Bahrain ( 17 yr old boy gets a year in jail - For insulting the King on twitter )

A lower criminal court in Bahrain, headed by a member of the ruling family, has sentenced a 17-year-old boy to a year in jail for insulting the Gulf island's king on Twitter.
The Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR) on Saturday said Ali Al Shofa was arrested in a house raid at dawn on 12 March 2013. He spent two months in jail while under investigation.
Ali was accused of posting insulting comments about Sheikh Hamad Al-Khalifa using the account @alkawarahnews, which he denied a relationship with. His lawyer submitted evidence that the account was still being run by other people.
Human rights groups said the sentencing was part of a wider crackdown on freedom of speech in Bahrain.


Last month a court sentenced five twitter users to a year each in jail for insulting the king on twitter.
Earlier in June, the BCHR reported the abduction and incommunicado detention of Jaffar Al-Demstani for tweeting about the torture of his father, Ebrahim Al-Demstani.

Saudi Arabia ( 7 Human Rights activists get Prison time- for posting on Facebook )

Saudi Arabia has sentenced seven activists from its restive Eastern Province to prison terms ranging from five to 10 years for posting messages on Facebook calling for anti-government protests, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said.


Minority Shia Muslims have held protests in Eastern Province over the past two years against alleged discrimination and negligence, which the Riyadh government denies.
"Sending people off to years in prison for peaceful Facebook posts sends a strong message that there's no safe way to speak out in Saudi Arabia, even on online social networks," said Joe Stork, HRW's deputy Middle East director.
The New York-based rights group urged EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and other European officials to condemn the convictions. Ashton was due to meet Gulf counterparts, including from Saudi Arabia, in Manama, Bahrain on Sunday.

"If the EU doesn't raise these cases with Saudi officials this weekend, its silence will look like craven compliance with the rights abuses of an authoritarian state."
Saudi Interior Ministry officials were not immediately available for comment.

TAMPA FL ( A Florida man killed a family puppy and cooked him - He was arrested )

TAMPA, FL - A Florida man is accused of strangling a family puppy, chopping it into pieces and cooking its ribs on the stove, Tampa police said.
Thomas Elliot Huggins, 25, was arrested Thursday after a family member called police.
"When officers arrived, they found the dog's ribs cooked in a pot on the stove," Tampa police said. "The dog's head was in the garbage."


Huggins had strangled the 5- to 6-month-old puppy and chopped it into quarters, storing pieces in the freezer for future meals, authorities said.
He was arrested on suspicion of animal cruelty. Animal control officials took the remains of the puppy.


Read more: http://www.abc15.com/dpp/news/national/pd-florida-man-strangles-puppy-dismembers-it-puts-it-on-stove#ixzz2Xig2mzJ0

Florida ( Woman rescued when alligator attacks boat )

 

The Associated Press

 

LOXAHATCHEE, Fla. -- A woman was rescued by airboat on Saturday in a remote part of the Florida Everglades after an alligator bit her inflatable boat and caused it to sink, authorities said.
The woman was floating on an inflatable boat in the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge when the gator attacked the raft, according to Palm Beach County Fire Rescue.
At 12:16 p.m. authorities responded to reports of a woman being attacked by an alligator, but later discovered she had been on a boat that was bitten by the gator.
"Due to the remoteness of the location, firefighters utilized an airboat to reach the woman," said Fire Rescue spokesman Capt. Albert Borroto. The woman, who will not be identified due to privacy concerns, was evaluated at the scene. She was not injured, but she was "shaken up" by the attack, Borroto said. Fire crews transported her back to dry land.
The wildlife refuge west of Boynton Beach is the last northernmost portion of the Everglades. The area where the woman was found is popular for canoes, kayaks and hikers and the wildlife is very abundant, Borroto said.
According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Loxahatchee Refuge consists of more than 200 square miles of Everglades habitat. It is home to the American alligator and the endangered Everglade snail kite.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/06/29/3477033/woman-rescued-when-alligator-bites.html#storylink=cpy

ROME ( Monsignor Busted " Trying to sneak 26 million into Rome " )

Vatican Monsignor Arrested in Cash-Smuggling Probe

ROME – A cleric formerly assigned to the Vatican finance office is among three people arrested Friday for allegedly attempting to smuggle 20 million euros ($26 million) in cash into Italy.

Monsignor Nunzio Scarano was recently relieved of his duties as a senior Vatican accountant after the Holy See learned that he was under investigation for money laundering.

The others taken into custody are financial intermediary Giovanni Carinzo and Giovanni Maria Zito, an erstwhile member of the intelligence division of Italy’s militarized national police.

The investigation leading to their arrests was part of a wider probe into the operations of the Institute for Religious Works, or IOR, the Vatican’s bank.

The smuggling case, however, does not appear to involve the IOR.

The Vatican said Wednesday that Pope Francis has named a five-person commission that in the coming months will investigate all that goes on in the IOR, involved for years in a series of financial scandals, with a view to its possible reform. EFE

Russia News ( Russia asks Edward Snowden to " Work with them " be a SPY ? ) see article

© REUTERS/ Bobby Yip

Edward Snowden: hot potato

by Anna Arutunyan at 28/06/2013 18:36

As NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden remains holed up somewhere in the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, at least three governments are involved in high-stakes backdoor negotiations over his fate.
Politicians in the United States vowed to step up pressure on Russia and Ecuador. The latter has suggested it might give asylum to Snowden, a former contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency wanted by the United States for leaking reports about a top-secret surveillance program. But for Ecuador and Russia, the key question was whether the whistleblower was a gift of fate or a hot potato.
By the end of this week, a number of Russian politicians were increasingly seeing him as an opportunity to exploit.
Russia’s Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, wants Snowden to help investigate whether American Internet companies provided information about Russian citizens to the U.S. government.
“We invite Edward Snowden to work with us and hope that as soon as he settles his legal status, he will collaborate with our working group and provide us with proof of U.S. intelligence agencies’ access to the servers of Internet companies,” Senator Ruslan Gattarov was quoted by RIA Novosti as saying on Thursday, a day after Russia’s upper house of parliament decided to set up a special working group to investigate Snowden’s claims.
Earlier, Kirill Kabanov, a member of President Vladimir Putin’s Human Rights Council, called on colleagues to appeal to the Kremlin to grant asylum for Snowden.
Given that Putin himself suggested that giving Snowden asylum was as useless as “shearing a pig – a lot of squealing and no fleece,” why has Snowden suddenly become so appealing for Russia’s political elite?
“It’s very good to demonstrate to the world that the United States isn’t such a big defender of human rights as it makes itself out to be,” Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin analyst and the prorector of the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, told The Moscow News. “And it’s good to show that Russia can act independently of the United States. Plus, if he stays, there’s a possibility that our security services will have access to his information.”
Putin was notoriously lukewarm on Snowden, saying on Tuesday that the sooner he left the country, the better. But that, Markov said, was part personal, and part political ploy.
“[Putin] is a former intelligence officer, and for him [what Snowden did] is betrayal,” Markov said. “Also, Putin doesn’t want to think that Russia organized [Snowden’s arrival to Moscow].”
But other analysts reflected Putin’s skepticism, and said that keeping Snowden in Russia would be a mistake.
“It should not be done,” Alexander Konovalov, President of the Institute of Strategic Assessment, told The Moscow News, suggesting that Snowden posed a liability by being too unpredictable.
“No one really knows what he was motivated by. It wasn’t money. It wasn’t Communist ideals, which don’t matter anymore,” he said. “So what were they? He’s part of a new information society, and for many of these people, there is a conflict between the responsibilities they’ve undertaken before the state, and the responsibilities which they themselves feel they have before humanity. We will increasingly be seeing people like this here in Russia.”
That, Konovalov said, is not something the Kremlin would be looking forward to.
A similar indecisiveness on whether Snowden was worth the trouble was reflected in the United States, where President Barack Obama was lukewarm on pressing for Snowden’s extradition.
"I have not called [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping] personally or President Putin personally and the reason is … number one, I shouldn't have to," Obama said this week, adding that given the business America does with Russia, Snowden just wasn’t worth “wheeling and dealing and trading on a whole host of other issues.”
For some lawmakers, on the other hand, extraditing Snowden was a matter of political principle.
U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told The Daily Beast that the extradition was a “defining moment” in America’s relationship with Russia.
“We are exploring what are the leverage points. I’m trying to put together a package to let the Russians know how serious we are,” he was quoted as saying.
But even in the States, other lawmakers, like Carl Levin of the Senates Armed Services Committee, recognize they have little leverage over Russia.
Pressure by the United States on Ecuador – which too distanced itself from Snowden when it denied it had given him refugee documents of passage – has already backfired, for example.
After Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, threatened Ecuador’s trade arrangements with the United States if it grants asylum to Snowden, Ecuador thumbed its nose and renounced the preferential tariffs anyway, “in the face of threats, insolence and arrogance of certain U.S. sectors,” President Rafael Correa said on Thursday.
Indeed, both Ecuador and fellow leftist ally Venezuela seem to be in the middle – exploiting the political rhetoric, but not committing to Snowden himself. Both have made strong statements against the United States, but have largely remained careful in offering Snowden asylum.

CAIRO ( U.S Citizen killed while photographing clashes in Alexandria - shot and stabbed )

CAIRO – A 21-year-old U.S. man was killed Friday while photographing clashes in Alexandria between supporters and opponents of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi.

The man was stabbed in the chest, Egypt’s official Mena news agency said, though security sources told Efe that the American may have been killed by birdshot.

An Egyptian man killed earlier Friday in Alexandria was a Morsi supporter, the sources said.

Anti-government militants burned the Alexandria offices of the president’s Peace and Justice Party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Dozens of people were injured in clashes around the PJP offices, including 11 police.

Andrew Driscoll Pochter Died

 

Medics working at a makeshift hospital set up inside a nearby mosque said they treated 143 people, most of them suffering from birdshot wounds.

The opposing sides pelted each other with stones and traded accusations of snipers posted on rooftops.

Foes of Morsi also set fire to three PJP offices in the Nile delta province of Dakahliya.

Cairo witnessed continuing mass demonstration by both partisans and opponents of the government.

Critics accuse Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood of doing little to address poverty and the declining economy, of failing to advance the goals of the 2011 revolution that forced out strongman Hosni Mubarak and of seeking to monopolize power.

The opposition is gearing up for nationwide marches this weekend aimed at driving Morsi from office. EFE