My News Today » Middle East

It’s generally considered a bad sign when your airline pilot gets on the PA system and asks you to pray

Kyle — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:22:11 +0000

Yahoo News – A worried Iranian airline pilot asked passengers to start praying after his plane was hit by a technical glitch early on Thursday, highlighting once again the notorious record of Tehran’s aircraft.

The Aseman Airlines Boeing plane had taken off from Tehran airport after a six-hour delay, but had to return following a technical fault, the ISNA news agency quoted a passenger as recounting.

“The plane took off at 0015 in the morning and had to land back in Tehran after 45 minutes,” the passenger said.

“The pilot told the passengers ‘the plane is facing a technical problem and has to return. So please pray.’”

Iran has been under years of international sanctions hampering its ability to buy modern planes from major manufacturers, such as Boeing and Airbus, or spare parts, and has suffered a number of air disasters over the past decade.

CERN researcher arrested for links to al Qaeda and possible plot to destroy the Earth

Kyle — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:26:33 +0000

BBC – The 32-year-old man of Algerian descent was one of two brothers detained in the south-east town of Vienne on Thursday.

Police believe they had been in contact over the internet with people linked to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and had been planning attacks in France.

Cern’s Large Hadron Collider is aiming to recreate conditions of the Big Bang.

The organisation confirmed that a physicist working at its site had been arrested “under suspicion of links to terrorist organisations”, and said it was helping the French police with their investigation.

Happy Afghanistan Election Day!

Kyle — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:22:27 +0000

Today is the day with the bombs blasting in the air Afghans go out to the polls to vote for their next president. With one cast of the ballet and a possibility of death soon after we salute you. Let Freedom Ring!

Neda, The Face of a Revolution

Kyle — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:41:21 +0000

Gawker – Unless you tuned out completely over the weekend you’ve seen the haunting video of a young woman named Neda dying on a Tehran street after being shot in the heart. She is now the immortal face of a revolutionary movement.

Click pic for source.

CNN Debates Twitter’s Relevance While Ignoring Important World Events Being Reported on Twitter

Kyle — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:40:58 +0000

Gawker – Over the weekend CNN’s Howard Kurtz asked America the burning question, “are we going overboard with this Twitter business?” Meanwhile, CNN virtually ignored an event overseas with the potential to alter world history, an event reported extensively by Twitter users.

On Saturday, as things turned from bad to worse in Iran as thousands of protesters took to the streets in anger to revolt against the sham election in that country, CNN, a cable news network that rose to prominence largely because of its reporting of strife in foreign lands, was virtually silent about the uprising on television and on the web. As pointed out by ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick, “hours after Iranian police began clashing with tens of thousands of people in the street, the top story on CNN.com remains peoples’ confusion about the switch from analog TV signals.”

CNN’s lack of coverage of the burgeoning revolution in Iran and the highly questionable re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, arguably America’s leading bogeyman at this moment in time, didn’t go unnoticed on Twitter, where the hashtag “#CNNFAIL” spread like wildfire and was one of the site’s trending topics for a large portion of the day.

Iranian experts say Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is so last season’s puppet leader. Well that is as long as the election isn’t rigged.

Kyle — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 23:22:13 +0000

www.guardian.co.uk – Iranians go to the polls tomorrow to elect a president after an acrimonious and volatile election campaign that has polarised the country and unleashed mass opposition to the hardline Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In the absence of reliable independent opinion polls, experts predicted today that Mir Hossein Mousavi, the moderate “green” candidate, would probably beat the controversial incumbent so long as the result was not rigged