#IranElection *

Written by Edward Yeranian VOA

Iranian opposition websites are reporting Iran has threatened to shut down 15 more newspapers and periodicals. The warning further intensifies pressure on the already limited number of papers allowed to publish.

Opposition websites, including Rah e Sabz and Ayande News say the government’s press censorship arm, the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, has warned 15 daily and weekly periodicals not to publish articles critical of the government or its ministers.

Those publications include daily papers, as well as economic and cultural publications, such as Emrouz, Bahar, Towse’e, Rouzan, Jahan-e Eqtesad, Ettelaat, Asrar, Jaha-e San’at, Mardomslari, Arman-e Ravabet-e Omumi, Jomhouri, Poul, Farhikhtegan, and Afarinesh.

Ali Nourizadeh of the Center for Arab and Iranian Studies in London says the Iranian government has intensified its scrutiny of the press.

“The deputy minister of Islamic Guidance said he has called upon several pro-government university professors and he asked them to read all newspapers daily, word by word and to report to him whether they have crossed the red line or not. So, any kind of criticism of Ahmedinejad, his government, his ministers, his deputy ministers would be considered hostile,” he said.

Ayande News says one delicate subject is the ongoing controversy around President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim-Meshaie, who is also the father of his son-in-law.

Opposition websites reported recently Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani and other hardline parliament members are trying to force President Ahmedinejad to dump Rahim-Meshaie. Last fall, Parliament voted against Rahim-Mashaie’s nomination to be first vice-president.

Nourizadeh says publications have been told they will be given “warnings” for each infraction and will be “shut down” after several warnings. He emphasizes the Iranian press is in bad shape due to ongoing censorship, newspaper closings, and arrests of journalists.

“Based on the official number of jailed journalists and writers, we have 76 of them in prison, and prison is hanging over the heads of more than 200 of them, and also we have journalists who are out of work-around 1200 of them are out of work-so the situation is the worst we ever faced during 31 years of Islamic Republic rule,” he said.

Iran analyst Meir Javedanfar of the MEEPAS Center in Tel Aviv says Iranian censorship sometimes includes attacking newspaper offices and threatening journalists:

“During the last Gaza War there was a newspaper that had its offices evacuated because it published an article that said both sides [Hamas and Israel] are to blame and because it also criticized Hamas. The editors were threatened and the office had to close down and they went and torched the premises,” said Javedanfar.

Following Iran’s disputed June presidential election, pro-government Basiji militiamen ransacked newspapers belonging to presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. Journalists at both publications were also arrested.

Written by Gilbert da Costa VOA

Residents of Nigeria’s city of Jos say attacks are continuing for a fourth day in parts of the state previously unaffected despite the imposition of a 24-hour curfew and the deployment of soldiers.

Incidents of violence are still being reported in the volatile city amid reports that clashes between gangs of Muslim Hausas and mostly Christian Beroms have now spread beyond Jos to neighboring towns and other parts of Plateau state.

A newspaper reporter based in Jos, Jude Owuamanam, said security forces have so far failed to control the violence outside the city. He described the current situation as one of total anarchy.

“Total anarchy, total breakdown of law and order. It appears that the crisis has overwhelmed the security men. They never contemplated the level. The feedback we are getting is that though it has been contained in some areas where it first started it is resurging in other areas. And when it gets to local government areas it is worse because soldiers don’t get there early and quickly,” said Owuamanam.

U.S.-based Human Rights Watch says more than 200 people have been killed in three days of violence. So far, Nigerian officials have confirmed only the death of 60 people.

The government imposed a 24-hour curfew and ordered troops to act swiftly to stop the fighting. Top police and military commanders are all in Jos to direct security operations in the troubled city.

A senator representing Plateau state in the National Assembly, John Shagaya, is appealing to community and religious leaders in the area to intervene.

“We commend the efforts of state and the security agencies for efforts that are being carried out so far to isolate the crisis within Jos North and to limit damages to properties and of course human lives,” he said. “We are appealing to leaders, especially community leaders, religious leaders, elder statesmen within the state to cooperate with government and of course the security agencies to ensure that the situation is brought under control,” he said.

Jos has seen at least four major outbursts of religious violence since 2001. The tensions in Plateau state have their roots in decades of resentment by indigenous minority groups, mostly Christian or animist, toward migrants and settlers from Nigeria’s Hausa-speaking Muslim north.

Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa with 140 million people, is divided between a predominantly Muslim north and a largely Christian south.

Written by Meredith Buel VOA

The U.S. military has reopened the severely damaged seaport in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince to help improve delivery of aid to victims of last week’s massive earthquake. The military has also opened three more airports to assist the flow of humanitarian relief.

The Commander of the U.S. Southern Command, Air Force General Douglas Fraser, says the military is gradually increasing its capacity to deliver assistance to the millions of people affected by the earthquake.

“We will have a small capability to move roughly 150 containers a day through the port today [Thursday], growing with the arrival of a commercial vessel tomorrow [Friday] of 250 containers per day and that capacity will remain relatively constant,” said General Fraser.

Fraser says that by the middle of next month, more improvements will allow the military to move up to 800 containers per day through the port.

Damaged infrastructure around the seaport, wrecked roads and congestion at the main airport in Port-au-Prince have hampered the delivery of aid.

Fraser says officials have opened three more airports, one in the Haitian city of Jacmel and two in the neighboring Dominican Republic. But road travel from the sites remains difficult.

The general says there are more than 1,400 flights on a waiting list to land in Port-au-Prince. He says the U.S. military is making every effort to meet the priorities set by the Haitian government and the United Nations to determine which flights are allowed to land.

“In some cases, we have had to divert aircraft just because there was not space available on the airfield,” he said. “We have tried to make that airfield operate as absolutely as efficiently as possible.”

Makeshift hospitals continue to struggle to treat the huge number of people injured in the earthquake.

The aid group Doctors Without Borders says at some of its surgical centers there is a 10 to 12 day backlog of patients, some of whom are dying from infection of untreated wounds.

The U.S. Navy hospital ship, USNS Comfort, is sending medical teams ashore to help with casualty evaluation and triage.

On the Comfort, pediatric orthopedic surgeon Commander William Todd expects that many of the incoming patients will be orphans or children separated from their families.

“I think we’re going to see a lot of those issues right now,” said Commander Todd. “We’re going to see parents not knowing where their kids are and kids not knowing where their parents are.”

Haitian officials say they will soon begin moving hundreds of thousands of people left homeless in Port-au-Prince, which was largely destroyed by the January 12 quake. The homeless will be moved to tent villages outside the ravaged capital.

Many people are desperate to leave behind the rubble-strewn streets and precarious structures that have been weakened by dozens of aftershocks.

VOA’s Bart Childs is in Port-au-Prince:

“There is a thought that if people return to a simpler life, a farming life, a village life, life will be better for them,” he said. “They clearly cannot live here. The infrastructure is dead. The city is overcrowded, so people are leaving.”

The earthquake killed an estimated 200,000 people and affected about three million others – about a third of Haiti’s population.

Written by Elizabeth Arrott (originally posted by VOA)

World powers are scrambling to find a way to help Yemen fight extremism and the conditions that breed it. Britain is hosting an international conference later this month on military, economic and development aid to the impoverished Arab nation. But, help has been available for years; the hard part is getting it to make a difference.

There is a risk of fatalism about the poverty in Yemen.

This young man in Sana’a has a wife and children, but no job. Asked how he provides for his family, he says he gets the money from God.

The provisions have not been much. The average Yemeni makes less than $3 a day. Nearly 40 percent of the workforce is unemployed and the country’s best and brightest often leave for work and a more stable life abroad.

Rebellion, secessionism and extremism throughout the country only makes things worse. Potential revenue builders, including tourism, untapped oil and gas, the refurbishment of the once world-class port of Aden, are at a standstill because of the unrest.

For the Yemeni government, fixing the problems is a daunting task. Deputy Finance Minister Jalal Yacoub says there are no easy answers.

“You really can’t fix everything in the country all in one go,” said Jalal Yacoub. “It’s impossible.”

Not that others have not tried to help. Neighboring Gulf countries, Western nations and international aid and monetary agencies have been working with the government in Sana’a for years. Donors have pledged $5 billion in aid for Yemen since 2006 alone. But of that money, only $150 million has actually made it to projects on the ground that might make a difference in the lives of ordinary Yemenis.

Unrest, corruption, the delays inherent in international bureaucracy all contribute to the problem.

Sana’a University Professor Ahmad Seif says, in much of the country, the government’s ability to offer basic services is extremely weak.

“We need the state to be present in its distributive functions,” said Ahmad Seif. “The state is needed now, desperately, to be omnipresent. Not a repressive state, or a heavy-handed state, but in its functions.”

Some in the Yemeni government, with the backing of foreign diplomats, have come up with a ten point plan to make a near-term difference.

Deputy Minister Yacoub says the key is to start small. He says attracting a core group of smart, capable Yemenis to join the government will help. Then they and others can begin to implement change, one step at a time.

“We have for example in the land area, or land issue, we have many laws and regulations all on the books and if we try to implement all those regulations and laws across the entire country it will be quite difficult and challenging,” he said. “And so what we are suggesting is translate all of that into something concrete on the ground, create a success story in a small part of the country.”

Yacoub says such targeted efforts and small success stories will create momentum and give credibility to the government.

“The citizens will become more comfortable with the government’s performance and the government officials will feel more enthusiastic about the process because they will have managed to translate what is on the book into something that is a reality on the ground,” said Yacoub. “It will give them more confidence to go and widen the scope of these reforms.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week said the “odds are long” of Yemen overcoming its development problems. But she echoed the thoughts of many by adding, “the cost of doing nothing is potentially far greater.”

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