Revolts

BEIJING - "Beijing power struggle heralds end of China Communist Party," screams one headline. More sensational headlines purport to reveal how the wife of recently sacked Politburo member Bo Xilai poisoned an Englishman, who may have been her lover. And if that weren't enough, other stories claim that "Bo planned airline crash" and "slept with more than 100 women. " It's payback time for Chinese exiles, especially those with a printing press, television station or just a computer at their disposal.

The cigarette smoke hovers dense inside the neighborhood cafe. Young patrons knock back beers at greasy wooden tables. A heated debate rages about Syria's revolt. The rotund bar owner labels the rebels baltajiya , or bandits, who are ravaging towns and villages. Demonstrators want only change and freedom, replies a young man in a hooded sweat shirt. Others wrangle over the president and the uncertain future. It is a striking scene for a tightly controlled police state.

The elected president of Mauritania was ousted Wednesday in a bloodless military coup that appeared to spell the end for the Arab nation's experiment in democracy. A council led by a military commander ousted President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi and placed him and other government officials in the North African country under house arrest. There were no reports of gunfire or violence.

"Pink slime," a food additive made from spare beef trimmings that's treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill off E. coli , salmonella and other possible bacteria, continues to rear its slimy head. Last month, as KTLA reported , McDonald's decided to cease using the additive in its hamburgers.  This decision came after prodding by TV chef Jamie Oliver. On his "Food Revolution," the disgusted food activist says the additive is made of " all of the bits that no one wants . " The USDA, however, says the additive is safe to eat. The department is so satisfied with the stuff that it plans to buy 7 million pounds of ground beef containing "pink slime" in coming months for the national school lunch program, the Daily reported on Monday.  And that's created a whole new stink.

More than 1,000 border guards were charged Sunday with murder and arson in an uprising that left at least 148 people dead or missing, most of them army officers whose bodies were hurriedly dumped by the mutineers. The details of what the prime minister called "a planned massacre" emerged after the government withdrew its promise of amnesty to the paramilitary force and sought to repair its increasingly tense relations with the military.

More than 100 military officers and their supporters were under arrest and others were being sought after a failed attempt to trigger a "people power" revolt against Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. The bid was sparked when 27 soldiers walked out of their Manila trial on earlier insurrection charges. They commandeered the five-star Peninsula Hotel, where they were joined by Brig. Gen.

Government troop reinforcements sped toward the western Ivory Coast on Friday to try to quell a rebellion that has split control of the West African country three ways. The south is under loyalist control, the north has been held by rebels for more than two months, and a chunk of the west is now in the hands of other insurgents.

One of Zimbabwe's most outspoken church leaders called Sunday for a peaceful uprising against President Robert Mugabe's autocratic rule, days before a parliamentary election that rights groups say has been tainted by years of violence and intimidation. Roman Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncube of Zimbabwe's second-largest city, Bulawayo, said he was willing to put on his vestments and lead a march to Mugabe's residence, but feared that "if I do it, I do it alone."

More than 100 American and other foreign children were trapped in this rebel-held central city Sunday as government forces tried to retake northern areas seized by renegade soldiers last week. The children, ranging from infants to 12-year-olds, attend a boarding school in the city. They are the sons and daughters of missionaries working across West Africa.

This Indian metropolis on the wind-swept plateau of the Bolivian Altiplano exports two things to the capital city in the rocky valley below: cheap labor and social revolution. Most mornings, the streets in El Alto's downtown fill with men and boys in modern clothes and women in the bowler hats and wide, silk dresses of the Aymara people. They pass stubby brick office towers, Internet cafes and market stalls, and squeeze into minibuses for the short commute to La Paz.

Syrian President Bashar Assad's condemnation of fellow Arab leaders exposes the power struggle running through a region where he, and his father before him, helped lead the cause of Arab nationalism. In his first address to his country since June, a defiant Assad vowed to crush a 10-month-old popular revolt against him. But he also raged at what he regards as the Arab League's betrayal of Damascus, singling out the Persian Gulf nations that have risen in stature as traditional powers Syria and Egypt have faded.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo's second stab at democracy since the end of a ruinous civil war, President Joseph Kabila is likely to cling to power. But Monday's election is already so flawed that the result will probably be contested, and the odds of violence or even a return to war are high, analysts and human rights activists warn. After the last poll in 2006, security forces killed hundreds of opposition protesters in the capital, Kinshasa. And that was when Kabila was still popular.

As deadly clashes intensified Monday between thousands of protesters and riot police, Egypt's interim government offered to resign in an attempt to calm three consecutive days of unrest that have shaken the country ahead of next week's parliamentary elections. It was unclear whether the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces would accept the Cabinet's offer to step aside, which would severely undermine the military's legitimacy. It was unlikely that resignations would appease protesters whose main target of derision has been the ruling generals and their refusal to hand power over to a new democracy.

  The rebel commander arrives as night falls, his escorts a cadre of young men on motorbikes, Arab scarves concealing their faces. He's always on the move: Syrian spies are everywhere amid the rugged borderlands of remote northern Lebanon. "We stand with the protesters," declares Ahmed al-Arabi, nom de guerre of a self-described senior officer with the Free Syrian Army, a group of military defectors who say they have taken up arms against the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Its principal commercial drag, Tripoli Street, could be the Hollywood set for an urban warfare action thriller: Charred tanks and pulverized shipping containers sit in front of blackened buildings pockmarked with rounds from bullets, rockets and sundry other lethal ordnance. But the hellish scene in the western port city of Misurata has nothing to do with fiction. More than a thousand people were killed here and many more injured in a months-long series of street battles that ousted the forces of Moammar Kadafi from the city and eventually, its environs.

Artillery shells and airstrikes, not placards and peaceful protests, sent Moammar Kadafi fleeing from his fortress: The Libyan uprising has made it clear that even the most brutal leaders may be endangered icons in a region reshaped since the first stirrings of revolt late last year. The 6-month-old Libyan revolt tapped into the spirit of revolutions that swept Egypt and Tunisia, but its darker narrative sobered the early euphoria of the so-called Arab Spring. Libyan protesters began peacefully but were quickly confronted with the tactics of a leader who bombed hospitals and unleashed tanks on mosques.

The interior minister and a former junta leader in Ivory Coast were killed Thursday after rebellious armed forces attacked government and security installations across the West African nation, officials said. President Laurent Gbagbo, who was visiting Italy when the violence erupted, declared the rebellion had been halted after hours of heavy gunfights and mortar exchanges left at least 10 rebel soldiers and seven loyal police dead.

A bloody revolt against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide spread to a dozen towns and cities Monday as his political opponents warned that the violence could spiral out of control unless Aristide stepped down. The United Nations, United States and France -- the Caribbean island's former colonial ruler -- expressed concern about the escalation of violence that has killed about four dozen Haitians in the last week.

Raed Habbal was not a particularly devout Muslim, a relative recalls. The 19-year-old college student and scion of a socialist family in the city of Hama even occasionally took a swig of alcohol with friends, the relative says. But during the 1982 uprising in Hama, the young man was snatched up by security forces aiming to crush what they called an armed Islamist revolt. By the time the government crackdown ended, then-Syrian leader Hafez Assad's forces had flattened swaths of Hama, the country's fourth-largest city, and killed tens of thousands of civilians.

Two days before black smoke left a pall over Hama, a bloodied symbol of the uprising against the government of Syria, the country's second-largest city, Aleppo, held a cultural festival featuring a 3,600-foot-long Syrian flag wrapped around its ancient citadel. On one of the city's main streets, families have still gathered every night on the sidewalks and in the medians for nighttime picnics. Vendors crowd around selling hookahs, popcorn, sandwiches and coffee. Traffic moves slowly as people park cars by the sidewalk and open doors and windows to let music stream out to entertain the crowds.