Police in China have spent three months seizing bogus meat, some of it fake beef or mutton made out of fox, mink and rat.

Preliminary results of a government inquiry into last week's collapse of a nine-story building on the outskirts of Bangladesh's capital have found that "heavy machinery and high-capacity generators" were "largely responsible," according to state media.

Bolivian President Evo Morales said he is expelling the U.S. Agency for International Development from his country for allegedly meddling and conspiring against the government.

 President Barack Obama said Friday he came to Mexico to break down stereotypes between the United States and its neighbor to the south.

In meetings this week in Washington, Arab states appeared to soften their 2002 peace plan, acknowledging that Israelis and Palestinians may have to swap land in any eventual peace deal.
The United States and the Palestinian leadership in the occupied West Bank praised the move. But speaking to hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the Gaza Strip on Friday, senior Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh said it was a concession that other Arabs were not authorised to make.
"The so-called new Arab initiative is rejected by our people, by our nation and no one can accept it," Haniyeh, prime minister of the Hamas government in the coastal enclave, said.
"The initiative contains numerous dangers to our people in the occupied land of 1967, 1948 and to our people in exile."
He was referring to the partition of British-mandate Palestine in 1948 when the United Nations voted to divide the territory into a Jewish state and an Arab state, and to the 1967 war when Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.[aljazeera]

U.S. officials say Israel has launched an airstrike into Syria, while Israeli officials say they cannot comment on the report.

U.S. officials told news agencies late Friday that the strike occurred late Thursday or early Friday and likely targeted a suspected weapons site. The reports said there is no indication that Israeli warplanes entered Syrian airspace.

The officials spoke to reporters anonymously. The U.S. government has made no official remarks on the reports.

Online news source Politico cites U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, as telling the audience at a Republican fundraising dinner Friday that Israel had bombed Syria that day. He did not elaborate.

Israel has declined to address the reports specifically, but says it is determined to prevent the transfer of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime to terrorists.

If confirmed, this would be the second time Israel has conducted airstrikes on Syria this year. Israel recently stated that it conducted a January airstrike on a weapons convoy in Syria that was thought to be headed for Lebanon's Hezbollah rebels.
VOA

The civil war in Syria, one of the few lasting legacies of the Arab Spring, has been under way for more than two years. The Americans and Europeans have had no appetite for intervention after their experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. At the same time, they have not wanted to be in a position where intervention was simply ruled out. Therefore, they identified a red line that, if crossed, would force them to reconsider intervention: the use of chemical weapons.
No one thought that Syrian President Bashar Assad was reckless enough to use chemical weapons because they felt that his entire strategy depended on avoiding U.S. and European intervention, and that therefore he would never cross the red line. This was comforting to the Americans and Europeans because it allowed them to appear decisive while avoiding the risk of having to do anything.
But in recent weeks the possibility of intervention increased, as first the United Kingdom and France and then Israel and the United States asserted that the Assad regime had used chemical weapons.[statesman]

Tucked in the northeast corner of Africa, Eritrea is one of the most closed societies in the world, so much so that it's sometimes dubbed the "North Korea of Africa."

President Isaias Afwerki does not tolerate any independent media. The Internet is restricted. Reporters without Borders recently named it 179th out of 179 countries for freedom of expression.

It's illegal to criticize the government which could mean something as simple as complaining about the city power outage. Even gatherings of more than seven people might get you hauled into a police station.

"Even asking a question like, 'Where is my father?' if your father is in jail," says Isayas Sium, an Eritrean-American software engineer in San Jose, Calif., who left the country in 1995. "These are the questions you cannot ask, let alone protest or criticize the regime."

From his perch in California, Sium tries to stay politically connected to his country. He marches when there's a local demonstration, contributes to refugee causes and posts on Facebook.

But there's always one thing missing. The people inside Eritrea don't dare to "like" his Facebook posts. And they never march in the streets themselves. For Eritrean activists living abroad, this silence can be frustrating.

So Sium had an idea: If we can't ask them to come out, what if we ask them to stay home?

An Act Of Defiance

Eritreans typically hit the coffee shops and movie houses on Friday nights, so the idea was to use this as a passive resistance that hopefully could not be punished.

The movement was dubbed Freedom Friday, or Arbi Harnet in the Tigrinya language that is widely spoke in Eritrea. Sium and other activists abroad then had to inform Eritreans in a country with no free media. So they smuggled out a phone book, organized volunteers on Facebook and started cold-calling the fatherland.

"At first it was a strange thing," says London-based activist Selam Kidane, "for somebody that you don't know to phone you randomly and talk to you about things that are considered quite dangerous."

Sium agrees.

"The first question they ask is, where'd you get my number? Then we tell them, 'Oh, I don't know you, I got your number from the phone directory.' So some of them say, 'OK, thank you.' Some will just hang up after they hear ...[EDGE]