Violent Clashes as Thousands Protest in Cities Across Syria

Security forces fired on protesters in Homs, one of Syria’s most restive locales, and the police and protesters fought in Deir al-Zour, a large city in the east. But thousands were permitted to demonstrate in Kiswa, a town south of Damascus, where demonstrators carried banners that read, “Leave!” and “The people want the fall of the regime.”

Some opposition figures had speculated that the government might try to bring down a death toll that surged past 100 on one Friday in anticipation of Mr. Assad’s speech, which may come as early as Sunday. Syrian officials have portrayed the address as significant, though many in the opposition said their expectations were low.

As the day wore on, the toll approached 22, the number killed last Friday.

“We want freedom and dignity but not under President Bashar,” said a 30-year-old farmer in Kiswa who gave his name as Abdel-Rahman. “He keeps promising for three months on reforms but all we see is more killing and suffering.”

The government’s crackdown has forced nearly 10,000 refugees across the northern border with Turkey and, on Friday, its repercussions spilled into Lebanon, where rival groups clashed after a protest against Mr. Assad in the northern city of Tripoli.

Three people were killed there, including an off-duty soldier, the police said. The clash erupted in a part of Tripoli that has often witnessed trouble between Sunni Muslims and Alawites, a minority heterodox sect that serves as the backbone of Mr. Assad’s rule.

The crackdown has brought international condemnation of a leadership that has ruled Syria for more than four decades. Diplomats have spoken of growing pressure on Mr. Assad, who has taken steps that have so far proved largely superficial, and Syrian officials have suggested that a more serious dialogue may ensue with opposition figures.

On Thursday, in a symbolic but humiliating episode, the country’s richest businessman, Rami Makhlouf, a reviled cousin of Mr. Assad, was forced to announce that he would devote himself to charity and avoid any new deals that brought him profit.

“You can’t do charity with the millions you stole from us,” read a banner carried by hundreds of demonstrators on Friday in Zabadani, a town on the outskirts of Damascus, the capital.

Since the start of the uprising in mid-March, the government and opposition have cast it in a different light. At times, government officials have acknowledged some of the protesters’ demands as legitimate, while insisting that armed groups have hijacked the movement. The opposition says the government is exaggerating the threat posed by armed groups and contends that the demonstrations are overwhelmingly peaceful.

Syrian state television said a policeman was killed and more than 20 were wounded when armed groups opened fire on them. It said six police officers were also wounded when gunmen attacked a police station in Deir al-Zour. Nawaf al-Bashir, an opposition figure in the city, said security forces killed two civilians there and wounded nine people.

The government has barred most foreign journalists from reporting in Syria, and it was almost impossible to reconcile the typically contradictory accounts.

Activists said the worst violence on Friday occurred in Homs, Syria’s third largest city and a center of the uprising, and the province of Idlib, a conservative Sunni Muslim region in the north that military forces have sought to return to the government’s control.

Activists said protests also occurred at the university in Aleppo and in other parts of the city, Syria’s second largest and a linchpin for the government’s durability. So far, the city has remained relatively quiescent, but activists said one protester had been killed there.

On the Turkish border, 200 refugees living in a makeshift tent city staged their own protest against the government, raising a banner that read “We hate you: Get away” and chanting “The people want the fall of the regime,” a cry voiced across the Arab world. Scores of children participated, waving branches plucked from the trees.

There were conflicting reports about the posture of the Syrian military, which has deployed to town after restive town. Some activists said that, in contrast to past weeks, the military did not participate in the crackdown on Friday, leaving the task to security forces and paramilitaries. Mr. Bashir said they had withdrawn from Deir al-Zour, where they had deployed just last week. Other activists said that they remained there and that additional military forces had begun an assault on the town of Dael, in southern Syria.

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, and Liam Stack from Guvecci, Turkey.

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Thousands of council homes empty

15 May 2011 Last updated at 04:56 ET The details were obtained by BBC One's The Politics Show London through Freedom of Information requests

More than 6,000 council homes have been left unoccupied in London, figures from the 33 local authorities have shown.

Nearly a third were empty because they needed repairs and more than 2,300 have been without tenants for over a year.

Last year, there were more than 360,000 households on council waiting lists for new homes, or 11% of all households in London, the research found.

The details were obtained by BBC One's The Politics Show London through Freedom of Information requests.

Continue reading the main story  6,249 properties currently unoccupied in London2,062 homes are empty because of their poor state of repair2,343 have been empty for more than a year

Source: FoI requests to London's 33 local authorities

"If you're somebody on the housing waiting list and then you learn there are all these empty properties, it's devastating news," said government housing minister Grant Shapps.

"It's no use to anybody having these council houses lay empty.

"I think the councils need to make sure they're doing everything possible to bring them back into use, and really quickly too."

One council with 500 empty properties, Labour-run Camden in north London, admitted it had a "very pressing problem".

But Julian Fulbrook, a Labour councillor, said the authority was "determined to bring these homes back into use as quickly as possible".

The government has given the borough ￡55m to repair properties which have been damaged or require work.

"This is very good news for us - but of course the government are taking away ￡40m from us," Mr Fulbrook said, referring to the cuts the council is making to all of its services.

"It's a bit like a game of snakes and ladders - we go up, we go down."

Tens of Thousands March in Mexico City

The silence was to honor the dead — more than 35,000 since President Felipe Calderón sent the military to fight drug cartels four and a half years ago.

Among the dead is Mr. Sicilia’s son, killed seven weeks ago in the colonial city of Cuernavaca.

Since then, Mr. Sicilia’s grief and fury have resonated with many Mexicans who believe they have become the ignored victims in a battle between organized crime on one side and soldiers and the police on the other.

At the rally Sunday, Mr. Sicilia called on the government to change its strategy in the war, calling first for the resignation of Genaro García Luna, the director of public security and an architect of Mr. Calderón’s battle against the drug gangs. “We want to hear a message from the president of the republic that with this resignation, yes, he has heard us,” Mr. Sicilia said.

The city police estimated that as many as 150,000 people took part in the march, although the number of people who finally gathered in the plaza late Sunday afternoon to hear Mr. Sicilia and other grieving families speak, seemed considerably smaller.

Since Mr. Calderón began his crackdown, sending soldiers to patrol large parts of northern and western Mexico, the government has argued that the dead are almost all members of rival gangs killed as drug cartels fight over territory and smuggling routes to the United States.

But the violence continues to increase and the toll of innocent victims has mounted as drug gangs have become more ruthless. Authorities have failed to check the killings because of a what even the government admits is a combination of corruption, fear and inefficiency.

New horrors have been revealed in the past few weeks. Mr. Sicilia’s son was found dead along with six other people, supposedly killed by a drug cartel. Then, soldiers found mass graves in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas that held 183 bodies, many believed to be people kidnapped from public buses on their way to the border. Meanwhile, the authorities have pulled 168 other bodies from pits in the central state of Durango.

The government has remained on the defensive, presenting the choice as one between either backing down and letting organized crime take hold, or continuing the fight along the same lines.

On Thursday, as Mr. Sicilia set on his march from his hometown, Cuernavaca, Mr. Calderón insisted that he would not pull the military from the streets, as many Mexicans have asked. “We are right, we have the law and we have the strength, we will win,” he said.

 

Thousands of Afghans Rally in Kabul to Reject Any Peace With Taliban

The meeting, organized by a former intelligence director, Amrullah Saleh, and attended as well by Abdullah Abdullah, a former presidential candidate, was a frontal attack on the current government’s policies, and speakers denounced both Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The organizers promised that if they were not listened to, they would “go to the streets and protest.”

Under the name “a gathering for justice,” the meeting was attended overwhelmingly by Afghans from the north and particularly from Panjshir Province, the home of the Afghan icon Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was killed by suicide bombers backed by Al Qaeda two days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Panjshir is also the home province of Mr. Saleh and Mr. Abdullah.

Both men have long experienced friction with President Hamid Karzai: Mr. Karzai forced out Mr. Saleh, and Mr. Abdullah withdrew from a runoff election against Mr. Karzai in 2009 because, he said, the voting would be rigged. “The Taliban and Al Qaeda are terrorists,” said Mr. Saleh, as he looked out across the crowd, many of them young people. “They have destroyed our lands and houses, dishonored our wives and families.”

Then Mr. Saleh addressed Mr. Karzai: “You call them your brothers, this is oppression — to this nation; they are not our brothers,” he said in a criticism of Mr. Karzai’s frequent reference to the Taliban not as enemies or terrorists but as “upset brothers” or “angry brothers.”

The meeting struck a strongly nationalist tone and seemed aimed at generating the kind of grass-roots movement that has swept the Middle East. It was advertised on Facebook, radio and television stations, as well as in local newspapers.

Banners in Dari, one of the official Afghan languages, around the edge of the large tents were critical of the government: “The international community should not support Karzai for deals with the Taliban;” “Don’t step on our national interest by making deals with the Taliban;” “Every government organ is screaming with corruption, let’s root it out.”

The meeting was held in the parking lot of one of Kabul’s many immense wedding halls, and the manager, who asked that his name not be used, said that his staff had set out more than 10,000 chairs. Almost every one was filled, and overflow crowds gathered outside to listen to the speeches over loudspeakers.

The dominance of northerners at the gathering raised the issues of the growing tension over the prospect of a peace deal with the Taliban and the very different outlooks of the predominantly non-Pashtun north of Afghanistan and the overwhelmingly Pashtun south.

“As you know, one tribe, one circle has governed Afghanistan,” said Rasullah Paya, 22, a Kabul University student, referring to the Pashtuns, the ethnic group of Mr. Karzai. “From now on we don’t want one circle, one tribe, one nation, to run the government,” said Mr. Paya, who is from the Hazara ethnic group and is originally from Parwan Province, which is also in the north.

In fact, the government’s senior figures come from all ethnic groups, but perhaps because there is general frustration with day-to-day corruption and inefficiency, people feel deeply disenfranchised.

Others were even blunter. Abu Bakr, 32, from Panjshir Province, said, “We came today to participate in this gathering, to express our hatred of the Taliban and of the High Peace Council.”

The peace council, with more than 60 members, picked by Mr. Karzai, has been involved in reaching out to the Taliban and other insurgent groups to persuade them to lay down their weapons and join the government.

Mr. Saleh worked for Mr. Karzai until last June when insurgents attacked a peace jirga held in Kabul with rockets. In the wake of the attack, Mr. Karzai forced both Mr. Saleh and the interior minister at the time, Hanif Atmar, to offer their resignations because they had not pre-empted the attack. While Mr. Saleh is a Tajik, Mr. Atmar is a Pashtun, and they have criticized the government’s failure to root out corruption and to take a tough stand against the Taliban.

Underlying the reason for the gathering and on the minds of many in attendance was Mr. Karzai’s recent meeting with senior Pakistani officials at which the two countries’ leaders pledged to work together to bring peace to the region. However, in private the Pakistanis pushed for changes in Afghan policies, urging the country to draw closer to China and implicitly distance itself from the United States.

After the meeting, several local newspapers released what they said were lists of Pakistan’s demands to Afghanistan. While some of the demands were completely fabricated, others appeared to have been mentioned at the meeting, and the overall lack of transparency, coupled with the recent revelation that Osama bin Laden was living near a Pakistani military compound, has exacerbated people’s suspicions of Pakistan.

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Thousands March Across the Middle East, Most Peacefully

Thousands in Oman marched through the southern town of Salalah, Reuters reported, after gathering for prayers in the parking lot of a mosque near a government office. It was the largest demonstration since late February, when protests in the northeastern port city of Sohar and the capital, Muscat, rattled the normally sleepy sultanate on the southeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula.

“The Omani people are not afraid of protesting for as long as it takes for reform,” the cleric, Amer Hargan, told the crowd, Reuters reported.

Protests in Oman have focused their energy on official corruption and economic issues, such as better pay and relief from rising prices, rather than opposition to the four-decade rule of Sultan Qaboos bin Said. The Omani leader has responded in recent weeks with promises to increase government spending and create jobs.

In Yemen, more than a hundred thousand gathered in giant, dueling demonstrations in the capital, Sana, for the third Friday in a row as President Ali Abdullah Saleh continued to resist calls for his departure. Television images and photos posted to social media Web sites showed waves of antigovernment marchers surging through the streets of the capital and throngs rallying in support of the embattled president.

In the face of eroding international support for his 32-year rule, Mr. Saleh rallied supporters, telling them that he welcomed a regional plan to have him step down from power, but would agree to leave only “within the framework of the Yemen constitution,” the official Saba news agency reported, a stipulation that appeared calculated to put off any immediate departure.

The plan, finalized this week in meetings between Yemeni officials and representatives of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, calls for the president to hand over power immediately and step down in 30 days, with new presidential elections 60 days later. It also calls for an immediate end to protests and allows immunity from prosecution for Mr. Saleh and his family. The opposition, reluctant to call off demonstrations, has yet to offer an official response.

Demonstrators also filled streets in the city of Taiz. Reuters reported security forces firing into the air to keep rival protests from clashing.

Friday, the Muslim holy day, has become a focal point for protests against autocratic governments across the Middle East since a wave of uprisings began this winter.

But the streets were empty in Jordan for the first Friday since Jan. 7, when demonstrators began gathering to demand changes in the kingdom. Organizers had called for demonstrations, but changed their plans after Islamic fundamentalists, the Salafis, echoed those calls.

“We did not want to give the government and the regime a chance to accuse the opposition of being in cahoots with the Salafis,” said Zaki Saad, the head of the political bureau of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a protest organizer. During demonstrations last Friday, Salafis armed with knives and rocks clashed with the police, wounding more than 80 police officers. “As a result of what took place last week, the political parties and the national parties who are calling for reform decided to cancel all their demonstrations until May,” he said.

Meanwhile, in Egypt, the country’s public prosecutor on Friday extended the detention of former president Hosni Mubarak another 15 days, to allow time for more interrogations, according to a spokesman in the public prosecutor’s office. Mr. Mubarak, 82, was first detained on April 13, a day after he was hospitalized in the Egyptian seaside resort of Sharm El Sheikh, where he has been staying since the three-week uprising that forced him to resign.

The former Egyptian autocrat, who ruled unchallenged for 30 years, faces accusations of financial corruption and ordering the killing of protesters. On Friday, a team of prosecutors was sent to question him, according to a statement issued by the public prosecutor’s office. Both his sons, Gamal and Alaa, were also arrested and are being held in a Cairo prison.

Reporting contributed by Mona el-Naggar from Cairo and Ranya Kadri from Amman, Jordan.

 

Thousands March Across the Middle East, Most Peacefully

 

Thousands in Oman marched through the southern town of Salalah, Reuters reported, after gathering for prayers in the parking lot of a mosque near a government office. It was the largest demonstration since late February, when protests in the northeastern port city of Sohar and the capital, Muscat, rattled the normally sleepy sultanate on the southeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula.

“The Omani people are not afraid of protesting for as long as it takes for reform,” the cleric, Amer Hargan, told the crowd, Reuters reported.

Protests in Oman have focused their energy on official corruption and economic issues, such as better pay and relief from rising prices, rather than opposition to the four-decade rule of Sultan Qaboos bin Said. The Omani leader has responded in recent weeks with promises to increase government spending and create jobs.

In Yemen, more than a hundred thousand gathered in giant, dueling demonstrations in the capital, Sana, for the third Friday in a row as President Ali Abdullah Saleh continued to resist calls for his departure. Television images and photos posted to social media Web sites showed waves of antigovernment marchers surging through the streets of the capital and throngs rallying in support of the embattled president.

In the face of eroding international support for his 32-year rule, Mr. Saleh rallied supporters, telling them that he welcomed a regional plan to have him step down from power, but would agree to leave only “within the framework of the Yemen constitution,” the official Saba news agency reported, a stipulation that appeared calculated to put off any immediate departure.

The plan, finalized this week in meetings between Yemeni officials and representatives of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, calls for the president to hand over power immediately and step down in 30 days, with new presidential elections 60 days later. It also calls for an immediate end to protests and allows immunity from prosecution for Mr. Saleh and his family. The opposition, reluctant to call off demonstrations, has yet to offer an official response.

Demonstrators also filled streets in the city of Taiz. Reuters reported security forces firing into the air to keep rival protests from clashing.

Friday, the Muslim holy day, has become a focal point for protests against autocratic governments across the Middle East since a wave of uprisings began this winter.

But the streets were empty in Jordan for the first Friday since Jan. 7, when demonstrators began gathering to demand changes in the kingdom. Organizers had called for demonstrations, but changed their plans after Islamic fundamentalists, the Salafis, echoed those calls.

“We did not want to give the government and the regime a chance to accuse the opposition of being in cahoots with the Salafis,” said Zaki Saad, the head of the political bureau of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a protest organizer. During demonstrations last Friday, Salafis armed with knives and rocks clashed with the police, wounding more than 80 police officers. “As a result of what took place last week, the political parties and the national parties who are calling for reform decided to cancel all their demonstrations until May,” he said.

Meanwhile, in Egypt, the country’s public prosecutor on Friday extended the detention of former president Hosni Mubarak another 15 days, to allow time for more interrogations, according to a spokesman in the public prosecutor’s office. Mr. Mubarak, 82, was first detained on April 13, a day after he was hospitalized in the Egyptian seaside resort of Sharm El Sheikh, where he has been staying since the three-week uprising that forced him to resign.

The former Egyptian autocrat, who ruled unchallenged for 30 years, faces accusations of financial corruption and ordering the killing of protesters. On Friday, a team of prosecutors was sent to question him, according to a statement issued by the public prosecutor’s office. Both his sons, Gamal and Alaa, were also arrested and are being held in a Cairo prison.

Reporting contributed by Mona el-Naggar from Cairo and Ranya Kadri from Amman, Jordan.