Eric Holder Video ( haha )

Iran ( Demonstrators rally to raise awareness for imprisoned student Omid Kokabee)

A group of demonstrators gathered Wednesday on the RLM bridge to raise awareness for Omid Kokabee, a former UT physics graduate student who has been imprisoned in Iran for almost four years.

The group gathered in the shade of the building Kokabee would have returned to for class after visiting his family in Iran. Physics professor Herbert Berk spoke at the demonstration about the circumstances of Kokabee’s incarceration.

“It’s hard to understand what it was, and there was no trial to really shed any light because, at the trial, the judge looked at him and declared him guilty and put him in jail for 10 years,” Berk said.

Berk serves as chairman for the Committee on International Freedom of Scientists, an organization that fights for imprisoned scientists. He said the reasons for Kokabee’s imprisonment are unusual.

“He was declared innocent of some of the [original] charges, but then they convicted him of conspiring with the United States government and getting illegal income, which is, as far as we can tell, the income from being a TA here,” Berk said.

Berk said Kokabee has lost weight and has come down with different medical afflictions while in the Iranian prison system.

U.S. Court Orders Closure of 13 Texas Abortion Clinics

AUSTIN, Texas – Thirteen abortion clinics in Texas have closed their doors after a legal battle with the state authorities who toughened sanitary standards a year ago for the centers, local press reported.

The clinics shut down on Thursday following the decision by a federal appellate court in New Orleans, which has jurisdiction in Texas, which cleared the way for the new abortion law to go into effect.

The law was annulled in late August by another court but Texas officials appealed to the federal chamber.

With the closings of the 13 clinics, the second most populous state in the country, with 76 million people, will have eight legal abortion centers in the four main cities, Austin, Houston, San Antonio and Dallas.

The original law was to go into effect on Sept. 1 but federal Judge Lee Yeakel annulled it, ruling that it was unconstitutional for women of child-bearing age to be more than 240 kilometers (150 miles) from an abortion clinic.

But Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, a Republican running for governor, appealed the ruling.

Federal Forces Join Search for Missing Students in Southern Mexico

MEXICO CITY – Mexican Government Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio said Thursday that federal security forces are assisting authorities in the southern state of Guerrero in their search for dozens of teacher trainees who have been missing since late last week, while also calling on the state governor to speed up the investigation.

Some of the four dozen students who have been missing since last Friday were taken away by municipal police, according to witnesses, while it has been reported that others may have been kidnapped by members of a criminal gang.

“Time is of the essence. There are lots of things to clear up and local authorities need to do their part, expedite their processes so we know what happened there and punish those responsible,” Osorio told Radio Formula in reference to the attacks on students in the city of Iguala, where six people died and 25 others were wounded.

He expressed his “enormous concern” and said Mexican army soldiers and Federal Police officers are “already visiting some places” in an effort to locate the missing students, estimated to number between 38 and 43 according to local authorities.

The young people who came under attack last Friday night after seizing some private buses “were merely part of a student movement,” the government secretary said.

Referring to the attackers, municipal police were involved but “organized crime elements also presumably participated” in two instances, he said, reiterating the need for a thorough probe to clarify the murky series of events that included an attack on a bus carrying members of a third-division soccer team.

It remains to be determined who instructed the police to fire on the students, Osorio said, calling on Gov. Angel Aguirre to order an accelerated investigation to “get at the exact truth.”

The Guerrero state Human Rights Commission said Tuesday that 13 of the students reported missing in the wave of violence had turned up, reducing the list of missing students to 43.

“They have been found in different parts of the state, some in their homes, others went to the Normal (School in Ayotzinapa), where their classmates are,” commission chairman Ramon Navarrete told Efe.

Mexico’s normal schools train future primary-school instructors.

“When they have clashes, in an effort to protect themselves and evade the police, they disperse” to make it more difficult for the security forces to find them, Navarrete said.

On Monday, classmates of the missing students pelted the state capitol with rocks and demanded Aguirre’s resignation.

Some 3,000 students, teachers and family members of the missing young people marched peacefully to the legislative building in Chilpancingo, Guerrero’s capital.

The protesters demanded justice for the six people killed in last weekend’s violence in Iguala, three of whom were education students.

Mexican Police Nab Drug Kingpin Hector Beltran Leyva

In a joint operation, police and soldiers nabbed Beltran Leyva on Wednesday at a seafood restaurant in the central town of San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato state, Criminal Investigations Agency director Tomas Zeron said

MEXICO CITY – Mexican police and soldiers have arrested suspected drug kingpin Hector Beltran Leyva, who is accused of running a drug network that for years smuggled vast amounts of cocaine from South America to the United States and Europe, authorities said.

In a joint operation, police and soldiers nabbed Beltran Leyva on Wednesday at a seafood restaurant in the central town of San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato state, Criminal Investigations Agency director Tomas Zeron said.

Not a single shot was fired.

Unlike other Mexican drug lords, Beltran adopted a low-key lifestyle and avoided ostentatious displays of wealth such as fancy cars, pretending to be a normal businessman involved in real estate and art dealing.

But Zeron said that in fact the suspect headed up the so-called Beltran Leyva cartel, which he ran along with his brothers after the group split off from the notorious Sinaloa cartel in 2009.

Hector took over the organization after his brother and the cartel’s then-chief, Arturo, died in a shootout with Mexican marines in late 2009.

Zeron said Beltran was one of Mexico’s most-wanted drug barons and that the Mexican and U.S. governments had been offering rewards of $2.3 million and $5 million, respectively, for information leading to his capture.

Along with the narcotics charges, Beltran Leyva’s gang is accused of numerous counts of murder, kidnapping and torture carried out in central Mexico, and he is also wanted in the United States on arms and ammunition-smuggling charges.

Georgian man stabs sister for not wearing hijab

TBILISI, DFWatch–A man from Pankisi Gorge stabbed his sister in the chest with a knife for refusing to wear a hijab.

The brother, 35, inflicted 7 wounds on his 33 year old sister, a former police officer.

Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge is located in the northeast of the country. The majority here are Kists, a subgroup of Chechens adhering to the Sunni branch of Islam.

The wounded woman underwent emergency surgery at the local hospital. His brother was arrested and is under investigation for attempted murder.

Seyphullah al-Shishani as he was hit by a shell. (Warning: disturbing images.)

The stabbed woman worked for several years as a police officer at Duisi police station, but left in February to start working at the local school administration. According to some locals, the woman left the police under pressure from her brother.

Neither family members nor relatives are eager to comment on the issue openly in this small but extremely closed community. According to some account the perepetrator has mental problems.

Pankisi Gorge, the home of approximately 7,000 Kists, in the last two decades witnessed the spread of radical Islam – Wahhabism, or Salafism especially among the youth, which is gradually replacing traditional Islam.

This leads to conflict between old and new generations, since the former follow adat; a traditional, moderate Islam and code of conduct widespread among many ethnic groups in Caucasus.

This conflict has come to the surface in Duisi, the administrative center of the Pankisi valley, where moderate and radical Muslims attend different mosques.

During a visit to the valley in December, 2013, DFWatch was told by elderly people that 80-90 percent of the youth are following Wahhabism, which was their biggest worry.

In Duisi, there was also a prevalence of bearded young men, dressed in specific orthodox style. Although many people there have a more moderate lifestyle, the rise of radicalism is quite visible and the prominence of Pankisi men among top ranks of Middle Eastern terrorists is proof of this.

Some of the most infamous Islamist leaders among groups active in the Middle East came from Pankisi Gorge. One of them, Tarkhan Batirashvili, aka Abu Umar al-Shishani, is head of the military wing of the Islamic State in Syria, though also actively participating in hostilities in Iraq; another one is Murad (Muslim) Margoshvili, aka Muslim al-Shishani, commander of the Junud al-Sham group, affiliated with the al-Nursa front, an official branch of al-Qaeda in Syria, and designated as terrorists by the United States.

There are no exact figures on how many Kists from Pankisi are fighting in the Middle East. Accounts range from as little as ‘several dozens’ to ‘hundreds’.

According to Kakheti Information Center (ick.ge), six men from Pankisi have died in the Syria war so far. One of them is another prominent field commander, Ruslan Machalikashvili, a.k.a. Seyphullah al-Shishani who was hit by a shell last February (see video).

Member delivering food to the quarantined Texas family

A photo posted to Twitter by New York Post web editorial assistant Connor Ryan shows an unprotected family member delivering food to the quarantined Texas family of the Liberian man hospitalized with Ebola.