Amnesty: Mubarak’s regime must stop flights to torture in Eritrea

Posted on By 3arabawy

I received the following statement from Amnesty International:

The Egyptian authorities are preparing to forcibly return up to 1,200 asylum-seekers to Eritrea. This follows the deportation of 200 people on Thursday evening and 200 others on Wednesday 11 June. Amnesty International has said that the organization fears 180 more might be deported today, late in the evening.
Asylum-seekers returned to Eritrea are at risk of torture and other ill-treatment, particularly those who have fled from compulsory military service. Most are likely to be arbitrarily detained incommunicado in inhumane conditions for weeks, sometimes years.

May’s occupation deaths in Afghanistan outnumber Iraq

Posted on By 3arabawy

From AP:

It’s a grim gauge of U.S. wars going in opposite directions: American and allied combat deaths in Afghanistan in May passed the monthly toll in Iraq for the first time.

AP is also reporting that:

As of Friday, June 13, 2008, at least 447 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to the Defense Department. The department last updated its figures June 7 at 10 a.m. EDT.
Of those, the military reports 310 were killed by hostile action.
Outside the Afghan region, the Defense Department reports 65 more members of the U.S. military died in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Of those, two were the result of hostile action. The military lists these other locations as Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba; Djibouti; Eritrea; Ethiopia; Jordan; Kenya; Kyrgyzstan; Philippines; Seychelles; Sudan; Tajikistan; Turkey; and Yemen.
There were also four CIA officer deaths and one military civilian death.

“Military civilian” by the way means mercenaries. What an oxymoron.

Superman found dead in Iraq

Egypt child labor a somber reality

Posted on By 3arabawy

From AFP:

Thirteen-year-old Essam Hussein spends his days lugging exhaust pipes in a little repair workshop in central Cairo, one of hundreds of thousands of children forced into labor to secure a future.
“I hate school, I like it here,” says Essam who dreams of owning his own repair shop with his brothers one day.
“I’ve been working here since last year,” he says, showing the mechanics’ garage where he has been working for about a year.
In a nearby workshop, Mohammed Hassan, 15, says he works only during the summer holidays.
“At least if school doesn’t work out, I’ll have a job,” says the teenager who makes around LE 40 per week.
Whether sweating under the engine of a broken down car, roaming the streets for a few pennies in exchange for flowers or picking cotton in the Nile Delta, one in 10 Egyptian children are forced into work.
On every street corner, out in the open fields or in gritty workshops, children, some as young as 10, are required to put in a day’s work.
The UN children’s agency UNICEF estimates that 2.7 million children between the ages of six and 14 in Egypt work.
According to official statistics, a third of Egypt’s 80 million population is below the age of 15. NGOs say that among those, 10 percent are forced to work, often in difficult conditions.