Syria Snapshot: Inside and Outside Hama (Yassin-Kassab)

For days Syrian security forces stayed out of Hama; not even traffic police were seen in the city. During these days, no armed gangs emerged from the shadows to terrorise and loot. Christians and Alawis were not rounded up and shot. Nobody was whipped for wearing an un-Islamic haircut. All that happened was day and night demonstrations against the regime swelled into crowds of hundreds of thousands --- men and women, adults and children.

Perhaps the security forces stayed out of the city on the request of Hama’s governor, and perhaps that’s why he was sacked. Now security forces have entered the city and brought plenty of insecurity in their wake.

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Iran Feature: Could the Economy Bring Down Ahmadinejad...and the Regime? (Setrakian)

Sanctions are biting harder than ever, but business still gets done through the leaks and loopholes. So it’s not changing the regime’s behavior where it counts: on its nuclear policy, specifically, its accelerating enrichment of uranium. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s policies have been largely bad for business and made life harder for most Iranians. Together, that could get Ahmadinejad booted from office, but it probably won’t topple the regime. Iran is rolling in oil money – a salve for all its economic wounds. But Iran can’t effectively tap the wealth underground, given the bans on foreign investment in the energy sector. That, combined with overall mismanagement, makes Iran’s economy is “fundamentally unsustainable,” in the words of one analyst – a “patient with many viruses.”

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Libya, Syria (and Beyond) LiveBlog: Insurgents Advance, Resistance Continues

2106 GMT: The people of Sana'a, Yemen, protesting tonight in anticipation of more protests tomorrow:

Tonight's protests in the Qaboun district of Damascus, Syria:

2100 GMT: The people of Tahrir Square, Egypt, get ready for tomorrow's protests.

2040 GMT: The US Ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, has traveled to the city of Hama and plans on spending the next 24+ hours with the protesters there. The State Department Spokesperson, Victoria Nuland, elaborates:

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Latest Syria Video: The Hama Resistance

Video which has come in overnight testifies to the loud, large resistance to the Assad regime's probing attempts --- through raids and arrests by security forces and troops --- to control Hama, Syria's fourth-largest city. In the first clip, protesters shout to President Assad, "O Bashar, you are not Syrian; Syrians don't kill other Syrians":

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Syria (and Beyond) LiveBlog: The Regime's Dilemma in Hama

Claimed footage of a protest last night in Hama, telling the President, "To Hell with You, Bashar"

2015 GMT: David Smith reports for The Guardian of London, "Tripoli: A Stronghold by Day, A Battleground at Night":

Anecdotal evidence suggests that there are now regular night-time clashes in the Libyan capital. .

The raids have turned parts of Tripoli, a city with no shortage of privately owned firearms, into a no-go area after dark. The man, who said he has stocked up on diesel in readiness for "zero hour", added: "Normally wedding parties go on until 2am, but now they finish at 8pm. No one goes out after sunset. They all stay at home."

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The Latest from Iran (6 July): Revolutionary Guards Do Politics

1850 GMT: Reformist Watch. Ali Shakouri Rad, a senior member of the Islamic Iran Participation Front, has told an audience of young supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mohammad Khatami, "We do not trust the government and the Guardian Council, and if they want to monitor elections --- given the context of past elections --- they are meaningless."

1705 GMT: Media Watch. Fars tries to take the high ground in the current political conflict, claims that the "disclosures" of the Supreme Leader's and Ahmadinejad's followers against each other are "media charlatanism".

1700 GMT: Parliament v. President. Speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani, in the midst of his play for support from the Supreme Leader, has declared that Ayatollah Khamenei, in a meeting with MPs, said the Majlis has the right to interrogate and impeach the President.

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US Politics Special: Fiddling While America Defaults?

With four weeks to go before the US faces a possible default on its debt, there is still little sense of how President Obama will lead the country out of the public finances mess the nation faces. It defies belief that the Administration does not have some kind of long-term strategy to ensure that America pays its bills come 2 August, but quite what that plan is nobody outside the Administration could claim to know for sure.

One disturbing possibility to begin considering is that Obama is privy to information that the crisis in America's finances is worse than thought --- his seeming reluctance to get fully involved in the debate is, in fact, a masterful attempt to avoid spooking the markets before a Band-aid can be slapped on the problem. That is pure speculation, but it says something about the ineffectiveness of the President that the only way to take some cold comfort from his performance is to imagine an even worse scenario.

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Iraq: Dozens Die in Truck Bombs North of Baghdad (Ghazi/Arango)

First, at midday, a truck exploded near a municipal building in Taji, north of the Iraqi capital. As people rushed to help the injured, a second, larger explosion struck. Nearly three dozen were killed, and many more wounded.

In the afternoon at a nearby hospital in the Baghdad neighborhood of Kadhimiya, a macabre scene unfolded, as women cried and shouted over the bodies of their husbands and sons, and the wounded, bloody and covered in dust, sought care. A list of the dead and wounded adorned a wall; the youngest victim was 3 years old.

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Tunisia Snapshot: The Economic Fallout of the Uprising & Libya

Unemployed in Gafsa (August 2010)A few weeks before the month of Ramadan sets in, Tunisia faces the economic fallout of two very different recent events. The first happened nearly five months ago and swept General Zine el Abidine Ben Ali from power in a popular uprising which wrought minimum damage on the fabric of Tunisian farming, manufacturing and tourism infrastructure - indeed there were numerous instances of workers defending factories against marauders or Ben Ali's militia. The second has been in Libya, where the three month UN-authorised military intervention, formally led by NATO, in what had already become a civil war, has inflicted considerable damage to the country's infrastructure. The instability attendant to a prolonged military campaign in Libya presents a serious strategic threat to its northern neighbour, Tunisia.

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Iran in the Movies: The Politics of Ashgar Farhadi's "Nader and Simin: A Separation" (Golsorkhi)

In the real world the Green Movement is stalling because it brought too many from Farhadi's couple A and not enough from couple B on to its side. Not simply because there are way more Bs than As, but because couple A have stuff to fall back on (potential for emigration, material wealth to cash in moment of crisis) and couple B have only faith and an apparently endless ability for suffering. 

Khamenei and Ahmadinejad both overestimate the reliability of this power base. This couple and this class are also capable of unravelling under pressure.

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