Kids' Marriages In Egypt married trigger outrage — once again

CAIRO – While celebrating his eldest son's lavish wedding, at which a number of famous singers and belly dancers performed, Nasser Hassan decided to "double the joy," he later recalled.

He announced that his son Omar would marry his cousin Gharam.

At the wedding, held in a province about 75 miles north of Cairo, the guests didn’t find it strange. Some would later tell Egypt’s Al Watan newspaper that there was “nothing inappropriate,” adding that it was only “an engagement, not a marriage".

Egyptian laws prohibit official registration for marriages for anyone under the age of 18. But the practice remains prevalent. According to UNICEF, 17 percent of Egyptian girls are married before the age of 18, the vast majority of the unions taking place in rural areas.

A Amazing Encounter Between A Deer And A Hunter

Hunter Jordan Maxon from New Richmond, Wisconsin, had a very odd encounter with a very friendly deer. 

After setting up a deer stand in a clearing, Maxon looked around to see if any wildlife had wandered into the area before he started hunting. That's when he noticed a buck about 70 yards away.

A 60-day Sentence For A 12-year Old Daughter's Rapist Father

As the judge in the Stanford rape case learned, along with the judge in the “affluenza” drunken driving case, the whole world is watching them. A crowd, an angry crowd, can form in a matter of days of people outraged by what they consider a lenient sentence for a heinous crime.

In the case of Judge John McKeon, as of early morning Wednesday, almost 20,000 people had signed a Change.org petition calling for his impeachment for the 60-day sentence he gave a Glasgow, Mont., man who pleaded guilty to repeatedly raping his prepubescent daughter.

Discrimination 30,000 Feet Above

My experience of discrimination with Delta Airline Flight 2215 last week when I was not allowed to assist a passenger needing medical attention.

By: Dr. Ashley Denmark, D.O.

Dr Ashley Denmark

It was supposed to be a relaxed flight. I’m a mother of two young children with a husband busy in his 3^rd year of law school. By the way, did I mention I’m a physician completing my 2^nd year of family medicine residency? Extremely busy right? So you can imagine as a busy mom and professional like so many, I was in DIRE need of a vacation. So when my college friend decided to have a destination wedding in Hawaii last week, I seized the opportunity to book me and my hubby two airline tickets with Delta to paradise.

Libyans, Missing Kadhafi?

Five years after an uprising killed Libya's Moamer Kadhafi, residents in the chaos-wracked country's capital joke they have grown to miss the longtime dictator as the frustrations of daily life mount (AFP Photo/Filippo Monteforte)

Tripoli (AFP) - Five years after an uprising killed Libya's Moamer Kadhafi, residents in the chaos-wracked country's capital joke they have grown to miss the longtime dictator as the frustrations of daily life mount.

Those living in the capital say they are exhausted by power cuts, price hikes and a lack of cash flow as rival authorities and militias battle for control of the fragmented oil-rich country.

"I hate to say it but our life was better under the previous regime," says Fayza al-Naas, a 42-year-old pharmacist, referring to Kadhafi's more than four decades of rule.

Mugabe Transition: Need for 'Soft Landing'

FILE - Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe arrives for the opening of Parliament in Harare, Zimbabwe, Oct. 6, 2016.

Zimbabwe is in flux. There are regular protests, especially in the capital, over currency and food shortages, unemployment, and alleged government corruption and mismanagement.

Observers say an effective political solution may not be soon in coming.

President Robert Mugabe, 92, and his ruling ZANU-PF party have been in power for 36 years. But the party is breaking into factions, and at least one former member, onetime Vice President Joyce Mujuru, has formed her own party, Zimbabwe People First. The longtime opposition Movement for Democratic Change has new competitors, including more than a dozen new parties and youth-driven protest movements inspired by social media. All are preparing for national elections in 2018.

Trust, Change, and Hope

 Essay by Julia M. Stasch, President, MacArthur Foundation  October 2016

“People and places around the world, as well as the earth itself, face formidable, complex, and connected problems.”

I wrote that a year ago. Events since then have underscored just how challenging those problems are, among them the pervasive loss of trust in major institutions of government and society.

Philanthropy is not immune from that trend. Most large foundations are considered “elite institutions.” Yet to be effective, we must facilitate, and operate in, an environment of trust and goodwill. 

In this essay, I address the task of building trust in a time of flux and challenge. Philanthropy, I argue, must learn from the ways that technology and new modes of communicating are reordering our world. We need to examine critically our history, structures, and practices, and where necessary, take new directions. We must listen more, be more flexible and inclusive, and allow those who experience directly the problems we seek to address even more room to participate fully and lead.

We cannot take trust for granted; it must be earned in all we do, every day.

IT HAPPENED TO ME: At 14, My Parents Paired Me With A 26-Year-Old Man

Laying brick to build a boys dormitory at a Christian camp when I was in my early teens. My parents were just getting to know James at this time

Even though I wanted nothing to do with him, my parents demanded he still be a part of our lives.

In tattered jeans and a Bible study T-shirt, I arrived home to a beautiful three-story house nestled in a gated community of the no-man’s-land of Pasco County, Florida. I had just spent two months in Bethlehem, where I sweated out my summer days shoveling gravel to pave a parking lot for a Bible college. I was 14 years old, cute, chubby, and still figuring out how eyeliner was meant to be applied.

You May Need "Months With A Colostomy Bag"

Student teacher needed emergency surgery after getting seven inch SEX TOY lodged up her bum 
Mum-of-one tried to use a fork handle and BBQ prongs to remove it but to no avail

A STUDENT teacher who got a SEVEN INCH s*x toy lodged up her BUM was forced to have it surgically removed after using BBQ prongs failed.

IT HAPPENED TO ME: A Mother's Hard Chioce To Live For A Little Foursome Family

"I am pretty sure you have an ectopic pregnancy,” the doctor said to me after the empty ultrasound.

“I need your expert opinion on something,” I said a bit hysterically to my mother over FaceTime.

“Uh... OK,” she replied, unsure how to react to my desperate mood. She had just picked up the phone on the second ring and I hadn’t even bother to say hello.

“Does this look like two pink lines to you?”

“Sure does,” she laughed.

Turkey Bans Orthodox Christian Liturgy, As It Builds 9,000 Mosques,

A total of 8,985 mosques were built between 2005 and 2015 by the Turkish government over the last decade in Turkey, according to statistics released by Turkey’s Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanet).

The Central Anatolian province of Konya contained the highest number of mosques, Dogan News Agency reported on Sept. 16. Ankara, the southern province of Antalya, the Black Sea provinces of Ordu and Trabzon, and the southeastern province of Diyarbakır were among the other provinces with over 2,000 mosques.

9-month-old Dead After Horrific Sexual Assault

 

A nine-month-old West Virginia girl died after sustaining horrific injuries during a sexual assault at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend, authorities confirmed Wednesday.

Benjamin Taylor, 32, was charged with murder on Thursday morning, according to Jackson County Sheriff Tony Boggs. Taylor was initially charged with first-degree sexual assault and was being held on $2 million bail.

The child’s mother found the nine-month-old covered in blood in the basement of the apartment complex where the couple lived on Monday morning.

Parents Found Dead

Two McKeesport, Pennsylvania, residents were found dead in their home Monday evening after their 7-year-old daughter told a school employee that she was unable to wake them that morning, according to the Allegheny County Police Department.

The girl told a school bus monitor that she did not want to go home because her parents "had not moved" for more than two days and had been "changing colors," according to Lt. Andrew Schurman of the Allegheny County Police Department.

Weird Orange Crocodiles Found Gorging On Bats In Gabon’s Caves

Caves are scary places – especially ones filled with crocodiles. “I was crawling through the cave and suddenly there were two red eyes,” says explorer Olivier Testa. “It was frightening!”

In 2010, he was part of an expedition into Gabon’s Abanda cave system following a tip-off about a population of dwarf crocodiles living there.

While crocs sometimes retreat underground during droughts, this is the first population documented taking up long-term residence in caves.

$22 Million Cash"Saved" In Buckets.

The Miami Lakes man who had $22.6 million cash stuffed in buckets inside a secret room says the money is all legit — earned from sales of equipment to legal marijuana growers in other states.

Lawyers for Luis Hernandez-Gonzalez offered their defense in court as a Miami-Dade judge on Tuesday lowered his bond to $2 million. He remains jailed.

“The prosecution of our client amounts to what we think is a war on marijuana and a war on legitimately earned cash,” defense lawyer Philip Reizenstein said after Tuesday’s hearing.

Lessons From 30 Years Of Counseling Priests Who Fall In Love.

For Catholic priests, love plays a major professional role. They talk endlessly about the love of God, love for God, God's love of man, love of neighbor, even love of self, albeit this last one at times disparagingly. The one that lights them up the most, however, is their love of the priesthood, something every priest I know feels deeply.

But the actual mechanics of love between two humans - the many powerful and often conflicted feeling that arise - create problems that are very challenging and deeply personal.

5 Ways To Test Out That Tiny Home

While the tiny home craze is not going away anytime soon, jumping on the wagon too fast could prove wobbly.

One of the best ways to experiment with the tiny life (typically 500 square feet or less) is to try before you buy.

It looks so perfect, doesn’t it? Photo: Courtesy of Dan Powell

If you can connect with an existing tiny home community, you might be able to check out different setups and styles while interviewing real people about how they get by.

Bear Trapped By Salmons.

A run of pink salmon in a British Columbia river was so thick a young grizzly bear had a difficult and frustrating time trying to catch one as hundreds of fish surrounded it.

How it finally succeeded is a sight that is fairly new to the folks of Knight Inlet Lodge.

Knight Inlet Lodge, the first grizzly bear viewing lodge on the coast of B.C., is a floating lodge in the wilderness of Glendale Cove in Knight Inlet, home to one of the largest concentrations of grizzly bears in the province.

No Hiding Place For Fugitive Mob Boss

ROME (AP) — One of Italy's most-wanted fugitive mob bosses was arrested after five years on the lam Wednesday when police found him hiding in a home bunker built between the bathroom and his son's bedroom.

Antonio Pelle, 54, crawled out of his hiding place on his stomach to the top of an armoire that had shielded the bunker at his home in southern Reggio Calabria. Video of his surrender showed at least two dozen police surrounding the wardrobe waiting for him to emerge.

Hurricane Matthew: 16 Killed In Caribbean, Nearly 2 Million Evacuation In US.

Latest Path of Hurricane Matthew

Hurricane Matthew, the strongest Caribbean storm in almost a decade, tore across the Bahamas on Thursday, with the coastal U.S. lying in its path as forecasters made a dire warning about some locations possibly being "uninhabitable for weeks."

Nearly two million people were under evacuation orders in Georgia, South Carolina and Florida, where residents braced for a possible impact from the storm, stocking up on supplies and boarding up homes. The National Weather Service has advised that "loss of life" and "immense human suffering" is possible from wind for those who do not take precaution for the storm.

Tenure Extensin: DRC Opposition Takes Hard Line Against Kabila

Opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi says protests organized by the Rassemblement on September 19 in which more than 50 people died have been a warning to Kabila.

KINSHASA — 

The Democratic Republic of Congo's main opposition coalition, Le Rassemblement, on Tuesday announced the conclusion of a two-week conclave. Among agenda items was their response to President Joseph Kabila's intention to stay in power beyond the end of his second term and a clarification of the platform’s position on talks it has so far boycotted.

Several hundred Congolese delegates of the Rassemblement, a platform comprising most of the DRC’s opposition parties, began arriving for the ceremony held in the capital, Kinshasa, Tuesday morning. They were there to hear how leaders plan to respond to the delay of elections, which were supposed to happen in November, and President Joseph Kabila’s intention to stay in office beyond the end of his second term on December 19.

Bloop! Georgia Teacher Fired For Calling First Lady Michelle Obama A “Gorilla”

One of these days, folks are gonna realize that the world — including social media — are always watching. A fact that a Georgia teacher wished she would have been aware before she popped off on Facebook about First Lady Michelle Obama.

According to CBS News, officials with a Georgia school district have fired employee Jane Wood Allen after she described FLOTUS as a gorilla on Facebook. On Monday, Forsyth County Schools issued a statement saying, “Effective Monday, Oct. 3, Jane Wood Allen has been relieved from duty and is no longer an employee of Forsyth County Schools.”

“Racism and discrimination are not tolerated in our school district. We are committed to ongoing staff training on the acceptance of all individuals,” they continued.

Release Sambo: ECOWAS Court Rules

FILE - Nigeria's former national security adviser, Sambo Dasuki (C), arrives for a hearing at the Federal High Court in Abuja, Nigeria, Dec. 14, 2015.

LAGOS — 

Nigeria's former national security adviser, held since December 2015 on fraud charges, should be released, a judge at the court of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) ruled Tuesday, saying his detention was unlawful and arbitrary.

Sambo Dasuki has been accused of fraud involving $68 million of defense spending, part of a wider $2.1 billion in arms deals under investigation. He has pleaded not guilty.

WhatsApp Doodles On Photos And Videos

 The feature is rolling out to all Android devices and will soon hit iOS users.

The new doodle feature lets you get creative with images and videos you share (WhatsApp Blog)

Facebook's mobile messaging app WhatsApp has started rolling out an update that brings Snapchat-like doodling features. Users can now doodle on photos and videos they share with friends and family over the messaging platform.

Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Sales Resume

Samsung makes three major software changes to ensure safety of new device.

Samsung relaunches Galaxy Note 7

Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 is available for purchase again, the company has announced. The sales commenced on 1 October in South Korea, and other regions across the globe will see the re-launch of the device in the coming weeks.

The resumption of sales comes after a successful replacement programme, which saw strong consumer response with many exchanging the older Note 7 with a new brand new one or other Galaxy handsets.