BANGKOK (AP) — In junta-ruled Thailand, the simple act of reading in public has become an act of resistance.

On Saturday evening in Bangkok, a week and a half after the army seized power in a coup, about a dozen people gathered in the middle of a busy, elevated walkway connecting several of the capital's most luxurious shopping malls.

As pedestrians trundled past, the protesters sat down, pulled out book titles such as George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" — a dystopian novel about life in a totalitarian surveillance state — and began to read.

In a country where the army has vowed to crack down on anti-coup protesters demanding elections and a return to civilian rule, in a place where you can be detained for simply holding something that says "Peace Please" in the wrong part of town, the small gathering was an act of defiance — a quiet demonstration against the army's May 22 seizure of power and the repression that has accompanied it.

"People are angry about this coup, but they can't express it," said a human rights activist who asked to be identified only by her nickname, Mook, for fear of being detained.

"So we were looking for an alternative way to resist, a way that is not confrontational," she said. "And one of those ways is reading."

Their defiance, if you can call it that, is found in the titles they chose. Among them: "Unarmed Insurrection," ''The Politics of Despotic Paternalism," ''The Power of Non-Violent Means."

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Thai school girls have their photographs taken with soldiers guarding the area to prevent anti-coup …

The junta has banned political gatherings of five people or more. But it is unclear what laws, if any, such low-key protests could be breaking.

The coup, Thailand's second in eight years, deposed an elected government that had insisted for months that the nation's fragile democracy was under attack from protesters, the courts and, finally, the army.

The leader of the junta, Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha, says the military had to intervene to restore order after half a year of debilitating protests that had crippled the former government and triggered sporadic violence which killed 28 people and injured more than 800.

Since taking over, the military has made clear it will tolerate no dissent, and it has launched a major campaign to silence critics and censor the media. The junta has warned all citizens against doing anything that might incite conflict, and the list of targets has been long.

At least 14 partisan TV networks have been shut down along with nearly 3,000 unlicensed community radio stations. Independent international TV channels such as CNN and BBC have been blocked along with more than 300 Web pages, including New York-based Human Rights Watch's Thailand page. Journalists and academics have been summoned by the army. Activists have fled.

A sudden interruption of access to Facebook on Wednesday fueled widespread speculation that the nation's new rulers were testing their censorship power; the junta, though, insisted it was merely a technical glitch.

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A demonstrator holds up a sign as she joins others during a protest against military rule at Victory …

Kasama Na Nagara, who works in the financial sector, said about 20 people were participating in the book readings. Saturday marked the third day that the group had organized such a protest. They have been careful to avoid soldiers.

On Friday, the group was supposed to gather on another walkway where they had conducted a reading a day earlier. But when troops showed up, they called it off.

Human Rights organizations are deeply concerned over how far the clampdown will go.

Some people have begun using encrypted chat apps on their smartphones, for fear of being monitored. And at least one major bookstore in Bangkok, Kinokuniya, has pulled from its shelves political titles that could be deemed controversial.

So far, Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," in which authorities operating under the aegis of "Big Brother" fit homes with cameras to monitor the intimate details of people's personal lives, is not among them.

"But we have Big Brother watching us now," Kasama said. "It has become too risky to speak out. It's sad. But it's safer to be silent in Thailand right now."

On Sunday, thousands of troops deployed in multiple locations across Bangkok to stop expected protests by a separate group of anti-coup protesters, raising fears of possible violence if the soldiers crack down. Authorities closed several elevated "Skytrain" stations to try to prevent large groups from gathering.

So far, the other anti-coup protests have been relatively small. As many as 1,000 people marched through Bangkok and scuffled with troops several times last week, though no injuries have been reported.

Those protesters have carried hand-made signs and banners with messages like "No dictatorship" and "Pro-Democracy" and "Anti-Coup." Some have shown up with masks of prominent political figures to conceal their faces and black tape across their mouths to protest the increasing repression.

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Associated Press writer Thanyarat Doksone contributed to this report.

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Follow Todd Pitman on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/@toddpitman

Thailand cracks down on reading

With the country under military rule, simply taking a book out in public is now viewed as an act of resistance.
'People are angry'

By Warren Strobel and David Brunnstrom

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The sole American prisoner of war held in Afghanistan was being flown to a U.S. military hospital in Germany on Sunday, after he was dramatically freed in a swap deal for five Taliban militants who were released from the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl had been held for nearly five years and his release, following years of on-and-off negotiations, suddenly became possible after harder-line factions of the Afghan Taliban shifted course and agreed to back it, according to U.S. officials.

A U.S. defence official said Bergdahl was able to walk and became emotional on his way to freedom, after being handed over to U.S. special forces in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday. "Once he was on the helicopter, he wrote on a paper plate, 'SF?'" the official said, referring to the abbreviation for special forces. "The operators replied loudly: 'Yes, we've been looking for you for a long time.' And at this point, Sergeant Bergdahl broke down."

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said he hoped the successful prisoner exchange deal might lead to breakthroughs in reconciliation with the militants.

"We had been ... working to find ways to open up some possibilities with the Taliban to try to get Sergeant Bergdahl back. This didn’t just start," Hagel told reporters travelling with him on a visit to Afghanistan.

"This has been an ongoing effort that our government has been involved in at every level ... We found some openings ... that made sense to us," he added. "The timing was right, the pieces came together."

Bergdahl, 28, was handed over about 6 p.m. local time on Saturday, a senior official said. The U.S. forces, who had flown in by helicopter, were on the ground very briefly, said the officials, who would not specify the precise location.

"Fortunately ... no shots were fired, there was no violence," said Hagel. "It went as well, not only as we had expected and planned but I think as well as it could have."

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U.S. Army Sergeant Bowe Berghdal is pictured in this undated handout photo provided by the U.S. Army …

"NEVER FORGOTTEN"

President Barack Obama hailed the release in a brief appearance with Bergdahl's parents, Bob and Jani, in the White House Rose Garden, saying that "while Bowe was gone, he was never forgotten".

Bergdahl had already left Afghanistan when Hagel touched down at the giant Bagram military base outside Kabul on Sunday.

A U.S. defence official said the newly released POW would receive treatment at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, including the start of his "reintegration process".

"That includes time for him to tell his story, decompress, and to reconnect with his family through telephone calls and video conferences," the official said.

Another defence official said it was expected that after treatment in Germany he would be transferred to another military medical facility in San Antonio, Texas.

Bergdahl, who is from Idaho, was the only known missing U.S. soldier in the Afghan war that was launched soon after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States to force the Taliban - accused of sheltering al Qaeda militants - from power.

He was captured under unknown circumstances in eastern Afghanistan on June 30, 2009, about two months after arriving in the country.

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U.S. Army Private Bowe Bergdahl watches as one of his captors display his identity tag to the camera …

In exchange for Bergdahl's freedom, the U.S. released five Taliban detainees from Guantanamo. They were being flown by U.S. military aircraft to Qatar, the Gulf emirate that acted as an intermediary in the negotiations.

U.S. officials referred to the release of the Taliban detainees as a transfer and noted they would be subject to certain restrictions in Qatar. One of the officials said that would include a minimum one-year ban on them travelling outside of Qatar as well as monitoring of their activities.

Those assurances were greeted with scepticism by U.S. Republicans and some Afghan officials, who voiced concerns that the men, who were described as senior Taliban figures, would rejoin the insurgency against the government in Kabul.

"They will be very dangerous people, because they have connections with regional and international terror organizations around the world," a top Afghan intelligence official told Reuters.

That view was echoed on the streets of Kabul. "It will strengthen the insurgency," said Sayed Najibullah, a tailor in the Afghan capital. "President Obama showed that his soldier's life was more important than a country’s national interest."

There was no immediate comment from the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who Hagel said had not been informed of the prisoner exchange in advance.

U.S. WINDING DOWN WAR

Bergdahl's release came days after Obama outlined a plan on Tuesday to withdraw all but 9,800 American troops from Afghanistan by the end of the year and the rest by 2016, ending more than a decade of U.S. military engagement.

A U.S. official said he did not see a link between the agreement and Obama’s announcement. "This predates the decision on troops. This is just a matter of this coming together with the help of the Qataris and the Taliban realizing that we were serious."

The U.S. had been trying diplomacy to free Bergdahl since late 2010, but talks had been complicated, U.S. officials said, by an internal split between Taliban factions willing to talk to Americans and those staunchly opposed.

That changed in recent weeks - the exact time-frame is unclear - when Taliban hardliners reversed position, officials said.

The Afghan Taliban confirmed on Saturday it had freed Bergdahl near Khost province which borders Pakistan. "This is true. After several rounds of talks for prisoners' swap, we freed U.S. soldier and our dear guest in exchange of five commanders held in Guantanamo Bay since 2002," a senior Taliban commander said. The Taliban commander said Bergdahl had mostly been held in the tribal areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Reuters first reported the potential deal involving the five Taliban detainees in December 2011.

While U.S. and Taliban envoys have met directly in the past, there were no direct U.S.-Taliban contacts during the most recent negotiations, U.S. officials said. Messages were passed via Qatari officials.

The final stage of negotiations, which took place in the Qatari capital, Doha, began a week ago, the U.S. officials said. Obama and Qatar's emir spoke on Tuesday and reaffirmed the security conditions under which the Taliban members would be placed, they said.

(Additional reporting by Mirwais Harooni and Jessica Donati in Kabul and Missy Ryan, Roberta Rampton, Mark Hosenball, Will Dunham, Elvina Nawaguna and Patricia Zengerle in Washington; Writing by Alex Richardson; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

PARIS/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - French police have arrested a 29-year-old man suspected of involvement in the shooting deaths last weekend of three people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, an attack that stoked fears of growing anti-Semitic violence in Europe.

Mehdi Nemmouche, a French citizen, was detained in the southern French city of Marseille on Friday and had a Kalashnikov assault rifle and another gun with him, a French police source said on Sunday. Nemmouche is from the northern city of Roubaix and spent time in jail in 2012, the source said.

French media reported that he was suspected of having stayed in Syria with Islamist jihadist groups last year. Islamist insurgents are playing a major part in a three-year-old uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

If confirmed, the Syria connection would deepen concerns among European governments about citizens, often with Islamic immigrant backgrounds, going to fight in Syria and bringing back political and sectarian violence to Europe on their return.

An Israeli couple and a French woman were killed on May 24 when a man entered the Jewish Museum in busy central Brussels and opened fire with a Kalashnikov. A Belgian man remains in critical condition in hospital.

French investigators have found a memory stick containing a video in which the suspect was shown carrying a weapon and claiming he used it for the May 24 shooting, RTL radio reported, without naming its sources.

French President Francois Hollande confirmed a suspect had been arrested and said France was determined to do all it could to stop radicalised youths from carrying out attacks.

"We will monitor those jihadists and make sure that when they come back from a fight that is not theirs, and that is definitely not ours ... to make sure that when they come back they cannot do any harm," Hollande told reporters.

The message "to these jihadists is that we will fight them, we will fight them and we will fight them", he said.

Families Mourn Jewish Museum Shooting VictimsPlay Video

France announced new policies in April to stop citizens joining the Syrian civil war, aiming to prevent young French Muslims becoming radicalised and posing a threat to their home country. This is a growing worry in a country that is home to Europe’s largest Muslim and Jewish communities [ID:L6N0NE3GG].

France, which has been a staunch opponent of Assad, estimates the number of its nationals directly or indirectly involved in the Syrian conflict at about 700, of which a third are fighting against the Damascus government.

RANDOM CHECK

French media said Nemmouche was arrested as part of random, drug-related checks at Marseille's bus terminal. Local media also reported that he had in his bag press clippings about the Brussels Jewish museum shooting.

Soulifa Badaoui, who worked as a lawyer for the suspect in the past, told BFM TV Nemmouche was not religious at the time. Asked what role religion played for him then, she said: "None, this was absolutely not part of his personality, he was not observant at all."

The Belgian federal prosecutor's office confirmed that a suspect had been arrested and said more details would be given at a news conference at 3 p.m. (1300 GMT).

Belgian federal magistrate Erik Van der Sypt told Reuters that a Belgian judge had issued a European arrest warrant and Belgium would seek the extradition of the suspect from France.

Last weekend's attack occurred on the eve of parliamentary and European elections in Belgium.

Police released a 30-second video clip from the museum's security cameras showing a man wearing a dark cap, sunglasses and blue jacket enter the building, take a rifle out of a bag and shoot into a room before calmly walking out.

European Jewish Congress President Moshe Kantor praised French and Belgian authorities for the arrest, saying there was a need to clamp down on the spread of hate crimes, especially by those hardened by bloodshed in places like Syria.

"...For too long authorities in Europe have acted speedily after the fact. It is now time for all to turn attention and set as the highest priority the prevention of these vicious crimes," he said in a statement.

Jewish community officials have drawn parallels between the Brussels shooting and the 2012 killing of four Jews at a school in France by an al Qaeda-inspired gunman, Mohamed Merah.

Security around all Jewish institutions in Belgium was raised to the highest level after the shooting, and French authorities also stepped up security after two Jews were attacked the same day as they left a synagogue in a Paris suburb wearing traditional Jewish clothing.

About half of Belgium's 42,000-strong Jewish community lives in Brussels. At some 550,000, France's Jewish community is the largest in Europe, though violence such as the 2012 school murders and France's stagnating economy have prompted an increase in emigration to Israel or elsewhere.

(Reporting by Nicolas Bertin; Writing by Ingrid Melander; Editing by Andrew Roche)

A man suspected of killing three people at a Jewish museum is found carrying a Kalashnikov rifle, police say.
Message for jihadists

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is weighing in on the rampage in Santa Barbara, California, calling both for stricter gun laws and for background checks for people with mental illness.

"The real problem here is we have too many guns in the hands of criminals, people with psychiatric problems — as this guy obviously did — and minors," Bloomberg said on "Meet The Press" on Sunday. "And we've got to find some ways to stop that.

"You always have to have due process, and you can't just go incarcerate people," Bloomberg continued. "And psychiatrists will tell you they can't predict which people with mental illness are gonna get a gun and start killing people. But you do want to have laws that let you get a temporary restraining order" before granting gun licenses to them.

Santa Barbara police say 22-year-old Elliot Rodger killed six people and wounded 13 others in the May 23 shooting spree in Isla Vista, California, before killing himself. On Sunday, Bloomberg lamented laws allowing students to carry guns on college campuses.

"We've had shootings on campus, and at the same time, some states are passing laws to explicitly let people carry guns on campuses," he said. "I don't know what you were like when you were in college, but my recollection of college 50 years ago is kids just should not have guns on campus."

In April, relatives told police they were concerned about YouTube videos Rodger had posted, and officers performed a welfare check on him on April 30. But police concluded he was not an immediate threat to himself or others.

"The parents of this kid knew he had a problem, knew he'd done something [and] the cops couldn't do anything," Bloomberg said. "Now, you don't want the cops to be able to go and grab somebody off the street and ... institutionalize them. There should be a process. But we don't have that thing that a cop could use right away."

The former mayor suggested that people with documented mental illness should have to prove to a judge that they could be allowed to carry a weapon. "Maybe you'd have to go before a judge and make a case," he said.

"Nobody says any law is going to solve all the problems," Bloomberg added. "What we do know is that a lot of people with mental illness do things that are destructive to themselves and to others."

In April, Bloomberg launched Everytown, a new gun control organization that he believes can rival the National Rifle Association.

“They say, ‘We don’t care. We’re going to go after you,’” Bloomberg told the New York Times of the NRA. “‘If you don’t vote with us, we’re going to go after your kids and your grandkids and your great-grandkids. And we’re never going to stop.’ ... We’ve got to make them afraid of us."

"For too long, change has been thwarted by the Washington gun lobby and by leaders who refuse to take commonsense steps that will save lives," says the organization's mission statement.

In the wake of deadly shootings in Tucson, Arizona, Aurora, Colorado, Newtown, Connecticut, Fort Hood, Texas, and elsewhere, Bloomberg is hoping his new group can do what President Barack Obama has not: successfully lobby Congress for stricter gun control laws.

"This is a battle we're going to win," Bloomberg told Yahoo News' Katie Couric last month. "This is not a partisan issue. I know people say, 'Well, one party's in more favor, one party's against.' They are individual votes, and I will support individual senators and congressmen who vote to make my kids safer and your kids safer."

Related video

Bloomberg calls for stricter gun laws

The former NYC mayor doesn't mince words in the wake of the deadly Santa Barbara rampage.
Weapons on campuses

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Some drought-stricken rivers and streams in Northern California's coastal forests are being polluted and sucked dry by water-guzzling medical marijuana farms, wildlife officials say — an issue that has spurred at least one county to try to outlaw personal grows.

State fish and wildlife officials say much of the marijuana being grown in northern counties under the state's medical pot law is not being used for legal, personal use, but for sale both in California and states where pot is still illegal.

This demand is fueling backyard and larger-scale pot farming, especially in remote Lake, Humboldt and Mendocino counties on the densely forested North Coast, officials said.

"People are coming in, denuding the hillsides, damming the creeks and mixing in fertilizers that are not allowed in the U.S. into our watersheds," said Denise Rushing, a Lake County supervisor who supports an ordinance essentially banning outdoor grows in populated areas.

"When rains come, it flows downstream into the lake and our water supply," she said.

Many affected waterways also contain endangered salmon, steelhead and other creatures protected by state and federal law.

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This May 2013 photo released by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (DFW) shows a DFW div …

Wildlife biologists noticed streams running dry more often over the 18 years since the state passed Proposition 215, but weren't sure why.

"We knew people were diverting water for marijuana operations, but we wanted to know exactly how much," said Scott Bauer, the department biologist who studied the pot farms' effects on four watersheds. "We didn't know they could consume all the water in a stream."

So Bauer turned to Google mapping technology and satellite data to find out where the many gardens are, and how many plants each contained.

His study estimates that about 30,000 pot plants were being grown in each river system — and he estimates that each plant uses about six gallons per day over marijuana's 150-day growing season. Some growers and others argue the six-gallon estimate is high, and that pot plants can use far less water, depending on size.

He compared that information with government data on stream flows, and visited 32 sites with other biologists to verify the mapping data. He said most grow sites had posted notices identifying them as medical pot farms.

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This undated graphic released by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife shows daily estimate …

Pot farm pollution has become such a problem in Lake County, south of Bauer's study area, that officials voted unanimously last year to ban outdoor grows.

"Counties are the ultimate arbiter of land use conflict, so while you have a right to grow marijuana for medicinal use, you don't have a right to impinge on someone else's happiness and wellbeing," Rushing said.

Saying they were being demonized, pot users challenged the law, and gathered enough signatures to place a referendum on the June 3 ballot. They argue that grow restrictions like the ones being voted on in Lake County lump the responsible users in with criminals.

"We definitely feel environmental issues are a concern. But more restrictive ... ordinances will force people to start growing in unregulated and illegal places on public land," said Daniel McClean, a registered nurse and medical marijuana user who opposes the outdoor-grow ban.

While some counties are trying to help regulate the environmental effects of pot farms, Bauer hopes his study will lead to better collaboration with growers to help police illegal use of water and pesticides.

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This 2013 photo released by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (DFW) shows a DFW environ …

Previous collaborative attempts between government and growers have not ended well, said Anthony Silvaggio, a Humboldt State University sociology professor who studies the pot economy.

"The county or state gets in there and starts doing code enforcement on other things," Silvaggio said. "They've done this in the past"

He said pot farmers believe they are being unfairly blamed for killing endangered salmon while decades of timber cutting and overfishing are the real culprits.

However, the environmental damage has led to a split in the marijuana growing community.

One business, the Tea House Collective in Humboldt County, offers medicinal pot to people with prescriptions that it says is farmed by "small scale, environmentally conscious producers."

"Patients who cannot grow their own medicine can rely on our farmers to provide them with the best holistic medicine that is naturally grown, sustainable and forever Humboldt," the group's website advertises.

Despite efforts of some pot farmers to clean things up, the increased water use by farms is a "full-scale environmental disaster," said Fish and Wildlife Lt. John Nores, who leads the agency's Marijuana Enforcement Team.

"Whether it's grown quasi legally under the state's medical marijuana laws, or it's a complete cartel outdoor drug trafficking grow site, there is extreme environmental damage being done at all levels," Nores said.

Officials say until the federal government recognizes California's medical marijuana laws, growers will continue to operate clandestinely to meet market demand for their product due to fear of prosecution. Meantime, enforcing federal and state environmental regulations will be harder.

"If cherry tomatoes were worth $3,000 a pound, and consumption was prohibited in most states, people would be doing the same thing," Nores said.

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Jason Dearen can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/JHDearen

Study finds pot farms draining Calif. rivers

Wildlife officials claim much of the marijuana grown in northern counties is not being used legally.
Forests being polluted