Blurred Eyeglasses Unveiled To Help Israeli Ultra-Orthodox Avoid Impure Sights

Fascinating — wearing blurry goggles to obscure one’s surroundings as a means of keeping the mind and spirit clear. In a world in which are constantly bombarded with undesired information, perhaps we could all use a pair. The Times of Israel writes:

An ultra-Orthodox organization has developed a range of products to act as a first line of defense against the threat of seeing immodest women, Israeli media reported on Tuesday.

In a change of tactics from previous ultra-Orthodox strategies that in the past have targeted women as the culprits of lasciviousness, the Committee for Purity in the Camp offers a variety of gadgets to limit the field of view and so prevent men from exposure to over-exposed women. The devices have recently gone on sale in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods of Jerusalem and elsewhere.

Two semi-transparent stickers applied to the lenses of the user’s spectacles blur vision of anything beyond the range of a few meters and so diffuse immodestly dressed women to a harmless blot.

Source: Disinfo

Officials Claim Ecuador Will Grant Julian Assange Asylum

The Ecuadorian president has denied the rumors, saying that his government’s decision will not be cemented until the end of the week, but this seems like a positive development. The Guardian reports:

Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, has agreed to grant Julian Assange asylum, officials within Ecuador’s government have said. The WikiLeaks founder has been holed up at Ecuador’s London embassy since 19 June, when he officially requested political asylum.

“Ecuador will grant asylum to Julian Assange,” said an official in the Ecuadorean capital, Quito, who is familiar with the government discussions.

On Monday, Correa told state-run ECTV that he would decide this week whether to grant asylum to Assange. Correa said a large amount of material about international law had to be examined to make a responsible, informed decision.

It remains unclear if Assange will be allowed to leave Britain and fly to Ecuador, or amounts to little more than a symbolic gesture. At the moment he faces arrest as soon as he leaves the embassy for breaching his bail conditions.

Pigs and squatters threaten Peru's Nazca lines

The squatters have destroyed a Nazca-era cemetery and the 50 shacks they have built border Nazca figures, said Blanca Alva, a director at Peru's culture ministry.

She said the squatters, the latest in a succession of encroachments over the years into the protected Nazca area, invaded the site during the Easter holidays in April and that Peruvian laws designed to protect the poor and landless have thwarted efforts to remove them.

In Peru, squatters who occupy land for more than a day have the right to a judicial process before eviction, which Alva said can take two to three years.

"The problem is that by then, the site will be destroyed," she said.

She said she counted 14 pig corals in a recent inspection that also revealed broken bits of Nazca ceramics.

The Nazca lines known as geoglyphs, declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 1994, were produced over a period of a thousand years on a 200 square mile (500 square km) stretch of coastal desert.

They include enormous birds, monkeys and other geometric shapes. The culture ministry evicted a separate batch of squatters in January from near a sprawling design known as the Solar Clock, only to face down a new group months later.

The lines are striking reminders of Peru's rich pre-Columbian history, and are considered one of the world's greatest archeological enigmas, as no one knows for sure why they were drawn, so large, and for so long.

"They're very delicate and they've survived to this point for 1500 years," said Ann Peters, an archeologist affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, who hosted an international symposium on Nazca culture in Peru this week.

Peters said encroachments in the area threaten research by 60 or so archeologists specialized in Nazca.

Ancient Nazcans formed the figures by scraping away the desert's dark iron-oxide pebbles to reveal the white soil underneath, which hardened as unearthed limestone was exposed to morning dew.

The head of the squatter settlement, Jesus Arias, denies his community has hurt the area. "It isn't archeological to me. There was no cemetery there, and there are no lines from Nazca culture either."

Arias said the squatters are the grown children of people from the nearby town of San Pablo who want their own homes.

"Our population keeps growing," he said. "These are poor people who don't have the money to buy land or a house."

Arias said the culture ministry should do a better job marking the boundaries of protected areas.

Encroachments are a common way for the poor, and increasingly organized land traffickers, to acquire property in Peru. Evictions can be violent when security forces try to pry thousands of people from their homes.

"It could generate chaos," said Livina Alvis, a prosecutor in the province of Nazca.

The culture ministry's Alva said squatters are the biggest threat to Peru's more than 13,000 archeological and heritage sites, a rich trove of information for scholars around the world.

"We get 120-180 reports or alerts about encroachments every year," Alva said. "For my colleagues in the rest of Latin America, who get two or maybe five cases per year, that figure is unbelievable."

Source: Reuters

Facebook App To Offer Discounts To People Who Agree To Be Constantly Tracked With Facial Recognition Technology

Would you agree to this in return for a half-price smoothie? Created by advertising agency Redpepper, a program called “Facedeals” is already being tested in Tennessee, with plans to expand nationally in the near future. The way it works is, internet-connected cameras mounted in front of businesses capture the faces of comers and goers. Individuals who have agreed to participate in Facedeals are identified and tracked using facial recognition software when a camera spots them, and as a reward periodically receive personalized deals and coupons via their smartphones:

KFC and Pizza Hut closed in Nepal as staff threatens to kill branch managers

All four KFC and Pizza Hut restaurants in Nepal shut down on Tuesday saying that staff had attacked and threatened to kill branch managers.

Devyani International, which operates outlets of KFC and Pizza Hut in Nepal and neighbouring India, wrote a letter to authorities announcing the immediate closure of its eateries in the capital Kathmandu.

“In order to disrupt our operations, some staff have physically attacked and threatened to kill the senior managers,” the company said in a letter leaked to local media and seen by AFP.

“These acts have put the life of senior managers at risk. To maintain the safety of our restaurants and the staff, we have shut down our services for an indefinite period,” it said.

The shutters were down at the four restaurants on Tuesday, and Devyani International and the police were unavailable for comment.

KFC and Pizza Hut, Nepal’s only international fast-food chains, opened their first branches in the country three years ago, generating long queues of locals wanting to sample international cuisine.

Their arrival was seen as a sign of an improving environment for foreign firms in a country ravaged by bloody civil war between 1996 and 2006, when a peace deal was reached between Maoists and the government.

During the violence, rebels targeted foreign ventures including Coke, Pepsi and Unilever, but more recently Kathmandu has seen rapid growth in restaurants, malls and supermarkets selling foreign goods.

Source: Raw Story

French riot night: Cops injured, cars torched, school burnt

Hundreds of French youths torched buildings and cars and clashed with police, injuring 16 officers during an overnight riot in the northern French city of Amiens.

French police reported that the clashes involved some 100 rioters and 150 officers, beginning around 9pm Monday and ending around 4am Tuesday.

At least three bystanders were hurt after rioters pulled drivers from their cars while hijacking the vehicles, the AP reported.

“The confrontations were very, very violent,” Amiens Mayor Gilles Dumailly told French television network BFM.

One of the events that sparked the riot was an arrest made over the weekend for dangerous driving, French media reported. The arrest was seen by many locals as insensitive and unnecessarily violent, as residents were attending a wake for a 20-year-old who died in a motorcycle accident.

A leisure center and two school buildings were razed, along with a dozen cars, local officials said. Rioters used trash cans as flaming barricades, and threw heavy objects at police officers, who responded by deploying tear gas, rubber bullets and a helicopter.

Amiens has experienced riots in the past. The city is infamous for high unemployment, racial tension and an aggressive police force.

The district in Amiens was among 15 areas declared the most troubled in France earlier this month, prompting the government to pledge additional security and money for the region. Dumailly hoped tensions would improve with a plan to fix up the housing projects and offer more services, he said at the time.

In 2005, France saw its worst urban unrest in 40 years, which led to the declaration of a state of emergency by the country’s then-center-right government. Entire neighborhoods of Amiens burned for nearly a month.

The 2007 deaths of two youths hit by a police car sparked another wave of violence in the city. Unrest flared again in 2010 when police shot and killed a youth who had robbed a casino.

Source: RT

Mississippi River Is Drying Up