Although the regime has effectively suppressed press accounts, dissident websites in Syria say security forces have dispersed three demonstrations in the past weeks. The last, on Feb. 29, reportedly involved hundreds of women protesting against price hikes. Authorities also arrested a number of people for supposedly organizing demonstrations, while others were beaten while protesting outside the Libyan embassy. The government has imposed a curfew to prevent protesters from gathering, and ordered closed the websites that have reported on them. (YNet, March 1)

The sexual abuse of reporter Lara Logan in Cairo's Tahrir square was certainly worthy of all the worldwide media coverage it has received, and raises disturbing questions about misogynist and xenophobic elements in the Egyptian revolutionary movement. But the incident's propagandistic exploitation by Islamophobes to discredit the Egyptian revolution altogether has also been a lugubrious spectacle. By way of contrast, there has been no global media outcry over the killing of a young Palestinian man in Jerusalem, apparently at the hands of a Jewish mob in an anti-Arab frenzy sparked in reaction to the revolutionary rising in Egypt. Joseph Dana noted on his +972 blog Feb. 23:

Israeli prosecutors are preparing a $275,000 lawsuit against Bedouin families for the cost of removing them from government land they tried to take over northwest of Beersheba, national media reported March 2. The suit is said to target the sheikh of a Bedouin tribe that has staged 13 attempts to occupy government land near the Bedouin town of Rahat. A Knesset member has also proposed a bill providing for the immediate imposition of a fine against Bedouin who try to grab government land. Officials estimate there are thousands of "illegal" Bedouin settlements, also known as "non-recognized communities," with tens of thousands of illegally constructed buildings, in the Negev.

A special court in India sentenced 11 Muslims to death Feb. 28 in connection with the Godhra train burning in 2002 that killed 59 Hindu nationalists and started the 2002 Gujarat riots. Special judge PR Patel handed down death sentences for 11 of 31 convicted last week of murder, attempted murder and/or criminal conspiracy. The remaining 20 all received sentences of life imprisonment, and 63 others were acquitted. The convictions were for setting on fire the S6 coach of Sabarmati Express, killing 59 people, mostly Vishwa Hindu Parishad members, returning from Ayodhya. The incident triggered riots in Gujarat in which more than 1,200 people were killed, mostly Muslims, in some of the worst violence between Hindus and Muslims in India since independence in 1947. The prosecution had sought the death penalty for all 31 convicted. The defense plans to appeal the death sentences and is prepared to take the matter to India's highest court.

An Argentine court on Feb. 28 commenced the trial of former dictators Jorge Videla and Reynaldo Bignone for allegedly overseeing a systematic plan to steal babies born to political prisoners during the nation's 1976-1983 "Dirty War." The two are accused in 34 separate cases of infants who were taken from mothers held in clandestine torture and detention centers, the Navy Mechanics School and Campo de Mayo army base. The case was opened 14 years ago at the request of Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and includes as defendants five military judges and a doctor who attended to the detainees. The trial is expected to hear 370 witnesses and last up to a year. With the help of the Grandmothers' DNA database, 102 people born to vanished detainees have recovered their true identities.

Some 17 Haitian groups have launched a new campaign against the neoliberal economic policies that Haiti has followed under successive governments over the last three decades. The immediate goal is to implement a moratorium "of at least five years on the trade liberalization agreements [between the Haitian government and international lending institutions] and the putting in place of an economic and social policy outside the logic of the market and of structural adjustment policies."

On Feb. 18 Puerto Rican education secretary Jesús Rivera Sánchez fired 11 members of the Executive Committee of the Teachers' Federation of Puerto Rico (FMPR) from their jobs in the public school system and cancelled their teaching certificates, depriving of them of the ability to teach in either public or private schools. In the letter terminating the teachers, Rivera Sánchez accused them of "abandonment of service," citing a one-day strike led by the FMPR and other education workers' unions last August to protest the system's failure to hire enough teachers. FMPR president Rafael Feliciano called Rivera Sánchez's action repressive and unprecedented. He said the fired teachers would continue to lead the union without pay. The FMPR, Puerto Rico's largest union, has a long history of militancy.

On the morning of Feb. 25 Mexican soldiers reported finding the bodies of María Magdalena ("Malena") Reyes Salazar, her brother Elías Reyes Salazar and Elías' wife, Luisa Ornelas Soto, by the Juárez-Porvenir highway, some three kilometers from their home in Guadalupe Distrito Bravos, near Ciudad Juárez in the northern state of Chihuahua. The three had been kidnapped by unidentified armed men on Feb. 7. [We first reported, following our source, that they were seized while riding in a truck; some reports now say they were taken from their home.] Six members of the Reyes Salazar family have been murdered in the past two years.