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admin:A stand-up comedian and women's right-to-drive activist, Fahad al-Butairi and Loujain al-Hathloul, were once seen as a groundbreaking Saudi power couple in a country that was rapidly relaxing its strict social rules.

Since then, both have been arrested, and a Twitter thread detailing their disappearance has gone viral, keeping alive a debate about the Kingdom's crackdown on dissidents. That debate reached a fever pitch after the October killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
American writer and television producer Kirk Rudell tweeted about his friendship with Butairi, who was widely known as the "Jerry Seinfeld of Saudi Arabia," and Hathloul, an internationally-known advocate for ending the prohibition of women driving in the country, on January 2.
Both were detained in 2018; Hathloul remains incarcerated.

Rudell tweeted about the couple he met in Los Angeles a few years ago while recording a TV show, and whom he continued to exchange messages with. "I'd like to see what they could do in this world, if they were given the chance," adding, "I'd like to have that dinner with them some day."
Rudell told CNN he was "surprised" by the tens of thousands of retweets, including a reply from California Congressman Adam Schiff, who said that he would be contacting Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States about the case.
"The responses were overwhelming and overwhelmingly positive. And it felt like people who didn't know them, who hadn't met them, who might feel they had little in common with this Saudi couple, for some reason seemed to feel the same visceral anger at their separation," Rudell told CNN.
Hathloul, 29, was arrested in March of last year as she was driving down a highway in the United Arab Emirates, where she had been living. She was then sent to Saudi Arabia and detained. The ban on women driving was eventually lifted, but only months after her arrest.
Around the same time, Butairi, 33, was detained in Jordan and put on a flight to Saudi Arabia where he was held for days before being released, according to four people close to the couple. It's unclear why he was detained.
Hathloul was released after some days, only to be arrested again a few weeks later in a sweep that targeted at least 11 women's right-to-drive activists. She remains in jail.
She and other women's rights defenders have allegedly been subjected to torture by electrocution and flogging, as well as s*xual harassment, according to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and three people close to the detainees.
A flyer circulating on social media in Saudi Arabia shows activists, including Hathloul, with a traitor stamp over each of their faces.
A flyer circulating on social media in Saudi Arabia shows activists, including Hathloul, with a traitor stamp over each of their faces.
In addition to Hathloul, the detainees include prominent women's rights activists Aziza al-Yousef, Eman al-Nafjan, Nouf Abdelaziz, Samar Badawi and Hatoon al-Fassi.
The official Saudi Press Agency said the women's rights defenders were accused of "suspicious contact with foreign entities to support their activities, recruiting some persons in charge of sensitive government positions, and providing financial support to hostile elements outside the country."
A former aide of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saud al-Qahtani, was present during at least one of the interrogation sessions and threatened to rape, kill and throw one of the detainees into the sewage system, according to Human Rights Watch and people familiar with the events.
The Saudi government did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the torture allegations, Qahtani's alleged role in the interrogations and the imprisonment of Hathloul and Butairi. Attempts to reach Qahtani through the Saudi government were unsuccessful. Riyadh previously denied allegations of torture in a statement to CNN following the initial Human Rights Watch report in November.
"The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's judiciary system does not condone, promote, or allow the use of torture. Anyone, whether male or female, being investigated is going through the standard judiciary process led by the public prosecution while being held for questioning, which does not in any way rely on torture either physical, s*xual, or psychological," a Saudi official told CNN in November. "The Kingdom will continue to uphold accountability and ensure justice is served within its laws."
Khashoggi's murder emboldens activists
Turkey has claimed that Qahtani, one of bin Salman's closest and most powerful aides, orchestrated the murder of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2. After weeks of denying any knowledge of the journalist's fate, Riyadh eventually claimed that his death was the result of a botched rendition attempt, and pinned the blame on Qahtani and a handful of other high-ranking officials.
Qahtani was removed from his post as bin Salman's communications chief, though he maintained other official positions.
The killing has sparked global outrage and tarnished bin Salman's reputation on the world stage. The CIA concluded that it believes bin Salman, commonly referred to by his initials MBS, ordered Khashoggi's murder. Riyadh has repeatedly denied that the Crown Prince was involved and says the claims in this purported assessment are false

Saudi prosecutors sought the death penalty for five of the 11 suspects accused of murdering Khashoggi as their trial began in Riyadh on January 3, the Saudi Press Agency reported.
Leading Saudi activist Hala al-Dosari told CNN that Saudis have been "emboldened" to speak out against the crackdown on human rights since Khashoggi's murder.
"I was very much silent after the women's arrests thinking that this must be an error," said Dosari. But Khashoggi's death "gave us a sense of urgency that this is not something that you can just wait out. This is a serious thing. People are being targeted and killed."
The chorus of concern over the Kingdom's alleged human rights abuses is also growing in the West. Last week, a group of British lawmakers and lawyers announced it was seeking access to the jailed female activists.
"There are credible concerns that the conditions in which the Saudi women activists are being detained may have fallen significantly short of both international and Saudi Arabia's own standards," British MP Crispin Blunt said.
Butairi: Not imprisoned, but not free
One person who has remained silent is Butairi. In the months since his release, he has stayed out of the public eye. He closed his Twitter account, which had millions of followers, and declined CNN's request for comment about the couple's detainment.
In his Twitter thread last week recalling his brief friendship with the couple, Kirk Rudell, the writer, said Butairi once told him that his wife was "much more famous" than he was in the Middle East.
While Hathloul was getting behind the wheel and breaking the law, Butairi was co-writing the lyrics for a music video parody called "No Woman, No Drive," which was watched more than 16 million times on YouTube.


source: edition.cnn.com/2019/01/08/middleeast/saudi-disappeared-couple-intl/index.html

I hope they are fine

emmynwah:Stunning Story Of Boko Haram Fighter's Ex-Wives Who Prefer Life With The Terrorists Than In IDP Camps

By Mod - 20 minutes ago - [ Update ]





An internally displaced person camp in Maiduguri, Nigeria, like the one that houses Zahra and Amina. Photograph: Sunday Alamba/AP

Zahra and Amina seem like lucky survivors of the scourge of northeastern Nigeria, the jihadist movement known as Boko Haram. Both were wives of fighters. Zahra escaped by agreeing to detonate an explosive vest that the militants strapped to her. After walking miles to her intended target, a government checkpoint, she turned herself over to soldiers. Amina fled with her three children after her husband was killed in battle.

Today, both women live in a camp for survivors of the conflict in the northeastern city of Maiduguri. When I met them on a recent research trip to the city, the last thing I expected to hear was that they wanted to rejoin the insurgents. Conventional thinking and security policies that aim to dissuade women from extremist groups tend to focus on ideology, presuming that only brainwashing could compel them to voluntarily join radical, violent militias. But here in the northeast, some women have largely been compelled to affiliate with Boko Haram by social and political conditions. Perversely, the group offers them respite from insecurity and the limited opportunities afforded them in a deeply patriarchal society riven by poor governance.

Zahra and Amina say that when they were with the militants, life was harsh and uncertain, but they had enough to eat. As voluntary wives of fighters, they were protected from s*xual predation. They attended religion classes, the first formal schooling many had ever received, and their children went to school, learning literacy and religion. There were courts where women could report abusive husbands. In contrast, in their now emancipated lives in the camp, they often go hungry. There is little chance to work to buy more food, and shortages have contributed to s*xual exploitation by the security forces who guard them. “Most Boko Haram women regret coming here, because life is just so hard,” says Amina.

These two women are just one small part of a massive humanitarian and security crisis that has been unfolding across the Lake Chad basin – the area where Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon meet – since 2014. Overshadowed by the conflicts in Syria and Yemen, the scale of humanitarian disaster in the region is nevertheless vast: more than 2.4 million people displaced, 5 million in need of food and shelter, and half a million children at famine levels of malnourishment.

While the Boko Haram insurgency may not directly affect the west – it doesn’t contribute to migration flows and the militants are not involved in attacks in Europe – the experiences of Boko Haram women carry wide implications for our understanding of why people join such movements. While the group, like many others that self-identify as “jihadist”, deploys ideological rhetoric to promote its political goals, it is the deprived and fractious context in which it operates that best explains its appeal – especially to women.

Zahra and Amina, like many women in the northeast, joined the militants by choice. They left by choice, too – unwilling to marry other fighters appointed by the group after their own husbands had died. Their stories challenge the dominant narrative around Boko Haram, shaped by the global outcry over the Chibok schoolgirls’ kidnapping, which holds that women only join by force, and that, similarly, only those who were abducted can be regarded as genuine victims. Returning from Nigeria, I met a group of Swiss women who regularly spend their holidays doing freelance volunteer work with female victims of Boko Haram. “We only help the ones who were kidnapped,” one pointedly told me.

But the circumstances that propel women such as Zahra and Amina into and out of Boko Haram show the limits of the neat categories of victim and perpetrator. In the early days of the insurgency, many women found the movement appealing because it offered alternatives to the patriarchy endorsed by their conservative families. The group’s leaders supported lower dowries, which meant more young women could choose husbands from among their peers, rather than the greying, financially secure men they would be traditionally compelled to marry. And while the militants were only able to provide for them so generously by looting and pillaging, some women felt the Nigerian state’s corruption justified these abuses. Life in the forest felt freer and more dignified than living in the dust of an internally displaced persons’ (IDP) camp, dependent on international aid groups for a meal a day.

Even now, Zahra’s and Amina’s thinking about the group – their belief that returning to the militants would improve their lives – is mostly a calculus of immediate survival. Dalori II, the camp where they live, like most in the city, is chronically short on food, and across satellite camps in the region groups such as Amnesty International have documented an epidemic of rape and s*xual exploitation. Some progress has been made to curtail these abuses, and humanitarian groups have tried to adjust food distribution practices to blunt the potential for abuse, but this has only changed the dynamic of the exploitation. “You have to become a harlot to stay in the camps,” says Amina.

One reason Zahra says she was glad to leave the militants was because she saw that their blind rejection of teaching in English was harming her children: “It does not benefit them to stay home. It’s better for them to learn.” She assumed that in Maiduguri, her kids would be able to attend school. But camp managers in Dalori II dismantled the one school on its premises, claiming it was no longer needed since people would be returning to their villages. But nobody has gone home, and now there is no school.

The northeast Nigerian state of Borno is now a vast patchwork of towns and villages with few men, a whole sub-society of single mothers trying to cope as breadwinners in areas with collapsed economies without their husbands’ protection and support. Some reintegration programmes offer skills training, but embroidering and selling a cap a month neither enables a woman to feed three children nor does it protect her from rape after dark. Plus, some international groups devote funds and attention to what they call “countering extremism”, with extremism often conceived in an amorphous way that views ideology, rather than a complex patchwork of political grievance and social frustrations, as a root cause of the violence.

While ending the insurgency and countering the militants’ appeal is obviously vital, it is also essential to recognise what precisely has guided women to join the militants in the first place. This has wider implications for the whole of the northeast, not just displaced women in the camps, or former Boko Haram women, but all women, who are trying to cope with conditions so impoverished and limiting that, sometimes, joining a militant group appears to offer a way out.

• Zahra’s and Amina’s names have been changed

• Azadeh Moaveni is senior gender analyst for the International Crisis Group and a former Middle East correspondent for Time magazine

***

Source:

www.tori.ng/news/114369/stunning-story-of-boko-haram-fighters-exwives-who.html

when there is no adequate provisions for her

wraymix:Barcelona coach Ernesto Valverde believes Real Madrid are enjoying one of their best periods of the season ahead of the teams’ Copa del Rey semi-final first leg next week.

Barca drew Madrid in the draw on Friday, meaning there will be three Clasicos in a month and two in four days, with the second leg on February 27 coming just before their La Liga fixture on March 2.

Chasing a record fifth Copa del Rey success in a row, Barcelona will be favourites, particularly after they thrashed Madrid 5-1 at the Camp Nou in October.



But their opponents have found form in recent weeks. Santiago Solari’s side have won six out of their last seven matches in all competitions.

“We see it as very even,” Valverde said at a press conference on Friday. “In the league, they arrived at a complicated time for them psychologically but now they are in a different moment, with more confidence.

“They are much better, getting better results and that changes a lot. A bit like Valencia tomorrow, we play them in one of their best moments of the season.”

Barcelona host Valencia at home in La Liga on Saturday and then face a trip to Athletic Bilbao next weekend, four days after the first leg against Real.

Valverde has rotated key players in the Copa del Rey this season and suggested he could do so again, admitting “we cannot neglect our job in La Liga”.

The Champions League also restarts this month, with Barca up against Lyon in the last 16.

“They are two great matches that come at a time when both teams are fighting for the top spots in the league and at the same time as the Champions League gets going again too,” Valverde said.

“It is a lot of important matches but we know that they are exciting for people, also for us, and it’s a great semi-final. Let’s see if we can make it through.”



Ousmane Dembele is close to recovering from an ankle injury but it is not clear whether the Frenchman will be fit for the first leg at the Camp Nou on Wednesday.


“I don’t know, we will evaluate him on Monday to see how he is,” Valverde said. “We thought for next week he could be available but I don’t know. On Monday we will have an answer.”

Barcelona also unveiled new signing Jean-Clair Todibo on Friday after the 19-year-old’s summer move from Toulouse was brought forward.

“He’s a signing for the future,” Valverde said. “But given his situation at Toulouse, it was decided he could join us now with the idea of settling in with his new team-mates.”

(AFP)

i see real Madrid qualified

HenryGee2310:Jesus was very popular, but he lost the election conducted by Pilate.
The election was between Jesus and Barabas and Pilate represented INEC at the time.
Barabas won and Jesus lost.
Where were the 5000 he fed?
Where was the family of the woman with the issue of blood?
Where were the 10 lepers?
Where were the lame, and all those he healed? Where was the family of Lazarus and that of Jarius?
That is the problem.
The right people will not win election when believers refuse to participate in politics.
Prayer is good, but prayer points do not count, only your votes count during elections!
Please go & get your PVC!
And go out *to vote on election Day*
DO NOT SIT AT HOME.
God bless you all.

HenryGee2310:Jesus was very popular, but he lost the election conducted by Pilate.
The election was between Jesus and Barabas and Pilate represented INEC at the time.
Barabas won and Jesus lost.
Where were the 5000 he fed?
Where was the family of the woman with the issue of blood?
Where were the 10 lepers?
Where were the lame, and all those he healed? Where was the family of Lazarus and that of Jarius?
That is the problem.
The right people will not win election when believers refuse to participate in politics.
Prayer is good, but prayer points do not count, only your votes count during elections!
Please go & get your PVC!
And go out *to vote on election Day*
DO NOT SIT AT HOME.
God bless you all.

relenting Jesus Christ to Nigeria politics is out of context

HenryGee2310:Wahala dey ooh about this Panties, bra and sanitary pads.

this ritual thing must be checkmate in our country for the sake of our future.

mimilistic:why will he step down

for the sake of integrity