Egyptians rally to demand faster reforms (Reuters)

CAIRO (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of Egyptians packed city centers across the country on Friday to demand faster reforms and voice frustration at what they regard as foot-dragging by military rulers and government officials.

Anger has been building among ordinary Egyptians and activists over the time taken to prosecute Hosni Mubarak and former officials charged with corruption and killing demonstrators during the uprising that toppled the president.

Most political organisations including the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's most organised grouping, backed calls for the protest, called "The Revolution First," which took aim at Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who heads the ruling army council.

Cairo's Tahrir Square, center of the uprising in February, was decked with red, white and black Egyptian colors in one of the biggest rallies since Mubarak's downfall.

"We want to change the government and those in charge," said Ehab Mohamed Mahmoud, 36, who checked those entering the square.

"The Field Marshal as well. He is an integral part of the old regime," he added, referring to Tantawi who was Mubarak's defense minister for two decades.

Muslim Brotherhood members voiced more cautious demands.

"The enemies of the revolution are many. But the army and the people are one hand. We ask the army to speed up the legal procedures to try the corrupt," said Mohamed Ali, a Brotherhood member in Tahrir.

Analysts say the political group, harassed and repressed under Mubarak, is best positioned to benefit from the timetable for transition outlined by the army, with a parliamentary election in September.

Presidential hopeful Mohamed ElBaradei, a former U.N. diplomat, told CNN there were some "unrealistic expectations" as Egyptians shook off decades of repression and he said it would take time to deliver wholesale change.

"But definitely there is no going back. At least people now are still poor, but they are free," he said. "They can go by the millions in the streets to demonstrate, and demonstrate peacefully ... It's a feeling that they are being empowered."

Former Arab League Secretary General, Amr Moussa, another presidential hopeful, joined the protesters in Tahrir.

Activists handed out surveys and one question read: "How do you assess the performance of the military council?" Some protesters showed off their forms where they had ticked a box saying: "Performance getting worse."

As with previous protests since Mubarak was ousted, activism combined with a festive mood. Children with faces painted in the Egyptian flag's colors joined their parents. As evening fell, numbers dwindled but some in Tahrir vowed to stay overnight.

There was no visible police or army presence.

PUNISHMENT

Many Egyptians believe the health problems reportedly afflicting Mubarak are a ploy by army generals to avoid bringing the former air force commander to trial.

Public frustration has also been fueled by court rulings this week clearing three former ministers of graft charges and another court decision to free on bail 10 policemen charged with killing demonstrators.

"Punishment for the killers of the martyrs," read one banner in Tahrir Square, referring to the killing during the 18-day uprising of more than 840 people, now known as "martyrs."

"Down with the Field Marshal," the crowd repeated as they were spurred on by one speaker.

Thousands of Egyptians gathered in other cities, including the Suez Canal cities of Suez and Ismailia, Alexandria on the Mediterranean and the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh where Mubarak has been detained in a hospital since suffering heart problems during questioning in April.

"We oppose the military council and we demand Field Marshal Tantawi steps down immediately. The army is doing Mubarak's bidding and the revolution is faltering," said Mohamed Fahmy, leader from the Coalition of the Youth of the Revolution.

Gun shots rang out near Tahrir square and in Suez, witnesses said. A witness in Tahrir said it was not clear where the shots came from. In Suez, one of the most violent spots during the uprising, one protester was shot by a person who was caught shortly afterwards by protesters, a Reuters eyewitness said.

(Additional reporting by Sami Aboudi, Marwa Awad, Patrick Werr and Ashraf Fahim in Cairo, Abdel Rahman Youssef in Alexandria and Yusri Mohamed in Suez; editing by Edmund Blair, Sami Aboudi and Jon Hemming)

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PR activists demand hate crime charges amid deaths (AP)

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Activists are demanding that a series of killings of gays, lesbians and transgenders in Puerto Rico be treated as possible hate crimes, saying there is an alarming rate of violence against these groups on the U.S. island.

In the last year and a half, at least 18 such people have been killed, three of them just this week, but authorities refuse to treat the cases as bias crimes, Pedro Julio Serrano, founder of the gay rights group Puerto Rico for Everyone, said Thursday.

"It seems they have declared open hunting season against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and transsexual people," he said.

A 2002 hate crime law in Puerto Rico covers crimes based on sexual orientation or gender identity, but it has only been invoked in one case. If someone is found guilty of a hate crime they automatically face the maximum sentence for the underlying offense. If the offense is murder, it means life in prison.

The island's attorney general created a special committee last year to investigate hate crimes, and the government recently appointed prosecutor Janet Parra to oversee hate crimes. Police are expected to name a liaison with the gay and lesbian community.

Neither Parra nor Police Chief Jose Figueroa Sancha returned messages seeking comment.

"These are tentative steps," Serrano said. "With the level of violence that we have, we have to take bigger steps."

The most recent victim, Carlos Alfredo Gomez, a transsexual known as Carlota, was shot to death Tuesday by someone driving along a street where he worked as a prostitute, police have said. No one has been arrested.

In late April, another transsexual, Francheska Gonzalez, was severely beaten by a man while leaving a gas station in the suburb of Rio Piedras.

"He began yelling insults at me," she said, adding that he hit her so hard he broke the implant in her right breast.

The suspect faces a June 29 hearing for an assault charge. Gonzalez wants him to be charged with a hate crime.

Late last year, two young men dressed in women's clothing were shot in the head and apparently run over by a car in the southern city of Juana Diaz. Also last year, the naked and battered body of a transgender woman, Ashley Santiago, was found in her home in the northern town of Corozal.

In a November 2009 case that sparked vigils in New York and Chicago, gay teenager Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado was found decapitated and partially burned in Cayey. The suspect has been charged with first-degree murder.

The Human Rights Campaign, a Washington-based group, issued a statement Wednesday urging Puerto Rico's government and police to create a plan to address crimes against gays and lesbians.

"The alarming rate of violence ... cannot be tolerated," the group said.

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Population experts demand funding for international family planning (OneWorld.net)

LONDON, May 30 (OneWorld.net) - A high-level population conference has appealed to international donors to step up financial support for family planning and reproductive health services in developing countries.

This call comes at a time when foreign aid for international family planning is one of the most divisive topics for US Congress to resolve in its FY2012 budget considerations. The US is the key global donor in this field.

Described by its organizers at University College London as the largest conference on population issues to be held this year, Population Footprints examined the capacity of the planet to sustain a human presence which is due to reach seven billion in October.

The six billion threshold was passed just 12 years ago. Earlier this month, the UN published an upward revision of its long term projections of global population.

Academics, campaigners and politicians attending the conference from around the world discussed what strategies might encourage a lower population trajectory. They addressed the troubling contexts of food security, climate change, migration and a skewed demographic profile in which richer countries have too few people of working age whilst the poorer countries have too many.

The debates were marked by disagreements between the participants, a point acknowledged in the closing summary by Professor Anthony Costello, Co-Director of the UCL Institute for Global Health.

"That doesn't matter," he said, "because what unites us is much greater. What unites all of us is that funding for women's health, maternal health, child health, fertility reduction, family planning - all the drivers for moving towards a stable population - is desperately needed."

Describing current global funding as "derisory", Professor Costello deplored that "the World Health Organization has seen its budget halved for reproductive health and family planning."

A downward trend in this area of funding was indeed a feature of the April compromise which saw Congress approve the US budget for FY2011. International aid for family planning and reproductive health was cut by 5% to $615 million.

The battle now turns to FY2012. President Obama's original request for $769 million will be subject to forces pulling strongly in both directions.

The objective to provide universal global access to reproductive health services by 2015 is included in the Millennium Development Goals, a set of commitments agreed by world governments.

There are 215 million women in developing countries with an unmet need for contraception. The cost of fulfilling this area of reproductive health alone is estimated at $3.6 billion.

Campaigners say that it is impossible to achieve the MDG target without significant new donor funding. They advocate that US support should rise towards $1 billion per annum.

However, many Republican members of Congress considered the FY2011 compromise to be too generous. They will press for further cuts for FY2012.

The UN Population Fund is a favored target. Its US support for FY2011 was slashed from $55 million to $40 million. Republicans are under lobby pressure to revert to the days of the Bush Administration when UNFPA was denied funding altogether.

The new Executive Director of UNFPA, Dr Babatunde Osotimehin, was a leading participant in the Population Footprints conference. Whilst he maintained a diplomatic silence on his budgetary relationship with the US government, Dr Osotimehin was unambiguous in his views about priorities for population policies. "If we protect women's rights, their ability to make choices, we will see a lot of difference in population," he told the conference.

The Ugandan Minister of State for Finance and Planning, Professor Ephraim Kamuntu, presented the same opinion in language designed to appeal to politicians, hard-pressed on delivering budgetary value for money. "We have done a study in Uganda which shows for every $1 you invest in reproductive health it saves you $3 eventually in health costs that result from non-spacing of children and complications in giving birth," he said.

Africa's rate of population growth is the highest of the world's continents, its numbers projected to double to 2 billion by 2050. But attitudes are changing, according to Eliya Zulu, Director of the African Institute for Development Policy.

"Unlike 15-20 years ago, more African people now want to limit their family size but they are not doing that because they do not have access to family planning," he said in a BBC World Service interview at the conference.

Several speakers referred to the long term decline in foreign aid for family planning. This trend was evidenced in a scrupulously factual presentation by Hania Zlotnik, Director of the UN Population Division. She demonstrated that, since 1996, donor assistance for family planning programmes has fallen by at least 50% in nearly all African countries.

"In most high fertility countries, contraceptive prevalence is increasing by less than 1% per year," she said. "At that rate it's going to take something like 30-40 years for them to meet the unmet need they already have."

Dr Mairo Mandara, a gynecologist from Nigeria, highlighted the extremes that exist in the poorest regions of the continent. In northern Nigeria, the average age at which girls are married is just 15. Only 3% have access to contraception. Nigeria's population of 158 million is the highest in Africa.

The Nigerian government has taken the initiative of embarking on its own programme of free family planning services. "Africa should fund family planning, not rely only on donors," Eliya Zulu told his followers on Twitter.

The share of funding between potential donors was not tackled in any detail but speakers were unwavering in their view of the priority for spending. Siri Tellier, former Director of UNFPA in Geneva, summed it up in population numbers: "the use of family planning will be the most important determinant in whether we go to 11 billion in 2050 or whether we go to 9 billion in 2050."

The Population Footprints conference was sponsored by The Leverhulme Trust and The Lancet medical journal.

* More Information:

Population Footprints - archived videos of the UCL conference

OneWorld Population Guide

OneWorld Gender and Development Guide

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Libyan mourners demand airstrike revenge

TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) — More than 2,000 Libyans shouting for revenge on Monday buried Moammar Gadhafi's second youngest son, who officials say was killed in a NATO airstrike along with three of the Libyan leader's young grandchildren.

In this photo made on a government-organized tour, supporters carry a poster of a Libyan army colonel who was killed in a NATO attack in April, during funeral ceremony for members of the Gadhafi family in Tripoli on Monday.

By Darko Bandic, AP

In this photo made on a government-organized tour, supporters carry a poster of a Libyan army colonel who was killed in a NATO attack in April, during funeral ceremony for members of the Gadhafi family in Tripoli on Monday.

Seif al-Arab Gadhafi's body, wrapped in a white burial shroud, was lowered into a grave to the thundering sound of anti-aircraft guns being fired from near the cemetery in a Tripoli neighborhood.

Two of his older brothers, Seif al-Islam and Mohammed, paid their respects, but his father was absent. Members of the Gadhafi family have only made infrequent public appearances since the start of the uprising against the Libyan leader in mid-February.

South Africa on Monday joined Russia in criticizing the NATO strike on the Gadhafi family compound. NATO officials have denied they were hunting Gadhafi to break the stalemate between better trained government forces and lightly armed rebels, who control much of eastern Libya.

In Monday's tumultuous funeral, the Gadhafi brothers were thronged by a huge crowd pushing to get closer to the coffin, draped in a green Libyan flag. Seif al-Islam, once pegged as his father's possible successor and a proponent of reform, was dressed in traditional Libyan garb, with a black cap and a black vest over a long white shirt.

The procession began at a large intersection in Tripoli's al-Hani neighborhood, which had been blocked off for the occasion. Thousands crowded around the hearse, chanting "Revenge, revenge for you, Libya" and flashing victory signs.

From there, the mourners carried the casket to the nearby cemetery, where weeds and thistles grew among stone slabs that marked graves.

Seif al-Islam stood at the freshly dug grave as the body of his 29-year-old brother was removed from the simple coffin and lowered into the ground in a burial shroud.

Seif al-Arab was killed late Saturday, along with three of Gadhafi's grandchildren, ages six months to two years, when NATO bombed the family's compound in Tripoli. A French orthopedic surgeon, who runs a private clinic in Tripoli, told reporters he saw three of the four bodies and that one was most likely Seif al-Arab, based on photographs he had seen.

Gadhafi and his wife were present during the attack but were unharmed, said Libyan officials, who accused NATO of trying to assassinate the Libyan leader.

Some foreign countries also criticized the strike, saying it exceeded the U.N. mandate of protecting civilians in Libya. The U.N. approved the implementation of a no-fly zone over Libya in March after Gadhafi attacked protesters who demanded his ouster.

South Africa, which led an African mediation effort in Libya, said Monday that "attacks on leaders and officials can only result in the escalation of tensions and conflicts on all sides and make future reconciliation difficult."

Russia accused NATO of a "disproportionate use of force" on Sunday and called for an immediate cease-fire.

Gadhafi has also called for a cease-fire, but rebels don't believe it is genuine, especially since he has continued to pound the besieged town of Misrata, the only major rebel bastion in western Libya.

Gadhafi's forces used tanks to shell Misrata on Monday, as rumors fueled fears that the Libyan leader was preparing to use chemical weapons.

Hundreds have been killed in Misrata over the past two months as Gadhafi has attempted to seize the town. Rebels succeeded in pushing Gadhafi forces out of several areas of town about a week ago, but they have responded with relentless shelling from the outskirts.

The most recent barrage started early Monday morning and only paused with the threat of NATO airstrikes, said Libyan activist Rida al-Montasser.

"Only when we heard the NATO planes flying over, the shelling paused," said al-Montasser.

Even as the shelling paused, fear spread through Misrata that Gadhafi forces were preparing to use chemical weapons in their fight to defeat the rebels.

"We heard like everybody else that the soldiers are distributing gas masks" in the nearby city of Zlitan, said al-Montasser.

The rumors of Gadhafi forces distributing gas masks could not be independently confirmed.

A U.N. watchdog indicated in February, soon after the Libyan revolution started, that it was unlikely that Gadhafi would use chemical weapons because he had no way to deliver such a payload. Gadhafi destroyed the aerial bombs needed as part of a 2003 reconciliation deal with the West, said the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

U.S. and British intelligence agencies reportedly have been concerned that Gadhafi may not have declared all his munitions and may have held some back, but no evidence has surfaced to support those fears.

Fearful Misrata residents asked officials in Benghazi, the de facto capital in eastern Libya, to send a shipment of gas masks, said al-Montasser, the activist.

On Sunday, the Libyan government unleashed two volleys of rockets on Misrata's port, and heavy shelling occurred elsewhere in the city. The attacks killed 12 people, raising the two-day death toll to 23.

Also Sunday, vandals burned the British and Italian embassies and a U.N. office in Tripoli. The unrest in the capital prompted the U.N. to withdraw its international staff.

Turkey temporarily closed its embassy in Tripoli on Monday due to deteriorating security, and its staff traveled to Tunisia, said Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

The Turkish consulate in rebel-controlled Benghazi was still open, the foreign ministry said.

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