President fires Cabinet

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP):

Facing an extraordinary wave of popular dissent, Syrian President Bashar Assad fired his Cabinet yesterday and promised to end widely despised emergency laws, concessions unlikely to appease protesters demanding sweeping reforms in one of the most hard-line nations in the Middle East.

The overtures, while largely symbolic, are a moment of rare compromise in the Assad family's 40 years of iron-fisted rule. They came as the government mobilised hundreds of thousands of supporters in rallies in the capital and elsewhere, in an effort to show it has wide popular backing.

Nearly every aspect of Syrian society is monitored and controlled by the security forces, and the feared secret police crush even the smallest rumblings of opposition. Draconian laws have all but eradicated civil liberties and political freedoms.

But with the protests that erupted on March 18, thousands of Syrians appear to have broken through a barrier of fear in this tightly controlled nation of 23 million.