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Coach JewelryEl-Aseel restaurant - which translates as Original or Pure in Arabic -- is tucked away on the third floor of a run-down building in the Egyptian border-town of Rafah, minutes from Gaza.

Moustafa, 22, wearing an Adidas jumpsuit, stands in the smoldering kitchen preparing chicken. He explains: "We are a border city, divided by two sides, so in a way we're both Palestinian and Egyptian. If you go up on the roof, you'll see Gaza. It's very close, but very far."

I spent four days in Rafah and nearby cities to see how places far from the revolutionary Tahrir Square are grappling with life in Egypt now that former President Hosni Mubarak is gone.

Rafah -- an isolated town right on the border with Gaza -- now finds itself in the eye of the change sweeping the region, socially and economically if not geographically.

Discount Coach HandbagsEgypt to open Gaza border crossing at Rafah

As old autocracies crumble, how will lives change on the streets and how will new rulers handle one of the biggest questions in the Middle East -- the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

Rafah is one of only two official entry and exit points -- the other is in Israel -- for human traffic into Hamas-ruled Gaza, but since a 2007 blockade supported by Mubarak, the impoverished town has thrived on tunnel-onomics -- an extensive underground system of smuggling goods into Gaza.

With talk of Egyptian plans to open the border with Gaza permanently, that trade is now compromised, leaving smugglers with mixed feelings of hope for Palestinians, but anxiety over losing money.

cheap hermes birkinGaza, home to an estimated 1.5 million people, has been under an Israeli blockade since June 2007, when Hamas -- which sweeped Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 but are also deemed a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States, and the European Union -- militarily forced supporters of the rival Fatah group from the strip.

Rafah's closed border crossing is a strikingly tangible symbol of former Mubarak's Israel-allied regime, but after revolutionary protests toppled him, recent events have led some to forecast a possible sea change in Egypt's foreign policy.

Earlier this month, Egypt successfully brokered a reconciliation deal between the Islamist group Hamas and Fatah, who are considered more mainstream, or moderate, by the West.

cheap nike shoes storeAnd in April, the Egyptian government temporarily reopened the Rafah terminal, with foreign minister Nabil al-Araby saying the decision to seal it off was "shameful."

He said then the opening would soon be permanent. Alla Iraqi, an Egyptian Armed Forces spokesman, told CNN on Wednesday the border will open permanently on May 28.

Two weeks ago, the Arab world commemorated Nakba, what Arabs call "the catastrophe" when thousands of Palestinians were dispelled from their lands or fled as a result of the creation of Israel in 1948.

Coach ScarvesIn Al-Arish, a town near Rafah which is also home to many Palestinians, hundreds rallied, chanting: "To Jerusalem we go, millions and martyrs."

Coach JewelryEl-Aseel restaurant - which translates as Original or Pure in Arabic -- is

tucked away on the third floor of a run-down building in the Egyptian border-town of Rafah, minutes from Gaza.

Moustafa, 22, wearing an Adidas jumpsuit, stands in the smoldering kitchen preparing chicken. He explains: "We are a border city, divided by two sides, so in

a way we're both Palestinian and Egyptian. If you go up on the roof, you'll see Gaza. It's very close, but very far."

I spent four days in Rafah and nearby cities to see how places far from the revolutionary Tahrir Square are grappling with life in Egypt now that former

President Hosni Mubarak is gone.

replica coach handbagsRafah -- an isolated town right on the border with Gaza -- now finds itself in the

eye of the change sweeping the region, socially and economically if not geographically.

Egypt to open Gaza border crossing at Rafah

As old autocracies crumble, how will lives change on the streets and how will new rulers handle one of the biggest questions in the Middle East -- the

Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

Rafah is one of only two official entry and exit points -- the other is in Israel -- for human traffic into Hamas-ruled Gaza, but since a 2007 blockade

supported by Mubarak, the impoverished town has thrived on tunnel-onomics -- an extensive underground system of smuggling goods into Gaza.

hermes birkin handbagsWith talk of Egyptian plans to open the border with Gaza permanently, that trade is

now compromised, leaving smugglers with mixed feelings of hope for Palestinians, but anxiety over losing money.

Gaza, home to an estimated 1.5 million people, has been under an Israeli blockade since June 2007, when Hamas -- which sweeped Palestinian parliamentary

elections in 2006 but are also deemed a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States, and the European Union -- militarily forced supporters of the

rival Fatah group from the strip.

Rafah's closed border crossing is a strikingly tangible symbol of former Mubarak's Israel-allied regime, but after revolutionary protests toppled him, recent

events have led some to forecast a possible sea change in Egypt's foreign policy.

Earlier this month, Egypt successfully brokered a reconciliation deal between the Islamist group Hamas and Fatah, who are considered more mainstream, or

moderate, by the West.

Nike outletAnd in April, the Egyptian government temporarily reopened the Rafah terminal, with foreign minister

Nabil al-Araby saying the decision to seal it off was "shameful."

He said then the opening would soon be permanent. Alla Iraqi, an Egyptian Armed Forces spokesman, told CNN on Wednesday the border will open permanently on

May 28.

Two weeks ago, the Arab world commemorated Nakba, what Arabs call "the catastrophe" when thousands of Palestinians were dispelled from their lands or fled as

a result of the creation of Israel in 1948.

In Al-Arish, a town near Rafah which is also home to many Palestinians, hundreds rallied, chanting: "To Jerusalem we go, millions and martyrs."

During the protest, resident Ahmed Baqi, 23, said: "We must use our new platform to extend a hand to Palestinians. It's our fight, too."

Large protests were planned in Rafah but the Egyptian military blocked demonstrators from entering the Sinai Peninsula.

Amid rising demands from Egyptians for the state to cool its relations with Israel, the military crackdown angered demonstrators in Cairo, who staged

protests at the Israeli embassy. Coach Totes Bags Ensuing clashes left 350 people

injured.

Sitting in a gated security compound in Rafah, a military lieutenant who asked not to be named, said: "Egypt cannot afford an escalating situation right

now."

He said activists were wrongly prioritizing the Israeli-Palestinian issue over Egypt's poor economy and rising sectarian tensions.

"It's not the time to help our neighbors ... and it's not the time to aggravate Israel," he said.

Coach BootsThe scrum of reporters assembles in the pre-dawn quiet two blocks from the border of Chinatown. It is more than two hours before Dominique Strauss-Kahn is scheduled to make an appearance, but it doesn't matter. On Monday the curtain will lift on Act I of the trial of the new century, and the courtroom has precious few seats. Two hours early might be too late. (See pictures of Dominique Strauss-Kahn behind bars.) After being herded through metal detectors, we ride the nearest elevator to the 13th floor. The doors open, and middle-aged Europeans to my left and right take off in a dead sprint. I don't realize why until I see a line assembling behind a velvet rope: the people are seeking admission to an exclusive club. replica coach outlet I played two sports in college, and though I'm well out of my prime shape, I am able to catch up and elbow my way into the throng. The hallway outside of Part 51 at the Manhattan criminal court looks like an old, crumbling train station. Faded marble walls flank scuffed green linoleum floors; a sign over one restroom reads "Public Toilet-Women." There is little air conditioning, and soon the hallway became stifling with the cluster of humanity. Inside the courtroom, the white walls are half covered with faded wood paneling, and the benches for the observers might resemble church pews, save for the wood dividers separating one person's bum from the next. The crime Strauss-Kahn is accused of committing allegedly occurred in a $3,000-a-night hotel suite in midtown Manhattan. When he was arrested, he was yanked from a first-class seat on a flight to Paris. What might he be thinking as he sits in this aging hall of justice, little changed since it was built in 1941 under Mayor F.H. LaGuardia? After a few minutes, two enormous gentlemen sit right in front of me in the first row, nearly blocking my view. I think they are detectives until I recognize their faces from the pictures of the defendant being led from his temporary home.cheap hermes birkin They are his bodyguards, probably hired by Stroz Friedberg, the firm handling Strauss-Kahn's security to the tune of $200,000 a month. (See a TIME story about Strauss-Kahn's security firm.) Outside, maids from the New York housekeeping union wear uniforms of light blue, black and white. They stand arm in arm protesting the alleged mistreatment of one of their own. In the rest of the building, dozens of trials are under way: people accused of drug possession or DUIs or assaults plead guilty and not guilty, and are sentenced or set free. But in Part 51 on the 13th floor, reporters from around the world wait silently, their cell phones in their laps, having been told repeatedly that any attempted picture taking will result in confiscation. Strauss-Kahn finally walks in dressed in a black suit and dark blue tie. nike sb shoesHe is stone-faced as he takes his seat next to Benjamin Brafman, the legendary defense lawyer who wrote the book, or at least the lectures, on the trial process. When the bailiff reads the charge, Strauss-Kahn and his lawyers stand up. In past decades, the reporters would have been ready, pens and pads in hand; today they hold their breath as they clutch their phones and Strauss-Kahn utters the two words everyone knows is coming: "Not guilty." The defense requests that the prosecution present all relevant information within a 45-day period of discovery. Judge Michael J. Orbus agrees and sets the date for the next hearing: July 18, at 2 p.m. E.T. The court officers bellow, "Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Please rise and move out of the courtroom." The scrum prods its way out the doors to what looks like a horse pen set up in front of the building, where each side fires their opening salvos. Brafman calls the two-word plea a "powerful statement." Kenneth P. Thompson, representing the accuser, says she is a woman of dignity and respect; all she wants is justice. As more than a hundred reporters clutching cameras and recorders fight for position, an old lawyer says to me, "I've seen a lot of trials here. I was here for the trial after John Lennon was shot. I've never seen anything like this." Coach Madison CollectionsBut as they'd say in a potboiler, we ain't seen nothing yet.

Coach OutletI'm still not sure what I did to set it off. All I know is that I was blithely surfing the Web using Apple's Safari browser on my MacBook Air last week, and a page identifying itself as "Apple security center" popped up. It declared that my Mac had 75 viruses, then launched the installation routine for something called Mac Protector. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. I'm pretty smart for my age — and I read my tech blogs — so I knew it was a Trojan horse, pretending to find malware on my computer so it could offer to sell me anti-malware software. If I bit, it would try to steal my credit-card information. (Similar scams have dogged Windows users for years.) I closed the security center, then canceled out of the installer and dragged it into the trash. The intrusion was over, and my Mac and data were never really at risk. (See the top 10 Internet blunders.) Still, it was an unnerving experience. replica coach outletFor years, attacks against Apple's OS X operating system have had a whiff of urban legend about them. Security researchers have repeatedly proved that Macs aren't impervious, but the troublemakers have mostly steered clear. They've been too busy inflicting pain on a far bigger, juicer target: Windows. Mac Protector is real, and it's cropping up in variants with names such as Mac Defender and MacGuard. cheap hermes birkin They're landing on enough Macs that Apple released an OS X update this week designed to foil them. Whereupon a version of the Trojan that bypassed the new security measures immediately appeared. (This could go on for a while.) The attacks on Macs and Apple's response to them have stirred up new controversy in an ancient debate. Is OS X uniquely well protected from cybercrooks? As its market share increases, will it become a more enticing target? Are Mac users who don't use security software asking for trouble? These questions sound simple enough, but the discussion has been fueled as much by emotion and politics as by rational analysis. Some Mac fans have behaved as if it were their birthright to live in a peaceable kingdom. They shouldn't. Some Windows users, itching to learn what schadenfreude feels like, keep predicting that the sky is about to crash down on Macheads.cheap nike shoes store It hasn't. Software companies that sell Mac anti-malware utilities like to chime in regularly. Guess what stance they tend to take? (See the best netbooks and netbook accessories.) The first thing to understand about Mac Defender/Protector/Guard is that it's just one attack, and not a particularly devious one. Even in its most pernicious form to date, it can do its dirty work only if its intended victim decides to install an unfamiliar piece of software that appears from nowhere — which nobody should do under any circumstances. It's also a cakewalk to remove, unlike many Windows-based fake antivirus Trojans. (They can be virtually impossible to eradicate without the help of third-party software.) Moreover, the scariest pieces of malware aren't Trojans; they're more sophisticated threats like botnets, which can silently enlist your PC into a zombie army of hundreds of thousands of machines dedicated to tasks like advertising fraud and spam distribution. Coach Totes Bags Almost all of them target Windows, not OS X. But the fact that the recent spate of Mac attacks could be worse doesn't mean that Apple types don't need to think about their computing safety. It's not just the possibility of more OS X malware. Instead of putting a particular operating system in the crosshairs, no-goodniks are turning their attention to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, where they spam users, steal identities and generally do their best to wreak havoc. They don't care whether you use Windows or a Mac, as long as your guard is down.

Coach BootsEvery morning at 8, Maulawi Zahir heads into Waygal district center, a remote mountain village of stone houses stacked almost vertically up granite slopes. As the undeniable man in charge of the Afghan village, the Taliban leader is there to hear and settle disputes. But despite his group's ascendancy, he struggles to burnish his credentials among his constituents, even in an area where loathing for NATO and the Afghan government runs deep. "People aren't happy, but they pretend to be," says one local trader. "They dislike the Taliban as much as they dislike government." Zahir's attempt at daily dispute resolution is important in one respect: for the first time in almost a decade the Taliban are administering an Afghan district unmolested. In fact, Waygal has been almost completely abandoned by NATO for the past three years. Discount Coach HandbagsFor the insurgents — and their non-Afghan militant allies from Pakistan and Arabic- speaking countries — it is the most visible step in a longer term strategy to turn Nuristan, itself virtually given up by the alliance since 2009, into a militant hub and a staging post for attacks on strategic targets, including the capital, Kabul. (See pictures of Osama bin Laden's Pakistan hideout.) Still, it is hard going for the Taliban. Local commanders don't exactly have the same agendas as the foreign fighters with visions of global jihad. Elsewhere in the province, on occasions when the militants have massed, Afghan government commandos and their U.S. mentors have scrambled from bases lower down the valleys to disperse them. Last Wednesday, as Taliban fighters attempted to storm Du Ab district center in Nuristan's west, U.S. warplanes killed more than 100 in a series of bombing runs, reportedly including civilians and a convoy of Afghan police. After NATO bombs killed several children in southern Helmand province on Sunday, President Hamid Karzai complained loudly.cheap hermes birkin NATO apologized for the civilian casualties. Karzai has yet to comment on the Du Ab strike although his government has been broadly supportive of the Nuristan campaign, with the Interior Ministry promising to reclaim areas lost to the Taliban. NATO is quick to point out that the sustained fighting in Nuristan is a testament to the toughness of the Afghan police on the front lines. That is undoubtedly true, but it misses the point that the Taliban attacks are part of a rolling effort to drive the government out of Nuristan altogether. nike dunk shoes The Taliban has three objectives in mind: to take Nuristan; storm Asadabad, capital of neighboring Kunar province; and undermine NATO's plans to hand a third territory, Laghman province, over to the Afghan government. (See pictures of the battle against the Taliban.) "The number of attacks has been shooting up," says a Western security analyst. "Bases are getting smashed, there are [illegal] checkpoints on the road every day." On May 1, when the Taliban announced their nearly nationwide spring campaign, Asadabad bore the brunt of the assault: three mortar attacks on a U.S. base in 36 hours and assaults on the prison and police headquarters, in what may well have been a hint of things to come. Indeed, history is not on NATO's side. Coach Madison CollectionsThe 1978 uprising by landowners and clerics, which led to civil war, the virtual collapse of the government and ultimately the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, began in eastern Nuristan and spread quickly to Kunar. "Trouble here can break the central government," said Qari Ziaur Rahman, a regional commander for the Taliban who is also a leader of the Punjab-based militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad, in a 2008 interview. "Whoever has been defeated in Afghanistan, his defeat began from Kunar." Whether the Taliban and their allies can pull off a successful assault on Asadabad is questionable, but there seems little doubt they'll try. For its part, NATO has redeployed troops to the valley linking Waygal with Asadabad in what looks like an attempt to lock the door.

Coach OutletSarah Palin told CNN on Monday that she plans to take her "One Nation" bus tour to Iowa, the state that votes first in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. "I'm sure at some point I will be going to Iowa," Palin said during a visit to Fort McHenry in Baltimore. "At some point." The comments come on the heels of a RealClearPolitics story that said Palin is planning a visit to Iowa in June, the same month a documentary about her rise to power is set to debut in the Hawkeye State. replica coach outletThe trip would be Palin's first visit to Iowa since December, when she stopped there during a book tour. She also addressed a fund-raising dinner for the Iowa Republican Party last September. Palin and her family were mobbed by television cameras after her arrival at Fort McHenry, the fort that famously defended Baltimore from a British assault during the War of 1812. The battle served as the inspiration for the national anthem, Francis Scott Key's "Star Spangled Banner." Asked about her 2012 thinking, Palin said her family's concerns come first. hermes birkin handbagsBut she also said the unsettled nature of the Republican presidential field has left the door open for other candidates, herself included, to join the nomination fight. "It's going to be a changed-up field between now and when deadlines finally arrive for declaring," Palin told CNN. While she said she is "satisfied" with the Republicans who are already in the process of campaigning, she predicted that the field "is going to change up a lot." "I believe that there are many more out there who have much more to add," she said. "Competition breeds success. cheap nike shoes store I hope there is going to be vigorous debate and a lot of good aggressive competition even in the primary so our voters have a good choice." Unprompted, Palin brought up Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who said last week that he plans to consider a presidential bid. "I think he would be a fine candidate," she said. "We have a lot in common. Coach Totes BagsI really like him. But there are so many candidates and potential candidates out there who have so much to offer."