Iran: More Protests, More Beatings, More Arrests

Riot police clashed with hundreds of pro-reform protesters in Tehran and arrested dozens of them yesterday, a witness said, in the latest unrest over last month's disputed election.

Demonstrators were chanting slogans against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the government, including: "Ahmadinejad – resign, resign" and "Death to dictators".

The witness said police beat protesters who had gathered in Haft-e Tir square in central Tehran, in defiance of a ban on such demonstrations put in place after the 12 June election, which the opposition says was rigged in favour of Mr Ahmadinejad.

"Riot police are taking dozens of protesters into their cars and they are taking them away," the witness said. "There are hundreds of riot police and plain clothes [security forces], beating people who gathered to support [opposition leader Mirhossein] Mousavi."

The clash erupted four days after similar confrontations between police and protesters for the first time in weeks on Friday after the former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani declared the Islamic Republic in crisis and said there were doubts about the election result. The authorities reject opposition charges of vote-rigging.

link: Police 'beat' pro-Mousavi protesters - Middle East, World - The Independent

Health Care: Obama's Definining Moment?

With some fellow Democrats balking over his insistence that both the House and the Senate pass health legislation before the August recess, Mr. Obama has a tough decision to make: Does he take a hard line, demanding that lawmakers stick to his timetable — and risk losing the support of Republicans and moderate Democrats? Or does he signal flexibility, allowing lawmakers to take their time — and give opponents the chance to marshal their case against the bill?

“He’s got to be careful that while he ratchets up the pressure, he doesn’t bet his whole presidency on whether this gets done before the August recess,” said Kenneth M. Duberstein, who orchestrated President Ronald Reagan’s first-term legislative strategy. “He has a broad, broad agenda that he’s in a rush to enact, and if he’s not careful he will be viewed as a steamroller who tries to get things fast and not necessarily right.”

link: A Defining Moment Nears for President - NYTimes.com

Knife Deaths Go Up During Anti-Knife Drive in UK

The number of knife deaths in areas targeted by an anti-knife crime scheme have risen, the Home Office has said.

The government's Tackling Knives Action Programme was launched last July by 10 police forces in England and Wales.

In its first nine months, 126 people died after being attacked with a knife or other sharp object - seven more than in the same period the previous year.

Overall knife-related violence fell by 10%, but the number of deaths among teenagers remains unchanged.

link: BBC NEWS | UK | Deaths up during anti-knife drive

CA Prison Population to Go Down by 27,000: Budget Deal

A proposed plan to solve California’s budget crisis would reduce the state’s prison population by 27,000, it was reported Tuesday, as opposition to the new fiscal deal mounted.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the budget deal, announced by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and bipartisan lawmakers on Monday, would involve the early release of thousands of inmates.

The Times said the reduction would be achieved through a combination of measures including allowing prisoners to finish their sentences on home detention and creating incentives for completion of drug rehabilitation plans.

The prison inmate proposal would help save the state 1.2 billion dollars in the coming fiscal year, the report noted.

link: Raw Story » Calif. budget deal would free 27,000 prisoners

Iran: Fissures in the Monolith

Robert F. Worth writes:

In a sign of persistent fissures within Iran’s conservative ranks, Iran’s supreme leader has told President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to reverse his decision to appoint a top deputy, according to comments reported by Iranian news agencies on Tuesday.

Also on Tuesday, scattered opposition rallies took place in Tehran, the capital, and other cities, with a heavy presence by the police and members of the Basij militia apparently discouraging many from taking to the streets to protest Iran’s disputed June 12 election.

A senior member of Parliament said the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had sent a letter to Mr. Ahmadinejad telling him to dismiss the deputy, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, whose appointment was announced Friday, according to news reports.

“Without any delay, the removal or acceptance of Mashaei’s resignation must be announced by the president,” the deputy speaker of Parliament, Mohammad-Hassan Aboutorabi-Fard, told the ISNA news agency.

The appointment had provoked a storm of criticism from conservatives, who were angered last year when Mr. Mashaei reportedly said that the Iranian people were friends with all other peoples, including Israelis.

link: Ayatollah Tells Ahmadinejad to Drop Choice for Top Iranian Deputy - NYTimes.

Seamus Heaney Recalls his Stroke

Irish poet Seamus Heaney has spoken about how he cried, like a child, for his father after he suffered a stroke three years ago.

The Nobel prizewinner and his wife, Marie, had been in Donegal celebrating the 75th birthday of Anne Friel, the wife of playwright Brian Friel.

Heaney became ill during the night - he felt ill and discovered that his leg was twisted.

He had to be carried downstairs by friends to a waiting ambulance.

"I cried and I wanted my daddy, funnily enough," he admitted.

But even having a stroke had a certain beauty, he told The Observer newspaper.

The trip on the bumpy back road in the ambulance to Letterkenny Hospital with his wife beside him will stay with him always.

"Marie was in the back with me. I just wrote about it three weeks ago. To me, that was one of the actual beauties of the stroke, that renewal of love in the ambulance. One of the strongest, sweetest memories I have.

"We went through Glendorn on a very beautiful, long, bumpy ride."

Heaney, who celebrated his 70th birthday in April, looked back on the "stroke episode" of August 2006 and said that it had prompted him to take a year off. It was, he said, his "rest cure".

As he lay in hospital, who should walk in to visit him but former US President Bill Clinton.

"He strode into the ward like a kind of god. My fellow sufferers, four or five men much more stricken than I was, were amazed.

"But he shook their hands and introduced himself. It was marvellous really. He went round all the wards and gave the whole hospital a terrific boost."

link: BBC NEWS | UK | Northern Ireland | Poet 'cried for father' after stroke

Moonrock Sent Partway Home

CollectSPACE reports

Forty years to the day after it was found and collected by Neil Armstrong, a moon rock is helping NASA mark the anniversary of the first lunar landing from on-board a perch that is closer than any Apollo-returned lunar sample has come to its original home in decades.

As was learned exclusively by collectSPACE, the moon rock was secretly launched aboard a March 2009 space shuttle mission to the International Space Station (ISS), where on Monday night it will be revealed during a NASA 40th anniversary celebration of the Apollo program at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.

The 21 gram (0.7 oz) moon rock is only the second* out of the 842 pounds (382 kg) of lunar samples collected by the Apollo astronauts between 1969 and 1972 to be launched back into space. Its journey is planned as a round trip -- it will return to Earth as it came with a future shuttle mission -- in part to symbolize NASA's current effort to return astronauts to the Moon.

link: collectSPACE - news - "EXCLUSIVE: Moon Rock on a Mission"

Recollected in Tranquillity: Creativity and Distance

Oren Shapira and Nira Liberman write:

Creativity is commonly thought of as a personality trait that resides within the individual. We count on creative people to produce the songs, movies, and books we love; to invent the new gadgets that can change our lives; and to discover the new scientific theories and philosophies that can change the way we view the world. Over the past several years, however, social psychologists have discovered that creativity is not only a characteristic of the individual, but may also change depending on the situation and context. The question, of course, is what those situations are: what makes us more creative at times and less creative at others?

One answer is psychological distance. According to the construal level theory (CLT) of psychological distance, anything that we do not experience as occurring now, here, and to ourselves falls into the “psychologically distant” category. It’s also possible to induce a state of “psychological distance” simply by changing the way we think about a particular problem, such as attempting to take another person's perspective, or by thinking of the question as if it were unreal and unlikely. In this new paper, by Lile Jia and colleagues at Indiana University at Bloomington, scientists have demonstrated that increasing psychological distance so that a problem feels farther away can actually increase creativity.

link: An Easy Way to Increase Creativity: Scientific American