Category Archives: Lands

Russia stance on Assad suggests divergence with Iran

Reuters reports: Russia does not see keeping Bashar al-Assad in power as a matter of principle, the Foreign Ministry in Moscow said on Tuesday in comments that suggested a divergence of opinion with Iran, the Syrian president’s other main international backer.

Fuelling speculation of Russian-Iranian differences over Assad, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps suggested on Monday that Tehran may be more committed to him than Russia, saying Moscow “may not care if Assad stays in power as we do”.

While Russia and Iran have been Assad’s foremost foreign supporters during Syria’s four-year-old war, the United States, its Gulf allies and Turkey have insisted the president must step down as part of any eventual peace deal.Talks in Vienna on Friday among the main foreign players involved in diplomatic efforts on Syria failed to reach agreement on Assad.

Asked by a reporter on Tuesday if saving Assad was a matter of principle for Russia, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said: “Absolutely not, we never said that.” [Continue reading…]

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Putin’s logic: The only way to maintain peace is to wage war

Masha Gessen writes: Much like the American gun lobby today, the Soviet rulers claimed that the only way to stay safe was to be armed to the teeth. Mr. Putin has now taken this logic a step further by claiming that the only way to maintain peace is to actually wage war.

“Peace, a life at peace, has always been and continues to be an ideal for humanity,” said Mr. Putin [speaking recently at the Valdai Discussion Club, a gathering of international political scientists and commentators]. “But peace as a state of world politics has never been stable.” In other words, peace is an anomaly, a fragile state of equilibrium that, Mr. Putin explained, is exceedingly difficult to sustain. The advent of nuclear arms helped, he said, by introducing the specter of mutually assured destruction, and for a while — from the 1950s through the 1980s — “world leaders acted responsibly, weighing all circumstances and possible consequences.” He thus cast the Cold War as the golden era of world peace.

Since the Cold War ended, the world has descended into disarray. “In the last quarter-century, the threshold for applying force has clearly been lowered,” said Mr. Putin. “Immunity against war, acquired as a result of two world wars literally on a psychological, subconscious level, has been weakened.” The United States is the primary culprit because it has thrown the world out of equilibrium by asserting its dominance. Mr. Putin, who has cited different examples of this American behavior in the past, this time focused on the missile defense system and its recent tests in Europe.

Mr. Putin’s speech then took a short detour as he ranted about the United States not playing well with others, including France and Japan. Then he got on the topic of Syria. He repeated what he has said before: Russian military intervention there is legitimate because Russia is protecting Syria’s sole legal government, that of Bashar al-Assad, and the United States can choose to accept this and negotiate with Russia, or find itself fighting a war against it.

It is important to listen to what Mr. Putin is saying. His narrative of resisting U.S. world domination is familiar, but the key point he made at his meeting concerns his views on war — and peace. The strategic purpose of his wars is war itself. This is true in Ukraine, where territory was a mere pretext, and this is true of Syria, where protecting Mr. Assad and fighting ISIS are pretexts too. Both conflicts are wars with no end in sight because, in Mr. Putin’s view, only at war can Russia feel at peace. [Continue reading…]

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Far-right extremists blamed after Syrians beaten in Germany

NBC News reports: Violence against refugees in Germany reached new heights over the weekend as armed groups attacked Syrians in several towns.

The incidents included a group of at least 20 dark-clothed people — including some armed with baseball bats — targeting a group of asylum seekers early Sunday in Magdeburg, police said. Three Syrian men had to be treated in hospital for bruises and injuries to their faces. One of the attackers was arrested near the scene.

In Wismar, two Syrian men had to be treated in hospital after they were assaulted outside a building which is used as a shelter for refugees. Police said masked attackers armed with baseball bats and other weapons threatened and then beat the pair.

A 26-year-old asylum seeker was injured in Freital, Saxony, after an explosive device detonated in front of his bedroom window. A police spokesperson told NBC News they suspect that the act was motivated by right-wing extremism. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey targets supporters of Erdogan foe in police raids

Reuters reports: Turkish police detained dozens of people including senior police officers and bureaucrats allegedly linked to President Tayyip Erdogan’s foe Fethullah Gulen on Tuesday, widening a campaign against the exiled Muslim cleric after Sunday’s election.

The prosecutor’s office in the western city of Izmir said it ordered the arrest of 57 people believed to be members of the “Gulenist terror group”, on allegations they sought a purge of the army by engineering a 2012 espionage trial.

Gulen was the “number one” suspect in the latest investigation, according to the Dogan news agency. [Continue reading…]

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Egyptians revolted against not only Mubarak and his cronies but a whole tyrannical state dripping in blood

Khaled Fahmy writes: This is an historical perspective on the Arab Spring – particularly in Egypt, but generalisable to some extent to other Arab countries – from a historian by education and practice. A peculiar personal experience drew me from being another Egyptian protesting in Tahrir Square in Cairo to the state historian of the Egyptian revolution. Only one week after Hosni Mubarak stepped down as president, the head of the Egyptian National Archives together with the Minister of Culture appointed me as Chair of an official committee empowered to document the momentous popular uprising of January 2011 that captured the attention of the world. I assembled a team of archivists, historians and IT experts. We set about planning how to accomplish the mammoth task ahead of us.

Soon we found ourselves having to find answers to difficult questions: ‘How do we go about collecting people’s testimonies?’ for example. Or, more worrisome, given that we were a government committee: ‘Can we guarantee that the testimonies do not end up falling into the hands of security agencies to be used against the same people who had entrusted us with these potentially self-incriminating testimonies?’

Historical questions presented the most difficulty. When did the revolution end? Did it end with Mubarak’s step-down? With the constitutional amendments of March 2011 that banned the then ruling party, dissolved parliament and called for fresh parliamentary elections? With these parliamentary elections that were held in November 2011? With the presidential elections in June the following year? Given that we were still attending funerals of friends and loved ones, running from one police station to another looking for demonstrators who had been arrested, and still demonstrating to demand the release of our comrades – given all this, was the revolution still going on?

Most difficult of all were questions not about when and how the revolution ended – if ever it did – but when it began and where it originated. Was it launched on 25 January 2011, National Police Day, when we took to the streets to protest against the endemic use of torture in prisons and other places of detention? Or did it begin on 14 January when Ben Ali, the Tunisian President, fled his country to Saudi Arabia, inspiring people in Egypt to say: ‘If the Tunisians could do it, then maybe we can, too’?

Or was its beginning on New Year’s Eve 2010 when Muslims and Copts took to the streets protesting against what they believed was their government’s complicity in the bombing of churches? Or a few months earlier with the beating to death of the young Alexandrian activist Khaled Said, who later became the icon of the revolution? Did it start in 2008 when thousands took to the streets all over the country in solidarity with the striking workers in the industrial town of Mahalla? Or were its origins in 2004 with the birth of the Kefaya (Enough!) Movement, whose members were protesting, week in and week out, against Mubarak’s dictatorial rule?

Did it start in March 2003 when we took to the streets protesting against the US bombing of Iraq and when we occupied Tahrir for a few hours? Or did it begin in March 2000 when the Israeli Prime Minister paid his ill-fated visit to al-Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem, prompting thousands of Egyptian university students to spill out of their university gates to demonstrate in solidarity with the Second Palestinian Intifada?

My colleagues on the committee and I pondered these questions, and probed even more difficult ones. [Continue reading…]

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Russians to Putin: We won’t forget Stalin’s crimes

The Daily Beast reports: From the early morning into the late night, thousands of Muscovites poured into Lubyanka Square, home of the former KGB, now the FSB.

The protest, devoted to naming the victims of Stalin’s “Great Terror,” has taken place on Lubyanka every October for the last nine years. Russians pay tribute to the one million people executed by the Soviet regime in 1937 and 1938, including more than 40,000 people killed in Moscow alone. But never before has Moscow seen so many people willing to participate in the memorial as last week.

Each participant had a piece of paper in hand with the names of two victims, their ages, professions, and dates of execution. There were 40,000 names all together. Shivering in the cold, damp wind, Tatyana Lokshina, the Russia program director and a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, waited in line to make her point: The victims were killed secretly and now the time had came to speak their names out loud. Lokshina’s piece of paper said: “Alexander Smirnov, 51, an ordinary collective farmer, was executed by shooting on July 10, 1938; Aleksey Smirnov, 67, a senior security guard at a savings bank in the Ukhtomsky region, was executed by shooting on February 17, 1938.”

Lokshina’s husband, Alexander Verkhovsky, had also been waiting in line to read his two names for almost three hours. The protest on Lubyanka Square was symbolically important for Lokshina and thousands of other Russian families. “The KGB secretly executed hundreds of thousands of people, as if on a death conveyer, depriving victims of their lives and the victims’ families of their right to remember,” she said. “By our collective readings of names, we return their memory to Moscow residents.”

To many Russians, Moscow is a big monument of mass terror with Lubyanka Square at its heart. Nowadays, Moscow’s dark history is hidden underneath layers of luxurious hotels, restaurants, bars, beautiful public parks with WiFi and bike trails. But the shadows still exist in people’s memories. [Continue reading…]

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Watchdog accuses Pentagon of evading questions on $800 million Afghanistan program

By Megan McCloskey, ProPublica, November 2, 2015

This story has been updated.

The watchdog charged with overseeing U.S. spending in Afghanistan says the Pentagon is dodging his inquiries about an $800 million program that was supposed to energize the Afghan economy.

John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, said the military is restricting access to some documents in violation of law and has claimed there are no Defense Department personnel who can answer questions about the Task Force for Business Stability Operations, or TFBSO, which operated for five years.

“Frankly, I find it both shocking and incredible that DOD asserts that it no longer has any knowledge about TFBSO, an $800 million program that reported directly to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and only shut down a little over six months ago,” Sopko wrote in a letter to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter released today.

The Pentagon’s claims are particularly surprising since Joseph Catalino, the former acting director of the task force who was with the program for two years, is still employed by the Pentagon as Senior Advisor for Special Operations and Combating Terrorism.

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Why Indonesia can’t stamp out fires that have cast a haze over South-East Asia

By Scott Edwards, University of Birmingham

The South-East Asian haze crisis has made Indonesia very unpopular with its neighbours. Yet its government can’t do much about it. Local elites, who call the shots in the forested regions, don’t want to tackle the crisis – and they’re able to stand up to national leaders in Jakarta.

The haze is caused by man-made forest fires, mostly on the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Kalimantan, often started to clear land for palm oil plantations. It’s an annual event, though this year El Niño has meant drier conditions and thus particularly bad haze – the worst since 1997.

During a major haze year, smoky air can harm the health of an estimated 75m people. It has been estimated that the fires will cost the Indonesian government $47 billion – and Singaporean and Malaysia’s will also be affected, thanks to airport and business closures and increased healthcare costs.

The fires have tripled Indonesia’s carbon emissions this year – in just a few months the fires alone have emitted more carbon than the annual emissions of Germany or Japan.

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Turkey’s slide into dictatorship is about to speed up

By Bahar Baser, Coventry University and Ahmet Erdi Öztürk, University of Ljubljana

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayip Erdoğan, appears to have strengthened his grip on the country after the Justice and Development Party (AKP) won an outright majority in a snap election just five months after an inconclusive poll. It is a result that will shock and frighten many in the country.

Unofficial preliminary results, appeared to give the AKP 49.3%, followed by the centre-left Republican People’s Party (CHP) on 25.7%, the far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP) on 12.1% and the pro-Kurdish left-wing Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) on 10.5%. The AKP is predicted to take 312 seats in the 550-seat parliament, the CHP 135 seats, the HDP 60 and the MHP 43.

This result is a big surprise, since pre-election polls forecast a result not much different from that of the June election – and it undoubtedly owes a lot to the toxic atmosphere in which the election was held.

As reported widely around the world, the campaign was anything but fair. The AKP not only controls the army, but also holds sway over the judiciary and much of the media. The party and President Erdoğan effectively dominated pre-election airtime on the country’s public broadcaster, the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT), which once again displayed blatant favouritism toward the government and Erdoğan.

More worryingly still, reports are circulating of vote-rigging. The news agencies announced the results very rapidly. The election was called for the AKP within only a few hours, despite the fact that many votes were not even delivered to the counting boots. Social media was abuzz with allegations of election fraud, as angry Turks documented their claims with photographs and videos.

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Turkey’s elections campaign unfair, say international monitors

The Guardian reports: International observers of Turkey’s parliamentary elections have criticised the climate of “violence and fear” that preceded the vote, saying the security environment, arrests of opposition activists and stifling of press freedoms combined to make the campaign “unfair”.

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has said he deserved respect from the whole world following Sunday’s result. But the international election observation mission that monitored the polls expressed serious concerns at a press conference in Ankara on Monday.

“This campaign was unfair and characterised by too much violence and fear,” said Andreas Gross, the Swiss head of the mission representing the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe (Pace).

In a stunning victory that secured 317 seats, the Justice and Development party (AKP) which Erdoğan founded and which is led by the prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, regained the outright majority it had lost in June’s inconclusive election. Saying the Turkish electorate had voted for stability, Erdoğan on Monday urged the international community to accept the election results. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: Angry young Kurds clashed with police here in the de facto capital of the country’s Kurdish southeast as it became evident on Sunday that the party backing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would regain its lock on power.

Young men set up barricades and fired bullets into the air, accusing the government of fraud. Police fired tear gas and water cannons to disburse the activists as Kurdish hopes of expanding their political clout suffered another setback.

“Now Turkey will become a one-man state,” said Elif, a university student in Diyarbakir, as she watched election results on television. “The peace process was also just to boost his own power. I don’t believe he will restart [peace talks].”

The unexpected triumph for Mr. Erdogan’s loyalists in Parliament undercut Kurdish politicians who have been trying to bring an end to a renewed conflict. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey: When the state steals newspapers

Mustafa Akyol writes: What happened in Turkey on Oct. 28 is something that should enter the Guinness Book of World Records, if it ever includes a chapter on “authoritarianism.” Two newspapers and two news channels, all very critical of the government, were taken over by government-appointed “trustees.” In less polite terms, they were practically stolen by the state.

If you haven’t seen the news, here is a summary of what happened: The media in question – dailies Bugün and Millet and TV channels KanalTürk and BugünTV – are owned by Koza İpek Holding. It was no secret that the holding’s boss, Akın İpek, has been a follower of Fethullah Gülen and a financial supporter of the Gülen Movement. Since this movement turned from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s best ally to worst enemy, every institution affiliated with it has been under legal scrutiny. Koza İpek Holding faced an investigation, too. But nothing yet has been found that is illicit.

Yet still, a famous judge (who had become famous last year by banning Twitter, at the behest of the government) took a fateful decision last Monday. He referred to an article in the penal code which says that a “trustee” can be appointed to a company if necessary to reveal any evidence, while the company goes through an investigation. He also noted Koza İpek Holding is a suspect of “terrorism.”

But were there any credible basis for this “terrorism” charge? Were there any guns or bombs involved? Not really. It is just that the president began calling the Gülen Movement a “terrorist organization” after a corruption investigation that targeted his government. It is not a legal definition, in other words, it is political rhetoric. [Continue reading…]

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‘A new wave of repression is imminent in Iran’

Akbar Ganji writes: [N]ow that Khamenei is no longer concerned about military attacks, he is constantly talking about “the enemy’s agents”. New repression and a crackdown on the opposition may be on their way. There is a danger that the judiciary may arrest some leading reformists, force them to “confess” that they work for the US, and broadcast the “confessions” on national television.

Fars, the news agency controlled by the IRGC, published a letter on 5 October from 11 hardline majles deputies in which they claimed that Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who has been incarcerated for 445 days, “is a professional spy and US intelligence agent in Iran” and that it was “imperative that the judiciary allow broadcast of his confessions to inform the nation”.

Even the mere talk of “films” of Rezaian’s confessions is evidence for my analysis of Khamenei’s thinking. The arrest of another Iranian-American Siamak Namazi last week by Revolutionary Guards intelligence further indicates where developments are leading. In all likelihood, Namazi will be described as an “agent” of American influence.

In yet another episode, former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s tourism visit to Iran has drawn harsh reaction from conservatives. They claim this trip “is part of a project to influence [Iran]” and aims to “test Iran’s public opinion in the aftermath of the nuclear deal.”

Mashregh, a website operated by the Revolutionary Guard has stated that American-Iranians “are the invisible conduits of American influence in Iran”, implying that any dual-national coming to Iran must be treated as a potential spy.

But the most important targets to be singled out, as agents of American influence, are domestic critics of the IRI. Ayatollah Ahmad Alamolhoda, who leads Friday prayers in Mashhad and is a member of the Assembly of Experts, has stated that the looming election constitutes a likely avenue of American influence, with the Americans using as spies those have a difference of opinion with Khamenei and his followers. [Continue reading…]

EA Worldview reports: Iranian authorities re-arrested prominent journalist Isa Saharkhiz on Monday on charges of “insulting the Supreme Leader” and “propaganda against the regime”.

A post on Saharkhiz’s Facebook page announced the arrest and posted photos of a search warrant for his home.

Saharkhiz, a journalist for more than 30 years and a former Deputy Minister of Culture, was seized in July 2009 amid the protests over the disputed Presidential election. He was released in October 2013.

Saharkhiz’s son Mehdi wrote of the arrest on Twitter and said his father had started a hunger strike.

In another arrest on Tuesday, Ehsan Mazandarani, the managing director of the Farhikhtegan newspaper, was detained for “security reasons”. [Continue reading…]

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Ayatollah Sistani fears Iran is worsening sectarian divisions in Iraq

The New York Times reports: Last year, Ayatollah Sistani issued a widely heeded call for young men to take up arms against the Islamic State. But that fatwa resulted in a constellation of new militias, and the growth of existing ones that are controlled by Iran rather than the Iraqi state. The influence of Iran and its militias in Iraq has grown as they have become essential to the fight against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

Ayatollah Sistani has become increasingly concerned that those militias are a threat to the unity of Iraq, experts say, in part because many of the militia leaders and their affiliated politicians have challenged efforts by the government to reconcile with Iraq’s minority Sunnis, a priority for the clerical leader.

Jawad al-Khoei, the secretary general of his family’s Khoei Institute, a religious institute and charity in Najaf, said of Ayatollah Sistani: “This time it is very serious. He is an old man now and maybe he considers that this will be the last thing he does in his life.”

Analysts say that despite his concerns, Ayatollah Sistani is not opposed to an Iranian role in Iraq.

“He believes Iran’s presence is necessary in Iraq, but it needs to take wiser policies,” said Mehdi Khalaji, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who has studied at the seminary in Qom and has written extensively about Ayatollah Sistani.

Mr. Khalaji said that when it comes to Iran, Ayatollah Sistani is primarily worried about tensions between Sunnis and Shiites and Iran’s role in worsening sectarian divisions in Iraq.

But even as he moves to diminish Iranian influence in Iraq, he is mimicking the ways of the Iranian system.

One diplomat in Baghdad, referring to the Shiite holy cities from where instructions to politicians are given at Friday sermons, noted that in much the same way as Iranian political leaders look to Qom for guidance, “Every Friday we look to Karbala and Najaf.”

Here in Najaf, where Ayatollah Sistani, three other senior ayatollahs and countless clerics collectively represent the Shiite religious establishment, known as the marjaiya, there is a sense of regret for lending crucial support for Iraq’s Shiite political class in the years after the 2003 invasion.

The marjaiya’s support over the years lent crucial legitimacy to the Shiite religious parties that came to dominate politics and that are now the source of great anger for the masses that began protesting against Iraq’s government in August. [Continue reading…]

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They freed a Syrian town from ISIS. Now they have to govern it.

The Washington Post reports: When Islamic State fighters fled this northern Syrian town in June, they took with them the electricity generators, the water pumps, the hospital equipment and pretty much everything else that had helped sustain the semblance that they ran a functioning state.

They left behind their graffiti, their instruments of torture, the block of wood on which they beheaded their victims, the cage in which they punished smokers — and a community riven with suspicion and distrust.

Today, Tal Abyad is a tense and troubled place. Its new Kurdish masters are seeking to assert their control over a mixed town that, at least until recently, had an Arab majority — some of whom were not entirely unhappy to be governed by the Islamic State.

“As long as you didn’t bother them, they didn’t bother you,” said Sarkis Kaorkian, 60, who is one of the town’s few Christians who remained behind and is now deeply relieved the Islamic State is gone. He claims he drank and smoked his way through the group’s 17-month rule by staying out of their way and paying on time the $100 tax, or jizya, leveled twice a year on Christian residents. [Continue reading…]

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Details revealed in chilling plot to kill anti-ISIS activists in Turkey

NBC News reports: The double murder achieved its goal. It sent the message that, even here in the relative safety of Turkey, ISIS and its supporters can reach its critics.

The bodies of 22-year-old Ibrahim Abdel Qader and 20-year-old Fares Hammadi were found early Friday in an apartment in the Turkish town of Sanliurfa. Qader had been stabbed dozens of times and both men were, in the gruesome fashion that has become ISIS’s trademark, beheaded.

The deaths of the two young Syrians, both members of a citizen-journalist group called “Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently,” sent shockwaves through the exile Syrian community here.

How did two young men, known targets of ISIS who took measures to protect themselves, end up dead?

NBC News has now learned the answer to that question: In an exclusive interview, Ibrahim’s brother, Ahmed, explained what happened. [Continue reading…]

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70 babies have drowned since Aylan

The Daily Beast reports: More than 70 babies have drowned since the fragile body of 4-year-old Aylan Kurdi washed up on Turkish shores last month. The outrage over the loss of his young life faded all too soon, but the drive to keep the world focused on the continuing tragedy has not.

One person who vows not to let the world forget about what has become the biggest refugee crisis since World War II is Melissa Fleming, a 51-year-old American who is the chief communications and spokeswoman for the United Nations Refugee Agency. She says she ends and begins every day obsessing over the human stories about refugees that she can share with the world in hopes someone is listening. On Friday, she tweeted a horrific video of a dying baby being given CPR. The day before, she tweeted a body count. “Dozens missing after refugee boat sinks off Lesvos. 11 dead. Kids! All in one terrible day.”

“What kills me is that even the biggest tragedies are headline news for just one day,” she told The Daily Beast. “My family reminds me I am obsessed, but I have to be. I get a report several times a day on statistics, which, to me, are human beings with the tears dried off. The stories that kill me the most are when I hear about a mother or father losing a child to the waves. As a mother myself, to lose them this way is incomprehensible.” [Continue reading…]

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After hailing democracy in Tahrir Square in 2011, Cameron now welcomes the man who killed Egypt’s revolution

Jack Shenker writes: In footage recorded by news cameras, you can see David Cameron – flanked by a large security team – threading his way through the flag sellers and nut vendors and the amiable mayhem of Tahrir Square. It is February 2011, ten days after the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. Locals drift over to see what the fuss is about, and many call out to welcome the British prime minister. At one point a boy, his face painted in revolutionary style with the colours of the Egyptian flag, runs up to Cameron and smiles. “Are you happy now?” Cameron asks, in English. The child looks blank. Cameron nods with satisfaction and holds out his hand. “Put it there,” he grins.

The imagery of Cameron traipsing around an urban landscape that still bore the scars of revolutionary struggle was designed to convey a particular message: after decades of providing steadfast support to one of the Middle East’s most entrenched autocrats, Britain was supposedly ready to embrace a new type of politics. “I’ve just been meeting with leaders of the democracy movement, really brave people who did extraordinary things in Tahrir Square,” Cameron told the BBC. “We want Egypt to have a strong and successful future, we want the aspirations of the Egyptian people – for democracy, for freedom, for openness, the things we take for granted – we want them to have those things.”

Almost half a decade later, Cameron is finally about to return Egypt’s hospitality, and once again news cameras will be on hand to capture the moment. This time round, though, the images will be very different.

Next week Egyptian president Abdel Fatah al-Sisi is scheduled to accept an invitation to Downing Street: red carpets will be unfurled, gifts exchanged and powerful hands shaken. His photoshoot with Cameron will be a celebration not of new politics, but of more conventional forms of power – the kinds that remain safely locked up inside the executive, the army and institutional elites. The buzzwords at the official banquet will be “stability” and “security”. Of freedom, or openness, or the Egyptian streets that Cameron was so keen to walk down – the streets in which power, not so long ago, came to reside – little mention will be made. [Continue reading…]

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Iran starts taking nuclear centrifuges offline

Reuters reports: Iran has begun shutting down uranium enrichment centrifuges under the terms of a deal struck with six world powers in July on limiting its nuclear program, Tehran’s atomic energy chief said on Monday during a visit to Tokyo.

“We have already started to take our measures vis-a-vis the removal of the centrifuge machines – the extra centrifuge machines. We hope in two months time we are able to exhaust our commitment,” Ali Akbar Salehi told public broadcaster NHK.

NHK’s website also quoted Salehi as saying it was important that there be “balance” in implementing the deal, signaling Tehran’s stance that all sanctions against Iran should be lifted promptly in step with its dismantling of nuclear infrastructure. [Continue reading…]

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