Clinton: U.S. Has Had 'Limited' Engagement With Muslim Brotherhood

In a press conference this morning, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said the United Sates has had contact with the Muslim Brotherhood.

The New York Daily News reports:

She revealed Thursday that America will renew its "limited contacts" with the organization, a move that is likely to anger Israel and its supporters who are uncomfortable with the group's highly conservative version of Islam.

Clinton said during a visit to Budapest that Egypt's upcoming parliamentary elections in September have given the U.S. a new impetus to recognize the country's largest Islamist movement.

"We believe, given the changing political landscape in Egypt, that it is in the interests of the United States to engage with all parties that are peaceful and committed to nonviolence that intend to compete for the parliament and the presidency," Clinton said.

The BBC reports that the Muslim Brotherhood "welcomed" Clinton's words, but that the U.S. had made no "direct contact."

The BBC adds:

The Muslim Brotherhood has stressed that the new party it has set up to contest September's elections will be a civil, not a theocratic, group.

But correspondents say that with its Islamist agenda and historical links to radical groups, the group is feared and mistrusted in the West and to some extent in Egypt.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/06/30/137529660/clinton-u-s-has-had-limited-engagement-with-muslim-brotherhood?ft=1&f=1014

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Senate OKs Crocker as Afghanistan ambassador

The Senate on Thursday confirmed the nomination of Ryan Crocker to be the new U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

Crocker will succeed Karl Eikenberry, who had strained relations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

A former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Crocker is a veteran diplomat who previously retired from the foreign service in 2009 after also serving in Pakistan, Kuwait, Lebanon and Syria.

He was first assigned to the American Embassy in Beirut during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the bombings of the embassy and the Marine barracks in 1983. As one of the foreign service's most experienced Middle East hands and a fluent Arabic speaker, he also held diplomatic posts in Qatar, Iran and Egypt.

Source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/cnn_allpolitics/~3/OuFiP-QmCUY/index.html

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Clinton Outlines Road Ahead For Arab Democracy

Speaking at an international conference in Lithuania, the secretary of State cited the real risk of Middle Eastern and North African nations slipping back into autocratic old ways. She also lamented the latest accounts of violence in Syria.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/07/01/137548394/clinton-outlines-road-ahead-for-arab-democracy?ft=1&f=1004

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Foreign Policy: Google Searches For Peace

Google Ideas just concluded its Summit Against Violent Extremism in Dublin but William McCants of Foreign Policy thinks there are a few things the search engine giant doesn't quite have all the answers to ? at least not yet.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/07/01/137552741/foreign-policy-google-searches-for-peace?ft=1&f=1057

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Business, Free Speech Winners In High Court Term

A lesser-known ruling involving a cell phone contract has the potential to all but obliterate the right to sue corporations. The decision upheld fine-print clauses that bind consumers to arbitration even when state law forbids such clauses.

Lawyers who represent large companies said the decision could spur more mandatory arbitration clauses in all sorts of contracts; not just retail contracts, but employment contracts, too. Lawyer Peter Keisler said he would expect many large corporations to require new hires to sign contracts promising not to sue as a condition of employment.

"It's almost malpractice for a lawyer of a company now not to put an arbitration clause in any kind of document, whether it's a consumer contract or an employment agreement," said Supreme Court advocate Tom Goldstein. "All of those agreements will be enforced and the company [will] no longer face the prospect [of class-action liability], if they write the agreement correctly."

In another big-business win, the court's five conservatives ruled that generic drug-makers, which account for 75 percent of the nation's prescriptions, cannot be sued for failing to warn consumers of dangerous side-effects, as long as their labels track their brand-name counterparts.

Not all of the big-business victories this term came in 5-to-4 votes. By a unanimous vote, the court threw out an anti-pollution lawsuit brought by state and local governments against the five largest electrical power companies — companies that combine to produce approximately 10 percent of the carbon emissions in the United States. The court said the states had no right to sue.

Looking at the term overall, observers without exception, see a conservative arc that is hostile to litigation, especially litigation that seeks to regulate business practices by holding companies accountable in court for their actions.

The business community won "the triple crown" of cases, said Robin Conrad, executive director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Litigation Center. "Not all cases are created equal," she said, and the chamber won all of the most important ones in which it was involved this term.

The only major case that the chamber lost involved a challenge to Arizona's strict state law imposing harsh penalties on businesses that hire illegal workers. The case was the only one in which the chamber joined forces with labor and civil rights groups and the federal government. Carter Phillips, who represented the chamber in that case, said the outcome suggests that for at least five members of the court, federal law does not trump state law on immigration matters as much as had previously been presumed.

First Amendment

Beyond the business cases, the other major theme that has emerged for this court is a very pure approach to the First Amendment.

Every legal case presents a clash of values, observes Stanford Law School Dean Larry Kramer. And for judges, as for the rest of us, "there are things we care about more and things we care about less ... for judges no less than anyone else, when a higher commitment comes in conflict with a lower one, the higher one wins."

Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/07/01/137538756/business-free-speech-winners-in-high-court-term?ft=1&f=1003

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This July 4th, Uncertainty Abounds

Victor Davis Hanson, National ReviewFor the last 235 years, on the Fourth of July, Americans have celebrated the birth of the United States, and the founding ideas that have made it the most powerful, wealthiest and freest nation in the history of civilization.But as another Fourth of July approaches, there has never been more uncertainty about the future of America -- and the anxiety transcends even the dismal economy and three foreign wars. President Obama prompted such introspection in April 2009, when he suggested that the United States, as one of many nations, was not necessarily any more exceptional than others. Recently,...

Source: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/06/30/an_exceptional_fourth_of_july_110418.html

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