Yesterday The Los Angeles Times published President Obama's address to the presidents of Middle Eastern states. President Obama, in a news conference that also focuses on his proposed budget, sayd he has told his counterparts in other countries that they ignore grass-roots democratic movements at their own peril. He stressed that autocratic governments won't survive in the Middle East unless they heed calls for change and meet the demands of protesters who are massing in the streets to demand more freedoms.
The same media-agency published another article also concerning protest movements in the Middle East. The continuing wave of unrest sweeping the Middle East led to a fifth day of protests Tuesday in Yemen and thousands of protesters swept into the main square of the capital of Bahrain, setting up tents and vowing to stay until the government agrees to major reforms. According to this material, in IranIn Iran, hard-liners in parliament demanded that opposition leaders be executed for advocating protests that attracted tens of thousands of people. Today The LA Times expert suggested that whether the burgeoning dissent in the Middle East will translate into new kinds of governance depends on factors such as popular grievances, the opposition and the nature of dictatorships.
Another material, published by The LA Times, poses a question whether U.S. keep countries on the 'terrorism list' because they're genuinely sponsors of terrorism, or because it wants to punish their governments for other reasons. There are currently only four countries on it: Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria. There were five until 2008, but the Bush administration removed North Korea to reward Pyongyang for cooperating on nuclear issues.
Also, the news agency reported that Turkey's prime minister on Tuesday rejected allegations by the opposition that his government was trying to silence critics through intimidation after a court ruling jailed 10 percent of the country's generals and admirals on charges of plotting to overthrow the government. On Monday, the police raided a dissident news website, the Oda TV, and detained its owner, journalist Soner Yalcin, and three colleagues for questioning for alleged links to the Ergenekon network.Turkish news reports said Oda TV was targeted hours after posting a video that allegedly discredits police investigating the network. Journalists' groups denounced the raid as an attack on press freedom.
The New York Times also addressed the issue of unrest in Iran. According to this media agency a day after the largest antigovernment protests in Iran in more than a year, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday dismissed opposition attempts to revive mass demonstrations as certain to fail, while members of the Iranian Parliament clamored for the two most prominent leaders of the protest movement to be executed. But while the government has tried and convicted many opposition members since large street protests in 2009, it has so far shied away from putting the two men on trial, perhaps fearing that would lead to further unrest. There were reports at least two people died in the protests in Iran on Monday. Few reporters were able to cover the demonstrations, but witness accounts and some news reports suggested that perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 people took to the streets in several cities, including Tehran. The protesters who died Monday were identified as Saane Zhaleh, a Kurdish student at Tehran Art University, and Mohammad Mokhtari, 22, a student at Islamic Azad
University in Shahrood. The government and the opposition issued conflicting accounts of what happened to Mr. Zhaleh. The authorities said Mr. Zhaleh was a Basij, one of the student vigilantes on many campuses, who was shot by a government opponent. Opposition accounts said plainclothes security officers roaming the streets beat him to death. The government and the opposition have scheduled separate memorial services for Mr. Zhaleh on Wednesday, creating a potential for renewed clashes.
The Washington Post published an article concerning the situation with computer worm that attacked Iranian nuclear facilities: In an underground chamber near the Iranian city of Natanz, a network of surveillance cameras offers the outside world a rare glimpse into Iran's largest nuclear facility. The cameras were installed by U.N. inspectors to keep tabs on Iran's nuclear progress, but last year they recorded something unexpected: workers hauling away crate after crate of broken equipment. In a six-month period between late 2009 and last spring, U.N. officials watched in amazement as Iran dismantled more than 10 percent of the Natanz plant's 9,000 centrifuge machines used to enrich uranium. Then, just as remarkably, hundreds of new machines arrived at the plant to replace the ones that were lost. While Israel's government has previously said Iran was on the brink of acquiring a bomb, the country's outgoing intelligence chief estimated last month that the Islamic republic could not have a bomb before 2015. Other intelligence agencies have said Iran could obtain nuclear weapons in less than a year if it kicks out U.N. inspectors and launches a crash program. Iran denies it is seeking to build a nuclear weapon. Stuxnet was discovered this summer by computer security
companies that eventually documented its spread to tens of thousands of computers on three continents. While the worm appears to spread easily, an analysis of its coding revealed that it was harmless to most systems. Albright said it was possible that the Natanz facility could become infected a second time, since so many computers in Iran - an estimated 60,000 or more - are known to have been affected. But he questioned whether the worm's limited success so far justifies the use of a tactic that will probably provoke retaliation, the author concludes.
