Syria (and Beyond) Live Coverage: Largest Protests Ever?

Homes burn as gunfire rocks the Khalidiyah district of Homs on Friday night.

See also Egypt Live Coverage: Former President Mubarak Learns His Fate
Friday's Syria (and Beyond) Live Coverage: Another Mass Execution?

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1943 GMT: Lebanon. The toll from today's clashes in Tripoli between supporters and opponents of the Syrian regime has risen to nine dead and 42 wounded, according to residents and a doctor.

1919 GMT: Syria. The Local Co-ordination Committees of Syria has said that 27 people died across the country today, including 11 in Homs Province and eight in Idlib Province.

A reporter for State TV, presenting live, is hit with a shoe by a man who shouts, "The Syrian TV is a liar!".

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Canada (and Beyond) Special: The Significance of Today's Protest in Montreal

The generally good-natured manner of the Quebec protests should not mask this is a fundamental conflict, between generations and ideas of social justice, reaching beyond Canada to modern democracies around the world. What is taking place in Montreal is an early and unofficial referendum on the global economic model of an elite that facilitated debt, government and personal, threatening to plunge the world into another Great Depression.

What the protesters in Montreal are rebelling against is the idea that spending cuts and austerity measures are required to rebuild the same economic system that caused the crisis in the first place. And some of the reaction to the reasonable desire among many students to take up the responsibilities of an adult citizen, without the de-humanising debt burden to get an education, is worrisome.

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Egypt Live Coverage: Former President Mubarak Learns His Fate

Tahrir Square in Cairo tonight

See also Syria (and Beyond) Live Coverage: Largest Protests Ever?

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2100 GMT: State TV is reporting at least 61 people injured in clashes today.

2000 GMT: Egyptian football supporters, known as "Ultras", have been part of the uprising and protests since January 2011. They were in Tahrir Square again tonight:

And in the Sinai Peninsula, a march in Arish:

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The Latest from Iran (2 June): Holding the Currency Line

See also The Latest from Iran (1 June): Through the Syrian Looking Glass

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1552 GMT: All the President's Men. Prominent conservative activist Abdolhossein Ruholamini, whose son died in the abuses in the Kahrizak detention centre in summer 2009, said earlier this week that charges were being filed against Saeed Mortazavi, then Tehran Prosecutor General and now Presidential advisor.

Now Ruholamini has claimed that the Government was informed about the filing of the charges against Mortazavi before it controversially appointed him as head of the Social Security Fund.

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Syria (and Beyond) Live Coverage: Another Mass Execution?

2137 GMT: Syria. Today, protests may have been the largest and most widespread that Syria has seen since the beginning of the uprising last March:

Victory! 900 protests counted in #Syria this Friday in 637 unique protest points. 83 protests in Damascus city.

— Free Syrian (@HamaEcho) June 1, 2012

A group of activists have collected over 900 videos of today's protests in a database. Obviously, we have not had time to review all 901 videos that have been put into the spreadsheet, but a spot check of a few indicates that the spreadsheet is credible.

Beyond the sheer number of protests (a record, we believe), spread over a large number of protest locations, today's protests were held during a period of escalation in violence, a factor that should have suppressed the size and scope of demonstrations. It did not. Furthermore, there have been extremely large and impressive demonstrations in Aleppo, in particular, and in Damascus.

The trend is now established and clear. The protest movement has been consistently growing in strength, and if it continues at this pace it poses a serious risk to the Assad regime. Beyond the protests, the amount of labor strikes, closed shops, sit ins, traffic disruptions, and general chaos across Syria threatens to erode the economy at an increasingly rapid pace.

The people of Syria have spoken yet again, in the clearest terms possible. Popular support for Assad is rapidly shrinking, and an ever-growing throng of voices are calling for the fall of the regime.

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The Latest from Iran (1 June): Through the Syrian Looking Glass

See also Iran Feature: Obama Ordered Cyber-Attacks on Tehran
Iran Feature: 17 NGOs Protest "Government Assault on Academic Freedom"
Iran Audio Feature: "Tehran's Troubled Relationship with China" --- Scott Lucas with Monocle 24
Thursday's The Latest from Iran (31 May): Towards a Diplomatic Crash in Moscow?

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2010 GMT: Clerical Intervention. An extract from the statement of Grand Ayatollah Mousavi Ardebili criticising elements in the regime for letting down the people --- we are watching to see if this causes ripples in Iranian politics and society:

Now I see some deeds and outcomes and wonder if we have been negligent in our responsibilities or are culpable. When our friends were struggling, they had much higher expectations....

I want to use this opportunity to tell the honourable people of Iran, the families of martyrs, and all the people who worked hard that we stepped in this path in good faith, but perhaps we were negligent, and if any of the current problems and failures are results of my actions, I apologize to everybody....

I am speaking for myself. I am concerned about my own actions and inactions. If we all had acted appropriately, we would not have reached this situation. I am afraid that all of us, former and current officials of the country, have to apologize to the people, more so those of us that wear the cloak of spiritual leaders....

Mousavi Ardebili urged the Islamic Republic's leaders to "honestly apologise for their mistakes" without fear of the consequences, as honesty and a serious attempt at making amends would result in understanding and reconciliation.

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Iran Feature: Obama Ordered Cyber-Attacks on Tehran (Sanger)

From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

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Iran Feature: 17 NGOs Protest "Government Assault on Academic Freedom"

Imprisoned Iranian StudentsStudents and higher education personnel in Iran continue to face routine and pervasive violations of their rights on the basis of their opinions, gender, religion and ethnicity. The Network for Education and Academic Rights, an independent non-governmental organization that monitors academic freedom, documented at least 92 violations of academic rights in Iran in 2011. According to the largest independent student organization in Iran, Daftar-e Tahkim Vahdat, between March 2009 and February 2012, there were at least 396 cases of students banned from further study by the Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology as a result of their peaceful political or other dissent. Additionally, at least 634 students were arrested by security and intelligence organs and 254 students convicted for similar reasons, with the correlated impact on their ability to continue their education. The Ministry of Science, Technology, and Research declared Daftar-e Tahkim-e Vahdat an “illegal” union in 2009, on grounds that it “engaged in activities that endangered national security.”

The Iranian authorities have threatened, suspended, arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced student activists for peaceful criticism of government policies on a regular basis. Officials also have routinely shut down hundreds of student gatherings, publications, and independent organizations. More than 30 students are currently serving long prison sentences in Iran solely for exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association, and assembly by expressing their opinions, participating in demonstrations, or membership of an independent student organization critical of government policies. Combined, these students have been sentenced to more than 130 years in prison, in some cases up to 15 years.

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Syria Feature: Who and What are the Shabiha? (Keller)

Shabiha pursuing protesters at Aleppo University, 16 May 2012

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"Women, children and old men were shot dead," Syria's foreign ministry spokesman, Jihad Makdissi, told reporters this week. "This is not the response of the heroic Syrian army."

Then who did kill 108 people in Houla, including 49 children, in cold blood? The answer appears to lie with the armed civilian militias from nearby Alawite villages, who are known to Syrians as shabiha, from the Arabic word for ghosts.

The term initially referred to shadowy gangs of smugglers who grew up around the coastal city of Latakia in the 1970s, and whose immunity from law seemed to come from their tribal and village connections to the ruling Assad family.

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Iran Audio Feature: "Tehran's Troubled Relationship with China" --- Scott Lucas with Monocle 24

I spoke for more than 10 minutes last night with Monocle 24 Radio about the state of Iran's relations with China.

The starting point was this week's cancellation by Iran of a $2 billion contract for China to build a dam, but discussion soon widened to Iran-Chinese relations, the effects of sanctions, and the state of the Iranian economy, including the role of the Revolutionary Guards.

To get to the discussion:

1. Go to Monocle 24's "Timeshift" page.
2. Click "Filter Monocle 24", tick "The Monocle Daily", and click "Apply Changes".
3. Select the programme for 31 May.
4. The item is at the start of the programme, after the 30-second Monocle 24 identification.