Saturday, August 6, 2011 at 11:04 | Scott Lucas in Africa, EA Global, EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran 2115 GMT: More night demonstrations in Syria, first in Homs, then in Kafranbel in the northwest:
Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 20:53 | Scott Lucas in Africa, EA Global, EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran 2100 GMT: Night-time protest in Daraa in southern Syria tonight, "Oh Homs, Daraa is with you until death":
And a demonstration in the Tayba Al-Imam section in Hama also expresses solidarity:
Freedom Square, Taiz, YemenThe events in Taiz took on a tragic dimension that went beyond the numbers of dead and wounded. Taiz is Yemen’s least tribal city, home to the highest number of educated people, professionals and traders. The city was “the heart of the revolution,” in one popular refrain, and its protesters were less politicized and more rigorously nonviolent than elsewhere in Yemen. The attack on May 29, with its deliberate cruelty and excess, confirmed what many Yemenis feared: that Saleh sees the democratic uprising as a greater threat to his power than Al Qaeda. The burning of the Taiz square, after all, coincided with the collapse of all government authority in large areas of south Yemen, where heavily armed jihadist groups have captured two towns and several villages. In the northwestern province of Saada, too, a militia movement now reigns supreme; they recently elected Yemen’s biggest arms dealer as their new governor. All this has implications that go well beyond Yemen’s remote mountains and deserts — the chaos in the north, for instance, threatens to set off a proxy conflict between the region’s two great nemeses, Saudi Arabia and Iran — and the Yemeni military has done little to oppose any of it.
Sunday, July 17, 2011 at 20:25 | Scott Lucas in Africa, EA Global, EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran 2025 GMT: Syria state news agency SANA is highlighting pro-regime rallies throughout the country today, including marches in Damascus, Baniyas, "stressing rejection of all forms of foreign interference in Syria's affairs".
The demonstrators unfurled large Syrian flags, sang the national anthem, and chanted in support of President Assad's reform programme.
2010 GMT: Footage from Morocco's largest city Casablanca of today's pro-reform demonstration:
Monday, July 11, 2011 at 13:05 | Scott Lucas in Africa, EA Global, EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran 1155 GMT: Thanks to James Miller for stepping in for a bit.
A couple of quotes, from those opposition figures who did attend, to flesh out the sketch of Syria's "national dialogue" talks that we offered in our first entry (see 0310 GMT)....
Mohammad Habash, an independent MP, said, "The way out is by putting an end to the security stateand to work for a civil and democratic country where there is political pluralism and media freedom and to end the one-party rule. Confronting protests with bullets is not acceptable at all."
And dissident writer Tayyeb Tizini asserted, "The bullets are still being fired in Homs and Hama. I would have hoped that that would have stopped before the meeting. That's what's necessary."
1130 GMT: Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh has met with US envoy John Brennan in Saudi Arabia. Yemeni State Television has released this video, where Saleh can be seen with his hands still bandaged. According to the State Department, Brennan pushed Saleh to sign the GCC transition plan.
Friday, July 8, 2011 at 21:51 | Scott Lucas in Africa, EA Global, EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran ;)
Protesters gather in Tahrir Square for "Persistence Friday."
See our separate video entries: Latest Syria Videos: The "No Dialogue" Protests - Set 1 and Set 2
2056 GMT: As we close the day, a brief reflection. Our predictions this morning were pretty accurate. We saw massive demonstrations in Yemen, both for and against President Saleh. We saw a large pro-Gaddafi celebration in Libya because Gaddafi had ordered a single Friday Prayer celebration. We saw massive demonstrations in Suez and Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt.
Perhaps the most important development, however, was in Syria. In Damascus, we saw large protests in the center of the city, and security fired on the crowds, a sure sign that even the capital is starting to turn against the regime, slowly but steadily. In Hama, US Ambassador Robert Ford was described by the Syrian Interior Minister as meeting "with saboteurs in Hama ... who erected checkpoints, cut traffic and prevented citizens from going to work." However, he got a hero's welcome, and nearly 500,000 people peacefully took to the streets with few incidents of security cracking down on the city.
Protests continue tonight in Egypt, and US-Syria relations may have changed permanently. Check in tomorrow (0600 GMT) to find out what happens next.
2051 GMT: Near Tahrir Square, Cairo, 5:30 PM:
Near Tahrir Square, Cairo, 6:00 PM, and the protesters are still there now.Ali Abdullah Saleh, Bahrain, Egypt, Khalil al-Marzooq, Libya, Robert Ford, Syria, Yemen, al-Wefaq 
What started as a sit-in has turned into an experment in democratic society. In the last four months, between 3,000 and 4,000 tents have been pitched in the streets of the university district in the Yemeni capital Sana'a. The tent city includes pharmacies and a makeshift hospital, four daily newspapers, auditoriums, a garden and hastily constructed cement memorials for the martyrs.
It is a city of citizens, a taste of what Yemen could become, a concrete utopia made of tarps, pallets, satellite dishes and a hodgepodge of power cables the protesters have audaciously connected to the grid in the ancient city. There is a "diplomats' tent" and a tent for actors; there are daily poetry readings and demonstrations; there is even a prison.
2040 GMT: Protest tonight in Homs in Syria:
2035 GMT: Notes of defiance in a New York Times summary of the regime's military incursion into Hama today (see 1030 GMT)....
“People here are ready with rocks,” said Omar Habbal, an activist....In past weeks, Hama, a city of 800,000 on the corridor between Damascus and Aleppo, has emerged as a symbolic center of the nearly four-month uprising against 41 years of rule by the Assad family. Protests have gathered momentum, with a remarkable demonstration of tens of thousands on Friday, and youths have turned out nightly to taunt the government in Aasi Square, which they have renamed Freedom Square.
Though some have ambitiously described the city as liberated, the city’s administration still functions, and the military remains in force on Hama’s outskirts.
Residents said about 20 military vehicles and several buses carrying armed men in plain clothes, arrived in the early morning. As they entered, some of the security forces chanted in support of President Bashar al-Assad; some residents in the streets responded with, “God is great,” a religious invocation meant as defiance.
“The whole city woke up to defend against the raid,” Mr. Habbal said.
Some activists said residents threw rocks, and others tried to build roadblocks and barricades with whatever was available — burning tires, stones and trash dumpsters.
The plainclothesmen carried out dozens of arrests, mainly on the outskirts. One activist said 43, another put the number at 65, though the estimates seemed more guesswork. Residents reported gunfire, but the forces soon retreated.
“The security forces entered, then they left quickly,” said a 24-year-old student who gave his name as Abdel-Rahman. Like many, he insisted on partial anonymity. “People are waiting. They can’t control Hama unless they wipe out the people here.”
Yemen’s young people, who began holding anti-government protests outside of Sanaa University five months ago, have lost control of the cause they started.
A consortium of political parties — which, although have for years stood in opposition to President Ali Abdullah Saleh, still represent for most Yemenis a corrupt government system — have effectively hijacked the protest movement.
In the tent city where it all began, now known as Change Square, it is entrenched politicians belonging to the so-called Joint Meetings Parties (JMP), a fragile coalition of opposition groups that includes Islamists, Nasserites, and Cold War-era socialists, who have taken control of the stage and the microphone.
General Yahya Saleh“The problem is that the rest of the world believes that this is a youth revolution,” Brig. Gen. Yahya Saleh, one of the nephews, said in an interview in his office at the sprawling headquarters of Central Security Forces, the paramilitary division he commands.
“How many are there in the squares?” he asked. “Do they represent the majority? In a democracy, does the minority rule the majority? They should have some self-respect and go home. It’s been five months now, and it’s boring.”
