The woman is young, and slim, and fair. She lies on her back surrounded by four soldiers, two of whom are dragging her by the arms raised above her head. She's unresisting – maybe she's fainted; we can't tell because we can't see her face. She's wearing blue jeans and trainers. But her top half is bare: we can see her torso, her tummy, her blue bra, her bare delicate arms. Surrounding this top half, forming a kind of black halo around it, is the abaya, the robe she was wearing that has been ripped off and that tells us that she was wearing a hijab.
The journalist Lamees Dhaif draws on the latest protests, arrests, and violence to put out a video message to the authorities in Bahrain: "Shame on You!"
UPDATE 1000 GMT: Footage of North Koreans grieving over the death of Kim Jong Il
North Korea's reclusive and enigmatic leader, Kim Jong Il, has passed away, according to North Korean state television. He has died at the age of 69. Kim Jong Il succeeded his father, Kim Il Song, in 1994. He will be succeeded by his son, Kim Jong Un.
North Korean media has reported that he died on Saturday.
A year ago last Saturday, Tunisian market-seller Mohamed Bou'azizi doused himself in gasoline and set himself alight. He died 18 days later from the burns.
Mohamed's death has been perceived as the starting point of subsequent uprisings, not only in Tunisia but across North Africa and the Middle East. If the symbolic weight of Mohamed's act has yet to be fully realised, the tangible outcome of his sacrificial act was both the coalescence of anger and despair with the Ben Ali regime and the capacity to spark and inspire multitudes within and beyond national boundaries.
Central to Mohamed's death were his material conditions as father and family breadwinner, a situation which left him feeling bereft of any alternative but a profound public wail of rage through self-immolation. In a post-Ben Ali Tunisia, and a Middle East and North Africa fraught with uncertainties, that must not be lost in the search for narratives to explain the so-called Arab Spring. There are some straightforward causes at its core: the fundamental wish of people to live and work and earn --- and simply be --- with the guarantee of certain basic freedoms and opportunities, rather than to suffer under unelected tyrannies and to endure systems of repression.
"Not even a stone was thrown," he said. But they were being watched. "Tens of police was standing in front of the protesters [as they tried to set up camp]."
The security forces waited for about a half hour as the protesters calmly assembled. "But then suddenly it seems they got the order; they started dispersing the protesters brutally."
He continues, "They started shooting us with tear gas, stun grenades, rubber bullets and bird shotgun pellets. They also had batons and were mercilessly beating protesters."
2205 GMT: The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordination Committees activist network said at least 15 civilians were killed by Syrian security forces today in Homs Province, the Jabal al-Zawiya area, and Maaret al-Numan in the northwest.
The Observatory earlier claimed that six soldiers, including an officer, were slain by defecting troops in Qusair in Homs Province, near the border with Lebanon: "Three armored vehicles were destroyed, and those inside were killed and wounded."
On the diplomatic front, the Qatari Prime Minister reportedly said that the Assad regime will agree to an Arab League plan allowing observers into the country. The Omani foreign minister of also said he is "optimistic" that Syria will sign the protocol within 24 hours "and save the Arab world from foreign intervention".
This weekend the League said Syria must accept the agreement or it would refer the matter to the United Nations Security Council.
Syria's state-run news agency SANA quoted Assad, speaking in front of an Iraqi delegation, that Damascus has "dealt positively with proposals presented because it's in our interest for the world to know what is happening in Syria".
Hekmati said that he had served with US military intelligence in Afghanistan and Iraq, working with the Army's "Advanced Research and Information Center", which "took money from the CIA to certain movies and games designed to change public opinion in the Middle East".
Hekmati "confessed", "[The] plan [of US intelligence] was to initially burn some valuable information, to give it free so that (Iran's) Intelligence Ministry would see the good things and then would contact me."
Iranian State TV showed a card with writing in English identifying the bearer as an "army contractor" and several photos claimed to be of Hekmati. In some, he was in military uniform with US army officers.
In physics, and anthropology, there is a well-known and fundamental law --- by observing something, you change it. Well, the opposite is also true: by ignoring something, it stays the same. If it misses the significance of the protests, the details of the troop movements, and the day-to-day developments, the media is less knowledgeable about the big picture. And that is not a bystander's failure, for it is that coverage that lays the groundwork for the international conversation about Syria, as well as some of the internal discussion.
The lesson, ultimately, is that when confrontation and gridlock become too entrenched in Washington, changes –-- however slow --- will try to dampen the partisanship. Continuous political fighting is tiring, not just for the politicians but for their constituents as well. And in the "truce" that will eventually be reached when exhaustion sets in democratic reforms previously regarded as impossible to enact can in time triumph.
Monday, December 19, 2011 at 8:15
