Bahraini authorities have arrested and imprisoned Nabeel Rajab, the rights activist and foremost critic of the Al Khalifa regime. The arrest comes as the country’s military continues its brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters.
Nabeel Rajab, the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights was detained at Bahrain’s international airport on his return from Lebanon.
The authorities have not commented on the reasons behind the arrest.
Rajab has played a significant role in anti-regime demonstrations over the past months.
Index on Censorship condemns last night’s arrest of Index’s 2012 Award winner and head of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR), Nabeel Rajab and the ongoing harassment of human rights activists in Bahrain including the arrest of those involved in peaceful protests: here.
Bahrain Live Coverage: Prominent Activist Nabeel Rajab Arrested: here.
MADRID — A northeastern town has declared the king of Spain an unwelcome person, dealing another blow to the 74-year-old monarch who has faced scalding criticism for going on an elephant hunting trip during a deep financial crisis.
The town council of Berga — population 17,160 — approved a motion declaring King Juan Carlos “persona non grata,” or not welcome.
The censure was proposed by the pro-independence Popular Unity Candidature party and published, following its approval, on the town’s website Saturday. Berga is located 108 kilometers (67 miles) north of Catalonia’s regional capital, Barcelona.
The king faced condemnation after breaking a hip while on a lavish safari in Botswana at a time when nearly one in four Spaniards were unemployed.
Spanish king’s ‘mistress’ appears on front cover of Vanity Fair
By Fiona Govan in Madrid
Friday May 18 2012
Spain’s royal family are facing fresh embarrassment with the publication of details of the controversial elephant hunting trip taken by King Juan Carlos last month and the mysterious role of the blonde aristocrat who accompanied him.
Corinna zu Sayn Wittgenstein appears on the cover of the June edition of Spain’s ‘Vanity Fair’ magazine alongside claims that she has been the king’s unofficial companion on numerous private trips abroad, including the ill-fated Botswana safari in April which caused outrage in Spain.
The twice-divorced Princess Corinna (46), who was born in Germany and claims her title through her second husband, has reportedly fled Spain amid intense speculation that she is actually the Spanish monarch’s mistress.
“She has told me that the king is her friend and a great guy whom she admires. Nothing more,” said Ms zu Sayn Wittgenstein’s first husband, Philip J Adkin, an American shipping magnate who confirmed he had also been a member of the hunting party in Botswana.
The hunting trip became public knowledge after the 74-year-old monarch fractured his hip in a fall in camp and was rushed back to Madrid for surgery. News of the king shooting endangered animals while Spaniards suffered deep economic strife was met with public outcry.
The king and Ms zu Sayn Wittgenstein reportedly met when she was organising shooting expeditions for Boss & Co, Britain’s oldest gunshop where she worked until 2006. They were on the same safari in Mozambique in 2004. Several hunting trips followed as well as a trip to Saudi Arabia.
In Belgium and the Netherlands, 15 indigenous tick species live. Some of them suck blood from various animals (and humans), but most limit themselves to one specific species or species group (eg hedgehogs, sand martins, or bats). Of these specialized ticks, Ixodes arboricola is probably the least known. This species infects mainly birds that breed and sleep in tree cavities and nest boxes, but there is still little known about its ecology and distribution and its role in the spread of diseases in birds and humans.
For several years, the research group Evolutionary Ecology at the University of Antwerp have studied parasites of birds. Currently, they do research on the ecological interactions between ticks (Ixodidae) and tree cavity nesting birds. In this project, including the genetic variation of the ticks in relation to their hosts, the spatial distribution and genetic variation is studied on the scale of Belgium and the Netherlands. In addition, it will look at the germs which may be present in those ticks.
Five years ago, during this research in forest fragments near Antwerp (Peerdsbos in Brasschaat and Boshoek in Boechout-Lier) and later in the Park de Renesse in Oostmalle, Ixodes arboricola was found, a species which may be numerous elsewhere in Europe, but which as far as we know had never been documented in Belgium. The species does not have a Dutch name yet.
The fact that the anti-democratic laws remain in force and that the trials continue highlights the political accommodation reached by the current government of Yingluck Shinawatra with the country’s traditional elites—the military, state bureaucracy and the monarchy. In a deal struck prior to national elections last July, Yingluck agreed to stay out of military affairs and leave the lese majeste laws untouched if she came to power.
The uneasy truce ended five years of bitter political infighting within the country’s ruling elites after the military ousted Yingluck’s brother—Thaksin Shinawatra—in 2006. The result, however, is that critics of the Abhisit government and its backers in the military and monarchy now face lengthy jail terms on a range of charges, including lese majeste, that is, denigrating the monarchy.
The lese majeste laws are such a politically sensitive issue because the monarchy has played such a pivotal role in protecting the Thai state apparatus. In times of crisis, the Thai king has been able to posture as a neutral arbiter and intervene to defuse developing opposition, to the military in particular. Over the past six years, however, the monarchy has increasingly been seen as acting in a partisan fashion against the Thaksin faction of the ruling elite. This is why there is a greater use of lese majeste laws to block critics.
The 50-year-old Somyot has a long history as an activist in student and trade union organisations and as a publicist. He is charged over two articles that appeared in the Voice of Taksin magazine in 2010, when he was the editor. Somyot was arrested on April 30, 2011 and has been held in custody ever since. Eight applications for bail were rejected. If convicted he faces up to 15 years imprisonment.
Efforts by the Thai government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra to replace the country’s military-imposed constitution have reignited bitter internecine fighting within the country’s ruling elite: here.
From Gulf News, a slavish mouthpiece for the dictatorial monarchical regime in Bahrain:
Thailand prime minister to visit Bahrain
Boosting cooperation in trade and medical services will top the agenda of her talks in the two Gulf countries
Several of the Society’s 211 nature reserves have suffered severe flooding, including the internationally-important Ouse Washes in East Anglia. The reserve, which is home to the largest concentration of nesting wading birds in lowland England, is now two metres under water. The rising flood waters have drowned the nests and breeding attempts of an estimated 600 wading birds, including 37 per of the lowland snipe population of England and Wales. Other waders affected include large numbers of redshank, lapwing and, most importantly of all, internationally-important black-tailed godwits.
Jon Reeves is the RSPB’s Ouse Washes site manager. He said: “Following centuries of land drainage across the UK, The Ouse Washes is now the most important stronghold for these birds, after they have been largely forced out of other sites. Literally, we have all our eggs in one basket and we’ve lost them. It’s devastating to watch the nests succumb to the rising waters without being able to do anything to prevent it.”
Flood plain
The Ouse Washes is used by the Environment Agency as part of the flood relief system for the River Great Ouse, which flows from Northamptonshire, through Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Cambridgeshire to the sea, near Kings Lynn, in Norfolk. In summer, the Ouse Washes nature reserve is grazed by cattle to create the ideal conditions for ground-nesting birds. The RSPB manages the site to keep the water levels at an optimum height for wading birds to create damp grassland and wet features without flooding. However, the Environment Agency has to open sluices to allow water onto the washes to prevent flooding elsewhere in the 150 mile catchment of The Great River Ouse. Jon Reeves added: “The Environment Agency is working hard to identify replacement land for the birds to nest to take the pressure off the Ouse Washes. Until this replacement land is in place, the birds will continue to face an uncertain future.”
Minsmere floods
Other reserves to have suffered flooding include Minsmere, on the Suffolk coast, where avocet and black-headed gull nests have been washed away. Fairburn Ings, near Leeds, and Pulborough Brooks, in West Sussex, have also been affected. Waterbird nests, including waders, such as lapwing, have been destroyed at these two sites.
However, the nest belonging to a pair of coots at Fairburn Ings enjoyed a miraculous escape, when the nest with eggs was washed away. The nest, like a miniature raft, floated to a new location about 30 metres away, where the eggs were able to hatch.
Some RSPB nature reserves are reporting better news as the heavy rainfall is helping providing much-needed water to those sites striving to combat the ongoing drought.
That war is, unlike what war propagandists say, not about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA. The Taliban leaders hardly looked beyond their own provincial borders, let alone Afghanistan’s national borders. They hardly knew where New York City was, let alone where the Twin Towers were.
That war is, unlike what war propagandists say, not about Osama bin Laden. Who was not in Afghanistan, but in United States ally Pakistan during the Afghan war. And who is dead now, though Afghan civilians and United States and other soldiers still keep dying. And United States, Canadian, and other taxpayers keep paying billions for the war.
plans to sign a natural gas sales agreement with Afghanistan, Pakistan and India this month, AP reported.
The deal would mark a decisive move toward construction of a pipeline crossing the four nations that backers hope will meet energy demands across the region.
Two high-ranking officials, who cannot be named as they are not authorized to speak with the media, told The Associated Press this week they expect the agreement to be signed at an energy conference in Turkmenistan late May.
Progress on the project has to date been delayed by disagreement among participant nations on transit fees and the price for the gas.
It has been widely assumed that gas for the more than 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometer) pipeline will be sourced from the Dauletabad field in southern Turkmenistan.
An official from the state gas company said, however, that a portion of the fuel will eventually be drawn from the vast and yet-to-be developed South Yolotan field near the Afghan border.
The gas pipeline across Afghanistan, projected to ship 33 billion cubic meters a year, has been actively backed by the United States. It would give Turkmenistan a further export route for its copious energy reserves and generate revenue for Afghanistan.
Turkmen President Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov has said Afghanistan could stand to earn more than $1 billion annually in transit fees.
Construction begins on Afghan stretch of TAPI gas pipeline: here.
US-Afghan Pact Won’t End War – Or Special Operations Forces Night Raids. Gareth Porter, Inter Press Service News: “But the only substantive agreement reached between the U.S. and Afghanistan – well hidden in the agreements – has been to allow powerful U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) to continue to carry out the unilateral night raids on private homes that are universally hated in the Pashtun zones of Afghanistan…. The Obama administration’s success in obscuring those facts is the real story behind the ostensible story of the agreement”: here.
Leaving Afghanistan by Staying. David Swanson, War Is a Crime: “Obama is full of praise for U.S. troops, as if they’ve benefitted Afghanistan. And he’s full of concern for the suffering of U.S. troops and U.S. citizens…. ‘Neither Americans nor the Afghan people asked for this war,’ Obama said, forgetting that one of those two countries had invaded the other one and occupied it for over a decade. ‘The reason America is safe is because of you,’ Obama told U.S. troops, forgetting that the war has made our nation more hated around the world”: here.
A few weeks ago I was with a few companions from Occupy Wall Street in Union Square when an old friend — I’ll call her Eileen — passed through, her hand in a cast.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“Oh, this?” she held it up. “I was in Liberty Park on the 17th [the Six Month Anniversary of the Occupation]. When the cops were pushing us out the park, one of them yanked at my breast.”
“Again?” someone said.
We had all been hearing stories like this. In fact, there had been continual reports of police officers groping women during the nightly evictions from Union Square itself over the previous two weeks.
“Yeah so I screamed at the guy, I said, ‘you grabbed my boob! what are you, some kind of fucking pervert?’ So they took me behind the lines and broke my wrists.”
Actually, she quickly clarified, only one wrist was literally broken. She proceeded to launch into a careful, well-nigh clinical blow-by-blow description of what had happened. An experienced activist, she knew to go limp when police seized her, and how to do nothing that could possibly be described as resisting arrest. Police dragged her, partly by the hair, behind their lines and threw her to the ground, periodically shouting “stop resisting!” as she shouted back “I’m not resisting!” At one point though, she said, she did tell them her glasses had fallen to the sidewalk next to her, and announced she was going to reach over to retrieve them. That apparently gave them all the excuse they needed. One seized her right arm and bent her wrist backwards in what she said appeared to be some kind of marshal-arts move, leaving it not broken, but seriously damaged. “I don’t know exactly what they did to my left wrist—at that point I was too busy screaming at the top of my lungs in pain. But they broke it. After that they put me in plastic cuffs, as tightly as they possibly could, and wouldn’t loosen them for at least an hour no matter how loud I screamed or how much the other prisoners begged them to help me. For a while everyone in the arrest van was chanting ‘take them off, take them off’ but they just ignored them…”
On March 17, several hundred members of Occupy Wall Street celebrated the six month anniversary of their first camp at Zuccotti Park by a peaceful reoccupation of the park—a reoccupation broken up within hours by police with 32 arrests. Later that evening a break-away group moved north, finally establishing itself on the southern end of Union Square, two miles away, even sleeping in park—though the city government soon after decided to defy a century-old tradition and begin closing the park every night just so they would not be able to establish a camp there. Since then, occupiers have taken advantage of past judicial rulings to continue to sleep on sidewalks outside the park, and more recently, on Wall Street itself.
During this time, peaceful occupiers have been faced with continual harassment arrests, almost invariably on fabricated charges (“disorderly conduct,” “interfering with the conduct of a police officer”—the latter a charge that can be leveled, for instance, against those who try to twist out of the way when an officer is hitting them.) I have seen one protestor at Union Square arrested, by four officers using considerable force, for sitting on the ground to pet a dog; another, for wrapping a blanket around herself (neither were given warnings; but both behaviors were considered too close to “camping”); a third, an ex-Marine, for using obscene language on the Federal steps.
Others were reportedly arrested on those same steps for singing a satirical version of the “Officer Krumpke” song from West Side Story. Almost no march goes by without one or two protestors, at least, being hurled against vehicles or have their heads bashed against the ground while being arrested for straying off the sidewalk. The message here is clear. Law has nothing to do with it. Anyone who engages in Occupy Wall Street-related activity should know they can be arrested, for virtually any reason, at any time.
Arrests Exceed 7,000 as the Occupy’s Movement’s Spring Plans Unfold Across the Nation: here.
May Day: From the Haymarket Massacre to the Occupy Movement: here.
What Occupiers Learned From Obama – and What He Should Learn From Them: here.
Danish-Bahraini activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja will be retried in Bahrain along with 20 others, according to his lawyer. Al-Khawaja, who was imprisoned for life last year after been found guilty of plotting against the state, has been on hunger strike since February.
“The Appeals Court has accepted that the case should be retried because al-Khawaja did not get a fair trial,” said a spokeswoman from the office of Mohamed al-Jishi, al-Khawaja’s lawyer. “The only proof the prosecution had against him was the admission he provided during torture,” she added.
Reneging on a promise made just weeks earlier, Bahraini authorities have denied visas to representatives of several free expression organizations who planned to travel to the kingdom next week to assess press and free speech conditions: here.
Reporters Without Borders condemns the Bahraini government’s last-minute withdrawal of the permission it had previously given for a visit by a delegation of NGOs that defend freedom of expression. Spurious grounds were used to prevent the visit, which had been scheduled to take place from 5 to 10 May: here.
Calls Mount for Stronger U.S. Stance as Bahrain Resists Reform: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 