Encouraging to see bookshops in Kashmir again: Author

Srinagar, Feb 6 (IANS) He vividly remembers his inner turmoil when he saw the last remaining bookshop in Srinagar closed at the height of unrest in the 1990s. But London-based Kashmiri journalist Mirza Waheed is now thrilled to see youngsters in the valley taking to books with genuine passion.

'How can anyone close a bookshop unless there are no readers left around?' asks Waheed, recalling the day when his favorite 'Kashmir Bookshop' greeted him with an imposing lock after his return from Delhi in the mid-1990s.

'I mean, it was horrifying. How can the only bookshop be closed in a city where 1.2 million human beings live? The prospect was horrifying,' adds Waheed, who has been working as an editor for BBC's Urdu service in London for the last nine years.

Born with a voracious appetite for books, Waheed was sent to Delhi at the age of 18 when his parents figured out that things were not working out in the valley. He completed his BA and MA in English Literature from Delhi University.

'He worked for a reputed publishing house in Delhi before moving out to London,' Suhail, a long-time friend of Waheed, told IANS.

The duo had grown up playing cricket, watching Bollywood flicks, and basking under the soothing autumn sun by Nigeen Lake, close to Waheed's residence, in the troubled 1990s.

The author, in his late 30s, was in India to launch his debut novel 'The Collaborator' published by Penguin Viking International Jan 30.

'Kashmir, which was once known as the seat of learning and literature, had lost its only lung with which its growing youth could breathe,' he said, at his book reading session in a busy coffee shop here last week.

'But it is encouraging that a few bookshops have now come up in the city and youth here are again showing interest in reading good books,' said Waheed, who visits his parents here every year.

'They ask good questions and sometimes difficult ones as well. There is huge talent among the Kashmiri boys and girls. And I am sure that despite the sufferings of my people, the youth is now trying to make up for the lost time,' said Waheed, whose book deals with the tragedy of his land and its people.

His emotions are echoed by Khwaja Nisar Hussain, a retired engineer who had come to attend the author's book reading session: 'Nothing is ever permanently lost as long as we have a generation of young boys and girls who continue to pursue reading and writing.'

The author also candidly throws in advice for budding writers when he talks about the inevitable affair of dark circles around the eyes - the sign of a writer.

'Writing is a very difficult job. Though it has become fashionable for writers to speak about inspiration...the truth is that one has to work very hard to write a book.

'When my mother saw me this time, she said she did not want a writer son with dark circles around the eyes ... thanks to the sleepless nights,' he chuckled.

As he signed his books for fans, he took a moment's pause and asked contemplatively: 'Was this possible a few years back?'

Source: Sify.
Link: http://www.sify.com/news/encouraging-to-see-bookshops-in-kashmir-again-author-news-national-lcglucibija.html.

Tunisian police fire on crowd, killing 2

By BOUAZZA BEN BOUAZZA, Associated Press – Sat Feb 5

TUNIS, Tunisia – Police fired at an angry crowd of 1,000 attacking the police station in the northwestern town of Kef on Saturday, killing two people and injuring 17 others, the Interior Ministry said.

The official Tunisian news agency said the crowd had turned on police after the police chief "abused" a member of the community. A local journalist said the police chief slapped a woman during a demonstration, triggering the violence between police and citizens.

The journalist said that two other people died on the way to the hospital, but that information could not be officially confirmed. The journalist, reached by telephone, asked not to be identified for professional reasons.

Regional prefect Mohamed Najib Tlijali, calling for calm on a local radio station, said that the police official was himself hospitalized but under arrest.

The clash pitting police against citizens appeared to be among the most serious since this small North African country began a process of moving out of a 23-year-long dictatorship with the flight into exile of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on Jan. 14 following a month of demonstrations.

A statement by the Interior Ministry, which is in charge of police, said that some 1,000 citizens threw stones and small firebombs at the police station in a surge of anger after the "abuse" by the police chief. The crowd burned two cars, one a police vehicle, a ministry statement said.

Police fired tear gas, then fired into the air in a vain effort to disperse the crowd, then began firing on demonstrators, the Interior Ministry said.

The statement did not specify the nature of the abuse by the police chief that triggered the incident, but the eyewitness said a woman was slapped. The ministry confirmed the police chief was under arrest and said investigators had been sent to Kef.

Tunisia remains tense since demonstrations pushed Ben Ali into exile in Saudi Arabia. Police, in particular, were long distrusted by the population because they carried out the repressive policies of Ben Ali's regime.

The demonstrations that set of Tunisia's "people's revolution" began in the nation's heartland when an unemployed man in the central western town of Sidi Bouzid set himself afire Dec. 17 after police confiscated his fruit and vegetable cart because he had no legal authorization to sell. A woman police officer reportedly slapped the man in a major affront to his dignity.

The Tunisian uprising has since spread to Egypt where tens of thousands have demonstrated for nearly two weeks calling for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.

Algerian opposition to hold rally despite promises

ALGIERS — Algeria's opposition said Saturday it will go ahead with a planned protest next week to keep up pressure on the president to step down, despite his pledge to lift a two-decade state of emergency.

Defying a longstanding government ban on protests in the capital, the Rally for Culture and Democracy will march on February 12 in Algiers at 11 am (1000 GMT), RCD official Tahar Besbes told AFP.

"The rally will take place ... So far we have not been refused permission by the city of Algiers to organize our march," he said.

The opposition is demanding the immediate end of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's regime, citing the same problems of high unemployment, housing problems and soaring costs that have inspired uprisings in neighboring Tunisia and Egypt.

The Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights (LADDH), which forms part of a part of a group calling itself the National Coordination for Change and Democracy, set up in the wake of January riots, will also join the protest.

Bouteflika on Thursday promised that Algeria's 19-year state of emergency would be lifted "in the very near future" amid a raft of new measures announced including a call for state-owned broadcasters to provide fair coverage of authorized political parties -- a key demand of the opposition.

But the RDC said that the president's pledge to lift martial law was a political "maneuver" aimed at creating "diversion."

Another opposition group, the Socialist Forces Front, said that while the measure contained a "positive signal," a new anti-terrorist law announced by Bouteflika was a cause for "concern and suspicion."

In response to growing public anger, the government has subsequently lowered the price of cooking oil and sugar and said it would subsidize other staples like wheat and milk.

Protests in the Algerian capital have been banned since June 2001 after bloody protests by Berber activists in the Kabylie region resulted in eight dead and hundreds of injured.

Copyright © 2011 AFP. All rights reserved.

Dams Threaten Aboriginal Tribe

By K. S. Harikrishnan

CHALAKUDY, India, Jan 28, 2011 (IPS) - Over the years, the Kadars, a dwindling aboriginal tribe who live on the borders of the southern Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, have survived pestilences, extreme exploitation and even mass sterilizations. But a new government plan to build a hydroelectric dam across the Chalakudy River would have been the death knell for the group who now number about 1,500.

With the Ministry of Environment and Forest veto of the proposed 140 million U.S. dollar dam project at Athirapilli in the valley of the Western Ghats, the Kadars have gotten a reprieve.

The decision of the Environment Ministry is "a major success for the forest and the tribe," A. Latha, an environmentalist and research co-ordinator of the Thrissur-based River Research Center, told IPS.

Local resistance and judicial intervention by the High Court of Kerala have also come to the aid of the Kadars and the unique flora and fauna of the forested hilly area of the Chalakudy river basin.

The Kadar community is one of the six endangered food-gathering communities in India according to anthropologists. Their population in 1961 was just 800.

Ayyan, a member of the tribe, says that many community huts will be submerged if the state continues the work on the dam. "We hear the death knell of our beloved river," the 60-year-old man told IPS.

"The government does not give adequate basic amenities to us at the settlement area, where living conditions are very bad. Their assurance on amenities is a pipe- dream. Now they want our river and forest for their benefits," Ayyan said.

P. Gopakumar, a Malayali author, told IPS that the government is guilty of sponsoring violence against tribal society in the name of the dam. "Acting on behalf of the middle men in the market sector, the promoters in government and private agencies are ignoring the rights of the tribe," he said.

According to Joy Kaitharam, general secretary of the Thrissur-based Human Rights Protection Center which fights for the rights of indigenous people, there has been no letup in the atrocities inflicted on the tribe since 87 Kadars were forcibly sterilized at the Mattathoor Government Primary Health Center, near Kodakara in 1976.

"Since the conduct of sterilizations, the population of the tribe has remained stagnant. Today, Kadar men are tortured by officials on charges of forest theft and for agitating against the dam," Kaitharam told IPS.

Prof. S. K. Tiwari, who compiled ‘Encyclopaedia of Indian Tribals’, pointed out that "Kadars shifted from traditional occupation to snake charmers as well as sellers of honey and wax since 1940."

"Because of the change of life style, very high morbidity is prevailing in the tribal belt. There is no modern health facility at the settlement," says S. P. Ravi, convener of the Chalakudy River Protection Forum. "Kadar people need highly nutritious food for managing anaemia."

Environmentalists say that the immediate fallout of building the dam will be the fragmentation of the habitat for elephants, tigers, lion-tailed macaques and other species that roam the contiguous sanctuaries and national parks in the Parambikulam-Anamalai range of Western Ghats - one of the internationally identified eco-regions for long-term conservation in India.

Due to the rich diversity of fish in the Chalakudy River, the National Bureau of Fish Genetic Resources in Lucknow has suggested the river area be declared as a "fish sanctuary."

Gopinathan Nair, president of the Limnological Association of Kerala, fears construction of dam will prevent both upstream and downstream migration of some of the fish - which is a vital activity for their survival. "Depletion of fish and mussels will certainly affect the environment surrounding the 140 kilometer-long river," Nair points out.

Cambridge-based Bird Life International has noted the importance of the endemic birds nesting in the Athirapilli-Vazhachal hills.

Botanists have focused on the abundant and diverse flora that has not yet been fully cataloged in the area. "Experts from government agencies are silent on the actual volume of trees that would be submerged," says Ravikumar, a botanist in Kochi.

Source: IPS.
Link: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54268.

Arctic Defrost Dumping Snow on U.S. and Europe

By Stephen Leahy

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jan 28, 2011 (IPS) - The world's northern freezer is on rapid defrost as large volumes of warm water are pouring into the Arctic Ocean, speeding the melt of sea ice, according to a new study.

Surface temperatures in parts of the Arctic have been 21 degrees C above normal for more than a month in recent weeks.

"Boats were still in the water during the first week of January," said David Phillips, a senior climatologist with Environment Canada, referring to southern Baffin Island, some 2,000 km north of Montreal. This is a region that receives just four or five hours of weak sunlight during the long winter. Temperatures normally range from -25 to -35 degrees C but were above zero on some days in January.

"It's impossible for many people in parts of the eastern Arctic to safely get on the ice to hunt much-needed food for their families - for the second winter in a row," Phillips said in a report.

The warming and melting of the Arctic is happening much faster than expected and new data reveals that huge volumes of warmer water from the North Atlantic are now flowing into and warming up the Arctic Ocean, researchers reported Friday in the journal Science.

"In the past hundred years the waters in the Fram Strait have warmed about two degrees C," says co-author Thomas Marchitto, of Colorado University's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.

The Fram Strait between Greenland and Svalbard (Spitsbergen) is the major connection between the Arctic Ocean and the world ocean. An international team of researchers analyzed marine sediments and found that temperatures of the northward inflowing Atlantic water varied by just a few tenths of a degree Celsius during the past 2,000 years. However, in the last hundred years temperatures have shot up by two degrees C.

"What's happening here is very unusual compared to the last 2,000 years," Marchitto told IPS.

Climate change is believed to be behind this warmer water because over 90 percent of additional heat trapped in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas is going into the oceans, he said.

"The accelerated decrease of the Arctic sea ice cover and the warming of ocean and atmosphere in the Arctic, as measured during the past decades, are in part related to an increased heat transfer from the Atlantic," said co-author Robert Spielhagen, a palaeoceanographer at the Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Literature in Mainz, Germany.

Sea ice has declined dramatically during the short Arctic summers in recent years, with some experts now projecting that the ice cover will be essentially gone in as little as five years. Just a few years ago, no one thought a summer ice-free Arctic could happen before 2060.

The warming Arctic and melting sea ice is a planetary-scale change since the Arctic Ocean covers 14 million sq km, an area almost as big as Russia. The Arctic and Antarctic polar regions are key drivers of Earth's weather and climate. The rapid defrosting of the Arctic has already altered the climate system, researchers now agree.

IPS previously broke the story revealing that the snow and cold in the eastern United States and Europe during the winter of 2009-10 was likely the result of the loss of Arctic sea ice. The same thing has happened this year.

As more and more sea ice melts, there is more open water to absorb the summer sun's heat. A day of 24-hour summer sun in the Arctic puts more heat on the surface of the ocean than a day in the tropics, James Overland of the NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in the United States told IPS.

That extra heat in the ocean is gradually released into the lower atmosphere from October to January as the region slowly re-freezes months later than normal. This is a fundamental change - a large part of the Arctic Ocean is radiating heat instead of being cold and ice-covered. That has disrupted wind circulation patterns in the northern hemisphere, reported Overland and other researchers at the International Polar Year Oslo Science Conference in Norway last June.

The result: the Arctic stays warm and mid-latitude regions become colder and receive more snow for much of the winter. Last December was the coldest south Florida has experienced in more than a century of record-keeping.

Most of Britain suffered through its coldest December ever. Up in the Arctic, Coral Harbor on the northwest corner of Hudson Bay was above zero degrees C for two days in early January for the first time in history. Much of the eastern Arctic centered around Baffin Island averaged +21C above normal between Dec. 17 and Jan. 15 this year.

This looks to be the new normal since Arctic experts agree the melting sea ice is now locked into a death spiral.

"In future, cold and snowy winters will be the rule rather than the exception" in the eastern United States and Europe, Overland previously told IPS.

This week the U.S. northeast suffered through its sixth major snowstorm this winter, breaking all snowfall records.

Source: IPS.
Link: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54278.

China and Brazil Inundate Latin America with Dams

By Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 2, 2011 (Tierramérica) - The growing presence of Chinese and Brazilian capital in Latin America's energy sector is facilitating the construction of hydroelectric complexes, but is also the fueling nationalist stances that are adding to the environmental criticisms of those major projects.

The three biggest hydroelectric dams in Ecuador are being built by Chinese companies, which have broken the hegemony of Brazilian construction firms like Odebrecht and Andrade Gutierrez.

Financing from China's Export-Import Bank, which is covering nearly all the costs, made those dams viable at a time when Ecuador had limited access to credit as a result of the public debt review promoted by the government, beginning in 2007, and its decision not to pay 4 billion dollars in debts, claiming it was not Ecuador's responsibility.

Brazil is also financing dam projects through its National Economic and Social Development Bank (BNDES). But those investments were hurt in 2008 when the Ecuadorian government of Rafael Correa expelled Odebrecht, accusing the firm of flaws in the construction of the San Francisco hydroelectric dam and demanding 210 million dollars in compensation.

The competition between Brazil and China, which both have surplus capital and construction companies specializing in major projects, has created conditions favorable for exploiting the energy potential of Latin America's abundant rivers.

In Peru, this power bid already has a winner. Five hydroelectric complexes are to be built in the Peruvian Amazon region. "They are being planned in function of Brazilian interests," which will be the sole beneficiaries, Alfredo Novoa, director of the non-governmental organization ProNaturaleza, told Tierramérica.

The environmental activist challenges the projects because he believes that Peru has sufficient energy-generating potential to meet current electricity demand, and can expand in the future through wind and other sustainable energy sources that do not entail the environmental and social costs of the dams in the Amazon jungle.

This nationalist reaction to the expansion of hydroelectric dams also condemns the financing from BNDES, which has stipulated that Brazilian equipment and inputs will be used to build the dams in Peru.

It is a mechanism that Brazil utilizes to boost its high added-value exports, as well as the interest and revenues of its companies, which will be partners or builders of the dams.

The energy agreement that Brazil and Peru signed in June 2010 for building five hydroelectric dams in the Peruvian Amazon was the result of "asymmetric negotiations," said Novoa, because it establishes sales to Brazil of surplus electricity for 30 years.

According to Novoa, Peru does not need new energy sources from the Amazon, but Brazil does, so it is evident who will benefit from the hydroelectric projects.

"You don't negotiate with Brazil, you just agree," Peru's President Alan García is alleged to have said in a private meeting with business leaders, diplomats and civil society representatives in Chile, according to a statement posted Jan. 20 on Twitter by Chilean political analyst Patricio Navia.

The dams and electrical transmission lines to be built will result in the deforestation of 1.5 million hectares of the Peruvian Amazon, according to estimates by engineer José Serra in a study for ProNaturaleza.

China has concentrated its investment in Peru in the mining sector, while Brazil has set its sights on fossil fuels, transportation infrastructure and hydroelectric dams in areas near the Peru-Brazil border.

The capital from the two emerging giants played an important role in Peru's economic growth and reduced its dependence on the United States, which has yet to overcome the economic crisis that exploded in 2008, political scientist Cynthia Sanborn said in a Tierramérica interview.

Brazilian companies are active in a variety of sectors in the Peruvian economy, but "I haven't seen much civil society resistance to those investments, with the exception of the hydroelectric projects," said Sanborn, a U.S. expert who heads the research center at the Peruvian University of the Pacific.

Chinese capital has faced opposition after Shougang Hierro, which has had mining operations in Peru since 1992, caused widespread contamination with a spill of oils and lubricants, and was accused of violating labor laws, just as two other Chinese firms faced conflicts that ended in death and injury.

Nicaragua is another country whose hydroelectric dams are in the hands of Brazilian firms, which have benefited from the fact that this Central American country does not have relations with China, because of its diplomatic ties with Taiwan.

The Brito hydroelectric project, granted in 2007 to the Brazilian Andrade Gutierrez construction firm, set off controversy and criticism from environmentalist because the dam on the San Juan River would reverse the natural flow towards the Caribbean, sending it instead to the Pacific. The dam is to have a capacity of 250 megawatts, with an initial cost of 600 million dollars.

Another Brazilian company, Queiroz Galvão, won the contract to build the Tumarín Dam, with the potential for 220 megawatts.

As for Brazil itself, Chinese investment has grown dramatically in the last to years, in various sectors. Curiously, Chinese firms have focused on buying electricity transmission and distribution companies, as well as others active in Brazil's oil fields.

They are two types of investments: one to acquire reserves of non-renewable natural resources to meet China's own growing demand, the other to generate employment for its citizens abroad and to export equipment, said Adriano Pires, an energy consultant and director of the Brazilian Infrastructure Center.

China is one of the few countries developing new technologies to carry out major infrastructure projects, but it will be hard for it to penetrate this sector in Brazil, as it did in Africa and Ecuador, because Brazil's own construction firms are very competitive, Pires told Tierramérica.

However, China is indeed a factor in the current boom in hydro and thermoelectric complexes, selling turbines and equipment at low prices.

Chinese investment only appears to be "timid" because much of it does not appear in the statistics, like the cases in which they have bought majority shares in major companies, pointed out Luis Afonso Lima, president of the Brazilian Society for Transnational Corporation Studies. Such is the case of the Swiss automotive company Volvo, he said by way of example.

But the focus of Chinese investment does not seem to be making electrical energy a priority in Brazil, he said.

With nearly 3 trillion dollars in international reserves, China is working to transfer its investment in U.S. Treasury bonds to other assets, agreed energy consultant Pires.

*Gonzalo Ortiz (Quito), José Adán Silva (Managua) and Milagros Salazar (Lima) contributed reporting.

*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialized news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Program, United Nations Environment Program and the World Bank.

Source: IPS.
Link: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54329.

Changes to Public Gatherings Law key demand by opposition, activists

By Thameen Kheetan

AMMAN - When opposition groups and disgruntled activists took part over the past few weeks in peaceful demonstrations, policemen were distributing water and juice among protesters.

However, law enforcement personnel were entitled under the Public Gatherings Law to arrest participants for breaking a provision in a controversial law stipulating that organizers obtain permission from the concerned authorities ahead of the rally. Those breaking the law could have faced one to three months in prison or a fine, or both penalties.

Activists saw the authorities’ reaction as a sign of change, and recent developments indicate change is coming.

In the Letter of Designation to the new government last week, His Majesty King Abdullah named the law in question as part of the legislation governing civil action that should be revisited.

Prime Minister-designate Marouf Bakhit was quoted by lawmakers last week as saying that the prior permission is likely to be dropped.

In all cases, amendments to the Public Gatherings Law will remain a key demand by the spectra of the opposition and other activists, who criticize it as a tool to suppress the freedom of expression.

“We believe that this law contradicts the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of expression,” Islamic Action Front (IAF) Secretary General Hamzah Mansour told The Jordan Times last week.

He said Jordan should go back to the 1953 law, under which organizers of a public gathering only had to inform authorities 48 hours prior to the planned event, without the need to wait for permission.

Under the current legislation, an organizing party must apply for a governor’s permission to hold a sit-in or a demonstration three days in advance. The law does not require the governor to mention reasons behind any refusal.

But just as it dealt with the recent demonstrations, the government refrained from cracking down on demonstrators on several occasions over the past decade, such as during the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon and on Gaza in winter 2008/09.

Prior to last year’s Lower House elections, at least 10 leftist youth activists were detained while preparing for a sit-in in front of the Prime Ministry to call for boycotting the polls. A few days later, an unlicensed sit-in by the same group went on smoothly outside the Parliament.

Some activists have defied the law, including the National Campaign for Defending Students Rights (Thabahtoona), which maintains its policy of not seeking official blessings for its sit-ins in front of various public institutions. The group, however, prefers to go out in “symbolic” numbers to avoid possible confrontation with police, activists from the group said.

Mohammad Sneid, a day laborer who moved into the spotlight after leading a sequence of protests in which workers employed by the government were demanding rights, said: “How do you expect people to ask for permission to demand their own rights?”

Last year, Sneid was detained for 10 days then released on bail by the State Security Court for charges of illegal assembly and slandering the then-minister of agriculture Saeed Masri.

A lawmaker said the law contradicts the spirit of the age.

“Since the endorsement of this law, we have repeated that it doesn’t suit the era of democracy and freedom of expression,” MP Jamil Nimri, head of the Lower House National Guidance Committee, told The Jordan Times.

He added that the law in question is on the list of laws that will be discussed during the upcoming parliamentary session, expected this spring or summer.

Former prime minister Ali Abul Ragheb, whose Cabinet endorsed the Public Gatherings Law as temporary legislation in 2001 before being passed by the Parliament three years later, said the law was then necessary to curb violent incidents that accompanied rallies across Jordan in solidarity with the second Palestinian Intifada against the Israeli occupation.

In an interview with The Jordan Times on Tuesday, Abul Ragheb said his government faced a shortage in the number of policemen to secure the dozens of rallies in the capital and other cities at the times of the Intifada and the 2003 US-led war on Iraq.

He said authorities then felt an urgent need to “protect people’s interests and bring about security and order for all citizens”.

But the politician explained that “whoever implements the law has to take into consideration that the constitutional principle is in favor of allowing” people to assemble in public, adding that any official who “arbitrarily” applies the law has to be held accountable.

However, things have changed since then, said Abul Ragheb; a businessman and a former MP.

“If you ask me whether the current circumstances require amending this law… the answer is yes,” Abul Ragheb said. He stopped short of elaborating on the needed amendments.

The necessity of revising the law, according to Mustafa Rawashdeh, a key teacher activist, lies in the fact that the implementation of its provisions “depends on the mood of official concerned with enforcing it”.

6 February 2011

Source: The Jordan Times.
Link: http://jordantimes.com/?news=34217.

Protecting stability a religious duty - IAF

By Mohammad Ben Hussein

AMMAN - The Islamic Action Front (IAF) said Saturday that preserving the stability and security of Jordan is a “religious duty”.

However, the largest opposition party said after a meeting yesterday that members of the council decided that the group will press ahead with rallies demanding economic and political reform.

“We stressed during the meeting the importance of Jordan’s security and stability… while at the same time the party will continue street protests in accordance with political parties and civil society groups,” said a statement issued following a meeting of the 120-member council.

In its statement, the IAF said it will maintain pressure on authorities to dissolve Parliament, amend the Elections Law and hold early elections that are transparent and free.

It also stressed that its demands echo public concerns including a call to improve the economic situation, fight corruption and forge ahead with political reform.

“The demands center around the pulse of the street,” said the statement.

The IAF, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, has spearheaded sporadic demonstrations in Amman and other main cities during the past weeks calling for constitutional reforms that see governments formed based on Parliament majority.

Leaders of the mother group met with His Majesty King Abdullah on Thursday and later described the meeting as “candid and open”.

6 February 2011

Source: The Jordan Times.
Link: http://jordantimes.com/?news=34216.