Syria Feature: Qatar & Turkey Hold Up Arms Until Insurgents Unite (Sengupta)

Stockpiles of arms, including anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles, are being held in Turkey for use by rebels in Syria's civil war, but their distribution is being held up because of disunity and feuding between the different groups of fighters....

In high-level discussions, Qatari and Turkish suppliers told opposition representatives that heavy weapons would not be made available until the various factions agreed to form a coherent command structure.

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Syria (and Beyond) Live Coverage: And So Another Week of Killing....

2100 GMT: Syria. Meanwhile, the daily death toll is Syria has reached at least 164, according to the Local Coordination Committees:

52 martyrs were reported in Damascus and its Suburbs (including 13 in Douma and 10 in Harasta), 42 in Idlib (30 of them were martyred in a massacre in Seqlein), 41 in Aleppo (including 11 martyrs in Masaken Hanano, and 12 in Karm Al-Jabal), 20 in Daraa, 4 in Homs, 2 in Deir Ezzor, 2 in Hama and 1 in Lattakia.

See our note on the casualty figures put forth by the LCC.

2025 GMT: Syria. The newest information:

Now we know a little more about this video. It was originally posted on September 26th, but it was posted under a different description. The old description was "the American Journalist الصحفي الاميركي" but the new one is "Austin Tice still alive":

It was discovered on the 26th by an opposition Facebook page, but was shared without comment as to who is responsible for the kidnapping:

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The Latest from Iran (1 October): Can the "Resistance Economy" Continue to Resist?

See also Iran Snap Analysis: Watching The Currency Crisis
The Latest from Iran (30 September): "The West Is In Economic Crisis"

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2045 GMT: Currency Watch. ILNA reports that students have protested in front of Parliament because the banks are not giving them subsidised currency for study abroad.

2035 GMT: Press Watch. The daily newspaper Maghreb has been raided and its managing editor Mehdi Emami Naseri summoned by the judiciary.

Some reports say the editor was arrested. There is confusion over the cause. Some reports say it was the publication of a photo of former President Mohammad Khatami; others say it was a picture of former President Hashemi Rafsanjani.

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Tunisia Feature: The Truth About the "Salafi Fanatics" (Marks)

Salafists demonstrate outside the El-Fath mosque in Tunis, 17 September 2012 (Photo: Salah Habibi/AFP)

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Local journalists covering previous instances of Salafi-oriented unrest --- from the October 2011 demonstrations against the film Persepolis to this June's riots at an art exhibit in Tunis's upscale La Marsa district -- have tended to narrate events from afar without directly interviewing Salafis. Such slipshod coverage has tended to leave readers with a broad-brush portrait of Tunisian Salafism --- one that obscures important details concerning the movement's composition and complexity. Far from being a monolithic group of highly organized extremists, Tunisia's Salafis are in fact a loose collection of religiously right-wing individuals whose identities and motivations require far closer scrutiny.

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MENA Opinion: What The "Crime" of Alber Saber Reveals about the "New Egypt" (Moremi)

The scene at the arrest of blogger Alber Saber

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You hear that the mob has told the police officers that you had posted that anti-Islam movie about the Prophet from that disgusting American on your facebook site. But you know you didn't and you know they are lying. And you don't understand how you can almost die in front of the police who never investigated anything when they where called to save you from the mob, but instead threw you in jail. Without evidence, without any reason. In Cairo. In 2012. In September.

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Iran Snap Analysis: Watching The Currency Crisis

There are some analysts who have asserted that the correction in the Rial's level was necessary, that the currency --- supported by Government funds --- has been over-valued for years.

That evaluation misses the point. This fall is chaotic, confused, and without any sign of a strategy for recovery. While there are undoubtedly some well-placed people who are profiting from speculation --- especially if they can get the official rate and 2 1/2 times more dollars compared to the open market --- many Iranians will only feel the short- and long-term pain. There will be higher costs on top of a spiralling inflation rate, more falls in domestic production as imported components cannot be afforded, Iranian students abroad who will struggle to get by, families who will see the erosion of savings.

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The Latest from Iran (30 September): "The West Is In Economic Crisis"

See also Iran Follow-Up: Fars News Apologises for Running Story from The Onion
The Latest from Iran (29 September): The Economy and the Divisions Within the Regime

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1422 GMT: Press Watch. One of the cameramen with President Ahmadinejad's entourage in New York has defected and has been granted asylum, according to Baztab.

1347 GMT: Press Watch. ISNA reports that a court has convicted Reuters and its Tehran Bureau Chief, Parisa Hafezi, of "publishing lies against the regime" and "disturbing public opinion".

Reuters was charged after a story in March briefly carried a headline characterising women training in ninjutsu as "assassins". The bureau was closed, as the press cards of staff were confiscated. Some observers saw a pretext for the authorities to shut down one of the few international agencies reporting from inside Iran.

Sentencing is expected within a week.

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Iran Follow-Up: Fars News Apologises for Running Story from The Onion

The original Fars English story, copied directly from The Onion

See also Iran Feature: Fars News and The Onion Agree --- "Rural American Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad to Obama"

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On Friday, we featured the story of how Iranian media, including Fars News' English-language site, were headlining, "Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad to Obama". The small problem with the breaking news? It was taken from the satirical on-line "newspaper", The Onion.

Today, Fars English's Editor-in-Chief has apologised:

Unfortunately an incorrect item was released on our website on Friday which included a fake opinion poll on popularity rate of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and US President Barack Obama. The news item was extracted from the Satirical Magazine, The Onion, by mistake and it was taken down from our outlook in less two hours.

It is not quite a full retraction, however. The Editor continues, "Although it does not justify our mistake, we do believe that if a free opinion poll is conducted in the US, a majority of Americans would prefer anyone outside the US political system to President Barack Obama and American statesmen."

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Syria (and Beyond) Live Coverage: Historic Aleppo Burns

See also US War on Terror Feature: The Death of a Guantanamo Bay Detainee
Saudi Arabia Feature: The Trial of the Political Dissidents
Saturday's Syria (and Beyond) Live Coverage: Political Drift in New York, Military Confrontation in Aleppo

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1925 GMT: Yemen. The World Food Programme has said that almost 50% of Yemenis go hungry amid the world's third-highest rate of child malnutrition.

"Five million people, or 22 percent of the population, can't feed themselves or buy enough to feed themselves....These are mostly landless laborers, so they don't grow their own food, and with high food prices they can't buy it either," WFP spokesman Barry Came said. "In addition, there is another five million who are being really hard hit by high food prices and on the edge of being food insecure. So 10 million people in this country go to bed hungry every night."

The number of Yemenis receiving daily WFP food rations has risen from 1.2 million in January to more than 3.8 million, but poor infrastructure and fear of kidnappings have complicated the logistics of providing food aid.

Thirteen percent of Yemeni children are now acutely malnourished.

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US War on Terror Feature: The Death of a Guantanamo Bay Detainee (Hussain)

Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif

I am happy to express from this darkness and draw a true picture of the condition in which I exist. I am moving towards a dark cave and a dark life in the shadow of a dark prison. This is a prison that does not know humanity, and does not know anything except the language of power, oppression and humiliation for whoever enters it. It does not differentiate between a criminal and the innocent.

--- Guantanamo inmate Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif to his lawyer, 26 December 2010

Two weeks ago, the Pentagon quietly released a statement that another Guantanamo detainee had died in custody, the ninth since the prison was opened in 2001. Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a 32-year-old man from Yemen who had spent eleven years incarcerated, was found dead in his cell on September 8.

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