Egypt // Current

Vanished Persian Army Said Found in Desert : Discovery News

http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/cambyses-army-remains-sahara.html

archaeorama
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19 hours ago
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Jew Hatred and Incitement to Genocide on Egyptian TV

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3pPImS2yz0&feature=player_embedded In this Egyptian... more

bielski
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5 days ago
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1 comment

People of rubbish

A new documentary uncovers the truly disastrous effects of the Swine Flu following the... more

Greenpointer
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14 days ago
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3 comments

Train collision kills at least 15 in Egypt

Cairo, Egypt (CNN) -- Between 15 and 20 people died when two trains collided outside... more

tcmfan08
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16 days ago
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Jews Banned From Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Conference

A United States-based organization’s conference on breast cancer awareness, to be... more

interditx
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20 days ago
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Egyptian Official Calls Museum Behavior 'Suspicious'

She's been dead thousands of years but she's still causing trouble. The bust of Queen... more

unclepete
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21 days ago
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“The burka is a prison, it’s a straitjacket”
French Urban Affairs minister, Fadela Amara

The burqa, always a sensitive religious symbol, is making headlines once again as governments around the world begin taking carefully constructed steps towards a full or partial ban on the controversial clothing.
As with everything, there are two sides to every story, while the burqa is seen by some as a sign of subservience, a piece of religious repression that is not mandatory in the Koran, instead serving to deface women from the role of human being to shrouded servant. Others argue that religious freedom, whatever that entails is one pivotal law that must remain in place for concern of offending not just Muslims, but people of all religions who consider religious expression through certain clothing a vital part of their religious freedom.

How can a woman be truly free if there is a barrier placed before her that prevents her from interacting with fellow humans, how can you truly relate to a person if you cant see her smile or frown? Our faces are possibly the most important parts of our bodies, excluding the mind, the face allows us to see who we are talking to, the starting point for our connections as humanity, not forgetting the health risks that a person’s skin needs to be exposed to sunlight.
Quotes by Muslim women who are pro burqa simultaneously have the same correlation, that by wearing the burqa they will not get harassed by men in the street, instead of creating a law that mandates women should be fully covered, is it not more logical to create some sort of law that enforces restraint on behalf of the males?

One thing Britain prides itself on is the acceptance of other cultures and religions, which has allowed this country to become a very ethnically diverse and equal place, British people, past and present have fought for too long to guarantee rights such as equal pay in the workplace and votes for women, and it would be an insult to the memories of these people, most notably the suffragettes if we allowed other persons to enter our country and abuse our rights under the guise of religious expression, when in reality, the burqa holds no place in the Koran and therefore in Islamic law.“The burka is a prison, it’s a straitjacket” French Urban Affairs minister,... more

CarolineS
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1 month ago
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Agriculture and the harvest in ancient Egypt

To celebrate harvests all this month in the Sustainable Agriculture Group, this entry... more

JanforGore
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1 month ago
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Love in Gaza: A Palestinian couple marries against all odds

Der Spiegel has a great story of a Palestinian couple, he in Gaza and she in the West... more

afitzgerald
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1 month ago
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Egypt severs ties to France's Louvre Museum

Egypt's antiquities chief says Egypt is suspending ties with the Louvre, saying the... more

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1 month ago
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Operation Phish Phry Busts Three in Las Vegas

Three Las Vegas residents were among 100 people indicted in what the FBI is calling... more

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1 month ago
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Want to fake viriginity? New gadget is angering Egyptian Islamic conservatives

Conservatives condemn the Artificial Virginity Hymen Kit as technology that will promote promiscuity. Others say the furor over the device raises disturbing questions about double standards.

Reporting from Cairo - Whether it's seen as a clever little gadget to help a woman keep a secret or a devilish deception that threatens Islam, the Artificial Virginity Hymen Kit is not welcome in Egypt.

The kit allows a bride who is not a virgin to pretend that she is. A pouch inserted into the vagina on her wedding night ruptures and leaks a blood-like liquid designed to trick a new husband into believing that his wife is chaste. It's a wink of ingenuity to soothe a man's ego and keep the dowry intact.

Egyptian conservatives condemn the device as technology that will promote promiscuity in a culture that forbids premarital sex. Their protests are arising in a nation that over the last 40 years has gone from miniskirts and secularism to hijabs and religious devotion. But seldom have conservatives faced such brazen advertising.

"No more worry about losing your virginity. With this product, you can have your first night back any time," states the website of Gigimo, a Chinese mail-order company that sells the kit and other sexual products, including sex dolls and bondage toys, worldwide. "Add in a few moans and groans, you will pass through undetectable."

Members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which controls 20% of the seats in Egypt's parliament, have called for banning the kit and arresting anyone selling it on the black market. Cleric Abdul Moeti Bayoumi has issued a fatwa urging that peddlers of the $29.90 device be charged with banditry and punished for spreading immorality and sin.

"Egyptian girls are normally afraid to lose their virginity before marriage," Sayed Askar, a lawmaker and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, recently told parliament. "A product like that can make it easier and tempting for girls who don't have strong wills to commit such a sin. It will be a crying shame and a blot on the government if they allow the selling of this product in our markets."

Lina Samaan, an accountant, said the furor raises disturbing questions about her country and the double standards that often apply to women:

"I think it's a shame that we are discussing a product like this. If most girls don't have sex prior to marriage only because they want to keep virginity, then there is something wrong with the way we think," she said. "Sex is a right for every woman but unfortunately we started turning to products like these because men -- even non-religious ones who have sex before marriage -- wouldn't marry a girl if she's not virgin."

The emotion over the kit speaks to a traditional society that is increasingly pious, whether it's rich professionals seeking moderate Islam on websites of progressive imams or poor and middle-class families adopting strict religion as a buttress to the influence of Western media and a loss of confidence in a state that has failed to provide prosperity.Conservatives condemn the Artificial Virginity Hymen Kit as technology that will... more

hpseaton
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1 month ago
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10 Things to Do in Egypt

I haven't done a travel tips video for a week or so, so I decided it was past time to... more

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1 month ago
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The Last Anchorite

From the director of C13H16CINO, a truly remarkable story of the last Anchorite,... more

s_remik
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1 month ago
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The terrible consequences of Egypt's swine slaughter

According to all recent reports, the ancient city of Cairo now presents to the world the image of a growing pile of festering trash. Nothing new, you say. The streets have never been exactly uncluttered, and the levels of noise and traffic and pollution are an object of wonderment. When I first visited the place, I was amazed to find people living with great dignity and aplomb in what were called "the cities of the dead"—among the graves and stones of Cairo's massive cemeteries. I was also struck by the number and variety of animals living cheek by jowl, as it were, amid the buses and taxis, with the human population. Looking down from the high window of Shepheard's Hotel, I saw that some enterprising person in a neighboring low-rise had managed to get a small flock of goats onto his roof. Other flocks and herds could be met with on the thoroughfares. And a great deal of excellent work was being unobtrusively done by that most useful of animals, the pig. As mass consumers of organic waste, pigs are hard to beat. They would chomp their way through great heaps of it, very often under the unspoken supervision of Cairo's quite large Christian minority.

I have to use the past tense about these noble beasts because, in the spring of this very year, they were all slaughtered on the orders of the Egyptian government. And it is this crazy action that has shifted the Cairo trash scene from the awful to the near-calamitous. It was alleged by the regime of President Hosni Mubarak, on the basis of no evidence whatever, that the swine themselves were the carriers of the so-called "swine flu." (Several friends and relatives of mine have already caught and recovered from this mild infection; everybody knows that actual encounters with pigs have absolutely nothing to do with it.) As a consequence of the pig massacre, the streets of Cairo have become almost unlivable, and the Christian garbage collectors, locally called the zabaleen, have been robbed of their livelihood. "They killed the pigs, let them clean the city," as one former garbage collector and pig man, Moussa Rateb, was quoted as saying of the Egyptian authorities.

This wouldn't be the only instance of clerical hysteria generated by the outbreak. Iranian television recently broadcast an item suggesting that the swine-flu virus had been deliberately incubated by the usual shady cosmopolitan "circles" and that the vaccine against it had been monopolized by a company in which Donald Rumsfeld held many shares. Back in May, just as Egypt's anti-porcine hysteria was gathering pace, there was a proposal from Sheik Ahmad Ali Othman, a senior advisory figure at the Ministry of Religious Endowments, that all pigs be killed because they were the descendants of those unbelieving Jews who were turned into swine in the Quran. (In case you don't follow this very toxic debate between contending schools of militant Islam, there are those who maintain that Jews are the spawn of the pigs and monkeys into which Allah turned the heretics, and those who take the more moderate view that the heretics turned into pigs and monkeys were further cursed by being made barren and sterile. The latter view leads to the slightly more lenient and broad-minded conclusion that, bad as today's Jews are, they at least cannot be in a direct line of descent from the original condemned beasts. These fine distinctions are worth knowing.)According to all recent reports, the ancient city of Cairo now presents to the world... more