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CAIRO (AP) — One Egyptian woman is taking on the country’s inheritance laws that mean female heirs inherit half that of men.

Since her father's death last year, Huda Nasrallah, a Christian, has stood before three different judges to demand an equal share of the property left to her two brothers by their father. Yet courts have twice issued rulings against her, basing them on Islamic inheritance laws that favor male heirs.

Nasrallah, a 40-year-old Christian human rights lawyer, is now challenging the rulings in a higher court. A final verdict is expected to be handed down later this month. She has formulated her case around Christian doctrine which dictates that heirs, regardless of their sex, receive equal shares.

"It is not really about inheritance, my father did not leave us millions of Egyptian pounds," she said. "I have the right to ask to be treated equally as my brothers.”

Calls for equal inheritance rights began to reverberate across the Arab world after the Tunisian govement had proposed a bill to this effect last year. Muslim feminists hailed the bill.

But there has been a blacklash from elsewhere in the Arab world. Egypt’s Al-Azhar, the highest Sunni religious institution in the Muslim world, vehemently dismissed the proposal as contradictory to Islamic law and destabilizing to Muslim societies. But there is hope that Tunisia could have broken the taboo on the topic for the region.

Nasrallah belongs to Egypt's estimated ten million Coptic Christians, who live in a predominantly Muslim society goveed by a constitution in which Islamic Shariah is the main source of legislation. Christians face restrictions in inter-religious marriages and church building, and are banned from proselytizing to Muslims.

Egypt’s legal system grants the Coptic church full authority over personal status matters of Copts, namely marriage and divorce. But the church does not have the same powers over its followers’ inheritance rights.

One of the oldest Christian communities in the world, the Egyptian Coptic church is also deeply conservative on social matters, banning divorce except in cases of adultery or conversion to Islam.

Nasrallah says she is making her case on religious grounds because she believes the court is more likely to respect existing structures within the society. She says she is trying to capitalize on a rare Christian doctrine that respects gender equality.

Karima Kamal, a Coptic female columnist at the privately-owned al-Masry al-Youm daily, says that Nasrallah's case highlights the double discrimination that Coptic women can face in a society where religion is printed on govement-issued identification cards.

"You should not implement the rules of one faith on people of another faith," she says.

In early December 2018, Nasrallah's father, a former state clerk, died, leaving behind a four-story apartment building in a Cairo low-income neighborhood and a bank deposit. When she and her brothers filed their request for inheritance at a local court, Nasrallah invoked a church-sanctioned Coptic bylaw that calls for equal distribution of inheritance. She says she was encouraged by a 2016 ruling that a Cairo court handed down in favor of a Coptic woman who challenged Islamic inheritance laws.

Nasrallah's brothers also testified that they would like their father's inheritance to be divided fairly between them, but the court has twice ignored their testimony.

Many Coptic men prefer to benefit from the Islamic laws, Nasrallah said, using the excuse that it's out of their hands.

“The issue of inheritance goes beyond religious rules. It has to do with the nature of the society we are living in and Egypt’s misogynistic judicial system,” said Hind Ahmed Zaki, a political science assistant professor with Connecticut University.

She says the state fears that if they grant equal property rights to Christian women, Muslim women will soon ask for the same.

Girgis Bebawy, a Coptic lawyer, has represented dozens of Copts in similar cases over the last two years, though he has yet to win a single one. He's hoping that the latest case, which is currently before Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court, could end differently.

"It's religious intolerance," he says.

Many Coptic families decide to settle inheritance matters outside the legal system, but Nasrallah says that as a lawyer, she hopes her case could set a precedent for others.

"If I didn’t take it to court, who would?" she said.

source : https://news.yahoo.com/egyptian-woman-fights-unequal-islamic-121431819.html

BEIJING (AP) - Asian stocks sank Wednesday after President Donald Trump threatened more tariff hikes on Chinese imports if talks aimed at ending a trade war fail to produce an interim agreement.

Market benchmarks in Shanghai, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia all declined.

Trump said Tuesday agreement on the “Phase 1” deal announced last month “could happen soon.” But he waed he was ready to raise tariffs “very substantially” if that fails.

The two sides disagree publicly about whether Washington agreed to roll back some punitive tariffs imposed in the fight over Beijing’s trade surplus and technology ambitions. The Chinese govement said last week that was settled, but Trump denied that.

Trump’s Idea “served as a reminder of the challenge that the two sides face,” said Jingyi Pan of IG in a report. However, she said, investors saw them as “positioning statements,” reducing their impact.

Trump’s Idea did little to jolt Wall Street, which closed with modest gains.

The Shanghai Composite Index lost 0.4% to 2,905.06 and Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 sank 0.9% to 23,3154.90. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng tumbled 2% to 26,511.11.

South Korea’s Kospi retreated 0.9% to 2,123.74 and Australia’s S&P-ASX; 200 sank 0.8% lower at 6,698.30. India’s Sensex opened down 25 points at 40,319.59. Taiwan, New Zealand and Singapore also declined.

Hong Kong shares have been jolted by growing violence in the anti-govement protests. Police shot a protester in a scuffle Monday and a man who was defending China in an apparent argument was set on fire. Activists also this week have damaged trains and transit stations while clashing with police using tear gas and other crowd control measures.

The protests began in June over an extradition bill that was subsequently withdrawn, but the movement expanded to demands for greater democracy, police accountability and other grievances. The protests, the U.S.-China tariff war and economic factors have sent Hong Kong tumbling into its first recession in a decade.

On Wall Street, the benchmark S&P; 500 index rose past the 3,100 level for the first time, but the gains 

source : washingtontimes

Mexico granted asylum to Bolivia's former President Evo Morales on Monday as unrest shook the South American nation, helping cement the Mexican govement's emerging role as a bastion of diplomatic support for left-wing leaders in Latin America.

Mexico's Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said Morales' life was in danger, and the decision to grant him asylum was in Mexico's long tradition of sheltering exiles.

Morales' govement collapsed on Sunday after ruling party allies quit and the army urged him to step down in the wake of a disputed election, adding to a sense of crisis in Latin America, which has been hit by weeks of protests and unrest.

Looting and roadblocks convulsed Bolivia after Morales stepped down. He said “violent groups” attacked his house. His exact whereabouts were unknown, though it was believed he had left in the presidential plane for his stronghold of Chapare province.

“His life and integrity is at risk,” Ebrard told reporters. “We will immediately proceed to inform Bolivia's foreign ministry that under inteational law, it should offer safe conduct.” 

Mexico has informed the Organisation of American States, and will inform the United Nations, he added. The Washington-based OAS delivered a report on Sunday citing serious irregularities during Bolivia's October vote.

The departure of Bolivia's first indigenous president, one of a wave of leftists who dominated Latin America's politics at the start of the century, comes amid a widespread rejection of incumbent leaders from either side of the political divide in the region, from Mexico to Brazil and Argentina.

Mexico elected its first left-leaning govement in decades last year, moving closer to like-minded govements and distancing itself from diplomatic initiatives aimed at pushing socialist president Nicolas Maduro from power in Venezuela.

Argentina last month elected a left-leaning leader, as voters rejected economic policies aimed at stabilising the economy but that deepened poverty and inflation.

The resignation of Morales, who goveed for 14 years, followed protests in Ecuador and Chile that forced their govements to step back from policies raising fuel and transport prices.

Ebrard said earlier on Monday his govement viewed Sunday's events in Bolivia as a “coup” because the military broke with the constitutional order by pressing Morales to resign

source : independent

BERLIN (AP) - The U.S. Embassy in Berlin unveiled a statue of Ronald Reagan on Friday at a site overlooking the location of the former president's iconic speech imploring the Soviet Union to remove the Berlin Wall.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the inauguration of the work a "monumental moment" before helping remove the cover from the larger-than-life statue on the Embassy's terrace, at eye-level with the top of the landmark Brandenburg Gate.

Saturday marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Pompeo was winding up a two-day trip to multiple cities and towns for commemorations.

The gate, which was just on the East German side of the Wall, was the backdrop for Reagan's 1987 speech in which he challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to go further with the reforms he was instituting.

Reagan implored him: "If you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

Pompeo praised Reagan for his bold defense of freedom, telling a gathering of politicians, diplomats, donors, and others that the former president "courageously denounced the greatest threat to that freedom, the Soviet Empire, the Evil Empire."

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas drew domestic and inteational flak recently for failing to mention Reagan - or any other American - in an op-ed published in 26 European newspapers focused on the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of communism.

"Dear Minister Maas, on behalf of the late President Reagan, whom you don't mention, and the millions of American Soldiers who served in West Germany along with your other NATO Allies, you're welcome," former U.S. Army Europe commander, retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, wrote on Twitter.

Maas sought to defuse the criticism Thursday at an event with Pompeo, saying "we owe you our freedom and unity to a decisive degree," while singling out contributions from Reagan and former President George H.W. Bush.

U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell earlier this year opened a multimedia exhibit on the same terrace focusing on Reagan's Brandenburg Gate speech, and said the statue was a tribute to a president whose "willingness to defend people seeking greater freedom around the world remains an inspiration today to Germans, Americans and every human being."

"As a Califoian, I'm personally proud to have our former goveor and president of the United States standing atop the Embassy, reminding visitors of America's commitment to democracy and freedom," he told The Associated Press.

Several American presidents visited Berlin during the Cold War to express their solidarity with those in the democratic West of the city that was divided by the Wall from Aug. 13, 1961, to Nov. 9, 1989.

Perhaps the best-known speech delivered by an American president came in 1963 when John F. Kennedy appeared at West Berlin's city hall.

He told the thousands gathered: "All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words 'Ich bin ein Berliner.'"

Today a plaque marks that location and the square have been renamed "John F. Kennedy Platz."

The site of the Reagan speech is marked with an information sign. The lawmaker who heads the state committee in charge of memorials in Berlin, Sabine Bangert, rejected the suggestion that Reagan had somehow been given short shrift.

"The contributions of U.S. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan to Berlin as well as to German unity are well known in Berlin," she told the AP.

"Kennedy's ... 'Ich bin ein Berliner' speech and Ronald Reagan's memorable Berlin sentence from 1987, 'Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall,' as well as Barack Obama's speech at the Brandenburg Gate in 2016, are in all of our memories."

source : cbn

One firefighter was injured fighting a brush fire that consumed 34 acres in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles Saturday night before crews stopped the still-active fire's forward progress.

The fire, referred to as the Barham Fire by the Los Angeles Fire Department, could be seen from Universal Studios and Waer Bros. Studios and sent smoke billowing near the iconic Hollywood sign. LAFD reported no civilian injuries or structure damage. No structures were threatened as of about 6:30 p.m. Saturday, according to a LAFD release.

The injured firefighter is being taken to an area hospital; the injury is not life-threatening, a LAFD release says.

The forward progress of the fire was stopped around 5 p.m., according to a LAFD release.

The Waer Bros. Studio lot in Burbank was evacuated Saturday due to the fire, CNN reports.

The fire was 15% contained, LAFD reported at about 6:30 p.m. Saturday.

More than 200 fire personnel, five helicopters and two aircraft were used to fight the fire, according to a Saturday evening tweet from Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti.

source : https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/11/09/barham-fire-near-hollywood-hills/2549725001/

With a chip that can track your every move, New York’s city-issued ID cards are about to take a seriously dystopian tu.

More than a million New Yorkers could soon willingly agree to carry a govement-issued tracking device, whether they realize it or not.

That’s the proposal from Mayor Bill de Blasio, who having recently retued from the cofield-dotted campaign trail in Iowa, is setting his sights on transforming New York City into something out of a dystopian sci-fi novel. But some critics are urging caution about the move.

The fuss is about a tiny RFID chip that the mayor wants to embed into each and every municipal ID card for New York residents as part of the “IDNYC” program.

The latest proposal might seem modest, but the reality is that it potentially puts hundreds of thousands of us at greater risk of identity theft, stalking, and (for undocumented New Yorkers) deportation. And sadly it’s part of the global trend towards so-called “smart cities”—a series of high-tech undertakings that claim to improve municipal efficiency at the modest price of stripping us of our privacy and autonomy.

It’d be a dubious trade-off if the technology delivered, but increasingly we see that these systems take more than we feared while delivering far less than we were promised.

Smart cities proponents claim that by integrating the inteet of things, artificial intelligence, and networks of sensors that we can make our children smarter, our commutes faster, and even save lives. The outlandish claims don’t end there. Smart cities are heralded as the solution to everything from the opioid crisis to de facto school segregation. Perhaps the most outlandish claim yet is that knock-off RoboCops will even prevent crimes before they even happen.

The movement is only in its infancy, but smart city programs already include every municipal service from schools, to hospitals, to sanitation, to law enforcement. And those outside major cities aren’t exempt either. Increasingly, towns big and small are being taken in by the promise of a data-driven society.

MORE DATA, MORE PROBLEMS

The privacy risk is hard to overstate. Govement agencies will have increasing amounts of extremely sensitive data about our health, our children’s school performance, and where we spend our free time. Go to the bar? The smart city knows. Go to a protest? It probably knows that too. And so will anyone who hacks in.

Hacking isn’t some theoretical risk, it’s already happened. As early as 2014, security researchers starting raising the alarm that critical city systems were unencrypted and completely vulnerable to attack.  That same year, the Department of Homeland Security admitted that hackers had broken into a public utility by simply guessing the password.

More recently, we’ve seen entire cities held hostage by hackers. Both Baltimore and Atlantasaw large swaths of their govements grind to a halt when attackers used ransomware to encrypt govement computer systems, demanding a large payment in exchange for the key. Residents lost access to everything from online bill payments, to deed transfers and even court scheduling. In the case of Baltimore, not only was the city out of action for weeks by the attack, but crucial data was permanently lost.

Disturbingly for those whose health and financial data is held in these systems, hackers can just as easily post what they find in public. As The Wall Street Joual recently noted: “The more connected a city is, the more vulnerable it is to cyberattacks.” Even with the best security protections, cities can’t eliminate the threat—not as long as we continue to collect the data.

Sadly, for many smart city projects, privacy protections are not just an unwanted expense, but an existential threat. After all, even though these systems are sold with the promise of promoting govement efficiency, the true product is often the public itself and all our data. Ventures like Firefly and LinkNYC use public location data to do what so many tech ventures have done: better target their ads. Smart cities create a captive, highly segmented audience ready to be told what they need to buy.

But the dangers don’t end with the exploitation of surveillance capitalism. As these systems are increasingly integrated into city services, we run the risk of automating age-old biases and further discriminating against marginalized communities. Some of the most visible examples to date have stemmed from the use of racially-biased facial recognition in law enforcement and racially or socioeconomically biased algorithms in child risk assessments. The risks likely go even further than what we can imagine now.

Rather than accept the New York’s new chip proposal, advocates are speaking out, and now the New York City Council is considering a bill that would outlaw this type of feature. If the bill passes, it will be a milestone in the backlash against smart cities and a clear signal we need to slow down and think more clearly about implementation before accidentally rushing into a dystopian future we can’t come back from.

source : patriotrising

• If Brexit wasn’t enough for the British public to contend with, it is now facing a snap election around one of the busiest, darkest and coldest times of the year — the run-up to Christmas.
• It’s well known that Brits are obsessed by the weather and when you combine that with an election, it’s no surprise that some British newspapers have gone into hysteria mode over the timing of the vote.

• If Brexit wasn’t enough for the British public to contend with, it is now facing a snap election around one of the busiest, darkest and coldest times of the year — the run-up to Christmas.

  It’s well known that Brits are obsessed by the weather and when you combine that with an election at a time of huge political crisis it’s no surprise that some British newspapers have gone into hysteria mode over the timing of the vote on December 12.

   

  Headlines predicting wild wet and icy weather have abounded with headlines ranging from “UK election weather waing” to “General Election may be hit by coldest winter in 30 years” and “General election 2019: Can snow delay the vote and your questions answered.”

  Because the vote is the first election to be held in December since 1923, it’s uncertain what impact the busy festive schedule, shorter daylight hours and potentially bad weather will have on voter behavior — but some experts are debunking the theory that weather matters that much.

  Stephen Fisher, associate professor in Political Sociology at the University of Oxford and whose work looks at political attitudes and behavior, told CNBC that the weather “is unlikely to be a serious factor affecting tuout, or the outcome, on 12th December.”

  “While there is research showing that tuout at local elections has been sensitive to weather conditions, there’s no correlation at the national level for general elections,” he said Wednesday.

  The snap election matters more than most as the result will shape the country for decades to come as the next govement will have to contend with the unwieldy beast that is Brexit.

   

  Bookmakers and voter polls put the ruling Conservative Party led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the lead to win a majority in the House of Commons, the lower house of Parliament.

  Snap votes and cold snaps

  British elections are usually held in late spring or early summer. The 2019 snap vote comes after the last election in June 2017 produced a shock result that saw former Prime Minister Theresa May lose her overall majority in Parliament.

  The result meant that the May govement had to make a deal with Northe Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to get a working majority; the arrangement has often overshadowed and derailed Brexit proceedings.

  In December, meanwhile, the average U.K. temperature is 7 degrees Celsius (45 degrees Fahrenheit) but it could be far colder in northe parts of the U.K., like Scotland. Council officials north of the border have already asked for the right to delay the election count in the event of extreme weather.

  Election data shows that cold weather has not deterred voters in the past, according to John Curtice, a politics professor at the University of Strathclyde and top polling expert. In fact, Curtice told CNBC that the highest ever tuout in a post-war election was seen in a winter election.

  “We obviously don’t have much experience of winter elections but we have had two at the back of winter, in February 1974 when tuout was almost 79%, six (percentage) points up from 1970, and the highest ever tuout in the post-war period was in February 1950 when the tuout was almost 84%,” he told CNBC Thursday.

  “So there’s limited evidence and the evidence we have suggests it’s not an issue,” he said. As for the shorter days, Curtice noted that “December is dark but it’s not the coldest or darkest month” with January and February often worse.

  Studies

  One academic study on the effects of weather and temperature on voter behavior has shown that these can have an effect, however. A 2017 study led by the Belgian University of Ghent and published in the ‘Frontiers of Psychology’ joual looking at voter behaviors and temperature in U.S. elections found that for each increase of 1°C (1.8°F), voter tuout increased by 0.14%.

  Researchers in that study claimed that, based on their model, an increase of only 1°C would have made Al Gore president rather than George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential race.

  Allan Monks, an economist at JPMorgan, also noted Wednesday that house research and Met Office records show there was no correlation between average temperatures or weather and voter tuout at previous U.K. elections.

  “There have been several winter elections, but there does not appear to have been a clear tendency for these to produce lower than normal tuout. Indeed, the highest tuout seen during the prior century was recorded in the winter election of 1950, when the average temperature for the month was 4°C,” he said.

  “The greater conce would instead appear to be whether there could be heavy snowfall or other adverse conditions on the day which prevent people from voting. The conventional wisdom is that this is more likely to deter Labour voters, and by region any impact might be most prominent in Scotland and the rural areas of the U.K. According to the met office, however, December is the least  .snowy month of winter with 3.9 days of snowfall on average

  source : https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/04/uk-election-and-bad-weather-does-it-make-a-difference.html