Shahrvand-e-Emrooz shut down after mocking president’s relationship with ‘wise man’ Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei The picture looks like a 16th-century Persian miniature. The wise man on the right is lecturing his companions who kneel dutifully in front of him, listening to his sermon. But something is not quite right. On second look, it becomes clear that all the characters are in fact recognisable to modern-day Iranians. Indeed, the wise man is none other than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s confidant, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei . And in an obvious satire of the country’s political leaders, it is Mashaei who counts the president among his obedient followers – not the other way round. The image appeared on the front page of an Iranian magazine, Shahrvand-e-Emrooz , a month ago. But now it seems the Iranian regime has taken offence, and it is widely believed the picture was the reason behind the enforced closure of the magazine on Monday. Shahrvand-e-Emrooz was previously shut down, along with several other titles, after the unrest that followed the 2009 elections, but resumed publication recently. Another publication, Roozegar , was also closed on Monday. The picture highlights the concerns among Iranian conservatives over Mashaei’s growing political influence . Supporters of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, believe that Mashaei, whose daughter is married to the president’s son, is attempting to undermine clerical power in Iran. Opponents of Mashaei, who favours cultural openness, say he has the president under his “spell” and have accused his team of anything from corruption to sorcery . Several of Mashaei’s close allies and some senior aides to the president have been arrested in recent months. Ahmadinejad’s unwavering support for Mashaei has infuriated conservatives and has even cost him the support of Khamenei. In the past six months, a power struggle has developed between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, which is widely believed to have stemmed from Mashaei’s influence. Analysts believe Ahmadinejad had been grooming Mashaei to succeed him in the next presidential elections, due in two years, but that has now become unlikely. Khamanei is also believed to have chosen to get along with Ahmadinejad rather than orchestrate a feud over Mashaei in an effort to avoid unrest during the elections. Iran’s opposition believes that by focusing on Mashaei and his relatively liberal views, Ahmadinejad is trying to find a way to attract votes and preserve his dwindling power. Analysts say Ahmadinejad and his team are casting their eyes on the period after Khamenei’s death. Tehran’s regime has given more space to opposition newspapers in recent weeks in a move to appease them in the runup to parliamentary elections. But it would appear that Shahrvand-e-Emrooz and Roozegar have gone too far in pushing the limits in criticising the government. In the picture, Mashaei who appears to be in a Safavid dynasty-era costume, is sitting close to Hamid Baghaei, Ahmadinejad’s executive deputy, who is shown as a handsome male companion. Iranian bloggers have also joked about Ahmadinejad’s relationship with Mashaei, which is often described as affectionate. Roozegar is believed to have been closed for publishing an interview with an Iranian politician analyst, Morad Saghafi, who referred to the 2009 post-election unrest. Reporters Without Borders on Tuesday condemned the closure of the publications and the ongoing imprisonment of Iranian journalists and bloggers. “Despite some conciliatory gestures, the Iranian authorities continue to crack down on the media and journalists, closing the weekly Shahrvand e-Emrooz and the daily Roozegar yesterday,” it said. Iran remains one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which campaigns for press freedom. Iran Press freedom Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Middle East Newspapers Newspapers & magazines Saeed Kamali Dehghan guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Sprint, the nation’s number three wireless carrier, has filed an antitrust lawsuit aimed at blocking the proposed $39 billion purchase by AT&T of T-Mobile. The lawsuit follows a similar one filed last week by the U.S. Justice Department.
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Moat inquest told family should have been involved, and hear that gunman had previously attempted suicide Raoul Moat’s elder brother told an inquest he believes police made a mistake in not allowing him to speak to the fugitive gunman during a stand-off in which he died. Within days of Moat’s release from Durham prison in July last year, he shot and injured 22-year-old Samantha Stobbart, the mother of his child, and killed her new boyfriend, 29-year-old Chris Brown. He also shot and blinded PC David Rathband, an unarmed officer sitting in a patrol car. Moat had been on the run for a week before the six-hour stand-off with officers in Rothbury, Northumberland, in which he died. He shot himself after he was twice Tasered by police. Officers used an untested XREP Taser that had not been approved by the Home Office. On the second day of the inquest in Newcastle on Tuesday, Angus Moat, a 41-year-old tax officer who has a different birth father but the same mother as the 37-year-old bouncer, said he had spoken to a senior officer about becoming a third party intervener alongside the police negotiators. He admitted he had not spoken to his brother for seven or eight years, as they had drifted apart. Angus Moat suggested police should have thrown Raoul a mobile telephone if he was not able to speak face-to-face. He said he “should have been involved” in attempts to “talk Raoul down”. Angus Moat said during the week his brother was on the run, their mother had spoken to the press and said Raoul would be better off dead, but he had not agreed. He described their mother as “severely mentally ill and incapable of being a parent”, as he said she had bipolar disorder. When asked during the inquest at Newcastle crown court if his brother could have been similarly afflicted, he replied: “Most definitely. I think he had an undiagnosed case of bipolar brought on by stress, being in prison, losing his business and his home.” He said his brother had attempted suicide in 1999 by taking a drug overdose and had been treated in hospital. Asked by John Beggs, a barrister acting for Northumbria police, if his comments stemmed from the fact that Raoul Moat did not have any close contact with family members over seven or eight years, he said: “It is a factor, but not principally.” He told the inquest jury: “I’d have told him to think of his kids. “Raoul thought everybody in his own family was against him and I wanted to show him that was not the case. “I thought if I could speak to him it could change the way he was feeling and the way he would act. I thought the presence of some of his family members might change things.” He said Raoul responded to aggression and threat, “but he also responded to kindness and friendship”. He added: “I thought it could potentially be the end of my brother’s life and I did not want that to happen. I knew he would be in a lot of trouble but I did not want him to die. My view was that going to prison for the rest of his life would be better than death.” The inquest earlier heard the gunman had said he would “take the shoot-out” rather than go back to jail. He left a message on a dictating machine three or four days before he was cornered by police marksmen. In the message, he described losing the only two people who mattered to him – his grandmother and his former girlfriend, Stobbart. He said: “Just take the shoot-out and everybody’s happy.” Superintendent Jim Napier of Northumbria police, in charge of the criminal investigation into Moat’s rampage, said the message had affected the way in which the stand-off was handled. “It is a personal disappointment I never got to see Mr Moat account for his crimes,” he told the hearing. The inquest had heard that while in prison, Moat had warned Stobbart he would “go crazy” after she ended the relationship. Police say this was the catalyst for his murderous rampage. The 11 members of the jury will focus on the events on 9 and 10 July, when Moat was found. There will be questions about weapons used, how police managed the incident, how officers dealt with the dead man and how he acted, the jury was told. Among the questions to be addressed are whether the XREP Taser should have been deployed. The hearing continues. Raoul Moat Police Crime Gun crime Helen Carter guardian.co.uk
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Two opinion polls put US president’s approval rating at new career low, with faltering economy the dominant issue for voters Barack Obama’s popularity has sunk to a new low, according to two new polls, adding to pressure on him to come up with a radical and workable jobs plan that might reverse his fortunes. Just 43% of people surveyed in a Washington Post/ABC opinion poll published on Tuesday approve of the job the president is doing overall – a new career low. This was mirrored by a Politico/George Washington University poll that put Obama’s approval rating at 45% , a drop of 7% since May, reflecting attitudes towards his handling of the debt standoff with Republicans in Congress. The dominant issue is the faltering economy, particularly unemployment, which is stuck at 9.1%, and Obama needs to produce some fresh job creation ideas when he addresses a joint session of Congress on Thursday night. “The poll figures are not good for him but we are still looking at 14 months before the next election,” Norm Ornstein, a political analyst at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, said on Tuesday. “An awful lot can happen in 14 months … I would not write him off.” Orstein said: “If anything can serve as a wake-up call – as if we haven’t had enough alarm calls already – these polls ought to do it.” He added that he felt Obama needed to become “more feisty” in dealing with the Republicans. The president, speaking in Detroit on Monday, said part of his plan would be to create big infrastructure projects such as rebuilding crumbling roads and bridges in the US, something he has been talking about since his 2008 White House campaign. The president may opt for projects he thinks Republicans in Congress will agree to, or go instead for proposals he knows they will block, allowing him to portray them as obstructionist. One of his would-be Republican challengers, Mitt Romney, in Las Vegas today, proposed an alternative approach to Obama in which economic revival would be left to the private sector rather than the federal government. In a 160-page book setting out proposals for getting people back to work, Romney advocates keeping taxes low and even reducing some, while cutting federal regulation and scrapping Obama’s healthcare reforms. Voters traditionally begin to pay more attention to politics after the Labor Day weekend, and this week will help shape the race for the White House. As well as Obama’s attempt to win Congressional support for a job stimulus package, the Republican candidates seeking to replace him as president are scheduled to debate in California on Wednesday night. It will be the first time Texas governor Rick Perry, who is well to the right of his party, will share a platform with the others seeking the Republican nomination. Although he only joined the race last month, Perry has quickly established himself as the frontrunner. The Politico poll puts him on 36%, with Romney, the previous favourite, on 17%. Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul are each on 10%, with the remainder in single figures. The televised debate will present a first opportunity for much of the US public to appraise Perry. Ornstein, who works for the AEI but describes himself as a ‘bastion of conservativism’, said though Perry is very smooth, many Republicans remain uneasy about him. “I think just as interesting as Perry is how the other candidates react to him. Romney has to change his approach … Perry is not used to debating when people push back,” said Ornstein. “Whether Romney has it in him to be an attack dog is an interesting question.” Barack Obama US elections 2012 Republican presidential nomination 2012 Republicans United States Democrats Rick Perry Mitt Romney Ewen MacAskill guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …On Thursday night in front of a joint session of Congress, President Obama will lay out his plans to fix the struggling economy and finally spur job creation. In advance, he’s been getting plenty of advice, from across the political spectrum, about what the economy needs right now. So who’s been arguing for what–and perhaps
Continue reading …The Yugoslav war crimes tribunal sentenced the former chief of the Yugoslav army to 27 years in prison today for providing crucial military aid to Bosnian Serb forces responsible for the Srebrenica massacre, as well as a deadly four-year campaign of shelling and sniping in Sarajevo. The case against Gen….
Continue reading …A 12-hour standoff has ended in Australia after police forced their way into the Sydney law office where a man, who claimed he had a bomb in his backpack, was holding his daughter hostage . The move was made after negotiations began to break down, say police. The 12-year-old girl has…
Continue reading …A large military convoy consisting of 200 to 250 vehicles entered Niger from Libya yesterday, leading many to speculate it might include Moammar Gadhafi or one of his sons, reports the AFP . One report claimed the convoy was heading through Niger on the way to Burkina Faso, a country that…
Continue reading …With the bodies of 17 victims still missing from an air force plane crash on Friday, Chilean officials have turned to a psychic to help find the bodies, reports the AFP . “We’re are working with a person who is on one of the (search) boats,” says Chile’s defense minister. “Not…
Continue reading …England riots to cost taxpayers at least £133m in policing and compensation
September 6, 2011 No Comment
Cost of compensation and policing starts to emerge as Boris Johnson says prisoners must not be abandoned The riots in England will cost more than £133m in policing and compensation for businesses hit by the violence, the home affairs select committee has been told. London’s mayor Boris Johnson also told the committee that the huge numbers jailed after the unprecedented inner-city violence must not be abandoned in prison, but helped to turn their lives around. Johnson said he agreed with the justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, who wrote a Guardian article on Monday revealing that almost 75% of the adults charged across the country with riot offences had previous convictions. He blamed a “feral underclass” and a broken prison system for failing to rehabilitate them. “One thing I do think the justice secretary is right to highlight is the importance, if you arrest such a huge number of people as we have and you put them into the criminal justice system, then you cannot simply abandon them … you have to make sure they are educated in there,” he said. But while the prime minister, David Cameron, has stressed emphatically that gangs orchestrated the riots, the committee was told by the Metropolitan police that the latest analysis suggested just 19% of those arrested had any gang affiliations. Current analysis also shows that only 21% of those arrested were under 18. For the first time a clear picture emerged of the costs of the rioting: in London, the bill for policing has reached £74m, and the cost for police forces outside the capital is set to exceed £50m. This includes a bill for Manchester of around £10m – made up of £5m in policing and potentially the same amount in payments under the 1886 Riots Damages Act (RDA) to individuals whose properties are damaged by rioting. Johnson revealed that in London the Metropolitan Police Authority had already received 100 applications for compensation under the RDA, totalling £9.3m – a figure which is likely to increase – bringing the cost of the riots to around £133m. Sparked by the fatal shooting by police of 29-year-old Mark Duggan in Tottenham, north London, the riots are now the subject of several inquiries, including the home affairs select committee hearings, an inquiry by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) and internal reviews by the Metropolitan police. The committee was told that the assistant commissioner Lynne Owens is evaluating the police response in Tottenham after Duggan’s death, particularly the events outside the police station on the Saturday night when the dead man’s family gathered in the hope of speaking to a senior officer. The family heard about Duggan’s death from a news report rather than from the police, and had arrived at the station demanding answers. Godwin said: “There was some confusion in terms of who was going to tell his family. We regret that. A commander has been to see the family to apologise. We need to look at the whole management that took place in Tottenham. Good decisions were taken and there were some misunderstandings and we need to get to the bottom of it.” Godwin said the relationship between the Metropolitan police and the IPCC needed to be examined – referring to an apparent blurring of roles as to who has the duty to inform the family in a police fatal shooting. However, in written evidence the IPCC said it was never its duty to inform a family of a death. Godwin – who is one of four candidates for the post of Metropolitan police commissioner – told the committee he wished he had had more officers on duty when the riots erupted in Tottenham, on the Saturday evening, before spreading across the capital: “Sometimes you realise how thin the blue line is,” Godwin said. “The debate … would have been different if people had been left in hospital after being seriously injured by baton rounds. I take pride in the fact that we filled up prison places instead of hospital beds, and I think that’s the British way,” he said. UK riots London Boris Johnson Crime Police Prisons and probation UK criminal justice Sandra Laville Vikram Dodd Helen Carter guardian.co.uk
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