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Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Candidate for Iran’s Presidency Defends Record as Nuclear Negotiator

The brief campaign ahead of next month’s presidential election in Iran might lack the passion of 2009, when rallies in support of opposition candidates set the stage for the mass protests that followed the vote, but one of the candidates injected some passion into the race on Monday when he showed a flash of anger anger during an interview on state television.

The candidate, Hassan Rouhani, is a moderate cleric who served as an Iranian nuclear negotiator during the presidency of the reformist Mohammad Khatami. When he was challenged on his record during that period by the state television interviewer, Hassan Abedini, Mr. Rouhani reacted with indignation.

An excerpt from an interview with Hassan Rouhani, a presidential candidate, broadcast on Iranian state television on Monday.

An interview excerpt posted on a YouTube channel set up in support of Mr. Rouhani’s campaign shows that the candidate first accused the host of lying â€" by suggesting that Iran’s nuclear program had been suspended as a result of his work â€" and then criticized the state-run television channel, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, or IRIB, more broadly.

As the blogger Arash Karami explained in a detailed post on the interview, Mr. Rouhani said that his work from 2003 to 2005 was “during the era of Bush, when crazy neocons had attacked Afghanistan, occupied Iraq and everyone said that Iran is next.”

When Mr. Abedini said that Iran’s nuclear work had halted as a result of the negotiations the candidate took part in, Mr. Rouhani interrupted to say: “What you said is a lie, you know it’s a lie. This talk is what ignorant people say, you are versed in this.” He added: “Maybe the person speaking to you in your earpiece doesn’t know, but you know.”

After he was pressed further by the host, Mr. Rouhani said, according to Mr. Karami’s translation: “We suspended the program? We completed the program. This is unethical behavior of the IRIB that has gotten into you. And the person who is speaking into your earpiece, this unethical behavior has gotten into him too.”

The clash came in the context of Mr. Rouhani’s effort to defeat a more prominent candidate, Saeed Jalili, Iran’s current nuclear negotiator who has made his hardline stance a centerpiece of his campaign.

In a series of messages posted on Twitter after the interview was broadcast, Mr. Jalili’s campaign pursued the argument that three agreements struck during Mr. Rouhani’s period in charge, which were mentioned by Mr. Abedini, did effectively force Iran to suspend its nuclear program.

Later in the interview, Mr. Rouhani â€" whose campaign is supported by Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who was barred from running this year â€" pressed his attack on the broadcaster further, saying (in Mr. Karami’s translation):

I wish there were justice at IRIB. I wish there were constructive criticism, which we would be thankful for. But if someone is attacked and accused on IRIB, for them not to have to call the head of the IRIB and see if he has permission to go on or not. It would be good if someone was attacked one night and the next morning they would be invited and have the opportunity to speak too. Many prominent figures, many people who have been lashed with a whip in the Shah’s government, many people who were close to Ayatollah Khomeini, have been insulted on IRIB. Unfortunately, IRIB has not acted justly.

Mr. Abedini, tell the head of your organization that those who have been insulted once in a while, and sometimes some have been insulted a lot, give them time, allow them to defend themselves. It won’t hurt. Don’t waste the capital of the revolution.

A Twitter feed in support of Mr. Rouhani’s campaign explained that the candidate was referring to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fierce attacks on leaders of the opposition during the last election campaign.

As my colleague Robert Worth reported from Tehran in 2009, during an extraordinary televised debate on the eve of the last election Mr. Ahmadinejad accused Mr. Rafsanjani of stealing billions of dollars of state money and called him ‘the main puppet master’ behind the campaign against him.

Monday’s interview was one of a series of generally bland discussions on state television with each of the eight candidates approved to run. Press TV, Iran’s state-run, English-language satellite channel, ignored the contentious portion of Mr. Rouhani’s interview, choosing to highlight instead his dry remarks on the management of Iran’s economy.

A video excerpt from the Iranian presidential candidate Hassan Rouhani’s interview on state television posted online by Press TV, a government-owned satellite channel.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.



Witnesses Describe Killings in Syria to BBC

As my colleagues Anne Barnard and Hania Mourtada reported earlier this month, residents, opposition activists and human rights monitors in Syria said that hundreds of civilians were killed by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in two Sunni Muslim enclaves in the largely Alawite and Christian province of Tartus.

On Tuesday, the BBC broadcast interviews with women who said they had witnessed atrocities in the village of Bayda and the nearby city of Baniyas in a video report from Syria by the correspondent Ian Pannell.

The claims of massacres in the region come two years after unrest there was first documented in video posted online, showing a brutal security crackdown by pro-Assad fighters on the men of Bayda and protests outside the town by its women.

One section of Mr. Pannell’s report, about 70 seconds in, features video said to have been recorded by a member of a pro-Assad militia after the massacre this month in Bayda’s main square. The blood-stained square will be familiar to readers who were following the conflict two years ago, when another leaked clip, shot from almost the exact same vantage point, showed pro-Assad fighters kicking and standing on the bodies of the town’s men, who were forced to lie face down on the ground with their hands bound behind their backs.

Video, said to show a security crackdown in the Syrian town of Bayda in April, 2011, was posted online by opposition activists that month.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.



Discuss Rape and Justice in Pakistan With Reporters From The Times and ‘Frontline’

Readers of The Lede are invited to join a discussion of the issues raised by the documentary “Outlawed in Pakistan,” to be broadcast Tuesday night on PBS. The film, part of the “Frontline” series, follows the case of Kainat Soomro, a young woman who accused four men of gang-raping her when she was just 13 years old.

As the film aims to show, Ms. Soomro’s long battle for justice illustrated how dangerous speaking out about rape can be in Pakistan, where the legal system and tribal customs forced her family to uproot their lives and endure threats.

On Wednesday at 2 p.m. Eastern time, The New York Times’s Islamabad bureau chief, Declan Walsh, will discuss “Outlawed in Pakistan” with the directors of the film, Habiba Nosheen and Hilke Schellmann. Submit your questions ahead of time using the form below and return here to follow the conversation once it begins.



Newborn Rescued From Sewer Pipe in China Reportedly in Good Condition

Video broadcast repeatedly on Chinese state television in recent days showed the intense rescue of a newborn who spent his first few hours on Earth trapped in a sewer pipe directly beneath the toilet where his mother had unexpectedly given birth.

Video broadcast on Chinese state television showed the rescue of a newborn from a sewer pipe in the Zhejiang Province city of Jinhua on Saturday.

The images, which circulated widely on Chinese social networks, showed that rescuers in Jinhua, who could see a tiny foot beneath the toilet when they arrived on Saturday, sawed off the section of pipe the baby was trapped in and brought it to a nearby hospital, where they worked with doctors to cut him loose.

Three days after the baby was extracted from the pipe, a search for the infant’s parents ended as a woman who was on the scene during the entire rescue admitted to the police that she was the boy’s mother, the state-run Zhejiang News reported.

A police officer told Britain’s Sky News on Tuesday that the boy was healthy enough to be discharged from the hospital. The unnamed police source also told the broadcaster that the mother, who had hidden her pregnancy, was the first to call for help, alerting her landlord to “weird noises” from the toilet. The landlord then spotted the child and called the authorities.

Before the mother came forward, CNN reported, the police in Jinhua had posted a message on the Chinese social network Sina Weibo reading: “Mom, come back! The baby is resilient and alive. Please show up, Mom. This is your own baby and he should return to your warm embrace soon.”

Comments directed and the infant’s mother and father by other Weibo users were less kind, Reuters reports. “The parents who did this have hearts even filthier than that sewage pipe,” one user wrote.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.



Newborn Rescued From Sewer Pipe in China Reportedly in Good Condition

Video broadcast repeatedly on Chinese state television in recent days showed the intense rescue of a newborn who spent his first few hours on Earth trapped in a sewer pipe directly beneath the toilet where his mother had unexpectedly given birth.

Video broadcast on Chinese state television showed the rescue of a newborn from a sewer pipe in the Zhejiang Province city of Jinhua on Saturday.

The images, which circulated widely on Chinese social networks, showed that rescuers in Jinhua, who could see a tiny foot beneath the toilet when they arrived on Saturday, sawed off the section of pipe the baby was trapped in and brought it to a nearby hospital, where they worked with doctors to cut him loose.

Three days after the baby was extracted from the pipe, a search for the infant’s parents ended as a woman who was on the scene during the entire rescue admitted to the police that she was the boy’s mother, the state-run Zhejiang News reported.

A police officer told Britain’s Sky News on Tuesday that the boy was healthy enough to be discharged from the hospital. The unnamed police source also told the broadcaster that the mother, who had hidden her pregnancy, was the first to call for help, alerting her landlord to “weird noises” from the toilet. The landlord then spotted the child and called the authorities.

Before the mother came forward, CNN reported, the police in Jinhua had posted a message on the Chinese social network Sina Weibo reading: “Mom, come back! The baby is resilient and alive. Please show up, Mom. This is your own baby and he should return to your warm embrace soon.”

Comments directed and the infant’s mother and father by other Weibo users were less kind, Reuters reports. “The parents who did this have hearts even filthier than that sewage pipe,” one user wrote.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.



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