...an organization of Arabic-speaking states with 22 member countries and four observers. The League tries to achieve Arab consensus on issues, which usually leaves them doing nothing but a bit of grimacing and mustache cursing...
envoy Kofi Annan
...Ghanaian diplomat who served as the seventh and so far the worst Secretary-General of the UN. Annan and the UN were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize for something or other that probably sounded good at the time. In December 2004, reports surfaced that Kofi's son Kojo received payments from the Swiss company Cotecna, which had won a lucrative contract under the UN Oil-for-Food Program. Kofi Annan called for an investigation to look into the allegations, which stirred up the expected cesspool but couldn't seem to come up with enough evidence to indict Kofi himself, or even Kojo...'s peace plan.
Renewed bloodshed on Thursday killed at least 23 people, putting to the test the hard-won ceasefire plan.
The Local Coordination Committees, the main activist group spurring protests on the ground, said security forces killed nine people in Homs, six in Idlib, five in Damascus
...The
City of Jasminis the oldest continuously-inhabited city in the world. It has not always been inhabited by the same set of fascisti...
' countryside and two in Aleppo
...For centuries, Aleppo was Greater Syria's largest city and the Ottoman Empire's third, after Constantinople and Cairo. Although relatively close to Damascus in distance, Aleppans regard Damascenes as country cousins...
The opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) said earlier on Thursday that regime forces killed three civilians and tossed in the clink dozens more in defiance of its undertaking to Annan to halt all military operations and withdraw troops from towns and cities by 6 am (0300 GMT).
The SNC said the epicenter of Thursday's bloodshed was the flashpoint central region of Hama, long a focus of dissent to Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir
Pencilneckal-Assad
Before going into the family business Pencilneck was an eye doctor...
's regime.
Spokeswoman Basma Qoudmani called for peaceful demonstrations across Syria to test the government's readiness to accept public shows of dissent. "The real test will be if there is shooting or not when people demonstrate," she said.
State media charged that it was the opposition who were jeopardizing the long-awaited truce, accusing rebel fighters of bombing a bus ferrying troops to their base in Syria's second-largest city Aleppo.
"An armed terrorist group used an bomb to target a bus transporting officers and non-commissioned officers to their unit in Aleppo. It killed a lieutenant colonel" and maimed 24 others, state news agency SANA said.
The interior ministry urged tens of thousands of people who decamped the violence both inside and outside the country to return home and offered an amnesty to opposition gunnies without "blood on their hands."
The rebel Free Syrian Army, for its part, insisted it was "100 percent committed" to the ceasefire in a conflict which monitors say has killed more than 10,000 people since March last year.
"The regime is being elusive. We are 100 percent committed to the ceasefire, but the regime is not abiding by it," FSA front man Colonel Qassem Saadeddine told Agence La Belle France Presse by Internet.
Saadeddine denied any involvement in the attack on the bus, dismissing the report as regime propaganda "to avoid fulfilling its commitment."
Among Syria's allies, China welcomed the regime's decision to uphold a "comprehensive ceasefire" describing it as a step towards a political solution. Russia called for more time.
Hours before the deadline expired, the military unleashed a lethal offensive against protest centers, killing 25 civilians on Wednesday, including 10 in the rebel stronghold of Rastan, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations
...an idea whose time has gone...
Susan Rice said Assad's regime had intensified violence since it first committed to Annan's six-point plan on April 1.
"Its commitments therefore have little, if any, credibility ... given that track record," Rice said.
Annan's plan calls for the withdrawal of forces from urban areas, a halt to fighting, a daily two-hour humanitarian truce, the release of arbitrarily jugged people, freedom of movement for journalists and the right to demonstrate.
SNC chief Burhan Ghalioun urged the international community to "monitor its implementation in full, mainly the right to demonstrate... and to provide the means to protect the people if the regime violates the plan."
"International observers should be on the ground as soon as possible," he said.