Amal Clooney and Egypt's economy

Patrick Kingsley of The Guardian reported on Friday that Amal Clooney was threatened with jail by Egyptian authorities last February if she released a report in Cairo on flaws in the Egyptian judiciary that had been commissioned by the International Bar Association. The report is available on the Web here.

Significant elements of the Egyptian judiciary are obviously arbitrary, conspiratorial to the point of paranoia, and a complete mess, as demonstrated by the opposite verdicts reached in the two cases against former dictator Hosni Mubarak; in the mass executions of Muslim Brothers ordered by a notorious provincial hanging judge; by the jailing of Aljazeera and other journalists for reporting the news; and by the jailing of protesters for protesting (the hero of 2011, Ahmad Maher of the April 6 Youth, among many others, is in jail for another two years).

An organization sponsoring a controversial visit to Israel by a number of American Muslim “leaders” is funded by one of a handful of major financiers of extreme Islamophobic groups in the United States.

Internal Revenue Service filings show that the Jerusalem-based Shalom Hartman Institute has received generous funding from the Russell Berrie Foundation in recent years.

This foundation was named in the 2011 Center for American Progress report “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America” as one of the top seven donors to anti-Muslim hate groups in the United States.

Make a run for it across the Turkey-Syria border and there's a chance you'll be blown up.

According to Turkish government figures, there are more than 600,000 mines buried along the 900km border. They were laid decades ago to prevent illegal crossings.

Turkey signed the landline ban treaty in 2003, but it was slow to start demining and marking and fencing-off mined areas.

Then the war in Syria started and everything was put on hold.