Mystery surrounds arrested Iranian blogger's reported death

BEIRUT -- Human rights activists are calling on Iran to investigate the apparent death of a blogger who was in custody after being arrested for criticizing the government in online postings.

Sattar Beheshti, 35, reportedly died this week while in detention after his arrest Oct. 30 by Iran’s cyber police unit.

Beheshti maintained a website, My Life for My Iran, on which he criticized the Iranian government, said the human rights group Amnesty International.

The exact time and cause of his death are not publicly known, Amnesty said in a statement.

“The Iranian authorities must immediately carry out an independent investigation into his death, including whether torture played a part in it,” Amnesty International said.

Bahrain bans all protests and rallies, citing security threats

Bahrain has banned all protests and rallies, arguing that a complete stop to such gatherings is needed to maintain security in the island nation.

Interior Minister Sheik Rashid ibn Abdullah Khalifa ordered the move, a sweeping attempt to bring its long-simmering unrest to a halt. An Interior Ministry statement issued Tuesday said “rallies and gatherings were associated with violence, rioting and attacks on public and private property.... They also were a major threat to the safety of the public.”

Anyone calling for rallies or taking part in them would face “legal actions,” the statement said.

Bahrain has been roiled by protests for more than a year by dissidents upset with the Sunni Muslim monarchy over police abuses and the marginalization of Shiite Muslims. While the government has undertaken some reforms, human rights groups and activists say abuses have continued, including the jailing of peaceful protesters. Amnesty International laments many “prisoners of conscience” remain behind bars.

Australians torn over promises, risks of coal-seam 'fracking'

Lock the Gate appears to be a fitting name for Australia’s protest movement against hydraulic fracturing. It took activists years to identify threats to public health from "fracking," a classic case of getting mobilized only after the proverbial horse has escaped.

Australians in the rural reaches of Queensland greeted fracking with gusto when the northeastern state’s political leaders began about seven years ago to tout the profit potential of the unconventional extraction method that blasts sand, water and chemicals into coal and shale seams. Ambitious projects were drafted. More than 4,500 wells were drilled in barely two years, and work has begun on a 250-mile pipeline from the gas fields to Gladstone Harbor and a massive liquefaction facility there. Once construction of the port complex on Curtis Island is completed in 2014, gas will be converted to liquefied natural gas and shipped north to energy-hungry Asian neighbors.

It wasn’t until the buildup got into full swing about three years ago that locals began complaining of distressing side effects of fracking. Activists claim drinking-water aquifers have been contaminated, groundwater depleted and greenhouse gases released along a three-mile stretch of the Condamine River, which at times appears to be boiling.

Dredging in Gladstone Harbor has been blamed for disease outbreaks among fish and mud crabs. Marine scientists attribute the sickness to toxic metals being stirred up from the seabed. Port developers say the defects and deaths were caused by an excess of fresh water from seasonal flooding.

“What was a wonderful fish nursery has turned into an industrial harbor, with ships that will be driving straight through the Great Barrier Reef,” said Matt Landos, a University of Sydney researcher and private consultant in aquatic animal health.

A greater irritant for Australians, Landos said, is the lack of information being provided on the environmental and health costs entailed in the race to make Australia the No. 1 LNG exporter in the world by 2020.

Gas output in historically coal-dependent Australia took off in the last decade, beginning with undersea extraction off the northwestern coast. It quickly swept to the more populous east coast with the discovery of major coal-seam deposits in the Bowen and Surat basins that extend from Queensland into New South Wales.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration in its 2011 world energy outlook reports that Australia, already the fourth-biggest exporter of LNG, has the largest proven natural gas reserves in the Asia-Pacific region, with 110 trillion cubic feet. It has nearly four times that volume in technically recoverable shale gas, the agency estimates, leaving it well positioned to fill the booming energy needs of the region.

Queensland’s new premier, Campbell Newman, campaigned on a platform of support for the LNG buildup but insisted before his election in March that it wouldn’t be “at any cost,” that the agricultural state's farmland had to be protected.

But activists charge that pursuit of the gas bonanza has been unbridled. And the acrimony has only intensified since the appointment of rancher John Cotter as “gas sheriff,” charged with resolving disputes between landowners and gas industry interests. Cotter’s son, John Jr., is founder of a private company that does consulting and project management in mining operations, including contracts with the multibillion-dollar Queensland Curtis Project expanding coal seam fracking and helping build an underground pipeline.

Lock the Gate Chairman Drew Hutton accuses the Cotters of having an “intolerable” conflict of interest and calls the appointment “a most appalling, short-sighted decision,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported last month.

Landos accuses the Queensland government of being blinded to the environmental threats of expanded fracking by “starry-eyed economic forecasts” of Australia emerging as the new LNG global powerhouse.

“It’s a false accounting that doesn’t take into consideration the costs of environmental cleanup,” the veterinary scientist complained in a telephone interview from Sydney. Expectations of jobs and export income, he added, “are leading to tremendous enthusiasm among our politicians to push the industry forward with minimal impediment.”

He worries that the all-out drive for LNG dominance will destroy coastal fisheries and damage sites of natural beauty in exchange for an economy dependent on gas that could be exhausted in 25 years.

The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization warned the Australian government in June that its rapid LNG development plan was posing “a significant risk” to the Great Barrier Reef, which has been under World Heritage protection since 1981. It extends from Gladstone Harbor northward along the Queensland coast and would be traversed by gas exporting ships headed for China, Japan and Taiwan.

UNESCO asked the Queensland government to provide assurances by February 2013 that port development will be brought under control and the reef protected, warning that otherwise the site may be designated as "in danger," a shaming censure for any First World national steward.

Campbell, the state premier, responded to the world body report with assurances that the environment would be protected, "but we are not going to see the economic future of Queensland shut down."

Lock the Gate and other anti-fracking groups have exploded over the last year as farmers have seen their water tables drop and their land littered with mine tailings, said Mariann Lloyd-Smith, a lawyer and senior advisor to the International POPs (Persistent Organic Pollutants) Elimination Network. The groups seek clarity on what is being injected into the coal seams. Companies often refuse to disclose such information, saying the formulas are industrial secrets.

Groups such as Australia’s National Toxins Network have been collecting data on pollution and waste to use in legal challenges that have become so prevalent that some fracking companies are giving up and handing in their exploration permits, Lloyd-Smith said.

Unlike in the United States, where property owners hold the rights to resources beneath their land, the Australian government owns everything below the topsoil. The Gasfields Commission has the authority to compel landowners to accommodate energy exploration, typically resulting in compensation of about $1,500 per well, Lloyd-Smith said. That's turning out to be too little to clean up the mess once drilling is over, driving up opposition across Australia.

Temporary bans on fracking in the two states south of Queensland -– New South Wales and Victoria –- have been enacted in response to public demands for investigation of environmental damage claims.

“When one farmer locks his gate, the companies have the right to take the case to arbitration or to the courts, and they often do. But when 100 farmers lock their gates, it’s a case of diminishing returns for the companies,” Lloyd-Smith said. “It’s that sort of consolidation of the community opposition that to a degree is winning the battle.”

"To a degree" may be the operative assessment, as energy industry leaders are fighting back. In a speech in Melbourne this month, ExxonMobil Australia President John Dashwood blamed the fracking bans on “those who run agendas on emotional messages.” He pointed to reduced greenhouse gas emissions as a tangible benefit from replacing coal-generated power with natural gas from shale and coal seams.

With more than $500 billion in LNG-purchase commitments from Asian neighbors already on the books, even the more vociferous cries of fracking opponents are being drowned out by the drilling and blasting from new wells cropping up by the dozens each week.

As Hutton of Lock the Gate recently warned, "The Queensland environment is going to die a death of 1,000 cuts with this industry that it cannot control.”

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Photo: Protests against the proliferation of coal-seam gas fracking have swelled in size and number in recent months as farmers, ranchers and rural residents confront industry and government leaders over the alleged polluting side effects of the unconventional gas extraction process. This protest last spring targeted plans to frack in New South Wales. Credit: Courtesy of Andrya Hart

 

Clashes in Beirut follow funeral for slain police official

BEIRUT -- A politically charged funeral for a slain police intelligence chief devolved into clashes in the heart of the Lebanese capital Sunday as angry mourners tried to storm the prime minister’s office but were pushed back by troops.

Soldiers used tear gas and fired shots in the air to disperse the enraged crowd of several hundred -- mostly young men, some wielding sticks.

The clashes followed a somber and peaceful funeral for Gen. Wissam Hassan, the police intelligence chief assassinated Friday in a car bomb in a upscale Beirut neighborhood.

Authorities initially said eight people were killed in Friday's explosion, but have since reduced the death toll to three, including the police official and a bodyguard.

The car bombing — the first significant attack in the Lebanese capital in four years — has outraged opponents of Lebanon’s government and resulted in calls for the nation's ruling coalition to resign. The incident has also raised tensions in a nation with deep religious and political divides and a history of sectarian conflict.

Israeli Army Radio ban on protest song raises controversy

JERUSALEM — A leading Israeli radio station's decision to ban for broadcast a protest song is stirring controversy and underscoring the sensitive intersection of art, politics and freedom of speech in the country.

"A Matter of Habit," recently released by veteran Israeli musician Izhar Ashdot, describes the slippery slope Israeli soldiers go down, from fear and confusion to complacency, until "killing is a matter of habit."  The lyrics, written by Ashdot's life partner, novelist Alona Kimhi, reportedly were inspired by her tour with Breaking the Silence, an organization of former combat soldiers whose website says it is dedicated to exposing the "reality of everyday life in the occupied territories." 

The song was welcomed by liberals as a protest of Israel's actions in the West Bank but fiercely criticized by others, who defaced Ashdot's official Facebook page last month, with one angry reader referring to Ashdot as a "draft-dodging dog" — though he didn't evade mandatory service.

Army Radio stuck by an advance invitation that Ashdot perform in its studios but expressly vetoed the playing of this song. The station later issued a statement saying there was no room on the military station for a song that "denigrates and denounces those who have sacrificed their lives for the defense of the country."

"I am worried when songs are banned for broadcast in a democratic country," Ashdot told Israeli media, adding he was shocked by the "incitement" against him that the statement encouraged. The decision and statement were issued by Yaron Dekel, a veteran journalist appointed to be the station's military commander in February.

Egypt's Christians, Muslims hold vigil on anniversary of massacre

CAIRO -- Thousands of Egyptians on Tuesday marched to Maspero, the country's television headquarters, to commemorate the killings of 27 people, mostly Coptic Christians,  a year ago by thugs and soldiers during a protest over a church destroyed by arson.

Muslims and Christians marched in solemn procession, carrying flowers and photos of the dead and chanting calls for justice for what has been dubbed the Maspero Massacre.  They called for the death penalty for Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, former head of the military-led government.

"I'm recalling everything that happened last year. I'm remembering how we approached the television building. I can still hear the gunfire and I remember the army tanks as they ruthlessly chased us," said Amir Roshdy, a 30-year-old Copt. "Till now we can still smell the blood of the martyrs, we still feel them here."

Protesters also chanted against Egypt's new Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. They accused him of striking deals with the former military rulers to secure power. Morsi was sworn into office in June and none of the nation's commanders have been charged.

Syria shells long-besieged Homs in extended attack

BEIRUT -- The Syrian military on Friday bombarded the central city of Homs for more than 12 hours in the  longest sustained government attack on the city in months, opposition activists said.

Homs, once a city of 1 million people, has experienced some of the heaviest fighting and bombardment during the more than 18-month conflict. Most residents are believed to have fled the city.

“Today’s shelling is as if they are preparing to storm” parts of Homs, said Abu Fidaa, the name used by an opposition activist reached Friday in Homs’ Khaldiyeh district, one of the targets of Friday’s bombardment. “It’s worse than Gaza.”

The shelling lasted from about 7 a.m. until after 7 p.m., he said.

Homs was the principal urban battlefield in Syria long before Damascus and Aleppo, the two largest Syrian cities, became major combat zones in recent months. But Homs has remained a heavily contested area and the site of major clashes despite the media focus on fighting in the other cities.

Some neighborhoods of Homs are largely deserted, filled only by rubble and battered buildings, witnesses say. Yet they say life has returned to some sense of normality in other districts where there has been less fighting.

The official Syrian government news service reported Friday that more than 20 terrorists, the government label for opposition fighters, were killed in military attacks on several districts of Homs.

Elsewhere in Syria, opposition forces said they had shot down a helicopter near Damascus. There was no independent corroboration of the report.

Meanwhile, the Turkish media reported that the Turkish military conducted retaliatory fire  into Syria on Friday for the third consecutive day. The Turkish strike followed word that a mortar from the Syrian side had fallen in the southern Turkish province of Hatay. No injuries were reported on the ground in Turkey. Turkey has vowed to retaliate against Syria for any strikes across the nation’s more than 500-mile border with Syria.

 On Wednesday, an apparent mortar shell from Syria struck the Turkish border town of Akcakale, killing five people. That incident drew international outrage and prompted Turkish artillery to fire back at Syrian batteries believed to be involved in the incident.

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Photo: An image taken from video obtained from the Shaam News Network, which has been authenticated based on outside reporting, shows smoke rising from houses after government shelling in Homs, Syria, on Oct. 5, 2012.  Credit: Shaam News Network / Associated Press

Sanctions, currency chaos igniting unrest in outcast Iran

Soaring prices at Tehran's cavernous Grand Bazaar have ignited violence this week as money traders and vendors clashed with riot police over the plummeting value of the Iranian currency, which is being gutted by international sanctions and mismanagement by the Islamic regime.

What for most Iranians has been an abstract political dispute between their leaders and Western countries concerned about Tehran's nuclear ambitions has suddenly hit them in their wallets and pushed them to lash out. The rial has lost 80% of its value against the U.S. dollar in the last year, a decline accelerated by tightened U.S. and European Union sanctions now depriving the regime of half the hard currency it was earning from oil exports.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blamed the deepening economic chaos on foreign enemies, contending there is "no economic justification" for the public scramble to dump rials in favor of dollars, euros and gold. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei also struck a defiant pose, reasserting Tehran's right to enrich uranium and vowing that Iranians "will never surrender to pressure."

But Iranian exiles and scholars see the angry outbursts in the marketplace as a sign that ordinary Iranians are finally fed up with a regime that has brought them isolation, insecurity and eroding living standards. They see a population, resentful of a crackdown on dissent three years ago, now edging toward rebellion.

The unrest also demonstrates that the U.S. policy of letting sanctions and diplomacy undermine popular support for the regime is having the desired effect, confronting Tehran with its gravest challenge since Islamic clerics came to power in a  1979 revolution, the experts say.

The street value of the rial has dropped by half in the last two months and plunged 18% on Monday alone. The unofficial exchange rate for the dollar -- more than 35,000 before back-alley trading halted -- is almost three times the official rate of 12,260. But that subsidized exchange rate is available only from state banks to a limited and shrinking number of key importers.

Money traders stopped selling dollars Tuesday, confused over how to price the swiftly deteriorating rial. Some vendors closed their shops in protest of the government's failure to intervene and prop up the currency; others boosted prices beyond what many shoppers can or will pay.  

Before harsher sanctions kicked in three months ago, Iran's government had been using a sizable share of its $100-billion annual oil earnings to subsidize dollar-denominated food and consumer goods, to keep prices stable and placate the population, said Abbas Milani, a Tehran-born academic who directs Iranian studies at Stanford University.

Milani said he suspects the government was initially using the economic downturn brought on by the sanctions to put an end to the costly dollar subsidies. But he now concludes that the regime has been forced to let the rial tumble because it has run out of the hard currency needed to stop the slide.

"We're not talking about a billion dollars or 2 billion to stabilize a currency that has gone down so far. The government would have to find enormous sums of money to pour in, and if they had it they would have done it by now," Milani said.

"I don't think the regime can survive this one," he said, unless Khamenei does the unthinkable and meets Western demands that Iran cease enriching uranium beyond levels needed for civilian nuclear programs.

Tehran officials recently told the International Monetary Fund that they had $50 billion on hand, enough to see Iran through the sanctions bite for at least four or five months, Milani said. He calculates that the regime should have saved about $300 billion in a rainy-day fund over the last eight years. That no intervention in the currency crisis has been forthcoming tells him that much of the oil windfall has been squandered or siphoned off into private accounts of the Revolutionary Guards and government leaders.

"Social and political cohesion in Iran will be deeply disturbed by this economic crisis," predicted Alireza Nader, senior policy analyst on Iran for Rand Corp. "And it's not just the economic crisis -- you saw Iranians take to the streets in 2009 for a number of reasons, and those tensions have been simmering below the surface. We see them coming up now."

Nader pointed out that protesters at the bazaar this week have shouted denunciation of the regime's politics as well as soaring inflation. Shouts of "Leave Syria alone and think about us!" could be heard in clandestinely shot video footage of the angry crowds, he said.

 The Iranian government has been the sole regional supporter of Syrian President Bashar Assad and his brutal suppression of a rebellion now in its 19th month.

"Eventually this is going to put enormous pressure on the Iranian government to concede on a number of issues, not just the nuclear programs but domestic political issues as well," Nader said. "It's already gotten to the point where people's livelihoods are at stake and they're not going to tolerate that situation. We can definitely expect to see more unrest in the coming months."

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Photo: An Iranian shopper on Wednesday pays a fruit seller at the Grand Bazaar in Tehran with 50,000-rial banknotes. The sanctions-battered Iranian currency has lost 80% of its value in the last year, spurring inflation and social unrest. Credit: Abedin Taherkenareh / European Pressphoto Agency

Insert: Riot police block an approach to the Grand Bazaar on Wednesday after arresting money traders and dousing fires lighted in protest of the falling rial currency. Credit: European Pressphoto Agency

Amnesty International to Egypt: Stop 'bloody' legacy of repression

CAIRO -- Amnesty International sent a letter Tuesday to Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi urging him to stem the “bloody” legacy of state repression highlighted in two reports that detail killings, torture and sexual assaults that have shaken the nation since last year's uprising.

Egypt's new leader must pave the way for reforms in order to ensure accountability and transparency from the army and police, the group said, blaming security forces for atrocities against demonstrators over the past 20 months.

The first report, "Brutality Unpunished and Unchecked: Egypt’s Military Kills and Tortures Protesters with Impunity," described the killings of protesters by a military acting "above the law" during the army's hold on the government that ended when Morsi forced the resignations of top commanders in August.

The human rights group's research on military abuse examined the deaths of 27 mainly Coptic Christian protesters killed outside Maspero, the state’s television headquarters, in October 2011.  It also focused on the deaths of 17 protesters outside Egypt's Cabinet in December 2011, as well as the May 2012 Abbaseya sit-in near the Defense Ministry in Cairo where 12 people were killed.

Missing Mexico activist found alive, says he fears for his life

MEXICO CITY -- The Ensenada-based spokesman for Mexico's Yo Soy 132 protest movement who went missing last week turned up alive in the Baja Calfornia Sur city of La Paz on Tuesday after fleeing his hometown in fear of his life, his father said -- although it was not clear who or what the activist was afraid of.

The Yo Soy 132 youth movement, which has emerged as one of the key critics of President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto, had alleged that government forces were responsible for the disappearance of the spokesman, Aleph Jimenez Rodriguez, 32, after he vanished last week. 

The group, however, had no proof that the government was involved. 

At a news conference in Mexicali on Tuesday, Jimenez's father, Julio Jimenez Aponte, said he had heard through an intermediary that his son was safe and in good health but "had made the decision to hide because he felt that his physical well-being was in jeopardy."

The Baja California state prosecutor's office confirmed that Jimenez had turned up in La Paz. Julio Jimenez said his son was on his way to Mexico City on Tuesday evening to seek the protection of Mexico's National Human Rights Commission.  

The prosecutor's office also said Aleph Jimenez was planning to file a complaint with the commission, though it was not clear who he believed was threatening him.

Friends  of Jimenez feared that the 32-year-old science teacher had been abducted by government forces in retaliation for his involvement in protests against the president-elect and his Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

Jimenez's disappearance made national headlines in Mexico, in part because of lingering concerns that the PRI, which is returning to power after a 12-year-hiatus, will engage in violent repression that it occasionally resorted to during its seven-decade reign as a quasi-authoritarian force in 20th century Mexico. 

Peña Nieto, who will be sworn in in December, has promised that his party has changed with the times and is now more respectful of democratic norms.

Jimenez and about 20 other activists were arrested after a peaceful protest at Mexican Independence Day celebrations in Ensenada on Sept. 15. Municipal police allegedly roughed up some of the demonstrators, sending one women to the hospital.

Later, Jimenez told friends that he feared for his safety. He also told them he was being followed.

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-- Cecilia Sanchez of The Times' Mexico City bureau contributed to this report.

Photo:  Supporters of Yo Soy 132 movement leader Aleph Jimenez Rodriguez rally Ensenada just before he emerged from hiding in La Paz, Mexico. Credit: Alejandro Zepeda / EPA