World

Iranian protesters remained defiant Monday with students staging sit-ins and some industrial workers going on strike despite a crackdown activists say has left dozens dead and hundreds more imprisoned. 

Videos posted on social media indicated that protests flared at various points in the capital and other cities over recent days, with women burning headscarves and shouting slogans against the Islamic republic.

Kurdish rights group Hengaw accused the authorities of using heavy weaponry, including “shelling” on neighbourhoods and “machine gun fire”, in the northwestern city of Sanandaj — claims which could not be independently confirmed amid widespread internet blocks.

Gunshots were also heard in Amini’s home town of Saqqez, said the Norway-based group.

The unrest erupted over three weeks ago over the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, an Iranian woman of Kurdish origin who died following her arrest by the notorious Tehran morality police who enforce the strict dress rules on women including compulsory headscarves.

Activists say she was beaten in custody, while the authorities in Iran have released a medical report blaming a pre-existing condition.

The protests have channelled anger among some Iranian women over the compulsory headscarf, but have also seen slogans shouted against the Islamic system created by late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after the ousting of the shah in 1979.

Oslo-based non-government group Iran Human Rights (IHR) shared images of a sit-in protest at the northern Gilan university and of high school girls in the northern town of Mahabad removing their headscarves.

It also posted a video which it said showed a large crowd of students outside Tehran polytechnic on Monday denouncing the “poverty and corruption” in Iran and shouting “death to this tyranny”.

– Workers on strike –

Footage shared on social media, including by news site Iran Wire, said students at Tehran women’s university Al-Zahra shouted criticism of the regime during a visit Saturday by President Ebrahim Raisi.

Student at universities including Tehran Azad also painted their hands red to evoke the crackdown by the authorities on the protests, images showed.

Analysts say that the multi-faceted nature of the protests — ranging from street marches to student strikes to individual actions of defiance — has complicated the state’s attempts to quell the movement.

This could make the protests an even bigger challenge to the authorities under supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 83, than the November 2019 protests against energy price hikes that were bloodily put down.

One viral video said to show a woman bare-headed in defiance of the dress code, in a street in the northwestern city of Kermanshah with outstretched arms and offering “free hugs” to passers-by.

There have also been signs of labour unrest. Videos broadcast by Persian media based outside Iran showed striking workers burning tyres outside the Asalouyeh petrochemical plant in the country’s southwest.

IHR said workers were blocking roads there, and there were also reports of strikes at refineries in Abadan in the west of Iran and Kengan in the south.

– ‘Chaos and disorder’ –

In an act of cyber defiance, the hacking group Edalat-e Ali (Ali’s Justice) had posted an image during the main state TV evening news on Saturday of Khamenei in crosshairs and being consumed by flames.

The crackdown on the protests sparked by Amini’s death has claimed at least 95 lives according to Norway-based group Iran Human Rights.

Another 90 people were killed by the security forces in Iran’s far southeastern city of Zahedan from September 30 after protests sparked by the alleged rape of a teenage girl by a police chief in the Sistan-Baluchistan province, said IHR, citing the UK-based Baluch Activists Campaign.

State media have said 24 members of the security forces have been killed overall, including in the Zahedan unrest.

Foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani warned Monday the government would “not stand with its hands tied in the face of chaos and disorder”. 

Campaign groups including IHR have also pointed to videos showing brutality by the security forces, including a defenceless protester beaten by baton-wielding police while taking cover in a building.

Activists also accuse the authorities of a campaign of mass arrests and travel bans to quell the protests, with celebrities caught up in the dragnet.

Ali Daei, once the world’s top international goalscorer in men’s football, had his passport confiscated on returning to Tehran from abroad after bitterly criticising the Islamic republic on social media, Iranian media reported.

Daei told AFP on Monday the passport was returned to him “after two or three days”.

Neighbors helped rescue teams comb through mud and debris Monday for signs of 52 people missing after a landslide swept through a town in Venezuela, killing at least 25.

Another 13 people were killed in heavy rains elsewhere in the South American country, while four died in Central America after tropical storm Julia dumped torrential rain on El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.

Residents of Las Tejerias some 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Caracas, used picks, shovels and any tools they could find to dig through a thick bank of mud deposited on the town Saturday.

“It came too fast, we had no time,” resident Carlos Camejo, 60, said of the mudslide.

“The town is lost, Las Tejerias is lost,” added Carmen Melendez, 55, desperately waiting for news on the whereabouts of a missing relative.

Some 1,000 rescuers were involved in the effort, Interior Minister Remigio Ceballos told AFP, with the military also deployed.

Authorities erected shelters for the displaced in Maracay, capital of the affected Aragua province.

The efforts had continued by lamplight overnight, with dogs and drones.

“We are working to find the people who are still missing, that is our main task right now,” Ceballos posted on social media late Sunday.

President Nicolas Maduro decreed three days of national mourning after the biggest river flood in the area in 30 years.

A torrent of mud several meters deep razed houses and businesses in Las Tejerias, a town of 54,000 people nestled in the mountains.

The deluge swept away cars, homes and telephone poles and felled large trees that were dragged by mud through the streets of the town left without electricity.

By the last count, Ceballos put the toll at 25 dead and 52 missing.

According to Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, five streams in the region overflowed after “as much rain fell in eight hours as normally falls in a month,” blaming the “climate crisis.”

Crews of workers with machinery were clearing the debris-covered roads while residents battled to clean out meters of mud dumped inside their homes.

Las Tejerias resident Jose Santiago spent 40 minutes clinging to an antenna while the flood dragged along several houses. His home was left standing but a torrent of mud swept through it.

“The river caught me and I couldn’t find anything to do besides climb a roof and grab onto an antenna,” the 65-year-old recounted. 

– ‘Life-threatening’ –

Further afield, four people died in Honduras and El Salvador when tropical storm Julia raced across Central America.

El Salvador police said on Twitter that “at least two people died” after a house collapsed in the town of Guatajiagua, some 150 kilometers east of San Salvador. 

Wilmer Wood, mayor of the eastern Honduran town of Brus Laguna, said two people died after Julia capsized a boat.

A third person is missing, said Wood.

The storm barelled into Nicaragua early Sunday as a hurricane packing sustained winds of 140 kilometers per hour, before weakening to tropical storm status but still inundating parts of the country with heavy rains that caused flooding.

By Monday morning, Julia’s eye was moving northwestward along the El Salvadoran and then Guatemalan coasts, according to the US National Hurricane Center which warned of “life-threatening flash floods and mudslides” across Central America and Southern Mexico.

The system was forecast to weaken to a tropical depression later Monday.

In Venezuela, the Tigres de Aragua and Caracas Lions baseball teams availed their stadiums as collection points for donations, and the Caracas metro said it too would raise collections from the public for those affected.

The crisis-hit country is no stranger to seasonal storms, but this was the worst so far this year following historic rain levels that caused dozens of deaths in recent months.

In 1999, about 10,000 people died in a massive landslide in the northern state of Vargas.

A US trio including ex-Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke, who played a key role battling the 2008 financial crisis, won the economics Nobel on Monday for research on banks in times of turmoil.

Bernanke, together with Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig, were honoured for having “significantly improved our understanding of the role of banks in the economy, particularly during financial crises, as well as how to regulate financial markets”, the jury said.

Bernanke, 68, has been both credited for spurring recovery after the 2008 recession and pilloried by critics for doing little to avert it, allowing investment bank Lehman Brothers to collapse.

He received the award for his analysis, conducted in the early 1980s, of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the worst economic crisis in modern history.

In particular, Bernanke showed “how failing banks played a decisive role in the global depression,” making the downturn “not only deep, but also long-lasting,” the Nobel jury noted.

In his role as chief of the central bank, Bernanke “was able to put knowledge from research into policy” during the financial crisis of 2008-2009, the Nobel Committee said.

Bernanke has been hailed for the Fed’s unorthodox response of slashing interest rates and flooding the financial system with liquidity.

– Bank runs –

Diamond, a professor at the University of Chicago born in 1953, and Dybvig, 67, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, were honoured for showing how “banks offer an optimal solution” for channelling savings to investments by acting as an intermediary.

The pair also showed how these institutions were vulnerable to so called bank runs, where a large number of savers simultaneously withdraw their money leading to the bank’s collapse.

The committee added that this dangerous dynamic can be avoided by governments providing deposit insurance and giving banks a life-line by becoming a lender of last resort.

“In a nutshell, the theory says that banks can be tremendously useful but they are only guaranteed to be stable if they are properly regulated”, Tore Ellingsen, chair of the prize committee, said.

Diamond, speaking to reporters after the announcement, reflected Monday on the decision by US authorities not to bail out Lehman Brothers, as they later did other financial institutions.

The bank’s collapse sent shockwaves through financial markets when it filed for bankruptcy in September 2008.

“It would have been better to find a more accommodating way, a less unstable way and unexpected way to resolve Lehman Brothers,” Diamond said, stressing there were questions about what regulators were legally able to do at the time.

“Had they found a way, I think the world would have had less of a severe crisis than it did,” Diamond said.

Speaking in an interview with the Nobel Foundation, Diamond also praised the work of his fellow laureate.

“The world was incredibly lucky to have Ben Bernanke sitting in the Federal Reserve during the crisis,” Diamond said.

– Few women –

Of all the Nobels, the economics prize has the fewest number of female winners: just two since it was first awarded in 1969, Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019.

This year, only two women were among the 12 individuals and two organisations honoured, Carolyn Bertozzi in chemistry and Annie Ernaux for literature.

Hans Ellegren, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, told AFP that since the science prizes generally honour research dating back decades, laureates who win “now reflect what the scientific community looked like back then.”

“I’m rather glad to be able to say that we have increased the proportion of women that get Nobel Prizes,” Ellegren said.

He noted that in the last five years, four women had been awarded the chemistry prize and two had received the physics prize, which has been a male-dominated field.

The economics prize, created by the Swedish central bank in 1968, was the only award not included when scientist Alfred Nobel created the prestigious awards in his 1895 will.

But like the other prizes it comes with a gold medal and an award sum of 10 million Swedish kronor (around $900,000).

The winners will receive the prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of scientist Alfred Nobel. 

Germany’s cybersecurity chief is facing the sack over alleged ties with Russian intelligence services, government sources told AFP on Monday, amid heightened vigilance over potential sabotage activities by Moscow.

Arne Schoenbohm, head of the Federal Cyber Security Authority (BSI), was accused in a recent investigation by broadcaster ZDF of contacts with Russia through an association he co-founded in 2012.

The interior ministry said it was “taking the facts that have been reported seriously and investigating them comprehensively” and was “examining all options on how to deal with the situation”.

The Handelsblatt daily reported that there was “great annoyance” within the government over the allegations.

A planned joint appearance by Schoenbohm and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser to present a report on German cybersecurity in 2022 has been cancelled as the ministry seeks to clarify the allegations. 

Faeser on Monday said her ministry was “examining all necessary steps that may be required” with regard to Schoenbohm. 

Germany was “vulnerable” to cyberattacks, “especially due to the threat posed by Russia’s war, and we must do everything we can to master this threat”, she said.

The association at the centre of the allegations, known as the Cyber Security Council Germany, advises businesses, government agencies and policymakers on cyber security issues.

According to the popular satire programme on ZDF that broke the story, Schoenbohm still maintains contact with the organisation. 

The latter denied the allegations, saying in a statement on its website on Monday that the charges were “absurd”.

Sebastian Fiedler, a politician with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), said the accusations “must be investigated very thoroughly” and had already caused “a great deal of damage to trust in the BSI”.

– ‘Increased vigilance’ –

Germany has in recent years repeatedly accused Russia of cyber espionage attempts.

The most high-profile incident blamed on Russian hackers to date was a cyberattack in 2015 that paralysed the computer network of the lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, forcing the entire institution offline for days while it was fixed.

Russia denies being behind such action.

Tensions between Russia and Germany have only intensified since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

The BSI has warned that companies, individuals and critical infrastructure are at risk of being hit by Russian cyberattacks.

Just two days ago, the rail network in the north of the country was temporarily paralysed by what operator Deutsche Bahn called “sabotage”, with some officials pointing the finger at Russia.

Important communications cables were cut at two sites, forcing rail services to be halted for three hours and causing travel chaos for thousands of passengers.

Transport Minister Volker Wissing said on Monday the period since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had been one of “increased vigilance” for Germany because “infrastructure has been targeted by many perpetrators”. 

“Since we don’t know who the perpetrators are, we can’t rule out anything right now,” he said of the rail shutdown.

Russia is also suspected of being behind explosions last month that set off leaks in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, which connect Russia to Germany.

The pipelines had long been at the centre of geopolitical tensions because Russia cut gas supplies to Europe in suspected retaliation against Western sanctions over Moscow’s war on Ukraine.

Anton Hofreiter, a Green party lawmaker and chairman of the German parliament’s European affairs committee, said that since the Nord Stream leaks “pointed to the Kremlin… we can’t rule out that Russia could also be behind the attack on the rail services”.

The missiles that sowed death and destruction in the Ukrainian capital for the first time in almost four months came in frightening roars early Monday.

The explosions smashed and shook buildings, burst water mains, left craters and torched automobiles — jarring Kyiv’s nearly three million people, including jolting some out of their sleep, as the city began its work week.

“I’m very shocked,” said 22-year-old Ivan Poliakov sitting on a park bench where he was so angry he struggled for his words.

“I arrived in Kyiv this morning. I was walking in the street… when there were the explosions,” he told AFP.

“I saw children and women cry. I love Kyiv. The people are good, they are courageous. But in an instant… it’s death.”

In the wooded Taras Shevchenko park in central Kyiv a missile gouged out a huge crater next to a child’s playground after renting asunder the air above it.

A small trail of white smoke was still rising. Branches were shorn clean off trees.

Shortly after 8:00 am Monday (0500 GMT), two missiles hit this upscale neighbourhood, less than a minute and 300 metres apart.

In the streets by the park, apartment block windows have been blown out and glass shards litter the ground.

The blasts were so powerful that they ripped the door of a bar restaurant, before employees began sweeping up the debris.

At one end of the park, the first blast hit a crossroads, close to a white, three-story administrative building — all of whose windows had been broken.

A missile dug a crater in the road, raising up the asphalt. Several cars parked there were now only twisted and blackened wrecks.

An AFP journalist saw a body entirely covered with a blanket.

– ‘They’re killing civilians’ –

A water pipe was hit, leaving a stream of water that flowed into the road leading to the city’s main artery.

Ksenia Ryazantseva and her husband live in a street next to the park, but their apartment faces a courtyard, opposite the children’s play area.

“We were sleeping and we heard the first explosion” by the crossroads,” Ksenia told AFP.

“We woke up and went to check, then the second explosion occurred (in the park). We don’t know what happened,” added the 39-year-old language teacher.

“We saw the smoke, then the cars and then we realised we had no more windows. Fortunately we live facing the courtyard,” she said.

“There’s a university, two museums. There are no military targets or things like that. They are killing civilians,” she said angrily.

Asked about her thoughts following the first attack on the capital since 26 June, she replied: “Well, we’re at war.”

For Serguii Agapov, there is no doubt the attacks are in reprisal for the explosion on the Russian bridge to Crimea.

– ‘Why?’ –

“After the Crimea bridge, everything started. Yesterday Zaporizhzhia, today Kyiv. Yes, I think that these are very horrible and cruel reprisals because civilians are suffering,” he said.

They are feeling, he added, both “fear and the desire that this be over soon. We don’t understand why they are doing this to us, what is the aim of all this?”

Around the two impacts of the missile strikes, men wearing clothes stamped “Expert” took samples from the craters. 

A red and white ribbon was strung around the area, which was guarded by armed police officers.

In Kyiv, the national police service said that at least five people had been killed and another dozen were wounded in the capital, which was among several cities hit Monday.

Half a dozen blasts were heard, with strikes on several neighbourhoods including the city centre.

After the attacks, passersby were few and far between in Krechtchatyk street, the main artery of the city which travels through Maidan (Square), the traditional rallying point of Ukraine’s independence. 

Many shops remained closed.

It was a sharp contrast with Sunday, when large crowds went through the area on a sunny afternoon.