Gun control opponents hold rallies across the US
‘High noon’ events held in 47 states to protest against legislative proposals announced by Barack Obama
Julie Dermansky and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 January 2013 01.07 GMTThousands of gun advocates gathered peacefully on Saturday at state capitals around the US to rally against stricter limits on firearms, with demonstrators carrying rifles and pistols in some places while those elsewhere settled for waving hand-scrawled signs or screaming themselves hoarse.
Activists promoted the “Guns Across America” rallies primarily through social media. Over 18,000 people RSVPed on Facebook, and the rallies kicked off at high noon in 47 states.
The size of crowds at each location varied from dozens of people in South Dakota to 2,000 in New York. Large crowds also turned out in Connecticut, Tennessee and Texas. Some demonstrators in Phoenix, Arizona, and Salem, Oregon, came with holstered handguns or rifles on their backs. In Frankfort, Kentucky, attendees gave a special round of applause for “the ladies that are packin’.”
In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, over 200 people, mostly white, middle-aged males, turned up to show their displeasure with Obama’s 23 new executive orders and his attempt to reinstate the assault weapons ban.
Brotherhood Struggles to Translate Power Into Policy in Egypt
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MAYY EL SHEIKH
Published: January 19, 2013CAIRO – When President Mohamed Morsi and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood pushed through a new constitution last month, liberals feared it would enable them to put an Islamist stamp on the Egyptian state, in part by purging nearly half the judges on the Supreme Constitutional Court.
But those warnings are turning out to be premature, at the very least, as the court itself made clear last week at its opening session last week, its first meeting under the new charter.
The president of the court sneered with disdain at a lawyer for the Muslim Brotherhood trying to address the reconfigured bench, stripped of 7 of its 18 members. “As if you left a court to be spoken of like this!” Judge Maher el-Beheiry snapped. He had already declared that the court, perceived as an enemy of the Islamists, “can never forget” the Brotherhood’s protests against it during the constitutional debate.
Campaign fights to keep EU cross-border crime powers
David Cameron’s opt-out plans under fire as police back European arrest warrant as weapon against international crime
Daniel Boffey Policy Editor
The Observer, Sunday 20 January 2013A housewife courted by David Cameron following her campaign for justice for her son, who was left brain damaged after an assault in Greece, has turned on the prime minister over his European agenda. Maggie Hughes is set to be the public face of a campaign against the Tory plan to opt out of EU cross-border and crime measures.
Her son Robbie, a former semi-professional footballer for Oxford United, was left on the brink of death in 2008 after being subject to a brutal gang attack by British men while on holiday in Crete. He was left in a coma, endured four brain operations, lost his sense of smell and taste and, to this day, has no memory of his family or friends.
India’s ruling party names Rahul Gandhi as VP
Congress party elevates 42-year old, who is son, grandson and great-grandson of Indian prime ministers, to higher post.
Last Modified: 20 Jan 2013 02:37
Rahul Gandhi, often tagged as India’s “prime minister-in-waiting”, was elevated to the governing Congress party’s number-two post, positioning him to lead the party, which his family has long dominated, in parliamentary elections next year.
“Together we will transform the country,” Gandhi said in his speech accepting the post of Congress vice president on Saturday, according to the Press Trust of India news agency.
“I have great experience,” the 42-year-old scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty said in the northern Indian city of Jaipur, at a party meeting held to prepare for general elections in 2014.
Members of the Congress Working Committee earlier approved a motion making him – the son, grandson and great-grandson of Indian prime ministers – second in the party’s hierarchy. His mother Sonia Gandhi is the party president.
Algeria ends desert siege with 23 hostages dead
Algerian troops ended a siege at a gas plant in the Sahara where 23 hostages died, with a final assault which killed all the remaining hostage-takers.
20 JAN 2013 06:15 – REUTERS
Believed to be among the 32 dead militants was their leader, Abdul Rahman al-Nigeri, a Nigerien close to al-Qaeda-linked commander Mokhtar Belmokhtar, presumed mastermind of the raid.
An Algerian interior ministry statement on the death toll gave no breakdown of the number of foreigners among hostages killed since the plant was seized before dawn on Wednesday.
Details are only slowly emerging on what happened during the siege, which marked a serious escalation of unrest in north-western Africa, where French forces are ratcheting up a war against Islamist militants in neighbouring Mali.
Keep on trucking: The human impact of the rise of Monterrey’s new super-suburbs
The American dream is taking shape in Monterrey, Mexico, complete with elite apartments and luxury shopping malls. But what of the men building this modern-day El Dorado – have their lives changed for the better? Photographer Alejandro Cartagena peers into their world as they make their way to work…
PETER POPHAM SUNDAY 20 JANUARY 2013
The city of San Pedro Garza Garcia in Mexico is living the Mexican-American dream: only two hours’ drive from Texas, it has become the closest thing to an elite north-American suburb available south of the border, with its sumptuous condominiums stacked in leafy hills, its country club and Porsche sales room, its large choice of private schools, its five-star hotels and luxury malls. This is where the neo-liberals’ vision of Mexico is taking its most seductive form.
Of course, all that blue-chip real estate needs to be built, and the men who build it live on the reverse side of the dream: no longer in squalid shanty towns but in the surreal new working-class housing estates that have sprung up on the opposite side of Monterrey from San Pedro, to the north-east, in remote locations where nobody lived at all until developers descended and unloaded row after row of tiny detached homes, one-up one-down, in surreally tasteful pastel shades, lined up along long, empty roads.
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