Image via Wikipedia

In Israel, lying in order to get your way into bed may be punishable with a jail sentence. A Palestinian who pretended to be Jewish in order to have casual sex with a woman was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Deliveryman Sabbar Kashur, 30, met an unnamed woman by chance in predominantly Jewish Western Jerusalem sometime in 2008. He told the woman that his name was “Daniel” and that he was “single and looking for a long-term relationship.”

Less than two hours later, the couple was sneaking into a nearby building for casual sex. According to media reports, Kashur left the building without waiting for the woman to get dressed.

Sometime afterwards, the woman found out that “Daniel” was really Sabbar. She went to the police shortly afterwards, falsely claiming that Kashur had violently raped her. Court proceedings went forward.

Eventually, even after the truth (so as it may) of the event transpired, Kashur accepted a plea bargain of 18 months in prison for “rape by deception” rather than risking a longer sentence:

Prosecutors acknowledged that the sex was consensual, but accused him of misrepresenting himself.

The court agreed, sentencing Kashur despite acknowledging that his case was not “a classical rape by force”.

“If she hadn’t thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have co-operated,” the judges said in their ruling.

“The court must protect the public interest against sophisticated criminals with a smooth tongue and sweet talking, who can lead astray innocent victims.”

Thoughts:

1. It’s nice to know that “serious romantic relationships” can include having sex in an office building two hours after you meet. Just like in America!
2. If lying in order to get laid was a crime, half the men in America (and Israel) would be in prison right now.
3. Maybe the solution to the whole Palestinian-Israeli conflict is for the two sides to get together and have lots of Isratinian babies.

As for Kashur, his case is provoking a legal furor and will likely be taken to the Supreme Court.

Kurdish supporters of the PKK march. Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife

Syrian security forces have begun a major crackdown against Kurdish separatists affiliated with the Turkish-based Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

The PKK is considered to be a terrorist organization by the United States, UN, NATO and the European Union due to their frequent attacks on civillian targets.

On July 1, 400 PKK members were arrested in a sudden raid by the Syrian secret police under charges of “membership in a terrorist organization, extraction of money by extortion and attempting to separate Kurds of the country along ethnic and religious lines.” Following the arrests, undisclosed punitive measures were taken against non-PKK affiliated Syrian Kurds in the city of Haseke.

Syria’s security apparatus appears to have arrested PKK members operating out of Haseke, Aleppo, Kamishli, Afrin and Rakka.

This follows the killing of 11 PKK terrorists by the Syrian military in June.

According to the Israeli DEBKAfile website, Turkey sold Israeli-made unmanned drones to Syria and over 300 Syrian Kurds are dead and 1000 injured in fighting with the Syrian military — most of them civillians.

Alhough DEBKAfile often prints rumors and unverified stories, television network al-Arabiyya confirms that Syria is using Israeli-operated aircraft and that hundreds of Kurds are dead.

The PKK also has bases in Iran and Iraq and, just today, blew up a major natural gas pipeline connecting Turkey and Iran.

Meanwhile, Damascus is involved in some strange diplomacy for the region: Turkey’s foreign minister and Hamas head Khlad Meshaal just had a Syrian-sponsored sitdown. According to Hamas, the talks discussed “ways of breaking the (Israeli) embargo.” This was followed by a Syrian-sponsored Allawi-al-Sadr summit. Al-Assad is keeping busy, eh?

A shot down RQ-1 Predator in Serbia's Museum of Aviation. Image via Wikipedia

In the boring-but-important department, the US government has approved export of a modified version of the unmanned Predator drone to the Middle East and South Asia. First on the list of potential buyers? Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Prior to this, sale of Predators was approved only to the NATO bloc, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

According to Bloomberg’s Gopal Ratnam, interest is high:

“There’s interest from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates,” Frank Pace, president of the Poway, California-based company, said in an interview at the Farnborough Air Show near London today. The U.S. recently approved the company’s request for an unarmed version of the Predator drone for export to countries beyond the NATO block, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, Pace said.

The company may sell as many as 100 of the so-called Predator XP models that is approved for export, Pace said. General Atomics has sold about 435 Predator series of drones. The average price of the plane ranges from about $4 million for the basic model to about $15 million for the latest Avenger version, according to spokeswoman Kimberly Kasitz.

“Saudi Arabia is a huge country and if they want to cover the country well they alone could get 50 aircraft,” Pace said.

(Emphasis ours).

The non-NATO Predators will differ from the full-functionality versions in several significant ways. Most importantly, they will lack the ability to carry missiles and will be crippled to perform surveillance and reconnaissance missions only.

Pakistan is currently embroiled in an ongoing insurgency against local Islamists while Saudi Arabia is widely suspected of involvement in the ongoing Zaidi insurgency in Yemen.

Drone aircrafts are in wide use throughout the Middle East, with both home-grown and foreign-purchased systems a common feature of all the region’s air forces. Turkey unveiled one of their own just last week, intended for use in the Kurdish insurgency.

Even non-government militias are armed with drones in the Middle East — Hezbollah purchases aerial drones from Iran.

However, Predators are considered among the best; General Atomics’ newest unmanned vehicles are almost undetectable by radar.

More importantly, the propaganda value in being armed with Predators — even crippled ones — is invaluable: Their missile systems are known for their accuracy.

Image via CrunchBase

New York-based Twitter darlings bit.ly may become part of Yahoo.

The URL-shortening service, which is widely used on Twitter and in the larger Web 2.0 world, is reported by GigaOm to be in talks with Yahoo. Here is Om Malik’s take on the acquisition rumors:

Yahoo and some of the other web giants have been kicking the tires on New York-based URL shortening service Bit.ly, according to a few people in the know. The interest in the company has increased over the past 60 days or so. Conversations are said it to be in early stages, and the company raised about $3.5 million ($2 million in venture capital and $1.5 million in debt) in March 2009 from Ron Conway and other super angel investors. Bit.ly declined to comment for the story.

So talks are still in an early stage, if Malik is correct. Fair enough — it’s easy to imagine Yahoo testing every aspect of the service before going ahead. The whole purchase sounds set to be one of 2010’s larger acquisitions.

If Yahoo purchases bit.ly, their newest service will have ties to… Libya. .ly is Libya’s top-level domain and bit.ly pays a token annual fee to a Libyan registrar for use of a .ly web address. According to Rex Dixon of bit.ly, Libya was chosen for the attractiveness of the to-level domain:

We picked the name bitly because it’s short and it is evocative of small bits, loosely coupled, a theme at betaworks. Bit.ly is a shorter url than bitly.com, which we also use, and echoes the name of several micro-blogging services like present.ly, song.ly and near.ly.

To purchase the domain, we paid $75 to an online registrar accredited by ICANN, the international nonprofit that governs internet domains and naming, which is headquartered in Marina del Rey, California, here in the US of A.

ICANN signed an accountability framework with Libya Telecom and Technology in March 2007, which sets out the telephone company’s (LTT’s) obligations as a registrar for the .ly domain and provides an internationally-accepted mechanism for dispute resolution.

However, this also subjects bit.ly to Libyan law and Libya Telecom and Technology’s web regulations. LT&T’s regulations could not be found online, but the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya’s domain name registration regulations specifically denotes that “domain names must not contain obscene, scandalous, indecent, or contrary to Libyan law or Islamic morality words, phrases nor abbreviations.”

Luckily for bit.ly, the regulations do not apply to content: bit.ly is a repository for thousands of both pornographic and anti-links. Bit.ly also operates another service, J.mp, which does not rely on a Libyan URL.

Gamal "Jimmy" Mubarak: Heir to the throne? Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife

Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s long-serving president, has been in bad health for quite some time. The country’s censorship laws make prison a likely possibility for anyone discussing his health in print. Even bloggers and Twitter users who discuss Mubarak’s health too loudly risk imprisonment. As a result, a cottage industry has been built up around Mubarak health rumors in Egypt.

In ealy 2010, German and Russian television erroneously reported that Mubarak died after he disappeared for six weeks.

Mubarak made a public appearance some day after the television reports to dispel rumors, but his schedule has been erratic ever since.

According to the Washington Times, US intelligence believes Mubarak has terminal cancer of the stomach and pancreas. Despite the paper’s sometimes ideologically-motivated leanings, the story appears solid. The reporter who got the scoop, Eli Lake, has a solid record on national security and intelligence stories.

The 82-year-old President is one of the Middle East’s longest-serving leaders; Mubarak has been in office since 1981.

So what happens when Mubarak dies?

We don’t know.

First of all, there’s no guarantee Mubarak may be going anytime soon. Fidel Castro has held onto nominal power for years despite obvious infirmities and history is full of seriously ill leaders serving as figureheads while their advisors “keep the boat rowing.”

According to Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow and Egypt specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, an entire floor of the military hospital in Cairo’s Mahdi neighborhood “was prepared to treat him” and that “I heard that they pump him up with something that makes him able to function, so he can do these meetings and go to these public events.”

Mubarak’s hand-picked successor is son Gamal, a technocrat with support among Egypt’s upper classes. However, Gamal is widely percieved as inexperienced and a bit of a dilletante. When the senior Mubarak dies, Gamal Mubarak — nicknamed “Jimmy” — will be competing with Egyptian intelligence chief General Omar Suleiman and former International Atomic Energy Head Mohammed el-Baradei for control of the nation. Suleiman enjoys widespread military support but is viewed as somewhat hesitant to assume power. El-Baradei has widespread support among the masses, but has limited support within Egypt’s ruling National Democratic Party.

Most importantly, Egyptian law bans el-Baradei, the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, from running for president in the next year.

Egypt’s largest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood is officially banned but nonetheless retains several seats in parliament. While they undoubtedly would like to assume power, they lack support within the country’s military, upper class and middle class.

Given Mubarak’s precarious health, a betting man would put the odds on the President passing sooner rather than later. When he passes, there will be change. But what kind of change, exactly — a continuation of National Democratic Party rule or a change in governmental structure — is open to debate.

But some things won’t change. For instance, Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel or the $1.5 billion in foreign aid Egypt recieves from the US annually.

While anti-Israel sentiment permeates every sector of Egyptian society, the two countries share a quiet-yet-substantial working relationship based on common enemies (read: Iran, political Islamists). More importantly, the National Democratic Party views the Islamist Hamas government in the Gaza Strip as an enemy; they have often gone out of their way to work with Israel to make life difficult for Hamas.

While anything is possible, the Muslim Brotherhood only have an outside chance to assume power — barring unforeseen circumstances, either Suleiman, el-Baradei or the younger Mubarak will inherit control of Egypt.

Meanwhile, the Christian Science Monitor is anticipating Egypt’s “possible regime change” while bloggers at The Guardian are encouraging Egyptian activists to emulate American hippies. Yes, hippies.

Meanwhile, popular discontent in Egypt is expoding over government corruption while Egypt’s middle and upper classes continue to experience enviable economic growth.

In other words: The next year will be interesting for Egyptians — and the world.