Sayed Nasr, defense attorney for Muslim Brotherhood leaders and President Morsi’s aides and advisers, said more than 450 detainees at the high security Tora Prison began a hunger strike, to protest brutally harsh treatment and intolerable conditions that make prison cells not fit for human, nor animal habitation.

As Egyptians witness the putschists’ flawed anti-demonstration law in action, coup authorities escalate their vengeance war against everybody who dares oppose their illegitimate quest for power.

The military regime in power in Egypt “is a coup against the January 25 Revolution and its goals“, say activists of the April 6 movement, which led the 2011 uprising that ousted former president Hosni Mubarak.

The statement came after three of the group‘s leaders were sentenced to three years in jail for holding “illegal protests“. Ahmed Maher, Mohamed Adel and Ahmed Duma are all in jail.

Several hundreds of Egyptians protested in central Cairo on Monday against a court ruling that sent three leading secular pro-democracy campaigners to jail, witnesses said.

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Rouhani’s comments, in an editorial in a German newspaper Monday and accompanying Twitter messages on an account associated with him, came during a Christmas break in talks over Iran’s nuclear program.

Der iranische Präsident Hassan Rohani will sein Land aus der internationalen Isolation führen. Seine Regierung verlasse in der Außenpolitik „frühere, extreme Ansätze“, erklärte Rohani in einem am Montag in der „Süddeutschen Zeitung“ veröffentlichten Beitrag.

„We want to rebuild and improve our relations to European and North American countries on a basis of mutual respect,“ he wrote in a contribution for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.

For months now, NSA defenders have argued repeatedly that the bulk metadata programs were necessary to stop terrorist attacks. For a while they were throwing around the claim of „54 thwarted terrorist events“ which some (falsely) pretended meant 54 thwarted attacks. However, the numbers have been debunked repeatedly by people looking into them. Multiple Senators have debunked the idea that the bulk metadata collection was useful. Senator Patrick Leahy said that his own review of a classified list of what the program was necessary for did not show that it was used to thwart terrorist attacks. Separately, Senators Ron Wyden, Mark Udall and Martin Heinrich went so far as to file an amicus brief stating that they‘ve yet to see any evidence that the program has been useful.

The European Union urged Egypt to reconsider jail sentences handed down to three leading figures of the country‘s 2011 uprising, saying they stemmed from flawed laws curbing freedom of expression.

Let‘s repeat the details here: (1) FISA Court issues secret ruling that totally reinterprets Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act in a manner that appears to be quite different than any plain language reading. (2) Snowden leaks a bunch of documents that reveal the existence of certain bulk data collection which has everyone up in arms. (3) FISA Court itself says that more information is a good thing for debate, and that it would like to release the ruling in question, asking the DOJ to do some redactions as necessary. (4) The DOJ says, well, given the choice, we‘d just as soon redact the whole damn thing. (5) The FISA Court says, „Come again? You need to explain that some more.“

(12.12.) Today, many nations are revising their moral values and ethical norms, eroding ethnic traditions and differences between peoples and cultures. Society is now required not only to recognise everyone’s right to the freedom of consciousness, political views and privacy, but also to accept without question the equality of good and evil, strange as it seems, concepts that are opposite in meaning. This destruction of traditional values from above not only leads to negative consequences for society, but is also essentially anti-democratic, since it is carried out on the basis of abstract, speculative ideas, contrary to the will of the majority, which does not accept the changes occurring or the proposed revision of values.

We know that there are more and more people in the world who support our position on defending traditional values that have made up the spiritual and moral foundation of civilisation in every nation for thousands of years: the values of traditional families, real human life, including religious life, not just material existence but also spirituality, the values of humanism and global diversity.

Of course, this is a conservative position. But speaking in the words of Nikolai Berdyaev, the point of conservatism is not that it prevents movement forward and upward, but that it prevents movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.

In recent years, we have seen how attempts to push supposedly more progressive development models onto other nations actually resulted in regression, barbarity and extensive bloodshed. This happened in many Middle Eastern and North African countries. This dramatic situation unfolded in Syria. (…)

The intensity of military, political, economic, and informational competition throughout the world is not decreasing, but only getting stronger. Other power centres are closely monitoring Russia’s progress as it grows stronger.

We have always been proud of our nation. But we do not claim to be any sort of superpower with a claim to global or regional hegemony; we do not encroach on anyone’s interests, impose our patronage onto anyone, or try to teach others how to live their lives. But we will strive to be leaders, defending international law, striving for respect and national sovereignty and peoples’ independence and identity. This is absolutely objective and understandable for a state like Russia, with its great history and culture, with many centuries of experience, not of not so-called tolerance, neutered and barren, but the actual modern, natural life of different peoples within the framework of a single state.