Unrest

Police invoking emergency regulations detained about 80 demonstrators in Cape Town who were demanding release of political prisoners. Elsewhere, at the end of one of the worst weeks of black unrest in five years, police reported 10 deaths in violence overnight.

On the afternoon of April 29, 1992, after hearing that the officers who beat Rodney King had been acquitted, I headed with a friend down to First A.M.E. Church in South-Central Los Angeles to attend a rally. We never made it. As we closed in on Western Avenue and West Adams Boulevard, our car was stopped by scores of people, mostly black men, milling about in the streets; the air was thick with a gathering anger. Minutes later that anger morphed into action - thrown bottles, a hurled trash can. It was clear that things were getting out of hand, and so we turned around.

The Internet is apparently available again in Egypt after the country cut access to the Web for a week amid mass unrest. After a long stretch of inactivity, RIPE NCC, which tracks Web traffic, recorded a sudden lurch in Egyptian Internet use starting just after 11 a.m. Thursday in Cairo. A similar tracking organization, Renesys Group, wrote in a blog post that access was restored to websites such as the Egyptian Stock Exchange, Commercial International Bank of Egypt and the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.

Trains stopped running. Markets closed. In at least one city, officials urged people to get off the streets and soldiers were everywhere. It is rarely easy to find out what's happening inside North Korea. On the cold Monday when officials announced the death of "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il, the few reports trickling out of the country indicated that the country of 24 million people shut down for a time. No signs of unrest were reported. But faced with making the transition to Kim's largely untested young son, the power structure appeared to be taking no chances.

Once the looters and firefighters were finished, the academic scholars began moving into riot-scarred Los Angeles. "Some flew in and flew out, but many said, 'Hey, we need to understand this in more depth,' " recalled UCLA researcher Neal Richman, who became part of that massive, ever-unfolding effort to examine what went wrong. "Few places in the world are such a grand laboratory. " Five years after the worst civil unrest in U.S. history, the books are still coming out, the papers are spewing forth.

More signs that the U.S. economy's fourth-quarter momentum has spilled into 2011 are giving stock market bulls a fresh jolt of confidence. The Dow Jones industrial average on Tuesday closed above 12,000 points for the first time since June 2008 ? another milestone in the market's rebound from its deep plunge after the financial crisis. Shaking off the continuing social unrest in the Middle East, the Dow jumped 148.23 points, or 1.2%, to end the session at 12,040.16. The prospect of revolution in Egypt had sent oil prices surging Friday and triggered a modest global sell-off in stocks.

Fifteen people were killed by Syrian security forces, witnesses said, as a bloody campaign to end political protests continued Wednesday in the southern city of Dara. The deadliest day in the weeklong unrest began at 2 a.m. when hundreds of government security agents raided the Omari mosque near the center of the Roman-era city, the witnesses said. They said anti-government demonstrators had sought refuge there and that a makeshift clinic was tending to those wounded in previous clashes.

The government announced Wednesday that it has expelled senior Newsweek correspondent Ray Wilkinson for an article he co-authored in this week's edition of the magazine. Wilkinson, 41, a Briton who is the magazine's bureau chief in Nairobi, Kenya, was on temporary assignment in South Africa. Home Affairs Minister Stoffel Botha said in a statement that a Newsweek article entitled "The Young Lions," about black anti-apartheid unrest, involved "selective reporting, half-truths and false innuendo."

The State Department said Tuesday that travelers to Haiti should exercise caution because of demonstrations and other evidence of unrest in all sections of the country. It said periodic general strikes may disrupt transportation and communication and that roadblocks may impede normal activities.