At least two protesters were killed in the Syrian city of Hama, where tanks are advancing on demonstrators who have erected barricades in the city center. Hama was the scene of a massacre of some 30,000 protesters in 1982.
The US energy giant ConocoPhillips, operating in a joint agreement with the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, was responsible for a devastating oil spill in the Yellow Sea that Chinese authorities hushed up for weeks.
Israeli police limited access to al-Aqsa Mosque in a precautionary measure a day after clashes in Jerusalem. Meanwhile haredi Jews clashed with police over the arrest of their leader Rabbi Yaakov Yosef on suspicion of inciting violence.
The Colombian army admitted that a man killed weeks earlier in the eastern department of Arauca—originally reported to be a “financial leader” of the FARC guerillas—was actually the noncombatant leader of a local indigenous community.
Over a dozen exiled Tibetans have been arrested in Nepal over the past week, in a crackdown against refugees while attempting to celebrate the Buddhist religious festival of Saka Dawa in the capital Kathmandu.
Thousands of protesters again took to the streets of Morocco to push for democratic reforms despite voter approval two days earlier of a constitutional reform that curbs the near-absolute powers of King Mohammed VI.
Hundreds of debt-ridden small merchants and farmers in northern Nicaragua launched a human blockade on the main road between the Caribbean coast and the capital in Matagalpa department.
Hundreds of Palestinian detainees at Ashkelon prison, in Israel’s south, continued their hunger strike into a second day following attacks by prison security forces, who fired tear-gas and beat detainees with batons and hoses.
A Tibetan writer was sentenced to four years in prison last month after helping edit a publication critical of Chinese policy in the restive region. The move comes amid a new wave of protests and arrests in Tbet.
The captain of The Audacity of Hope, a US boat carrying activists seeking to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza has been jailed in Athens. John Klusmer is being charged with two felonies, including “disturbing sea traffic”
Israeli Defense Forces arrested 23 Palestinians, including two members of the Palestine National Council, in operations across the West Bank. There are 6,700 Palestinians currently held in prisons and camps in Israel and in the West Bank.
At least 24 were killed in Friday protests across Syria, as thousands again took to the streets throughout Yemen, and some 5,000 led by the families of those killed in the uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
