A SAUDI princess has been charged with human trafficking for allegedly holding a domestic worker against her will and forcing her to work at an Orange County condominium, prosecutors said.

Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas identified 42-year-old Meshael Alayban as a Saudi princess who was charged with one count of human trafficking. If convicted, she faces up to 12 years in prison.

Alayban was arrested after a Kenyan woman carrying a suitcase flagged down a bus Tuesday and told a passenger she believed she was a human trafficking victim. The passenger helped her contact police, who searched the Irvine condo where Alayban and her family were staying, authorities said.

The 30-year-old woman told authorities she was hired in Kenya in 2012 and her passport was taken from her on arrival in Saudi Arabia. She was forced to work excessive hours and was paid less than she was promised and not allowed to leave, authorities said.

"This is not a contract dispute," Rackauckas told the court during a bail hearing Wednesday afternoon, likening the case to slavery. "This is holding someone captive against their will."

An Orange County judge set bail at $5 million for Alayban and required her to submit to GPS monitoring. He also banned her from leaving the county without prior authorisation.

Alayban did not appear in court in Santa Ana. Her attorney, Paul Meyer, said the case was a contractual dispute and argued his client shouldn't be assigned a ransomlike bail solely because she was rich. He said she had been travelling to the U.S. since she was a child, owned properties here and had given her word she would address the allegations.

"This is a domestic work hours dispute," he said.

Rackauckas had asked the judge to deny bail for Alayban or set it at $20 million, saying it was unlikely any amount would guarantee a Saudi princess would show up in court. He said the Saudi consulate had already offered to cover $1 million in bail initially set after her arrest.

Police say Alayban's family travelled to the U.S. in May with the victim and four women from the Philippines.

The victim had signed a two-year contract with an employment agency guaranteeing she would be paid $1,600 a month to work eight hours a day, five days a week. But starting in March 2012, she was forced to cook, clean and do other household chores for 16 hours a day, seven days a week, and was paid only $220, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors say the victim's passport was taken from her, and she wasn't allowed to return to Kenya. In May, she was brought to the U.S. and given her passport only to pass through customs, the district attorney's office said.

Once here, she was forced to tend to at least eight people in four apartments in the same Irvine complex, washing dishes, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry and ironing, the office said.

The other four women left the home voluntarily with police once authorities arrived. They told police they were interested in being free, said Irvine police chief David Maggard Jr.

No charges have been filed in connection with their circumstances.

Police said there are no indications of physical abuse.

It is the first forced labour case brought in Orange County under a human trafficking ballot initiative passed last year by California voters, and it is being investigated by local police and federal immigration authorities.

Claude Arnold, special agent in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's homeland security investigations in Los Angeles, said he hoped the case would encourage other trafficking victims to trust in law enforcement.

Alayban is set to be arraigned in court Thursday. She is one of the wives of Saudi Prince Abdulrahman bin Nasser bin Abdulaziz al Saud, the district attorney's office said.

Source: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/lifestyle/saudi-princess-arrested-in-us-for-human-trafficking/story-fni0d7e4-1226677708563

Former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger says the American media are not telling the truth about the current situation in Syria.

“In the American press it’s described as a conflict between democracy and a dictator- and the dictator is killing his own people, and we’ve got to punish him. But that’s not what’s going on,” he said during a speech at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

“It is now a civil war between sectarian groups,” Kissinger added.

Kissinger’s remarks come as the United States has been criticized for fomenting sectarian discord in Syria and the broader Middle East by interfering in the nations’ internal affairs and backing up insurgencies.

Elsewhere in his remarks Kissinger said “the outcome I would prefer to see” in Syria was a broken-up and balkanized country with “more or less autonomous regions.”

U.S. President Barack Obama has authorized sending weapons to foreign-backed militants in Syria, further escalating the conflict in the Arab country.

The White House earlier accused the Syrian government of using chemical weapons against the militants, an allegation denied by Damascus.

Obama’s policies regarding Syria have been attacked by some American politicians.

Former Congressman Ron Paul said the Obama administration was “escalating” the war in Syria by sending weapons to the militants.

“Today we heard from President Obama that the war in Syria will be escalated. He now has agreed to send weaponry in to assist the rebels. It’s escalation, that’s a proper word, because we’ve already been involved for quite a few months. We’ve been supporting the rebels for probably the past two years, supposedly for humanitarian reasons,” he said in a statement posted on YouTube.

“But now there is going to be a much more aggressive approach and we’re going to send weapons. There is a few problems with this, first off it’s war. Second thing is presidents are not supposed to start war without permission from the people through a congressional declaration of war,” Paul argued.

The unrest in Syria erupted over two years ago and many people, including large numbers of Syrian soldiers and security personnel, have been killed in the conflict. 

Damascus says the conflict is being engineered from outside the country, and there are reports that a very large number of the militants fighting in Syria are foreign nationals.


Source: http://www.presstv.ir/usdetail/310927.html

What you will read below is extremely disturbing. It is the firsthand impressions of a Boğaziçi (Bosphorus) University student who was detained by police in connection with the Gezi Park incidents in Istanbul. 

We, as a generation, grew up in an atmosphere of state brutality, when most of the time sex crimes were part of the torture process during military regimes. Horrible stories and horrible statements were heard. One example is the unforgettable self-confession of a retired general of the September 12 regime. He said, “When I have rock-hard young men at my service, why should I use batons?” when he was asked about torture done with batons… He was arguing that it did not happen, why he should use the baton, when he had other weapons… 

That was the 1980s. We thought those days were over… Now, it is 33 years later. We live in the age of limitless, endless information exchange where nothing can be hidden… When everything is documented, police brutality is filmed, recorded, not tolerated, unless encouraged by dark-minded administrators…

I will not go on discussing how pathetic a man can be when he uses his sexual skills as a punishment for the other sex. How pathetic it is for him to see sex as punishment… We can discuss that later. 

The entry you will read below came through the Internet. It was on the Facebook page of the person narrating. It was also in Hürriyet columnist Yalçın Bayer’s web version of his column. It was sent to Yalçın Bayer by Professor Işık Aytaç, again from Bosphorus University, as the account of her student Erkan Yolalan, who shared his story on his Facebook page.

Erkan Yolalan first thanks everybody who has assisted him, especially to those who fetched him a lawyer.
Here is his story: 

“I am at home, I’m fine. I want to write what I went through. My only aim is that everybody knows what is being experienced while in detention. I have no other aim; I want to say that at the beginning. I will write all of the events that happened to me from the beginning and with all swear words and insults included. With all its openness…

“Last night (June 3, 2013) around 9 p.m. I was detained in Beşiktaş, at traffic lights on Barbaros Avenue. I was not involved in any action like swearing or throwing stones. They took me in bending my arm the moment they saw me. Some friends of mine saw on TV how I was taken into custody. Then hell began. 
  
“After crossing the lights in the direction of the seaside, while I was at the edge of the platform where the IETT bus stops are at the seaside, any policeman who was there and any riot police squad member (çevik kuvvet) who saw me started kicking and punching me. For about 100-150 meters, in other words, all the way to the Kadıköy ferry station, whoever was present there was kicking and punching. Insults and curses such as ‘Are you the ones to save this country, mother f***, sons of ****,’ never ended. I could not count how many people hit me before I reached the detention bus. 

“Just as I was taken near the buses, a few policemen called from behind a bus, ‘Bring him here.’ They took me behind the bus and started kicking and punching me there. I learned later that because of the cameras they took me behind the bus to beat me. 

“When I was inside the detention bus (İETT) the lights were out, and I heard a girl’s voice begging inside the bus: ‘I did not do anything, sir.’ I could not even see who was hitting me as I was taken inside the bus and after I was in the bus. The only thing I was able to do in the dark was to cover my head. Curses and insults continued. I sat. Everyone who was passing near me was hitting me. I got up and went to a corner. They wanted me to take a seat again. I told them everyone who passed by was hitting me when I was seated. 

They again swore, slapped and punched me and made me sit.  

“They were hitting the girl and throttling her. A civilian policeman whose name is İsmail said exactly this to the girl, ‘I will bend you over and f*** you right now.’ [He – Erkan Yolalan- later added that this policeman İsmail also said, “Now that it is dark and the lights are off I will ****”]  

“And the response of the girl was heartbreaking. With a low voice, she could only say ‘Yes, sir.’ 
“And next, we, the three people present at the bus, were forced to shout: ‘I love the Turkish police. I love my country.’ They made us yell this again and again ordered us to make it ‘louder, louder.’ The insults and beating did not come to an end. 

“The atmosphere seemed a bit calmer, but this time they brought another young person. The guy’s nose was broken. When I asked him why he didn’t protect his face, he told me ‘Two people held me by force and a third person punched my nose three times.’ From time to time there were others brought in.  

“A young person named Mustafa from Bahçeşehir University was brought then. Twenty policemen from the riot squad had attacked him, and he looked too weak even to stand up. Slapping and punching him near the detention bus was not enough for them, they hit his head with a helmet. That was not enough either, they hit his head on the bus window. They took him inside the bus while continuously hitting him. His hands were cuffed from behind; his head was bleeding; they made him sit on the floor.  

“We saw his head bleeding. I went near him and held a cloth (the bloody t-shirt of the guy whose nose was broken) to his wound to stop the bleeding. This police named Süleyman cursed at me and told me to ‘f*** off’ to my seat. I told him, ‘He is bleeding.’ He said, ‘He can bleed.’ He did not care at all. They were holding the guy in handcuffs with all his injuries. We pointed that out to a couple of policemen. Finally, one of them opened the cuffs. 

“Actually the second heartbreaking incident happened when we were at the police station for statements. Mustafa asked me this: ‘Did they hit me at the bus? What happened?’ The guy could not remember. He was not fully conscious while he was on the bus. 

“As a last point, we could not go to the toilet while we were at the bus. They only gave us a bottle of water. Then we were taken to the hospital for doctor’s reports and then to the police station.   

“Once we were at the police station, an army of lawyers was waiting for us. And the policemen now were talking to us on polite terms. 

“I want to thank all the lawyers, all our friends who called the lawyers and everybody who was worried about us. There is not a bit of an exaggeration in this piece. Everything that has been experienced is true and my only aim is for everybody to hear it firsthand. 

Revolt against brutality is continuing. This fascist order will be destroyed.” 

New Information: This story was at Parliament today, June 6. Main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) Antalya deputy Yıldıray Sapan spoke in Parliament. He referred in short to this incident and demanded that this civilian police officer be found. Sapan also asked how the prime minister, Arınç or the interior minister would feel if such words were said to their daughters, wives, sisters or any other person they know.     

I want that policeman to be found also. And the others. 

Note to international readers: Do you know what will happen? This person Erkan will be terrorized with scores of lawsuits filed against him by the policemen in question, all testifying that he attacked them first. The public prosecutor will process these cases much faster, even before the cases against them begin. Collecting the evidence will take ages. The guy and all the others on that detention bus and any others testifying for him will be found guilty and will be given jail sentences. Earmark this paragraph for future reference.  

Turkish media outlets have been slammed for their coverage of the ongoing protests in the country. As water cannons and tear gas were unleashed on thousands of protesters, injuring scores, local media chose to air a documentary on penguins.

As the unrest unfolded on Friday and Saturday, Turkish media did not cover the violent police clashes, instead broadcasting nature and history documentaries, and cooking shows.

“We are watching the news from CNN International: Protesters, tear gas, and police hitting people. Then we checked CNN Turkey and there was a penguin documentary. So, I can't comment!” TV talk show host and producer Ozgur Cakit told RT.

Other networks briefly mentioned the protests, but failed to cover the violent clashes in which scores were injured.

Angered and outraged locals turned to the Internet to share information and vent frustration – Twitter and Facebook were one of the few ways to read news on the latest developments. In response, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan condemned social media’s role in the riots, singling out what he called the “scourge” of Twitter.

“There is now a menace which is called Twitter," Erdogan said on Sunday, dismissing the protests as organized by extreme elements. "The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society."

It was through Twitter that activists spread the word to gather in support of the demonstrations, until the issue could no longer be ignored. Local channels then had to play catch-up, trying to make up for lost airtime.

The media’s initial inaction has angered many in Turkey, RT’s Irina Galushko reported from Istanbul. Demonstrators lashed out against local media, gathering outside the offices of private TV stations NTV and HaberTurk on Sunday and Monday. In Istanbul’s Taksim district, protesters smashed an NTV satellite van, destroyed its equipment and covered it with graffiti. 

See why you should not be so naively happy during a time like this? There are crooks like Obama, idiots like you, Revolutionaries like Anon, awakers like us, the UBC, and then there's turkey.

Turkey has entered a fourth day of turmoil, as the country is swept away in the biggest wave of anti-government protesting in years. Thousands now flood the streets, as police continue to crack down on protesters with tear gas and water cannon.

The brutal suppression of a peaceful environmental sit-in in Istanbul ignited a nationwide protest against the Turkish government. Allegations of police crossing the line between keeping the order and oppression are mushrooming in the social media.

Over the days of clashes with the protesters, Turkish police excessively used water cannons and tear gas, drawing condemnation from Amnesty International and calls for restraint from Turkey’s closest allies.

“The use of tear gas against peaceful protestors and in confined spaces where it may constitute a serious danger to health is unacceptable, breaches international human rights standards and must be stopped immediately,” Amnesty stressed in a statement, calling on the Turkish government to investigate all reports of abuse.

Photos and video footage of officers clubbing activists and spraying them with irritants at point-blank range are circulating across social media, further inflaming the Turkish riots. The online anger is fueled by the dismissal of the protesters as “simple looters” by the government and the apparent downplaying of the importance of the protest in the official media.

The Turkish government insists that the protests are irrelevant and inspired by extremist forces. As he was leaving the country on Monday for a North Africa visit, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said that the Turkish intelligence services are investigating possible foreign links to the weekend riots. He also said the protest have nothing to do with the Gezi Park sit-ins. 


Orchun Sunear, a musician, told RT that he had seen a lot of people being seriously hurt by police, and even witnessed people being crushed by a police tank. A friend of his called Lednah, also a musician, is in a coma after being caught up in the crackdown.

“My father, and grandmother have never seen anything like this. In three generations the police have never behaved like this. This is not normal in Turkey and I don’t understand why this is happening,” he said.

Turkish Interior Minister Muammer Güler said that 115 police officers and 58 protesters had been injured in the clashes as of Sunday. Amnesty International said the victims of the clashes are numbered in their hundreds, while rumors in social media claim that more than 1,000 people suffered.

There are also claims of at least two protester deaths at the hands of the police. The government says those reports are lies, while Erdogan branded social media “the worst menace to society."

Widely-circulated graffiti in the capital, Ankara, describes the information stand-off: “Revolution will not be televised, it will be tweeted”.


Well, its only not televised not because you said it will not, but rather the mainstream media is ignoring it. Only UBC bothers to broadcast the revolution.

Sources: http://rt.com/news/turkey-police-brutality-reports-148/ http://rt.com/news/istanbul-park-protests-police-095/

A generous delivery of 30,000 pizzas to military personnel serving in Afghanistan, made last summer, has officially been named by Guinness World Records the world's largest pizza delivery ever.

The delivery was orchestrated by Pizza 4 Patriots, a nonprofit group founded by retired Air Force master sergeant Mark Evans, to U.S. service members in Kandahar, Bagram and Camp Bastion.

Evans told ABC News that he is "completely pleased and overwhelmed" by the news. "The world record is secondary to taking care of our soldiers and sending them a slice of home," he said.

Pizza 4 Patriots has been delivering pizzas to troops for the last five years. As of February, Pizza 4 Patriots had delivered more than 122,000 pizzas to military personnel serving abroad since 2008.

All deliveries, including the Guinness record, were made with help from private carrier DHL Express, which donates its services. Many of the pizzas are actually air-dropped to troops in the field.

Most recently, Evans helped facilitate the delivery of 21,000 pizzas -- 1,000 pizzas more than Pizza 4 Patriot's goal of 20,000 -- for Super Bowl 2013.


Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/24/worlds-largest-pizza-delivery_n_3332237.html?ref=topbar

The Palestinian News & Info Agency (WAFA) has reported that Israeli soldiers kidnapped twelve children, students of the Orphanage School in occupied East Jerusalem.

Bassam Khalil, vice-principal of the school, stated that the army kidnapped the children as they left school in the Old City, and took them to a local Police station in the Chain Gate area.

He added that, so far, three of the kidnapped children have been identified as Mohammad Abu Sneina, Obaida Es’eed, and Marwan Dweik.

The army claimed that the children hurled stones at Israeli settlers’ vehicles in the area.

Earlier on Wednesday, the army invaded different parts of the West Bank and kidnapped six Palestinians in the districts of Nablus, Tubas and Jenin.

On Tuesday, the army also invaded various areas in the West Bank, kidnapped eight Palestinians, and kidnapped two children in Abu Dis town, in occupied East Jerusalem.

Israeli soldiers invade the West Bank, and conduct arrests and home invasions, on a daily basis as part of the ongoing Israeli violations against the Palestinians and their property in the occupied Palestinian territories.


Source: http://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/2013/05/22/israel-kidnaps-12-children-of-the-orphanage-school-in-occupied-jerusalem-unicef-eu_commission/

The World Health Organization says it appears likely that the novel coronavirus (NCoV) can be passed between people in close contact.

This comes after the French health ministry confirmed a second man had contracted the virus in a possible case of human-to-human transmission.

Two more people in Saudi Arabia are also reported to have died from the virus, according to health officials.

NCoV is known to cause pneumonia and sometimes kidney failure.

World Health Organization (WHO) officials have expressed concern over the clusters of cases of the new coronavirus strain and the potential for it to spread.

Since 2012, there have been 33 confirmed cases across Europe and the Middle East, with 18 deaths, according to a recent WHO update.

Cases have been detected in Saudi Arabia and Jordan and have spread to Germany, the UK and France.

"Of most concern... is the fact that the different clusters seen in multiple countries increasingly support the hypothesis that when there is close contact this novel coronavirus can transmit from person to person," theWorld Health Organization said on Sunday.

"This pattern of person-to-person transmission has remained limited to some small clusters and so far, there is no evidence to suggest the virus has the capacity to sustain generalised transmission in communities," the statement adds.

Before the war began, Kazal was in love with her neighbour in Homs. "He was 20 years old and I dreamed of marrying him one day," she says. "I never thought I would marry someone I didn't love, but my family and I have been through some hard times since coming to Amman."

Kazal says she is 18 but looks much younger. She has just got divorced from a 50-year-old man from Saudi Arabia who paid her family about US $3,100 (UK £2,000 or U$3,072) to marry her. The marriage lasted one week.

"I lived with my husband in Amman, but we weren't happily married. He treated me like a servant, and didn't respect me as a wife. He was very strict with me. I'm happy that we're divorced."

Her huge, blue eyes fill with tears when she talks about the marriage.

"I agreed to it so I could help my family. When I got engaged I cried a lot. I won't get married for money again. In the future I hope to marry a Syrian boy who's my own age."

Andrew Harper, the Representative of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Jordan, is concerned that some of the 500,000 Syrian refugees in the country are increasingly turning to such desperate measures.

"We don't have enough resources to give aid to all those who need it. The vast majority of refugees are women and children. Many of them are not used to going out to work, so survival sex becomes an option."

His office in central Amman is surrounded by hundreds of newly arrived refugees, waiting in long lines to register for aid. He says the UNHCR has intervened with some families who have been offering their daughters up for early marriage.

"I can't think of anything more disgusting than people targeting refugee women… You can call it rape, you can call it prostitution, you can call it what you want but it's preying on the weakest.

"The government and people of Jordan are doing what they can but people are poor and we have to get more resources into the community so families aren't forced into something that deep down I believe they don't want to do."


Short-term marriages between men from the Gulf and Syrian girls reportedly happened before the war began. But Kazal's mother Manal, who dresses conservatively like her daughter in an abaya and headscarf, says she would have never considered such an arrangement in the past.

"Life here is very hard and we receive very little aid. We have a baby who needs lots of milk every day, and we can't afford to pay the rent. So I had to sacrifice Kazal to help the other members of the family."

She says that the marriage was arranged by an Amman-based NGO called Kitab al-Sunna, which gives cash, food and medicines to refugees. It is funded by donations from individuals across the Arab world.

"When I went for help at the NGO they asked to see my daughter. They said they would find a husband for her."


The director of Kitab al-Sunna, Zayed Hamad, says that he is sometimes approached by men who want to marry Syrian women.

"They ask for girls who are over 18. They're motivated by helping these women, especially those whose husbands died as martyrs in Syria. Arab men see Syrian women as good housewives, and they find them very pretty, so traditionally it is desirable to marry one."

Um Mazed is a 28-year-old Syrian refugee from Homs who has started earning money by arranging marriages between Syrian girls and Arab men.

In a grubby room covered with mould, she fields phone calls from prospective brides and grooms.

"The men are usually between 50 and 80, and they ask for girls who have white skin and blue or green eyes. They want them very young, no older than 16."

She says she has presented more than a hundred Syrian girls to these men, who pay her a fee of US $70 for an introduction, and about US $310 if it results in a marriage.

"If these marriages end in divorce after a short time, that's not my issue, I'm just the matchmaker. As far as I'm concerned it's not prostitution because there's a contract between the groom and bride."

Um Mazed means "Mother of Mazed", one of her three children. She doesn't want her identity known because she's ashamed of what she is doing for a living, but claims she has no choice.

"How are we supposed to live when the NGOs give us so little help? How are we supposed to pay our rent? We're not getting enough help to live decently, that's why I'm doing this - so my family and I can survive."


Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22473573