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Ketterson sent a copy of the marriage license. That changed everything.

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The Egyptian authorities are revoking the Al Jazeera Network’s licence to broadcast from the country, and will be shutting down its bureau office in Cairo, state television has said.

“The information minister [Anas al-Fikki] ordered … suspension of operations of Al Jazeera, cancelling of its licences and withdrawing accreditation to all its staff as of today,” a statement on the official Mena news agency said on Sunday.

In a statement, Al Jazeera said it strongly denounces and condemns the closure of its bureau in Cairo by the Egyptian government. The network received notification from the Egyptian authorities on Sunday morning.

“Al Jazeera has received widespread global acclaim for their coverage on the ground across the length and breadth of Egypt,” the statement said.

An Al Jazeera spokesman said that the company would continue its strong coverage regardless.

(watch this one full-screen!)

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China has blocked the word "Egypt” from the country’s wildly popular Twitter-like service, while coverage of the political turmoil has been tightly restricted in state media.

China’s ruling Communist Party is sensitive to any potential source of social unrest.

A search for "Egypt” on the Sina microblogging service brings up a message saying, "According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results are not shown".

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The gurus of so-called ‘radicalisation’ who have turned Islam into a security issue have fixed the debate, making bin Laden a timeless, single and permanent pathology of all things Muslim.

It is no exaggeration to claim that since 9/11 so-called radicalisation has replaced new Orientalism as the prism through which Western security apparatuses view Middle Eastern youth and societies. Guantanamo Bay, profiling, extraordinary renditions, among others, are only the tip of the iceberg.

The policing, equipment, funding, expertise and anti-terror philosophy being fed to the likes of Algeria, Libya and Morocco are geared towards fighting the ‘bearded, radical salafis’ whose prophet is Osama bin Laden. But, the tangible bin Ladens bracing suicide in its entirety have emerged from the ranks of the educated middle classes whose prophet is Adam Smith.

Al-Qaeda, literally "the base", may today be the swelling armies of marginals in the Middle East, not the ‘salafis’.

It is not the Quran or Sayyid Qutb – who is in absentia charged with perpetrating 9/11 despite being dead since 1966 – Western security experts should worry about. They should perhaps purchase Das Kapital and bond with Karl Marx to get a reality check, a rethink, a dose of sobriety in a post-9/11 world afflicted by over-securitisation.

From Tunisia and Algeria in the Maghreb to Jordan and Egypt in the Arab east, the real terror that eats at self-worth, sabotages community and communal rites of passage, including marriage, is the terror of socio-economic marginalisation.

The armies of ‘khobzistes’ (the unemployed of the Maghreb) – now marching for bread in the streets and slums of Algiers and Kasserine and who tomorrow may be in Amman, Rabat, San’aa, Ramallah, Cairo and southern Beirut – are not fighting the terror of unemployment with ideology. They do not need one. Unemployment is their ideology. The periphery is their geography. And for now, spontaneous peaceful protest and self-harm is their weaponry. They are ‘les misérables’ of the modern world.

Provided the bridge faces Mecca, of course.

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A 9-year-old girl’s cake brought in a lot of dough in Florida.

Cash, that is – $10,000 to be exact. A fertilizer company paid the sum for Abigail Putnam’s cake at the Polk County Youth Fair. Abigail’s father, Adam Putnam, is the state’s agriculture commissioner. He says even she knew a cake isn’t worth $10,000 and donated $9,000 of her money back to the fair.

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CNN, to its credit, is using coverage from the grown-ups at CNN International. MSNBC had Dan Senor (council on foreign relations) reporting from Davos. Yes, liberal MSNBC was getting live analysis from a neoconservative former spokesperson for the occupying U.S. government in Iraq. Fox just had former U.N. Ambassador and ultra-hawk John Bolton on to warn us about the Muslim Brotherhood. Al Jazeera had an opposition party leader on the phone.

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A few days later, the detectives saw Brown, 22-year-old Antoine Smith and 18-year-old Marquitta Brown drive to a Babies R Us/Toys R Us at 4607 Millennia Plaza Boulevard, where the three stole several boxes of diapers. The three then drove to the Windsor Cove Apartments in Orlando, where they sold the diapers, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

On Jan. 26, the detectives again followed the three to the store. When the Browns and Smith exited the store with more stolen diapers, detectives tried to arrest them, but the three ran away on foot.

The detectives were able to locate and arrest them shortly afterward.

These crooks will not be pampered…

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One man pleaded with people outside the museum’s gates on Tahrir Square not to loot the building, shouting at the crowd: "We are not like Baghdad." After the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, thieves carted off thousands of artifacts from the National Museum in Baghdad — only a fraction of which have been recovered.

Suddenly other young men — some armed with truncheons taken from the police — formed a human chain outside the main entrance in an attempt to protect the collection inside.

"I’m standing here to defend and to protect our national treasure," said one of the men, Farid Saad, a 40-year-old engineer.

Another man, 26-year-old Ahmed Ibrahim, said it was important to guard the museum because it "has 5,000 years of our history. If they steal it, we’ll never find it again."

Credit: Mars Exploration Rover Mission, NASA, JPL, Cornell; Image Processing: Marco Di Lorenzo, Kenneth Kremer

Celebrating 7 years on the surface of the Red Planet, Mars exploration rover Opportunity now stands near the rim of 90 meter wide Santa Maria crater. Remarkably, Opportunity and its fellow rover Spirit were initially intended for a 3 month long primary mission. Still exploring, the golf cart-sized robot and shadow (far right) appear in the foreground of this panoramic view of its current location. The mosaic was constructed using images from the rover’s navigation camera. On its 7 year anniversary, Opportunity can boast traversing a total of 26.7 kilometers along the martian surface. After investigating Santa Maria crater, controllers plan to have Opportunity resume a long-term trek toward Endurance crater, a large, 22 kilometer diameter crater about 6 kilometers from Santa Maria. During coming days, communication with the rover will be more difficult as Mars moves close to alignment with the Sun as seen from planet Earth’s perspective.

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China is planning to create the world’s biggest mega city by merging nine cities to create a metropolis twice the size of Wales with a population of 42 million.

Total investment in urban infrastructure over the next five years is expected to hit £685 billion, according to an estimate by the British Chamber of Commerce, with an additional £300 billion spend on high speed rail and £70 billion on urban transport.

Imagine not having to spend that kind of money on pointless wars…

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[Our economy] demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns [...] We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace. We need to have people eat, drink, dress, ride, live, with ever more complicated and, therefore, constantly more expensive consumption.

~American retail analyst Victor Lebow

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A "Black Widow" suicide bomber planned a terrorist attack in central Moscow on New Year’s Eve but was killed when an unexpected text message set off her bomb too early, according to Russian security sources.

The unnamed woman, who is thought to be part of the same group that struck Moscow’s Domodedovo airport on Monday, intended to detonate a suicide belt on a busy square near Red Square on New Year’s Eve in an attack that could have killed hundreds.

Security sources believe a spam message from her mobile phone operator wishing her a happy new year received just hours before the planned attack triggered her suicide belt, killing her but nobody else.

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While Muslim Protestors prayed today, Christian Egyptians formed human chains to protect them. Solidarity,strength and co-existence.

[31 pictures]:

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Great. My book ran out of batteries. Stupid future.

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So say “I don’t understand” more often, and when someone else says it be sure to embrace it as the lifeblood of your workplace.

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European robins may maintain quantum entanglement in their eyes a full 20 microseconds longer than the best laboratory systems, say physicists investigating how birds may use quantum effects to “see” Earth’s magnetic field.

Quantum entanglement is a state where electrons are spatially separated, but able to affect one another. It’s been proposed that birds’ eyes contain entanglement-based compasses.

Conclusive proof doesn’t yet exist, but multiple lines of evidence suggest it. Findings like this one underscore just how sophisticated those compasses may be.

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The Internet service provider (ISP) hosting WikiLeaks’ servers is fighting back against the European Data Retention Directive by running all customer traffic through an encrypted virtual private network (VPN) service before logging it.

The European Data Retention Directive, which was approved in 2006, aimed to identify the origin, time and means of communication for all Internet traffic to support investigations.

By anonymizing all traffic, not even WikiLeaks ISP Bahnhof will be able to see what customers are doing, making any such logs useless.

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Google won’t autocomplete searches for “bittorrent,” but if you are interesting in learning how to kidnap someone, make meth, build a bomb, cheat on your taxes, or shoplift, they will happily autocomplete your search for you.

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What you see here is a prototype for an emoticon keypad. The concept is mostly self explanatory, if you plug this in, you need only tap one of the bubbles with the emotion you wish to convey, and it will simply appear on your screen

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Consumer Watchdog’s latest complaints about the relationship of Google and the Obama administration are outlined in a 32-page report.

The paper questions a decision by NASA allowing Google executives to use its Moffett Federal Airfield near Google headquarters. Although H211, a company controlled by Google top executives, pays NASA rent, they enjoy access to the airfield that other companies or groups don’t have, Simpson said.

The paper also questions Google contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and other agencies, suggesting that, in some cases, Google contracts were fast-tracked. The paper also questions Google’s relationship with the U.S. National Security Agency and calls for the company to be more open about what consumer information it shares with the spy agency.

When asked if other companies, including broadband providers, should disclose what customer information they share with the NSA, Simpson said they should, too.

“I understand the NSA is a super-secret spook organization,” he said. “But given Google’s very special situation where it possesses so much personal data about people, I think that there ought to be a little more openness about what precisely goes on between the two.”

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Google’s Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said he expected to spend another 10 years at the company, after his surprise handover last week to co-founder Larry Page.

If he really thinks it’s necessary to say something like that, it’s a good bet he’ll be gone before summer.