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Saturday, November 28, 2015

book is Making it Easier to Get Over Your Ex

Facebook is making it easier to stay resolved in your breakup.
The company announced Thursday that is testing features that might make it easier to break up online.
Facebook will now provide a variety of options when a person changes their relationship status in a way that indicates they are no longer attached. For instance, users will have the option to see less of their ex’s name and profile, and their posts won’t show up in that person’s news feed.
The ex will also not be a suggested person to tag in photos, and overall their pictures and status updates will be limited.
Facebook says its starting to test these features in the United States on mobile and will expand them based on user feedback.
“This work is part of our ongoing effort to develop resources for people who may be going through difficult moments in their lives. We hope these tools will help people end relationships on Facebook with greater ease, comfort and sense of control,” the company said in a statement.

Japan's newest and largest mosque opens


Nagoya, Japan - The largest mosque in Japan opened its doors on November 20 near the central Japanese city of Nagoya, heralding a new chapter in the East Asian nation's relationship with Islam.
Islam has never made more than a marginal impact on Japan, although the history of Japanese relations with Muslims stretches back further than most people imagine, the Japanese included.
The first mosque in Japan, the Kobe Muslim Mosque, opened in October 1935 and remains a centre for prayer more than 80 years later. Several dozen other mosques have since opened around the country, serving as community centres for a Muslim population numbering in the tens of thousands.
Several dozen mosques in Japan serve the tens of thousands Japanese Muslims. Pictured Tokyo Mosque [Photo by Koichi Kamoshida/Newsmakers]
The first Ahmadi Muslim missionary arrived in Japan in the same year - 1935 - but it is only now that this minority community has had the resources to build its own centre, the Bait ul-Ahad Mosque. They have done so on a grand scale, building the Japan's biggest mosque with a capacity in its main chamber for 500 people to be at prayer.
The opening ceremonies were attended by a range of guests, including a Japanese politician and local city officials, as well as leaders of the Ahmadi Muslim community from around the world. At the head of the guest list was Caliph Mirza Masroor Ahmad, the supreme leader of the 20 million-strong global Ahmadi community.
"This is a milestone of our progress," Caliph Ahmad told Al Jazeera. "If this mosque is preaching the message of love, peace, and harmony, naturally people will be attracted to it."
The main distinction between the minority Ahmadi Muslim community and the majority of Muslims is the former's belief that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908) was the foretold messiah and mahdi who brought his followers back to the spirit of the original Muslim community at the time of the Prophet Muhammad.
Many in the majority Muslim community dispute Ahmadi views on the caliphate and on continuing revelation in the contemporary age and do not regard their teachings to be part of orthodox Islam.
According to Muhammad Ismatullah, the leader of the Tokyo-based community, Ahmadis in Japan number fewer than 300 people, and are mostly Pakistanis, with perhaps 10 percent who are ethnic Japanese.
The largest portion of the Ahmadi community lives in the vicinity of the industrial city of Nagoya. The man responsible for this fact, Ataul Mujeeb Rashed, was in attendance at the opening of the Bait ul-Ahad Mosque.
Today, Rashed is, among other things, the imam of the Fazl Mosque in south London, but from 1975 to 1983 he was an Ahmadi missionary to Japan.
In the late 1970s, he could often be found handing out religious fliers at the Hachiko exit of Tokyo's Shibuya Station.

The Ahmadi caliph at that time had decided that it would be a more effective strategy to spread Islam by starting not in the capital cities of the countries where missionary activities were ongoing but elsewhere.
In the case of Japan, it was Rashed who recommended Nagoya as the base from which to begin.
"I proposed Nagoya firstly because it was the fourth-largest city in Japan … and secondly [because] it is, geographically speaking, right in the middle of Japan," Rashed explains.

The caliph accepted Rashed's proposal and thereafter Nagoya became the main stage for Ahmadi activities in Japan.
In the final years of his mission, Rashed even decorated a white Toyota car with religious slogans written in Arabic, English, and Japanese, and drove through rural towns preaching the faith over a loudspeaker system that he had fixed to the car roof.
While these efforts did not result in mass conversions, the 'Toyota in the Service of Islam' was the focus of a great deal of curiosity wherever it passed.
The new Bait ul-Ahad Mosque promises to serve as the key base for the Ahmadi community of Japan, but its capacity - 500 worshippers - is far greater than the number of Ahmadis in the country.
"Certainly a building half this size would be sufficient for the Ahmadis residing in Japan," said Masayuki Akutsu, a researcher at The University of Tokyo. "However, this mosque has been created not solely for their religious activities; rather, it is also for their social interactions with the broader Japanese society."
It remains doubtful that Islam - whether in the Ahmadi form or otherwise - will make significant inroads in Japan.
But in offering a direct, experiential counterpoint to the negative, fear-inducing images of Islam often conveyed, such initiatives may help in building bridges and breaking down divisions. 

Putin Calls For Sanctions Against Turkey

The Russian jet that was brought down in Syria. Inset: Vladimir Putin.
The decree published on the Kremlin's website includes a ban on some unspecified goods.
It also calls for ending chartered flights from Russia to Turkey and for Russian tourism companies to stop selling vacation packages in Turkey.
"The circumstances are unprecedented," Dmitry Peskov, Mr Putin's spokesman, said hours before the decree was published.
"The gauntlet thrown down to Russia is unprecedented. So naturally the reaction is in line with this threat," he added. 
A senior Turkish official told Reuters the sanctions would only worsen the standoff between Moscow and Ankara.
The sanctions come after Turkey warned Mr Putin not to "play with fire" as their war of words continues over the downing of the jet.
President Recep Erdogan says he does not want to harm relations with Russia and hopes to meet Mr Putin "face to face" in Paris next week.
But the Russian President is refusing to contact Mr Erdogan directly because Ankara does not want to apologise, a Putin aide said.
Relations between the former Cold War antagonists have hit a low after Turkey shot down the jet near the Syrian border earlier this week.
Russia Deploys S-400 Missile System In Syria
Mr Erdogan warned Mr Putin about "playing with fire" in a speech in northeast Turkey, broadcast live on television.
He responded after Mr Putin dismissed as "rubbish" Turkey's claim that it would not have shot down the jet if it had known it was Russian.
Mr Putin also said that America - an ally of Turkey on Syria - had known the flight path of the downed Russian jet.
"The American side, which leads the coalition that Turkey belongs to, knew about the location and time of our planes' flights, and we were hit exactly there and at that time," Mr Putin said.
He added that Russian planes were easily identifiable and Turkey was making excuses for its actions.
"They [our planes] have identification signs and these are well visible," Mr Putin said

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.