Showing posts with label World. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World. Show all posts

Middle-Class Afghans Face a Murky Future

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Bryan Denton for The New York Times


Haji Safiullah, right, attends to a customer at his pharmacy along the Kabul River. He is part of a new generation of Afghans that has succeeded in the private sector.







KABUL, Afghanistan — The landmarks of this capital city’s new middle class light up a once-restrained night sky — vast and glittering wedding halls with aspirational names like “Kabul-Paris,” streetlamp networks, come-hither billboards for energy drinks.




After the ouster of the Taliban in 2001, thousands of Afghan families returned from abroad, or came in from the countryside, to construct urban and increasingly Westernized lives. They built homes and careers based on an influx of foreign money, expanded bureaucracies and new educational opportunities.


And they are the ones most haunted by the fear that it could all just be a bubble, doomed to pop once foreign money and Western militaries stop holding it up.


“We are enjoying life,” said Rasool Mohibzada, 31, a former taxi driver who sold chickpeas and balloons in Pakistan during the Taliban years, but after returning to Kabul won a job as an I.T. manager for the British Council, the cultural relations agency of the British government.


Sitting in the large house he built on a $95,000 plot of land in airy western Kabul and playing with his 5-year-old daughter, he is a member of a young Afghan generation whose eyes burn with modest aspiration for what would be by outside standards an ordinary life — access to electricity, schools for his son and daughter, rule of law, security.


“But I am quite afraid about the future at the moment,” he said, shaking his head. “If I got the chance, I would go now.”


Though all of Afghanistan’s major cities have grown and changed, the biggest differences, by far, can be seen in Kabul. Its population has exploded, now more than 5 million compared with 1.2 million in 2001, and its streets, planned for 30,000 cars, are clogged with 650,000, according to the mayor, Mohammad Yunus Nawandish. He is drawing up an expanded city plan that can accommodate up to 8 million residents.


The new urban elite makes up only a tiny slice of Afghan life — most of the newcomers to Kabul are impoverished migrants who now occupy terraces of rough mud houses that have splashed up onto the rocky hillsides surrounding the city.


And the norm is still grinding poverty for about 70 percent of Afghans, who live in the countryside, or about 25 million people by some estimates. Taken as a whole, life expectancy for Afghans is still just 48 years, and the average annual national income per capita is about $410. That makes the contrast with the markers of the middle class all the more striking: in Kabul, there are beauty parlors, a bowling alley, new television stations, access to health care (although Afghans must travel abroad for serious treatment), restaurants like Afghan Fried Chicken and children’s birthday parties hosted at nice hotels.


At the private American University, privileged young adults — some of them the offspring of top officials and businessmen who have minted fortunes in the war economy — stride the five-acre campus, paying up to $6,000 a year for degrees in law and other subjects.


Some in the new generation have succeeded in the private sector, like Haji Safiullah, 42, a serious, thin-faced man, who owns three pharmacies and is branching out into construction, building apartment blocks in Kabul, Jalalabad and Mazar-i-Sharif.


“I am one of the people who have invested more than $1 million in different businesses,” Mr. Safiullah said.


Even as the United States is deliberating how large a force, if any, will stay in Afghanistan past the 2014 end of the international combat mission, Mr. Safiullah holds to the belief that the Americans will not leave Afghanistan altogether for many years. All the same, he is clear about the shape catastrophe will take if the world averts its gaze: a deterioration of security and an economic collapse.


“To tell you the truth, I am not that worried about the future because the international community has invested a lot in Afghanistan,” he said. “They will not let this investment fail.”


However, he keeps a Kalashnikov rifle beneath his counter just in case.


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3 North Korean Doctors Are Killed in Nigeria

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POTISKUM, Nigeria (AP) — Assailants in northeastern Nigeria have killed three North Korean doctors, beheading one of them, officials said Sunday.




The attack on Saturday night in Potiskum, a town in Yobe State, comes after gunmen killed at least nine women who were administering polio vaccines in Kano, the major city in Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north.


The assailants apparently killed the North Korean doctors inside their home, said Dr. Mohammed Mamman, chairman of the Hospital Managing Board of Yobe State.


The North Korean doctors had no security guards at their residence and typically traveled around the city without a police escort, officials said.


All three bodies had what appeared to be machete wounds.


Two of the men had their throats slit. The assailants beheaded the other doctor.


The doctors lived in a quiet neighborhood in the town. There was no room to house them at the hospital, where they would have had some protection, Dr. Mamman said.


Initially, doctors at the hospital who worked with the three men identified them as being from South Korea, while the police said they were from China.


But Dr. Mamman said that the three men were from North Korea and had lived in the state since 2005 as part of a medical program between Yobe State and the North Korean government.


More than a dozen other North Korean doctors work in the state under the program, which also includes engineers, Dr. Mamman said.


He said all the North Koreans would receive immediate protection from the security forces.


“It is very unfortunate,” he said of the killings.


The Yobe State police commissioner, Sanusi Rufai, confirmed that the attack took place and said that officers had begun an investigation.


Mr. Rufai said the police had already arrested 10 people, though the police in Nigeria routinely round up those living around the site of a crime, whether or not there is any evidence suggesting their complicity.


North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency did not immediately report the three doctors’ deaths on Sunday.


No one claimed responsibility for the attack, though suspicion fell on the Islamist sect Boko Haram. Members of the sect, whose name means “Western education is sacrilege,” have been attacking government buildings and security forces over the past year and a half.


In 2012 alone, the group was blamed for killing at least 792 people.


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Venezuela, Despite Myriad Problems, Seizes On a Hat

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Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters


Vice President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela wore a patriotic cap to a parade Monday in Caracas.







CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuela seems to lurch from one crisis to another. President Hugo Chávez has virtually disappeared since going to Cuba for cancer surgery more than eight weeks ago. Last month, 58 people were killed in a prison when inmates clashed with soldiers. Inflation is spiking, the government just announced a currency devaluation and lurid murders are the stuff of daily headlines.




But high on the list of government priorities last week was an unexpected item: baseball caps.


Even in a country where political theater of the absurd is commonplace, the great cap kerfuffle took many Venezuelans by surprise.


It all started over the summer, when a young state governor, Henrique Capriles, ran for president against Mr. Chávez. Mr. Capriles started wearing a baseball cap decorated with the national colors — yellow, blue and red — and the stars of the Venezuelan flag.


In response, the electoral council, dominated by Chávez loyalists, threatened to sanction Mr. Capriles for violating a rule against using national symbols in the campaign. The move struck many people as patently partisan because Mr. Chávez regularly wore clothes made up of the national colors and patterned on the flag and used vast amounts of government resources to promote his re-election.


Suddenly, the tricolor cap became a symbol of Mr. Capriles’s underdog campaign, and soon it could be seen everywhere, on the noggins of his supporters.


But Mr. Capriles lost the election in October, and the cap was mostly forgotten. Until now.


At a rally on Monday to celebrate the anniversary of a failed 1992 coup led by Mr. Chávez, a host of government officials unexpectedly pulled out caps like the one Mr. Capriles had made famous and put them on.


Had Mr. Chávez’s top cadre switched sides? Nothing of the sort.


“It is the cap of the revolution,” Vice President Nicolás Maduro said from the stage. “They can’t steal it like they’re accustomed to stealing it.”


He held up the hat, which had a small emblem commemorating the coup’s anniversary, and shouted, “Cap in hand! Tricolor in hand, everyone!”


A day later, at a session of the National Assembly, legislators on both sides of the aisle showed up wearing caps. The chamber looked like the stands at a baseball game.


All of this has given rise to plenty of jokes.


“The cap — expropriate it!” said one wag on Twitter, referring to a famous episode when Mr. Chávez, a socialist, in what seemed like a spontaneous act, ordered the nationalization of several buildings in the center of Caracas.


Then came a new twist on Thursday night, when the government interrupted regular television and radio programming with a special broadcast. Anxious Venezuelans worried about Mr. Chávez’s long absence might have wondered if they were about to get an update on the president’s health.


Nope. The two-minute broadcast consisted of images of Mr. Chávez, at various points of his 14-year presidency, wearing the tricolor cap.


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IHT Rendezvous: French Communists Abandon Hammer and Sickle

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LONDON — The Communist Party of France has sparked a revolution among the comrades by removing the hammer and sickle from their membership cards.

The iconic symbol of the international proletariat has been replaced with the star of the multi-party European Left alliance, much to the horror of traditionalists at the party’s 36th congress that opened near Paris on Thursday.

What was billed by the party leadership as a forward-looking move was denounced by others as revisionist backsliding and part of a conspiracy to abandon the movement to the embrace of social democracy.

Emmanuel Dang Tran, secretary of the party’s Paris section, told France Info radio that members were shocked at the abandoning of “what represents, for the working class of this country, a historic element in resistance against the politics of capitalism.”

An anonymous commenter on the radio’s website suggested wryly: “It’s natural that they’ve abandoned their tools. There’s no work anymore!”

Mr. Tran was among those who believed the symbol change amounted to the party paying allegiance to the European Left, a coalition of left-wing movements formed in 1999 to cooperate within the European Parliament.

He said the leadership was trying to create a social democracy mark-2 alongside “Greens, socialists, Trotskyists and I don’t know who else.”

Pierre Laurent, the party’s national secretary, defended the decision to dump the hammer and sickle, saying it no longer represented present-day realities. “We want to turn towards the future,” he said on Friday.

The internal spat was the latest upset for a communist party that was once powerful on the left in France, with ministers serving in a number of Socialist-led administrations.

It remains the country’s largest left-wing party in terms of membership. But its standing has declined rapidly since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.

For the first time last year, it failed to put up its own candidate at a presidential election and opted instead to support Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the Left Front.

Although the Communist Party is the largest grouping in the Left Front, hardliners complain it risks playing second fiddle to other movements in the alliance despite being its “sole historically revolutionary component.”

The 20Minutes news Website asked whether the loss of the hammer and sickle meant the party was becoming a “Communist Party light” and noted that this week’s congress had also adopted Mr. Mélenchon’s “people first” slogan.

“That is something to chew on for the many who fear the party will be dissolved into a Left Front led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon,” it wrote.

L’Humanité, the former official Communist newspaper that retains close links with the party, managed to remain upbeat as the congress opened. It ran a poll that indicated the party’s public image had improved since the creation of the Left Front.

It also interviewed the rank and file at the party congress who said that, among other things, they saw the gathering as an occasion for communists to go on the offensive, continue a citizens’ revolution, or simply spend a “fraternal moment with all the comrades.”

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China Makes Arrests in Crackdown on Immolations

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HONG KONG — The police in a restive Tibetan area have arrested 12 people and detained dozens more accused of playing a part in acts of self-immolation by Tibetan monks and others protesting Chinese rule, the state-run news media said Thursday, as the government stepped up its campaign of attributing the protests to a plot inspired by the exiled Dalai Lama.




The announcement of the crackdown in Qinghai Province in western China comes as the number of self-immolations reported in Tibetan parts of the country over the past four years approached 100, a somber milestone that has appeared to spur efforts by the Chinese police and officials to crack down on people and groups seeking greater freedom for Tibetans.


China’s state-run Xinhua news agency said that since November, the police in Huangnan, a heavily Tibetan prefecture of Qinghai, have formally arrested 12 suspects and detained 58 other people over self-immolations in the area.


One of those arrested, whose Tibetan name is rendered as Puhua in the Chinese-language report, was charged with homicide and accused of giving speeches encouraging self-immolations at funerals for people who died by engulfing themselves in fire, the news agency report said. It did not give details about the other suspects, when they were held by the police or the accusations against them.


Like other official Chinese reports on the self-immolations, Xinhua presented them as the outcome of a conspiracy inspired by the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, and groups outside China seeking to challenge the Communist Party’s hold over Tibetan regions in the country. The Dalai Lama has not made any explicit statements in support of the acts, and his supporters have dismissed the accusations as groundless attempts to divert attention from the failings of Chinese rule.


The Xinhua report said the self-immolations were “incited by the Dalai’s clique abroad and then implemented within the country, with photos and other personal information about the self-immolators then sent abroad to stir up attention.”


The self-immolations began in February 2009 as protests against Chinese policies that many Tibetans see as a threat to their traditional homeland and Buddhist beliefs. Reports and pictures of the protests and other acts of defiance against Chinese authorities have been spirited out of the areas to advocacy groups abroad. At least 81 Tibetans died after their protests, according to the International Campaign for Tibet, a group based in London that advocates self-rule for Tibet.


The Voice of America broadcast service on Wednesday denied accusations made by a Chinese television program and newspaper that Voice of America encouraged Tibetan self-immolations. Many self-immolations have occurred in traditionally Tibetan areas of provinces next to the Tibetan Autonomous Region, the administrative area that China established in 1951. Qinghai Province is among those areas, as are parts of Sichuan and Gansu Provinces.


Chinese courts rarely find in favor of suspects in crime cases, and the latest reported arrests and detentions are likely to end in at least some trials and convictions. A court in Sichuan Province imposed heavy sentences on Jan. 31 on two Tibetans after declaring them guilty of urging eight people to burn themselves. Three of those people died.


Despite the Chinese government’s crackdown, there have already been three self-immolations by Tibetans this year. The second one died.


The Dalai Lama fled his homeland in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese Communist forces that entered Lhasa, his seat of power, in 1951. Many Tibetans revere the Dalai Lama, who is 77, and observers have said that when he dies, contention could intensify between the Chinese government and his supporters about designating his successor.


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At War Blog: Interview With Gen. John R. Allen on Leaving Afghanistan

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The New York Times interviewed Gen. John. R. Allen on Sunday, a week before his scheduled departure from Afghanistan after 19 months as the commander of the American and allied forces.

Following are some of General Allen’s comments. Brief explanations have been provided in brackets.

On his relationship with President Hamid Karzai:

“I wanted him to understand that he was always going to have my loyalty and I was always going to work with him. In fact, I said a number of times, ‘I’m proud to have served you at the same time I served my own leadership, whether it’s a NATO leadership or U.S. leadership.’ Now, I wanted him to believe it because it happened to be true. I think our personalities matched in that regard.”

“Now, we’ve had some tough times. This has been a time of really dramatic change for the campaign. When I got here, I measured success in how well we and how often we were fighting. Today, it’s a very different environment. The Afghans are virtually entirely in the lead across Afghanistan.”

“This is what I’ve learned about the president. If you listen to him, he’s got some pretty good ideas, and often the controversy that has arisen in the relationships hasn’t been because necessarily you disagree with the ideas. It’s because you haven’t listened to them early enough.”

“And sometimes it’s been strained. I don’t think he ever believes that actions that I have taken were ever intended to disadvantage him as the president, or not do everything I possibly could for the Afghan people. I told him, I’m prepared to die in this country on behalf of his people. I take that very seriously.”

On civilian casualties:

“I’ve met with the families of the casualties that we’ve inflicted. I’ve flown to the villages to personally apologize for the casualties, and do what I can to do the right thing for those families. I’ve taken measures with respect to the employment of certain kinds of fires.” ["Fires” is common military shorthand for a variety of munitions, from bullets to missiles to mortar shells.]

“We had a couple of pretty rough incidents where Afghans were killed by the delivery of aviation fires. I eventually said to President Karzai that civilian structures, tents, potential areas where civilians might be either taking refuge or hiding or living, I’m not going to deliver any more fires on those structures unless my troops are pinned down, can’t move, and the only option they have is to deliver fires on these structures, or I decide, the senior leader out here, I decide to deliver fires on these structures.”

“The civilian causalities as a result of air fires plummeted immediately. It was probably the decision I could have made long before that and none of our forces were put at risk, or a greater risk because of this.”

On the aftermath of the burning of Korans at Bagram Air Base:

“I have to tell you, I thought this could be it for the relationship.

“I immediately got on the phone to a number of Afghan media outlets, immediately cut a video apologizing for this as sincerely as I could possibly appear and sound because this was going to be bad, it could be really bad. I called the president, I went to see him, apologized to him for this. It was completely inadvertent but this culture deserved that apology. We were in their home, so to speak. We are guests in their home and even though it was an accident, even though it was not intentional, we had made a bad mistake, a real error and the people deserved my apology, the president deserved my apology.

“He accepted it and I think in many respects, the personal nature of our relationship was what tempered the language coming out of the palace, the relief, his own engagement with the media and so on. Because of both of our actions, both of them supporting each other, we were able to keep this from being the result of a bad mistake from being something that could have really fractured the relationship.”

On the fallout in March after an American soldier killed 16 villagers in the southern Afghan district of Panjwai, which he first heard about when he was in the United States to testify before Congress:

“The first phone call was something of the effect of — we’ve got mixed reporting from Panjwai. We think an American soldier maybe shot some people and my response was, ‘All right. Let’s develop the situation quickly. Tell me what we got in front of us because we’ve got to make the Afghans were included on this.’ ”

“Then the phone calls started coming in and the numbers started going up and pretty quick and this is as bad a circumstance as you might have imagined.”

“I called President Karzai from home and we had a long conversation about it. I promised him once again that we would take all steps, measures, take all actions necessary to get to the bottom of this and we would do a full and complete investigation and those people necessary would be held accountable.”

“This was still unfolding. It was one shooter. It was multiple shooters. There were wild rumors associated with things that he had done in addition to shooting. So the information environment was wide open at this point. And both for the purposes of internal stability in Afghanistan for the purposes of preserving our relationship we were working very, very hard to confirm what we knew to be the facts and try very hard to get after the rumors that were just flying.”

“Once again, when he could have been angry, when it could have been a very negative conversation, I mean, he was tutorial. He explained to me why this is bad for the relationship, why this is bad for the campaign, and why this will shake the confidence of the Afghan people, his personal gesture of measured conversation with me. He wasn’t angry.”

On why the United States should stay engaged in Afghanistan:

“I put it in the context of this has been worth it. This is bigger than anyone of us. It’s bigger than the president. It’s bigger than the president of Afghanistan, because this isn’t about today. This is about tomorrow. This is about doing all we can to facilitate President Karzai with his desire to be successful. But it’ll be about doing all we can do to set up his successor for success.”


On overcoming the skepticism of officials in Washington, who often express frustration with Mr. Karzai:

“For this president, at this moment of its history, the Afghanistan history, to be able to hold together these tribes and these ethnic groups with these kinds of challenges has got to be one of the hardest jobs going. And so I try to paint the context of the challenges that he faces, the history from which he originates and help conceivably, he will interpret our actions. He may not understand what we are trying to do, or may misinterpret what we’re trying to do or say. And frankly, one of the great things about our democracy is also one of the hardest things about our democracy: That is, we don’t always speak with the same voice.

“So he’ll hear a voice from one part of the government, it will be different for another part of the government and he’ll see to square the differences. It’s not a criticism, it just is who we are. The farther you are away from Kabul, the farther you are away from the palace, the farther you are away from the history of this country in the complexities of society, the easier it is to generalize, frankly.”

On the need for the Afghan government to better serve its people and stamp out corruption within its ranks:

“We’ve worked very hard, obviously, to build a capacity in those. But when your ability to survive the night, or put food on the table was — well, for many years are functionally, what tribe you were part of, or what group you were part of. And those patronage networks undertook economic opportunities which made them some respect, criminal patronage networks.

“They can only survive because institutions of governance are weak. And so now, we find ourselves in this — at this very moment when the future of the country relies on the strength of institutions. The criminal patronage networks recognized that their future, their survival can only be sustained by keeping these institutions weak. That’s the moment we find ourselves in, and the presidential directive on any corruption and government reform and the Mutual Accountability Framework came out of Tokyo.

“These created very helpful, very useful, both domestic and international expectations for reform. So we need to see how smoothing past the written word and the spoken word and start moving towards action. I think the president, if he were sitting here would tell you that they have achieved some good action, good results in his presidential decree. The Mutual Accountability Framework is constantly being audited to see that there’s progress on reform. But again, we’re still pretty fresh in the process and we’ve got to let this play out some more.”

On the future of the war and Afghanistan:

“Let me make sure I’m clear on this. Nothing is sure in a post-conflict society. But I think the indicators, as far as I’m concerned, are that we’re on the right trajectory. What you have to understand, what people have to understand is some of these reforms take a very long time. In an environment where human rights were crashed under multiple different invasions or civil wars or the Taliban, creating once again the kind of bias for human rights that we would all expect in the Western society, just doesn’t come easily to this country.

“Nothing will happen in this country without security. And that security is being purchased every single day by the Afghan National Security Forces. And then, on the platform of that security, this president has announced a program or platform that he intends to follow. Now, he’s moving forward in some areas, he’s having resistance in others, but we just have to expect this is going to take time. That’s where huge patience has to come in. That’s where the decade of transformation comes in.”

On the surge of “insider attacks” against Westerners that took place in 2012:

“The losses became to this particular means of attack became very troubling, very significant, and tragic. And while on the tactical level and on the operational level, we were able to deal with the problem. This was becoming a strategic crisis — a strategic crisis in capitals, a strategic crisis for the alliance — and the Taliban saw this. They knew this. They saw that. They saw that the future of the A.N.S.F. relied on our being close, partner or adviser inside the Afghan formations.

“We were very careful in our reaction to insider attacks. Not to wall ourselves off from the Afghans and create distance. I used to tell them, you may not be able to do anything about the linear distance that you have to deal with but there’s a lot you can do about your proximity and the closer you all feel to each other, the more secure you will be. And that’s in an environment where we’re transitioning to being advisers almost entirely across Afghanistan. That has to be one of the operative principles for philosophically how we’re going to live with the Afghans. You treat them like brothers. You live with them like they’re family. That reduces the unknowns, it reduces the potential for cultural affront, and it makes you more secure.”

“That doesn’t mean we’re not going to keep a close eye on the environment. We still have these people called Guardian Angels because there are enemies in the ranks and they’re waiting to take that shot.”

“We took a lot of measures and the numbers are down. But I don’t in any way want anybody to become complacent about the number being down. I don’t want anyone to lift up on the security measures that they’re taking or reduce the attentiveness that they have to the environment around. So, I want everybody to be attentive and we’re going to periodically refresh our training both at the very lowest levels and for the units coming in. So, we’re not going to give up on this.”

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North Korean Propaganda Video Imagines Attack on U.S.

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SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea is not known for its subtlety, famous instead for its soaring patriotic rhetoric and threats to turn the capital of its rival, South Korea, into a “sea of fire.”




But even by those standards, the latest volley of North Korea propaganda is noteworthy. Posted recently on YouTube, a video by one of the North’s propaganda agencies shows an animated version of Manhattan in flames — part of a dream in which a young Korean man envisions a glorious future of rocket launchings and the reunification of the Korean Peninsula. The background music to the celebration of perceived military might: an instrumental version of “We Are the World.”


“I see black smoke billowing somewhere in America,” the text that scrolls across the screen says in what are, in essence, subtitles of the man’s dream. “It appears that the headquarters of evil, which has had a habit of using force and unilateralism and committing wars of aggression, is going up in flames it itself has ignited.”


By Tuesday afternoon, the video had been removed from YouTube after a copyright complaint from Activision, the maker of the video game “Call of Duty,” from which the fiery New York scene was lifted. Copies, however, were up elsewhere on the Web, including on Live Leak.


The three-and-a-half-minute clip — titled “On Board Unha-9” and posted on YouTube on Saturday by Uriminzokkiri, a North Korean government Web site — is the latest evidence of the propaganda mileage Pyongyang is extracting from its Dec. 12 launching of its Unha-3 rocket, which the West considers North Korea’s first successful test of long-range-missile technology.


North Korea has been trumpeting the success of the rocket, which put a satellite into orbit, to its people, saying it was proof that their country was advancing toward a high-tech future. But the latest video is part of a years-long effort by the North to reach South Koreans and Koreans around the world through the Internet. (North Korea keeps its people, except for a tiny portion of its elite, cut off from the Internet.)


This is not the first time North Korea has portrayed attacks on the United States. Propaganda posters have shown a missile striking what looks like Capitol Hill.


The latest propaganda assault comes after weeks of increasingly strident missives from the North, which is angered by a Washington-led United Nations resolution tightening sanctions as punishment for the rocket test. The country has since promised a nuclear test, its third, as it tries to build what it calls a deterrent against attack by the United States or others.


There is no evidence that the North has the ability to strike the United States mainland with missiles.


The launching of the Unha-3 has become a symbol of pride in impoverished North Korea, where the government has told its people the success came despite American plots to “strangle and stifle” North Koreans. Thousands of scientists and officials there who were involved in the rocket project have been awarded government medals, according to North Korean news media.


Another YouTube video, also uploaded on Saturday, showed the Unha-3 rocket blasting off while a narrator identified as a worker in a Pyongyang cosmetics factory compared the moment to “flame of love igniting at first sight.” She also likened South Korean diplomats who pushed for United Nations sanctions to “ugly things” and “confrontational maniacs.”


Uriminzokkiri has been running Twitter and YouTube accounts since 2010, uploading more than 5,470 songs, news reports and videos. Earlier pieces had called Hillary Rodham Clinton, when she was secretary of state, a “minister in a skirt” and South Korean officials “servile dogs.”


South Koreans are blocked by their government’s firewall from gaining access to North Korean Web sites, but they could watch Uriminzokkiri posts on YouTube.


The “On Board Unha-9” video shows a sleeping man dreaming of traveling in a space shuttle named Kwangmyongsong-21. (The suggestion is that the North has a bright technological future, since the country is apparently up to only the third version of the Unha rocket, and the satellite that North Korea put into orbit in December is named Kwangmyongsong-3.)


The shuttle circles the Earth, passing over the Korean Peninsula, where people are jubilant over a reunification of the two Koreas. The camera then zooms in on the cataclysmic Manhattan scene from “Call of Duty,” which features Russians invading New York.


Marc Santora and Robert Mackey contributed reporting from New York.



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Afghan Airline, Kam Air, No Longer Under U.S. Ban

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KABUL, Afghanistan — The American military on Monday reversed a recent decision to blacklist one of Afghanistan’s main airlines, Kam Air, on suspicion of drug smuggling, and it agreed to share details of its accusations with the Afghan government.




The turnaround came after days of Afghan criticism and what some Western officials described as a disagreement between the military and the American Embassy on the prudence of the ban, which would have forbidden any American military contracts with Kam Air. The prohibition came to light in news reports last week, and it was an embarrassment after a positive meeting between President Obama and President Hamid Karzai in Washington in which Mr. Karzai stressed the importance of Afghan sovereignty.


According to a statement released late Monday evening by United States Forces-Afghanistan, the military said that senior officials met with senior Afghan officials at the Foreign Ministry on Saturday, explaining the reasons behind the blacklisting and offering information about the company that led to the ban.


In return, the statement said, the Afghan government agreed to investigate Kam Air and take further action, if needed. Afghan officials could not be reached for comment.


The statement noted deference to the Afghan government’s sovereignty as one reason that it had lifted the ban. The United States military does not directly contract with Kam Air, but the lines are somewhat blurry because the military pays for many activities by the Afghan government. Banning Kam Air from military contracts cast a shadow over the company and posed difficulties for Mr. Karzai’s travel plans. He frequently charters Kam Air planes for official visits abroad, but he was forced to make other plans for his current visit in Europe, officials said.


On Monday, he met in London with Prime Minister David Cameron and President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan to discuss halting efforts to restart the peace process with the Taliban. The leaders reaffirmed support for establishing an office in Qatar to aid in talks with Taliban delegates there, and set a six-month deadline for progress, officials said.


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Reformers Aim to Get China to Live Up to Own Constitution

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Pool photo by Ed Jones/Getty images


A recent speech by Xi Jinping in which he stressed the need to enforce the Constitution has stirred hope among reformers.







BEIJING — After the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, the surviving Communist Party leaders pursued a project that might sound familiar to those in the West: Write a constitution that enshrines individual rights and ensures rulers are subject to law, so that China would never again suffer from the whims of a tyrant.




The resulting document guaranteed full powers for a representative legislature, the right to ownership of private property, and freedoms of speech, press and assembly. But the idealism of the founding fathers was short-lived. Though the Constitution was ratified in 1982 by the National People’s Congress, it has languished ever since.


Now, in a drive to persuade the Communist Party’s new leaders to liberalize the authoritarian political system, prominent Chinese intellectuals and publications are urging the party simply to enforce the principles of their own Constitution.


The strategy reflects an emerging consensus among advocates for political reform that taking a moderate stand in support of the Constitution is the best way to persuade Xi Jinping, the party’s new general secretary, and other leaders, to open up China’s party-controlled system. Some of Mr. Xi’s recent speeches, including one in which he emphasized the need to enforce the Constitution, have ignited hope among those pushing for change.


A wide range of notable voices, among them ones in the party, have joined the effort. Several influential journals and newspapers have published editorials in the last two months calling for Chinese leaders to govern in accordance with the Constitution. Most notable among those is Study Times, a publication of the Central Party School, where Mr. Xi served as president until this year. That weekly newspaper ran a signed editorial on Jan. 21 that recommends that the party establish a committee under the national legislature that would ensure that no laws are passed that violate the Constitution.


After the end of the party’s leadership transition last November, liberal intellectuals held a meeting at a hotel in Beijing to strategize on how to push for reform; constitutionalism was a major topic of discussion. At the end of the year, 72 intellectuals signed a petition that was drafted by a Peking University law professor who had helped organize the hotel meeting. In early January, a censored editorial on constitutionalism at the liberal newspaper Southern Weekend set off a nationwide outcry in support of press freedoms.


Several people involved in the advocacy say their efforts are not closely coordinated, but that rallying around the Constitution was a logical first step to galvanize reform.


“We have a common understanding that constitutionalism is a central issue for China’s reform,” said Zhang Qianfan, the law professor who drafted the petition. “The previous reform was preoccupied with economic aspects. But we learned from the experiences of the recent two decades that economic reform can go wrong if it’s not coupled with political reform, or constitutional reform actually.”


Through the decades, party leaders have paid lip service to the Constitution, but have failed to enforce its central tenets, some of which resemble those in constitutions of Western democracies. The fifth article says the Constitution is the supreme authority: “No organization or individual may enjoy the privilege of being above the Constitution and the law.” Any real application of the Constitution would mean severely diluting the party’s power.


It is unclear whether the latest push will be any more successful than previous efforts. A decade ago, a similar wave of advocacy failed to significantly alter the status quo, despite some initially encouraging words from Hu Jintao, the newly designated president at the time. The authorities admonished scholars who took part in seminars on the issue, and propaganda officials ordered the state news media not to publish articles on calls for constitutional government.


Liberals have been encouraged by a speech that Mr. Xi gave on the 30th anniversary of the Constitution in which he said, “The Constitution should be the legal weapon for people to defend their own rights.” He added that implementation was needed for the document to have “life and authority.” Analysts say the speech, delivered Dec. 4, was much stronger than the one given by Mr. Hu on the Constitution’s 20th anniversary. And on Jan. 22, Mr. Xi said in a speech to an anticorruption agency that “power must be put in the cage of regulations.”


But Deng Yuwen, an editor at Study Times, said he had so far only seen talk from Mr. Xi. “We have yet to see any action from him,” Mr. Deng said. “The Constitution can’t be implemented through talking.”


And since taking power, Mr. Xi has appeared more concerned with maintaining party discipline than opening political doors. In remarks made during a recent southern trip that have circulated in party circles, Mr. Xi said China must avoid the fate of the Soviet Union, which broke apart, in his view, after leaders failed to stick to their socialist ideals and the party lost control of the military.


In part, liberals advocating constitutional checks on power have been energized by the party’s takedown of Bo Xilai, the polarizing former Politburo member who is expected to be prosecuted soon on charges of corruption and subverting the law.


One journal supported by reform-minded party elders, called Yanhuang Chunqiu, published a New Year’s editorial that said fully carrying out the Constitution would mean “our country’s political system will take a big step forward.”


Mia Li contributed research.



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The Lede Blog: Two Iranian Space Monkeys Got Confused, an Official Says

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A senior official at Iran’s space agency confirmed on Saturday that state media reports on the launching of a monkey into the thermosphere had used images of two different monkeys. The official insisted, however, that the monkey had survived the journey and that Iran was not trying to cover up a failed flight.

As The Lede explained on Friday, doubts about Iran’s claim that the monkey had survived the journey spread after journalists noticed that the monkey pictured in the first reports from state-run news organizations had a prominent mole over its right eye, before the launch, but had clear skin when it showed up at postflight celebrations broadcast on Iranian television the next day.

Video from Iranian television of the monkey that Iran says it launched into space.

The space agency official, Mohammad Ebrahimi, told The Associated Press in Tehran that the first images provided to Iran’s official news outlets to illustrate their reports had mistakenly shown another of the five monkeys that trained for the flight at the space agency — the one with the mole — and not the one that had actually taken part.

A report from Press TV, Iran’s English-language satellite news channel, broadcast on Monday used the still images of the first monkey.

A report on simian space travel broadcast on Monday on Press TV, Iran’s state-run news channel.

The second monkey was featured in a Press TV report broadcast on Tuesday.

A report on Iran’s space monkey broadcast on Tuesday by Press TV.

In his interview with The A.P., Mr. Ebrahimi insisted that the monkey that had made the flight was in good health and said that of several monkeys that had been trained for the flight, the one that seems least stressed for the journey had been chosen at the last moment. One of the photographs of the monkey with the mole over its eye did appear to show the monkey in distress while strapped into a launch seat.

The space agency did not, apparently, offer to disprove rumors that one of the monkeys had died by showing them both to the A.P. reporter on Saturday.

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Novella’s Sympathetic Portrayal of Armenians Causes Uproar in Azerbaijan

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BAKU, Azerbaijan —A novella by an Azeri author that portrays ethnic Armenians sympathetically has provoked an uproar in Azerbaijan, with Azeri lawmakers denouncing the work and protesters burning the author’s portrait outside his house.




The novella, “Stone Dreams,” was published in mid-December by Ekrem Eylisli, a former lawmaker, but condemnation grew strident only over the last week, after mainstream news outlets began reporting on and discussing it.


On Thursday, a crowd of several dozen people gathered around Mr. Eylisli’s house and burned his portrait. At a session of Azerbaijan’s Parliament on Friday, lawmakers attacked the novel, with one recommending that Mr. Eylisli be stripped of his citizenship and urging him to move to Armenia.


Another lawmaker, Melahet Ibrahimqizi, said, “He insulted not only Azerbaijanis, but the whole Turkish nation,” a reference to passages in the book that discuss historical Turkish violence toward Armenians.


The work tells the story of two Azeri men who try to protect their Armenian neighbors from ethnic violence, an incendiary topic in Azerbaijan, a country still gripped by the war it fought two decades ago with Armenia. Since the war ended, Azerbaijan has been trying to regain control of Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly ethnically Armenian enclave within its borders, and secure the return of Azeris who were forced from their homes.


Mr. Eylisli, 75, said he knew there might be an uproar over his book, which he finished in 2007. He said he decided to publish it last year in a relatively obscure Russian-language journal, Friendship of Peoples, because Russian-language speakers tend to be better educated and more progressive.


“Armenians are not enemies for me,” he said in an interview. “How can they be? I am a writer living in the 21st century. A solution to Nagorno-Karabakh is being delayed, and hostility is growing between the two nations. I want to contribute to a peaceful solution.”


He added that he was shocked by the ferocity of the reaction. “I did not say anything insulting, I did not betray my country,” he said. “I describe how an Azerbaijani helps an Armenian. What is bad about this?”


On Friday, protesters placed a copy of the journal containing “Stone Dreams” in a coffin and held a mock funeral at a monument in honor of Azeris who were killed in the war.


Via social media, young people discussed passages in the book that they found particularly distasteful, like a description of the young hero’s impulse to convert to Christianity and “ask God to forgive Muslims for what they did to the Armenians.” Armenia is predominantly Christian, while most Azeris are Muslim.


Qan Turali, 28, a popular novelist, said he saw the book’s artistic merit but believed that Mr. Eylisli had chosen the wrong time to publish a book portraying Armenians in a positive light.


“He is a great writer, the novel is good, but the time is not right,” he said. “Azeri people still feel pain and are aggressive. Instead of increasing tolerance toward Armenians, the writer caused more hatred.”


He said Mr. Eylisli’s work would have been received better if he had added depictions of Azeris being killed by Armenians. Another writer, Oktay Hajimusali, 32, was blunter, saying that it is “nonsense to promote peace with Armenians.”


Ellen Barry contributed reporting from Moscow.



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Metropolitan Museum Collaborates With Chinese Museum

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THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF CHINA, which opened two years ago to much fanfare as the Communist Party unveiled this mammoth showpiece to project its cultural ambitions, has now taken another step in trying to establish its legitimacy in the art world.


The museum, reinvented from past incarnations and criticized by some for its party-approved depictions of modern Chinese history, on Friday will open an exhibition of nature-theme works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is the first large-scale exhibition that the National Museum has put on with the Met, and it is being hailed by both sides as a major expression of the growing cultural exchange between China and the United States.


“Never before has an exhibition of this scope and theme, drawn entirely from the Met’s holdings, traveled to China,” Thomas Campbell, the Met’s director, said at a news conference here on Thursday.


The exhibition, “Earth, Sea, and Sky: Nature in Western Art,” aims to introduce to Chinese viewers the breadth and depth of the Met’s vast collection. Drawn from the galleries of 12 of the 17 curatorial departments at the Met, the 130 pieces represent an assortment of textures, mediums and time periods. The objects include tapestries, lacquerware and oil paintings, and they date as far back as the third millennium B.C. It is scheduled to run through May 9.


The exhibitors aimed to recreate a quintessential Met experience for Chinese visitors to the National Museum, which is on the east side of Tiananmen Square at the heart of this ancient capital. It begins on the second floor, where viewers enter the exhibition via a model of the Met’s neo-Classical facade. Highlights include masterpiece works by major artists like Rembrandt, Monet and Hopper. There are two paintings by van Gogh, who is loved by many Chinese and whose “Cypresses” appears on the cover of the exhibition’s comprehensive Mandarin catalog.


“I chose the theme of nature as a very broad-based theme from which we could pull from all over our collection,” said Peter Barnet, the exhibition creator and organizer, as well as the medieval art curator at the Met.


“By bringing these objects together I think we can see things in a way that one cannot even when you visit New York,” he added.


Unusual juxtapositions of pieces are found throughout the exhibition, like that of a Babylonian frog-shaped weight from 2000 B.C. placed opposite a 19th-century Monet painting of coastline cliffs. The exhibition takes a broad interpretation of the meaning of Western art, with pieces ranging from a landscape painting of American mountains by Frederic Church to a falcon statuette from ancient Egypt that depicts the god Horus and dates to around 360 B.C.


The Met show is the latest in a series of international exhibitions hosted by the National Museum. In less than two years since it opened after its renovation the museum — the largest in the world under one roof at two million square feet — has featured a number of exhibitions from prominent museums, including the Uffizi Gallery, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.


“The team we have here at the National Museum is young just like the museum itself is young,” Chen Lusheng, deputy director of the National Museum of China, said. “So we are very willing and open to learn from the varied experience of well-known museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum.”


But whether the National Museum has what it takes to propel itself into the top ranks of the world’s museums is unclear.


“Right now I think that the National Museum may become like the National Concert Hall, which has become a routine stop on international tours,” said Alfreda Murck, a Chinese-art historian living in Beijing, referring to the striking dome-shaped performance space west of Tiananmen Square. “They need more staff, but they have been doing a brilliant job with what they have.”


Many liberal Chinese and Western critics have raised questions about whether the museum, which they deride as a centerpiece for the Communist Party’s propaganda efforts, can or should be accepted in a field that places strong emphasis on the integrity of an exhibition’s narrative. A central part of the museum’s permanent exhibition is a historical showcase of modern China called “The Road to Rejuvenation,” which glorifies Communist China while avoiding accurate depictions of the era. For example references to the Cultural Revolution are almost entirely omitted.


Some might see the Metropolitan Museum’s partnership with the National Museum as lending legitimacy to an institution designed for the dissemination of party propaganda.


“I suppose the Met’s very presence does legitimize the propaganda to a degree,” Ms. Murck said. “But it’s also good for the Met because it gives them a high profile.”


Mr. Campbell said collaborating with the Chinese museum seemed natural since the Met had lent some of its pieces to an exhibition in the Shanghai Museum. “We see this as an opportunity — a central space in Beijing to share the treasures of the Metropolitan Museum with a broad Chinese audience,” he said. “I’m sure in the future we will have other collaborations as well.”


Edward Wong contributed reporting.



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The Lede Blog: Piecing Together Accounts of a Massacre in Syria

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As my colleagues Hania Mourtada and Alan Cowell report, the bodies of dozens of young men, shot in the head from close range with their hands bound, were found in a narrow river in a neighborhood of Aleppo, Syria, on Tuesday.

The bodies were found in the Queiq River, which skirts the front line and de facto border between government-held areas of Aleppo and territory controlled by rebel fighters in the neighborhood of Bustan al-Qasr.

Graphic video posted on YouTube showed bodies lined up along the muddy riverbank. Many had visible head wounds and lengths of cord wrapped around their wrists. Gunfire echoed in the distance, and at the end of the clip the cameraman broke into a run. “A sniper is firing at us,” he said.

Graphic video showed dozens of bodies, shot in the head and bound at the wrists, found in a river in a suburb of Aleppo.

Early video and reports from the scene on Tuesday suggested the number of dead to be around 50, a figure that rose significantly on Wednesday. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an anti-government group based in Britain that has a network of contacts inside Syria, said 65 bodies were recovered from the river. The group estimated that 15 more remained in the water but could not be retrieved because of a threat posed by government snipers.

The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper whose correspondent, Ruth Sherlock, was on the scene of the grim discovery, reported that residents pulled 79 bodies out of the river. A rebel fighter interviewed by Ms. Sherlock estimated that as many as 30 more bodies could remain in the water, but said they were impossible to retrieve because of nearby government sniper positions.

Thomas Rassloff, a freelance photographer based in Germany, was taken to the riverbank by Free Syrian Army fighters who he said told him “there are a lot of bodies.” Mr. Rassloff described the scene in a post on Time magazine’s Lightbox blog.

As we climbed down to the river, we couldn’t believe the horror of the scene. The bodies were bloated and covered with blood; some with their hands tied behind their backs. Several were missing eyes. All were men, and a few of the victims appeared to be young boys.

Nearby residents began gathering at the banks of the river. A large number of police were gathering there, too, some of whom I recognized from an interview days before. One officer I knew gave me a type of perfume to put under my nose to combat the smell.

One by one, the victims were loaded into cars and taken to a nearby school, where relatives began to identify the deceased. I photographed the scene at the river for approximately 30 minutes before my driver felt we should leave due to the risk of snipers and mortars.

The rebels and the government have blamed each other for the mass killing, but Ms. Sherlock, of The Daily Telegraph, reported that many of the dead were residents of rebel-held areas whose families said they disappeared after traveling to government-held areas.

It was impossible to be certain who was responsible for their deaths. But those identified, at least half the total by nightfall, were from rebel-held districts, and locals blamed government checkpoints on the other side of the river.

“These are my sons,” said Abu Mohammed, 73, as he shuffled towards the corpses laid out in rows in a schoolyard. A relative held his arm, as he stared at the exposed faces of the victims.

His legs buckled as he recognised the two young men, no older than 30, as his sons. They had travelled to central Aleppo, which is still in the hands of the Syrian government, 20 days before.

“They thought they had nothing to fear from the government, so they went to renew their identity cards. But they didn’t come back. Now I have found them here.”

Video posted to YouTube from the schoolyard where the bodies were taken shows dozens of bodies lined up in rows, each one neatly wrapped in a blue plastic tarp.

Video posted on YouTube showed dozens of bodies lined up in rows in a schoolyard.

Another clip shows local families filing slowly through the rows of bodies looking for missing loved ones. A man off camera yells into the crowd, “Guys who have finished, go outside!” Among those searching, a grown man knelt next to one of the bodies, gently held its head and plaintively wailed. Through his moans, he calls the dead man his brother.

Video posted to YouTube showed families searching for lost loved ones among rows of bodies.

Combat between the government and rebel forces has raged for more than six months in Aleppo, the most populous city in Syria. The fighting continued while the residents of Bustan al-Qasr searched the bodies for lost loved ones. Fear of airstrikes and shelling repeatedly scattered the crowd, according to an update posted by Ms. Sherlock on Twitter.

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The Lede Blog: Under Attack, Cairo Hotel Tweets an S O S

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Video of unidentified men streaming into the lobby of Cairo’s Semiramis InterContinental hotel was shown live on Egypt’s ONTV early on Tuesday.

Last Updated, 5:57 p.m. As our colleagues Kareem Fahim, David Kirkpatrick and Mayy El Sheikh report, the mayhem on Cairo’s streets briefly spilled into the lobby of one of the city’s luxury hotels, the Semiramis InterContinental, during intense clashes between riot police and protesters along the Nile Corniche overnight.

Images of a mob streaming into the hotel, shown live on Egyptian television and then posted online, raised fears of further damage to the country’s already battered tourist industry. Coming at the same time as violence in cities on the Suez Canal, this week’s unrest threatened two of the main pillars of the Egyptian economy.

Judging by a series of urgent pleas for help posted on the hotel’s Twitter feed, the raid came just after 2:30 a.m. local time.

Within an hour of sounding the alarm on the social network, the staff reported on Twitter that the security forces had arrived.

Guards at the hotel told Bel Trew of the Egyptian news site Ahram Online that phone calls to the police and the army initially went unheeded as about 40 men armed with shotguns, knives and a semiautomatic weapon broke into the shuttered lobby and started looting.

An Ahram Online journalist who witnessed the attack, Karim Hafez, said that protesters had stopped fighting with the police to help secure the hotel: “When they realized these groups were trying to loot the hotel, protesters shot fire crackers at them as they attacked the building and tried to push them away from the area but these groups were armed with birdshot bullets.”

This reported cooperation of the protesters with the police officers they have been battling for days on the street outside the hotel prompted bloggers like the British-Egyptian journalist Sarah Carr to comment on the black comedy of the situation.

Another Egyptian blogger, Mohammed Maree, reported on his @mar3e Twitter feed that a police captain on the scene confirmed to him that the protesters who were fighting with the security forces when the raid took place were not responsible for the storming of the hotel.

Mr. Maree also reported that witnesses to the raid said it began after four people drove up in a car with no license plates and fired shots to scare protesters away, before storming the hotel. He later posted a photograph of some of the hotel’s guests leaving under the protection of protesters.

Nabila Samak, a spokeswoman for the hotel who posted the calls for help on Twitter, told The Times that the staff members had called Egyptian television stations for help earlier in the evening, well before the attack, after appeals to the security forces for protection went unanswered.

Ms. Samak told Ahram Online that the staff worked to secure the hotel’s guests but were not equipped to cope with the effective collapse of the police force, since, “no guards of hotels in Egypt are armed.” Later she thanked protesters for coming to the aid of the hotel’s staff and guests.

A Saudi women who identified herself as a guest at the hotel, Hilda Ismail, posted updates and photographs from a shelter the guests were taken to during the incident on her Arabic-language Twitter feed.

In one message, she wrote: “If there is no Egyptian security, and if Morsi is sleeping, where are this country’s men!! Come get these dogs, the Semiramis Hotel is being ransacked and we are there.”

Later, Ms. Ismail uploaded a brief video clip of a man attempting to reassure guests that they were safe after the arrival of special forces officers from the ministry of the interior led by a Captain Moataz.

In the clip, the man tells the guests that the police captain wants “to assure you that the hotel is secured and it is under the control of the ministry of the interior now. Within no time you will go back to your rooms and already are in safe hands.” The police, the man added, “will make sure that such thugs will not enter the hotel again. We are sorry.”

Ms. Ismail also posted an image of the ransacked lobby on Twitter.

Ms. Ismai’s claim to have been a guest at the hotel was supported by the fact that she had uploaded a brief video clip, apparently shot from a high floor of the hotel, showing the fighting on the Nile Corniche below.

An unnamed hotel manager in Cairo told Al-Masry Al-Youm, an Egyptian newspaper, that “more than 45 clients insisted on leaving despite the hotel’s offer to relocate them to higher floors, away from the clashes.”

Ignace Bauwens, an executive with the luxury hotel chain, which was created in 1946 by Pan American World Airways, said in a statement e-mailed to The Lede: “The safety of our guests and colleagues is paramount and we have a responsibility to do everything we can to look after them. With the recent escalation of the situation near Tahrir Square we have decided to temporarily close the hotel for security reasons. Our guests have been relocated to other hotels further away from the demonstrations and we’re not taking any new bookings for the coming week.”

Late Tuesday, the staff posted another urgent plea for help on Twitter.

The latest message prompted some alarm, but, as the journalist and blogger Mosa’ab Elshamy observed, the hotel’s staff, like other Egyptians, appeared to be getting used to “the daily chaos.”

Kareem Fahim contributed reporting from Cairo.

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Yemen Seizes Boat Suspected of Smuggling Iranian Arms

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WASHINGTON – Authorities in Yemen last week seized a boat in their territorial waters filled with a large quantity of explosives, weapons and money, according to American officials briefed on the interdiction. The officials said Monday that there were indications that Iran was smuggling the military contraband to insurgents inside Yemen, although they declined to provide details.




Yemeni security forces halted and searched the boat, a 130-foot dhow, last Tuesday and found the weapons in three large cargo rooms in the hold, according to reports on the mission reaching Washington. There was American support for the interdiction, officials said.


The government of Yemen confirmed the seizure Monday in an official statement. The captured weapons included surface-to-air missiles used to shoot down civilian and military aircraft, C4 military-grade explosives, 122-millimeter shells, rocket-propelled grenades and bomb-making equipment, including electronic circuits, remote triggers and other hand-held explosives, the statement said. If the weapons turn out to be the Iranian-made Misagh-2, as cited in the reports from Yemen, it would reflect a significant increase in lethality for the insurgents.


Yemen is already awash with small arms and explosives acquired over years of war and insurgency, much of it brought in from a number of foreign sources through its poorly controlled ports. There has been little effort to regulate the supply – one governor of a northern province is also a major arms dealer – and insurgents have often raided the stores of Yemen’s corrupt and divided military. Many of Yemen’s unruly tribes command powerful arsenals.


The United States has a publicly acknowledged security assistance effort under way with Yemen. At the same time, the American military and the C.I.A. are engaged in a clandestine program of using drones to strike militants associated with a terrorist organization, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen. With the United States and Saudi Arabia providing both public and secret security assistance there, and with Iran also said to be arming militant forces, Yemen has become the battlefield for a major proxy war by outside powers.


American officials said the weapons on board were made in Iran, and that the pattern of shipment aboard the boat matched past instances of suspected Iranian smuggling into Yemen. Officials described the smuggling as part of a plan by Iran to increase its political outreach to rebels and other political figures in Yemen. To identify with greater certainty the source of the seized weapons, the boat’s navigation instruments will most likely be examined to determine its origin and route, and the crew will be questioned.


For years, Yemen has accused Iran of supporting the Houthi rebels, who fought an intermittent guerrilla war against the Yemeni government from 2004 to 2010. Those accusations – including claims of intercepted weapons shipments – often lacked evidence and, up until about a year ago, routinely were dismissed as propaganda.


But after the uprising in Yemen in 2011, the Houthi movement expanded from its base in the northwest — now a de facto Houthi statelet — across the country. It has benefited from widespread dissatisfaction with both Yemen’s government and the local equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood, known as Islah.


By last spring, American military and intelligence officials described what they viewed as a widening effort to extend Iranian influence across the greater Middle East.


Iranian smugglers backed by the Quds Force, an elite international operations unit within Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, had begun shipping AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and other arms to replace older weapons used by the rebels, American officials said early last year.


Using intercepted cellphone conversations between the smugglers and Quds Force operatives provided by the Americans, Yemeni and Indian coastal authorities seized some smaller shipments, according to American and Indian officials.


Thom Shanker reported from Washington, and Robert F. Worth from Sana, Yemen. Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington.



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The Lede Blog: Fire at a Nightclub in Southern Brazil

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Victims of the fire are attended by medics — this video contains graphic images.

An intense fire ripped through a nightclub crowded with university students in southern Brazil early on Sunday morning, leaving behind a scene of horror, with bodies piled in the club’s bathrooms and on the street.

At least 233 people were killed, many of them students in the agronomy and veterinary medicine programs at a local university, police officials said. By Sunday evening, the authorities had released a preliminary list of the dead.

As Simon Romero reports, a flare from a band’s pyrotechnic show ignited the fire in the nightclub, called Kiss, in the southern city of Santa Maria. Rescue workers continued to haul bodies from the still-smoldering building on Sunday.

Amateur videos posted to YouTube showed scenes of chaos as medics scurried over the bodies of victims who appeared to be unconscious, checking for signs of life.

Medics rush to care for victims of the fire.

Officials and witnesses say that security guards at the club had locked some exits, sowing panic as people attempted to flee the flames and smoke.

“Only after a multitude pushed down the security guards did they see the crap they had done,” Murilo de Toledo Tiecher, 26, a medical student who survived the fire, said in comments posted on Facebook.

Shortly before the fire, a club D.J. posted a photo on Facebook from inside the crowded club apparently showing the pyrotechnic display on stage.

A short time later, another photo that was said to be taken outside the club and widely disseminated through social media showed smoke billowing from the front entrance.

The fire quickly engulfed the building.

Firefighters and volunteers who used T-shirts to protect themselves from the smoke struggled to pull people from the burning building.

Firefighters and volunteers tried to pull people from the burning building

Photos from the scene showed frantic friends and family members gathered outside the club and a hospital.

As Mr. Romero reports, witnesses said the fire started about 2 a.m. after the band, Gurizada Fandangueira, took the stage. At least one member of the five-person band, which is based in Santa Maria and advertised its use of pyrotechnics, was said to have been killed in the fire.

In a statement posted on its Facebook page, the nightclub said that its operations are on hold and that it would assist the authorities with an investigation. “We would still like to reiterate that our staff has the highest technical qualifications and was properly trained and prepared for any contingency,” it added.

Overcrowding and a disregard for fire safety codes have led to deadly blazes at nightclubs in the past, though Sunday’s tragedy in Brazil is among the worst.

In 2003 in Rhode Island, also fire set off by a pyrotechnic display at a club killed about 100 people. A fire that erupted under similar circumstances in Russia left almost as many dead in 2009.

And in Luoyang, China in 2000, 309 people were killed in a fire that broke out at a dance hall, forcing some to leap from high-rise windows.

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The Lede Blog: Egypt's Soccer Riots, a View From the Ground

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Video posted online appears to show fans of Cairo’s Al Ahly soccer team celebrating a court verdict.

It was one of the world’s deadliest episodes of soccer violence — a clash between fans of the Egyptian team Al Masry, of Port Said, and players and fans from Al Ahly, of Cairo, a year ago that killed 74 and wounded over 1,000.

On Saturday, a court in Cairo handed down death sentences for 21 of those involved in the riots. The violence that the verdict prompted, involving hard-core “ultra” supporters of both teams, killed at least 28 and wounded at least 300, my colleagues David Kirkpatrick and Mayy El Sheikh reported.

Pictures and video from Port Said and Cairo were markedly different. In Cairo, as the video at the top of this post shows, there were widespread celebrations. In Port Said, a city of about 600,000:

Rioters looted and burned a police barracks and set fire to a police station. They attacked members of the news media, damaging television cameras that sought to film the violence and ending their broadcasts. They closed off all roads into Port Said as well as the railroad station, and the Ministry of Electricity and Energy said rioters had attacked a power facility as well.

Video posted online appears to show protesters in Port Said.

In Cairo, Mr. Kirkpatrick and Ms. El Sheikh reported, the families of those killed in the clash last year “held pictures of the victims in the air. Some danced and chanted. A few fainted. And the Cairo ultras celebrated for hours outside their team’s headquarters.”

Video posted online appears to show celebrations in Cairo.

Tara Todras-Whitehill, a photographer in Cairo, posted further pictures of the celebrations on her Twitter account.

It was not immediately clear where the following picture also posted on Twitter, by Tom Gara of The Wall Street Journal, came from. But it apparently shows a man playing an accordion in the midst of one riot.

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The Lede Blog: Street-Level Views of Protests in Cairo to Commemorate 2 Years of Revolution

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Thousands of protesters remained in Cairo’s Tahrir Square late Friday despite thick clouds of tear gas, after a day of nationwide demonstrations on the second anniversary of the revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.

Late Friday, Bel Trew, a correspondent for the English-language news site Ahram Online, reported on Twitter that the police fired yet another volley of tear gas at the protesters in Tahrir Square.

Gas was also fired at demonstrators near the presidential palace after dark, according to a video report from El Watan, an Egyptian news site.

Video from an Egyptian news site showed tear gas being fired at demonstrators near the presidential palace in Cairo on Friday night.

Earlier in the day, as marches from around the city converged on Tahrir Square, activists, bloggers and journalists shared street-level views of the protests as they unfolded, posting text updates, photographs and video on social networks.

As one march made its way to Tahrir, a skirmish broke out after some in the crowd reportedly attacked the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Web site, Ikhwan Online, and then tried to block firefighters from going to extinguish a blaze.

According to the journalist and blogger Sarah El Sirgany, witnesses said that masked anarchists, calling themselves the Black Block, initiated the fighting with an attack on the Islamist Web site’s office. During the attack, a vendor’s stand was set on fire, which led to a confused round of fighting between a group of vendors and some protesters, who were under the mistaken impression that they were battling members of the Brotherhood.

When activists from that march finally reached Tahrir, they came across a running street battle between protesters and the police across a concrete barrier blocking one entrance to the square.

That battle, on Qasr al-Aini Street, had begun Thursday evening, when protesters pulled down the barrier, only to see it rebuilt by soldiers. Some of the fighting Friday was caught on video by Simon Hanna for Ahram Online. Mr. Hanna’s report features an interview with one of the protesters, a young man who held an empty tear-gas canister in his hand as he explained that his family intended to stay in Tahrir Square until they get justice for his brother, who was killed there while demonstrating on Jan. 25, 2011.

As Priyanka Motaparthy, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, pointed out, an edit of video shot from the other side of the barrier uploaded to the Interior Ministry’s own YouTube channel portrayed the clash in a very different way, suggesting that the police officers there were victims of aggression from thuggish young men.

Video of a clash in Cairo on Friday, posted online by the interior ministry.

While there was some optimism among opposition activists that the spirit of the revolution lived on, there was also disappointment that a persistent problem, the sexual harassment of female protesters, was also in evidence on Friday.

Despite the efforts of volunteers from Tahrir Bodyguard and OpAnti-SH, who work to protect female protesters against sexual harassment in the square, several activists and journalists reported either being attacked or witnessing assaults on women by groups of men as night drew in.

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