Eideard

Authorities in the country have virtually canceled Valentine’s Day by nixing planned concerts and other events, according to the Associated Press, citing a report by Russian news agency RIA-Novosti.

Instead, Uzbeki lovers will have to content themselves with a government-organized reading of poems by medieval Mughal emperor Babur, who wrote about monuments, flora and fauna, wine parties and battle strategy…

Uzbekistan’s unofficial ban on romantic celebrations isn’t new. Last year, news agency Turkiston described Valentine’s Day as the work of “forces with evil goals bent on putting an end to national values.”

Other Muslim countries feel equally as frigid toward the amorous holiday, which is a nominally Christian one.

Saudi Arabia and Iran have both banned celebration of the day, Voice of America reports. Iranian officials last year said they would take action against amorous citizens who ignored the ban. Saudi Arabia prohibits the gifting of red on V-day — including chocolates, bears, or roses, according to the Saudi Gazette.

In India, right-wing group Sri Rama Sena warned in 2010 that it would take action against educational institutions, restaurants and theaters if they encouraged Valentine’s day celebrations. Some adherents of the group even burned Valentine’s Day cards…

Malaysia joined in the spoil-sporting last year when it announced it would crack down on “immoral acts” during the holiday as part of a wider campaign for its citizens’ lifestyles to be “sin-free.”

The head of the Malaysian Islamic Development Department told state media: “In reality, as well as historically, the celebration of Valentine’s Day is synonymous with vice activities.”

Is there no end to bureaucrats on this planet with no heart for love?

Muslim women on their way to the symbolic stoning of Satan

Saudi authorities have executed a woman convicted of practising magic and sorcery.

The Saudi interior ministry said in a statement that the execution had taken place on Monday, but gave no details of the woman’s crime.

The London-based al-Hayat daily, however, quoted Abdullah al-Mohsen, the chief of the religious police who arrested the woman, as saying she had tricked people into thinking she could treat illnesses, charging them $800 a session.

The paper said a female investigator followed up the case, and the woman was arrested in April 2009 and later convicted in a Saudi court.

It did not give the woman’s name, but said she was in her 60s.

So far 76 people have been executed this year in Saudi Arabia, according to an Associated Press count. At least three have been women.

In the GOUSA – with appropriate political connections – she might have been elected governor, say, of Florida. Although her profit margins were obviously not sufficient to impress Saudi princes much less Big Pharma.

Why Texas? Well, if the topic is political rule based on ignorance, allegiance to superstition and bigotry – stimulated by the occasional execution to excite fervor – there’s hardly a better comparison.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A Saudi court has sentenced a woman to 10 lashes for challenging a ban on women driving in the conservative Muslim kingdom…

The sentence was reported two days after Saudi King Abdullah granted women the right to vote and run in municipal elections. He also promised to include them in the next all-appointed consultative Shura Council in 2013.

“Flogging is a cruel punishment in all circumstances but it beggars belief that the authorities in Saudi Arabia have imposed lashes on a woman apparently for merely driving a car,” Philip Luther, an Amnesty regional deputy director, said in an emailed statement…

Under Saudi Arabia’s strict Islamic laws, women require a male guardian’s permission to work, travel abroad or even undergo some medical surgeries. They are not allowed to drive.

While there is no written law banning women from driving, Saudi law requires citizens to use locally issued licences while in the country. Such licences are not issued to women, making it effectively illegal for them to drive.

In May, as pro-democracy protests swept across the region, some women in Saudi Arabia called for their right to drive. A campaign called Women2Drive issued calls on social media such as Twitter and Facebook to challenge the ban.

Some women posted on twitter that they drove successfully in the streets of Jeddah, Riyadh and Khobar while others said they were stopped by police who later let them go after signing a pledge not to drive again.

Isn’t a boycott of such a backwards nation overdue? Retain the minimal contacts required for commerce and communications – but, suggest tourists avoid this theocracy like the plague.

UPDATE: The King evidently felt enough heat to force the court to withdraw the sentence.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca has accepted gifts from executives seeking his agency’s business, individuals who later received special treatment from him, and even a pair of felons implicated in a massive money-laundering and fraud scheme, according to a Times review of disclosure records…

Since becoming sheriff in 1998, he has accepted more than $120,000 worth of gifts and free travel. In a recent three-year span, he accepted significantly more freebies than California’s 57 other sheriffs combined.

State law allows local officials to accept gifts, with some restrictions. But government watchdogs said Baca’s willingness to accept so many gifts creates potential conflicts of interest.

“Doesn’t he realize the appearance is terrible?” said Bob Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies. “When you’re taking gifts from strangers, there’s only one reason. They only give gifts because they want something.”

Baca rejected the notion that donors were looking for special favors or treatment. “The implication of all these gifts is ‘Well, they’re influence-buying.’ Nothing could be more opposite than that,” he said. “What they’re expressing is appreciation for the respectful way we do business…”

RTFA. It’s long, almost as complex as the way the sheriff rationalizes away any sense of ethics while accepting gifts from people doing business with the county.

Police fire tear gas at protestors in Bahrain
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Saudi Arabia sent troops into Bahrain today to help put down weeks of protests by the Shi’ite Muslim majority, a move opponents of the Sunni ruling family on the island called a declaration of war.

Analysts saw the troop movement as a mark of concern in Saudi Arabia that political concessions by Bahrain’s monarchy could embolden the Saudi kingdom’s own Shi’ite minority.

Which shows you how much political courage “analysts” have.

About 1,000 Saudi soldiers entered Bahrain to protect government facilities, a Saudi official source said, a day after mainly Shi’ite protesters overran police and blocked roads…

Witnesses said the 25-km (16-mile) causeway between the two countries was closed and tanks were rolling across to Bahrain, a key U.S. ally and home of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet.

Analysts and diplomats say the largest contingent in any GCC force would come from Saudi Arabia, which is already worried an uprising by Bahrain’s Shi’ites may inspire restive Shi’ites in its own Eastern Province, the center of the oil industry.

Bahraini opposition groups including the largest Shi’ite party Wefaq said the move was an attack on defenseless citizens.

“We consider the entry of any soldier or military machinery into the Kingdom of Bahrain’s air, sea or land territories a blatant occupation,” they said in a statement…

The reports come after Bahraini police clashed on Sunday with mostly Shi’ite demonstrators in one of the most violent confrontations since troops killed seven protesters last month.

After trying to push back demonstrators for several hours, police backed away and youths built barricades across the highway to the main financial district of the Gulf banking hub.

Those barricades were still up on Monday morning, with protesters checking cars at the entrance to the Pearl roundabout, the focal point of weeks of protests. On the other side of the same highway, police set up a roadblock preventing any cars moving from the airport toward the harbor.

Between theocracy and monarchy, there isn’t a whole boatload of progress happening among the United States’ dearest allies in the region.

Oh, did I say “allies”. I meant keepers of the flow of oil from the region to Western industry and transport.

Oil is thicker than water

In August last year, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak was not happy with Saudi Arabia. He complained that the Saudis appeared to be funding an opposition candidate, Anwar Ibrahim, in upcoming elections.

What’s more, the Malaysian authorities suspected two senior Saudi princes of involvement. The Saudis launched an investigation, and uncovered something very different — and more alarming.

A secret report seen by CNN concludes: “There is no evidence any Saudi official ever supported Anwar Ibrahim” and “claims of support from the Saudi royals named in the initial report [names redacted] were found to be without basis.” But the investigation found that hundreds of millions of dollars of Saudi money had been funneled to leading Islamist politicians and political activists overseas. It also found that al Qaeda and the Taliban were still able to use Saudi Arabia for fund-raising, despite numerous measures to choke off those sources of cash.

According to a Saudi source who is not authorized to speak publically, “People close to the senior leadership of the Taliban live in Saudi Arabia and send money back” [to the Taliban].

Today he estimates the money reaching al Qaeda is “in the region of tens of thousands of dollars possibly hundreds of thousands…”

The problem facing Saudi authorities is huge, the source told CNN. “Eighty-six percent of all Islamic charities are based in Saudi Arabia” making “monitoring all their activities difficult.” The problem was compounded by several other factors, he said. Saudi Arabia “has the world’s fourth largest migrant workforce, 7 million legal workers, 3 million illegal.”

Many of them use unregulated Islamic Hawala money transfer banks where a deposit in one country can immediately be picked up in another with no paper trail to trace it. The Hawala networks were identified by the U.S. Treasury Department last year as a significant channel for funding the Taliban and other insurgent groups…

With friends like this, etc.. The Saudi royal family are vendors. We are customers for their oil. Not even clients.

So, please, don’t pay too much attention to high-sounding declarations of comradeship in the War on Terror. Or whatever it’s called this week.

Saudi Arabia has taken an Israeli bird into custody on suspicion of espionage after it was found to be wearing a transmitter and leg bracelet with the words “Tel Aviv University,” the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv reports.

Ha’aretz, another Israeli newspaper, says the wounded bird is part of a long-term Israeli research project into bird migration patterns, but residents told Saudi Arabia’s Al-Weeam newspaper that the incident seems to be a “Zionist plot.”

Iran’s Tabnak news agency, according to Ha’aretz, reported that “spy personnel number of X63 [the I.D. number on the leg bracelet] leaves no doubt that other birds are going to be sent by the Zionist regime for espionage against Saudi Arabia and other countries.”

Give me a fracking break! One group of theocratic nutballs being extra-paranoid over the activities of a tiny rational portion – of another group of theocratic nutballs.

The first oil pipeline linking the world’s biggest oil producer, Russia, and the world’s biggest consumer of energy, China, has begun operating.

The pipeline, running between Siberia and the northeastern Chinese city of Daqing, will allow a rapid increase in oil exports between the two countries.

Concentrated in western Siberia, Russia’s network of pipelines for oil exports has so far run towards Europe.

Until now, Russian oil has been transported to China by rail. Russia is expected to export 15m tonnes of oil through the new pipeline each year – about 300,000 barrels a day.

The project cost $25bn and was partly financed by Chinese loans.

The core of China’s stimulus programs was infrastructure. Not only energy-based facilities like this pipeline; but, four transcontinental high-speed railways systems. The Great Recessaion served as an opportunity to build commerce for the long haul.

Our new Republican governor will probably shut it down.

History keeps on rolling along

Millions of dollars of Saudi Arabian money have flowed into Afghanistan over the past four years, the country’s intelligence officials say, with the sponsorship of terrorism its most likely use.

According to members of the Afghan financial intelligence unit, FinTraca, the funds, totalling more than £920 million, enter from Pakistan, where they are converted into rupees or dollars, the favoured currency for terrorist operations.

“We can trace it back as far as an entry point in Waziristan,” said Mohammed Mustafa Massoudi, the director-general of FinTraca in Kabul. “Why would anyone want to put such money into Waziristan? Only one reason — terrorism.”

The revelations illuminate the difficulties in dividing the Taleban from al-Qaeda influence and the continuing involvement of Saudi donors in sponsoring the insurgency…

It also suggests that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the offshoot, still has a potent and far-reaching financial ability. Although Saudi Arabia — the home of the bin Laden family — is considered a key ally in the war against terror, a US government report last year said that private Saudi backers were the chief source of finance for the Taleban.

With friends like these…?

Italian-built Falaj2 Stealth patrol boats on order for Emirates Navy

The United Arab Emirates navy is thought to have opened fire on a small patrol vessel from Saudi Arabia after a dispute over water boundaries. According to one report, two Saudi sailors were injured in the alleged bombardment.

The Saudi vessel was forced to surrender, and its sailors were delivered into custody in Abu Dhabi for several days, before being released and handed over to the Saudi embassy earlier this week.

The clash happened in disputed waters between the coasts of Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and the peninsula on which the gas-rich state of Qatar sits…

The seabed is rich with oil deposits, while the Dolphin pipeline project to carry natural gas direct from Qatar to Abu Dhabi has provoked irritation in the Saudi authorities. Nevertheless, direct conflict between the two countries’ armed forces is highly unusual.

The Gulf is one of the most heavily armed regions in the world. The Saudi government has been building up its army and air force for years in response to what it sees as a regional threat from Iran…

But now the UAE, despite its small size, is the fourth largest purchaser of weaponry on the international market in the world.

Western governments are exasperated that the two countries are unable to co-operate because of a series of long-running border disputes, largely influenced by oil reserves…

Is there anything to do with oil profits and the greedy bastards controlling most of it – that doesn’t provoke militarism and war?