, which bears the same name as the rallying point for the protests in the Egyptian capital, Cairo.



Yemen's ruling party has set up tents in Yemen's Tahrir, or “Liberation,” Square to prevent anti-government protesters from taking over the area.

Quote:Amman - The Muslim Brotherhood movement in Jordan, the country's main opposition group, on Saturday described the downfall of Egyptian President Hosny Mubarak as a 'historic victory' with the United States and Israel as the main losers.

Quote:Ever since Barack Hussein Obama made ‘MUSLIM OUTREACH’ the main priority of NASA, the shuttle is being grounded, future manned space missions are not in the budget, but Muslim names seem to be popping up in every part of NASA. AKI –The United States space agency NASA has okayed the naming of one of its spaceships after a young Egyptian woman killed in late January anti-government protest, according to Egyptian daily Al-Masry-al-Youm.



The paper quoted Essam Mohamed Haji, a researcher at NASA as saying on Thursday he had received approval to put the young woman Sally Zahran’s name on a spaceship heading for Mars....



“This is the least we could provide to Egyptian youth and revolutionaries. This step represents transferring the dreams of Egyptian youth from a small stretch of earth to the enormous expanse of space,” said Haji was cited as telling Al-Masri Al-Youm by phone from California.