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Ahead of a planned opposition rally on Monday, Iran tightened security and arrested over 20 mothers who were mourning children killed in the unrest that has broken out since the disputed June 12 elections.The mothers took part in an antigovernment protest in Leleh Park in central Tehran every Saturday since the death in June of Neda Agha-Soltan, 26, whose shooting became a symbol of the government’s violent repression. The rally had been attacked by the police before, but Saturday was the first time the mothers were arrested. An opposition Web site reported that the protest was broken up by the police and many demonstrators were taken away. The BBC Persian service quoted a witness who said 29 women were arrested, some of whom were later released. But at least 21 remained in jail, the BBC said.

TEHRAN -- Iranian security forces and paramilitary groups broke up anti-government demonstrations in central Tehran on Monday, using clubs, tear gas and electric batons to disperse crowds outside the University of Tehran, witnesses said. Authorities blocked main roads into the city center and arrested dozens of demonstrators who sought to turn Iran's annual "Student Day" rallies into the latest in a series of protests against the government that began about six months ago. Officials had declared such demonstrations illegal and threatened to meet them with force. Despite the warnings, thousands of demonstrators tried to join students at sealed-off campuses of Tehran's main universities. Deployed to head them off were hundreds of riot police, Revolutionary Guard Corps troops and members of the Basij, a pro-government militia.

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranian security forces fired warning shots in Tehran on Monday and beat opposition protesters among thousands seeking to renew their challenge to the government six months after a disputed election, witnesses said.The security forces fired shots into the air as they clashed with supporters of opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi at a state rally marking the killing of three students under the former Shah, the reformist website Mowjcamp said."Security forces are beating demonstrators, men and women. Some of them are injured and bleeding," said one witness in Tehran's central Haft-e Tir square.The June 12 presidential election, which secured President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election, sparked Iran's worst unrest since the Islamic revolution three decades ago and exposed deep divisions in the establishment. Authorities deny allegations of vote-rigging.

Iranians are marking University Student Day, traditionally an anti-US event that commemorates the killing of three students in 1953. Opposition supporters are expected to try to hijack official protests by chanting their own anti-government slogans.Olivia Cornes navigates some of the opposition chants heard in Iran since June's disputed presidential elections, with the help of BBCPersian.com and protesters themselves.The waves of street chanting among anti-regime protesters are spontaneous but many are not new. Slogans that Iranians used 30 years ago to call for an end to the Shah's regime are now thrown back at the Islamic regime which replaced it.

Tens of thousands of people, government protesters and supporters alike, demonstrated Saturday in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua."The only way for the government to change, as it has been shown in all these years, is for the people to go to the streets," said Dora Maria Tellez, who was a main figure in President Daniel Ortega's government during the 1980s but who now leads an opposition party."There is no other way," she said at the protests, which appeared to be peaceful. It was not immediately clear how many of the masses were demonstrating against the government and how many had gathered to support it.

Tens of thousands of opposition supporters held a major rally on Friday evening in Tirana, seeking a partial recount of the ballots cast during the 28 June parliamentary elections.The rally, which was organised by the Socialists headed by Tirana's mayor Edi Rama was also supported by smaller opposition parties from the left and right, which accuse the government of Prime Minister Sali Berisha of electoral fraud.The rally. which was extended into a three day marathon by a few hundred opposition supporters and deputies who camped out in front of Berisha's office, closed on Sunday afternoon.Speaking at the closing rally opposition leader Edi Rama described the protest as the birth of a new political movement, while giving the government an ultimatum to accept his party's request for a partial recount.

Greenpeace activists have boarded a boat carrying palm kernel animal feed from Indonesia, chaining themselves to the boat and its four cargo cranes off the coast of Tauranga. The boat, the East Ambition, is several kilometres off the Tauranga coast. The 12 activists are calling on Prime Minister John Key to stop imports of palm kernel, used for animal feed on New Zealand farms and sold by Fonterra's RD1.Greenpeace activist Jo McVeagh said the palm kernel crop encourages rain forest destruction and adds to climate change.She described Fonterra's involvement as "criminal".

NEW DELHI — Indian survivors of the Bhopal gas disaster on Thursday protested outside the offices of the US company blamed for the toxic leak ahead of the 25th anniversary of the notorious accident.Around 200 protesters gathered in front of the Dow Chemical building in a suburb of New Delhi, shouting slogans and waving placards demanding the firm pay for years of contamination and health problems.Thousands were killed instantly when gas leaked at a plant in Bhopal overnight on December 2-3, 1984 and tens of thousands have been killed since due to contamination, making it the world's worst industrial accident.

The history of Bertha Oliva de Nativi is the history of Honduras.  If the storyline of the past one hundred years of this continent has been ‘so few with so much, and so many with so little’, then Bertha has been the fearless protagonist racing to rewrite the chapters that will hence come.   In 1982 Berta’s husband, Professor Tomas Nativi disappeared.  One of hundreds of Hondurans and tens of thousands of Central Americans to lose their lives to state sanctioned violence, Tomas and all of those who have disappeared remain the most terrifying and silencing bootprint of the military regimes of the 1980’s.  The stories are all too common: "they came to our door in the middle of the night" or "he just never came home ever again."  Their families must find ways to grieve, to cope, and to say goodbye to their loved ones without the benefit of closure or resolution.  Some, however, began to demand answers.

ST ANDREWS, Scotland (Reuters) - Twenty activists donned suits and ties and buried their heads in the sand on a Scottish beach on Saturday to protest against a meeting of finance ministers from the Group of 20 powerful nations.The protest on West Sands, where beach scenes in the 1980s Oscar-winning movie "Chariots of Fire" were filmed, began a peaceful march that attracted more than 200 people.Demonstrators will be holding a rival People's G20 in St Andrews, a few miles from the hotel where finance ministers and central bankers of the world's most powerful developed and emerging nations are meeting to discuss the global economy.

TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- Shouts of "Allahu Akbar," or "God is great," a sign of continuing protest in Iran, could be heard Tuesday night in north and west Tehran, along with shouts of "death to dictator."In addition, pictures and videos were posted online of a reported protest at the University of Kashan, south of the capital city.The shouts were heard and reports came a day after the Islamic republic warned reformists against taking to the streets in protest, as the 30th anniversary of the Iranian hostage crisis approaches.

On the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, two hundred internationals traveled from the US, UK, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Belgium to join the weekly peaceful demonstration in Bil'in.Each Friday, Palestinians from the village of Bil'in are joined by hundreds of internationals and Israelis protesting the apartheid wall which annexes Palestinian land.Iyad Bornat, Head of the Popular Committee, said "the twelve metre polystyrene wall", which was made and carried by the residents of Bil'in, "was carried from the mosque in the centre of the village and placed on the other side of the fence, with the hope that the Israeli soldiers would remove it."

Reporting from Cairo - He doesn't seem a radical or a troublemaker, but to the Egyptian government, Abdel Fattah Rizk, a surgeon with a graying mustache and hands pink from scrubbing, is a man to be watched.He belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood, the most potent opposition group in the country. Hundreds of its members are in prison and many more are lying low. But even as security forces scour the nation for dissent, the Brotherhood is everywhere, from the shacks of handymen to the estates of millionaires and the halls of parliament.The government of President Hosni Mubarak paints the Brotherhood as an extremist organization with terrorist ties determined to impose strict Islamic law across Egypt. The group says it renounced violence decades ago, and its real threat to the ruling party is its appeal to the educated and middle class, who view the regime as corrupt and too beholden to the West. Although there are radicals among its members, the Brotherhood espouses a moderate Islam to reshape Middle East politics.

Honduran women continue their resistance to the de facto regime that kidnapped and ousted the democratically elected president in a coup d'état on June 28, 2009. In August an international delegation organized by JASS (www.justassociates.org), Petateras, Radio Feminista and allied organizations traveled to Honduras and accompanied Honduran Feminists in Resistance, an alliance of feminists and women's organizations. The delegation, together with the Feminists in Resistance, documented the impact of the current political crisis on women - in particular, the human rights abuses, sexual harrassment and rape committed against women who are resisting the coup and calling for a return to democracy.

<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face @font-face /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal .MsoChpDefault @page Section1 div.Section1 --> TEHRAN, Iran — A hard-line cleric sought Friday to head off an attempt to reinvigorate Iran's anti-government movement, warning against a planned opposition rally next month that would coincide with annual state-sponsored demonstrations against the United States.Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, delivering the weekly Muslim prayer sermon in Tehran, also had an unusual warning for the security forces, telling them any soft treatment of those activists already in detention would be considered treason. "Nobody gives a flower to his murderer," he said.Iranian authorities executed a fierce crackdown on the hundreds of thousands of protesters who poured into the streets in response to allegations that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won re-election in June through vote fraud.

On the third week of the new academic year in Iran, thousands of students from the main campus of Azad University in Tehran held several peaceful demonstrations protesting the coup government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In the demonstrations that were attacked by Basiji and plain-clothes agents, students changed anti-government slogans protesting the conditions prevalent in the country and in the universities, while also insisting on their support of Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi. Since the demonstrations, the streets leading up to the main campus were taken over by security agents and many students were denied entry into the main campus and its buildings.

The international community should strongly back the efforts of prosecutors in the human rights unit of the Honduras Attorney General's office to investigate army and police abuses in Honduras and to overturn a decree by the de facto government that severely restricts freedoms of speech and assembly, Human Rights Watch said.The organization also called on the international community to oppose any amnesty for human rights violations as part of the transition back to democratic rule. Deposed President Manuel Zelaya and the de facto government of Honduras are now engaged in negotiations about such a transition, and have announced that an agreement may be imminent.

TEGUCIGALPA/MANAGUA, Oct. 1 (Xinhua) -- At least 500 supporters of ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya on Thursday protested the martial law imposed by the post-coup government in this Honduran capital. The demonstration, gathering members of the union and peasants' groups, was staged outside the U.S. embassy, also calling for Zelaya's reinstatement. Participants told local media that the protest would continue until the martial law and curfew was lifted. There were also demonstrations outside the capital city.

Honduras's interim leaders suspended key civil liberties last night in response to "calls for insurrection" by ousted president Manuel Zelaya, empowering police and soldiers to break up "unauthorised" public meetings, arrest people without warrants and restrict the news media.The announcement came just hours after Zelaya called on supporters to stage mass marches today to mark the three-month anniversary of the 28 June coup that ousted him. Zelaya described the marches as "the final offensive" against the interim government.Zelaya, who surprised the world when he sneaked back into the country last Monday and holed up in the Brazilian embassy, is demanding he be reinstated to office, and has said that the government of interim president Roberto Micheletti "has to fall".

Students in Iran have demonstrated against the government at Tehran University on the first day of the new academic year.Footage posted on websites showed several hundred people chanting slogans against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Eyewitnesses said students were not allowed into an official ceremony attended by a government minister to mark the start of term.