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HANOI Police in Vietnam on Monday arrested a prominent dissident whom they accused of having abused democracy rights to infringe state interests, in the latest effort to crack down on critics in the Communist-ruled country.

Despite sweeping reforms to the economy and growing openness to social change, including gay, lesbian and trans-gender rights, Vietnam's Communist Party retains tight media censorship and zero tolerance of criticism.

Hoang Duc Binh, 34, was arrested in the central province of Nghe An and will be detained for 90 days for opposing duty officers and abusing democracy rights, provincial police said on their official news website.

Police said he was linked to reactionary groups, frequently posted information against the communist regime on his Facebook social media account and led protests against Taiwan's Formosa Plastics Corp, complicating regional safety and security.

There have been frequent protests against Formosa since its steel plant killed tonnes of fish and contaminated the central coastal region in Vietnam's worst environment disaster in April last year.

Several dissidents and bloggers voiced support for Binh online.

Traffic police stopped a car Binh was traveling in and dragged him out, said one activist with knowledge of the arrest, who declined to be named for fear of possible reprisals.

Thousands of protesters poured into a nearby street to demand Binh's release, added the activist, dispersing only when heavy rain fell.

Regional officials were not immediately available for comment.

At least 112 bloggers and activists are serving prison sentences in Vietnam for exercising their rights to the basic freedoms of expression, assembly, association, and religion, New York-based Human Rights Watch said in January.

(Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

BAGHDAD Iraqi forces have reduced the area of Mosul controlled by Islamic State to 12 square km, military spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Rasool told a news conference on Tuesday.

BANGKOK Thailand has no immediate plan to block access to Facebook , the telecoms regulator said on Tuesday, as it expects the social media giant to comply with court orders for the removal of content deemed to threaten national security.

BERLIN/WASHINGTON Last month, in a phone conversation between Donald Trump and Angela Merkel, the U.S. president shared his views on Turkish leader Tayyip Erdogan.

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Vietnam police arrest dissident for 'abusing democracy rights' - Reuters

On the eve of a meeting between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Donald Trump on Tuesday, Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, living in exile in the United States, urged the West to push his homeland back to democracy.

"[T]he Turkey that I once knew as a hope-inspiring country on its way to consolidating its democracy and a moderate form of secularism has become the dominion of a president who is doing everything he can to amass power and subjugate dissent," Gulen writes in a Washington Post op-ed.

Gulen points to the 1,000 Turkish citizens detained late last month over supposed links to Gulen, who Erdogan blames for the unsuccessful coup attempt against him last summer.

Gulen denies involvement in the coup, and pointed out in the op-ed that he condemned it at the time. Still, he noted, Turkey's European allies and the United States should push the country back to the democratic goals it agreed to as a requirement for NATO membership.

The exiled cleric pointed to two "critical" measures he said would reverse Turkey's "democratic regression" a new civilian constitution "involving the input of all segments of society and that is on par with international legal and humanitarian norms, and drawing lessons from the success of long-term democracies in the West" and a school curriculum that emphasizes "democratic and pluralistic values and encourages critical thinking."

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Our constitution opens with the words that India is both a republic and a democracy. We are making an important claim: is it true?

Republic is a Roman word. A republican state is one in which power rests with the citizens. Democracy is a Greek word. It means a state in which leaders are chosen from among the general population, and not the aristocracy. Republic and democracy dont mean the same thing, and even democracy has many interpretations. Athenian democracy was actually a psephocracy. For instance, in Athens all (adult male) citizens were equal and therefore leaders and jurors were chosen by lot, meaning by turn. Socrates had total contempt for this democracy and throughout Platos works his refrain is: In a storm, would you choose a ships captain by lot?

After the Middle Ages, Europe was inspired by Greece in art, philosophy and science and culture, but by Rome in government. In the US constitution, the word democracy in fact does not appear, though republic does. Many of Americas founding fathers were classicists who favoured Rome. The Federalist Papers, which is Americas version of our Constituent Assembly debates, were written by figures like Alexander Hamilton and James Madison under the pseudonym Publius, referencing a Roman who helped set up the republic. A story, probably apocryphal, tells of Benjamin Franklin exiting the constitutional convention of 1787. A man in the crowd asks him what sort of government America has been given. Franklin replies: A republic, if you can keep it.

Republics are not easy to keep because we are naturally attracted to the heroic saviour who will sort out our problems with his genius. The historian Livy tells us that Rome was a republic for some four centuries. It was, like democracy, different from the republic we know. Suffrage was even more restricted than in Athens, and Rome had an aristocracy (the Senate is a Roman institution) and slavery and colonialism, but it did not bow to one man. The heroic saviour Julius Caesar ended the republic.

The UK is a democracy but not a republic, because executive power flows from a monarch. The resistance to this structure is referred to as republicanism. What about India?

It is obvious that we are a democracy, because our leaders are chosen by voters. But are we a republic? Does real power rest with the citizens of India? The outside observer will notice that this is not the case. The interest of the state and its organs is put above the interest of Indias people. There is a background to this: Nehru inherited an aggressively expansionist imperial state with tentative borders. Its relationship with the citizen focused on taxation and law and order. This continued after 1947. Even today, where the state feels threatened by citizens demanding rights, it will not hesitate to put them down with lethal force.

This story was reported on October 1, 2016: Four people were left dead and as many as 40 were injured after police opened fire on a protest this morning, according to sources in the Chirudih village near Hazaribagh in Jharkhand. Residents have been protesting the acquisition of land by the National Thermal Power Corporation for their coal mines.

This, the murder of citizens by the state, is actually a regular occurrence in India, in the adivasi belt, the northeast and Kashmir. It is not a national issue because the killed are not like us. Also, their resistance hinders our development and our version of nationalism. We refer to their questioning of our consensus as anti-national behaviour.

We reduce Indian citizens to categories which can be despised: Terrorist, Maoist, Islamist, Separatist, Jihadist and so on. This makes it easier for our armies and paramilitaries to kill them, though as Hazaribagh and thousands of such incidents show, we also have zero regard for the poor. I used the example of the murder of helpless individuals faced with loss of their land, because in India today it is not possible to elicit sympathy for most categories of protestors. In such a place, a media organ that puts the armys interest above the citizens can align itself to the name republic. This is done without irony and perhaps without even understanding of what the word republic means. The armys interests can be supreme in a martial law state like Pakistan, not in constitutionally republican India.

When can we, wholly and in full measure, claim to be a republic? Only when the rights and liberties of Indian citizens are respected by the state, without exception. Not steamrolled over regularly, to applause from the media.

And when the violation happens, as it can happen anywhere, it is addressed meaningfully and ended. Till that happens, it would be fair to say that India is a democracy. But it is not really a republic.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Yes, India is a democracy but it's not really a republic - Times of India (blog)

New York Times

Comey's Firing Tests Strength of the 'Guardrails of Democracy' New York Times Political scientists who study democracy and authoritarianism know the answers will be long debated. The true significance of Mr. Comey's firing, they say, is that it presents a kind of stress test for American democratic institutions. In unhealthy ... Trump's war on American democracyHerald Scotland Perez: Firing of Comey Affront to DemocracyWJCL News Opinion: After Comey's firing, how can we save our constitutional democracy?MarketWatch The New Yorker -San Francisco Chronicle -ThinkProgress all 17,276 news articles »

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Comey's Firing Tests Strength of the 'Guardrails of Democracy' - New York Times

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that U.S.-led interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia were not about spreading democracy, but about addressing regional security issues.

Rice, who served in former President George W. Bush's administration asnational security advisor from 2001 through 2005 and as secretary of state from 2005 to 2009, made the revelation during an interview at the Brooking Institute. Rice played a key role in the Bush cabinet during the post-9/11 years that saw the U.S. launch two large-scale invasions against Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. In addition to the regional threat of the Al-Qaeda-allied Taliban government in Afghanistan and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, later disproved, the White House defended its military action by touting a U.S.-led campaign to spread democracy to the region. In remarks referencing her latest book, however, Rice said otherwise.

Related: War in Iraq: Islamic State Collapses As Military Kills ISIS Commander in West Mosul

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"We didn't go toIraq tobring democracy toIraq, we went toIraq tooverthrow Saddam Hussein, who we thought was reconstituting his weapons of mass destruction and who we knew had been a threat in the region. It was a security problem," Rice said. "We didn't overthrow the Talibanto bring democracy to Afghanistan, we overthrewthem because they were harboring Al-Qaeda in a safehaven after 9/11."

Then President George W. Bush delivers a speech celebrating what he deemed a victory in the Iraq War to crew aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, as the carrier steamed toward San Diego, California on May 1, 2003. Bush's former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has since said U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were about tackling security problems, not defending or spreading democracy. Larry Downing/Reuters

She compared the U.S.'s motives to that of World War Two when the nation intervened to defend European and Asian allies from the spread of Axis powers Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. She also said she regretted the notion that the U.S.'s first major military engagements of the 21st century were mixed up with the "freedom agenda" and emphasized that U.S.'s missions in Afghanistan, codenamed Operation Enduring Freedom, and in Iraq, codenamed Operation Iraqi Freedom, were strictly concerned with taking out U.S. foes. She claimed she would never have asked Bush tobring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan by military force, which she said was a "dramatic" example of democracy promotion.

Both Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered from ongoing conflicts since the U.S.'s intervention. In Iraq, the toppling of Hussein, a member of the country's Sunni Muslim minority, exacerbated long-standing sectarian tensions between Sunni Muslims and the Shiite Muslim majority. Ultraconservative Sunni Muslim groups, some of which were former members of Hussein's government and military, formed Al-Qaeda's franchise in Iraq, which took advantage of the post-war chaos to target U.S. soldiers and Shiite Muslims, further threatening the stability of the U.S.-installed government. Al-Qaeda in Iraq united with other jihadist groups to form the Islamic State of Iraq in 2006, which ultimately rebranded itself into the Islamic State militant group (ISIS). After mostly withdrawing from Iraq in 2011, the U.S. was forced to return in 2014, albeit in smaller numbers, to assist an Iraqi-led campaign against ISIS.

A member of the Army writes a note at a military base southwest of Mosul, Iraq, April 28, 2017. This year marked 14th consecutive year of U.S. military presence in Iraq. Suhaib Salem/Reuters

Since toppling the Taliban's government in Afghanistan, the U.S. continues to battle the insurgents, which have recently begun a new offensive after taking new swathes of territory across the nation. Most U.S. troops had left by 2016, but advisers of President Donald Trump have suggested another increase in U.S. forces on the ground after the Taliban's resurgence and the rise of an ISIS syndicate attempting to rival the Taliban's hold on the nation. Last month, the Taliban conducted its deadliest attack of the conflict yet when the group killed as many as 140 Afghan soldiers after infiltrating a military base.

Rice's comments on democracy and war echoed claims she made her in most recent book,Democracy: The Long Road to Freedom. In the book, which was released last week, Rice reflects on democracy movements and the transition to democracy in nations around the world, from the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. to post-war Iraq and Afghanistan. Since leaving the State Department at the end of Bush's last term, Rice returned to academia and joined the Council of Foreign Relations.

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U.S. Wars in the Middle East Were Not Supposed to Bring ... - Newsweek