Yemen Opinion: An Avoidable Civil War Has Begun (O'Neill)

Photo: APThe scenes coming to us out of Yemen appear as raw and bloody chaos: running gun-battles through the streets, protesters screaming fiercely and the president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, apparently wounded in a mortar attack at the weekend (and rumoured to be headed to Saudi Arabia for treatment).

But while it looks like madness, the falling apart of Yemen is deeply rooted in the inexorable logic of its own history, the personalities of the major players and a looming generational shift. While civil war is not inevitable, circumstances have made it likely, and it may be too late to prevent the country from violently tearing apart its own seams.

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Pakistan: Obama Administration Divides Over Drone Strikes (Entous/Gorman/Rosenberg)

Fissures have opened within the Obama administration over the drone program targeting militants in Pakistan, with the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and some top military leaders pushing to rein in the Central Intelligence Agency's aggressive pace of strikes.

Such a move would roll back, at least temporarily, a program that President Barack Obama dramatically expanded soon after taking office, making it one of the U.S.'s main weapons against the Pakistan-based militants fighting coalition troops in Afghanistan.

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Libya Snapshot: Going Broke in Benghazi? (Faul)

Abdalgader Albagrmi's office sits above a vault piled high with gold. It's the dwindling pile of cash next to the bullion, however, that keeps the Libyan rebels' deputy Central Bank chief up at night.

As that pile shrinks, so too does the chance of funding and sustaining a revolution to oust one of the world's longest-serving dictators.

If the cash-flow problem "isn't solved in the next few days, there's going to be a problem here," Albagrmi said, speaking from his office in Benghazi, the northeast Mediterranean port that has become the rebels' de facto capital.

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Yemen, Syria, Bahrain (and Beyond) LiveBlog: A President Is Wounded

Video of the destroyed Presidential Mosque in the Yemeni capital Sana'a

2130 GMT: Media are reporting tonight that the Vice President, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, is now acting President and Supreme Commander of the armed forces.

Meanwhile, Abdel Rahman Ba Fadel, an opposition member of the Yemeni parliament, has told Al Jazeera, "A medical team arrived from Saudi Arabia but there is a plane ready to take him [President Saleh] there if they fail to treat him in Yemen."

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The Latest from Iran (4 June): Remembering Khomeini...Without Ahmadinejad

1940 GMT: The security presence blocking the silent protest for Haleh Sahabi at a religious complex in north Tehran this afternoon:

1925 GMT: Preventing Haleh's Memorial. Witnesses say Iranian security forces fired in the air to disperse several hundred people who had gathered for silent protest over the death of activist Haleh Sahabi (see 1505 GMT).

The forces reportedly used batons as well to disperse the crowd outside the Hosseini Ershad mosque in northern Tehran.

Kalemeh reports that a "few dozen" protesters were arrested and some were "severely beaten".

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Syria 1st-Hand: "I Don't Want My Girl to Grow Up Afraid Like Me" (Anonymous)

Protest in Homs, April 2011A Homsi friend, whom I’ll call Ghada, told me why she decided to take part in the protests. While visiting Damascus, she was sitting in the back seat of a taxi as the driver began to interrogate her daughter, a four-year-old. “Who is he? This is Dr. Bashar, an eye doctor, are your eyes hurting?” the driver said, pointing at a billboard image of President Assad (who was trained as an ophthalmologist), with the line “The master of country” written over it. “Do you know him? Do you love him?”

For a second, the only image Ghada could think of was the picture of a dead man in Al-Sanameen, near Daraa, who was shot in the eye by government snipers early on in the Syrian uprising. And she remembered a fact every Syrian knows too well: many taxi drivers work for the Mukhabarat, the secret services, and one way they have of gathering information and watching over the current mood in the country is through chit-chat with passengers. For years, Syrians have bitten their tongues when a taxi driver suddenly decided to talk about fuel prices or the government’s performance in any area.

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Libya Photo Exclusive: The People of Benghazi (v. der Osten Sacken)

Thomas v. der Osten Sacken has just returned from a stay in Benghazi, Libya's second-largest city and the seat of power of the opposition. In this photo essay, offered exclusively on EA, he presents its people and images:

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Iran Special: Taking Apart the Supreme Leader's Speech on "Uprisings" (Siavashi)

It is in Khamenei's consideration of what is "new" --- the uprisings in the Arab Spring --- that the significance of this speech lies.

For the Supreme Leader has to go through the looking glass to explain why these demands for rights, justice, and legitimacy of rulers are very, very good from Tunisia to Bahrain and, at the same time, to portray why they are very, very bad in his own country. In that looking glass, however, there is no resolution, only the paranoia, delusion, arrogance, and hypocrisy that mark Khamenei even as he pays homage to his predecessor and the Islamic Republic.

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Latest Syria Video: Protests Defy the Internet Blackout

People of Kobani to President Assad --- "Leave, Leave!"

Burning of Chinese, Russian, and Iranian flags in Daraa in south:

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Latest Yemen Video: Protests Amidst the Chaos in Sana'a

Protesters in Change Square in Sana'a cheer (incorrect) news that President Saleh killed:

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