Global outcry as 20 medics prepare to go to jail for helping protesters during the Arab spring’s forgotten uprising Dr Ali al-Akri sits at home in Bahrain waiting for the jailer to call. When it happens, probably within days, the veteran physician will pack his bag, kiss his family goodbye and go to the prison that he will probably call home for the next 15 years. “I’ll do what I have to do,” he says, “if that means that Bahrain will be a better place. And all of the doctors convicted with me will do the same.” The 20 Bahraini medics who were sentenced on Thursday to prison terms of between five and 15 years remain on bail in Manama, but all are sure that their fate has been sealed by the military court that convicted them of a range of subversive crimes, some of which the government claims amount to acts of terrorism. The sentences have drawn widespread international condemnation and refocused attention on the uprising in the tiny Gulf state that faded away as the rest of the region boiled. When nobody was looking, Bahrain’s revolution died. “And this is what happens now,” said Hussein al-Musawi, a protester who ran an information tent at the now defunct Pearl Square roundabout, which was the main protest hub. “We’re in a grieving period for a stillborn promise.” The plight of the medics – 18 doctors and two paramedics – continued to attract criticism , with the US saying it was deeply disturbed by the sentences and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights saying it had “severe concerns”. Several of the doctors said their ordeal during the six months since they were arrested in Bahrain’s main hospital – the Salmaniya medical centre – has left them crushed and dispirited. In February they were catapulted to the vanguard of a protest movement that shook the foundations of the kingdom. The doctors say they became unwitting participants in a series of events that rapidly overtook them. As protesters were chased away from Pearl Square they began regrouping in the grounds of the hospital. It was the only place they said they felt safe from security forces. And that, according to al-Akri, is when the trouble started for the medics. “We knew right from the beginning that our issue was about politics,” he said one day after being sentenced on various charges of committing crimes against the state. “We were as far away from politics as you could be but we found ourselves in the centre of it because were treating the victims.” The doctors were the highest-profile group to be convicted over the past six months, which has seen many hundreds of arrests and a purge of suspected protesters from government jobs. The ruling al-Khalifa family has pledged reforms in the Sunni-led state that rules over a large Shia majority, which it accuses of having ties to Iran. “It’s all lies,” said al-Akri. “We have nothing to do with Iran and we want nothing to do with Iran. There is not a single incident that they could point to that would reinforce the view that Bahrain’s Shias are carrying out an Iranian agenda.” Matar Matar, a former opposition lawmaker from the al-Wefaq party, is also on bail, accused of offences against the state. He said little he has seen has given him reason to think things will change. “There have been no improvements on the ground,” he said. “The situation has gone from bad to worse. They are ignoring change and trying to deny that there is a movement for reform. “But they are under a lot of pressure too. The economic situation here is very bad and they don’t have anything on the horizon. They can no longer convince Saudi businessmen to come here.” Saudi Arabia remains firmly in Bahrain’s camp, seemingly convinced that the crackdown it helped lead has saved the tiny kingdom from peril, and spared its own country from an uprising that it continues to see through a sectarian prism Bahraini officials released more details on the alleged activities of the doctors. They included using the hospital as a political platform, preventing some patients from receiving treatment, inviting foreign media and other non-medics into trauma areas, and storing weapons in the hospital, where an AK-47 and some bladed weapons were reportedly found. The doctors say they had no role in stopping ambulances, but admitted joining political rallies. “It was the security forces who [stopped the ambulances] and that was proven during the trial,” said al-Akri. “There was evidence from the dispatchers and statements from the security forces themeselves. “We were outraged when the ambulances were stopped and we led protests calling for the removal of the health minister. When he was sacked, we stopped.” “We witnessed the atrocities. And because we did not obey [the government] we are being punished.” And then he offered an optimistic tone — of sorts. “There is a bottleneck now and things should ease. The government is feeling political, social and financial pressures and all have their limits. Nobody feels safe here now, people of either sect. Nobody is comfortable anymore and that cannot last.” Bahrain Middle East Arab and Middle East unrest Martin Chulov guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Brother of exonerated prisoner praises Perry’s criminal justice record
September 30, 2011 No CommentCory Session’s brother Tim Cole died in the middle of a 25-year prison sentence for a crime he didn’t commit. So it’s somewthing of a surprise that Session, who serves a policy director for Texas’ Innocence Project, has nothing but good things to say about Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Perry is known as a tough-on-crime
Continue reading …Long before we feared the Large Hadron Collider would kill us all , the US boasted the world’s leading particle collider—and now, after 25 years, Fermilab’s Tevatron is being shut down. The machine’s biggest achievement was the discovery of the top quark, a subatomic particle that was the last-discovered “building…
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Author Polina Zherebtsova – who was 14 when conflict began – publishes journal on taboo subject despite death threats Polina Zherebtsova was 14 when the bombs started raining down. They hit the market where she worked with her mother, the streets she walked down daily, until Grozny was reduced to rubble, a hometown no longer recognisable. From the start, Zherebtsova wrote about it, an act of catharsis as much as a document on the second Chechnya war. She filled dozens of diaries in a messy, scribbled cursive, sometimes embellished with doodles – bomb blasts that look like flowers, blocks of flats seen from a distance. This week, despite death threats and fears for her safety, Zherebtsova published Polina Zherebtsova’s Diary, gathering three years’ worth of journals for a rare look into daily life in Grozny under siege. “I thought, when they kill me, people will find this diary,” Zherebtsova said in Moscow, where she has been living since 2006. “I thought, people will read this diary and understand there is never a need to fight.” Filled with the horrors of war and the daily concerns of a teenage girl, the book has already prompted comparisons with the diary of Anne Frank. But Zherebtsova prefers to be likened to Tanya Savicheva, who chronicled the slow death of her family during the siege of Leningrad. “It kept me from going crazy,” Zherebtsova, 26, said, her dyed blonde fringe peeking out from under a headscarf and long gold earrings adorned with dolphins framing her lightly freckled face. She spent the entire war in Chechnya as tens of thousands died or fled during Moscow’s brutal attempt to pacify the mainly Muslim republic. Although extracts have been published in Russian magazines to wide acclaim, Zherebtsova still works odd jobs to make ends meet: she publishes articles and works as a nanny, sometimes as a consultant, sometimes as a secretary. Almost every day includes a doctor’s visit to nurse the wounds – physical and psychological – that remain. A bomb attack left shrapnel in her right leg and after several operations to remove the pieces, it is still painful. Her teeth fell out after weeks of hunger and years of malnutrition. The nightmares, she said, have eased since she finished the book but they persist. The fear of death in war has now been replaced with the fear that writing about the horrors of Chechnya – a still taboo subject – will bring repercussions. One by one, publishing houses refused to publish the book. “Everyone said they really liked it but wanted no problems with the government,” she said. Last autumn, she finally found a saviour in Detektiv-Press, a small publisher devoted mainly to history books and memoirs. Days later, the calls began. “One time they said: ‘So, you will write about Chechnya? Do you want to live?’ I don’t know who it was,” Zherebtsova said. Since then, the calls have come dozens of times over, from unknown numbers. No words are ever exchanged. In the past two weeks, her husband has been targeted instead, sometimes getting 20 calls a day. Zherebtsova was once attacked in a lift by a man she is certain was waiting for her. But something pushed her forward. “I was always having nightmares about this war,” she said. “These civilians who were killed would come to me in my sleep and I felt I had a duty to them. I felt I had to tell it.” It is a tradition among the women in the family to keep a diary, and Zherebtsova began when she was nine after her grandfather, a well-known journalist in Grozny, was killed in the early days of the first Chechen war. “We thought there would be no more war, and then it started again,” she says of a conflict that raged from 1994-96, died down for three years, and then reignited. Zherebtsova takes great pains to paint her family as ethnically mixed, and in the book describes how she is mainly Russian on her mother’s side, and Chechen on her father’s, although she never knew him. Ethnic tension remains sharp in the north Caucasus, and Zherebtsova hopes to avoid politicising the republic’s suffering. “I don’t scold anyone in particular, neither the rebels nor the Russian soldiers,” she said. “There is no evil in the book – just the life of civilians who fell into life in war.” Zherebtsova fled Chechnya in 2005, first to the south of Russia before making her way to Moscow thanks to a grant from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s foundation. She says she will never go back. “It’s a different country now, one that is no longer mine,” she said. “My dream now is to leave and live in a normal country.”. “There is no life here. If there’s no war, then there’s revolution.” Zherebtsova holds little hope that Russia can change, yet there must be some. The book’s dedication reads: “Dedicated to the rulers of modern Russia.” Chechnya Russia Europe Miriam Elder guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …A California man lived for days by eating leaves and drinking creek water after his car plummeted 200 feet off a ravine. After David Lavau’s family reported him missing, they set off to search for the 67-year-old by themselves in the Angeles National Forest, using his last debit card purchase…
Continue reading …The annual Ig Nobel prizes for odd research were handed out last night and the winning scientists were as weird as ever. Among the winners were a Japanese team that determined the ideal level of airborne wasabi to awaken sleepers (for a potential fire alarm), a Norwegian who tried to…
Continue reading …Kobe Bryant won’t be resting on his laurels during the NBA lockout . The Los Angeles Laker has verbally agreed to a $3 million contract to play with Italian club Virtus Bologna for the first 40 days of the Italian league season, a source tells the AP . Bryant grew up in…
Continue reading …As the will-he-or-won’t he—and the maybe-he’s-too-heavy —speculation continues to build, a source tells Chris Christie’s hometown paper that the New Jersey governor may soon stop saying no. Pressure from Republicans—including major donors unhappy with the current field—is beginning to pay off and Christie is thinking about launching…
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Christine Hemming is convicted of burglary after stealing the cat days after separating from the Lib Dem MP An MP’s wife caught on CCTV stealing a kitten from the home of her husband’s lover has been found guilty of burglary. Jurors at Birmingham crown court took just over five hours to convict Christine Hemming, 53, who snatched the cat three days after separating from the Liberal Democrat John Hemming. CCTV footage of the offence shows Hemming crawling on her hands and knees underneath a window before sneaking into the home of Emily Cox. Hemming, who showed no reaction as the verdict was returned, will be sentenced next month. She had acknowledged that she went to Cox’s house on the night the kitten, named Beauty, was last seen. Claiming she visited the property to deliver items of post for her husband, Hemming had told jurors: “I had no intention of stealing a cat – either before I went to the property, when I was at the property, when I left the property, and subsequently.” She was bailed to appear at Birmingham crown court on 28 October. Crime Liberal Democrats Animals guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Christine Hemming is convicted of burglary after stealing the cat days after separating from the Lib Dem MP An MP’s wife caught on CCTV stealing a kitten from the home of her husband’s lover has been found guilty of burglary. Jurors at Birmingham crown court took just over five hours to convict Christine Hemming, 53, who snatched the cat three days after separating from the Liberal Democrat John Hemming. CCTV footage of the offence shows Hemming crawling on her hands and knees underneath a window before sneaking into the home of Emily Cox. Hemming, who showed no reaction as the verdict was returned, will be sentenced next month. She had acknowledged that she went to Cox’s house on the night the kitten, named Beauty, was last seen. Claiming she visited the property to deliver items of post for her husband, Hemming had told jurors: “I had no intention of stealing a cat – either before I went to the property, when I was at the property, when I left the property, and subsequently.” She was bailed to appear at Birmingham crown court on 28 October. Crime Liberal Democrats Animals guardian.co.uk
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