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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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New York Times

The Fertile Ground of French Communism New York Times Mr. Mlenchon, who also had the support of the French Communist Party, or P.C.F., obtained 19.5 percent of the first-round vote, though he came in fourth and couldn't participate in the runoff. By refusing to give Mr. Macron (in Mr. Mlenchon's eyes a ...

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By Ileana Johnson, Fairfax Free Citizen

A bill narrowly passed the house in California, repealing part of the law enacted during the Cold War era in our countrys history when communists were really active and infiltrating our government, attempting to overthrow it.

The bill proposed to eliminate the section which allowed the firing of public employees if they were members of the Communist Party. The bill now goes to the Senate and its author, Democrat Assemblyman Rob Bonta, hopes that it will pass.

Assemblyman Randy Voepel, a Southern California Republican who fought in the Vietnam War, said communists in North Korea and China are still a threat.

Assemblyman Travis Allen, also a Republican, said that this bill is blatantly offensive to all Californians. Communism stands for everything that the United States stands against.

Why the Cold War era laws suddenly need changing is puzzling to other Republicans in the California legislature.

It should not surprise anyone, given the fact that California is now ruled by a one party system, the Democrats; they have become advocates for communism, illegal aliens, and a sanctuary for law breakers.

Judging by the communist stance of academia on campuses around the country and the curriculum taught in our public schools, the Antifa fascist anarchists, Black Lives Matter, SEIU, and other progressive organizations around the country, communism is their way to attain social, environmental, and gender justice, a utopia that the UN is pushing through its many octopus organizations.

Why communism?

The youth in this country have been taught revisionist history for a long time. Many have been purposefully asleep, in a drug stupor, or absent during their history classes.

Communist teachers with an agenda of their own have glossed over the atrocities that various totalitarian communist dear leaders have committed against their own people.

Communism has been repackaged as globalism, global citizens, no borders, no national language, no culture, and no sovereignty under the rule of a few billionaire elites and the United Nations.

And the Democrat Party has been hijacked and is run by communists who are no longer hiding their destructive agenda. Atheists are pushing hard for communism since atheism is the communist states sanctioned religion.

In a recent PragerU video, Dennis Prager wondered, Why Isnt Communism as Hated as Nazism?

If you consider the almost 100 million victims of communism and the six million victims of the Nazis, why is Nazism always cited as evil but communism praised?

Dennis Prager explained that communism enslaved entire nations, Russia, Vietnam, China, North Korea, Eastern Europe, Cuba, and much of Central Asia. They ruined the lives of well over a billion people.

Prager gave the following reasons why communism does not have the evil reputation Nazism has:

1) Widespread ignorance of the communist record. Leftists (not liberals) have never loathed communism; they teach communism as a viable and desirable solution to crony capitalism.

2) The Nazis carried out the Holocaust. The communists killed many more of their own people, but they never carried it out in the systematic genocide that the Nazis have engaged in against every woman, man, and child of Jewish descent.

3) Communism is based on nice-sounding theories, Nazism is based on heinous sounding theories. Teachers have focused their attention on the horrifying atrocities of Nazism, and the academia glossed over the evils of communism, calling them perversions of true communism.

4) Germany took responsibility for the evils of Nazism and attempted to make amends for the atrocities committed while the Russians did not apologize for Lenins or Stalins horrors, such as the Holodomor in Ukraine. Lenin, the father of Soviet communism, is treasured in Russia today. People still deny, by assertion or implication, Stalins holocaust, said Russian historian, Donald Rayfield, from the University of London. Mao Zedong is still honored in China.

5) Communists murdered mostly their own people. Nazis killed very few of their own fellow Germans. In the world opinion of academic circles, murdering your own countrymen does not carry the same weight as murdering people from other nations.

6) The Left considers the last good war fought as WWII. Lefties do not look at wars against communist regimes as good wars. Thus, academia considers the Vietnam and Korean Wars against communism as bad wars and the soldiers who fought in them were spat upon when returning home. But Jane Fonda, who sympathized with the Vietnamese and took pictures of herself on their tanks, was glorified by the Left.

WWII was a good war because the Nazis had occupied many European nations that were subsequently liberated at the end of WWII.

Most high school and college students have no idea what happened to millions of innocents under communism, despite testimonials from many of the survivors of communism. And we were saddened to see anarchists in D.C. cowardly photographing their arms and hands while flipping the Victims of Communism Memorial.

Young leftists mocked those who tried to educate by telling them the truth. They have been so thoroughly brainwashed by their schools that they no longer discern rational thought. They see themselves so diversely open-minded, yet their brains had fallen out long time ago.

Why communism gets a pass from our Democrat Party-dominated culture, Why communism gets a pass from our one-party system and culture, WorldTribune.com

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A bill making its way through the California Legislature to remove membership in the Communist Party as a disqualification for employment by the state 64 years after the rule was imposed prompts us to revisit how anti-communist hysteria in the 1950s almost destroyed the University of California.

The measure by Assemblyman Rob Bonta (D-Oakland) narrowly passed the Assembly on Monday and is now before the Senate.

Its more than a reminder of the toll that the Red Scare exacted on our public institutions. The measure also lends some perspective to the debate going on today about free speech on university campuses. As we observed recently, the uproar over a few isolated cases of speakers being barred or shouted down obscures how in most respects the debate actually is a marker of free speech, not a sign of suppression. That wasnt the case in the 1950s.

The Legislature enacted its employment ban on communists in 1953. Bonta doesnt go so far as to declare that the states action then was wrong, though he told my colleague Melanie Mason that the communist label could be misused or abused, and frankly, has been in the past, in some of the darker chapters of our history in this country.

The Red Scare impinged on the University of California most directly through the loyalty oath controversy of 1949-54, which I recounted in my recent book Big Science, about the career and work of the Nobel-winning UC Berkeley physicist Ernest Lawrence.

The controversy began in June 1949 with a vote by the UC Regents to add a statement disavowing membership in the Communist Party to an oath of allegiance already required of UC employees.

At that point, anti-communist hysteria was in full cry in California and across the country. The state legislature had echoed congressional concerns about subversion by establishing its own Committee on Un-American Activities in 1941, but the committee moved into high gear only in 1947, when its chairman, Sen. Jack Tenney, stages a clownish investigation of ostensibly lax security at Lawrences Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley (now the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab).

Tenneys probe went nowhere, but at the same time the Atomic Energy Commission was stepping up its own red hunt by establishing local panels to investigate employees of AEC contractors including UC, which was running the Los Alamos atomic weapons lab in New Mexico for the government and which received heavy government funding for Lawrences lab. The chairman of the California AEC panel was UC Regent Jack Neylan, a renowned red-baiter. Lawrence was a dear friend of Neylan, and had to step in more than once to dissuade the regent from ordering the dismissal of Lawrence employees he suspected of communist sympathies.

In 1949, Tenney resurfaced with a package of 13 bills targeting suspected communists at the university and elsewhere in state government. Hoping to head off legislative interference in UC affairs, then-Chancellor Robert Sproul proposed a loyalty oath in which UC employees would disavow support of any organization advocating the overthrow of the United States government. The regents added the specific reference to the Communist Party.

Adding to political sensitivities within the UC administration was a speaking invitation tendered by UCLA to Harold Laski, a leftist political scientist from Britain. Sproul, who then had authority over UCLA as well as Berkeley, forced the campus to withdraw the invitation.

Neylan soon emerged as the outstanding hard-liner among the regents. In early 1950, when opposition to the loyalty oath already was coalescing among the faculty, he persuaded the board to fire any employees who refused to sign the oath. Among the majority siding with Neylan was Mario Giannini, son of A.P. Giannini, the founder of the Bank of America and himself a former regent; among those opposing the policy was newly elected Gov. Earl Warren, an ex-officio regent and the future chief justice of the U.S.

The loyalty oath split the UC faculty. A majority opposed the oath but nevertheless chose to sign. For many, being required to affirm ones political loyalty was so repugnant that the real choice became whether to stay at Berkeley at all. European-born scientists and other faculty faced a particular moral quandary: As I wrote in Big Science, even the most ardent anti-communists among them thought the oath an uncomfortably close reminder of the impositions on academic freedom they had suffered in their homelands.

The oath prompted a flow of resignations that sapped Berkeley of the core of its scientific faculty. Many had been attracted to the university by Lawrences fame as the inventor of the atom-smashing cyclotron, and were now appalled that his friendship with Neylan prevented him from speaking out against the oath in fact, even trying to enforce it in his lab.

One who left was the brilliant young particle physicist Wolfgang Pief Panofsky, who was granted a personal audience with Neylan at Lawrences behest. Instead of persuading Panofsky to stay, Neylan hectored him about the evils of communism for two hours straight. Panofsky fled to Stanford, where he taught for the next 56 years.

The loyalty oath affair reached its climax with the firing of 31 non-signers in 1950. That also marked the beginning of the end. Two years later, the state Supreme Court ordered them all reinstated; in 1954 they won back pay for the period of their dismissal. One, David Saxon, would later become president of the university.

The loyalty oath began a subtle transformation in the universitys reputation as a haven for pure science. Instead, it began to seem a place where ones views on the fraught politics of national security loomed over ones career prospects. The atmosphere at Lawrences laboratory and the university as a whole did not make people who dissented feel they were welcome, Saxon observed at a symposium marking the 50th anniversary of the affair.

What the episode really illustrated was the folly of trying to impose policies so central to the mission of a university by fiat.

Everybody lost, and no one won, David Gardner, a historian of the controversy and himself a former president of UC, said at the symposium. How could it be that a great university set out in 1949 to clarify a policy about communism and its place in the university, and a year-and-a-half later wind up dismissing 31 members of the faculty of the University of California against whom no charges were made?

At Berkeley, the loyalty oath experience continued to resonate through the 1960s and the birth of the free speech movement, which militated against Vietnam- and civil rights-era restrictions on political speech on the campus. And the issues continue to resonate today not least as a reminder that the loyalty oath affair was fueled at least partially by UCLAs speaking invitation to Laski.

Free-speech challenges still erupt at Berkeley and other UC campuses, but wholesale disqualifications for ones political beliefs or even political statements havent been tried since. That doesnt mean they wont recur political attacks on university faculty members are common, generally as right-wing attacks on supposed liberal leanings of university professors.

The California Legislatures consideration of a bill to wipe communist sympathies off the roster of disqualifying attributes for state employment is a good step, but it passed only narrowly, against opposition from legislators still cherishing the mistakes of the past: The whole concept of communism and Communist Party members working for the state of California is against everything we stand for on this floor," said Assemblyman Randy Voepel (R-Santee) during floor debate. But the politics of the 1950s have no place in the politics of the 21st century.

Keep up to date with Michael Hiltzik. Follow @hiltzikm on Twitter, see his Facebook page, or email michael.hiltzik@latimes.com.

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