CAIRO — Hundreds of thousands of protesters turned out in cities across the Middle East on Friday to protest the unaccountability of their leaders and express solidarity with the uprising in Libya that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi is trying to suppress with force.

How can anyone justify threatening rape victims with a Bad-Conduct Discharge if they dare to speak out about their assaults? I'm just dying to hear the argument, if you've got one!

Rick Scott says that he's going to focus on jobs, education, and the rule of law; but Gary Borders is running Lake County like his own personal mafia! And the governor is instead involved in promoting an Arizona SB1070-copycat bill - I guess that's his definition of rule of law!

Fascinating debate about the MSM's power or lack thereof over the outcome of the revolution on the streets of Cairo....

A crucial reminder that myths are precisely that: halfway between fact/truth & lies/falsity! As Joan says:

A rather unbiased piece (though tipped off in the end) by a "real socialist" (not your animus Obamacreation that you keep dreaming up around every left-leaning corner in DC today) about the facts on the ground & what you should know about the Egyptian revolution: that it's "a mas …

I hope you weren't thinking that the people in the government who were putting you in harm's way were actually going to make sure that you received the treatment you deserved for your services.... If you were, perhaps you should look at Joe Rogan's youtube page!

A look at recent major attacks in Iraq:

'Christians have been living in the Middle East seven decades prior to the arrival of Islam, and for 14 other decades as part of, or under, the law of Islam. Never has the situation of Christians reached such a difficult, unstable situation as it has in the last two years.

"More than 100 people have died and hundreds have been wounded since Tuesday in bomb attacks that bear the hallmarks of Sunni Arab insurgents

We definitely need to heed Tim's advice to put away "the safe & sanitized version of this man & his compatriots" & "awaken from the stupor" which our "Ambien-induced haze" has cast upon us in order to deal with the legacies of injustice which MLK against which he spent his life f …

What would it be like if we really remembered Martin Luther King and honored his memory? Would we think about the advances he and his supporters made in civil and human rights? Would we work to preserve and expand them?

An encyclopedia of rightisms!

Now this is what an adult conversation looks like!

It's happening all over the country. Union workers in both the public and private sectors have a target on their backs. Politicians are taking aim, determined to destroy the last remaining force dedicated to working people: the labor movement.

Among the victims of this senseless tragedy was a little boy named Adam. Three-year-old Adam witnessed the horror of dozens of deaths, including that of his own parents.

They saw their brethren murdered during Mass and then were bombed in their homes as they mourned. Al-Qaida vowed to hunt them down. Now the Christian community of Iraq, almost as old as the religion itself, is sensing a clear message: It is time to leave.

From the article, Islamist deaths squads are hunting down gay Iraqis and summarily executing them.

"A new wave of Iraqi Christians has fled to northern Iraq or abroad amid a campaign of violence against them ."

"Intelligence officials say foreign fighters have been slipping back into Iraq in larger numbers recently and may have been behind some of the most devastating attacks this year, reviving a threat the U.S. military believed had been almost entirely eradicated.

For the last 10 years sexual orientation has been included in a list of discriminatory grounds for executions – gay rights activists say the vote to remove that listing is "dangerous and disturbing."

""As soon as Obama took over, he said he would do this and that -- a lot of things. But he still hasn't met a single goal," said Saad Zaki Khalil, 56, who was selling cigarette lighters in central Cairo.

The Arab and Muslim world are, by nature, chronically violent. In addition to tribal and family feuds, religious and political wars are ever-constant, as are slavers, gun-runners, pirates, tyrants, torturers, and garden-variety thieves and gangsters.

Egypt condemned the threat to its Christian community, which makes up about 10 percent of the country's 78 million people. It beefed up security around churches.

The strategy involved the deliberate deployment of Shi'a and Kurdish police commandoes in areas of Sunni insurgency in the full knowledge that they were torturing Sunni detainees, as the reports released by Wikileaks show.

Gunmen seized hostages at the Our Lady of Salvation Church, a Syrian Catholic cathedral, during Sunday mass, demanding the release of women they said had converted to Islam but were being detained by the Coptic church in Egypt.

US military documents leaked to whistleblowing website Wikileaks reveal thousands of previously unreported civilian deaths, according to independent research organisation Iraq Body Count.

Speaking at a Wikileaks news conference, Prof John Sloboda from Iraq Body Count estimated the logs would "bring to the public knowledge more than 15,000 deaths".

Wikileaks says the secret US military logs also suggest US commanders ignored evidence of torture by the Iraqi authorities.

A US Department of Defense spokesman dismissed the documents as raw observations by tactical units, which were only snapshots of tragic events.

Under orders of Nouri al- Maliki and on the eve of his trip to Tehran, yet another good will gesture to Iranian regime, was thrashed onto Camp Ashraf residents this evening. Iraqi forces attacked Ashraf residents by firing bullets, and ‎using sticks and truncheons.

Jewish refugees waved giant replicas of the keys to their homes in Iraq, Morocco, Algeria and Egypt during an official demonstration held yesterday to coincide with the visit to the Prime Minister's office in Jerusalem of Hilary Clinton and Mahmoud Abbas.

When federal investigators discovered that the manager of a Saudi Arabian company paid bribes to win two lucrative subcontracts supplying food to American troops in Iraq, they naturally wanted to know more. Did he act on his own? Had U.S.

"It's Not Just About Israel" "The whole emphasis on Israel's salience in this matter, and of the related idea of subcontracting a strike to the Israeli Defense Forces, is an evasion, somewhat ethnically tinged, of what is an international responsibility."

This story was not well covered by the media-- seeded as background to the current US withdrawal from Iraq. After the US is out-- can the Kurds expect more atrocities like this?

"As the United States works toward a drawdown of combat forces in Iraq by this August, and a withdrawal of all troops by 2011, military commanders and diplomats are scrambling to make sure that the Iraqi government will be ready to take over.

We keep hearing that the last decade of war, where we pour in gazillions to build up Iraq and Afghanistan even as our own economy sputters, has weakened Al Qaeda.

"I was in the room playing with my cousin and they called us to come," Delan said. "They cut my cousin. I was very afraid. I was crying and crying. My mother is very fat; I knew if I could run she could not catch me, but she held me too strong. I could not get away.

Diplomatic efforts to find a solution to the Iraq crisis and legal arguments ahead of the 2003 invasion are being explored by the Chilcot inquiry.

The most senior civil servant at the Foreign Office in the lead-up to the war, Lord Jay of Ewelme, is appearing.

It should have been a happy summer for Michael Clauer. The Texas Army National Guard captain was winding down his time in Iraq, preparing for a new unit to arrive and replace him and the 130 service members under his command.

As ambitious as the title might seem, my intention is rather simple in design: I'm going to list solutions to the problems this Country is facing.

Pro-Israel highlights from Barack Obama's June 4th, 2008 speech to the AIPAC policy conference.

Many Iraqis are increasingly uneasy that a wave of bombings and shootings may revive all-out sectarian warfare that ravaged the country several years ago. In Baghdad and other cities, some are falling back into old cautionary habits — going outside only when necessary and avoiding busy markets and other crowded places.

A wall-- plus, of course, checkpoints: "A series of recent suicide bombings has driven the governor of the Iraqi capital to propose the concrete barrier, which will be 15ft (4.5m) high and 70 miles (112km) long.

Baghdad, Iraq (CNN) -- At one of Baghdad's two female juvenile prisons, the young Iraqi girls live in limbo, sadness and desperation permeating every aspect of their interrupted lives.

"NBC News has obtained a scathing report from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who says that most of the Defense Department's safeguards were "unclear" or "inadequate" to identify the threat and prevent the mass shooting that killed 13 soldiers at Fort Hood in December.

The Associated Press ran a story today covering a visit by First Lady Michelle Obama to the disaster-stricken nation of Haiti. No doubt the Obama administration wants to help Haitians in need, but please. First things first.

The video is graphic, and disturbing. As a group of men amble down a Baghdad street two US Army helicopters open fire, repeatedly shooting the men and gunning one down as he tries to flee. As the dust clears, the troops survey their handiwork.

"You've been around enough to know that someone who showed the symptoms of Major Hasan in the army of Algeria, or Syria, or Tunisia, or Turkey, would have been in jail long before he could have gunned down his fellow soldiers.

SADDAM Hussein's look-alike cousin Iraq's former Defense Minister Ali Hassan Al-Majid - better known as 'Chemical Ali' - has been sentenced to death for "crimes against humanity" that he was found to have committed in 1988 against residents of the Iraqi-Kurdish town o …

"A senior Kurdish official confirms Iran's start on the building of a wall separating the Islamic Republic with Iraq's Kurdistan Region, meant to prevent separatists from crossing the mountainous border"

"Saddam Hussein killed more Arabs and Muslims than any other Middle Eastern leader in recent history.

An exhibit at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles recalls one of worst atrocities of the late 20th century, the gassing of 5,000 Kurdish men, women and children in the town of Halabja by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.