Egypt: January 25 anniversary demonstrations

• Hundreds of thousands of people protest against Scaf
• Generals release prisoners in the latest concession
• Arab League plan for Syria put to UN
• Read the latest summary
A young man gives the victory sign in Tahir Square, Cairo
A young man gives the victory sign in Tahir Square, Cairo. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

8.48am: Welcome to Middle East Live. Dozens of demonstrations are planned in Egypt to mark the first anniversary of the revolution that toppled president Hosni Mubarak. Amid a heavy security presence the protests are being held to express opposition to the ruling military junta. Jack Shenker and Abdel-Rahman Hussein in Cairo will be providing regular updates through out the day.

Here's a round up of the latest developments in Egypt and elsewhere in the region:

Egypt

• Activists have established multiple starting points from which scheduled marches will set out towards Cairo's Tahrir Square, Ahram reports. The day is expected to witness dozens of separate demonstrations, in which participants plan to hold up pictures of slain activists, Egyptian flags, and lists of outstanding revolutionary demands, it says.

• The head of the military junta, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, has promised to partially lift the country's three-decade-old state of emergency, in a last-ditch effort to bolster public support ahead of the demonstrations.

Human rights campaigners said the law remained in place because police were still allowed to detain anyone suspected of thuggery. Meanwhile, security measures were ramped up at government buildings as Egyptian authorities braced themselves for what is expected to be one of the biggest outbreaks of popular unrest since the fall of Mubarak on Wednesday.

• The Egyptian revolution is like the Nile in flood: try keeping that back with barriers and uniforms, writes novelist Ahdaf Soueif.

Ahdaf Soueif

The revolution, which began a year ago on 25 January, has gone everywhere. It has raged and tiraded through some spaces, flowed steadily through others, and seeped into yet more. There is nowhere, nothing, nobody who has not been affected by it.

As the People's Assembly convenes and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf) plots, the revolution continues along the pathways it has created and carves out new ones ...

Nature acts to redress an imbalance that has become dangerous. Only this time nature was human: a flood of people who left their homes and walked peaceably into the squares of their cities to say "no more". No more military rule whether clear or hidden, no more emergency or repressive laws, a restructuring of the police and the security apparatus, the freedom of political prisoners and civilians subjected to court martial. The cleansing of the judiciary. No to corruption. Yes to human rights. And a rearrangement of the economy to privilege the majority.

Parliament, as the elected legislative body, can start delivering on a lot of these. If the military allows it. Or if it gets rid of the military. What will become clear over the coming few weeks is how far parliament – or sections of it – will align itself with the aims of the revolution.

• Egypt faces an acute financial crisis that could undermine its political transition, the New York Times reports. Activists focused on forcing Egypt's military rulers to give up power say the economic malaise has become a major obstacle to their cause because so many Egyptians have come to crave a return to stability.

• Two of Egypt's best known activists Gigi Ibrahim and Mosa'ab Elshamy, tell the New York Times of their frustration at the lack of genuine change. "Really, what we have achieved was only just to topple Mubarak; we have Mubarak's generals running the country," said Ibrahim. Elshamy, who was arrested at a protest in May said "what I saw in prison made me feel more determined."

Syria

• Britain, the US and France are seeking Russian support for a new United Nations security council resolution to endorse Arab demands that Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, step down. Western countries have, in effect, abandoned attempts to impose UN sanctions on the Assad regime and are hoping for a new consensus for based on an Arab League timetable for a transition of power.The secretary general of the Arab League, Nabil al-Arabi, and Hamed bin Jassem AlThani, the Qatari prime minister, are planning to brief the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, in New York in the next few days.

• Barack Obama used his state of the union address to warn Assad that he cannot resist the "wave of change" that has swept across the region.

President Obama 2012 state of the union

I have no doubt that the Assad regime will soon discover that the forces of change cannot be reversed, and that human dignity cannot be denied.

How this incredible transformation will end remains uncertain. But we have a huge stake in the outcome. And while it's ultimately up to the people of the region to decide their fate, we will advocate for those values that have served our own country so well. We will stand against violence and intimidation. We will stand for the rights and dignity of all human beings –- men and women; Christians, Muslims and Jews. We will support policies that lead to strong and stable democracies and open markets, because tyranny is no match for liberty.

• Peter Harling from the International Crisis Groups highlights the collective failing over Syria in an excellent analysis of the crisis in Foreign Policy magazine.

If this impasse endures any longer, the struggle could quickly mutate into an open-ended civil war. Although the regime bears most of the responsibility for bringing the situation up to this point, the international community and exiled opposition have no excuse for moving it further along this terrifying path.

Libya

• Elders in Bani Walid said they were appointing their own local government after fighters opposed to the National Transitional Council seized control of the town. They denied claims they were loyal to Muammar Gaddafi, and there were no signs of Gaddafi-era green flags, which witnesses earlier said had been hoisted over the town.

Israel and the Palestinian territories

• An Israeli military court has ordered the speaker of the Palestinian legislative body to be jailed for six months without trial after he was arrested at a checkpoint last week. Aziz Dweik, a member of Hamas and a senior elected politician, was imprisoned "without charge or legal justification", a statement from his office said. It claimed Israel was attempting to thwart moves towards reconciliation between the rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas.

Tunisia

Persepolis

• The trial of a television executive on morality charges for airing the award winning Iranian cartoon Persepolis, is a relic of the despotism that Tunisians protested against, according to Human Rights Watch. The broadcast led to protests in Tunis because it contained a scene depicting God. Now Nabil Karoui, director of Nessma TV, will go on trial in April 19 for airing the film.

9.27am: Excitement is building in Egypt.

Activist Gigi Ibrahim tweets:

CNN's Ben Wedemen shows the size of the Tahrir crowd.

Protests have also begun in Suez, according to al-Jazeera's Adam Makary.

9.44am: The Guardian's Jack Shenker, who tweets under the name @hackneylad, is prepared for a busy day.

9.54am: Another apparent sop to Egyptian activists? Almost 2,000 detainees convicted by military courts and 1,250 convicted by civilian courts are reported to have released from Tora prison, according to Egyptian journalist Nadia abou el-Magd.

Meanwhile, the BBC's Helen Merriman says she has never seen so many Islamists in Tahrir Square.

10.18am: Despite his apparent phobia about crowds, Mohamed ElBaradei the former UN weapons inspectors and Egyptian reform leader, has joined the protests.

Earlier this month ElBaradei announced he would not be standing as a presidential candidate in protest at the ruling military council's failure to cede power to civilian rule.

The latest Arabist podcast discussed ElBaradei's motives and his fear of crowds.

10.32am: In Syria, three people are reported to have died in intense shelling in Damascus suburbs of Qalamoon. The LCC activist network said several explosions had been heard in the neighbourhood this morning. The area had been surrounded from all directions and shelled heavily, it added.

It named the dead as Mahmoud Oqab Durra, Dhafer Ahmad al-Saleh and Ayman Mohammad al-Abed.

Peter Harling's analysis of the crisis says the Syrian army is now struggling to contain territory in a bloody version of whack-a-mole.

The security services remain largely cohesive and ready to fight, but in many places they increasingly resemble at best an occupying force cut off from society, at worst a collection of sectarian militias on a rampage. The military is fragmenting, slowly but surely. The regime's territorial control depended on the protest movement remaining largely peaceful. Now that an insurgency is spreading, it is losing its grip. Arguably, the regime has refrained from using much of the firepower at its disposal, for fear of tilting the balance decisively against it within the international community. It could easily muster enough troops to put down resistance in any specific area, but at the expense of letting things slip elsewhere in a losing game of whack-a-mole; other rebellious areas would go for broke, knowing their turn would soon come if the regime was allowed to deal with them sequentially.

10.45am: Talking of ElBaradei ... the Nobel laureate is being put forward as a possible Arab League envoy to Syria, al-Masry al-Youm has reported.

It reported the London-based newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat as saying that the league's secretary general, Nabil al-Arabi, had proposed ElBaradei as the special envoy to implement its initiative to end the bloodshed.

At the time of writing, there is no sign of the story on paper's English language website.

10.56am: The Guardian is inviting readers to share thoughts and memories of the Egyptian revolution on Twitter using the hashtag #jan25stories. We'll be posting a round up later.

11.07am: Russia is prepared to to discuss a UN resolution on Syria but will not support unilateral sanctions or military interference, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, has said, according to Russia Today.

It reported that Lavrov had offered to host talks in Russia between the different Syrian forces. If the Syrian opposition does not want to go to Damascus, "this could be Cairo, the headquarters of the League of Arab States, Turkey or Russia's territory", he said.

Meanwhile, Russian and Syrian writers are at loggerheads over the crisis. Earlier this week, it was announced that the Russian Union of Writers had "honoured" Bashar al-Assad with an award for "his contribution to resistance against global hegemony".

The Syrian state news agency quoted the chairman of the union, the writer and historian Valery Ganchev, as declaring:

We wish success to President Al-Assad in solving the current crisis and we believe in this success.


Unsurprisingly, this has not gone down well with many Syrian writers. The Syrian Writers' Association has written an open letter to Ganchev, expressing its "bewilderment" and "shock":

As we feel the shock that the Writers' Union of the great Russian nation, the nation of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Lermonotov, Tugenev, Tolstoy, Checkoff, Mayakovsky, and Gorky, decided to reward a butcher who kills his people, we cannot surmise your motives to do so.

Even the regime-following Union of Syrian Writers did not go as far as your union.

We question whether the 750,000 members of your union have in fact agreed to such a dishonourable initiative: rewarding a bloodthirsty ruler who engages daily in bloody decimation against his people and did not hesitate when murdering hundreds of women and children, or when arresting poets, writers, journalists and artists.

11.19am: The live streaming site Bambuser is currently showing live video footage from the protests in Cairo.

Remembering those who were killed in the revolution has been a major theme so far.

11.30am: The Assad regime is fuelling sectarian divisions in a bid to fracture the opposition, a Christian woman from Hama tells Arab League monitors in this video.

Everyone knows that the number of Christians in Hama is small and we are minority in this town. Everyone knows that Assad's regime is playing games to create fear among minorities, even among Christians who believe in ousting the oppressive regime.

This atmosphere of fear has curbed the courage among Christians who want freedom and dignity and stayed living under oppression. Any Christian who might be pro-revolution is in fear of his brother or his neighbour's harm if they find out about him.

This has fully paralysed them and kept them living in constant fear of Assad's regime. If their kids get killed, injured or detained, they have to be silent. They have to support the brutal regime under fear.

The Alawite Assad regime is spreading fear among minorities that Sunni sects will slaughter them if ousted. We have been living in Syria for centuries with love and harmony with other sects, without any problems. We have to fight two beasts at this time – the Syrian regime and sectarian strife.

The clip could not be independently verified. On Tuesday, the Arab League decided to continue the monitoring mission to Syria despite the withdrawal of the Gulf states from the initiative.

11.35am: In the Cairo neighbourhood of Shubra, 3,000 protesters began marching towards Tahrir Square at 1pm local time, writes Abdel Rahman Hussein.

A year ago on this spot, protesters rallied against the police. This time, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is the target of their ire.

Chants are ringing out against the military council and military rule, with protesters insisting the revolution is unfinished. As one chant puts it: "Field Marshall Hussain Tantawi is just like Mubarak."

Shubra has a sizable Coptic Christian population and protesters have stressed unity between Muslims and Christians in their songs. On a truck driving in front of the march is a giant obelisk with the names of all the martyrs. It was the work of the Maspero Youth Union, a Coptic Christian group formed after the revolution.

There are numerous grievances against Scaf and concerns about the transition period while the generals remain the country's main overseers.

Sherif Wahid, an electrical engineer participating in the protest said: "I'm here to stress that we, the people, want to write the constitution, not the military council. And the military should not have special status in any new constitution – no one will be above the law. We are not here to celebrate the anniversary. The Egyptian people still haven't benefited, and they will be not be tricked.

11.53am: It is difficult to get an idea of the scale of the protests in Cairo. But those taking part (not always the best guide) claim they are huge.

Omar Robert Hamilton tweets:

Is Gigi Ibrahim getting carried away? She claims:

The Big Pharaoh tweets:

12.15pm: Time for a brief roundup of today's developments so far.

Egypt

• Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets in towns and cities across Egypt to mark the one-year anniversary of the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak. While some are celebrating the successes of the revolution, and the strong showing of Islamist parties in the elections, others are using the day to intensify the pressure on the ruling military authorities.

A chant in the Shubra neighbourhood of Cairo likened Field Marshall Tantawi to the deposed former president. Many of the protesters are carrying tributes to those who died in the revolution and its aftermath.

• About 3,000 people pardoned by military rulers on the occasion of the anniversary have been freed from Tora prison on the outskirts of Cairo. The development came just hours after the release of the blogger Maikel Nabil and seemed aimed at appeasing reformist demands.

Syria

• Russia is prepared to to discuss a UN security council resolution on Syria as long as it "couldn't be interpreted to justify any foreign military interference in the Syrian crisis," the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said.

Britain, the US and France are seeking Russian support for a new resolution to endorse Arab demands that Bashar al-Assad step down. The secretary general of the Arab League, Nabil al-Arabi, and Hamed bin Jassem AlThani, the Qatari prime minister, are planning to brief the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, in New York in the next few days. Lavrov also said Moscow would block any attempts to get UN approval for sanctions against Syria.

• Three people are reported to have died in heavy shelling in the Damascus suburb of Qalamoon. The LCC activist network said several explosions had been heard in the neighbourhood this morning. The area had been surrounded on all sides and shelled heavily, it added.

• Mohammad ElBaradei has reportedly been put forward as a potential Arab League envoy to Syria. The London-based newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, quoted by al-Masry al-Youm, said the Nobel laureate was suggested by Nabil al-Arabi, the secretary general of the Arab League. ElBaradei has said he will not stand as president in Egypt in protest at the ongoing military rule.

12.25pm: Liberals and Islamists are gathering on different sides of Tahrir Square in a reflection of Egypt's deep political divides, AP reports.


Volunteers from the Brotherhood, a fundamentalist group that won just under half of parliament's seats in recent elections, were checking IDs and conducting searches of the thousands flocking to join the protests.

Other Brotherhood followers formed a human chain around a large podium set up by the group overnight. The Brotherhood loyalists were chanting religious songs and shouting "Allahu Akbar", meaning God is great.

In contrast, liberals on the other side of the square were chanting "Down, down with military rule," and demanding that Tantawi, Mubarak's defence minister for nearly 20 years, be executed.

12.51pm: Government forces have stormed restive districts of Hama, according to activists, firing mortars and deploying snipers in an assault that killed at least one person.

The assault began Tuesday night, according to the Local Co-ordination Committees, quoted by AP. Shells hit several districts around Hama's Bab Qebli area, the LCC said.

One person was killed by sniper fire, according to the LCC and another opposition group, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

1.11pm: The ruling generals want to portray today as a celebration of the revolution, but activists have other ideas, Jack Shenker reports from Cairo.

"From where I am, it is most certainly a protest," he said.

Jack Shenker

Outside of Tahrir Square, from every corner of the city, including Giza where I am walking at the moment, there are possibly hundreds of thousands of people ... for them this isn't about celebration ... this about fighting to complete the revolution and bring down the military government. [There is] a very angry mood and a very confident one.

For many #Jan25 protests are not about celebration but fighting to complete the revolution, @hackneylad reports from Cairo (mp3)

Recent concessions have emboldened rather than calmed protesters, Jack said. Field marshal Tantawi has been forced into making concessions to try dampen the energy of the protest movement, he added. But Tantawi has succeeded only in bringing more people out on the streets.

Many people here are saying they have never seen these numbers [of protesters] even on January 28 last year. This feels even bigger today. It is an incredibly strong turnout and it doesn't bode well for the military government.

It is difficult to predict whether the protest will turn violent, Jack said.

The security forces have deliberately not deployed in Tahrir today. Where they are guarding very heavily is Maspero and the state television building and some protesters are expected to move towards there, especially after dark. If they attempted to storm the building there would certainly be clashes.

Speaking above chants of "freedom", Jack said many protesters intend to hold a sit-in in Tahrir Square. "Never mind the parliament, never mind this so called transition timetable, they won't be leaving until this military government falls."

1.20pm: The march in the Shubra district of Cairo will not head directly to Tahrir Square but will instead go to Qasr El Nil bridge first to hold a minute's silence for the martyrs, reports Abdel-Rahman Hussein.

Many of the protesters are wearing masks of those who died in the Maspero violence last year- Khaled Saeed, Azhar scholar Emad Effat, Salafi Sayed Bilal and Mina Daniel.

Cairo-women-in-masks Women in Cairo wear V for Vendetta masks Photograph: Guardian

These veiled women are wearing the V for Vendetta masks that have become a global symbol of resistance.

1.47pm: Many marches from across Cairo are converging in Tahrir Square, according to reports on Twitter.

This video- apparently shot at 1pm local time- gives an idea of the scale of the protests.

2.00pm: A "peacekeeping" force of former NTC rebels has set up checkpoints on the outskirts of Ban Walid, the town that was re-taken by Gaddafi loyalists earlier this week.

Libya's defence minister has held talks with townsmen today, reports Reuters.


"The minister came here today and we are speaking to him to find a solution to this problem," said Abdul Azziz al-Jmaili, a member of a local council in Bani Walid, 150 km (90 miles) south of Tripoli, adding that government forces were around the town.

The minister, Osama al-Juwali, is part of the provisional government installed in November by the National Transitional Council (NTC), the self-appointed body which won Western backing in an uprising that ousted Gaddafi in August.

2.25pm: The Wael Ghonimm, the Google executive turned revolutionary hero after he was released from prison last year, has appeared at today's demonstration.

Jack Shenker has spotted two other celebrity revolutionaries.

2.48pm: Jack Shenker can see protesters in every direction from Cairo's 6 October Bridge.

In an Audioboo update from the bridge he says throngs of people are converging on an already packed Tahrir Square. "Tahrir is at capacity," he said.

Egypt protests Nile (mp3)

Many people are despondent at the gap between their hopes last year at the time of the revolution and the reality of how little has changed since, Jack said. But he said they believed more concessions and changes will come via pressure from the street.

The revolution is on its way to Tahrir", is the chant. Earlier they were singing 'Bread, freedom and human dignity, bread, freedom and social justice'. That is what remains to be achieved in Egypt and these protesters are not going to rest until they get it.

2.56pm: Thousands of people on the Kasr El-Nil bridge are trying to get into Tahrir Square, Abdel Rahman Hussein reports.

Such are the numbers inside the Square and on the bridge, it will be interesting to see if all will manage to get in.

On the bridge protesters are holding a mock funeral procession, carrying caskets with pictures of those killed since 25 January 2011. The procession is solemn and accompanied by a military-style drum beat.

3.01pm: Maikel Nabil, the detained blogger who was released on the eve of the anniversary, has refused to accept a pardon from Egypt's military rulers, Ahram reports.

In this video address, recorded on Tuesday, Ahram quotes him saying:

I want everyone to know that I categorically refuse the decision of the military dictator Mohamed Hussein Tantawi to absolve me. I strenuously reject the word 'pardon' because I did not commit a crime to be pardoned by the leader of the arm.

I was practising my right to express my opinion freely, to adopt a certain belief and to promote my thoughts. I did not commit a crime."

If the SCAF thinks this is a way to abort the revolution and persuade some people not to hit the streets tomorrow on 25 January to chant for the fall of the military rule, I would like to stress that my release does not mean the military is good, that the regime has changed, nor is there democracy and freedom of speech in Egypt.

And I would like you to know that the 302 days that I lived in prison were full of suffering and pain, thanks to direct instructions from the members of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

That means we are under a political regime that is corrupt, tyrannical and bloodthirsty and which we cannot leave in power for one more day, as this would jeopardize our lives and those of our siblings and loved ones.

3.12pm: The head of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent in the northern town of Idlib was shot dead on Wednesday, Reuters reports.

"We just learned a few minutes ago of the death of Mr. Abdulrazak Jbero, head of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent branch in Idlib. Mr. Jbero was on his way by car from Damascus to Idlib. He was shot. Circumstances are still unclear," Beatrice Megevand-Roggo, head of ICRC operations for the Near and Middle East, told Reuters.

"Regardless of the circumstances, the ICRC condemns this very severely," she said. "The lack of respect for medical services is still a great issue in Syria."

Jbero, a Syrian national, served as first president of the country's Red Crescent society, an ICRC spokesman said.

The activist group, the Local Coordination Committees in Syria, said Jbero was shot by the security forces - a claim that cannot be independently verified.

3.33pm: Syria's state news agency claimed the Red Crescent official in Idlib was assassinated by an "armed terrorist group".

An informed official source told a Sana correspondent that an armed terrorist group opened fire on Dr Jbeiro and killed him with a shot to the head after which he was transported to Maaret al-Numan Hospital where he passed away.

Its account also cannot be independently verified.

3.38pm: Al-Arabiya has published what it claims is a leaked version of the Arab League's report on Syria.

The 14-page pdf document is in Arabic.

We'll post a translation when one is available.

3.47pm: There are tensions between the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and the more liberal groups in Tahrir Square, writes the blogger Zeinobia.

[A liberal] stage announced that they will hold a trial for Hosni Mubarak with judges and so on in the square, then there will be a march to get him from the international health center. That stage also announced that there will be a march from Tora city to Tora prison to get the rest of the Mubarak gang and bring them to the square.

The [Muslim Brotherhood] stage airs patriotic songs and even held some marriage ceremony on in. The families of martyrs are extremely angry from that stage describing it as celebratory; one of the martyrs' mother told me that they aren't here to celebrate.

Syrians have also got a stage in the square, she adds.

Activist Tarek Shalaby tweets:

CNN's Ben Wedeman says a stage has been set up in Tahrir Square for opponents of the Syrian government.

He also highlights this graffiti:

4.08pm: From the centre of Cairo to the centre of Manama, where Bahraini opposition groups staged a rare march- and security forces reportedly responded with tear gas and stun grenades.

AP reports that:


Police set up checkpoints and many shops were closed after the Wednesday unrest. Clashes occur almost daily in the island kingdom, but mostly in areas outside the Manama's business districts.

A government statement also said at least 41 policemen were injured in clashes with demonstrators that took place elsewhere on Tuesday. One policeman has severe burns from a petrol bomb.

This video, purportedly shot today in the Ras Raman area of Manama, shows protesters marching followed by the noise of explosions. It could not be independently confirmed.

4.19pm: The desire by many protesters to seize the anniversary as an opportunity for a fresh revolution is captured in this video by Ahram Online.

In it, one man is shown leading the crowds in shouting:


Yes, we're chanting against the military. We've come back again, and this time we're not leaving.

Another chant goes:

Today is not a festival; it's a revolution!

4.36pm: A reminder that you can watch live images of Tahrir Square here.

4.58pm: Hama has borne the brunt of the violence in Syria today, activists report, with heavy machine gun fire and explosives bombarding the city for a second day. The LCC activist network said in a statement:


The Syrian army is bombarding Hama with heavy weapons, using rocket-propelled grenades.

The 'shabiha' (regime militiamen) and security agents backed up by tanks are pounding all parts of the Baba Qibli neighborhood.

There will be dead and wounded. Houses have collapsed.

The LCC estimates that, since the beginning of the uprising, Hama has lost 953 citizens, including 69 children and 33 people who died under torture.

5.11pm: "Two words on my feed - 'maspero' and 'sit-in' - make me nervous," writes @lijahzarwan on Twitter.

Large numbers of people have reportedly gathered outside the state TV and radio building in Maspero chanting "liars, liars".

The Guardian's Jack Shenker (@hackneylad) reports that overflow marchers who couldn't get into Tahrir are heading to Maspero- "symbol of #SCAF's media assault on the #jan25 revolution".

In October, 27 people- mostly Coptic Christians- died during clashes between security forces and protesters conducting a sit-in outside the television building. Hence the unease.

5.29pm: Numbers in Tahrir have slightly receded, but that just means it's quite packed rather than fully packed, reports Abdel-Rahman Hussein: there are still tens of thousands in the square.


At the Radio and Television Building in Maspero there are about 500 protesters gathered there chanting "Here are the liars" as well as chanting against Scaf rule.

There is palpable anger at the state media for its coverage of the revolution and its pro-military line ever since. However protesters don't tend to mass in numbers at Maspero, and some protesters are urging people to head back to the square.

The reason is the line of police and army soldiers guarding the building behind barbed wire. There are also police lined up in front of the barbed wire facing the protesters.

Some do not want matters to escalate into a potential confrontation. Others, however, feel that it is imperative to voice their disgust at the state media and by extension, the military that allegedly calls the shots behind the scenes.

Protester Haytham Aiyad said: "Maspero needs to be cleansed. The problem is that very few inside that building want real change, the others follow the regime line and are its voice. They are not willing to change. People here aren't many but the numbers grow bit by bit. Cleansing the media is one of the most important revolutionary demands."

19.30pm: Apologies for the lack of updates: we've had some technological hitches. But here's a brief summary of the latest developments across the region.

Egypt

• Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in towns and cities across Egypt to mark the one-year anniversary of the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak. While crowds thronged the streets in places such as Suez and Alexandria, the focus of activity throughout the day was Tahrir Square, birthplace of the revolution. As night fell, increasing numbers gathered at the Maspero radio and television building.

• The mood of the marches reflected the ambiguities and divisions of a revolution which many believe is not over yet. Some people- foremost among them Islamist groups who performed well at the polls in recent elections- saw the day as a celebration. Others were determined to use it as a means of voicing protest at the military rulers who they accuse of hijacking the revolution. Much of the day was given over, as well, to the commemoration of the revolution's victims.

• In a move widely seen as a sop to the latter, about 3,000 people were freed from Tora prison on the outskirts of Cairo. The development came just hours after the release of the blogger Maikel Nabil, who recorded a video on YouTube saying he contested the authorities' claims he had been 'pardoned' as- he insisted- he had committed no crime.

Syria

• The head of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent in the northern town of Idlib was shot dead. Reuters quoted an ICRC spokeswoman as saying that Abdulrazak Jbero had been on his way by car from Damascus to Idlib when he was shot. The state news agency claimed he had been shot by an "armed terrorist group".

• Hama saw the worst of the violence in Syria, with heavy machine gun fire and explosives bombarding the city for a second day, activists said. The LCC network said that houses had collapsed and that there would be "dead and wounded".

• Russia remains opposed to sanctions against Syria, said Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. He said his country was prepared to discuss a UN security council resolution as long as it "couldn't be interpreted to justify any foreign military interference in the Syrian crisis."

• Al-Arabiya published what it claimed was a leaked version of the Arab League's report on Syria. The 14-page pdf document is in Arabic.

Bahrain

• Security forces fired tear gas and stun grenades after opposition groups staged a rare march into the center of the capital Manama. The incident came a day after violence in which the government said at least 41 policemen were injured in clashes.

Libya

• Libya's defence minister held talks with townsmen in Bani Walid, a former stronghold of Muammar Gaddafi where local fighters drove out a pro-government militia this week. Reuters quoted Abdul Azziz al-Jmaili, a member of a local council, as saying a solution was being sought.

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