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Saturday, November 28, 2015

100 Women 2015: Return of a topless rebel

On 8 March 2013, from her grandparents' house in the Tunisian capital, an 18-year-old activist called Amina Sboui uploaded a photograph to Facebook, took a deep breath, and hit "post".
The photo showed Amina reclining on a leather sofa, reading a book and smoking a cigarette. She wore red lipstick and black eyeliner. She was naked from the waist up, and across her torso was a message written in Arabic: My body belongs to me; it is not the source of anyone's honour. 
As she watched the comments stack up beneath the picture - almost a thousand in the first hour - Amina began to panic. She had anticipated the abuse, the misogyny, even the death threats. What she hadn't considered was something that now looked inevitable: her mother was going to find out. She closed the laptop and left the house.
Six days later, Amina's mother found her hiding at the home of a friend in the centre of Tunis. She bundled her daughter into the car and drove south to Kairouan, where she had a sister and where Amina spent the next three weeks locked inside the family home. 
Unable to imagine any rational explanation for the girl's behaviour, Amina's mother concluded that she must have been possessed by an evil spirit. Kairouan is among the oldest and most revered centres of Islam in North Africa, and it was not difficult to find among its clerics a man who claimed expertise in the casting out of demons. 
He came to the house day after day, says Amina, placing his hands on her head, reciting passages from the Koran, and asking if she had vomited green bile. When the exorcist's mobile phone rang as he was about to begin his ceremony, he took it as proof that there was a devil in the room. "When your phone rings," Amina told him, "that's proof that someone called you."
By early April, hoping that Amina had been cured of her madness and that the danger to her life had now passed, the family let her return to Tunis. But if they thought the worst was over, they were quickly proved wrong.
A month later Amina was back in Kairouan - not to visit her aunt, but to protest at a planned meeting of Ansar al-Sharia, a radical Islamist group that emerged during the Tunisian revolution in 2011. On the wall of a cemetery not far from Kairouan's great mosque, Amina scrawled the word Femen - the name of the European feminist collective, now based in Paris, whose topless protests had inspired her own act of defiance. Immediately, she was arrested and charged - first for carrying a pepper spray, later for indecency and for desecrating a cemetery. 
Amina's trial exposed a fault line that has split Tunisian society for decades. The country is among the most progressive places in the Arab world, and there were plenty of Tunisians - feminists, secularists, human rights activists - willing to defend her right to protest even if they didn't approve of her methods.
Other liberal voices, including those of some well-known feminists, condemned Amina, arguing that her actions had set back women's rights by turning what ought to be a social and political struggle into a divisive, unwinnable war over faith and culture.
Louder than either were the Islamists who gathered outside the courtroom in Kairouan, some calling for Amina to be lashed or even stoned to death.
In May, an already volatile situation was exacerbated when three European Femen activists stripped off in protest outside the Ministry of Justice in Tunis. They, too, were arrested and jailed. Maya Jribi, a Tunisian politician and long-time advocate for women's rights, deplored the use of Femen-style tactics in the context of a country like Tunisia. "Please leave us alone" she said. "You risk ruining everything we have fought for." 
The European women were freed within a month and returned to Paris. At the beginning of August, just over two months after she'd been convicted of possessing pepper spray and imprisoned, Amina was also released. Still facing death threats and keen to finish her education, she, too, left for France. Many in Tunisia were glad to see her go.
Now, though, after two years in Paris, Amina is back - and about to launch a new feminist magazine.
In France she completed high school, covered her body in tattoos, and co-authored an autobiography that was published in Paris under the title, My body belongs to me.
In the title and in the book itself, Amina stressed the point that she had been trying to get across in the original photograph - that when the female body is seen as the repository of a family's honour or the source of its shame, it immediately becomes a possession that must be owned and guarded by men. 
The male demand for female modesty, she argued, is implicitly backed by the threat of violence. So-called "honour killings", still endemic across North Africa and the Middle East, are just the most extreme manifestation of this threat.
"They talk about people who die because of alcohol, because of cigarettes, because of drugs," Amina says. "But also because of honour. We have no statistics, but I am sure it is huge." 
For much of her time in Paris, Amina stayed in the family home of a French writer and publisher called Michel Sitbon, and it is with his financial backing that Amina has been able to start work on her new venture.
Amina describes the publication, which will go to press in January 2016, as a "feminine feminist magazine". It will carry features, she says, that would typically be found in a women's magazine - "make-up, fashion, cuisine… but we're also going to talk about books, we're going to talk about abortion, we're going to talk about homosexuality, refugees, secularism… we're trying to be interesting to every woman."
The magazine will be called Farida - a girl's name which means "unique" in Arabic but which also carries, to Amina's ear, an echo of the English word "freedom". It will be printed in Arabic only and aimed at women between 15 and 25 years old. 
Farida draws it inspiration from an earlier publication called Faiza, which was first published in Tunis in 1958 by a pioneering female journalist and editor called Dorra Bouzid. Bouzid, now over 80, is still active in Tunis, and was planning to collaborate with Amina until the two women quarrelled and fell out.
Whatever their disagreements, Amina acknowledges her debt to the older feminist and sees a parallel between the needs of Tunisian women today and the struggles of an earlier generation.
When Bouzid published Faiza, Tunisia was a newly independent country, and its first president, Habib Bourguiba, had just passed a series of laws that gave unprecedented new rights to Tunisian women. Polygamy had been outlawed. Divorce had been legalised. Marriage could no longer take place without a woman's consent. There was an urgent need, Amina argues, for the secular ideas of Tunisia's rulers to be reflected in the popular press and translated into the culture of everyday life.
Faiza - the first women's magazine published in Arabic - was part of that movement. And Farida, Amina hopes, will advance the same progressive, secular values for a generation of young women who have grown up in the increasingly religious and conservative climate of 21st Century Tunisia.
Hostility towards fundamentalist forms of Islam is the thread that joins Amina's topless protests to her work as a writer and editor. She does not regret the incendiary provocation of the topless photos, but she does want to turn her attention to "something that everyone will be able to understand". Farida, she says, "will be more mature than provocative. It's not, like, the 'activist Amina' - it's the 'editor Amina'. It's another personality."
The blaze of controversy that Amina sparked in 2013 has not yet been extinguished. In the streets of Tunis and even in the picturesque village of Sidi Bou Said, where she now lives, Amina's appearance in the street still draws insults, abuse, and stares of outright disbelief. Tunisia may be among the more liberal nations of North Africa, but it remains a traditional and predominantly Islamic country - a place in which Amina's blue hair, facial piercings and elaborate tattoos retain the power to shock. 
The death threats, too, have not entirely subsided. But if Amina is frightened, she gives no sign of it. It's the haters, she says, who are truly scared. "I see people afraid of women," she says. "They are trying to do anything [so] that we don't open our mouths, because they feel the danger of women."


A Ends Phone Data Collection Program

The federal government’s collection of bulk data from the telephone calls of virtually every American will stop at midnight Saturday, ending a raging controversy that began with disclosures about the secret program by Edward Snowden.
Beginning Sunday, if the government wants to check on a specific phone number in a potential terrorism case, a request must be made to the relevant telephone company for a check of its own data. The government will no longer retain the information.

President Obama said in January that the bulk data collection would end, and Congress in June formally banned it but allowed for a six-month transition period that ends Saturday.

Under the program, the government collected information about calls made, including their duration and the phone numbers involved. But the content of the calls was not monitored, recorded, or collected. 
A statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence defended the revised program. 
"There is still a need to be able to identify communications between terrorists abroad and individuals with whom they are in contact in the United States," the statement said. 

Under the revision, the government will present a specific phone number or cell phone identifier to the phone companies to seek the relevant call data. Except in emergencies, the records can be obtained only with an individual order from a special federal intelligence court.
For now, the National Security Agency, which ran the massive government data collection program, will retain access to the data it collected before the program was ended. 
The NSA says it will check that database only to test the new program and to conform to court orders in civil cases challenging the program's constitutionality. 


Mali attack: Rocket kills three at UN base at Kidal

Two UN peacekeepers from Guinea and a civilian contractor were killed in the attack in Kidal, officials said.
Eight days ago, gunmen attacked a hotel in the capital, Bamako, taking scores hostage. Nineteen people were killed.
The peacekeeping mission in Mali was approved in 2014 after France led a military campaign to drive out Islamist militants from the north.
The Minusma force comprises some 10,000 soldiers from dozens of different contributor countries - the majority from Mali's west African neighbours.
The UN mission - criticised by some at the time of its approval because there is no peace deal to support - has suffered more casualties than any other in recent years, with 56 troops killed.
Map
Islamist militants are suspected of being behind Saturday's attack, in which 14 people were injured, several seriously, reports suggest.
"Our camp in Kidal was attacked early this morning by terrorists using rockets," said an official from the Minusma force.

Militancy in Mali
  • October 2011: Ethnic Tuaregs launch rebellion after returning with arms from Libya
  • March 2012: Army coup over government's handling of rebellion, a month later Tuareg and al-Qaeda-linked fighters seize control of north
  • June 2012: Islamist groups capture Timbuktu, Kidal and Gao from Tuaregs, start to destroy Muslim shrines and manuscripts and impose Sharia
  • January 2013: Islamist fighters capture a central town, raising fears they could reach Bamako. Mali requests French help
  • July 2013: UN force, now totalling about 12,000, takes over responsibility for securing the north after Islamists routed from towns
  • July 2014: France launches an operation in the Sahel to stem jihadist groups
  • Attacks continue in northern desert area, blamed on Tuareg and Islamist groups
  • 2015: Terror attacks in the capital, Bamako, and central Mali.

3 Dead in Shooting at Colorado Planned Parenthood

(COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.) — A gunman burst into a Planned Parenthood clinic and opened fire, launching several gunbattles and an hourslong standoff with police as patients and staff took cover under furniture and inside locked rooms.
By the time the shooter surrendered, three people were killed — including a police officer — and nine others were wounded, authorities said.
For hours, police had no communication with the shooter other than intermittent gunfire from inside the Colorado Springs clinic. As the standoff progressed, officers inside the building herded people into one area and evacuated others.
Officers eventually moved in, shouted at the gunman and persuaded him to surrender, police said. About five hours after the attack started, authorities led away a man wearing a white T-shirt.
A law enforcement official identified the gunman as Robert Lewis Dear of North Carolina. The official, who had direct knowledge of the case, was not authorized to speak to the media about the ongoing investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity. Dear is 57 years old, according to jail booking records.
No other details about the gunman were immediately available, including whether he had any connection to Planned Parenthood.
“We don’t have any information on this individual’s mentality, or his ideas or ideology,” Colorado Springs police Lt. Catherine Buckley told reporters.
Planned Parenthood said all of its staff at the clinic was safe. The organization said it did not know the circumstances or motives behind the attack or whether the organization was the target.
The University of Colorado in Colorado Springs police department identified the officer killed as 44-year-old Garrett Swasey, a six-year veteran of the force. He was married and had a son and daughter, according to the website of his church, Hope Chapel in Colorado Springs.
There were no immediate details about the two civilians killed in the attack. Five officers and four others were hospitalized in good condition, police said.
“Certainly it could have been much, much worse if it were not for the heroism of our police officers to corner the person in the building,” Colorado Springs Fire Chief Chris Riley said.
Witnesses described a chaotic scene when the shooting first started just before noon.
Ozy Licano was in the two-story building’s parking lot when he saw someone crawling toward the clinic’s door. He tried to escape in his car when the gunman looked at him.
“He came out, and we looked each other in the eye, and he started aiming, and then he started shooting,” Licano said. “I saw two holes go right through my windshield as I was trying to quickly back up and he just kept shooting and I started bleeding.”
Licano drove away and took refuge at a nearby grocery store.
“He was aiming for my head,” he said of the gunman. “It’s just weird to stare in the face of someone like that. And he didn’t win.”
Inside, terrified patients and staff hid wherever they could find cover. Jennifer Motolinia ducked under a table and called her brother, Joan, to leave him final instructions for the care of her three children in case the gunman found her.
Joan Motolinia said he could hear gunshots in the background as his sister spoke. “She was telling me to take care of her babies because she could get killed,” he said.
For others, the first sign that something was wrong was when police officers appeared and ushered people to the building’s second floor. Planned Parenthood employee Cynthia Garcia told her mother, Tina Garcia, that the officers wouldn’t say why they were gathering everybody together — then she heard the gunshots.
Her daughter and the others were holed up there for hours while the standoff continued, Tina Garcia said.
Some people managed to escape the building and flee to a nearby bank. An armored vehicle was seen taking evacuees away from the clinic to ambulances waiting nearby.
With the immediate threat over, authorities swept the building and turned their attention to inspecting unspecified items the gunman left outside the building and carried inside in bags. They were concerned that he had planted improvised explosive devices meant to cause even more destruction. As of late Friday, police did not say what was found.

Black Lives protesters take on 'blue code of silence'

But with a chill wind whipping off Lake Michigan, driving the rain into the faces of demonstrators, it was still an impressive turnout.
In just three days, church groups, trade unions and community organisations turned hundreds and hundreds on to the streets.
It was the biggest protest so far in Chicago, marking the death of Laquan McDonald.
Thirteen months ago the black 17-year-old was shot dead by police.

High on drugs and carrying a knife, several patrols were called to deal with the incident on the city's South Side.
Jason Van Dyke was one of the police officers to respond. Within eight seconds of arriving on the scene, he emptied his weapon in the young man from very close range. Sixteen shots.
Reports suggest one of his colleagues told him to stop before he reloaded.
The incident was captured on police dash cam. Repeated requests by the media in Chicago to have the video released were rejected, refused and fought in court.
Until Tuesday. Fourteen months after the fatal shooting. Then it was released. Silent and disturbing. And on the same day the local prosecutor decided Van Dyke should be charged with murder.
This protest targeted "Black Friday". The busiest shopping day of the year in the US, the day after the traditional Thanksgiving holiday.
And they targeted Chicago's 'Magnificent Mile,' Michigan Avenue. The city's busiest shopping area, home to high end designer stores.
At the front, veteran civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. He told me that the point of the protest was to make people sit up. They wanted the resignation of the city's police chief. But they also wanted a change in the policing of the city.
"It's not just the guy who shot him. The nine who watched him didn't try to stop him," he said.
"And also they did not report what had happened – that's the culture. That's the blue code of silence. It makes them less credible. We need a new police infrastructure and culture."
Police wanted to restrict the protestors to one side of the street. But those who'd gathered spread across the wide boulevard, bringing traffic to a standstill.
As they reached the city's famous Water Tower, there seemed to be confusion.
The intention was to close down the stores, to stop people shopping. There were some scuffles, but not more than pushing and shoving. And several of the crowd drifted away, the wet and cold too much. 
But from one store it spread.
Demonstrators blocked the doors, stopping anyone getting in. And from there it moved further and further back up the avenue. Some shoppers had no ideas what was happening and couldn't quite understand why they were being blocked.
They argued and pleaded, but the marchers stood firm. Others applauded them, saying that they had a right to express their anger and frustration.
In front of Top Shop there were about a dozen. Some old, some young. Some black. Some Asian. Some white. Some Hispanic. All adding their voices to the call for change.

One of the organisers told me: "We're going to stop the money, the revenue which hurts the city and the state to show them this is going to hurt them in the long run."

After several hours, and at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, the protesters moved on. Their point made. But with a promise to return.
A promise that this show of political and economic strength over the death of a black man at the hands of the police in the US will be repeated.
Until there is a change in the culture of policing in Chicago. And across America.

Erdogan expresses 'sadness' over Russian jet shot down

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan voiced "sadness" on Saturday over the downing of a Russian fighter jet by Turkish forces, saying he wished it had not happened.
Addressing supporters, Erdogan again defended Turkey's action and criticised Russia for its moves in Syria before expressing his regrets.
"We wish it hadn't happened, but it happened. I hope something like this doesn't happen again," Erdogan said. 
The Turkish president said both sides should approach the issue in a more positive way.
Erdogan renewed a call for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the UN's climate change conference in Paris that starts on Monday.
Travel warning
Earlier on Saturday, Turkey issued a travel warning urging its nationals to delay non-urgent trips to Russia.
Turkey's Foreign Ministry said it issued the warning because Turkish travellers were facing "problems" in Russia. It said Turks should delay travel plans until "the situation becomes clear".
Turkey's downing of the Russian military jet on Tuesday - the first time in half a century that a NATO member shot down a Russian plane - has drawn a harsh response from Moscow, which Erdogan has dismissed as emotional and indecorous.
Russia has since restricted tourist travel, left Turkish trucks stranded at the border, confiscated large quantities of Turkish food imports, and started preparing a raft of broader economic sanctions.
Russia was set to announce further sanctions against Turkey later on Saturday, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov.
Peskov, who is a close confidant of Putin, accused Turkey of having manipulated the evidence of Tuesday's incident.
The Russian Su-24 bomber had not crossed Turkish airspace as Ankara claimed, Peskov said, adding the map presented by Turkey to show that it did was manipulated.
'Playing with fire'
Erdogan told supporters during a speech in Bayburt in northeast Turkey on Friday that Russia "is playing with fire to go as far as mistreating our citizens who have gone to Russia".
"We really attach a lot of importance to our relations with Russia... We don't want these relations to suffer harm in any way."
Putin has so far refused to talk to Erdogan because Ankara has not yet apologised for the downing of the jet, a Putin aide said.
Erdogan has said Turkey deserves the apology because its airspace was violated.
The nearly five-year-old Syrian civil war has been complicated by Russian air strikes in defence of President Bashar al-Assad.
Turkey and regional powers have accused Russia of targeting moderate armed groups fighting Assad.
The frayed relations could also impact two major planned projects - a TurkStream gas pipeline and the Akkuyu nuclear power plant - between the two countries.
Turkey and Russia have also sparred over the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group, with each side accusing the other of being soft on "terrorism".

Russia suspends visa-free travel with Turkey

MOSCOW – Russia announced Friday that it will suspend visa-free travel with Turkey amid the escalating spat over the downing of a Russian warplane by a Turkish fighter jet at the Syrian border.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced that Moscow will halt the existing visa-free regime starting Jan. 1, saying that Turkey has become a conduit for terrorists and has been reluctant to share information with Moscow about Russian citizens accused of involvement in terrorist activities.
Turkey’s downing of the Russian military jet Tuesday, the first time in half a century that a NATO member shot 
down a Russian plane, has drawn a harsh response from Moscow. Russia has since restricted tourist travel, left Turkish trucks stranded at the border, confiscated large quantities of Turkish food imports and started preparing a raft of broader economic sanctions.
President Vladimir Putin has also ordered the deployment of the long-range S-400 air defence missile systems to a Russian air base in Syria just 50 kilometres (30 miles) south of the border with Turkey to help protect Russian warplanes, and the Russian military warned it would shoot down any aerial target that would pose a potential threat to its planes. The military also moved the missile cruiser Moskva closer to the shore to help cover Russian bombers om combat missions.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan refused to apologize for the plane’s downing, which Ankara said came after it flew for 17 seconds into Turkish airspace. At the same timed, Erdogan said he has tried in vain to speak by phone to Putin to discuss the situation and expressed hope they could meet at the sidelines of a climate summit in Paris next Monday.
Putin’s foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov said Friday that the Kremlin had received Erdogan’s request for a meeting, but wouldn’t say whether such a meeting is possible.
Asked why Putin hasn’t picked up the phone to respond to Erdogan’s two phone calls, he said that “we have seen that the Turkish side hasn’t been ready to offer an elementary apology over the plane incident.”
The tug-of-war between the two countries has been driven by a clash of their leaders’ personal ambitions.
Putin and Erdogan have been frequently compared to each other. Both are populist leaders who frequently crack down on critics and often revert to anti-Western rhetoric. They had enjoyed close relations until recently, despite differences over Syria, and regularly exchanged visits. In September, Erdogan travelled to Moscow where he and Putin attended the opening of a new mosque, and they also met separately on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit hosted by Turkey.
The summit in Antalya marked their deepening rift over Syria, when Putin showed fellow G-20 leaders aerial pictures of what he said were convoys of oil trucks carrying crude from fields controlled by the Islamic State group into Turkey.
Putin’s move came as Russia, the United State and France all have focused their air strikes on the IS oil infrastructure, seeking to undermine the group’s financial base following the terror attacks in Paris and the downing of a Russian passenger plane in Egypt.
Erdogan angrily dismissed the Russian accusations, but Putin retorted Thursday that it was hard to believe that the Turkish leadership didn’t know about the illegal oil trade.
“We have no doubt whatsoever that this oil goes to Turkey, we are seeing it from the air,” Putin said. “If Turkey’s political leadership doesn’t know anything about it, they should know now.”
Lavrov said Friday that Russia strongly backs France’s proposal to shut down the Turkish-Syrian border as a way to fight Islamic State fighters in Syria.