Security forces and gunmen loyal to President Bashar al-Assad shot dead at least 70 demonstrators in Syria as thousands took to the streets for Friday protests across the country.
Pakistan’s Supreme Court upheld the acquittal of five of the six men accused in the gang rape of Mukhtar Mai—the woman whose refusal to remain silent about the 2002 crime won international acclaim for her courage.
The US is sending $25 million in nonlethal aid to Libyan rebels to cover “vehicles, fuel trucks and fuel bladders, ambulances, medical equipment, protective vests, binoculars, and non-secure radios.”
Tokyo Electric Power Company issued a plan for cooling down the reactors and reducing radiation leaks within six to nine months at the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant on Japan’s Pacific coast.
The Center for Biological Diversity charges that the impacts on wildlife of last year’s BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe have been dramatically underestimated.
Syria’s government passed a draft decree to lift the emergency law and a bill to dismantle the Supreme State Security Court. But protesters took to the streets in large numbers again the next day in the central city of Homs,
Italy’s government announced it is indefinitely suspending plans to build the country’s first nuclear power plants—ahead of a June referendum on the atomic development plans, which the administration says is no longer necessary.
Security forces in Yemen opened fire on protests led by women, many in full face veils, after President Ali Abdullah Saleh tried to win support from Islamists by attacking the “mixing of sexes” at demonstrations.
Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who became the hero of the Egyptian revolution, spoke before an International Monetary Fund paenl in Washington DC, chiding the organization for its long support of strongman Hosni Mubarak.
More protesters were killed by security forces in Syria, despite a pledge by President Bashar al-Assad to end emergency rule—in force since 1963 when the Ba’ath party took power—within a week.
At least one was killed as officers fired on protesters who overran a police station near Jaitapur, site of a proposed nuclear plant in Ratnagiri district of India’s Maharashtra state.
The Mexican state of Tamaulipas has dismissed its security chief while federal police arrested 16 municipal officers in the town of San Fernando following the discovery of more than 145 bodies in mass graves over the past weeks.
