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Thursday, October 10, 2013

Another ‘Angola 3\' Prisoner, With Cancer, Is Released

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Video of Police Chase and Eyewitness Reports of Shooting Near U.S. Capitol

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Iran Frees Another Reformer, but Netanyahu Warns Iranians, in Persian, Not to Be ‘Dupes\'

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Decades in Solitary Confinement, Then Death in Freedom

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Police Officer in Brazil Jokes on Facebook About Breaking Truncheon Over Protester

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Assad Says He May Seek Re-election

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Banksy Parodies Syrian Rebel Videos

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Pakistani Girl Shot by Taliban Says Militants Only Helped Amplify Her Message

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Iran\'s Foreign Minister Discusses Twitter, Netanyahu and Kerry on State Television

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Pakistani Taliban Leader Talks Peace and Frolics on Camera

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Canadians Stuck in Egyptian Legal Limbo Thank Supporters via YouTube

Two Canadians who were detained in Cairo during the deadly security crackdown in August and are still barred from leaving the country despite their release last week posted a message of thanks to their supporters on YouTube on Wednesday.

A video message from John Greyson and Dr. Tarek Loubani, two Canadians jailed in Egypt during a crackdown on Islamist protesters in August.

The two men, John Greyson and Dr. Tarek Loubani, were passing through Egypt on their way to the Gaza Strip on a humanitarian mission when they found themselves in the middle of the crackdown on Islamist supporters of the deposed president, Mohamed Morsi. In a letter describing their arrest, the men said that Dr. Loubani, an emergency-room physician, helped treat protesters who had been shot by the security forces on Aug. 16, as Mr. Greyson, a filmmaker who was documenting the trip, recorded video.

As The Globe and Mail reported, Canadian consular staff members helped the men book space on a flight out of Cairo on Sunday, the day after they were set free from prison. However, they were then “prevented from boarding a Frankfurt-bound plane after officials at Cairo International Airport found the men's names on a no-fly advisory.”

A spokesman for Egypt's prosecutor-general told the Canadian newspaper that the two men were still under investigation for allegedly cooperating with members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Dr. Loubani was traveling through Egypt to offer training in emergency medicine in Gaza, which is ruled by Hamas, a Palestinian offshoot of the Brotherhood movement.



Video Offers Glimpse of Russia\'s Ban on Gay ‘Propaganda\' in Action on a Moscow Street

Video recorded this week during the arrest of gay rights activists in Moscow shows what Russia's legal ban on “propaganda for nontraditional sexual relationships” looks like in practice.

Video posted online by the Russian news site Grani showed the arrest of gay rights activists on Sunday in Moscow.

The raw footage, accompanying a report from the independent Russian news site Grani, shows police officers arresting activists as they marched through the Russian capital's Arbat district on Sunday, chanting and carrying a banner that read: “Hitler Also Began With the Gays. No to Fascism in Russia.” The activists also chanted against legal moves to take children away from gay parents.

The video also captures the response of some bystanders, who initially intervened to prevent the police officers from using excessive force, before discovering what the protest was about. The clip is not subtitled, but the intervention of the bystanders begins when an older woman steps in and tells the officers, “You can't act like that.”

She then turns to a man behind her and says, “Hey man, help out.”

The man, wearing a black hat and a leather jacket, then says: “Major. Officer. What did they do?”

A short time later, as the confusion continues, a female protester in a black jacket and a rainbow scarf explains to the woman and an officer, “We are protecting the rights of L.G.B.T.”

The officer asks, “What's that?”

The protester replies, “Lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders.”

The older woman asks, “You're for them?”

The protester says, “We're for them.”

The older woman says: “Ohhhhhhhh no. Then no.”

The protester responds, “Hitler started with the gays.”

The older woman says, “This is the decline of morality.”

At a later stage, as a male protester in a blue hat is being pushed into a police car, he shouts, “What law have I violated?”

The officer answers simply, “19,” referring to the law on following police orders.

A female bystander asks, “What did they do to you?”

The male protester says, “Now they're going to hit me!”

After the police bundle him into the car, an officer says to the female bystander, “We warned him.”



Snowden\'s Father Meets the Press in Moscow

Video of Edward J. Snowden's father speaking to reporters at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow on Thursday, posted online by the Russian government's English-language news channel, RT.

As my colleague Andrew Roth reports, Lon Snowden, the father of the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden, arrived in Moscow on Thursday to visit his son, and was met at the airport by a scrum of Russian journalists, including camera crews from the main state television channel and the government's English-language network, RT.

The elder Mr. Snowden's remarks were also broadcast live by LifeNews, a pro-Kremlin tabloid news organization that recently published what it described as a photograph of Snowden the younger shopping in an undisclosed location.

An excerpt from live coverage of Lon Snowden's news conference at the airport in Moscow on Thursday from LifeNews, a pro-Kremlin outlet.

At the airport, and in a subsequent appearance in the city, the N.S.A. leaker's father stood next to his son's legal adviser in Russia, Anatoly Kucherena, who arranged the visit and is known to have close ties to President Vladimir Putin's government.

Video of Lon Snowden discussing his visit to Russia in Moscow on Thursday.

According to Steve Rosenberg, a BBC correspondent in Moscow, Mr. Kucherena told reporters that Edward Snowden might soon need to find work, since his savings were nearly exhausted, and that he fields inquiries from movie producers wanting to buy his client's rights every day.



Video of the Libyan Prime Minister Speaking After His Release

Libyan government footage of Prime Minister Ali Zeidan speaking to ministers after his release.

The Libyan government released video footage showing the prime minister, Ali Zeidan, speaking to fellow cabinet members and officials after his release on Thursday from a kidnapping that took place before dawn at a hotel in the capital, Tripoli.

In his remarks, Mr. Zeidan said that a Libyan state would “rise, positive, seeking the good and seeking peace and seeking reform, and looking to achieve everything that humanity describes as good.”

He thanked the army, the chief of staff, and the police forces, as well as the guards who dealt with the situation, and he went out of his way to assure foreigners that they were not targets.

“I also salute the revolutionaries, who had a great role - the real revolutionaries, who rise above greed. I salute them for the role they had in this, and I hope that they would be a part of the state, and have an effective role through its civil and military institutions.”

He added, “I hope that we deal with this situation wisely, using our brains, away from worries and magnifying the situation, and we try to mend what we can.”

A Libyan television broadcast showed the prime minister shortly after he was released. In what were described as the “first pictures” of him, the news announcer says he was surrounded by a heavy accompaniment of security forces to usher him into the prime minister's headquarters.

Libyan television showed Mr. Zidan escorted into his headquarters.

Mr. Zeidan was abducted by members of one of the semiautonomous militias that serve as his government's primary police and security force, according to statements from the prime minister's office and a coalition of militia leaders.

As my colleagues David D. Kirkpatrick and Gerry Mullany reported, the kidnapping was an apparent act of retaliation for his presumed consent to the capture of a suspected Qaeda leader by an American commando team.

A spokesman for the coalition, which calls itself the Operations Room of Libya's Revolutionaries, said the prime minister's “arrest” came after a statement by Secretary of State John Kerry that “the Libyan government was aware of the operation” that captured the suspected Qaeda leader, Reuters reported.

On their Facebook page, the coalition posted a photograph of Mr. Zeidan in detention, an image soon picked up by Arabic and international news organizations.

Al Arabiya English, on its Twitter account @AlArabiya_Eng, posted the photograph of Mr. Zeidan during the detention.

In its television report on the kidnapping, the BBC interviewed the head of security at the Corinthian Hotel, where Mr. Zeidan resided for security reasons, who said that men came to the building with an order from the prosecutor general for his arrest. They arrived at the hotel with a large number of vehicles emblazoned with the name of the group.

Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting from Tripoli, Libya.

Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.



Saudi Women Drive, Despite Ban, and Find Some Support on the Kingdom\'s Roads

A brief flurry of civil disobedience on the roads of Saudi Arabia this week, by women who flouted the conservative kingdom's ban on female drivers and documented it on Twitter and YouTube, ended on Thursday in a predictable manner - with an image of officers pulling alongside one car, captioned simply, “Police stopped us.”

Even so, a look back through the Twitter timeline of the female Saudi blogger who reported that setback, Eman Al Nafjan, also revealed something more surprising - evidence that some of the men the protesters shared the road with supported their cause. That was most obvious in video of one of the protest drives recorded on Wednesday by Ms. Nafjan, a mother and PhD candidate who writes as @Saudiwoman. The clip showed men, women and children in other cars flashing the thumbs-up sign to the woman behind the wheel as they passed by.

Ms. Nafjan, a mother and Ph.D. candidate who uploaded photographs and video of women driving this week, told Mohammed Jamjoom of CNN that the positive feedback seen in the video was recorded in Riyadh, the capital of the conservative kingdom.

This is not the first time that female activists have tried to use YouTube clips of themselves behind the wheel to prove that there is nothing dangerous or immoral about Saudi women driving themselves. In 2008, a rights activist named Wajeha al-Huwaider uploaded video of herself driving on International Women's Day. Three years later, another activist, Manal al-Sharif, was arrested on charges of disturbing public order for posting video of herself driving, recorded by Ms. Huwaider, as part of an online campaign to encourage Saudi women to take the road en masse that year.

Images of the latest protest drives were posted online all week by Ms. Nafjan to build support for a new push to do away with the ban, which activists hope will culminate in a demonstration of careful but illicit driving by women across the kingdom on Oct. 26.

Taken as a whole, though, what is most obvious about the photographs and video transmitted from the passenger seat by Ms. Nafjan is how little visible drama they show. That, she wrote on Twitter earlier in the week, is exactly the point.

Although the ban is a matter of Saudi tradition, not law, there have been reports recently that government officials could sanction a change, as the blogger and journalist Ahmed Al Omran and Ms. Sharif both noted this week.

Late Thursday, Ms. Nafjan reported that she and the driver who were briefly detained by the police had been released, although she noted that her mother was alarmed by opponents of the movement who were attempting to build support for her arrest using a new Twitter hashtag.



Back-to-Work Day at H.P.

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Encouraging the Reviewers, Honestly

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Today\'s Scuttlebot: The Demise of Lavabit, and an Interview With John McAfee

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Daily Report: Ban Upheld in U.S. on Some Samsung Phones and Tablets

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G.E.\'s ‘Industrial Internet\' Goes Big

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All Is Fair in Love and Twitter

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A Conversation With Lavabit\'s Founder

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PC Shipments: It Could Have Been Worse (and Probably Will Be)

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Today\'s Scuttlebot: Google\'s Anti-Aging Start-Up, and the Man Tied to Silk Road

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Daily Report: Novel Prompts Reflections on Our Technological Lives

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Stun Guns and Video Generate a Surprising Match

Taser International, a manufacturer of electronic stun guns, is not the company most people would expect to be bumping elbows with the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Dropbox as it looks for acquisitions.

Taser is the best-known maker of a class of weapons known as electric control devices, which are intended to give law enforcement officials a nonlethal method of immobilizing suspects with electrical shocks.

But a medical study last year said the devices could pose significant health risks, including cardiac arrest, and Amnesty International, the human rights group, released a report blaming Tasers for the deaths of at least 500 people held in custody in the United States since 2001. And Taser is currently named as a defendant in 23 lawsuits in which plaintiffs say wrongful death or personal injury stemmed from its devices, according to the company's most recent quarterly filing with securities regulators. Taser has said its products are less risky for civilians than firearms.

It was the lawsuits that, through a chain of events, brought Taser into closer contact with Silicon Valley companies. About seven years ago, Taser developed a miniature camera that attached to its devices so law enforcement officers could record the situations in which the devices were needed. Eventually, Taser began offering wearable cameras that officers could clip to their glasses, chests and helmets.

“We said, how can we help law enforcement and ourselves and anyone using our devices tell the truth about the situation,” said Jason Droege, general manager of Evidence.com, a cloud service run by Taser.

But police officers shooting video through wearable cameras and smartphones have created big new technology challenges for police departments, which must manage the vast numbers of photos and videos that the devices capture. The files have to be stored securely, with audit trails that show who had access to them and other controls that prevent tampering. Taser created Evidence.com to help law enforcement agencies do all this.

In an effort to bolster its new direction, Taser plans to announce on Thursday that it has acquired a start-up based in Seattle called Familiar that is in a business that seems to have almost no connection with Taser's own. Familiar runs a service that turns ordinary smartphones and tablets into digital picture frames, letting friends and family members automatically broadcast photos and videos to each others' devices.

Facebook, Dropbox and Twitter also had conversations with Familiar about an acquisition, according to a person briefed on the discussions who declined to be named because the conversations were confidential.

Slater Tow, a spokesman for Facebook, declined to comment, as did Jim Prosser, a spokesman for Twitter. Dropbox did not respond to a request for comment.

As part of the deal, which this person said was for less than $10 million, five people from Familiar will join Taser. Mr. Droege said Taser was attracted to the expertise that Familiar had in creating a consumer-friendly service for securely moving video and images among devices.

“For us, that's super important,” he said.



For Silicon Valley Novels, Blurring Fiction and Non-Fiction

Mark Twain once said: “It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.” It seems that Dave Eggers has people questioning which of those two types of storytelling he wrote about in his new book, “The Circle.”

The new novel tells the story of Mae Holland, a young idealist who comes to work at the Circle, a Google-like technology company that has conquered all its competitors by creating a single login for people to search, shop and socialize online. As my colleagues  and  noted Thursday, a lot of people are debating whether the book is based on a real truth that could happen, or a fantasy that could prove to be science fiction.

Mr. Eggers isn't the first person to attempt to weave together a narrative about Silicon Valley's culture into a novel.

“Cash Out,” written by Greg Bardsley, takes readers on a journey that has been described as a cross between “The Hangover” and “Office Space.” The story follows a disgruntled Valley start-up employee who goes on a three-day spree to try to sell his  $1 million stock options vesting at a job he despises. It involves a kidnapping by a group of tech-support nerds, blackmail and a lot of drama. Barring the kidnapping, some of the story could veer into the truth category.

“The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest” is a novel written by Po Bronson, which showed how ludicrous the computer industry can be, including Silicon Valley power plays, and makes fun of the tech creative process. The book follows a company in search of a next-generation chip for its computers that will help keep the company's stock from falling after a failed public offering. The book describes itself as a story that “reveals the brutal, absurd side of the industry.” The book did so well it became a movie in 2002, and its stars included ,  and .

“Dot Dead,” by Keith Raffel, is pretty much what it sounds like: a murder mystery worth of a Steve Jobs keynote presentation. The novel follows a high-powered executive with one of Silicon Valley's hottest tech firms, whose life is thrown into chaos when he comes home to find his part-time maid stabbed to death in his bed. (Cue creepy “C.S.I.” music here.) While the evidence points to the executive as the killer, he has to go on an exhaustive investigation to prove he was framed. There's also a little love story thrown in to keep the reader turning the page.

“Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore: A Novel,” by Robin Sloan, is one of the latest forays into Silicon Valley novels. Mr. Sloan, who is often referred to as a “media inventor,” previously worked at Twitter as a media manager. The story follows Clay Jannon, a hipster Web designer, who comes upon Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and then gets caught up in a global conspiracy, some hacking, and of course, a love story. It's a page-turner for today, and given that Mr. Sloan has worked in tech for years, it's spot on when it comes to its Silicon Valley references.



A Senator Raises Privacy Questions About Cross-Device Tracking

A lawmaker has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate online ad companies that track consumers across devices, like showing them ads on their phones based on Web sites they visit on a computer.

The letter, sent on Thursday by Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, to Edith Ramirez, the commission's chairwoman, cited a New York Times article that ran on Sunday detailing the new ways that mobile advertisers are tracking consumers, including across devices.

“Such tracking envelops users in a digital environment where marketers know their preferences and personal information no matter which device they use while consumers are kept largely in the dark,” Mr. Markey wrote.

One of the new challenges for advertisers is that apps on mobile phones do not use cookies, the predominant method for tracking people across Web sites. It has generally been impossible for advertisers to show someone a mobile ad based on searches they did on a different device, for instance, or to know whether a mobile ad resulted in a purchase on another device.

Various companies are figuring out ways to connect people's behavior across devices and show them ads accordingly. One of the companies featured in the article, Drawbridge, applies statistical modeling to data from ad exchanges and Web publishers to determine that several devices belong to the same person.

A Drawbridge spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Other companies, like Google, Facebook and Amazon, have other ways to track people's behavior across devices, like when they are logged in to their accounts with those services.

“Previous tracking technologies such as cookies are giving way to more sophisticated, surreptitious methods for monitoring users,” Mr. Markey wrote. “The implications of this evolution are enormous for the privacy of millions of Americans.”



Saudi Women Drive, Despite Ban, and Find Some Support on the Kingdom’s Roads

A brief flurry of civil disobedience on the roads of Saudi Arabia this week, by women who flouted the conservative kingdom’s ban on female drivers and documented it on Twitter and YouTube, ended on Thursday in a predictable manner â€" with an image of officers pulling alongside one car, captioned simply, “Police stopped us.”

Even so, a look back through the Twitter timeline of the female Saudi blogger who reported that setback, Eman Al Nafjan, also revealed something more surprising â€" evidence that some of the men the protesters shared the road with supported their cause. That was most obvious in video of one of the protest drives recorded on Wednesday by Ms. Nafjan, a mother and PhD candidate who writes as @Saudiwoman. The clip showed men, women and children in other cars flashing the thumbs-up sign to the woman behind the wheel as they passed by.

Ms. Nafjan, a mother and Ph.D. candidate who uploaded photographs and video of women driving this week, told Mohammed Jamjoom of CNN that the positive feedback seen in the video was recorded in Riyadh, the capital of the conservative kingdom.

This is not the first time that female activists have tried to use YouTube clips of themselves behind the wheel to prove that there is nothing dangerous or immoral about Saudi women driving themselves. In 2008, a rights activist named Wajeha al-Huwaider uploaded video of herself driving on International Women’s Day. Three years later, another activist, Manal al-Sharif, was arrested on charges of disturbing public order for posting video of herself driving, recorded by Ms. Huwaider, as part of an online campaign to encourage Saudi women to take the road en masse that year.

Images of the latest protest drives were posted online all week by Ms. Nafjan to build support for a new push to do away with the ban, which activists hope will culminate in a demonstration of careful but illicit driving by women across the kingdom on Oct. 26.

Although the ban is a matter of Saudi tradition, not law, there have been reports recently that the government could act to lift the ban, as the blogger and journalist Ahmed Al Omran reported.

Taken as a whole, though, what is most obvious about the photographs and video transmitted from the passenger seat by Ms. Nafjan is how little visible drama they show. That, she wrote on Twitter earlier in the week, is exactly the point.

Late Thursday, Ms. Nafjan reported that she and the driver who were briefly detained by the police had been released, although she noted that her mother was alarmed by opponents of the movement who were attempting to build support for her arrest using a new Twitter hashtag.



Video of the Libyan Prime Minister Speaking After His Release

Libyan government footage of Prime Minister Ali Zeidan speaking to ministers after his release.

The Libyan government released video footage showing the prime minister, Ali Zeidan, speaking to fellow cabinet members and officials after his release on Thursday from a kidnapping that took place before dawn at a hotel in the capital, Tripoli.

In his remarks, Mr. Zeidan said that a Libyan state would “rise, positive, seeking the good and seeking peace and seeking reform, and looking to achieve everything that humanity describes as good.”

He thanked the army, the chief of staff, and the police forces, as well as the guards who dealt with the situation, and he went out of his way to assure foreigners that they were not targets.

“I also salute the revolutionaries, who had a great role â€" the real revolutionaries, who rise above greed. I salute them for the role they had in this, and I hope that they would be a part of the state, and have an effective role through its civil and military institutions.”

He added, “I hope that we deal with this situation wisely, using our brains, away from worries and magnifying the situation, and we try to mend what we can.”

A Libyan television broadcast showed the prime minister shortly after he was released. In what were described as the “first pictures” of him, the news announcer says he was surrounded by a heavy accompaniment of security forces to usher him into the prime minister’s headquarters.

Libyan television showed Mr. Zidan escorted into his headquarters.

Mr. Zeidan was abducted by members of one of the semiautonomous militias that serve as his government’s primary police and security force, according to statements from the prime minister’s office and a coalition of militia leaders.

As my colleagues David D. Kirkpatrick and Gerry Mullany reported, the kidnapping was an apparent act of retaliation for his presumed consent to the capture of a suspected Qaeda leader by an American commando team.

A spokesman for the coalition, which calls itself the Operations Room of Libya’s Revolutionaries, said the prime minister’s “arrest” came after a statement by Secretary of State John Kerry that “the Libyan government was aware of the operation” that captured the suspected Qaeda leader, Reuters reported.

On their Facebook page, the coalition posted a photograph of Mr. Zeidan in detention, an image soon picked up by Arabic and international news organizations.

Al Arabiya English, on its Twitter account @AlArabiya_Eng, posted the photograph of Mr. Zeidan during the detention.

In its television report on the kidnapping, the BBC interviewed the head of security at the Corinthian Hotel, where Mr. Zeidan resided for security reasons, who said that men came to the building with an order from the prosecutor general for his arrest. They arrived at the hotel with a large number of vehicles emblazoned with the name of the group.

Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting from Tripoli, Libya.

Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.



Video of the Libyan Prime Minister Speaking After His Release

Libyan government footage of Prime Minister Ali Zeidan speaking to ministers after his release.

The Libyan government released video footage showing the prime minister, Ali Zeidan, speaking to fellow cabinet members and officials after his release on Thursday from a kidnapping that took place before dawn at a hotel in the capital, Tripoli.

In his remarks, Mr. Zeidan said that a Libyan state would “rise, positive, seeking the good and seeking peace and seeking reform, and looking to achieve everything that humanity describes as good.”

He thanked the army, the chief of staff, and the police forces, as well as the guards who dealt with the situation, and he went out of his way to assure foreigners that they were not targets.

“I also salute the revolutionaries, who had a great role â€" the real revolutionaries, who rise above greed. I salute them for the role they had in this, and I hope that they would be a part of the state, and have an effective role through its civil and military institutions.”

He added, “I hope that we deal with this situation wisely, using our brains, away from worries and magnifying the situation, and we try to mend what we can.”

A Libyan television broadcast showed the prime minister shortly after he was released. In what were described as the “first pictures” of him, the news announcer says he was surrounded by a heavy accompaniment of security forces to usher him into the prime minister’s headquarters.

Libyan television showed Mr. Zidan escorted into his headquarters.

Mr. Zeidan was abducted by members of one of the semiautonomous militias that serve as his government’s primary police and security force, according to statements from the prime minister’s office and a coalition of militia leaders.

As my colleagues David D. Kirkpatrick and Gerry Mullany reported, the kidnapping was an apparent act of retaliation for his presumed consent to the capture of a suspected Qaeda leader by an American commando team.

A spokesman for the coalition, which calls itself the Operations Room of Libya’s Revolutionaries, said the prime minister’s “arrest” came after a statement by Secretary of State John Kerry that “the Libyan government was aware of the operation” that captured the suspected Qaeda leader, Reuters reported.

On their Facebook page, the coalition posted a photograph of Mr. Zeidan in detention, an image soon picked up by Arabic and international news organizations.

Al Arabiya English, on its Twitter account @AlArabiya_Eng, posted the photograph of Mr. Zeidan during the detention.

In its television report on the kidnapping, the BBC interviewed the head of security at the Corinthian Hotel, where Mr. Zeidan resided for security reasons, who said that men came to the building with an order from the prosecutor general for his arrest. They arrived at the hotel with a large number of vehicles emblazoned with the name of the group.

Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting from Tripoli, Libya.

Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.



Snowden’s Father Meets the Press in Moscow

Video of Edward Snowden’s father speaking to reporters at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow on Thursday, posted online by the Russian government’s English-language news channel, RT.

As my colleague Andrew Roth reports, Lon Snowden, the father of the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, arrived in Moscow on Thursday to visit his son, and was met at the airport by a scrum of Russian journalists, including camera crews from the main state television channel and the government’s English-language network, RT.

The elder Mr. Snowden’s remarks were also broadcast live by LifeNews, a pro-Kremlin tabloid news organization which recently published what it described as a photograph of Snowden the younger out shopping in an undisclosed location.

An excerpt from live coverage of Lon Snowden’s news conference at the airport in Moscow on Thursday from LifeNews, a pro-Kremlin outlet.

At the airport, and in a subsequent appearance in the city, the N.S.A. leaker’s father stood next to his son’s legal adviser in Russia, Anatoly Kucherena, who arranged the visit and is known to have close ties to President Vladimir Putin’s government.

Video of Lon Snowden discussing his visit to Russia in Moscow on Thursday.

According to Steve Rosenberg, a BBC correspondent in Moscow, Mr. Kucherena told reporters that Edward Snowden might soon need to find work, since his savings were nearly exhausted, and that he fields inquiries from movie producers wanting to buy his client’s rights every day.