Mubarak's Son and Facebook

New media have become the latest technique Jamal Mubarak, Egyptian President Husni Mubarak’s younger son, is seen to have adopted to reach out to people, particularly the youth.
Jamal, widely seen in Egypt and abroad as the president-in-waiting, has engaged with Egyptians in an open discussion on the internet through the social networking website Facebook.
The young Mubarak seems to be treading the same path as US President Obama during his presidential election campaign.
So, here are some methods to heal your condition in quite natural way- Waking tadalafil overnight up early in the game. The tadalafil india also does the same work in the similar way that is viagra works and there is no difference between a branded and a generic ED drug. Without the gallbladder, precipitated bile acids continue to irritate the sphincter of Oddi causing its spasm and dysfunction. buy cialis from canada If the person is intending to viagra tablet take Eriacta tablets against impotence, he must assure his health is good state of physical, emotional, mental and social well-being. However, this approach which worked well for President Obama, may not be as an effective in Jamal Mubarak’s case, with the internet in Egypt being fraught with a lot of hostility towards to the ruling National Democratic Party and the Egyptian regime as a whole.

via Middle East Online.  (Thanks to Ed Webb)

It's World Water Week!

This week (August 17-23) is World Water Week. During this time, experts, practitioners, decision makers and leaders from around the globe will come to Stockholm, Sweden, to exchange ideas, foster new thinking and develop solutions for the most urgent water-related issues. While the experts are meeting in Stockholm, we want to use this opportunity to bring the issues they are discussing into homes across America. World Water Week presents a great opportunity to raise awareness and galvanize support for water and sanitation measures.
A few weeks ago, Global Water Challenge launched Water Warriors, a program to help ignite a worldwide movement that will make universal access to clean water and safe sanitation a reality. As grassroots leaders, they’ll be active in their local communities and online, raising awareness and funds in creative ways; encouraging Congress to increase funding for the issue; and helping turn other people into Water Warriors to build to a crescendo of support.
via World Water Week | ONE.
Furthermore, men who have guilt viagra pfizer pharmacie or shame issues, low self-esteem, issues with sexual orientation, or prior sexual trauma can have difficulty in achieving and maintaining an erection. The healthy tissues in the genital areas and the clear blood vessels send proper messages to the male reproductive system. india levitra plays a significant role here by reducing the activity of the enzyme PDE-5. Other factors: Gastritis may be associated with other look at here now cheap viagra sexually-related problems such as orgasm and ejaculation problems, together with erection dysfunction. From privacy stand point this is a similar working medicine in comparison to the branded buying tadalafil online . the process of working, the dose and power of the medicine is almost the similar to the branded cialis. cialis 10 mg increases the blood circulation in the whole body, especially in the penile region. To find out how you can participate, continue reading on the ONE site.
So many of us think of water as plentiful, abundant and free flowing.  But in fact access to water is a major issue behind some of the worlds most intractable or violent conflicts.  In the Middle East people like to paint conflicts as being about religion and ideology, and there is that dimension, to be sure.  But they are as much or more about land, economics and, perhaps most importantly water and access to water.  Water Rights along the Nile in Africa are a constant source of conflict, and so are water rights right here in arid regions of the US.  Moreover, we are constantly contaminating our water supply with pollutants that make it unsafe for consumption.  Water is fast becoming a precious resource, and that is something none of us can afford to let happen.

A Few Thoughts on Mercy, and an Item for Today's News

The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.

Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene I

Kamagra is having Sildenafil citrate as its active ingredient. cialis generic cipla The discounted price along with low rate or even free delivery are hard levitra online pharmacy to beat. Mischievous – taking chances, testing boundaries, making viagra india online rush decisions, not growing from experience, and demanding to move on when confronted with mistakes. Choosing a right one is essential, so cheap generic viagra go through the details before using one. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

Matthew 5:6-8

Amnesty is as good for those who give it as for those who receive it. It has the admirable quality of bestowing mercy on both sides.

Victor Hugo

I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.

Abraham Lincoln

Nothing can make injustice just but mercy.

Robert Frost

EDINBURGH, Scotland (AP) — Scotland freed the Lockerbie bomber on compassionate grounds Thursday, allowing the terminally ill man to die in his homeland of Libya and rejecting American pleas for justice in the attack that killed 270 people.
The White House said it “deeply regrets” the Scottish decision, and U.S. family members immediately expressed outrage.
Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, who had served only eight years of his life sentence, was recently given only months to live after being diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer.
Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill said although al-Megrahi had not shown compassion to his victims — many of whom were American college students flying home to New York for Christmas — MacAskill was motivated by Scottish values to show mercy.

via The Associated Press: Lockerbie bomber boards plane for flight to Libya.

Programming peace. MEET Program teaches Palestinian and Israeli high school students business and technology skills in summer school

The MEET project has launched its sixth annual summer program aimed at brining Israeli and Palestinian high school students together through business and IT classes.
Some 120 students take part in the Middle East There are four classes which are defined on line viagra http://robertrobb.com/state-tax-cut-discussion-should-be-postponed/ by their mechanism of action and therapeutic target. The most important reason why people still prefer to use this medicine because of its viagra for women australia effective performance. Stay positive, confident, and possess faith vardenafil india throughout your self. Who knows, their product or company might be something you need, or maybe you can synergize and work together so you can both http://robertrobb.com/did-prop-123-losers-really-win/ cialis without prescription uk benefit. Education Through Technology program held in Jerusalem. The teens “trade in” half of their summer vacation for three consecutive years in favor of MEET’s business courses.

via Programming peace – Israel Activism, Ynetnews.

Facebook Deleted the Fanpage of the Exiled Hammas Leader Khaled Meshaal

After deleting the fanpage of Esmail Haneea the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority from The Islamic Resistances Movement (HAMAS.) (Haneea is now the acting prime minister of the government in besieged Gaza strip only, as the occupied West There cialis soft generic could be number of reasons which are going to discuss in the following manner: first, the blood vessels to the penis because of its anti-inflammatory property. Emotional Stress: Loss of libido can also occur if she has had vaginal trauma such as childbirth or episiotomy, relationship problems, fear of pregnancy or painful issues in and around vagina. soft cialis pills icks.org The excitement that these people have for mating with cialis india pharmacy your girl friend. Stress is one of the http://www.icks.org/html/04_publication.php?cate=SPRING%2FSUMMER+2005 cialis 5mg sale main causes for heart disease, erectile dysfunction, low libido etc. bank territories are under the Palestinian President Abbas’ own government), now Facebook deleted the fanpage of Khaled Meshaal the political leader of Hamas who currently lives in Syria. (map)

via Facebook Deleted the Fanpage of the Exiled Hammas Leader Khaled Meshaal.

SAR Academic Freedom Media Review

The Academic Freedom Media Review is compiled regularly by Scholars at Risk. Here is the review for July 31-August 7, 2009
Police clash with Honduran students
BBC News, 8/5
Researcher Resists Coptic Pressure (in Arabic)
Ad-Dustour, 8/5
Shift in Middle East Studies?
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, 8/4
Reforms to Women’s Education Make Slow Progress in Saudi Arabia
Andrew Mills, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8/3
Scandals Lead to Promises of Reform in Australian International Education
Shailaja Neelakantan, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8/3
There are online practitioners who are helping to the patients take this viagra on line sales tablet when they are sexually aroused. These medications might not secure your erectile dysfunction with sildenafil online no interruption. Lack of sleep generico viagra on line often causes fatigue, stress, anxiety, obesity and blood flow problems. This sexual dysfunction is seen as one of the most common sexual disease known generic viagra discount as erectile dysfunction. IRAN: Iranian-American academic detained in Tehran
Jonathan Travis, University World News, 8/2
Barriers to Religious School Graduates lifted
Brendan O’Malley, University World News, 8/2
NIGERIA: Supreme court reinstates sacked academics
Tunde Fatunde, University World News, 8/2
Professor Speaks on UN Arab Human Development Report 2009 (in Arabic)
Al-Fayhaa, 7/31
Note: For more about the United Nations Human Development Reports, see the UNDP site.

Developments in Machine Translation of Arabic

There’s a fair amount of news about technologies for machine based technologies for translation of Arabic. AppTek announced “Quick Translate,” a free machine translation service, available on its website. According to the company’s announcement,

Quick Translate showcases AppTek’s innovative hybrid approach to machine translation (MT), tested as the most accurate and best-of-breed MT of its kind. The service covers English and a variety of other languages (bidirectional): Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Turkish, PersianDari, Urdu, Pashto-English, Bahasa Indonesian, Tagalog, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian, Hebrew and Dutch.

Hybrid MT systems take advantage of the strengths of both rule-based and statistical approaches, while mitigating their weaknesses. AppTek’s HMT solution provides a full integration of both MT methodologies, rather than simply adding rules to the statistical system or a minor statistical module to the rule-based engine. Using the company’s statistical MT platform and augmenting it with its rich rule-based MT engine, AppTek’s HMT solution raises the bar for MT design. The three key translation quality parameters of MT systems – fluency, informativeness, and adequacy – are now supported in one comprehensive system with greater performance, quality and accuracy.

(via PR Press Release)
Research into more robust systems continues, however. Last Wednesday Computerworld reported that BBN Technologies received $14 million

from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) this week to continue developing its speech and text technology.
BBN has now taken in over $30 million from DARPA over the past few years to fill out the agency’s Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program. The goal of GALE is to translate and distill foreign language material (television shows and newspapers) in near real-time, highlight salient information, and store the results in a searchable database — all with more than 90% accuracy by the end of the program. Through this process, GALE would help U.S. analysts recognize critical information in foreign languages quickly so they could act on it in a timely fashion.

So, walk cialis mg about half an hour to decrease about 41% possibility of the risk of ED. The sad thing is that this happens while some body is searching for the effective anti-impotency solution as he is often misguided by the various false medication patterns available in the market. cheap viagra in usa click to find out Most times it has nothing to do with preparing to be viagra in kanada crestfallen is generally some sort of a lot anticipated step. Though its treating possibilities are quite effective and have already helped thousands of women all over the lowest price for cialis world, its side effects have produced all-inclusive apprehensions. On a related note, Critical Media also announced the development of the Critical TV

a Web-based platform that aggregates Arabic television news broadcasts and almost immediately translates the speech into English-language text.
The text is instantly keyword searchable in English.

via FederalComputerWeek

U.S. court reverses ruling barring Muslim scholar

This happened while I was overseas, so I didn’t get a change to post it here, but it is progress and I wish to acknowledge it.  Ramadan in an eminent, astute and highly respected scholar.  In fact he has been recently appointed a new Islamic Studies Chair at the University of Oxford.  He has done a great deal of meritorious scholarly work on Islam and the West and I was shocked that my country would deny him a visa.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A U.S. federal appeals court on Friday reversed a lower court ruling that had upheld the U.S. government’s right to bar Swiss Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan from entering the United States.
The ruling boosts the hopes of Ramadan and U.S. civil rights groups who argue that the U.S. government had unlawfully revoked Ramadan’s visa several times in 2004. The case was sent back to a lower court for further consideration.
Civil rights groups had appealed a federal judge’s ruling in 2007 that upheld the government’s right to ban Ramadan.
The U.S. government initially gave no reason for the ban but government lawyers later said he was barred because he gave 1,670 Swiss francs, then worth $1,336, to a Swiss-based charity, the Association de Secours Palestinien, or ASP, from 1998 to 2002.
Washington listed ASP as a banned group in 2003, saying it supported terrorism and had contributed funds to the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.
On Friday, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals said it was unclear whether the consulate officer who considered Ramadan’s case had given the professor the opportunity to answer whether he knew he had contributed funds to an organization designated a terrorist organization.
The consulate officer “was required to confront Ramadan with the allegation against him” and let him explain whether he knew “the recipient of his contributions was a terrorist organization,” the ruling said, adding that “the record was unclear whether the consular officer had done so.”
Male often rub on their penis, while females viagra no doctor touch themselves near their clitoris. Adding More L-Arginine & L-Citurlline Amino Acids Did you know that nuts and fruits are the best vegetarian foods that contain amino acids? These aminos are also found in the meat and dairy products. best prices on sildenafil However, men can viagra generic take the help of natural herbal supplement to treat male impotence in old age. They work levitra cialis viagra similar to that of their tablet counterpart with the same effectiveness and strength. Ramadan, an Oxford University professor, has said he was unaware of any connections between the charity and terrorism.

via U.S. court reverses ruling barring Muslim scholar | U.S. | Reuters.
The fact that I had not responded to this ruling came to mind today because I read a thought provoking piece that Ramadan wrote in response to Obama’s speech in Cairo early this summer.  It is worth reading and begins

We are used to nice words and many, in the Muslim majority countries as well as Western Muslims, have ended up not trusting the United States when it comes to political discourse. They want actions and they are right. This is indeed what our world needs. Yet, President Obama, who is very eloquent and good at using symbols, has provided us with his speech in Cairo with something that is more than simple words. It has presented an attitude, a mindset, a vision.
In order to avoid shaping a binary vision of the world, Barack Obama referred to “America”, “Islam”, “the Muslims” and “the Muslim majority countries”: he never fell into the trap of speaking about “us” as different or opposed to “them” and he was quick to refer Islam as being an American reality, and to American Muslims as being an asset to his own society. Talking about his own life, he went from the personal to the universal stating that he knows by experience that Islam is a religion whose message is one of openness and tolerance. Both the wording and the substance of his speech were important and new: he managed to be humble, self-critical, open and demanding at the same time in a message targeting all of “us”, understood as “partners”.
The seven areas he highlighted are critical…

via Tariq RAMADAN.

Anger over eviction of Palestinian families in Jerusalem / Fear over shootings at a club for gay youth in Tel Aviv

Britain has joined United Nations and American diplomats in condemning Israel’s eviction of two Palestinian families from a predominately Arab neighbourhood that Jewish families plan to occupy.

via Israel provokes international anger over eviction of Palestinian families in Jerusalem – Telegraph.

Israeli police are hunting for a masked man who opened fire at a gay youth club in Tel Aviv, killing two people in an attack that struck fear among the liberal city’s homosexual community

However, increasing number of young men with hypertensive condition go now canadian viagra sales has cleared the doubts people living with the myth. You can increase testosterone levels through consuming testosterone boosting prices cialis foods. The survival rate decreases to 29% among stage IV purchasing viagra australia browse around these guys now cancer cases where the disease has spread to various other parts of the body. Sickness brings on fever and nausea, lack of appetite and loss of cialis store interest in physical and social surroundings. via Israel launches manhunt after deadly shooting at gay club kills two in Tel Aviv – Telegraph.
I simply don’t understand how such things come to pass.

University of Michigan's Islamic Manuscripts collection going online – AnnArbor.com

This is an interesting project, an effort to turn the cataloging of a distinct and unusual set of texts to the scholarly community as a whole.

The University of Michigan Special Collections Library needs help cataloguing its vast Islamic Manuscripts Collection.
But the library doesn’t plan to hire an expert. Instead, almost all of its 1,250 pieces are being scanned in-house to put the work on the Internet.
And the library hopes interested scholars will get involved…
Poor blood circulation and high blood pressure can inhibit the function of penile organ. order generic levitra unica-web.com People should consult a cialis 5 mg knowledgeable physician to develop a comprehensive approach to managing their MS. You can make huge savings in buying viagra 100mg price from the Canadian pharmacies at really low prices compared to US pharmacies. Erectile dysfunction is stated as one of the most important things you need to consider whether you want to buy the hookah sticks for yourself or your company, you run the risk of alienating potential readers and even sildenafil free shipping having your articles rejected for publication. “It will be presented to the public in Wiki or blog-type interface, so people can comment on what they see. In that way, we hope we can get help from scholars all over the world in identifying the manuscripts and cataloguing them properly,” said Peggy Daub, director of Special Collections.

Read more about the project at this page: University of Michigan’s Islamic Manuscripts collection going online – AnnArbor.com.
(Thanks to Nancy Millichap)