Mark Mobius, executive chairman of Templeton Asset Management’s emerging markets group, said another financial crisis is inevitable because the causes of the previous one haven’t been resolved.
“There is definitely going to be another financial crisis around the corner because we haven’t solved any of the things that caused the previous crisis,” Mobius said at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo today in response to a question about price swings. “Are the derivatives regulated? No. Are you still getting growth in derivatives? Yes.”
The total value of derivatives in the world exceeds total global gross domestic product by a factor of 10, said Mobius, who oversees more than $50 billion. With that volume of bets in different directions, volatility and equity market crises will occur, he said.
Alex Seitz-Wald of Think Progress rightly takes Sen. Rand Paul to task for going on Sean Hannity’s radio program — one week after commendably leading opposition to the Patriot Act on civil liberties grounds — and advocating the arrest of people who “attend radical political speeches.” After claiming to be against racial and religious profiling, Paul said: ”But if someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government, that’s really an offense that we should be going after — they should be deported or put in prison.” Seitz-Wald correctly notes the obvious: ”Paul’s suggestion that people be imprisoned or deported for merely attending a political speech would be a fairly egregious violation on the First Amendment, not to mention due process.”
Indeed, the First Amendment not only protects the mere “attending” of a speech “promoting the violent overthrow of our government,” but also the giving of such a speech. The government is absolutely barred by the Free Speech clause from punishing people even for advocating violence. That has been true since the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio, which overturned the criminal conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader who had threatened violence against political officials in a speech.
The KKK leader in Brandenburg was convicted under an Ohio statute that made it a crime to ”advocate . . . the duty, necessity, or propriety of crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform” and/or to “voluntarily assemble with any society, group, or assemblage of persons formed to teach or advocate the doctrines of criminal syndicalism.” The Court struck down the statute on the ground that it “purports to punish mere advocacy” and thus “sweeps within its condemnation speech which our Constitution has immunized from governmental control.” The Court ruled that “except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” — meaning conduct such as standing outside someone’s house with an angry mob and urging them to burn the house down that moment — “the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force“ (emphasis added).
The days are numbered for Muammar Gaddafi’s rule and a diplomatic solution for his exit is no longer an option, according to an internationally prominent Libyan diplomat who has defected. Hafed Gaddur, Tripoli’s longtime envoy to former colonial ruler Rome, was well-known in Italy as a powerful Gaddafi associate who had Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on speed dial and brokered multi-billion dollar deals between the two nations.
“Gaddafi’s regime is over,” Gaddur said in an interview under the frescoed ceilings of the Libyan embassy in Rome, which now flies the rebel tricolour. “There are no more diplomatic solutions for him. It’s just a question of time now.”
Horrified at Gaddafi’s violent crackdown on peaceful protests, he said he threw his weight behind the rebels on Feb. 25. He cut off all ties with Tripoli in April after deciding Gaddafi would never agree to a diplomatic solution for his exit.
Libya’s top oil official became the latest leading figure to desert Muammar Gaddafi today, complaining of “unbearable” violence and adding political momentum to a revolt against the leader’s long rule.
The move by National Oil Corp head Shokri Ghanem, who is also a former prime minister, came two days after the defections of eight army officers including five generals and those in earlier weeks of senior diplomats and other former ministers.
“I left the country and decided also to leave my job and to join the choice of Libyan youth to create a modern constitutional state respecting human rights and building a better future for all Libyans,” he said.
Heavy shelling north of Yemen’s capital threatened to close the main international airport Thursday as government troops and opposition tribesmen appeared to escalate bloody street battles that have pushed the country to the edge of civil war.
The airport, which lies roughly six miles north of the city, was open on Thursday and flights operated normally, the airport director, Naji Quddam, said in a statement, denying earlier news reports that it had closed.
But the main road to the airport from Sana remained dangerous to navigate because of government checkpoints, sporadic shelling and heaving fighting in the north of the city.
There, large numbers of tribal fighters surging south toward the capital, Sana, squared off against Yemeni troops at an important checkpoint in fierce fighting overnight and on Thursday. The northern checkpoint is a major barrier between the capital and Amran Province, a stronghold of the tribesmen loyal to the Ahmar family who have been battling the government for 10 days. Government troops have attempted to seal off the city to prevent rural tribesmen from joining the fight there.
On Wednesday afternoon, tanks and armored vehicles could be seen rolling into Sana from the south. The streets of city were largely empty, as residents fled for the safety of surrounding villages. Exploding artillery shells and sporadic machine-gun fire could be heard across the city.
Despite his repeated public offers to step aside to ease the crisis in the country, Yemen’s authoritarian president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, appeared to be gearing up for a major assault on the Ahmar family, his tribal rivals and political opponents.
The violence here has transformed a largely peaceful uprising into a tribal conflict with no clear end in sight. The United States and Yemen’s Arab neighbors like Saudi Arabia, which have tried and failed to mediate a peaceful solution to the country’s political crisis, are reduced to sitting on the sidelines and pleading for restraint.
The woman who spoke to NPR says she was taken by bus to a police station, blindfolded, and made to stand for five hours in a room. She was accused of working to bring down the Bahraini regime.
“They tried to force me to confess that I told people at my work to be against the regime,” she says.
Authorities showed the woman a picture of someone protesting at Pearl Roundabout. At the time, Bahrain’s crown prince said it was legal to protest. Now, authorities say it’s a crime.
“They tried to force me to confess that a picture in a protest — that it is my picture. And it was really not my picture,” the woman says.
She was taunted about one of her relatives, who has been jailed without charge for many weeks. “They said very bad things about him,” she says. “And they told me that, ‘Do you think he will come out of the jail? He will die in jail.'”
But perhaps the worst part of the ordeal was that the woman was detained at all. In an Arab culture, particularly in the Gulf, detaining a woman is the ultimate humiliation, going back to the days when the way one tribe defeated another was to capture and rape its women.
“They told me if I didn’t confess they will let men come and — continue with me,” the woman says. “They told me that.”
Even the mildest criticism of the Egyptian military was too much for Mahmoud Saad, a television host on the newly founded, independent Tahrir television network.
“Any institution of the country that takes taxes from us should be open to question,” Hossam el-Hamalawy, a blogger, said in an interview with Mr. Saad.
“No, no, no,” Mr. Saad interrupted. “I will not allow you to say those things on this network.”
“Thank you, Mr. Hossam,” he declared, hanging up.
The next day Mr. Hamalawy and two other liberal television journalists, but not Mr. Saad, were summoned to a military headquarters for questioning about their remarks.
The Egyptian military — facing public criticism for torturing demonstrators and admitting that it forced some female detainees to undergo “virginity tests” — is pressing the Egyptian news media to censor harsh criticism of it and protect its image. The military’s intervention concerns some human rights advocates who say they are worried that such efforts could make it harder for politicians to scrutinize the military and could possibly undermine attempts to bring it under civilian control or investigate charges of corruption.
“Nobody believes corruption was limited to the civilian government,” said a prominent liberal politician, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal by the military.
In recent weeks military authorities have sent letters warning news organizations to review any discussion of the military before publication or broadcast. A military court has also sentenced a blogger to three years in prison for what it called persistent attacks, and it has charged an outspoken liberal presidential candidate with libeling a general and insulting the military. Military authorities have summoned many journalists and bloggers to headquarters for questioning about their reports and sources.
The cries tumbled from a balcony as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan swaggered down the campaign trail in this picturesque industrial city and former Ottoman capital. “Papa Tayyip!” went the refrain, drawing a wry smile from the man himself.
The words may have lacked the weight of “Father of the Turks,” the title given Mustafa Kemal Ataturk after he established modern Turkey in 1923. But it said much about Mr. Erdogan — arrogant and populist to detractors, charismatic and visionary to supporters — who will soon enter his second decade as leader of a country he has helped transform.
As Turkey heads to an election on June 12 — the size of Mr. Erdogan’s majority the only question — the country faces an Arab Spring, which took it by surprise; ambitions that stretch beyond its means; and growing fears that Mr. Erdogan’s eight years in office have decisively shifted power from the old secular elite and toward his party and the merchant class, migrants and downtrodden that it courts.
But even his critics acknowledge that this country of 79 million is a far different place from the one he inherited, emerging as a decisive power in a region long dominated by the United States.
Though Turkey is still dogged by unemployment, its businesses are booming. In foreign policy, it is acting like the heir of the Ottoman Empire that preceded it, building relationships with Iran and Arab neighbors at the expense of Israel.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates must want Iran to build nuclear weapons. He didn’t say that directly. But how else should one interpret his latest threat against the embattled Persian Gulf state?
In what he said was his last major policy address, Secretary Gates expressed hope that Iraq would allow U.S. troops to remain. In fact, that’s a really bad idea, since America’s mission is over and Washington can’t afford to occupy the entire globe. Once defeated, forever occupied appears to be the secretary’s slogan. We are lucky that the Pentagon doesn’t still have army garrisons in Mexico, defeated back in 1848.
Secretary Gates talked about redeeming America’s blood “investment” and demonstrating that Washington planned to stay engaged in the region. He added: “It would be reassuring to the Gulf States. It would not be reassuring to Iran, and that is a good thing.”
Is it?
There obviously is much to dislike about Iran. An authoritarian theocracy with little sympathy for individual liberty. A troublesome meddler backing brutal Syria and aggressive Hezbollah. A regime with grudges against America’s favorite totalitarian theocracy, Saudi Arabia, and favorite democracy, Israel. A geopolitical adversary with strong connections in Iraq, which the Bush administration had hoped would become a base for American military operations. An untrustworthy government apparently developing nuclear weapons.
Obviously, none of these are good. But will failing to reassure Iran—in fact, doing the utmost to unsettle Iran—make the region safer? The fact that the regime is odious does not mean that it has no legitimate security concerns, concerns constantly exacerbated by Washington. If the United States does not reassure Tehran, the mullahs, and whoever might replace them, would be foolish to abandon their presumed nuclear program.
Israel would not withstand a regional conflict ignited by an Israeli strike of Iran’s nuclear facilities, former Mossad chief Meir Dagan said on Wednesday, adding that Israel did not have the capability to stop Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, just to delay them.
In his first public appearance since leaving the post in September, Dagan said earlier this month that the possibility a future Israel Air Force attack on Iranian nuclear facilities was “the stupidest thing I have ever heard.”
Speaking during a conference in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, Dagan continued his public rejection of a military move against Iran, saying that Israel didn’t “have the capability to stop the Iranian nuclear program, only to delay it.”
“If anyone seriously considers [a strike] he needs to understand that he’s dragging Israel into a regional war that it would not know how to get out of. The security challenge would become unbearable,” Dagan said.
The former Mossad chief reiterated his position, saying that the “military option is the last alternative, not preferred or possible, but a last resort. Every other alternative must be weighed before the use of force.”
Referring to those who criticized him for speaking out on these matters soon after his retirement, Dagan said: “I feel obligated to express my opinion on certain matters. The prime minister and defense minister are the ones in charge, but sometimes good sense and a good decision don’t have anything to do with being elected.”
On May 15, five days after Israel’s Independence Day, Palestinians rallied around the Nakba—the Arabic word for catastrophe, used to mark the displacement of as many as 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. It was a bid to reiterate their opposition to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and control of the Gaza Strip. For the first time in years, every Israeli newspaper carried the word “Nakba” on its front page, albeit not in reference to the historical event but to demonstrations that consumed the West Bank and Israel’s border towns. The episode highlighted an important truth: Sooner or later, Israel will be forced to incorporate the Palestinian Nakba narrative into the larger Israeli societal discourse. There can be a Zionist narrative of 1948 that includes the tragic and violent Palestinian experience of displacement—but it must be predicated on the acceptance of the Nakba in Israeli society.
My first experience with the history of the Nakba came as a young Jewish Studies student at the University of Maryland. One graduate seminar I attended was led by Benny Morris, the prominent Israeli historian responsible for revolutionizing his country’s historiography pertaining to the founding period. The subject of the seminar was 1948, and the course material—army reports from the field, personal letters, radio transcripts—came directly from Morris’ influential first book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, published in 1988.
Early on in the seminar, I asked Morris, a short man with a fiery personality, if it was difficult to be a post-Zionist—an adherent of a movement that strives to replace Israel’s Zionist identity with a liberal cosmopolitan one—in Israel. He responded, almost snapping at me, that he was not a post-Zionist and never had been. As I would see in the seminar, Morris had exposed one of Israel’s darkest chapters without abandoning a strong allegiance to Zionism.
American Jews strongly believe in Israel’s commitmitment to peace, and largely think the Palestinian leadership and people are opposed to it, according to a new poll.
Eighty-four percent of respondents in the survey released last week said the Israeli government is committed to a lasting peace, compared to just 20 percent who said the same about the Palestinian Authority. More than half think the Palestinian people are opposed to peace with Israel.
Sponsored by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, the poll sampled more than 1,000 American Jews several days before President Obama called for the 1967 borders to be used as the basis for negotiations for a future Palestinian state.
More than 75 percent of those polled said the biggest obstacle to peace in the region is the Palestinians’ “culture of hatred” and promotion of anti-Israel sentiment.
Seventy-eight percent said it was essential for the Palestinian Authority to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and 62 percent did not believe that Israelis would be free from Palestinian terror attacks even if a Palestinian state were created in the West Bank and Gaza.
A prominent Pakistani journalist who investigated links between the military and al-Qaida has been found dead, triggering angry accusations against the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency.
Saleem Shahzad, Pakistan correspondent for a news service based in Hong Kong, disappeared on his way to a television interview in Islamabad on Sunday evening. On Tuesday, police said they found his body on a canal bank in Mandi Bahauddin, 80 miles south-east of the capital.
Shahzad’s abandoned car was found 25 miles away. Television images of his body showed heavy bruising to his face. Media reports said he had a serious trauma wound to the stomach.
Human Rights Watch had already raised the alarm over the disappearance of the 40-year-old father of three, citing a “reliable interlocutor” who said he had been abducted by ISI.
“This killing bears all the hallmarks of previous killings perpetrated by Pakistani intelligence agencies,” said a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch in south Asia, Ali Dayan Hasan. He called for a “transparent investigation and court proceedings”.
Other journalists reacted angrily, directly accusing ISI of responsibility on television and social media. “Any journalist here who doesn’t believe that it’s our intelligence agencies?” tweeted Mohammed Hanif, a bestselling author.
Al-Qaeda carried out the brazen attack on PNS Mehran naval air station in Karachi on May 22 after talks failed between the navy and al-Qaeda over the release of naval officials arrested on suspicion of al-Qaeda links, an Asia Times Online investigation reveals.
Pakistani security forces battled for 15 hours to clear the naval base after it had been stormed by a handful of well-armed militants.
At least 10 people were killed and two United States-made P3-C Orion surveillance and anti-submarine aircraft worth US$36 million each were destroyed before some of the attackers escaped through a cordon of thousands of armed forces.
An official statement placed the number of militants at six, with four killed and two escaping. Unofficial sources, though, claim there were 10 militants with six getting free. Asia Times Online contacts confirm that the attackers were from Ilyas Kashmiri’s 313 Brigade, the operational arm of al-Qaeda.
Three attacks on navy buses in which at least nine people were killed last month were warning shots for navy officials to accept al-Qaeda’s demands over the detained suspects.
The May 2 killing in Pakistan of Osama bin Laden spurred al-Qaeda groups into developing a consensus for the attack in Karachi, in part as revenge for the death of their leader and also to deal a blow to Pakistan’s surveillance capacity against the Indian navy.
The deeper underlying motive, though, was a reaction to massive internal crackdowns on al-Qaeda affiliates within the navy.
Several weeks ago, naval intelligence traced an al-Qaeda cell operating inside several navy bases in Karachi, the country’s largest city and key port.
“Islamic sentiments are common in the armed forces,” a senior navy official told Asia Times Online on the condition of anonymity as he is not authorized to speak to the media.
“We never felt threatened by that. All armed forces around the world, whether American, British or Indian, take some inspiration from religion to motivate their cadre against the enemy. Pakistan came into existence on the two-nation theory that Hindus and Muslims are two separate nations and therefore no one can separate Islam and Islamic sentiment from the armed forces of Pakistan,” the official said.
“Nonetheless, we observed an uneasy grouping on different naval bases in Karachi. While nobody can obstruct armed forces personnel for rendering religious rituals or studying Islam, the grouping [we observed] was against the discipline of the armed forces. That was the beginning of an intelligence operation in the navy to check for unscrupulous activities.”
The official explained the grouping was against the leadership of the armed forces and opposed to its nexus with the United States against Islamic militancy. When some messages were intercepted hinting at attacks on visiting American officials, intelligence had good reason to take action and after careful evaluation at least 10 people – mostly from the lower cadre – were arrested in a series of operations.
“That was the beginning of huge trouble,” the official said. [Continue reading…]
In the aftermath of 9/11 we worked in tandem; he was in Karachi, I was in Islamabad/Peshawar. After the US ”victory” in Afghanistan I went to visit him at home. He plunged me into Karachi’s wild side – in this and other visits. During a night walk on the beach he confessed his dream; he wanted to be Pakistan bureau chief for Asia Times, which he regarded as the K2 of journalism. He got it.
And then, years before ”AfPak” was invented, he found his perfect beat – the intersection between the ISI, the myriad Taliban factions on both sides of AfPak, and all sorts of jihadi eruptions. That was his sterling beat; and no one could bring more hardcore news from the heart of hardcore than Saleem.
I had met some of his sources in Islamabad and Karachi – but over the years he kept excavating deeper and deeper into the shadows. Sometimes we seriously debated over e-mails – I feared some dodgy/devious ISI strands were playing him while he always vouched for his sources.
Cornered by the law of the jungle, no wonder most of my Pakistani friends, during the 2000s, became exiles in the United States or Canada. Saleem stayed – threats and all, the only concession relocating from Karachi to Islamabad.
Now they finally got him. Not an al-Qaeda or jihadi connection. Not a tribal or Taliban connection, be it Mullah Omar or Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. It had to be the ISI – as he knew, and told us, all along.
In an interview on the Real News Network recorded a few days before his murder, Shahzad described the transformation of al Qaeda over the last decade and that while the group itself has shrunk, its ideology has spread horizontally by incorporation inside and beyond the new Taliban.
First you have to understand this fact, that there are 17 Arab-Afghan groups which are operating inside Pakistani tribal areas and in Afghanistan, and most of these groups and most of the groups are aligned with al Qaeda but they are not part of al Qaeda — number one. And the strength of those 17 Arab-Afghan groups is over 1,000 approximately.
Second, those who are the members of al Qaeda are hardly 100, not more than 100.
The third thing is — and this is the most important thing — and that is the phenomenon of new Taliban — the new generation of those Afghan fighters, of the Pakistani fighters, or the fighters coming from the Pakistani tribal areas who previously pledged their allegiance to Mullah Omar and the Taliban, but now they — in the last ten years — they completely absorbed al Qaeda’s ideology inside-out, and they are more loyal to al Qaeda than to Mullah Omar or to the al Qaeda leaders, or to their jihadi commanders.
So this is the new group, this is al Qaeda horizontally, not only in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the tribal areas, but all across the globe, like in Yemen, in Somalia and other parts, even in Europe, even in America. So this is the new generation on which al Qaeda is heavily banking on. And not only those, but it also includes the new converts, white Caucasians which are living in North Waziristan and in South Waziristan. And many of them were sent back to their countries of origin in Europe, Canada and America, and different countries. So, this was a completely new phenomenon. Al Qaeda grew horizontally in different directions.
Watch Shahzad’s last interview (in two parts) with the Real News Network:
At the Fox News holiday party the year the network overtook archrival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a Midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of boos erupted among the Fox faithful. The CNN logo followed, and the catcalls multiplied. Then a third slide appeared, with a telling twist. In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network’s founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as “the Chairman” – Roger Ailes.
“It was as though we were looking at Mao,” recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those who disliked the way Ailes runs his network joined in the display of fealty, given the culture of intimidation at Fox News. “It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders,” says a former executive with the network’s parent, News Corp. “There are people who turn people in.”
The key to decoding Fox News isn’t Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. It isn’t even News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch. To understand what drives Fox News, and what its true purpose is, you must first understand Chairman Ailes. “He is Fox News,” says Jane Hall, a decade-long Fox commentator who defected over Ailes’ embrace of the fear-mongering Glenn Beck. “It’s his vision. It’s a reflection of him.”
Ailes runs the most profitable – and therefore least accountable – head of the News Corp. hydra. Fox News reaped an estimated profit of $816 million last year – nearly a fifth of Murdoch’s global haul. The cable channel’s earnings rivaled those of News Corp.’s entire film division, which includes 20th Century Fox, and helped offset a slump at Murdoch’s beloved newspapers unit, which took a $3 billion write-down after acquiring The Wall Street Journal. With its bare-bones newsgathering operation – Fox News has one-third the staff and 30 fewer bureaus than CNN – Ailes generates profit margins above 50 percent. Nearly half comes from advertising, and the rest is dues from cable companies. Fox News now reaches 100 million households, attracting more viewers than all other cable-news outlets combined, and Ailes aims for his network to “throw off a billion in profits.”
The outsize success of Fox News gives Ailes a free hand to shape the network in his own image. “Murdoch has almost no involvement with it at all,” says Michael Wolff, who spent nine months embedded at News Corp. researching a biography of the Australian media giant. “People are afraid of Roger. Murdoch is, himself, afraid of Roger. He has amassed enormous power within the company – and within the country – from the success of Fox News.”
Fear, in fact, is precisely what Ailes is selling: His network has relentlessly hyped phantom menaces like the planned “terror mosque” near Ground Zero, inspiring Florida pastor Terry Jones to torch the Koran. Privately, Murdoch is as impressed by Ailes’ business savvy as he is dismissive of his extremist politics. “You know Roger is crazy,” Murdoch recently told a colleague, shaking his head in disbelief. “He really believes that stuff.”
Britain is training Saudi Arabia’s national guard – the elite security force deployed during the recent protests in Bahrain – in public order enforcement measures and the use of sniper rifles. The revelation has outraged human rights groups, which point out that the Foreign Office recognises that the kingdom’s human rights record is “a major concern”.
In response to questions made under the Freedom of Information Act, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed that British personnel regularly run courses for the national guard in “weapons, fieldcraft and general military skills training, as well as incident handling, bomb disposal, search, public order and sniper training”. The courses are organised through the British Military Mission to the Saudi Arabian National Guard, an obscure unit that consists of 11 British army personnel under the command of a brigadier.
The MoD response, obtained yesterday by the Observer, reveals that Britain sends up to 20 training teams to the kingdom a year. Saudi Arabia pays for “all BMM personnel, as well as support costs such as accommodation and transport”.
Bahrain’s royal family used 1,200 Saudi troops to help put down demonstrations in March. At the time the British government said it was “deeply concerned” about reports of human rights abuses being perpetrated by the troops.
The United States pulled its human rights officer from Bahrain last week after he’d become the subject of a weeks-long campaign of ethnic slurs and thinly veiled threats on a pro-government website and in officially sanctioned newspapers.
Ludovic Hood left the island nation on Thursday. During his final days in Bahrain, Hood was given security protection equal to that of an ambassador, U.S. officials said.
“The safety and security of our diplomatic personnel is our highest priority,” the State Department in Washington said in a statement in response to inquiries from McClatchy. “It is unacceptable that elements within Bahrain would target an individual for carrying out his professional duties.”
Hood’s early departure from Bahrain — five human rights and U.S. officials confirmed that he had not been scheduled to leave Bahrain last week — underscores the serious tensions that have arisen between the U.S. government and Bahrain, the home port of the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet.
A senior Egyptian general admits that “virginity checks” were performed on women arrested at a demonstration this spring, the first such admission after previous denials by military authorities.
The allegations arose in an Amnesty International report, published weeks after the March 9 protest. It claimed female demonstrators were beaten, given electric shocks, strip-searched, threatened with prostitution charges and forced to submit to virginity checks.
At that time, Maj. Amr Imam said 17 women had been arrested but denied allegations of torture or “virginity tests.”
But now a senior general who asked not to be identified said the virginity tests were conducted and defended the practice.
The government pounded a major coastal city on Monday with airstrikes to dislodge Islamic militants and, to the west, smashed the country’s largest antigovernment demonstration in overnight clashes that killed at least 20 protesters, according to witnesses reached by phone.
In Zinjibar, along the country’s southern coast, residents said warplanes attacked militant positions with repeated bombing runs beginning early Monday afternoon, a day after Islamists of uncertain affiliation took control, seizing banks and a central government compound. The compound was hit in the airstrikes and also shelled by the army, witnesses said.
It is unclear how many people have died in the Zinjibar fighting, which began Friday. The city has few medical services left, and no electricity or water, people there say. Hundreds have fled; others have taken refuge in local mosques, residents said.
In the city of Taiz, west of Zinjibar, security forces and plainclothes gunmen swept through a main square, driving out the thousands of protesters seeking the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Witnesses said that security forces descended from three directions in a thick cloud of tear gas late Sunday afternoon, and that the clashes continued until after midnight with security forces firing water cannons and setting the protesters’ tents ablaze with Molotov cocktails. Video posted on social networking sites by opposition groups showed protesters scattering as plainclothes gunmen fired from doorways and from rooftops. Bulldozers and tractors demolished remnants of the sit-in. Sporadic gunfire echoed through the city on Monday, witnesses said.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai called Tuesday for an immediate halt to coalition air strikes on civilian homes and threatened to take unilateral action to block such attacks if international forces don’t take him seriously.
Three days after an errant U.S. air strike killed as many as 12 Afghan women and children in southern Afghanistan, Mr. Karzai called a press conference to criticize the international alliance.
“The Afghan people can no longer tolerate these attacks on their homes,” Mr. Karzai said during the televised news conference. “Nobody has the right to take the life of an Afghan child.”
While Mr. Karzai has no significant authority to block the air strikes, his threats could inflame passions across Afghanistan and undermine the fragile working relationship with Western leaders as the U.S. military prepares to begin withdrawing thousands of troops this summer.
Western officials in Kabul said that relations between Mr. Karzai and the U.S.-led coalition have been deteriorating and the Afghan president took repeated jabs at military leaders during his hour-long press conference.
“We must clearly demonstrate our understanding that Afghanistan is an ally, not an occupied country,” Mr. Karzai told reporters. “And our treatment with NATO is from the point of view of an ally. If it turns to the other, to the behavior of an occupation, then of course the Afghan people know how to deal with that.”
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